When, early in 1917, events began so to shape themselves as directly to
point to the entrance of the United States into the Great War, Edward
Bok set himself to formulate a policy for The Ladies' Home Journal. He
knew that he was in an almost insurmountably difficult position. The
huge edition necessitated going to press fully six weeks in advance of
publication, and the preparation of material fully four weeks previous
to that. He could not, therefore, get much closer than ten weeks to the
date when his readers received the magazine. And he knew that events, in
war time, had a way of moving rapidly.
Late in January he went to Washington, consulted those authorities who
could indicate possibilities to him better than any one else, and found,
as he had suspected, that the entry of the United States into the war
was a practical certainty; it was only a question of time.
Bok went South for a month's holiday to get ready for the fray, and in
the saddle and on the golf links he formulated a policy. The newspapers
and weeklies would send innumerable correspondents to the front, and
obviously, with the necessity for going to press so far in advance, The
Journal could not compete with them. They would depict every activity in
the field. There was but one logical thing for him to do: ignore the
"front" entirely, refuse all the offers of correspondents, men and
women, who wanted to go with the armies for his magazine, and cover
fully and practically the results of the war as they would affect the
women left behind. He went carefully over the ground to see what these
would be, along what particular lines women's activities would be most
likely to go, and then went home and back to Washington.
It was now March. He conferred with the President, had his fears
confirmed, and offered all the resources of his magazine to the
government. His diagnosis of the situation was verified in every detail
by the authorities whom he consulted. The Ladies' Home Journal could
best serve by keeping up the morale at home and by helping to meet the
problems that would confront the women; as the President said: "Give
help in the second line of defense."
A year before, Bok had opened a separate editorial office in Washington
and had secured Dudley Harmon, the Washington correspondent for The New
York Sun, as his editor-in-charge. The purpose was to bring the women of
the country into a clearer understanding of their government and a
closer relation with it. This work had been so successful as to
necessitate a force of four offices and twenty stenographers. Bok now
placed this Washington office on a war-basis, bringing it into close
relation with every department of the government that would be connected
with the war activities. By this means, he had an editor and an
organized force on the spot, devoting full time to the preparation of
war material, with Mr. Harmon in daily conference with the department
chiefs to secure the newest developments.
Bok learned that the country's first act would be to recruit for the
navy, so as to get this branch of the service into a state of
preparedness. He therefore secured Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant
secretary of the navy, to write an article explaining to mothers why
they should let their boys volunteer for the Navy and what it would mean
to them.
He made arrangements at the American Red Cross Headquarters for an
official department to begin at once in the magazine, telling women the
first steps that would be taken by the Red Cross and how they could
help. He secured former President William Howard Taft, as chairman of
the Central Committee of the Red Cross, for the editor of this
department.
He cabled to Viscount Northcliffe and Ian Hay for articles showing what
the English women had done at the outbreak of the war, the mistakes they
had made, what errors the American women should avoid, the right lines
along which English women had worked and how their American sisters
could adapt these methods to transatlantic conditions.
And so it happened that when the first war issue of The Journal appeared
on April 20th, only three weeks after the President's declaration, it
was the only monthly that recognized the existence of war, and its pages
had already begun to indicate practical lines along which women could
help.
The President planned to bring the Y. M. C. A. into the service by
making it a war-work body, and Bok immediately made arrangements for a
page to appear each month under the editorship of John R. Mott, general
secretary of the International Y. M. C. A. Committee.
The editor had been told that the question of food would come to be of
paramount importance; he knew that Herbert Hoover had been asked to
return to America as soon as he could close his work abroad, and he
cabled over to his English representative to arrange that the proposed
Food Administrator should know, at first hand, of the magazine and its
possibilities for the furtherance of the proposed Food Administration
work.
The Food Administration was no sooner organized than Bok made
arrangements for an authoritative department to be conducted in his
magazine, reflecting the plans and desires of the Food Administration,
and Herbert Hoover's first public declaration as food administrator to
the women of America was published in The Ladies' Home Journal. Bok now
placed all the resources of his four-color press-work at Mr. Hoover's
disposal; and the Food Administration's domestic experts, in conjunction
with the full culinary staff of the magazine, prepared the new war
dishes and presented them appetizingly in full colors under the personal
endorsement of Mr. Hoover and the Food Administration. From six to
sixteen articles per month were now coming from Mr. Hoover's department
alone.
