The Mother of Nurses for National Nurses Month—Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale--The Lady with the Lamp of the Crimean War.

As we noted recently Nurses have become the special iconic heroes of the Coronavirus pandemic.  Also this is officially National Nurses Month largely because this is the birthday of Florence Nightingale who is credited with founding modern nursing as a profession.

Britain and America each have iconic nurse heroines.  But other than sharing a common calling, horrific experience in war, and a steely determination, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton could not have been more different.

Nightingale was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and member of the British ruling class.  Barton came from a struggling but respectable family of middling means.  Nightingale struggled to gain acceptance for nursing as a respectable occupation for gentle women.  Spinster Barton had no choice but to work spending years as a school mistress before volunteering without training to serve the Civil War wounded.  Nightingale came from a family with Unitarian connections but was a devoted Anglican.  Barton was raised a Universalist who had no religious affiliation in later life, but credited her ethics to her childhood faith. Nightingale was interested in the professionalization of nursing, sanitation practices, and what we would now describe as holistic medicine.  Barton cared about the amelioration of suffering and building a new model of active charity and volunteerism.  Disabled by illness and perhaps Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Nightingale had to largely retire from active nursing and administration within a few years of returning from the Crimean War and spent the rest of her long life as a semi-invalid, writer, and researcher.  Nightingale never embraced feminism, was in fact openly critical of it and cultivated the support and friendship of powerful men.  Barton, although necessarily careful to curry support for the American Red Cross from the President and Congress, was supportive of women’s suffrage.

Clara Barton, America's Angel of the Battlefield, was inspired by Nightingale but very different from her.

But, of course, Nightingale’s famous example inspired and motivated Barton in her own career.

Florence Nightingale was named for the city of Florence, then the capital of the Duchy of Tuscany on May 12, 1820.  Her father, born William Shore, inherited a rich country estate from his mother’s family and assumed their name, Nightingale. 

In 1825 the family returned to England where they took up residence in a large and elegant new country home on the familial estate, Lea Hall in Derbyshire.  The following year her father bought a second estate, Embley Park, in Hampshire.  Soon after he was appointed the High Sheriff of Hampshire.  The family divided their years between the two country seats.

Nightingale was home tutored, like most of her class, but benefited from parents who allowed her to study deeply beyond the narrow instruction usual for women of her class and place.  By here late teens she was as academically accomplished as most university educated men.

Her mother, despite progressive social views and ardent abolitionism, was a Victorian traditionalist when it came to the role of women.  She ardently opposed young Florence’s announcement that she was determined to find a career in service, and particularly in nursing.  Women nurses were not unheard of.  But other than Catholic and Anglican nursing orders, it was considered an unskilled job for the lowest orders of society.  Because they were required to come into close physical contact with patients, including men, it was assumed that they were degraded and likely to service their charges sexually as well.  In fact, secular nurses were often regarded as little more than prostitutes.

Despite her mother’s opposition, in 1844 Nightingale launched a round of visiting hospitals in London and elsewhere, observing conditions and techniques, and eventually volunteering her services.  She rejected an ardent suitor, politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, for fear that marriage would interfere with her calling.  She continued her hospital visits for 14 years, eventually attracting the attention and support of others.

Florence Nightingale as a teen age beauty about the time she renounced romance and declared her determination to pursue nursing.

In 1849 Nightingale undertook extensive travels in Europe, Turkey, and Egypt.  He mother probably hoped the Grand Tour would divert her from her purpose.  She was dead wrong.  She used the trip to make visits to hospitals and study nursing techniques.  In Egypt she visited a convent of nursing sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Alexandria, where she was impressed by the order and discipline that made their care superior to anything she had found in Europe. 

Later on the journey she spent considerable time at the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in Germany. The institute had been founded for the care of the destitute in 1833 and had grown into a training school for women teachers and nurses.  She described the event as the turning point of her life.  She returned to the Institute in 1851 for four months of medical training—the only formal nursing education she ever received.  She vowed to establish similar training programs in England.  Her accounts of her experiences there, The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc, was her first major publication and drew attention for her plans in England. 

