The Americanization of Edward Bok / The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After

by Edward William Bok

Bok took large advertising spaces in the Philadelphia newspapers, asking for men of exceptional character to go to France in the service of the Y. M. C. A.; and members of the Committee spoke before the different commercial bodies at their noon luncheons. The applicants now began to come, and the Committee began its discriminating selection. Each applicant was carefully questioned by the secretary before he appeared before the Committee, which held sittings twice a week. Hence of over twenty-five hundred applicants, only three hundred appeared before the Committee, of whom two hundred and fifty-eight were passed and sent overseas.

The Committee's work was exceptionally successful; it soon proved of so excellent a quality as to elicit a cabled request from Paris headquarters to send more men of the Philadelphia type. The secret of this lay in the sterling personnel of the Committee itself, and its interpretation of the standards required; and so well did it work that when Bok left for the front to be absent from Philadelphia for ten weeks, his Committee, with Thomas W. Hulme, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, acting as Chairman, did some of its best work.

The after-results, according to the report of the New York headquarters, showed that no Y. M. C. A. recruiting committee had equalled the work of the Philadelphia committee in that its men, in point of service, had proved one hundred per cent secretaries. With two exceptions, the entire two hundred and fifty-eight men passed, brought back one hundred per cent records, some of them having been placed in the most important posts abroad and having given the most difficult service. The work of the other Philadelphia committees, particularly that of the Women's Committee, was equally good.

To do away with the multiplicity of "drives," rapidly becoming a drain upon the efforts of the men engaged in them, a War Chest Committee was now formed in Philadelphia and vicinity to collect money for all the war-work agencies. Bok was made a member of the Executive Committee, and chairman of the Publicity Committee. In May, 1918, a campaign for twenty millions of dollars was started; the amount was subscribed, and although much of it had to be collected after the armistice, since the subscriptions were in twelve monthly payments, a total of fifteen and a half million dollars was paid in and turned over to the different agencies.

Bok, who had been appointed one of the Boy Scout commissioners in his home district of Merion, saw the possibilities of the Boy Scouts in the Liberty Loan and other campaigns. Working in co-operation with the other commissioners, and the scoutmaster of the Merion Troop, Bok supported the boys in their work in each campaign as it came along. Although there were in the troop only nine boys, in ages ranging from twelve to fourteen years—Bok's younger son was one of them—so effectively did these youngsters work under the inspiration of the scoutmaster, Thomas Dun Belfield, that they soon attracted general attention and acquired distinction as one of the most efficient troops in the vicinity of Philadelphia. They won nearly all the prizes offered in their vicinity, and elicited the special approval of the Secretary of the Treasury.

Although only "gleaners" in most of the campaigns—that is, working only in the last three days after the regular committees had scoured the neighborhood—these Merion Boy Scouts sold over one million four hundred thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds, and raised enough money in the Y. M. C. A. campaign to erect one of the largest huts in France for the army boys, and a Y. M. C. A. gymnasium at the League Island Navy Yard accommodating two thousand sailor-boys.

In the summer of 1918, the eight leading war-work agencies, excepting the Red Cross, were merged, for the purpose of one drive for funds, into the United War Work Campaign, and Bok was made chairman for Pennsylvania. In November a country-wide campaign was launched, the quota for Pennsylvania being twenty millions of dollars—the largest amount ever asked of the commonwealth. Bok organized a committee of the representative men of Pennsylvania, and proceeded to set up the machinery to secure the huge sum. He had no sooner done this, however, than he had to sail for France, returning only a month before the beginning of the campaign.

But the efficient committee had done its work; upon his return Bok found the organization complete. On the first day of the campaign, the false rumor that an armistice had been signed made the raising of the large amount seem almost hopeless; furthermore, owing to the influenza raging throughout the commonwealth, no public meetings had been permitted or held. Still, despite all these obstacles, not only was the twenty millions subscribed but oversubscribed to the extent of nearly a million dollars; and in face of the fact that every penny of this large total had to be collected after the signing of the armistice, twenty millions of dollars was paid in and turned over to the war agencies.

It is indeed a question whether any single war act on the part of the people of Pennsylvania redounds so highly to their credit as this marvellous evidence of patriotic generosity. It was one form of patriotism to subscribe so huge a sum while the war was on and the guns were firing; it was quite another and a higher patriotism to subscribe and pay such a sum after the war was over!

Bok's position as State chairman of the United War Work Campaign made it necessary for him to follow authoritatively and closely the work of each of the eight different organizations represented in the fund. Because he felt he had to know what the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army, the Y. W. C. A., and the others were doing with the money he had been instrumental in collecting, and for which he felt, as chairman, responsible to the people of Pennsylvania, he learned to know their work just as thoroughly as he knew what the Y. M. C. A. was doing.