The Department of Agriculture was laid under contribution by the
magazine for the best ideas for the raising of food from the soil in the
creation of war-gardens.
Doctor Anna Howard Shaw had been appointed chairman of the National
Committee of the Women's Council of National Defence, and Bok arranged
at once with her that she should edit a department page in his magazine,
setting forth the plans of the committee and how the women of America
could co-operate therewith.
The magazine had thus practically become the semiofficial mouthpiece of
all the various government war bureaus and war-work bodies. James A.
Flaherty, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, explained the
proposed work of that body; Commander Evangeline Booth presented the
plans of the Salvation Army, and Mrs. Robert E. Speer, president of the
National Board of the Young Women's Christian Association, reflected the
activities of her organization; while the President's daughter, Miss
Margaret Wilson, discussed her work for the opening of all schoolhouses
as community war-centres.
The magazine reflected in full-color pictures the life and activities of
the boys in the American camps, and William C. Gorgas, surgeon-general
of the United States, was the spokesman in the magazine for the health
of the boys.
Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo interpreted the first Liberty Loan
"drive" to the women; the President of the United States, in a special
message to women, wrote in behalf of the subsequent Loan; Bernard
Baruch, as chairman of the War Industries Board, made clear the need for
war-time thrift; the recalled ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard,
told of the ingenious plans resorted to by German women which American
women could profitably copy; and Elizabeth, Queen of the Belgians,
explained the plight of the babies and children of Belgium, and made a
plea to the women of the magazine to help. So straight to the point did
the Queen write, and so well did she present her case that within six
months there had been sent to her, through The Ladies' Home Journal, two
hundred and forty-eight thousand cans of condensed milk, seventy-two
thousand cans of pork and beans, five thousand cans of infants' prepared
food, eighty thousand cans of beef soup, and nearly four thousand
bushels of wheat, purchased with the money donated by the magazine
readers.
On the coming of the coal question, the magazine immediately reflected
the findings and recommendations of the Fuel Administration, and Doctor
H. A. Garfield, as fuel administrator, placed the material of his Bureau
at the disposal of the magazine's Washington editor.
The Committee on Public Information now sought the magazine for the
issuance of a series of official announcements explanatory of matters to
women.
When the "meatless" and the "wheatless" days were inaugurated, the women
of America found that the magazine had anticipated their coming; and the
issue appearing on the first of these days, as publicly announced by the
Food Administration, presented pages of substitutes in full colors.
Of course, miscellaneous articles on the war there were, without number.
Before the war was ended, the magazine did send a representative to the
front in Catherine Van Dyke, who did most effective work for the
magazine in articles of a general nature. The fullpage battle pictures,
painted from data furnished by those who took actual part, were
universally commended and exhausted even the largest editions that could
be printed. A source of continual astonishment was the number of copies
of the magazine found among the boys in France; it became the third in
the official War Department list of the most desired American
periodicals, evidently representing a tie between the boys and their
home folks. But all these "war" features, while appreciated and
desirable, were, after all, but a side-issue to the more practical
economic work of the magazine. It was in this service that the magazine
excelled, it was for this reason that the women at home so eagerly
bought it, and that it was impossible to supply each month the editions
called for by the extraordinary demand.
Considering the difficulties to be surmounted, due to the advance
preparation of material, and considering that, at the best, most of its
advance information, even by the highest authorities, could only be in
the nature of surmise, the comprehensive manner in which The Ladies'
Home Journal covered every activity of women during the Great War, will
always remain one of the magazine's most noteworthy achievements. This
can be said without reserve here, since the credit is due to no single
person; it was the combined, careful work of its entire staff, weighing
every step before it was taken, looking as clearly into the future as
circumstances made possible, and always seeking the most authoritative
sources of information.
Bok merely directed. Each month, before his magazine went to press, he
sought counsel and vision from at least one of three of the highest
sources; and upon this guidance, as authoritative as anything could be
in times of war when no human vision can actually foretell what the next
day will bring forth, he acted. The result, as one now looks back upon
it, was truly amazing; an uncanny timeliness would often color material
on publication day. Of course, much of this was due to the close
government co-operation, so generously and painstakingly given.