Nightingale’s sister also published her extensive correspondence describing in detail her experience in Egypt and “The Orient” which showed her as a gifted travel writer and astute observer of life and customs in other lands.

During these travels Nightingale also made contact with important British political figures also traveling abroad, especially Sidney Herbert, who she met in Rome.  Herbert was a former Secretary at War in the Tory government Sir Robert Peel and would be called back to that post during the Crimean War.  He became a lifelong devoted friend and supporter of Nightingale. 

Back home, Nightingale resumed her round of hospital visits will arguing for opening nursing to respectable women and for formal schooling for them. 

In 1852 she finally got a position where she could put her ideas into practice as the Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London.  It may not have been tending to the poor as she one day hoped to do, but it was a start.  In her relatively short tenure at the Institute, she inaugurated formal training for her nurses.

About the same time, probably against his wife’s wishes but bowing to the inevitable, Florence’s father settled an £500 annual income on her allowing her to live comfortably while pursuing her career.

What interrupted Nightingale’s new job was the onset of the Crimean War, as foolish a major power conflict as was ever fought.  France under the newly minted Emperor Napoleon III, Britain and Russia chest bumped over the rotting but still alive corpse of the Ottoman Empire.  The immediate cause of the war, Russia’s occupation of Ottoman provinces along the Danube ostensibly in defense of Orthodox rights, was voided when Austria threatened to join the coalition against the Tsar and Russia withdrew its troops.  Undeterred, the war went on anyway, fought mostly in naval actions on the Black Sea beginning in 1853 and on the Crimean Peninsula with the siege of the port of Sevastopol in September of 1854.  Large, stupidly led Ottoman, French, and British Armies slogged it out against stubborn Russian resistance, cholera, and other epidemics.

Considered the first modern war because of the use of steam powered war ships, iron clad floating batteries, railroads, telegraph lines, massed artillery, the war quickly turned into a charnel house.  And for the first time reporters traveling with the armies got word back to London and Paris by wire within hours of actual events.  Newspapers quickly filled with grim stories.

Word also got back to England about the suffering of the British wounded in comparison to the French, who had better organized medical services and hospitals.  Nightingale offered her services and her friend Herbert, back as Secretary at War, quickly accepted the offer and promised his full support and all of the supplies she needed.

Nightingale set sail for the war zone on October 21, 1854 in charge of a hastily recruited force of nurses including 10 Roman Catholic nuns, 8 Anglican Sisters of Mercy, 6 nurses from St. John’s Institute, and 14 from various other hospitals. 

Nightingale rejected the services of Jamaican traditional healer/doctor Mary Seacole who made it to the Crimea on her own and served much closer to the front lines than Florence.  After brief recognition the memory of her service was nearly erased by Nightngale's fame.

She declined the services of Mary Seacole a Black Jamaican traditional doctor.  Seacole traveled to the Crimea anyway at her own expense and served valiantly near the front lines.  Briefly honored upon her return to England, her memory was virtually erased as Nightingale’s reputation soared.

Florence’s group arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari, Istanbul, 250 miles across the Black Sea from the Crimea.  Thousands of British wounded were warehoused there with almost no support.  This would be Nightingales main base throughout the war.

She found appalling conditions:

There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no soap, towels, or clothes, no hospital clothes; the men lying in their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons covered with vermin . . .

We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely sour. The butter is most filthy; it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are waiting for, until they arrive from France . . .

Nightingale appealed through correspondent William Russell of the The Times for supplies and assistance.  The Times organized relief drives and supplies began to trickle in by year’s end. 

Contemporary illustrations in the British Press could not begin to capture the horror and suffering amid the primitive conditions at Nightingale's hospital at Scutari.

