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A FRACTURED SERVICE: FRANCES WEBSTER AND THE GREAT WAR, 1914–1918 michael mcguire

N , Frances Webster sought to ensure proper ap- I preciation of her World War I work. The unmarried daughter of Edwin S. Webster Sr.—the co-founder of the electrical engineer- ing firm Stone & Webster—Webster had assisted the ’s vast -based operations since . Webster objected to her parents praising her activity as equal to American mil- itary service by hanging “a star out for me” in the family’s prestigious Back Bay home.1 The “star” was arguably a “Blue Star Flag”—a ban- ner designed by Ohio’s Robert Queisnner in 1917 to honor his sons’ overseas military service.2 Webster thought it improper “to have . . . the same thing [on display] for me.” She particularly complained that the action publically equated her to Augustus Aspinwall, a family friend who had served on the Front and died in combat while she had lounged in Parisian restaurants and theaters. Webster contended her parents had “too high ideas” about her experience in France. She insisted, “If I were a boy[,] I’d be doing much more in the war.”3 Frances Webster served in World War I within contexts defined as appropriate to her class, gender, and nationality. Defining her and her family’s participation in the American Red Cross (ARC) as a patriotic duty, her conduct in France’s , Evian, and Picardy regions dis- plays attributes of what Christopher Capozzola has termed a “culture

1Sam Bass Warner Jr., Province of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Press, 1984), 54–55. 2Holly S. Fenelon, That Knock at the Door: The History of Gold Star Mothers in America (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2012), 13–14. 3Frances Webster to Edwin S. Webster Sr. (hereafter FW and ESWSr.), October 3, 1918, Frances Webster letters [typed transcriptions], 1917–1918, Ms. N-2267 (here- after Webster Letters), Historical Society (MHS), .

The Quarterly, vol. XCI, no. 2 (June 2018). C 2018 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00671.

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of coercive voluntarism.” According to Capozzola, political, economic, and social forces unleashed by Congress’s declaration of war made Americans’ voluntary association with war work both “good deed” and patriotic “duty.”4 As Julia Irwin and Emily Rosenberg have noted, such coerced patriotism often underlay wartime US and ARC operations.5 American women who called for and engaged in women’s national service abroad and at home similarly framed their words and deeds in dutiful terms, as Susan Zeiger, Kimberly Jensen, and Kath- leen Kennedy have demonstrated.6 The actions of Webster’s social peers—and even some of her rivals—certainly revealed their accep- tance of patriotic service to America in the Great War. There are also limits to coercive voluntarism’s ability to explain Webster’s particular wartime behavior in France. Her prewar status as the beau monde daughter of a “new man” ingratiating his way into Boston Brahmin society affected her First World War service and sen- timents. As the beneficiary of an education from the Winsor School— an all-female institution—she appreciated the need to act altruistically. She universally depicted her bilingual ARC ministrations for rapatriés (repatriated French refugees) as philanthropic rather than patriotic. This made her work appear a wartime analog of Pro- gressive Era American charity as depicted by Merle Curti and Olivier Zunz. For Curti, Progressive entailed “the profession- alization of [private] charity and welfare ...forpublic purposes.” To Zunz, fin-de-siècle affluent Americans’ philanthropy represented “acts of generosity and hubris [emanating from the] . . . new rich fe[eling] free to . . . envision and fashion the common good.”7 Frances Webster framed her rapatrié relief benevolently, not patriotically. By contrast—as Capozzola and others have explained the historical context of Americans war service—President Wilson and the ARC

4Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (: University Press, 2008), 6–8, 85. 5Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Hu- manitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89, 93; Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expan- sion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 74. 6Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers with the American Expe- ditionary Force (: University of Press, 1999), 6, 12, 16, 46– 47, 71–72, 76, 100; Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women and the First World War (: University of Press, 2008), 12, 63, 121, 127, 139; Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xvi, 3, 12. 7Merle E. Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad: A History (, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), viii; Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 8.

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then concurrently represented America’s aid to Frenchmen as a na- tional obligation. Moreover, Webster’s comportment in France repeatedly marked her as not a patriot, philanthropist, or patrician. In Evian, Paris, and Picardy, she figuratively and literally discarded humanitarian robes and assumed a holiday disposition. Earlier wealthy, well-educated American humanitarians—particularly those in the Commission for Relief in (CRB)—had toured wartime Belgium in such ways, yet they principally nourished Belgians.8 Frances Webster’s vacationer behavior provided no military or civilian relief. It mixed pleasure with catharsis and garnered her free meals and amusements. Frances Webster did not travel to France to assert American strength or to “make sense of [her position in] the larger world”—reasons Christo- pher Endy and Brooke Blower have given for the transatlantic travel of Webster’s contemporaries.9 Instead, she used America’s wartime power to indulge in what Harvey Levenstein has termed “the ‘pure’ tourist experience” that “thousands of American officers and civil- ian volunteers from the middle- and upper-classes who spent most of the war in Paris” experienced.10 However, Levenstein’s account of the American presence in the City of Light during 1917–1918 ex- clusively comes from American men’s perspectives and emphasizes violence, alcoholism, and promiscuity. Webster juxtaposes shopping, sightseeing, and shows akin to a fin-de-siècle Grand Tour.11 Issues of nation, class, charity, and entertainment inspired Webster’s conduct during the First World War, but her mobilization for and demobiliza- tion from ARC service make her distinct from her peers and fellow nationals.

Webster before the War (1894–1914) Before 1914, Webster’s family was acquainted with the upper ech- elons of Boston Brahmin society. Her paternal grandfather was a

8Thomas D. Westerman, “Touring Occupied Belgium: American Humanitarians at ‘Work’ and ‘Leisure’ (1914–1917),” First World War Studies 5 (2014): 43–46 (hereafter WWI Studies). 9Christopher Endy, “Travel and World Power: Americans in , 1890–1917,” Diplomatic History 23 (1998): 571, 573; Brooke L. Blower, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2. 10Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jeffer- son to the Jazz Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xii, 220. 11Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 139, 189–91, 220–24.

