Was there ever such a time? Most of us have forgotten whether there is a National Board of Health, but “the words Red Cross, and the emblem for which they stand,” have become as familiar as the Stars and Stripes.
Yet there was a time when all other countries knew of it, but in the United States we knew of Internal Revenue and of the National Board of Health, but not of the Red Cross!
The little tablet is not dated, but I have no difficulty in supplying the date. These six pages were penciled on a night between June 9 and July 1, 1881. They appear to have been intended as the basis of an article for the Associated Press, endeavoring to call a little more attention to the fact that on May 21 of that year the American Red Cross had actually been organized and that on June 9 it had elected officers. The Associated Press had sent out a paragraph announcing the organization, May 21, and this was to tell that “A subsequent meeting has been held, and the following officers elected: President, Miss Clara Barton; secretary, George Kennan,” and so on. She might have told, but did not, that her own name as president was presented by President Garfield himself.
She had to explain what the Red Cross was for, although “During the last three or four years the public eye has been growing familiar with the term,” through constant efforts to secure for it such recognition in America as it long had had abroad.
“Nation after nation has recognized its benign mission,” the narrative runs on, “until twenty-seven countries have welcomed, received, and incorporated its humane principle into laws which govern their rules of warfare. In twenty-seven lands, wherever the national emblem is thrown to the breeze in token of war, there floats beside it this beautiful emblem of mercy, pity, justice, charity, and neutral care for the wounded, comfort for the dying, and burial for the dead. To us alone it is a stranger. For seventeen years it has knocked at our door, but our great, noisy family failed to hear.”
That was her first great triumph!
So she obtained her official recognition, and then on the very next day held her meeting for organization, and that fall secured her incorporation, and the next year the treaty, and so on, and so on, one step leading to another; and when she had gotten the consent of the White House, she undertook to educate the great American Republic, and let them know what the Red Cross stood for. She hoped the time would come when the name and symbol would be as well known in America as the words Internal Revenue or National Board of Health.
She had no publicity organization, nor press committee; but one night she sat up in bed, lighted her candle, took her little pad and pencil, and began to write:
“In almost any part of the world except the United States of America the words Red Cross, and the emblem for which it stands, would be as familiar—” and so on.
She did not finish the article in this form, though I find what use she made of it later in that year, in a pamphlet entitled “A Sketch of the History of the Red Cross.” That document was reissued with added material in 1883, after the adoption of the international treaty. The two lie before me, the completed pamphlet, with the endorsement of Secretary Blaine, and the nomination, by President Garfield himself, of Clara Barton to be president of the American Red Cross Association, and the three-cent pencil tablet on which Clara Barton began, on one night very soon after June 9, 1881, to teach the great American people what the words Red Cross and its emblem were intended to represent. She was not much given to weeping, but her tears would have wet through the little pad of paper many times before she accomplished what she undertook. But she succeeded. She lived to see the name and emblem of the Red Cross as familiar in her own country as in any of the twenty-seven that had previously adopted it. And that was what she hoped and prayed to do.