Despite improvements and the best efforts of her overworked nurses, death rates actually climbed in the hospital in the months after Nightingales arrival due to sanitary conditions and overcrowding.  Cholera, typhus, and typhoid swept the wards.  Over 4,000 men died there over the winter.

Meanwhile the government commissioned a prefabricated hospital and dispatched it to the scene under the civilian leadership of Dr. Edmund Alexander Parkes.  When it arrived and was set up nearby, its death rates were less than 1/10th of those at Suctari under Nightingale’s care. 

In March of 1865 a Sanitary Commission arrived from home which flushed the sewers at Suctari, after which deaths dropped sharply.  Nightingale did not recognize the connection however, and credited the improvement to nutrition and nursing care. 

Despite their limitations, Florence and her nurses worked tirelessly, none more so than their leader.  In addition to her administrative duties, she spent much time in the wards.  And because the prejudice against nurses persisted among Army authorities, only Nightingale was allowed on the wards at night to aid the ill trained and sometimes brutal male orderlies.  She visited bedsides carrying a lantern, earning her the nickname Lady with the Lamp among her charges.

Russell spread the word of her service back home where she was hailed as a hero.  The Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses was set up under the stewardship Herbert while she was still abroad and an astonishing £ 45,000 was raised by 1859.

In May of 1855 Nightingale finally made it to the Crimea, inspecting hospitals near the front at Balaclava.  While there, she fell ill with “Crimea Fever” and lay dangerously near death for 12 days.  She returned to Suctari weakened.  But she resumed her duties and even returned Balaclava in March of 1856, remaining there until after active fighting ceased on the peninsula when the hospitals there were closed in July.

Florence Nightingale after her return from the war.  After the Queen herself she was the most famous and admired woman in Britain.

In August Nightingale boarded a French ship and returned privately to England where she was hailed as a great heroine.  She was introduced to Queen Victoria herself and presented the monarch with a report on conditions.  Her fame even crossed the Atlantic where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized her in Santa Filomena

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

In 1860 with money from the Nightingale Fund the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital opened in London.  Nurses there were trained in a course of study designed by Florence.  She was, however, too ill to accept the superintendency of the new school.  She also raised money for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital   near her family home.  But her days as an active nurse and administer were over.

Nightingale busied herself with a close study of statistics from the various hospitals and medical facilities in the war.  What she discovered caused her to dramatically re-assess her own views.  In 1859 she published her findings in Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army in which she acknowledged the supreme importance of sanitation in reducing hospital deaths.  In 1859 an army medical college was opened at Chatham and the first military hospital was established in Woolwich in 1861 following the advice laid out by Nightingale.

That was followed in 1860 with Notes on Nursing which laid down the educational program adopted at the St. Thomas school and others throughout Britain. 

When the Sepoy Rebellion broke out in India in 1857, Nightingale volunteered once more to go abroad.  But her health would not permit it.  Instead she undertook a deep study of India and wrote many articles about the sub-continent over the next several years, including a detailed proposal for digging wells in Indian villages.

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Nightingale continued to write and was honored time and again over the next decades.  She participated as far as she was able in events like the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. 

Nightingale died in London, on August 13 1910 at the age of ninety and was buried in the family plot at East Wellow, Hampshire after an offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was turned down by her family. Memorial services took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral.  

Blue Skies—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

Blue Skies sung by Willie Nelson.

We are celebrating Irving Berlin’s birthday over at the Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout blog.  And what better way these days than to celebrate with maybe his most cheerful song—Blue Skies. 

The song was composed in 1926 as a last-minute addition to the Rodgers and Hart musical Betsy. The show running for only 39 performances but Blue Skies was an instant success leaving the principal composing team’s work in the dust.  On opening night audience demanded 24 encores from star Belle Baker.  The song was also a celebration, after the death of his first born son as an infant, of the birth of Berlin’s daughter Mary Ellin.

Irving Berlin at the piano belting out one of his own songs.