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partner in Kidder, Peabody, a prestigious Boston investment bank with strong Brahmin connections. Family income allowed for Edwin Webster Sr.’s private school education and enrollment in the Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology. Upon graduating from MIT in 1888, Webster embarked upon a yearlong Grand Tour of Europe before accepting an appointment at Kidder, Peabody, where his fa- ther was a senior partner. In 1890, he and MIT classmate Charles Stone co-founded the Massachusetts Electrical Engineering Com- pany in Boston, which they renamed Stone & Webster three years later. Webster married Jane de Peyster Hovey, daughter of Boston Evening Transcript editor William Alfred Hovey. The family enjoyed an increasingly affluent lifestyle thanks to Stone & Webster’s construc- tion of a “500-volt direct current system” for Maine’s Warren Paper Company, development of domestic electrical and chemical assets, and its professional advice to J. P. Morgan during his reorganization of after the 1893 Panic.12 Stone & Webster’s growing fortunes made it possible for Edwin Webster, one of Boston’s “new men” of finance, to weave his family into the higher, more venerable ranks of Boston society.13 Frances, his first child, was born in 1894. She and her three younger siblings enjoyed lives of growing privilege. In late 1913, her family moved from a sizable home in Brookline’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood to a “grand [Back Bay] town house” at the corner of Dartmouth Street and Commonwealth Avenue.14 The Websters enrolled Frances in the Winsor School, which originated in the Back Bay and routinely tu- tored daughters from Brahmin families like the Brooks and Salton- stalls. These young women received an education that emphasized fluency in French, physical activity, overseas travel, and Progressive Era “outreach philanthropy.” The Winsor School’s catalog insisted that its goal was to graduate “competent, responsible, generous-minded women” capable of success in all areas.15

12Bass, Province of Reason, 52–58; Betty Farrell, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 158, 171; The Daniel Hovey Association, The Hovey Book: Describing the English Ancestry and American Descendants of Daniel Hovey of Ipswich, Massachusetts (Haverhill, MA: Lewis R. Hovey Press, 1913), 343. 13Farrell, Elite Families, 35. 14Bass, Province of Reason, 57; “Table Gossip,” Boston Daily Globe (hereafter Boston Globe) November 16, 1913. 15Dianne Haley, Generous-Minded Women: A History of the Winsor School (Bev- erly, MA: Memoirs Unlimited, 2013), 7, 9, 16, 18, 69–73, 159–61; Farrell, Elite Fami- lies, 54, 80, 171.

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The Boston Daily Globe’s articles and society columns hinted that Frances Webster had become such a woman. Edwin Webster Sr.’s el- dest daughter was originally a largely private figure. Her one early public event occurred in 1906 when she christened the Octopus, then billed as the “best [submarine] in the world.” Entering Win- sor in 1906, Webster quickly fulfilled the expectations of her social peers and her schoolmistresses. Five years later, she graduated from Winsor along with Eleanor “Nora” Saltonstall, scion of a family that dated its American origins to the seventeenth century.16 Appropri- ately for upper-class Boston, Webster participated in several prewar equestrian competitions. With her horse Divinity, she won six blue ribbons at three Boston-area horse shows in 1911,17 and a seventh blue ribbon the following year at the New Riding Club’s Invitation Day show. Webster also rode in the invitation-only Warrenton Club Point-to-Point Race held on W. H. Wilbur’s vast Warrenton, estate—the display grounds for “the flower of Virginian and the perfection of [Virginia’s] horses.”18 As Ms. Webster approached her debutante ball in 1912, she as- sumed a greater public role deemed appropriate to her social status. In November, she agreed to serve as a bridesmaid in Alice Boutell’s Washington, DC marriage and to join Winsor graduate Amy Owen Bradley as a “bud”—a debutante-to-be—for Mary Lord’s debutante tea party. Webster’s own cotillion on December 4, 1912 was designed to eclipse others. The Globe described it as “one of the most no- table ever witnessed in Boston, both for the elaborateness of the decorations and the magnificence of the gowns.” The Copley Plaza was awash in “thousands of rare blossoms, and an almost unlimited number of potted plants . . . [that] ravished the eye.” Invited ladies received “solid gold vanity boxes” and praised Miss Webster’s “very girlish...whitesatin[gown]withatunicofwhitebeaded net.” Thereafter, Frances Webster was an invited guest at Mary Tufts’

16“Octopus Born Today,” Boston Globe, October 4, 1906; Judith S. Graham, ed., “OutHereattheFront”: The World War I Letters of Nora Saltonstall (Boston: North- eastern University Press, 2004), 5. 17“Open-air Horse Show at Chestnut Hill,” May 31, 1911, “Saddle Horse Pairs Compete,” December 8, 1911, and “Table Gossip,” April 7, 1912, Boston Globe; “Boston Park Riding School Horse Show,” Bit & Spur 11 (1912): 12. 18“Horse Show Closes,” Boston Globe, , 1912; “Hunt Club Races,” and N. Frank Neer Jr., “Facts from Virginia,” Bit & Spur 11 (1912): 21, 29.

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Trinity Church wedding in and at Natalie Thayer’s debutante ball in January 1914.19 Not long after “coming out” into society, Frances Webster also exhibited a pre-war willingness to assume charitable work. In , she and Nora Saltonstall were two Globe-featured “flower girls” at a flower booth supervised by Frances’s mother to raise funds for Boston’s then-embryonic Infants’ Hospital.20 Near the year’s end, both classmates volunteered as ushers for “Angels in Art,” a tableau of old European Masters staged in Boston’s Jordan Hall, and Frances ran her mother’s flower table for the Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children.21 Frances Webster’s pre-1914 activities ex- emplified patrician involvement in constructing voluntary arms ofthe Progressive Era “American welfare state” and in advancing children’s treatment and therapy as part of women’s Progressive Era “female dominion.”22

Webster during American ‘Neutrality’ (–April 1917) Frances Webster’s conduct in the three years following Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination suggested she envisioned things go- ing on as they always had. In mid- she and her mother enjoyed box seats for a fête at Boston’s Country Club, and joined a crowd of “many people of prominence from New York[,]. . . Philadel- phia[, and]. . . Boston” at Harvard University’s Class Day. Two months later, while Europeans waged war, Frances and her mother visited the Newport Casino in Rhode Island—apparently to observe the men’s singles of the US national tennis championships.23 In , Webster performed in the chorus of an all-female show, “The

19“Table Gossip,” November 10, 1912, December 8, 1912, November 16, 1913, and , 1914, Boston Globe. 20“Table Gossip,” March 23, 1913 and “Spring Festival for the Infants’ Hospital,” April 11, 1913, Boston Globe. 21“Table Gossip,” November 16, 1913 and February 15, 1914, Boston Globe. 22Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Women and Political Culture,” in Charity, Philanthropy and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark. D. McGarvie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 194–95; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Fe- male Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38–65. 23“Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, June 21, 1914 and August 30, 1914; Tennis and the Newport Casino (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2011), 25.

