This going about with distinguished visitors was by no means all hard work and no play. There was the occasion when Sir George Newman and Lord Astor (they sent us the one available Lord with an American background) and another knight whose name I cannot remember, and I were all ejected from one of Lord Astor’s apartments. It was a fine bit of farce all the way through. When I started to commandeer a Health Department car to use for this particular party, the best I could get was a ramshackle, dusty touring-car, with a chauffeur who had neglected to put on a collar. It looked disreputable enough when I drove up in it to the Waldorf-Astoria. It looked even more so when this peer of the realm and his two knight-companions came out and got into it. Not because it looked unworthy of them. On the contrary, to American eyes it looked a little better than they did. I was aware that Englishmen traditionally wore baggy tweeds, but I had not been aware that any tweeds could be that baggy or that cloth caps, the kind corner-loafers wear, were part of the outfit too.
We worked hard all day, visiting baby clinics and schools. We had stopped at a cafeteria in the Bronx, all of us bringing our food to the same table and cheerily lunching with the chauffeur, who steadily rebuffed these queer strangers’ efforts to engage him in conversation. It was a hot, steamy day in early summer and every ten minutes we grew dustier, stickier and seedier to the dispassionate eye. Then, as we started home, Lord Astor said that since the American type of large, expensive apartment house was non-existent in London in those days, he wanted to show one to these Englishmen.
“I own an apartment house called the Apthorp down here,” he said. “May we drop in there?”
So we dropped in at the Apthorp, on upper Broadway, an impressive kind of apartment house with a smart and very dapper West Indian hall boy, one of those sing-song and rather severe West Indians. When we entered, he sized us up as either hoboes or swindlers—so much was obvious. When Lord Astor said he wanted to show these friends of his one of the apartments, the boy froze like a dowager with her train stepped on.
“We’ve nothing to show you,” he said, ice clinking in his voice.
“Now come,” said Lord Astor, “I happen to know there are some vacancies. We must go up at once. We’re in a hurry.”
“Look here,” said the boy, “you’d better go along quietly. I don’t want to have to make trouble for you.”
“But,” said Lord Astor, “I’m Lord Astor. I own this building.”
“Will you get out of here before I call the police?” said the boy.
So we got out of there, with the boy following us to see we didn’t steal a statue on the way out. Then, being a smart lad, as I said, he managed to read the golden letters “H.D.” beneath the grime and mud on the door of our disreputable car. He asked the chauffeur a few questions and then, turning dusky purple, began to apologize just as the driver let in the clutch. As we rattled away, we all looked at one another and began to laugh.
“What are you going to do about the hall boy?” I asked, as soon as I got my breath back.
Lord Astor looked at himself and then at the others.
“Nothing whatever,” he said. “He was quite right. If he had let us in, I’d have had him discharged.”
That combination of a car, a celebrity and a tour of child-welfare facilities often provided some amusement. Once I had recovered from its effects, I knew I had had a very fine time as escort for a similar tour with Theodore Roosevelt. That day combined in a nut-shell all the excitement, the hurry and the feverishness of the period.
It was fairly early in 1918, as I remember. It was Colonel Roosevelt’s idea to begin with, starting with a telephone message from his secretary indicating that the Colonel had developed a lively interest in the Bureau’s work and wouldn’t we like to take him around and show him what we were doing? The answer was obviously yes. An appointment was made. I suspected it was going to be quite a day, so, for moral support, I drafted Dr. Henry Dwight Chapin as my companion, and up we went to the Colonel’s office to escort him on the rounds. Our only special preparations consisted of using the Department of Health’s best-looking car as a tribute to the Colonel’s dignity, and asking the Police Department to detail a few men to the places we were to visit—in case of crowds. The Colonel drew a crowd wherever he went. When it came to attracting public attention, he was a kind of human three-alarm fire.
The fun began the moment we were ushered into the Colonel’s office. He squared round and faced us immediately—the angriest man I ever saw in my life, I think: mustache bristling, eyes glowing behind his thick-lensed glasses and voice telling us just what he thought of us.
