The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)

It would have been well if Clara Barton had retired from the active work of the presidency of the American Red Cross at the close of the war with Spain. She had accomplished in her lifetime an almost incredible total of heroic work. She had completed seventy-eight years of service; she had created the American Red Cross and led it successfully in peace and war. On twenty different fields on both sides of the ocean she had raised its banner over areas devastated by fire, flood, famine, and pestilence. She had won the support of her Government to an enterprise till then unknown and but little regarded. She had made the Red Cross in America so useful in times of peace that the Red Cross societies of the world had widened their spheres of operation to incorporate her plans of service. She had crowned her long and arduous career with an achievement that won for her the heart of the American army and navy in Cuba, and brought to her the thanks of the Congress and of the President of the United States. She could have retired with honors such as no woman in America ever had won. If her judgment told her that this was the time for her to transfer her burden of active supervision to some younger person, her heart triumphed over her judgment.

She was eighty years of age when, on September 8, 1900, a tornado and tidal wave submerged Galveston, Texas. Five days later Clara Barton was on the ground. Difficulties of transportation held her back for twenty-four hours or she would have been there a day sooner.

Her plea for lumber, hardware, and other materials for providing temporary shelter met with a nation-wide response, and supplies of food and clothing, as well as considerable sums of money, were placed at her disposal.

After six weeks spent in Texas, Clara Barton returned, worn out by her exertions, but bringing the grateful thanks of the people of Galveston, and, in addition, an official letter of thanks from the governor of the State of Texas and also of its legislature. The Central Relief Committee of Galveston also tendered her a series of engrossed resolutions, declaring that she deserved to be “exalted above queens,” and that her achievements were “greater than the conquests of nations or the inventions of genius.”

In the following year occurred the seventh International Conference of the Red Cross, already referred to, held at St. Petersburg in Russia and extending from the middle of May until near the end of June of 1902. Clara Barton headed the delegation from the United States. The conference was held under the high patronage of Her Majesty the Empress Dowager Marie Feodorovna. Miss Barton was the guest of the Emperor and Empress. No delegate to the conference was treated with greater consideration than Clara Barton. At the close of the conference she was decorated by the Emperor, who conferred upon Clara Barton the Russian decoration of the Order of the Red Cross.

Two of her letters concerning this journey have been quoted in a previous chapter. Clara Barton returned to her own land crowned with additional honors, but confronting new and wholly unexpected difficulties.

The American Red Cross had been reincorporated by Act of Congress June 6, 1900. Under the new form of organization the board and its executive committee possessed large powers. There was a feeling on the part of some members of the board that the American Red Cross was too exclusively under the direction of Clara Barton. Her work for the relief of Galveston had been undertaken almost the moment that she first learned of its great need. She had not waited to call an executive committee meeting. While her work in that field was most heartily commended, there was a feeling on the part of members of the board that the Red Cross, being now virtually a representative organ of the United States Government, its fields of service should be determined, not by the judgment of an individual, but of the governing body of the organization itself. There was further criticism growing out of the fact that, when emergencies arose by reason of any great national disaster, a considerable part of the money was sent direct to Clara Barton on the field, and expended by her without passing through the hands of the treasurer.

Miss Barton admitted that she had made these decisions at times without the formal authority of her executive committee, and that she had received and expended money according to her best judgment when the emergency was at hand. She did not desire to be bound by burdensome restrictions; she wished to be at liberty to meet the need whenever it should arrive, and in the way that seemed to be necessary.

If everything had gone well with the Red Cross during the absence of Clara Barton at St. Petersburg in 1902, it may be that she would have consented to retire on her return from that notable experience. It was hardly likely that any further honor could have come to her higher than that which she had already received. Theoretically she ought to have been training up assistants who would act effectively in her absence, and in time succeed her. It was in some respects a limitation on her part that she had not found assistants to whom she could delegate authority with confidence that it would be properly used. On the other hand, she had made some experiments in training up associates, and found reason to regret it.

While Clara Barton was on her way to St. Petersburg the disastrous Mont Pelée earthquake occurred. She had left the American Red Cross organized with a board of control which gave it authority to act in such an emergency. She returned from St. Petersburg bitterly disappointed because the American Red Cross played in that disaster, as she felt, a wholly insignificant part. It seemed to her to have displayed a complete lack of that initiative which had always characterized her action under such conditions.