In 1927, the music was published and Ben Selvin’s recorded version was a hit. That same year, it became one of the first songs to be featured in a talkie, when Al Jolson performed it in The Jazz Singer. The song was recorded for all of the major and dime store labels of the time.  In 1935 Benny Goodman recorded a big band swing version.

A lobby card for the 1945 Paramount musical Blue Skies.

In 1946 it became the title song of a Paramount Technicolor musical starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Joan Caulfield, and Billy DeWolfe with a slew of other Berlin hits including Putting on the Ritz danced spectacularly by Astaire.  Crosby did it again six years later with Danny Kaye in White Christmas.

Willie Nelson recorded it in 1972, 52 years after it was written,  had a #1 Billboard Hot Country chart hit with it.  He also included it on a Greatest Hits compilation and on his beloved 1978 Stardust album of material from the Great American Songbook. 

The Songwriter of the American Century—Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin--American master song smith.

Say happy birthday to Israel Isidore Baline, born May 11, 1888 in the city of Tyumen in the Ural Mountains 1200 miles west of Moscow.  His father, a Canter, moved his family to the relative safety of the United States in 1893 after Cossacks burned the Jewish Quarter of Tyumen to the ground.  Only three years later his father was dead and the eight year old boy had to quit school and work as a news butcher—a street peddling paper boy—for pennies a day.

He left home at 14 to leave his mother one less mouth to feed and began to support himself singing for tips in saloons, eventually working up to being a song plugger at Tony Pastor’s seminal night club.

Berlin in costume in some sort of parade in New York City in 1911, his break-out year with Alexanders Rag Time Band.

He changed his name to Irving Berlin and began to try his hand at songwriting.  His first success was Alexander’s Rag Time Band in 1911 which became a sensation after he wrote words to go with his music and got it placed in a Broadway review.  Its fresh sound and syncopated rhythm helped set off a new national rage for Rag Time music, which had gone out of fashion a decade earlier.  

Self-taught on the piano—he never could play in any key but F—and unable to read music, none-the-less he eagerly launched himself on a career as a songwriter.  His first Broadway show, Watch You Step in 1914, starred dancing sensations Verne and Irene Castle and included several hits including Play a Simple Melody,  the first of his famous “double” songs in which two different melodies and lyrics are counterpointed against one another. 

He would continue to write for Broadway and films for the next 60 years producing an unrivaled string of hits that included, A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody, Always, Blue Skies, God Bless America,  and There’s No Business Like Show Business to name just a few. 

Nearly as patriotic as George M. Cohan, Berlin penned Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning for his World War I camp show with an all doughboy cast, Yip Yip Yaphank.   God Bless America was also written for that revue  but somehow failed to make the cut.  In 1938 he gave it to Kate Smith for a special 20th anniversary Armistice Day Broadcast and it became a virtual second national Anthem.   He toured for three and a half years to post in the U.S. and Europe with a second all-GI review This Is the Army in which he sang This is the Army Mr. Jones in GI uniform.  The show became the basis of a 1945 film of the same name staring Ronald Regan and Joan Leslie in which Smith reprised God Bless America. Berlin signed over all royalties from that song to benefit  the Boy Scouts of America earning them millions of dollars. 

Berlin, a secularized Jew, is also known for his holiday songs including Easter Parade and White Christmas both of which were featured in the 1940 film Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.  Easter Parade was the only song not written from the movie.  It first appeared in the 1933 revue As Thousands Cheer which presented each number as an item in a newspaper,   Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb originally song.  Holiday Inn essentially transformed the newspaper items for holiday throughout the year stitched together by the thinnest of plots.  Both Easter Parade and White Christmas were again featured two in enormously successful self-titled movie musicals.  Crosby’s 1948 re-recording of White Christmas remains America’s favorite secular Christmas song and is an annual seasonal hit.  For decades it held the record as the bestselling recording of all time.

