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.

Similar to what we did for the woman in industry was the help we were 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.