“I’m not going with you at all,” he told us. “I wanted this trip to be quiet and unmolested—above all I wanted to avoid any publicity—and yet you’ve gone ahead and had it announced in the papers—”
I protested that we had done no such thing. I had not said a word about it to a reporter or to anyone connected with journalism and, so far as I knew, there had been no publicity at all.
“Oh, there hasn’t?” he roared, bouncing out of his chair. “I’m through with you and the whole thing. I resent this whole business and I refuse to make myself a party to it by going out with you.” Then he shouted for his secretary to bring him the morning paper and began wading through it, snorting and growling like one of his own western grizzly bears. It took a long time to find the item, but in the end he turned up a tiny paragraph at the foot of a column on one of the back pages about how Colonel Roosevelt was planning to visit baby health stations that morning. I tried to explain that perhaps my request for police details had enabled a police reporter to pick it up. But he would listen to no explanations.
When we started to leave after his tenth repetition of “I’m disgusted with the whole thing and I’m not going with you,” he suddenly became relatively friendly. “Either of you in a hurry?” he asked. When we said why, no, in some surprise and sat down again, he leaned forward and asked: “Look here, what do you think of the way this war’s being managed?” Dr. Chapin and I sputtered something feeble, but it did not matter what we said because the Colonel was distinctly not listening. Instead he was warming up to the first few sentences of a sizzling speech. “I’ll tell you what I think of this war,” he began and, for the next half hour, he never stopped to draw breath. We just sat there, speechless, swamped under a brilliant oratorical outpouring of scorn and anger. He told us exactly where President Wilson was wrong and exactly why Theodore Roosevelt should have been given a large hand in the management of the war and exactly what he would do if he were in the saddle and why anything else was tragic, idiotic, bungling, treacherous, unforgivable non-sense. It really was inspiring to hear him—beyond any question the best speech I had heard the Colonel make in twenty years of listening to him.
It evidently did him good to state his opinions so fully, so forcibly and so frankly. When he had finished and the whole administration was figuratively lying about the office in shreds and tatters, he leaned back in his chair, grinned at us with amiable ferocity and said:
“Well, I don’t want to disappoint you. Maybe I will go with you after all. Let’s make it day after tomorrow—and remember, no publicity.” We swore there would be no publicity. When he called in his secretary to have her make a note of the engagement, she was solemnly instructed to make every effort to keep the expedition out of the papers. As we were leaving, he turned again to the secretary: “Well, I don’t know,” he said, “the newspaper boys are good fellows and it might make nice copy for them—maybe you’d better call up the Sun and the Associated Press and see if they’d like to send somebody along with us on Thursday.” Then, turning to me: “Perhaps we could wind up some place where there’s an auditorium,” he said. “Then we could—yes—” to the secretary—“call up all the newspapers and tell them I’ll make a speech to all the reporters they want to send.”
That was the way he went about avoiding publicity. Even so, not wanting to speak out of turn, I stuck to my end of the bargain and gave
the press no notice from the Bureau, merely asked the Police Commissioner to supply plenty of police coverage at all the stops we were planning to make. Within a few hours Health Department doctors and nurses who had heard the news by grapevine telegraph were coming in to ask me if they could be on duty at the first baby health station we were to visit so they could see the Colonel.
Being nervous about managing what was turning into a traveling circus, I left it to Dr. Chapin to go for the Colonel on Thursday morning and went myself to the first stop of the itinerary to see that all was ready. The front room was crowded with mothers and babies and the back room full of doctors and nurses thrilled over the approaching great man. He arrived in style, in the big shiny department car, followed by a string of a dozen or fifteen taxis packed full of reporters, news-photographers and newsreel cameramen with all their equipment, the whole cavalcade roaring through the narrow East Side streets with the air of a royal procession in a hurry. Naturally there was a first-class crowd for the photographers to work on. The moment the Colonel stepped out of the car he pounced on a policeman and began shaking him by the hand: “I know you,” he said. “I appointed you to the force back when I was Police Commissioner, didn’t I?” And he and this policeman proceeded to have an Old Home Week there on the sidewalk, with news-cameras clicking merrily, until I tore them apart and got the Colonel inside.
