All in the Day's Work: An AutobiographyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Journalists -- United States -- Biography; Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva), 1857-1944
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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