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S. S. Romantic,” held at Boston’s Cort Theatre while her friend, Nora Saltonstall, directed the show’s publicity.24 Amonthafter“TheS.S. Romantic,” she waitressed in a Copley Plaza cabaret dinner to bene- fit needy Boston children.25 In Webster again performed in the chorus—this time playing a Chinese girl in the farce Hello, Frisco. The following month, she was one of thirty-six young Boston society women who waitressed, ushered, or sold candy at an anti- suffrage revue; Webster’s personal records and social coverage make it unclear whether her presence was a political statement opposing women’s suffrage or a social expedient. Both happenings occurred in Boston’s Wilbur Theatre.26 Two years into the First World War, Frances Webster appeared guided by her prewar concept of appro- priate social behavior. Webster’s lack of interest in publicly patronizing Boston’s war char- ities clashed with her peers’ activism. Three months before managing the “S.S. Romantic” publicity, Nora Saltonstall helped raise $5,000 for Belgian war victims and rolled bandages for a surgical dressings committee. Nora’s mother Eleanor likewise assisted victims of the Great War. By mid-1916 she had served on the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital’s Surgical Dressings Executive Committee, organized a Boston bazaar to aid French orphans and wounded Frenchmen, and co-founded the Special Aid Society for American Preparedness, a Bay State entity that organized many affluent “well-known women [for] knitting surgical dressings and gardening for war sufferers.”27 Amy Owen Bradley, her fellow Winsor graduate and Mary Lord tea party “bud,” had joined the American Fund for French Wounded (AFFW) in France. Termed the “heiress corps,” the AFFW emerged in 1915 to solicit, pack, and disburse medical supplies among French military hospitals. Bradley entered the AFFW on October 31, 1916 and served as a chauffeuse (female driver) and a warehouse organizer. Although in she considered returning home for “a few months,” Bradley remained with the AFFW until .

24“Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, April 11, 1915. 25“Pretty Waitresses and Flower Girls,” Boston Globe, May 12, 1915, 18. 26“Table Gossip,” April 2, 1916 and May 7, 1916, Boston Globe. 27Eleanor (“Nora”) Saltonstall Diary 1911–1915, December 28, 1914, and , 1915, Eleanor Saltonstall papers, MHS; “Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, April 2, 1916, “Extended Relief Work,” April 14, 1916, and “Women Active in Preparedness Plan,” Boston Globe, , 1916.

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Like Bradley, nineteen other Winsor alumnae served overseas before America declared war.28 Winsor students likewise undertook war-related activities. Follow- ing a 1916 address on the Harvard Surgical Unit’s work with the American Field Service—a voluntary organization established to ferry wounded Allied servicemen to French military hospitals—Winsor pupils raised $305 for the service. Winsor students also found internal inspiration for war philanthropy. Helenka Adamowska, a Winsor stu- dent from 1914 to 1917, arranged for her mother to lecture the school on “the terrible conditions” within German-occupied Polish lands. In response, Winsor students contributed to the Friends of Poland, a Boston charity that cooperated with many transatlantic societies aid- ing Poles. Other Great War-related philanthropic Winsor projects in- cluded collecting clothing and funds for refugees in Western Europe and crafting surgical dressings for the ARC.29 Members of Edwin Webster Sr.’s firm also apparently considered the European conflict of more concern than Frances. On Decem- ber 30, 1916, Stone & Webster associate partner Eliot Wadsworth resigned his post to become chair of the ARC’s Central Commit- tee in Washington.30 Stone & Webster manager Frederic Whiting insisted that Wadsworth’s voluntary enlistment enhanced employees’ “[i]nterest in the Red Cross” and praised the ARC’s apparent “utilitar- ian” efforts to mobilize America’s “moral resources” in “the quickest and best manner” and “deepen and broaden [Americans’ war-related] morality.”31 The following month Stone & Webster encouraged its

28Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Albuquerque: University of New Press, 1992), 93; Michael E. McGuire, “‘A Highly Successful Experiment in International Partnership’? The Limited Resonance of the American Committee for Devastated France,” WWI Studies 5 (2012): 102; The Overseas War Record of the Winsor School, 1914–1919 (Boston?: n.p., n.d., c. 1919), 1– 16; “Letter,” July 17, 1917, in Amy Owen Bradley, Back of the Front in France: Letters from Amy Owen Bradley, Motor Driver of the American Fund for French Wounded (Boston: W. A. Butterfield, 1918), 36. 29“Radcliffe College,” The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 24 (): 510. For a history of the American Field Service, see Arlen J. Hansen, Gentlemen Volun- teers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War, August 1914– (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996). Ida Clyde Clarke, American Women and the World War (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1918), 500–502. Haley, Generous-Minded Women, 123. 30“Editorial Note,” Stone and Webster Journal 20 (1917): 1; Irwin, Making the World Safe, 62–63. 31“Frederic J. Whiting, “The Real Meaning of the Red Cross,” Stone & Webster Journal 20 (1917): 22, 27–28.

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branches to champion patriotism through preparedness by purchas- ing materials vital to war and corporate work.32 In , the company’s periodical, Stone & Webster Journal, even recounted an employee’s 1916 experience in the American Field Service.33 Only when the American declaration of war appeared imminent did Frances Webster join her peers in assuming war-related activi- ties. In February 1917, she became one of over 3,000 Boston-area adults enrolled in the Brigham Hospital’s seventy-two-hour nurse’s aide training program. The course helped prepare participants to as- sist medical professionals at home or abroad—wherever the Ameri- can Red Cross needed them. Like other Bostonians, Webster agreed “to be ready to go anywhere at anytime for two years.” This was the extent of Frances Webster’s patriotically-linked service on the eve of Congress’ war declaration. Unlike Nora Saltonstall, Webster appar- ently never sought to participate in war “work wholeheartedly and . . . efficient[ly]” as Bostonians anticipated the US’s entry into the global conflict.34 She simply waited for the Red Cross’s call.

Webster Not Yet ‘Over There’ (April–December 1917) When the became a belligerent, the White House announced that wartime participation in American Red Cross pro- grams would best befit “all who love their country and who love humanity.”35 Wilson’s executive statement aligned patriotic war activ- ity with American women’s Red Cross service. A month later, Pres- ident Wilson’s proclamation of the Selective Service Act similarly equated American men’s “duty to give [them]selves” over to military service with “a Nation which has volunteered in mass.”36 According to Christopher Capozzola, such official statements “demanded th[at

32“Patriotism, Preparedness, and Prudence,” Stone & Webster Jour. 20 (1917): 91– 92. 33“Ambulance Experiences in France,” Stone & Webster Jour. 20 (1917): 180–87. 34Frances Webster, Introductory Note, Webster Letters. “Military and Naval,” February 18, 1917, “Mayor Has Plan for Army of 1,500,000,” February 18, 1917; “Or- ganizing Red Cross Hospital in Boston,” February 10, 1917, and “Mobilizing Women for War Readiness,” Boston Globe, February 9, 1917. 35Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 2, 1917, The Pa- pers of : –April 6, 1917, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 41:521–22 (hereafter Wilson Papers); Wilson, State- ment on Relief Coordination, April 6, 1917, Box 42, Records of the American National Red Cross, Series 2, Record Group 200, (hereafter RCNA2), NA. 36Wilson, Proclamation 1370, May 18, 1917, Wilson Papers, 42:181.