Considering that so much of the medical and nursing staff of the Bureau was wasting its morning in the back room, I immediately asked the Colonel if he would mind stepping in and saying “Hello” to them. When I got him inside, I found he expected to be personally introduced to each of them. They were all members of my Bureau, but names have always been one of my major stumbling-blocks and, as I took the Colonel around, I asked to have one of my supervisors at my elbow so he might whisper their names in my ear. That made it all the more dramatic when, as we were leaving, the Colonel said he wanted to say goodbye all around—and, although I can still hardly believe it, he actually went back and shook hands with every one of those people all over again and called each one of thirty-odd perfect strangers by name. If I had seen that done on the vaudeville stage, I should have called it a trick.
That started us off in fine style. All the rest of the day we went rushing around New York, stopping at various Bureau stations, schools and institutions for children, going in to let the Colonel talk to the mothers and children and tell them about his own grandchildren. Every time we came out of a station or a school we would have our pictures taken again, the Colonel standing between Dr. Chapin and me, and grinning so refulgently that the cameramen must have had to stop down their lenses. I think we had our pictures taken on an average of every fifteen minutes for six hours. But between times he plied me with the shrewdest and best informed set of questions I ever listened to. At five o’clock we reached the Post-Graduate Hospital where Dr. Chapin had arranged for the use of the auditorium. I was a little afraid that once the Colonel got on his feet he would be unable to resist the temptation to repeat his violent dissertation on the way the war was being handled; but no, he stood up and made a speech brimming over with intelligent eulogy of child welfare work. It was old stuff to the assembled press, but it had all been new and glorious to him and he said so as emphatically and at as much length as if the entire Bureau of Child Hygiene had been his own baby.
I was exhausted by that time—so were Dr. Chapin and the reporters and photographers. But, when we climbed wearily back into the car for the last time and asked the Colonel if he wanted us to take him home: “No,” he said, “not home. Drop me at the Union League Club. I’ll be dressing there before I go on to a dinner where I have to make a speech.” Well, after all, he was the man who coined the phrase “the strenuous life.” He was apparently quite capable of going through the whole performance again without stopping for breath. We left him at the club and went home to try to recuperate.
Yes, odd events happened in those queerly kinetic years. I had the privilege, shared with a great many other women, of being suspected of mildly radical sympathies which during the war were, of course, synonymous with giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I was no pacifist whatever. I would hardly have received that major’s commission if I had been. But I did belong to a luncheon club for women active in various social and economic movements, and that was apparently enough. The name of the club was, and still is, Heterodoxy. Perhaps it was the name that alarmed the spy-chasers. Perhaps it was true, as legend said, that a worried member of Heterodoxy had written a letter calling on the secret service men to keep an eye on the club’s weekly meetings because its rolls contained so many pacifists and radicals. The fantastic result was that we really did have to shift our meeting-place every week to keep from being watched. It was just like an E. Phillips Oppenheim novel. All except the characters, that is. My colleagues in treason were not sloe-eyed countesses with small pearl-handled revolvers in their pocketbooks but people like Crystal Eastman, Fannie Hurst, Rose Pastor Stokes, Inez Haynes Irwin, Fola La Follette and Mabel Dodge Luhan.
We had Amy Lowell to address a meeting once, I remember. She dealt very pleasantly with her theories of poetry and such general subjects and then asked if anybody would like her to read some of her poems. That produced a landslide of requests. Member after member demanded a special favorite, and each selection was more sentimental than the last, which had dripped with sweet sorrows of one sort or another. It was all so sad that Rose Pastor Stokes turned around and laid her head on her neighbor’s shoulder and cried down her neck, sobbing an obbligato to Miss Lowell’s sonorous voice. The poetess stood it as long as she could and then:
“I’m through,” she said. “They told me I was to be speaking to a group of intellectual, realistic, tough-minded leaders in the women’s world. Instead I find a group that wants nothing but my most sentimental things. Good afternoon!” And she poked her cigar into her mouth and walked out glowering.