Rightly or wrongly Miss Barton felt that this inability to act promptly and decisively was in some measure the result of a divided authority. She thereupon set in motion an effort to amend the by-laws so as to increase the power of the president. These changed by-laws were adopted at the annual meeting of the American Red Cross in Washington, December 9, 1902. Clara Barton was elected president for life and given the authority which she deemed requisite for effective action.

An earnest protest was made against Miss Barton’s increase of power, and the disaffection increased throughout the year 1903. On January 2, 1904, President Roosevelt notified Miss Barton that he could no longer serve as an officer of the Red Cross in the condition of unrest which had developed.

Three weeks later, on January 29th, the minority of the American Red Cross presented a memorial to Congress charging that under the new form of organization practically all power was centered in the president of the society, who was elected for life and permitted to choose her own executive committee. A committee of investigation was appointed to inquire into the affairs of the Red Cross. Of this committee Senator Redfield Proctor was chairman.

It would be difficult to describe the emotions of Clara Barton when she knew of the appointment of this committee. She was shocked and horrified. She felt as if it had been a personal disgrace; and what was worse, as she viewed it, she feared that it would result in a dissension that would ruin the American Red Cross. On the other hand, she had no mind to retire while the investigation was on. Whatever happened, she would not resign until the investigation ended.

The committee of investigation appears to have been a very sensible body. It set about gathering such material as it needed, and the examination of such witnesses as were produced by the remonstrants.

The remonstrance did not contain any charges of any dishonesty on the part of Miss Barton in the administration of the affairs of the Red Cross; or, any charge of misappropriation of any property or money by Miss Barton; or any improper act or conduct of any kind which involved any element of moral turpitude.

The charges were, in brief:

(a) That proper books of accounts were not kept at all times; and

(b) that the property and funds of the Red Cross were not at all times distributed upon the order of the treasurer of the society, as alleged to be required by the by-laws of the society; and

(c) that a certain tract of land in Lawrence County, Indiana, had been donated to the society by one Joseph Gardner; that the society was reincorporated after such donation, and such donation was never reported to the new corporation.

The reply to these charges, in brief, was that, in the main, proper books of account had been kept, but, in so far as accurate books of account had not been kept, it was due to the impossibility of keeping them while active work was in progress on the field of disaster, and, in so far as the by-laws of the society had not been complied with in the making of disbursements through the treasurer, it was impossible to do so during the stress of active relief work in the field; that so far as the Gardner donation of Indiana land was concerned, no Red Cross money had ever been invested in it; that the title to the real estate was always in the Red Cross and in the then existing corporate entity of the Red Cross, but that the land had not been found to be suited to the work of the Red Cross and the title thereto had been allowed to lapse because of the accumulation of taxes and charges for maintenance which were found to be in excess of the utility of the land to the Red Cross.[4]

The committee of investigation held three meetings, on April 12, April 26, and May 2, 1904. Clara Barton did not attend in person, but was represented by counsel. It never became necessary for her to present her defense. At the close of the third meeting the chairman of the committee adjourned the hearing without day and the investigation came to an end. The committee never presented a report; there was no occasion to do so. The proceedings of the committee are obtainable by any one who cares to read them, and they indicate with sufficient clearness the reasons which presumably influenced the committee in terminating the hearing after one side had been presented. There was no reason why the committee needed to hear anything in defense of Clara Barton.

The investigation having ended, Clara Barton presented her resignation June 16, 1904. The resignation was accepted. The American Red Cross came under its new form of organization with the President of the United States as nominal President of the Red Cross. The committee of the opposition had proposed that Clara Barton be made honorary president for life with a salary to continue as long as she lived. She did not accept either the office or the money. She retired from the Red Cross, leaving it to the management of those who with her resignation came into its control. Her own relation with the organization ceased entirely.

Clara Barton was normally responsive to praise and abnormally sensitive to criticism. In all the years of her public life she never recovered from that supersensitiveness which had characterized her childhood. Fulsome and excessive praise disgusted her, but she enjoyed discriminating appreciation. Straightforward opposition she could meet and bear, but she shrank from criticism at the hands of those who had been her friends, and such criticism hurt her far more than any one could imagine who beheld her self-possession and outward calm. She seemed to the world to take opposition somewhat lightly, but she bled within her armor from wounds which the world never suspected.

