Clara Barton: A Centenary Tribute to the World's Greatest Humanitarian: Founder of the American Red Cross Society, Author of the American Amendment to the International Red Cross Convention of Geneva, Founder of the National First Aid Association of AmericaYoung, Charles Sumner
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Clara Barton: A Centenary Tribute to the World's Greatest Humanitarian: Founder of the American Red Cross Society, Author of the American Amendment to the International Red Cross Convention of Geneva, Founder of the National First Aid Association of America
Young, Charles Sumner
Barton, Clara, 1821-1912
Also, inexcusable ignorance was shown on the part of the accuser of
Clara Barton as to her methods in Red Cross affairs. It is certified to
by the Red Cross (and of official record) that Clara Barton made her
report at the close of every disaster, and in every instance the report
was approved by the Red Cross, and was satisfactory to her government
and the American people. Besides besmirching the history and good name
of the Red Cross and her country, thus to impeach the integrity of the
Founder of the Red Cross and for more than a score of years its
President, is to impeach also her various boards of officers and her
hundreds of other associates, including American Presidents,—all of whom
uniformly approved her methods, her reports and the results achieved,
while “she remained the President of this small American Red Cross and
sometimes acted also as its Treasurer.”
If what the “lone accuser” asserts be true, that “we (Red Cross) have
letters that seem to show that she occasionally had some of the
contributed funds invested in the West,” they are letters, among other
Red Cross effects, that came officially into the possession of the Red
Cross, in 1904, through the pleasure and free-will offering of the
conscientious-and-honest-to-a-fault-concealing-nothing Clara Barton. And
for which also she received a _clearance card_, a “receipt in full.” As
an American citizen and a member of the Red Cross I protest the legal
right, or the moral right, of the Red Cross “accuser” now to incriminate
her whose lips are sealed, or longer to approve of record, _upon what
seems to show_.... The facts _not only seem to show, but do show_, that
if Clara Barton had not accepted as a present from the twin brothers,
Edwin and Edward Baltzley of Glen Echo, Chautauqua, her Glen Echo real
estate, and for a house thereon as a present, the wreckage lumber from
the people of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889, there would have been no
free-of-rent home for the Red Cross for the last fifteen years of her
Red Cross administration and that of other philanthropies; that, while
the accuser was living in a palace and “rolling in wealth,” the accused
would have been homeless and penniless, living on charity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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