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American] women and men” mobilize their “material resources, . . . industrial labor, and . . . political consent” for “military service over- seas [and on] . . . the home front.”37 “Uncle Sam” had framed war charity volunteering as a duty. Frances Webster’s alma mater and social circle took this responsi- bility seriously. An editorial in the April 1917 Winsor Lamp, a student publication, affirmed that “‘in the immense work that the declaration of war has imposed upon our nation we are eager to do our share.’”38 Many Winsor alumnae likewise acted in the spirit of coercive volun- tarism. Excluding Frances Webster, thirty-two graduates, an increase of thirteen over Winsor’s pre-war participants, began war work in Eu- rope under the aegis of the United States or on behalf of the Allied Powers. Winsor women openly deployed the language of coercive voluntarism to explain their European work. Elizabeth Ayer left an AFFW chauffeuse position in “to work for our own men.” Alice Cunningham, a secretary with US Army Base Hospital No. 5 re- ferred to her service as her “lot.” Margaret Curtis and Hannah Fiske, both veteran aid workers with the American Church of Paris, success- fully “offered [the ARC their] services” as soon as it entered France. Fiske even pleaded for the Red Cross to “Give me something no one else wants to do.” Penelope Parkman, a canteen worker at Saint Nazaire, hoped the Germans would have an “inkling of the spirit with which America is entering the war.” Hildegarde Porter thought it an “honor” to serve in the American Military Hospital on the outskirts of Paris.39 Like its students, Winsor’s alumnae emphasized national service as paramount after Congress declared war. Following statements from Washington, Stone & Webster similarly framed volunteering as both a wartime good deed and a patriotic duty. Charles Stone and Edwin Webster Sr. publicly insisted it was each male employee’s duty, including “those having others dependent on them...tostudyhisown...case”beforedeterminingif“heis unable to serve to greater advantage in some other way” than in uni- form.40 The firm also encouraged all Americans to “Make [their] sac- rifice!” by underwriting the First Liberty Loan. It even founded a

37Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 86–87. 38“Editorial,” The Lamp (1917), cited in Haley, Generous Minded Women, 123, 162–63. 39Overseas War Record, 1–16, 20–22, 35, 39–40, 45, 74–75. Anna Welles, “Sunday Evening in the Latin Quarter,” North American Student 2 (1914): 340. 40“The Stone & Webster Organization and the War,” Stone & Webster Jour. 20 (1917): 295.

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company Liberty Loan Club on May 14, 1917, to encourage enroll- ment by “every [Boston office] member.” The company displayed “the progress of . . . subscriptions” on a “Liberty Loan clock . . . on the first floor.”41 Two months later, the firm championed total employee financial support for the ARC to help America resolve the global cri- sis through means larger than “normal peace-time charities.” Stone & Webster supported the decision of its “young lad[y]” employees in Boston to form a knitting circle in mid-1917; by year’s end they had finished seventy sweaters, thirty scarves, and numerous other ar- ticles.42 In fall 1917, the corporation’s Journal framed the Second Lib- erty Loan’s success as “highly essential to . . . advanced civilization.” Its editors hoped that “none . . . think that they may evade the sac- rifices of war.” The Stone & Webster Journal also began a “War Bul- letin” listing employees who accepted Armed Forces or war-related posts. On December 19, 1917, female employees staged a “Stone & Webster War Dance” to finance purchases of “woolens, tobacco, sweets and other comforts for our boys.”43 Amid this rising maelstrom of coercive volunteerism, Frances Web- ster undertook good deeds that advanced patriotic aims. In the sec- ond half of 1917, she served on the 1918 lecture committee for the Junior League of Boston, an all-female entity that encouraged elite young women’s participation in civic concerns. Some of the sched- uled speeches pertained to war issues. Webster had arranged for dis- cussions of drill activities at New England’s Camp Devens, a US Army training site, YWCA fundraising efforts for war programs, and Food Administration conservation programs.44 In December 1917, Webster learned the ARC required her services overseas. Stone & Webster’s “War Bulletin” announced she had “sailed for France as a nurse’s aid [sic],” with her family’s understanding that “she will be engaged in child welfare work.”45 The statement implied the family wanted her

41“The War Loan,” “The Stone & Webster Liberty Loan Club,” and “News from the Companies,” Stone & Webster Jour. 21 (1917): 332, 372, 473. 42C. W. Kellogg, “War Conditions,” and “News from the Companies,” Stone & Web- ster Jour. 21 (1917): 20, 368. 43“Editorial Comment,” “Why We Should Subscribe,” “War Bulletin,” and “News from the Company,” Stone & Webster Jour. 21 (1917): 157, 234, 211–12, 460. The Journal assured all that four matrons would chaperone the function. 44“Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, 2, 1917. 45“Stone & Webster War Bulletin No. 5,” Stone & Webster Jour. 21 (1917): 450.

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involved in a patriotically appropriate venue that protected her from danger. As Webster departed the US in mid-December 1917, the framing of prior ARC civilian projects in France allowed Americans to con- sider children’s work as patriotic. American Red Cross officials con- nected their embryonic infant welfare work, headed by University of pediatrics professor Dr. William Palmer Lucas, to the war effort. The ARC noted its infant welfare programs would safeguard France’s future generations from “tubercular infection[s that] . . . par- ticularly threaten[ed] France ...[dueto]trench warfare.”46 Ameri- can Red Cross statements broadly represented its material and moral French civilian aid as aiding the war. As she traveled to France to begin “child welfare work,” Webster was more wealthy philanthropist and tourist than patriot. Her let- ters describing the voyage on the SS Niagara emphasized time spent singing “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Jerusalem the Golden” with fellow passengers as part of a “sextette” akin to her pre-mobilization choral days. Webster also noted that she encouraged her fellow voy- agers to initiate Christmas-themed relief work among Polish civilians and “ten little children” onboard. Save, however, for brief notes about the ship’s shaded lights and one drill, there were no refer- ences to war activity. Moreover, Frances Webster’s letters to her sister and mother made no effort to present her presence on the Niagara patriotically.47 Instead, she sounded like an American beginning her Grand Tour.

Webster Partially Mobilized ‘Over There’ (December 1917–) The foreign relief-foreign relations continuum also held for the site where Frances Webster began her ARC service in France—Dr. Lu- cas’s Children’s Bureau work at Evian-les-Bains. Since , German military officials had returned French and Belgian rapa- triés to France via . By the end of 1916, French offi- cials had centralized this repatriation at Evian, a railway city near Lac

46“Infant Welfare Commission to Safeguard Child Life in France,” The Red Cross Bulletin 1 (August 25, 1917): 3. 47Frances Webster to Mrs. Edwin S. Webster Sr., (hereafter FW and MESWSr.), December 16, 1917; FW to Mrs. Mabel Harte (hereafter MMHte), December 22, 1917; and FW to Edwin S. Webster Jr. (hereafter ESWJr.), December 31, 1917, Web- ster Letters.

