Julia Ward Howe and the First Mothers’ Day Proclamation—A Disrupted Heritage

Peace organizations have used Julia Ward Howe's Proclamation  with material like this circulated by the Peace Alliance.

The usual touching Mother's Day services will have to be held virtually for Congregations across the U.S.A today.  If mothers are not the topic of the sermon or homily, they are sure to be remembered in prayer, sung to or about, and honored in some way.  Unitarian Universalist congregations will be among the most enthusiastic celebrants.  An in scores of those congregations this morning the sermon will credit Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World a/k/a the Mothers Peace Day Proclamation as the authentic origin of the American observation.  Some will completely ignore Anna Jarvis, the West Virginia spinster who spent her life campaigning to establish an annual Day honoring mothers and then defending it from rampant commercialization.  Worse yet some ministers will actually denounce Jarvis as a fraud and the usurper of a crown that rightly should rest on Howe’s brow.

It is understandable, Howe, most famous as the author of the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the most popular female poet in the country, was one of our own—a life-long Unitarian.  Moreover, she was a social justice hero—not only an abolitionist but a women’s suffrage and rights advocate and a peace activist.   And the pacifism reflected in her declaration is highly valued and admired by many modern UUs.

The trouble is that although the Proclamation attracted wide attention and comment in both the U.S. and Europe it did not result in any action.  There never was a strike for peace by mothers.  No observance was organized anywhere.  It turned out to be a fine flight of rhetoric but a blind alley leading nowhere.

Anna Jarvis of West Virgina was the true Mother of Mother's Day

When Anna Jarvis began her ultimately successful crusade to honor mothers, she made no mention of Ward or her Proclamation.  Her celebration had no political or social agenda whatsoever.  It was entirely about sentimental adoration.

Despite this there are distinguished U.U. ministers with more impressive letters stringing out behind their names than you can shake a stick at will tell the folks in the pews that they are Facetiming Mom to brunch after church because of Julia Ward Howe.

Howe is best remembered for the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, to which a generation of young men marched to their death in the Civil War.  She spent the rest of her long life as a champion of many causes and of social justice.  But having seen firsthand the dreadful slaughter of war—even a just war in a righteous cause—she dedicated her greatest energies to preventing war.

The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 caused her to attempt to mobilize women around the world for peace.  She called for June 10th to be celebrated annually as Mothers’ Peace Day.  Her proclamation of the day, characteristically in verse went as follows: 

Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World

Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God—
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

—Julia Ward Howe

The memory of Howe’s words would wax and wane with public sentiment  about war—revived as pacifism—and isolationism—thrived during periods of war weariness and forgotten if not vigorously erased when patriotic fever worked up a bloodlust for war.  Nobody but that iconoclast Mark Twain brought it up during the Spanish American War.  

When Woodrow Wilson made Anna Jarvis’s celebration a national holiday by proclamation to be celebrated annually on the second  Sunday in May, he was aware of Howe’s declaration and was worried that some might try to graft its pacifism onto the new holiday.  So he tried to wrap honoring Mothers with patriotism, as if mothers elsewhere did not deserve the veneration as nurturers of patriots.  He added the stipulation that the day should be celebrated with displays of the Stars and Stripes, a jingoistic touch never mentioned or advocated for by Jarvis.

During both World Wars I and II and the Red Scares and hysteria that followed them Howe’s Proclamation was virtually suppressed.  It remained obscure during the Cold War and almost faded to a neglected footnote.

Another Mother for Peace, most famous for this iconic poster, used JuliaWard Howe's Proclamation during the Vietnam Era.

During the Vietnam War it was somewhat resurrected by the women’s organization Another Mother For Peace and by both Quaker and Catholic peace activists.

It really spread like wildfire in UU circles in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the ramp-up of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Pacifism and/or anti-war activism was popular and spreading rapidly through both clergy and members in the pews.  Many of the sermons preached today were based on widely circulated articles printed then.  And Howe gave credibility to those who were then trying to get the UUA to declare itself a Peace Church.

That effort ultimately failed, but Howe and Mother’s Peace Day have found new advocates. 

The Black Lives of UU's Mother's Day bail out campaign had become an annual event.

Recently, however, Mothers Day took on new meaning.  Black Lives of UU  issued an extraordinary challenge  in response the crisis of mass incarceration that leaves many mothers separated from their children because of the hostage extortion of high cash bail which is levied disproportionately against women of color and often for minor and non-violent offenses.  In the wake of the White Supremacy Teach-in which over 500 UU congregations have held in 2017, they are asked those congregations—and others—to pledge $5000 each to a national fund to bail mothers out of jail.   That effort fell short—five grand  was a lot of money for most moderately sized congregations—but a considerable amount was raised and the campaign has been renewed every year.

