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

by Charles Sumner Young

CLARA BARTON IN THE LITERARY FIELD

The treasure-house of the world is of books. Books are one’s chosen friends, and friends are of souls with like aspirations. From the contents of books character is made. The legacy in books is what youth bequeaths to maturity. In youth Clara Barton entered the “true university,” that of books. She read not only books from the shelf but found “books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Her favorite authors were Shakespeare, Longfellow, Milton, Keats, Schiller, Bunyan, Tennyson, Scott and Browning.

Had she followed the promptings of her head, and not her heart, Clara Barton might have been a Mrs. Sigourney. One of her admirers says that, had she been an author, “her gracefulness of expression, her buoyancy of thought, and brilliancy of imagery” would have placed her in a class with Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë. But Clara Barton is now in a class—in a class by herself—and throughout the future the student of humanity will study Clara Barton.

Clara Barton’s descriptions of battle, and other, scenes are surpassing in vividness—unequalled. In her diaries, which she kept for more than half-a-century, are nuggets of human wisdom. Her wise sayings, as those of Benjamin Franklin, would fill a volume. Such Clara Barton Red Cross maxims, and other wise sayings as appear in these pages, are but the flotsam and jetsam of a cargo of writings, the cargo partly wrecked and no part of it available by the author.

Clara Barton was a nurse, but only as Lincoln was a rail-splitter. As an executive, Clara Barton is accredited as the greatest man in America, by one of America’s greatest statesmen; as the greatest woman in the world, by one of America’s greatest generals; as having done more for humanity than any other woman since the time of Mary of Galilee, by a great State Executive. By a great writer, it is said that through reading everything is within one’s reach. Clara Barton’s mental reach into national and world problems at least widens and heightens the possibilities of womankind.

Her Red Cross lectures are not “Caudle Lectures to Ladies”; they, including official reports, are high-class state papers which would do credit to the White House—literary, argumentative, statesmanlike. For twenty-three years in America Clara Barton was the Red Cross encyclopedia, the Red Cross dictionary. She was also the Red Cross legislature, the Red Cross Supreme Court, the Commander-in-Chief of our Red Cross battalions, at home and abroad. Although one of the “remonstrants,” in the press, referred to the Red Cross as “Clara Barton’s Bread and Butter Brigade” the Achilles in that brigade had won for humanity the greatest battle on American soil.

Her address, “History of the Red Cross; Its Origin and Progress,” is all comprehensive, showing research, scholarship, logic. Her “Address to the President, Congress and People of the United States” on “The Red Cross—A History of This Remarkable Movement in the Interest of Humanity” is as overwhelmingly convincing, as to the necessity of adhesion by this Government to the Treaty of Geneva, as was Webster’s historic reply to Hayne, in advocacy of the perpetuity of the Union. Her address on “What is the Significance of the Red Cross in its Relation to Philanthropy” is hardly less meritorious. Her address at Saratoga on “International and National Relief in War” is more than a literary gem; it is a compendium of humanitarian history—of Red Cross philosophy. No similar humanitarian address even approximates it, in wisdom and argument.

Through seven years, in the field of letters and politics, there raged a war against woe, a war led by a Master Spirit. Humanity won—won through that Master Spirit. That Master Literary Spirit, says another great woman, has “won the hearts of the women of the world.” She not only “walked like a benediction of her God amid the desolate, the stricken, the hungry and despairing,” but she walked and talked and lived “in pulses stirred to generosity.” Her pathos of sentiment and elegance of diction won the hearts of the American people, won Congress, won the President, won the Red Cross for America. And “the Red Cross in its great and human principles, its far-reaching philanthropy, its innovations upon long established and accepted customs and rules of barbaric cruelty, its wise practical charity, stands forever next to the immortal proclamation of freedom to the slaves that crowns the name of Abraham Lincoln.”

IDA M. TARBELL
Clara Barton got the preliminary experience which led to the foundation of the Red Cross work, on the battlefields of the Civil War. I have a high regard for her devotion, her organization ability.—Ida M. Tarbell.

LUCY LARCROM
Even a casual observer can not fail to see in Clara Barton’s work a unity peculiar to itself—a work which has grown out of a character, and which no one but herself could have done.—Lucy Larcrom.

REPRESENTATIVE OF THE LITERARY WORLD

ELBERT HUBBARD
Clara Barton has given us a constant lesson in thrift; a worker from infancy, taking neither vacation nor recreation.

ALICE HUBBARD
The greatest woman of all times. The people of the United States admire, revere and devotedly love Clara Barton.

The Fra—Elbert and Alice Hubbard.