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Leman on the Franco-Swiss border. During 1917, French agents re- ceived 205,000 rapatriés at Evian.48 Gallic administrators primarily focused on inspecting repatriated adults. Child rapatriés generally entered “without . . . examination or care.” Lucas changed this. On September 6, 1917, he opened an ARC dispensary in Evian to identify children “suffering from tuberculosis, skin, and other infectious dis- eases.” Lucas rapidly acted with French officials to expand the Evian work.49 By November 8, 1917, he had launched the Children’s Bu- reau hospital at Evian’s Hotel Chatelet, a “modern five-story struc- ture” that had catered to summer tourists. Its “abundant bathrooms and hot and cold water facilities” made “hygienic conditions excellent” for convalescing rapatriés. Lucas also arranged for Bureau nurses to live in a hotel villa when not examining a daily average of 500 rapatrié children and triaging an equal daily average of adults. A month later, Lucas opened a second dispensary in the hotel’s garage.50 The Children’s Bureau represented its helping of youths as ad- vancing the war effort. It insisted that “[e]very contagious case . . . stopped may mean an epidemic prevented somewhere in France.” ARC propaganda also depicted Evian work with pathos-laden pieces that emphasized refugees’ plight and uplift. Just as Jacob Riis bleakly depicted New York tenement conditions in How the Other Half Lives (1890), the Red Cross Bulletin pitiably described rapatrié juve- niles as ragged, underfed, and orphans and noted how, when Evian’s mayor told rapatriés of Americans’ work with children, many shouted “‘L’Amérique vive nos Allies.’”51 Children’s Bureau “official” histo- rian Rosamund Gilder insisted that ARC Evian personnel’s “necessar- ily superficial” examinations of refugee children provided “a valuable service” that promoted “friendly [Franco-American] relations,” which

48Philippe Nivet, Les Réfugiés français de la grande guerre: Les Boches du Nord (Paris: Economica, 2004), 54–56. 49“Taking Care of the Homeless Returned from the German Captivity,” Red Cross Bull. 1 (October 1, 1917): 2; Rosamond Gilder, “‘Sauvons Les Bebes [sic]’: The Story of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross,” 39–41, and Annual Report of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross, August 12, 1918, 2, Box 847, RCNA2. 50“Paris Office Cables Report on Present Activities in France,” Red Cross Bull. 1 (November 5, 1917): 1; Chart of ARC Medical Service, in Maps and Charts of Chil- dren’s Bureau, n.d. (c. 1919), Box 847, RCNA2; “Children’s Dispensary Opened in Evian by Red Cross,” Red Cross Bull. 1 (December 10, 1917): 3; Complete Report [of] Children’s Bureau, American Red Cross in France, to , 19, Box 847, RCNA2. 51“Children’s Dispensary Opened in Evian.” “Tragedy and Pathos Fill Lives of Chil- dren in War Areas,” Red Cross Bull. 1 (December 10, 1917): 3–4.

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Gilder identified as “an actual [wartime] need.”52 From this perspec- tive, American relief officials and French nationals apparently con- sidered ARC foreign aid a diplomatic tool of American statecraft, as Julia Irwin has contended.53 Webster benefited from her participation in Lucas’s Evian opera- tions. By late December 1917, the hospital and dispensaries had eight doctors, seventeen nurses, five nurses’ aides, and five social workers. Half of the doctors, and, apparently, all the nurses, nurses’ aides, and social workers were women.54 This situated Webster within a famil- iar philanthropic milieu. In return Webster brought her knowledge of French, acquired at Winsor, to the Children’s Bureau’s inspection of 200–400 daily children. Webster was part of the “corps of French and French-speaking American aides [who] . . . br[ought] the chil- dren to the doctor, t[ook] down the reports, sen[t] the sick cases to the hospital, and explain[ed] to the agitated [child’s] family . . . what was occurring and ...should be done.” Webster’s Boston training also qualified her for Evian’s general dispensary, which served asan infirmary for children not needing hospitalization.55 Webster’s social class, philanthropic outlook, and nursing ingénue status were aptly suited for Evian. In late , “largely [repatriated] . . . [France’s] better educated and more well-to- do classes”; social-peer-to-social-peer French conversations became more necessary when asking personally invasive medical questions. Dr. Lucas also insisted that, to deal with peak arrivals of 400–600 children, examinations be “necessarily superficial” to detect obvious, lethal contagions and serve France “at highest efficiency and [as] . Dr. Armand Delille, the French Médecin chief[,] approved.” Cursory inspections—the kind Webster often gave—also advanced “the pub- lic health [objective of] . . . preventive medicine. . . . , which was [the Children’s Bureau’s] main [concern].”56 The entire Evian struc- ture functioned as one giant triage system to enable “a person able to travel [to] . . . move on”; Lucas compared his Evian objectives to “the

52Gilder, “Sauvons Les Bebes,” 48–49, Box 847, RCNA2. 53Irwin, Making the World Safe, 2, and “Sauvons les Bébés: Child Health and U.S. Humanitarian Aid in the First World War Era,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86 (2012): 37–65. 54Children’s Bureau, Department of Civil Affairs, December 17, 1917, Box 847, RCNA2. 55Gilder, “Sauvons Les Bebes,” 41, 44, Box 847, RCNA2. 56Gilder, “Sauvons Les Bebes,” 48, Box 847, RCNA2. June Lucas, “History of Evian from November 8 [1917] to , 1918,” Box 847, RCNA2.

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medical [concerns] of Ellis Island on a larger scale.” While he later conceded the ARC could have done “more” medically for repatriated youth, speed trumped thoroughness in Dr. Lucas’s system.57 Webster’s early ARC time in France exhibited less effective ser- vice and patriotism and more tourism. While in Paris awaiting as- signment to Evian, she helped the AFFW assemble 725 comfort bags and wore her Red Cross uniform as required from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each weekday. However, tourist activities dominated Web- ster’s descriptions of her week in Paris. After arriving in the City of Light, she informed her father that “[e]ven if I were sent home now the trip over and what I’ve seen already are the most interest- ing and thrilling things I’ve ever done.” Her first Paris sojourn in the company of Nora Saltonstall over the New Year in 1918 favored entertainment over service. Visiting friends on , Webster purchased a “really very chic little brown velvet model dress [and] ...agood looking hat to match” at Cheruit’s. Two days later, Web- ster wore her dress to lunch and to shop with Saltonstall at the Ma- gasin du before joining her Uncle Bertie for a tour of Les Invalides, the French war museum and Napoleon’s mausoleum. The following day, she entertained three gentlemen callers—including ARC Major James Perkins—and she and Boston friend Ruby Mc- Cormick hosted two “awfully nice Y.M.C.A. boys” in Ruby’s hotel quarters. Webster insisted that she experienced each site in full splen- dor, because Americans in Paris with dollars “can have everything,” and she did not endure the “great shortage[s]” plaguing the French. Webster described this interlude as “discouraging” to her mother be- cause she and her colleagues “seem[ed] to be eating so much and ac- complishing so little”; but, by Nora Saltonstall’s estimation, Webster was acting “so much more [her] natural [self].”58 Arriving at Evian on , Webster incrementally advanced several ARC wartime objectives vis-à-vis rapatriés. In late January, she used her cultured French language skills to persuade parents and children to let her take youths’ temperatures rectally to measure them more accurately. Webster also insisted that all her ministrations

57Gilder, “Sauvons Les Bebes,” 48, Box 847, RCNA2; William Palmer Lucas, MD, “Work of the Children’s Bureau, Department of Civil Affairs, American Red Cross, France,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 155 (1918): 275. 58FW to ESWJr., December 31, 1917, FW to Polly Webster, and FW to MESWSr., , 1918, and FW to ESWSr., January 8, 1918, Webster Letters; Saltonstall to her family, January 5, 1918, in Graham, ed., “Out Here at the Front,” 84.