She retired from the Red Cross broken-hearted. Her common sense ought to have saved her from nine tenths of the suffering which she endured in that unhappy experience. She felt that she had been denationalized, repudiated by her own country, expatriated. She thought for a time that she could not continue to live in the United States. She turned her eyes toward Mexico, and thought of going there partly to escape from the sorrows which confronted her, and which she painfully exaggerated, and partly with the thought that she might there establish something corresponding to the American Red Cross. She had a friend in California, Mr. Charles S. Young, who knew much about Mexico. On January 13, 1904, after the appointment of the congressional committee and before any of its hearings, she wrote the following letter which came as near to being hysterical as anything that Clara Barton ever wrote:

In conversation she said: “The Government which I thought I loved, and loyally tried to serve, has shut every door in my face and stared at me insultingly through its windows. What wonder I want to leave?”

In another conversation, referring to the abandonment of her dream of going to Mexico, she said: “There were but two countries where the Red Cross did not exist, China and Mexico. I did not want to go to China, but did want to go to Mexico, and fully intended to go. My friends finally dissuaded me and perhaps it was for the best, for if I had gone I probably would not have been alive now.”

From this distance it is possible to view the whole situation in perspective. The present author has no hesitation in saying that the time had come for Clara Barton to retire from the active work of the administration of the American Red Cross. The organization had grown well beyond the ability of any one person to manage it in the way that Clara Barton had managed it so successfully in its earlier years. On her return either from Cuba or St. Petersburg, she ought to have retired, accepting the honorary presidency, and giving over the control and active management to younger people. The author has witnessed in not a few instances the pathetic struggle which goes on in the minds of elderly people on their prospective retirement from positions which have outgrown them. It is a situation nothing less than tragic. A person long identified with an organization comes easily to believe, either that he cannot get on without it, or that it cannot get on without him. Clara Barton had come to believe the latter concerning the American Red Cross. She was mistaken.

There comes a time in the life of almost any organization when, if it is to prosper and enlarge, it must accept new leadership and adapt itself to changed conditions. A woman as sensible as Clara Barton was in most things should have realized this situation and not have permitted herself to be heart-broken by a change as necessary for her as it was for the Red Cross.

Nor is it necessary at this time to refer to the fact that the change might perhaps have been brought about in a kindlier spirit and with less of distress to a noble woman. If there was any lack of consideration for her, it will do no good now to remember it, nor to ascribe unworthy motives to any who had a share in it.

One thing, however, ought to be said concerning this tragic experience. If Clara Barton did not bear this sorrow like a philosopher, she bore it like a Christian. The author has searched her diaries and most intimate papers of this period without finding in any of them any spirit of personal resentment or desire for revenge. She felt that she had been deeply wronged, but she felt it not so much as a wrong done to her as an injury to the cause she loved. Her constant question was not, What will become of me? but, What will become of the Red Cross? Her books had been kept honestly and she knew it; but she also knew that, when money came to her on the field, she had been accustomed to spend it for the necessities of life for those she had come to help, and that not all of it had passed through the hands of the treasurer. She knew that no committee of Congress could find any of this money in her possession, but she also knew that her system of book-keeping had not been established with a view to a possibility of that kind of an audit. How would it affect the Red Cross if any scandal arose out of her unbusinesslike book-keeping?

She came in time to realize that she had taken this matter too seriously. She came to know the relief of lessened responsibility and to be glad that the Red Cross, with its cares and responsibilities and widening sphere of influence, had been safely transferred to other hands.

The author may be permitted to add a personal word. In his personal conversation with Clara Barton concerning these unhappy events he never heard her speak uncharitably of any of her opponents. He was not with her during the time of the actual difficulty, and has sometimes regretted that he was not there. Had he known all that he now knows from months of labor spent in the examination of her most intimate papers, he would have advised her to retire in 1898 or 1902, and to turn over all her records to her successors, and enjoy for herself a few years of unofficial honor before her long life closed. He did not at that time possess the intimate knowledge which now is in his possession, of the whole life and method of work of the American Red Cross under her administration. He is of the opinion that she ought to have accepted her retirement, not only willingly but gladly, and that she was far more troubled than she had need to be concerning the events which led to her retirement from office.

But this fact he records with sincere admiration for this noble woman, the author’s friend and kinswoman, that in her conversation with him in the years that followed, and in her diaries and intimate self-revelations of her private papers, he has found no word that seems inspired by selfish ambition, by personal resentment, or by any unworthy motive.