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

GREATNESS—AN IMMORTAL AMERICAN DESTINY—IMMORTALITY

From a speech by Honorable Henry Breckenridge, Acting Secretary of War, representing the United States Government, at the laying of the corner-stone of the American Red Cross Building, at Washington, D. C, March 27, 1915.

To every soldier who fought in the Union Army, and survived the war, the name of Clara Barton was known. And as long as the American Red Cross endures or its name is remembered the memory of Clara Barton will be cherished. Her sympathies were universal, her zeal unflagging. She nursed the wounded of two wars on the continents, in our Civil War and in the Franco-Prussian War. She directed the work of her association to the calamities of peace, as well as the stricken fields of war. She was in Cuba before the Spanish War—was on the “Maine” the day before it was blown up, and tended the wounded survivors in the hospital ashore. Wherever humanity called for help—in the Balkans or in Strasburg—in Cuba or in Galveston—in Paris or on the American battlefields of the sixties—there came the ministering hand of Clara Barton.

To take an historical perspective, disfavor with a temporary and passing administration means nothing in the end to a name as great and a career as long as Clara Barton’s, as this estimate shows. For a while it may mean on both sides much misconstruction and suffering, but in the end this is forgotten and the fame remains undimmed.

Florence Nightingale, at the Crimea, England’s great introducer into the world of the system of women hospital nurses, was actually so ignored by a subsequent English ministry that, though a poor invalid, she was ousted from her minor position in a Governmental office. It caused her intense pain, and although a chronic sufferer from her many labors, she saw herself ignominiously thrown out by new political leaders who, great as they were, could not understand her. But when she became an octogenarian, all this became a buried incident, and all England a few years ago bent to do her homage, when the Lord Mayor of London granted her the freedom of the city, and the Golden Casket, England’s highest of honors. Now, since her death, a monument is being erected and nothing is considered too good to let Great Britain make her memory green in the British Isles.

Thus will perish the temporary unhappy misunderstanding and misconstruction of 1902–1904, through which Clara Barton suffered. In the atoning stream that swallows time’s ticking seconds of little troubles, its unessentials will be dissolved. Indeed, as demonstrated in nearly 3000 American newspapers in 1912, they have already been dissolved, leaving her character and career eternally crystallized at the base of an enduring national foundation and an immortal American destiny—the greatest an American woman has yet produced.

© Harris & Ewing
HENRY BRECKENRIDGE
So long as the American Red Cross endures, and its name is remembered, the memory of Clara Barton will be cherished.—Henry Breckenridge, of Kentucky. Orator of the Day, Assistant Secretary of War, representing the U. S. Government at the laying of the corner stone of the Red Cross Building at Washington, D. C., March 17, 1915; Lieutenant-Colonel World War.
See page [368].