It may have been my connection with Heterodoxy that offended the Daughters of the American Revolution. Or perhaps it was my connection with the Federal Children’s Bureau, which, for some reason or other, struck the stupider kind of conservatives as vaguely subversive when it was first started. I did not know I was on the D. A. R. blacklist until I received an invitation from a committee, headed by Heywood Broun, for a dinner given by and for all people who were not to be allowed to address meetings of the D. A. R., wherever found. I went to the dinner and had a very fine time in the very best of company—that list was the cream of American intellectuals with a slightly liberal leaning, for it was at the time when the Red-hunt was at its hottest.
I enjoyed it all the more in remembering that not long before I had been a Daughter of the American Revolution myself. A patient of mine insisted that I should join the D. A. R.—surely a woman with my fine old American background could raise a revolutionary ancestor. Finally she went so far as to say that, if I didn’t join the D. A. R. she might have to look for another doctor. That was serious, so I checked up on my forebears, discovered that a good half dozen of my ancestors had fought the British, and duly joined. Not long afterward, however, my patient died. The dues were not high, but they struck me as absolutely wasted money, so I immediately resigned.
Until I received that dinner invitation, I never regretted it. Then, however, I saw what a blunder I had committed. It would have been much better if the D. A. R. had blacklisted me while I was still on their membership-roll.
There was any amount of confusion, during the war years, about the precise point where liberalism lapsed into dangerous radicalism. I belonged to one organization in the early years of the war, before we entered the holocaust, that I look back upon with awe and a vague feeling of nostalgia. The air was full of public-spirited efforts of one sort or another at that time, but in this case a full-fledged idealist was found in a strictly scientific laboratory: the late Dr. S. J. Meltzer. He was an important official in the Rockefeller Institute, and when the war began in Europe he had the idea that all doctors
were above factional strife and feelings. He planned and put into operation an organization called “The War Brotherhood,” the membership of which was to be made up of all doctors from all nations at war. In the light of what happened afterwards and what is happening today, Dr. Meltzer’s ideals now seem curiously eccentric. But they did not seem so then. Among the doctors in the United States, the idea attracted the very best: the list of members sounds like an honor roll of American medicine. We had many meetings all permeated with our high purpose. We proposed to keep doctors neutral. It never occurred to us that this was an impossible task. Europe did not take kindly to our offer of brotherhood. It became apparent almost at once that doctors are as human and as nationalistic as anyone else. We still had hopes of our own, but later, when we entered the war, American doctors became as partisan as the others, and the Brotherhood dissolved.
That organization is now merely a bit of Americana from the pre-war period. As I was the only woman to hold office in the War Brotherhood, it marked my idealistic contribution to a world that has long since departed. It is hard now to remember that it ever existed.
When the Bureau of Child Hygiene was fairly started on its career, we fell heir to one of the neglected stepchildren of the Department. This was the issuance of employment certificates to children allowing them to leave school and go to work. While this would seem to be a matter belonging wholly to the jurisdiction of the Board of Education, the Legislature, in its wisdom, had handed the enforcement of this law to the Department of Health because a physical examination was to be made of each child and the granting, or with-holding, of the certificate depended upon the physical condition of the child.
We soon found that these presumed physical examinations were a farce and that very little political pressure was needed to assure any child, no matter how underweight or physically handicapped he might be, of getting his certificate without any difficulty. It was an intrenched racket. The law at that time required a child to be fourteen years old and to have completed the eighth grade of school work. The enforcement was so lax that practically any child with a very little dressing of his age could get a certificate at any time. To give a little idea of how lax this enforcement was, I remember my first contact with the office force in the Department assigned to this duty. I wandered into the office one day and on the scales stood a child, palpably not much over ten years old, peaked and thin and with his pockets protruding in knobby excresences that looked like huge swellings at various parts of his anatomy. The recorded weight was all right for a boy of fourteen and his school record looked all right also. But as he stepped down from the scales, I called him to me. “Let’s see what you have in your pockets?” I queried. Quite calmly he began to disgorge the lumps and the net result was over twenty pounds of lead which he had spread over his person to get his weight up to the required degree. Anyone could have noticed it but no one did. Anyway, our clean-up began at once.
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