Part 47

“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.