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to refugees—which left her “busy every single day”—offered rapa- triés “a real welcome,” a clear nod to Gilder’s cherished facilitation of Franco-American fraternity via Evian triaging. Moreover, she worked twelve-hour shifts each weekday and Saturday—excluding the cus- tomary two-hour French lunch break. This proved far more rigor- ous than her schedule while in Paris.59 Frances Webster’s intimate procedures and extensive shifts advanced Children’s Bureau goals of treating “sick [refugee] child[ren]” to ensure France had a “nation of the future.”60 Her material and moral uplift also supplemented the French Ministry of the Interior’s Evian work. Its exclusive focus on “receiving[,] ...feeding,” and domestically relocating rapatriés ignored the “systematic medical examination of . . . [rapatrié] chil- dren.” Webster’s work reduced Interior ministry complaints that child refugees entering other sites had and transmitted diseases.61 Webster’s accounts of her Evian activity resembled more conde- scending philanthropist and tourist than humanitarian patriot. She routinely described the rapatriés she willingly examined and served as “pathetic”—a touchstone of Progressive Era charitable discourses. Webster never intimated that she knew or cared whether her nurs- ing at Evian advanced American war aims. Moreover, in her off-duty hours Webster often lived as if sightseeing was her primary concern. She spent her first week at Evian enjoying a Hotel Chatelet villa and its lovely view of a nearby lake. Webster commented on the “remark- ably good food” at Evian. Like a tourist writing home, she extoled rustic meals of sausage, cabbage, “and anything else of a hearty na- ture.” Webster even suggested she digested more sugar than Parisians or stateside Americans. Her bucolic diet reflected how the different food had eroded Webster’s class-based image. In late January, she in- formed her mother that “the dainty little daughter with the delicate appetite” had become a wartime casualty. Disregarding her prewar languid and social table manners, the nurse’s aide now “shovel[ed] away” food into her mouth before “rush[ing] upstairs [to] . . . eat chocolate[s and] . . . apricot wafer[s]” in solitude.62

59FW to MESWSr., and 24, 1918, FW to ESWSr., January 8,1918, and FW to F. J. Hovey, n.d., Webster Letters. 60Gilder, “Sauvons Les Bebes,” 1, Box 847, RCNA2. 61W. C. Stevenson, “Report on Evian-les-Bains,” August 13, 1918, Box 847, RCNA2. 62FW to ESWSr., January 8, 1918, FW to MMHte, , 1918, FW to MESWSr., January 14, and 24, 1918, and FW to ESWSr. and MESWSr., January 15, 1918 and n.d. (c. ), Webster Letters.

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Two episodes during Webster’s ten-week (January 8–March 15) stay at Evian displayed more Grand Tour than Great War. Her sched- ule left Webster’s Sunday afternoons free for touring the surrounding Franco-Swiss countryside, for “walking in the snow,” and for other ac- tivities that made her feel like a “real lady of leisure.” In late Febru- ary she and another nurse drove fifty miles to a tenth-century chateau, possibly Switzerland’s Chateau de Vufflens, to enjoy the “lovely [coun- tryside] all the way.”63 Two weeks later, while praising her mother for “working hard” at collecting surgical dressings for the Allies, she re- ported taking a four-hour drive with another nurse around the same Swiss frontier. Both women enjoyed the sunny afternoon as they serenely lunched on sandwiches and cake on the edge of Lac Leman and viewed Chateau Chillon.64 In late , the ARC reassigned Webster to Paris as a lead secretary for the Children’s Bureau. Webster was initially “really excite[d]” but angry at the thought of “getting stuck in Paris for good.” Though irritated at potentially ending all refugee work, Webster soon found solace in Paris’s amenities. After arriving on March 15, she de- voted part of the next two days to buying a “very nice looking” spring uniform at Nicoll’s and lounging in the Bois de Boulogne, followed by two weeks of interviewing French nurses’ aides for the Children’s Bureau’s operations in and beyond Paris.65

Webster Fully Mobilized (March–) The Ludendorff Offensive led to more patriotic activity by Frances Webster. On March 21, 1918, the German Army began three months of sustained assaults that created a surge of refugees. Ending the in- terviews of French nurses, Webster began work with the ARC’s De- partment of Civilian Affairs, resettling French refugees fleeing the warzone. While she would have preferred to “be nursing,” Webster

63Webster repeatedly refers to this as the tenth-century Chateau de Larrainge. No such estate appears to have existed; however, two prewar tourist works reference a tenth-century chateau in Vufflens-le-Château, Switzerland. FW to MESWSr., March 1, 1918, and FW to MMHte, n.d. (c. February 21, 1918), Webster Letters. W. Pem- broke Fetridge, Harper’s Hand-book for Travellers in Europe and the East Vol. III: Switzerland, Tyrol, , , Sweden, and (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874), 677. John Ball, Ball’s Alpine Guides: Pennine Alps, Including Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa (: Longmans, Greene, and Co., 1873), 255. 64FW to MESWSr., March 9, 1918, Webster Letters. 65FW to PW, February 28, 1918, FW to ESWJr., March 17, 1918, and FW to ESWSr., March 24, 1918, Webster Letters.