With the establishment of the various war boards in Washington, Bok
received overtures to associate himself exclusively with them and move
to the capital. He sought the best advice and with his own instincts
pointing in the same way, he decided that he could give his fullest
service by retaining his editorial position and adding to that such
activities as his leisure allowed. He undertook several private
commissions for the United States Government, and then he was elected
vice-president of the Philadelphia Belgian Relief Commission.
With the Belgian consul-general for the United States, Mr. Paul
Hagemans, as the president of the Commission, and guided by his intimate
knowledge of the Belgian people, Bok selected a committee of the ablest
buyers and merchants in the special lines of foods which he would have
to handle. The Commission raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, with
which it purchased foods and chartered ships. The quantities of food ran
into prodigious figures; Bok felt that he was feeding the world; and yet
when the holds of the ships began to take in the thousands of crates of
canned goods, the bags of peas and beans, and the endless tins of
condensed milk, it was amazing how the piled-up boxes melted from the
piers and the ship-holds yawned for more. Flour was sent in seemingly
endless hundreds of barrels.
Each line of goods was bought by a specialist on the Committee at the
lowest quantity prices; and the result was that the succession of ships
leaving the port of Philadelphia was a credit to the generosity of the
people of the city and the commonwealth. The Commission delegated one of
its members to go to Belgium and personally see that the food actually
reached the needy Belgian people.
In September, 1917, word was received from John R. Mott that Bok had
been appointed State chairman for the Y. M. C. A. War Work Council for
Pennsylvania; that a country-wide campaign for twenty-five million
dollars would be launched six weeks hence, and that Pennsylvania's quota
was three millions of dollars. He was to set up an organization
throughout the State, conduct the drive from Philadelphia, speak at
various centres in Pennsylvania, and secure the allocated quota. Bok
knew little or nothing about the work of the Y. M. C. A.; he accordingly
went to New York headquarters and familiarized himself with the work
being done and proposed; and then began to set up his State machinery.
The drive came off as scheduled, Pennsylvania doubled its quota,
subscribing six instead of three millions of dollars, and of this was
collected five million eight hundred and twenty-nine thousand
dollars--almost one hundred per cent.
Bok, who was now put on the National War Work Council of the Y. M. C. A.
at New York, was asked to take part in the creation of the machinery
necessary for the gigantic piece of work that the organization had been
called upon by the President of the United States to do. It was a
herculean task; practically impossible with any large degree of
efficiency in view of the almost insurmountable obstacles to be
contended with. But step by step the imperfect machinery was set up, and
it began to function in the home camps. Then the overseas work was
introduced by the first troops going to France, and the difficulties
increased a hundredfold.
But Bok's knowledge of the workings of the government departments at
Washington, the war boards, and the other war-work organizations soon
convinced him that the Y. M. C. A. was not the only body, asked to set
up an organization almost overnight, that was staggering under its load
and falling down as often as it was functioning.
The need for Y. M. C. A. secretaries overseas and in the camps soon
became acute, and Bok was appointed chairman of the Philadelphia
Recruiting Committee. As in the case of his Belgian relief work, he at
once surrounded himself with an able committee: this time composed of
business and professional men trained in a knowledge of human nature in
the large, and of wide acquaintance in the city. Simultaneously, Bok
secured the release of one of the ablest men in the Y. M. C. A. service
in New York, Edward S. Wilkinson, who became the permanent secretary of
the Philadelphia Committee. Bok organized a separate committee composed
of automobile manufacturers to recruit for chauffeurs and mechanicians;
another separate committee recruited for physical directors, and later a
third committee recruited for women.
The work was difficult because the field of selection was limited. No
men between the military ages could be recruited; the War Boards at
Washington had drawn heavily upon the best men of the city; the
slightest physical defect barred out a man, on account of the exposure
and strain of the Y. M. C. A. work; the residue was not large.
It was scarcely to be wondered at that so many incompetent secretaries
had been passed and sent over to France. How could it have been
otherwise with the restricted selection? But the Philadelphia Committee
was determined, nevertheless, that its men should be of the best, and it
decided that to get a hundred men of unquestioned ability would be to do
a greater job than to send over two hundred men of indifferent quality.