Front line maternity ward medical staff bring comfort to new moms who had to give birth without the partners and families during  Coronavirus quarenteen.

This year the shadow of the Coronavirus will make the sacrifices of mothers on the front lines of the medical emergency, the moms at home juggling work and  children’s educations, and the frail and/or dying elder mothers cut off from the comfort of the human contact with their families all the more poignant.

Both Howe and Jarvis could have agreed on that.

A World Without Guernica

Guernica after the bombing.

In consideration of President Trumps recent attacks on Syria, the on-going depredations of the Israelis against the civilian population of Gaza, the proxy war against Yemen, and saber rattling this week by the U.S. and France against Iran, it is time to recall again one of the first mass bombings of a civilian population center with little or no military significance in history.  German and Italian war planes bombed the market town of Guernica, a Basque village in northern Spain on April 26, 1937.  The atrocity, an episode of the Spanish Civil War which was a dress rehearsal for World War II, outraged world opinion at the time.

The dead in Guernica.

Within weeks Spanish expatriate painter Pablo Picasso in Paris was commissioned by the Republican Government for a display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at the 1937 World’s Fair in The City of Light.  Picasso’s huge, dramatic monochromatic black, gray and white painting became an international sensation and anti-fascist icon.  It toured the world and survived the Blitz in London.

When the United Nations opened its new headquarters in New York City, a full-size tapestry reproduction was hung on a wall outside the entrance to the Security Council Chambers to remind the delegates and diplomats that their mission was to make a world where atrocities like Guernica are impossible.

Pablo Picasso's Guernica perhaps the most important painting of the 20th Century and certainly the most representative of that blood drenched age.

On February 4, 2003 United States Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the Security Council laying out America’s case for going to war against Iraq.  A press conference followed outside the chambers.  When reporters assembled they found the famous Guernica tapestry covered by blue curtains.  Officially the United Nations claimed it was in preparation for painting and renovation.  Some reporters were told that TV news crews had complained that the stark images distracted from the speakers in front of them.

No one honestly believed either story.  The picture had been masked to avoid embarrassing Powell and the Bush Administration which was preparing to launch their announced campaign of shock and awe which would include bombing Baghdad and inevitably cause civilian casualties.

Painting representing Guernica  being covered for Colin Powell's United Nations press conference.

That is the moment that New York born poet Gregg Mosson captured in his piece A World Without Picasso’s Guernica which was included in the 2007 anthology Poems Against War: Bending Toward Justice.

Mosson was a former reporter and commentator whose work has appeared In The Cincinnati Review, The Baltimore Sun, The Oregonian, The Baltimore Review, and The Futurist. His poetry has appeared in many small-press journals. He earned his MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where he was a teaching fellow and lecturer. He has authored two books of poetry, Season of Flowers and Dust in 2007 and Questions of Fire in 2009.  Mosson currently was a contributing poetry editor at The Baltimore Review.

The Poems Against the War anthology in which Mosson's poem appeared.

A World Without Picasso’s Guernica

February 5, 2003

At the United Nations, blue drapes sheath

a tapestry rendition of Guernica, so speakers can paint

blitzkrieging dreams, burying screams affixed and aired;

killing machines can work again.

Who expunged Guernica from the U.N.,

and then did U.N. walls tremor

down to their foundation

in the “war to end all wars”

and covetous twentieth century?

Yesterday, today, or tomorrow

bombs drop and discombobulated body parts

hurl through the air, and brown limbs

burst from horses

and spin past a still-standing bystander

dumbstruck

as infernos smoke and buildings crumble.

—Gregg Mosson

Sheena Blackhall

Scottish poet Sheena Blackhall captured the horror of the bombing itself.  Blackhall as born in Aberdeen in 1947 and is a poet, novelist, short story writer, illustrator, traditional story teller, and singer.  She has written over 100 poetry pamphlets—chapbooks we call them this side of the Pond—12 short story collections, 4 novels and 2 televised plays for children.

 

 

Guernica

Most of the men off fighting in Civil War
Our women and children haggling over bargains.
And then three hours bombardment from the skies
Like a place of card, our town, stamped on by giants

Those who hid in the fields were soon machine gunned.
The wooden walls of our homes, a red inferno

Wives wailed over the dead, blown up by shrapnel
Horses and bulls lay crushed by masonry.

Doves flew in all directions, panic-stricken.
I ran wildly ahead towards a bomb hole
Dived inside the churned up, muddy crater.

Bullets ricocheted, and cars exploded
Riddled corpses leaked blood on the streets

Children huddled round a parish priest
Too shocked to speak. In tatters, every one

The Plaza was a wall of living flame,
All that was left, a church, a tree, a factory

Charred bodies will forever haunt my dreams.
And this was how war came to Guernica 

—Sheena Blackhall