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insisted it was “a wonderful thing to be right here . . . and be able to . . . help” shuttle arriving refugees in and around Paris. She also ex- pressed pride in the performance of the “New England Division” of the American Expeditionary Force and its profile in France as “one of the very best” American units. As German forces approached Paris’s outskirts, Webster also praised Pershing’s offer of “all our troops and things to the French.”66 The German onslaughts also awakened Webster to society’s inabil- ity to transcend wartime material realities. From Paris, she sensed that fighting on the Western Front was “raging as furiously as ever” and that it could soon affect her personal safety. Indeed, after March 23, German artillery shells from the “Paris Gun” thudded closer to her residence and place of work. Moreover, French officials rationed sugar in Paris—even for wealthy Americans. Not shirking from these sacrifices or dangers, she praised an American pastor’s April echo- ing of Lincoln that “the dead shall not have died in vain.” Webster heard it as a call to protect what American and Allied men had died defending. Still, these military events left Webster “very tense”: she asked her father to give her pearls to her younger sister, Polly, should a German shell claim her life.67 Amid this maelstrom, Webster’s attitudes and behavior still pre- served vestiges of the old Grand Tour. On March 30, as German forces neared Paris, she attended a concert in the Madeleine church and lunched and dined with ARC colleagues and family friends. Two days later, she strolled along the Champs Élysées and dined at Pumier’s with a Mr. Colket, an American officer. On April 14, de- spite the “very tense” atmosphere, Webster attended a performance of William Tell at the Opéra Garnier with an ARC nurse and a YMCA woman, where attendees “completely forgot all about the war and the old gun” shelling Paris from miles away. A week later, she strolled around and dined in Paris with her Uncle Bertie and attended the Théâtre Français with a fellow American woman. Representing her- self as a family authority on Paris’s desirable haunts, she offered her brother, Edwin, a guided tour whenever he arrived.68

66FW to ESW, March 31, 1918, and FW to PW, April, 1, 1918, Webster Letters. 67FW to ESWSr., March 31, 1918, FW to PW, April 1, 1918, and FW to MESWSr., April 7 and 14, 1918, Webster Letters; For the Paris Gun, see Henry W. Miller, The Paris Gun: The Bombardment of Paris by the German Long Range Guns and the Great German Offensives of 1918 (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930). 68FW to ESWSr., March 31, and April 21, 1918, and FW to MESWSr., April 7, 1918, and FW to ESWJr. April 24, 1918, Webster Letters.

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In late , military events further affected Webster. The first wave of the Ludendorff Offensive, Operation Mihiel, hadin- flicted over 300,000 casualties upon British and French armies. This included 400 casualties from the 26th US Infantry Division near Saint-Mihiel.69 In response, the ARC reassigned Webster to a French military hospital in France’s northeastern Picardy region where she could “help look after our American men ...wounded while brigaded among the French.” Webster thought the transfer offered her a “too good to be true” chance to fulfill her patriotic nursing duty. Treating Allied and American troops would permit Webster “to do something active to help” address the “necessary” concern of saving lives. Web- ster conceded that her most likely field hospital tasks would include “bed-making, feeding and scrubbing.” Still, she believed the assign- ment offered her “the most satisfying” war service she could envision, “[n]ext to getting at the Germans in person.”70 Webster’s reassignment on April 26 inspired her to cast her pres- ence more patriotically. Her bilingual skills made Webster the only American nurse who could interpret between US servicemen and French medical professionals in parts of Picardy. As American soldiers became more involved in Allied counter-attacks and offensives, Web- ster appreciated the growing utility of her translations, medical min- istrations, and American servicemen’s moral uplift to the war effort. She routinely informed French nurses of soldiers’ dietary restrictions and nursed some of the 60,000 American servicemen recovering from gas attacks. While Webster conceded that her work often left her “pretty balled up,” she and her colleagues effectively cared for high volumes of American casualties, such as the 200 wounded “Yanks” who arrived on June 17, 1918. By the time of her departure from Picardy in August 1918, her patriotism routinely led her to praise re- covering American soldiers, deride Germans as “Boches,” and frame German air raids on her hospitals as a danger borne for her country.71

69Christopher Mick, “1918: Endgame,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 1: Global War, ed. Jay Winter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 150; David Woodward, The American Army and the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 204. 70FW to ESWSr., April 21, 1918; and FW to ESWJr. And FW to MH April 24, 1918, Webster Letters. 71FW to MESWSr., April 29, May 26, and 27, and July 16, and 25, 1918; FW to MMHte, May 2, 1918; FW to ESWSr., May 4, 1918; and FW to ESWSr. And MESWSr., June 17, 1918, Webster Letters; Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2000), 110.

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Webster’s newfound patriotism also reverberated in her acknowl- edgment of her family’s war work in the Back Bay during the sum- mer of 1918. Her father had worked “awfully hard” raising funds on behalf of the ARC’s War Savings Campaign: Webster Sr. exceeded his quota by mid-June and recruited 6,000 new members and obtained tens of thousands of dollars pledged to America’s official war charity. Her father insisted that his results were “well worth while [sic]...for the [Red Cross] is doing fine work.” During that summer, her mother helped knit pajamas, compresses, and pads which Frances hinted she might be distributing among the Americans she treated in Picardy. By September Ms. Webster even praised Stone and Webster employees’ contributions of time, treasure, and talent to America’s war effort.72 There were also moments in Picardy when Webster insisted her ef- forts at tourist self-entertainment were in fact patriotic. Shortly after arriving in the war zone, Webster and two other nurses rented lodg- ings in Beauvais, a town in Picardy’s Oise province. In late April, she lamented to her mother that she and her fellow ARC nurses were denied “proper recreation” at a club under their lodgings. The indi- viduals prohibiting their entry were not military officers but women in the Smith College Relief Unit, which in February 1918 began serv- ing under the ARC. Since March 23, the Smith Unit had tended to nearby French refugees and Allied soldiers. In mid-April, the dozen Smith women at Beauvais inaugurated a “club for American and En- glish soldiers passing through or stationed near us.” Webster found the ban on joining “the Smithies[’] . . . entertain[ments]” irritating. Both sets of women operated under the ARC; yet, Webster’s cohort was “requested to keep upstairs so [the Smith Unit] can have full play with the men.” Frances Webster insisted that the Smith Unit was “for Smith College before they’re for the U.S.A.” She castigated these Smith women’s earlier (–March 1918) refugee rehabilitation work in Picardy as purposeless since the Germans now had reoccupied the lands Smith women had helped restore. Webster complained that she and the “lots of boys” downstairs would benefit from each other’s company, but that the exclusionary policy left her “sitting in the attic” to the detriment of all.73

72FW to ESWSr. And MESWSr., June 2, 1918; and FW to ESWSr., June 24, and September 12, 1918, FW to MESWSr., August 5, 1918, Webster Letters; “Red Cross Workers Join Stamp Drive,” Boston Globe, June 22, 1918: 12. 73FW to MESWSr., April 19, 1918, Webster Letters. “The Smith College Relief Unit,” Smith Alumnae Quarterly 9 (1918): 211, 328. For a brief summary and analysis

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Webster’s Picardy conduct suggested she still conceived of herself as being on tour. Describing the drive north to Beauvais in ways com- parable to American CRB volunteer Maurice Pate’s narration of “‘a beautiful [German] aeroplane raid”’ on Belgium, Webster delighted in the “lovely” sights of “pale green” trees, “sprouting” plowed fields, and the pink sunset she observed en route. Webster also delighted in the new uniform she received at Beauvais. Its “white coiffe with a little Red Cross” and its accompanying blue chiffon outdoors cover left her feeling “all dolled up.” She welcomed the lull in medical work produced by Germany’s nearby but dismal final offensive, Operation Gneisenau, which Allied and American troops repulsed. On June 9, the day after Gneisenau began, Webster reveled in “doz[ing and] . . . stroll[ing] around” Beauvais over the next two days. She informed her mother that “the feeling of absolute irresponsibility and quiet was wonderful.”74 Webster also adored her chances to entertain American servicemen independent of the Smith Unit. An American engineering regiment had asked one of the ARC doctors at Beauvais to “supply some girls for a [July 4] party.” Webster happily reported that the Red Cross doctor “supplied me, among others, and to say I enjoyed myself is putting it mildly”; Webster, however, never framed this frat- ernization as a patriotic duty, as some overseas American women did. Webster even managed to depict the field hospital’s fare as a culinary curiosity for its delectable tastes—particularly its horse meat when stewed with onions.75 On the eve of a weeklong ARC leave in Paris, Frances Webster was again thinking like a Grand Tour-iste.