The Committee felt that enough good men were still in Philadelphia and
the vicinity, if they could be pried loose from their business and home
anchorages, and that it was rather a question of incessant work than an
impossible task.
Bok took large advertising spaces in the Philadelphia newspapers, asking
for men of exceptional character to go to France in the service of the
Y. M. C. A.; and members of the Committee spoke before the different
commercial bodies at their noon luncheons. The applicants now began to
come, and the Committee began its discriminating selection. Each
applicant was carefully questioned by the secretary before he appeared
before the Committee, which held sittings twice a week. Hence of over
twenty-five hundred applicants, only three hundred appeared before the
Committee, of whom two hundred and fifty-eight were passed and sent
overseas.
The Committee's work was exceptionally successful; it soon proved of so
excellent a quality as to elicit a cabled request from Paris
headquarters to send more men of the Philadelphia type. The secret of
this lay in the sterling personnel of the Committee itself, and its
interpretation of the standards required; and so well did it work that
when Bok left for the front to be absent from Philadelphia for ten
weeks, his Committee, with Thomas W. Hulme, of the Pennsylvania
Railroad, acting as Chairman, did some of its best work.
The after-results, according to the report of the New York headquarters,
showed that no Y. M. C. A. recruiting committee had equalled the work of
the Philadelphia committee in that its men, in point of service, had
proved one hundred per cent secretaries. With two exceptions, the entire
two hundred and fifty-eight men passed, brought back one hundred per
cent records, some of them having been placed in the most important
posts abroad and having given the most difficult service. The work of
the other Philadelphia committees, particularly that of the Women's
Committee, was equally good.
To do away with the multiplicity of "drives," rapidly becoming a drain
upon the efforts of the men engaged in them, a War Chest Committee was
now formed in Philadelphia and vicinity to collect money for all the
war-work agencies. Bok was made a member of the Executive Committee, and
chairman of the Publicity Committee. In May, 1918, a campaign for twenty
millions of dollars was started; the amount was subscribed, and although
much of it had to be collected after the armistice, since the
subscriptions were in twelve monthly payments, a total of fifteen and a
half million dollars was paid in and turned over to the different
agencies.
Bok, who had been appointed one of the Boy Scout commissioners in his
home district of Merion, saw the possibilities of the Boy Scouts in the
Liberty Loan and other campaigns. Working in co-operation with the other
commissioners, and the scoutmaster of the Merion Troop, Bok supported
the boys in their work in each campaign as it came along. Although there
were in the troop only nine boys, in ages ranging from twelve to
fourteen years--Bok's younger son was one of them--so effectively did
these youngsters work under the inspiration of the scoutmaster, Thomas
Dun Belfield, that they soon attracted general attention and acquired
distinction as one of the most efficient troops in the vicinity of
Philadelphia. They won nearly all the prizes offered in their vicinity,
and elicited the special approval of the Secretary of the Treasury.
Although only "gleaners" in most of the campaigns--that is, working only
in the last three days after the regular committees had scoured the
neighborhood--these Merion Boy Scouts sold over one million four hundred
thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds, and raised enough money in the Y. M.
C. A. campaign to erect one of the largest huts in France for the army
boys, and a Y. M. C. A. gymnasium at the League Island Navy Yard
accommodating two thousand sailor-boys.
In the summer of 1918, the eight leading war-work agencies, excepting
the Red Cross, were merged, for the purpose of one drive for funds, into
the United War Work Campaign, and Bok was made chairman for
Pennsylvania. In November a country-wide campaign was launched, the
quota for Pennsylvania being twenty millions of dollars--the largest
amount ever asked of the commonwealth. Bok organized a committee of the
representative men of Pennsylvania, and proceeded to set up the
machinery to secure the huge sum. He had no sooner done this, however,
than he had to sail for France, returning only a month before the
beginning of the campaign.