The Easter Parade number with Clifton Webb and Marilyn Miller from As Thousands Cheer on Broadway in 1933.

Early Berlin Broadway revues included now embarrassing blackface minstrel numbers and some of those were carried over to the silver screen.  But Berlin was a staunch advocate of civil rights and a long-time member of the NAACP.  In As Thousands Cheer Ethel Waters sang Supper Time, a lament for the lynching of her husband of which she said “If one song can tell the whole tragic history of a race, Supper Time was that song. In singing it I was telling my comfortable, well-fed, well-dressed listeners about my people...those who had been slaves and those who were now downtrodden and oppressed.”  Not surprisingly Hollywood film makers concerned with being able to show films in the segregated South never included Supper Time in any of the several movies they built around the Berlin song book.

Show business itself was often a theme for Berlin including numbers presented as vaudeville acts like A Couple of Swells.  And of course There’s No Business Like Show Business from his most successful book musical Annie Get Your Gun has become the enduring anthem of the entertainment industry.

Berlin and bride Dorothy depart on their ill-fated honeymoon to Cuba.

Berlin’s personal life from the days when he was singing on the streets for pennies on was reflected in his music.  His first wife, 20-year-old Dorothy Goetz was the sister of E. Ray Goetz one of his early collaborators.  She died tragically of typhoid contracted during their Cuban honeymoon in 1912.  Grief stricken, Berlin could not write for months. Then his first composition was also his first ballad, the heart felt When I Lost You.

Berlin and his second wife Ellin MacKay at their New York City Hall wedding--the beginning of an enduring 63-year marriage.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

In 1924 Berlin married  Ellin Mackay, and Irish-American Catholic heiress whose father bitterly opposed the marriage.  He wrote the enduring classic love song Always for her and signed over to her personally rights to the song to make up for being disinherited by her father. The rights to that one song alone would make her independently wealthy.  Their marriage remained a love affair and they were inseparable until Ellin died in July 1988 at the age of 85. They had four children during their 63 years of marriage: Irving, who died in infancy on Christmas Day 1928; Mary Ellin, Elizabeth Irving,  and Linda Louise.  Blue Skies in 1926 was a jubilant celebration of his first daughter’s birth.

Berlin wrote in many styles over his long career but is perhaps best remembered for his simple, direct, and heartfelt love songs with lilting melodies and lyrics that seemed an extension of everyday speech.  A classic example was What’ll I Do? From 1924.

Berlin never gave up his love of singing his own songs.  This is from a 1930's outdoor concert and radio broadcast.

In all Berlin wrote around 15,000 songs.  Many of them are as fresh today as when first written and continue to be recorded by artists in a number of styles.  Berlin died in his adopted home town of New York in 1989 a year after Ellin at the age of 101.

M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me)—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

 M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me) Sung by Henry Burr.

It’s Mother’s Day and how better to celebrate than with the first recording of the song most closely identified with the holiday.  M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me) was written by lyricist Howard Johnson, also known for such hits as I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream and When the Moon Comes over the Mountain, and music by Theodore Morse in 1915.

Henry Burr at the recording microphone in the 1920's.

It was recorded by prolific Canadian-born tenor Henry Burr who recorded thousands of songs for various labels under various names.  He was very popular in the 1910's and had the most #1 hits in the decade.  His most successful record was Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight which eventually sold an astonishing million copies. He is estimated to have sold around 240 million records.

The song was covered by many and became a vaudeville staple.  It rose to new popularity with a follow-the-bouncing-ball animated short that helped teach the lyrics to many.  Changing musical tastes past the song by until post-World War II barbershop quartets made it a mainstay of the niche genre

The Frothy Boys serenade Karen Meyer with M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word that Means the World to Me).

The Frothy Boys, the men’s a cappella group made up of Tree of Life UU Congregation member memorably sang it to a mom plucked from the congregation every year at Mother’s Day services and also sang it as a singing telegram to other moms in the community to raise money for charity.

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.