A woman’s story at a winter’s fire,
Authorized by her grandam.
The “charges,” including detractions, innuendoes and suspicions (of which the foregoing are only in part), take a wide range, extending from the time Clara Barton taught her first school at Bordentown in 1836 (80 years previous), down to the Sea Islands hurricane in 1893 (22 years previous). These “charges” were segregated by a friend of Clara Barton for the Library Committee. In that form they consist of thirty-one “charges,” including the accuser’s personal verdict, “the dishonest appropriation of relief funds.” In history the “accusation” will be referred to as “The Thirty-One Charges Without a Charge In It.” In legal circles such affirmations are known as “stale charges,” or by a worse name; but, even if presented immediately, such “charges” would have no standing in any court of equity in this country. The “charges” are further negatived by the admissions of the accuser, “It is difficult to obtain data regarding the receipts and expenditures;” “It is impossible to say what funds were received and expended.”
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.
The “lone accuser” has no “letters that seem to show,” save and except such letters be interpreted by an “enemy,” and for an ulterior purpose. There is no truth in cynicism, or but half truth, which is more untruth than no truth. There is no truth in “we (Red Cross) have others in our possession” which the “lone accuser” pretended to have in her post-mortem cruise, in 1916, while trying to thwart the will of the people as to the proposed Clara Barton memorial tablet in the American Red Cross Building; and, still worse, trying to blot out forever the name of the Red Cross Founder. As the sentiment of all the people, but said by the people of Johnstown just after the flood, in 1889: “Try to describe the sunshine. Try to describe the starlight. Picture the sunlight and the starlight, and then try to say good bye to Clara Barton.”
Truth will come to sight.
In re Memorial to Clara Barton in 1916, the Library Committee of the House of Representatives, having before them all charges of whatsoever nature against Clara Barton, but especially those certain post mortem “charges,” wholly ignored each charge, and all “charges,” made by the “remonstrants” of 1902–4, in their memorial to Congress at that time. The report of the Library Committee in 1916 was favorable to Miss Barton, and as disastrous to the cause of the “remonstrants” as was that of the Red Cross Proctor Committee, in 1904.
From the House Records, in the unanimously approved report by the Library Committee, are the following excerpts:
“Miss Barton’s life was given up to the work of relieving the distress in Europe and America, and her place in the affection of her friends and admirers is secure. None of them is willing to admit that she needs any special tablet, or stone, or that either is required to keep alive her memory as a benefactor of all distressed mankind. As one of the women of the Civil War, and a distinguished one, she also is memorialized in the Red Cross Building.”