Webster Demobilized (August–December 1918) As the war wound down, Webster took every opportunity to visit Paris when on leave in August and September. These Parisian respites quickly dissipated her self-cultivated sense of patriotic mobiliza- tion and philanthropic service, and increasingly framed her French

of the Smith Unit’s wartime refugee work, see Michael McGuire, “Cultures de Guerre in Picardy, 1917,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 42 (2016): 38–44. 74Maurice Pate, Diary, October 16, 1916, UNICEF Records, Archives, and History, www.cfhst.net/unicef-temp/Doc-Repository/doc%5Cdoc334639.PDF, cited in Wester- man, “Touring Occupied Belgium,” 47; FW to MESWSr., April 29, June 10, and FW to MMHte, May 2, 1918, Webster Letters; Mick, “1918: Endgame,” 151. 75FW to ESWSr., June 24, and July 10, 1918, Webster Letters; Zeiger, America’s Great War, 72.

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experiences through a tourist’s lens.76 In many ways, this was Web- ster’s exit from service. Bruno Cabanes has defined the concept ofa person’s exit from World War I as including the period when someone mobilized for the conflict departed the profession or the location of her or his war service.77 Beginning on August 1, 1918, she shopped for three days despite the scorching heat, insisting this was “more ex- hausting than three months nursing.” During the same respite, Web- ster also “thoroughly enjoyed [her]self” at an unchaperoned Parisian supper with an American ambulance driver. A month later during an- other leave, she and a nursing colleague, Mrs. Clark, dined at Maxim’s “out of uniform [and] ...feelinglikeamillion dollars.” Webster soon became the object of the attention of “Tom,” an American who en- tertained her in her “one brown city costume” over dinners at Larue’s and outings at the cinema and the English Theatre. In return, Web- ster offered him a guided tour of Paris’s central historic district, the Île de la Cité. Amid her outings, Webster rightly informed her father that her activity was in no way on par with that of Augustus Aspinwall, the family friend who was wounded and then killed in action. Webster even joined family friends, the Welds, on a weeklong October vaca- tion in Cannes that included sailing, playing bridge, and viewing films with American servicemen. After Webster’s holiday, she returned to Beauvais where she remained until the Armistice.78 The pleasure and purpose Webster derived from her active ARC sabbaticals contrasted with the idleness and irrelevance she found pervading her final hospital assignments. Webster often described having “nothing to do” in Picardy save making beds and rubbing sol- diers’ backs—war tasks she earlier appraised as “most satisfying.” To relieve their dreary lives, she and her fellow nurses “gossiped for hours.” Even servicemen’s medical needs failed to remobilize Web- ster. On August 20, she proved more interested in guiding a French bureaucrat around her hospital than in cleaning six new patients, one of whom she described as “a nigger of some sort.” Three days later,

76For a description of elements of Paris’s wartime experiences, see Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919: Vol. 2: A Cultural History, ed. Jay Winter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Pierre Darmon, Vivre à Paris pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Fayard, 2002). 77See La victoire endeuillée: La sortie de guerre des soldats français (1918–1920) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 10–11. 78FW to MESWSr., August 3, 5, and 25, September 25, October 6, and 19, 1918, FW to ESWSr., October 3, and 22, 1918, and FW, “Introductory note,” Webster Letters.

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Webster reported that her ward’s staff and thirty-eight French pa- tients were “exceptionally happy” at news of continued Allied ad- vances. However, while these troops thanked nurses for “everything . . . done for them,” Webster indifferently observed the men were “not seriously hurt.” Webster’s sole excitement in military hospitals came from the ARC’s new uniform. She was relieved that its “grey long cape” let her “always look respectable” when she journeyed out- doors but criticized its apron as being unduly “full in the skirt” and its requirement of a “belt at my waist line.” Webster even expressed “hat[ing] to leave” her current post when called upon to replace an- other nurse going on leave. This was partly because her Picardy col- league would now oversee forty-eight servicemen, and partly because it was the “Service de Sante [sic],” the French military medical ser- vice, which requested her.79 Frances Webster’s growing reluctance to assist convalescing troops still sacrificing themselves in offensives co- incided with her distaste for her wartime duties and her growing ap- petite for enjoying France.

Conclusions Why did Americans like Frances Webster involve themselves in the ARC’s European wartime work? Christopher Capozzola proposed that Americans joined the ARC after April 1917 because American cultural forces compelled them to, else they would face “serious con- sequences.” Julia Irwin has suggested that volunteers’ motives ranged from advancing the American Red Cross’s “professed ideals” of help- ing humanity and serving patriotically to financial and professional advancement and “a thirst for adventure and travel.”80 Webster’s atti- tudes and actions in Boston and France suggest that disparate reasons for serving overseas could simultaneously or successively inspire afflu- ent American women to travel under the Red Cross banner. Webster was a patriot who by her count worked at five French evacuation hos- pitals, an American evacuation hospital, and Evian.81 She was also a philanthropist who described aiding Evian rapatriés in humanitar- ian rather than loyal and military terms. And Frances Webster was a woman on holiday in a world at war. Whether it was her brief

79FW to ESWSr., August 21, 1918, FW to MESWSr., August 3, 24, and September 5, 1918, Webster Letters. 80Capozzola, Uncle Same Wants You, 8; Irwin, Making the World Safe, 96–103. 81FW, “Introductory note,” Webster Letters.

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stay in the Hotel Chatelet villa, her Lac Leman jaunts, her Picardy dancing and chatting, or her Parisian dining, entertaining, and shop- ping, Frances Webster repeatedly immersed herself in the wartime analog of Harvey Levenstein’s “ostentatious leisure and extravagant consumption.”82 For her, quenching her thirst for travel appeared as a right and a privilege. Frances Webster’s extravagant, holiday-like wartime conduct in France suggests that historians need a more fluid framework for explaining why and how Americans served overseas in the First World War.

82Levenstein, Seductive Journey,139.

Michael McGuire is a lecturer at the Pardee School of Global Stud- ies. His recent articles in First World War Studies and Histor- ical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques have examined the intersection of Franco-American international relations and cultural concerns in World War I.

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