But the efficient committee had done its work; upon his return Bok found
the organization complete. On the first day of the campaign, the false
rumor that an armistice had been signed made the raising of the large
amount seem almost hopeless; furthermore, owing to the influenza raging
throughout the commonwealth, no public meetings had been permitted or
held. Still, despite all these obstacles, not only was the twenty
millions subscribed but oversubscribed to the extent of nearly a million
dollars; and in face of the fact that every penny of this large total
had to be collected after the signing of the armistice, twenty millions
of dollars was paid in and turned over to the war agencies.
It is indeed a question whether any single war act on the part of the
people of Pennsylvania redounds so highly to their credit as this
marvellous evidence of patriotic generosity. It was one form of
patriotism to subscribe so huge a sum while the war was on and the guns
were firing; it was quite another and a higher patriotism to subscribe
and pay such a sum after the war was over!
Bok's position as State chairman of the United War Work Campaign made it
necessary for him to follow authoritatively and closely the work of each
of the eight different organizations represented in the fund. Because he
felt he had to know what the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army,
the Y. W. C. A., and the others were doing with the money he had been
instrumental in collecting, and for which he felt, as chairman,
responsible to the people of Pennsylvania, he learned to know their work
just as thoroughly as he knew what the Y. M. C. A. was doing.
He had now seen and come into personal knowledge of the work of the Y.
M. C. A. from his Philadelphia point of vantage, with his official
connection with it at New York headquarters; he had seen the work as it
was done in the London and Paris headquarters; and he had seen the
actual work in the American camps, the English rest-camps, back of the
French lines, in the trenches, and as near the firing-line as he had
been permitted to go.
He had, in short, seen the Y. M. C. A. function from every angle, but he
had also seen the work of the other organizations in England and France,
back of the lines and in the trenches. He found them all
faulty--necessarily so. Each had endeavored to create an organization
within an incredibly short space of time and in the face of adverse
circumstances. Bok saw at once that the charge that the Y. M. C. A. was
"falling down" in its work was as false as that the Salvation Army was
doing "a marvellous work" and that the K. of C. was "efficient where
others were incompetent," and that the Y. W. C. A. was "nowhere to be
seen."
The Salvation Army was unquestionably doing an excellent piece of work
within a most limited area; it could not be on a wider scale, when one
considered the limited personnel it had at its command. The work of the
K. of C. was not a particle more or less efficient than the work of the
other organizations. What it did, it strove to do well, but so did the
others. The Y. W. C. A. made little claim about its work in France,
since the United States Government would not, until nearly at the close
of the war, allow women to be sent over in the uniforms of any of the
war-work organizations. But no one can gainsay for a single moment the
efficient service rendered by the Y. W. C. A. in its hostess-house work
in the American camps; that work alone would have entitled it to the
support of the American people. That of the Y. M. C. A. was on so large
a scale that naturally its inefficiency was often in proportion to its
magnitude.
Bok was in France when the storm of criticism against the Y. M. C. A.
broke out, and, as State chairman for Pennsylvania, it was his duty to
meet the outcry when it came over to the United States. That the work of
the Y. M. C. A. was faulty no one can deny. Bok saw the "holes" long
before they were called to the attention of the public, but he also saw
the almost impossible task, in face of prevailing difficulties, of
caulking them up. No one who was not in France can form any conception
of the practically insurmountable obstacles against which all the
war-work organizations worked; and the larger the work the greater were
the obstacles, naturally. That the Y. M. C. A. and the other similar
agencies made mistakes is not the wonder so much as that they did not
make more. The real marvel is that they did so much efficient work. For
after we get a little farther away from the details and see the work of
these agencies in its broader aspects, when we forget the lapses--which,
after all, though irritating and regrettable, were not major--the record
as a whole will stand as a most signal piece of volunteer service.
What was actually accomplished was nothing short of marvellous; and it
is this fact that must be borne in mind; not the omissions, but the
commissions. And when the American public gets that point of view--as it
will, and, for that matter, is already beginning to do--the work of the
American Y. M. C. A. will no longer suffer for its omissions, but will
amaze and gladden by its accomplishments. As an American officer of high
rank said to Bok at Chaumont headquarters: "The mind cannot take in what
the war would have been without the 'Y.'" And that, in time, will be the
universal American opinion, extended, in proportion to their work, to
all the war-work agencies and the men and women who endured, suffered,
and were killed in their service.