ECTTS and the End of WWI, 1918

For every fighter a woman worker Y.W.C.A.
Image Source: Baker, Ernest Hamlin, Artist. For every fighter a woman worker Y.W.C.A.: Back our second line of defense / / Ernest Hamlin Baker. , 1918. [N.Y.: The United States Printing & Lith. Co] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98507935/.

The United States entered WWI on April 6, 1917, a year and a half before Germany agreed to an armistice. During that interval, the ECTTS student body, then entirely female, actively supported the allied cause. With peace, students organized successive celebrations and fundraising initiatives that were among the most distinguished in the community. By doing so, they contributed to Greenville’s emerging identity as something more than a tobacco marketplace: the town was becoming a progressive academic center wherein the educated values of the Training School defined premier expressions of civic engagement, generosity, and global understanding. By leading these initiatives as informed citizens, Training School students stood tall as involved participants in national and global affairs of the gravest sort, establishing their readiness to engage more fully in the political work of the community and nation.

Student support for the cause and celebrations of its victory helped convince skeptics that these women were deserving of fuller participation in the politics of the nation. In this, their efforts echoed the ideas of R. F. Beasley, North Carolina Commissioner of Public Welfare, as published in a 1918 issue of The Training School Quarterly. There, Beasley suggested that “those who oppose equal suffrage are simply bickering over a detail whose significance is wholly swallowed up in the larger fact that woman’s ideals [i.e., peace and justice], which are the more permanent ideals of the race, are taking possession of the world faster and faster.” By celebrating the victory of democracy and liberty without malice, enmity, or arrogance, Training School students addressed, through their ideals and actions, questions of equal suffrage, demonstrating their readiness for the same.

From the start, the ECTTS student body organized support for the war effort. When the school custodian was drafted and a replacement could not be found, the Y.W.C.A. assumed those responsibilities “in order to be of service and to help in winning the war in more ways than one.” The Y.W.C.A. then pledged the proceeds from their work to the United War Work Campaign, a private charitable initiative providing morale-building support for American troops in Europe. To assist short-handed farmers with the fall harvest, ECTTS students picked cotton and then donated their pay to the UWW Campaign. Students also bought U. S. Liberty Bonds with money made by cleaning off the campus tennis courts.

Then, amid their work, elation followed initial news, delivered on November 7, that an armistice had been concluded. However, as it turned out, that news was premature, but it was soon followed, days later, by a definitive report: the war was over. One ECTTS student, Mabel Grant, recorded in her diary the rollercoaster of emotions experienced by many:

"While I was at the E.C.T.T.S. there came to me on Thursday, Nov. 7, 1918, the good news that I had longed to hear so many dreary months. When I came from my math [class], I saw a crowd of girls … some were screaming, crying, hollering and others jumping up and down keeping all the noise they could. I didn’t know what to think they were keeping so much noise.

I ask[ed] several what was the matter before I got an answer. Ruby Giles was crying so I went up to her and ask[ed] what was the trouble with her, and she told me that Germany had quit fighting. I could not believe it at first, but when I looked on the wall … [I] saw the paper Mr. [Claude] Wilson had put up there with these words, “Germany signed peace terms at 6-30, fighting stopped 2-30 P.M.”

When I saw those words, my heart was filled with a joy that words cannot express. I felt that the days of anxiety were over, and the dear loved ones could soon come back to us. The dark, gloomy clouds that made the world so dark and dreary all passed away and life had never seemed any brighter than it did then….

For the rest of the day we could not study [as] our hearts were filled with too much joy to think of books. I put my books in my room and went out in the yard with Lucy Kornegay and Quessie Powell. We stood out there and listened to the prayer whistle, and all the other whistles in the town were blowing at the same time. Anyone can just imagine how we felt.

But in my joy, I didn’t forget the ones that had loved ones that were sleeping in an unknown grave and could never come back to the ones that had waited so patiently but all in vain. My words were “if Marion had lived just one month longer, he could have come back to Mary,” but God knows best for each and every one of us.

At three thirty we met in the auditorium and had prayer services. Mr. Wilson conducted the little service. After the prayer, we sang several patriotic songs [and] then were dismissed to celebrate peace just as we wished to. A crowd of the [students] in my class went to pick cotton. We took a big U.S. flag and put it up beside the road to let people that passed know just what we were working for….

But late in the afternoon we came back to the dormitory and heard that it was a false report about the German people signing the peace terms. At the sound of the words the same dark cloud seemed to come before us, but we still prayed that peace might be restored to the world once more.

On Monday morning Nov. 11, 1918, just as we were dressing for breakfast, we heard the whistles begin to blow. At first we didn’t pay much attention to them but [as] they began to get louder and louder, some of the girls said peace had been made, [while] others said they were blowing because our boys were going to begin one of the biggest drives the world had ever known of. Well, it was all guess work for we didn’t know why it was until we went out for breakfast and just a few minutes after we sat down Miss [Kate] Lewis held the paper up and we read Worlds Wide War Ended. There w John A. Tucker, PhDas such a noise in the dining hall that it would have been almost impossible to have heard a gun fire. Mrs. [Kate] Beckwith went over and got the paper, walked midway the Dining Hall and read the wonderful news. We were all glad but could not feel over it just as we felt the first time we heard it. There was some doubt in our heart of it being true, but we can thank God that He has spared us to live through the largest war the world has ever experienced.

On this same date Nov. 11 [it] was my birthday and I must say it was the happiest day that I have ever spent. Don’t think it possible for anything to happen that would make me any happier. All the girls in my class picked cotton that day. We all were happy and felt like there was something in life to live for, so we could work better by know[ing] that the money we made was going to help take care of the boys until they came home.

Late in the afternoon we came back to the school in an Overland truck. That night a young man from Wake Forest [Dr. Hubert Poteat] made a talk on the wonderful news. He sang the following song, one that all the girls were very much interested in,

When the Boys come home

There’s a happy time coming, when the boys come home,

there’s a glorious day coming, when the boys come home.

We will end the dreadful story of the battle dark and gory in a sunburst of glory,

when the boys come home.

The day will seem brighter, when the boys come home.

And our hearts will be lighter, when the boys come home.

Wives and sweethearts will press them in their arms and caress them,

and pray God to bless them, when the boys come home.

 

The thin ranks will be proudest, and our cheers will be the loudest,

 when the boys come home.

The full ranks will be shattered, and the bright arms will be battered,

and the battle standards tattered,

when the boys come home.

Their bayonets may be rusty, when the boys come home.

And their uniforms dusty, when the boys come home.

But all shall see traces of battles’ royal graces in the brown bearded faces,

when the boys come home.

From the nation’s heart forever,

when the boys come home."

 

Grant’s account of the November 11 event refers to an assembly organized by the Y.W.C.A. the evening of the armistice.  It featured an address by Dr. Hubert Poteat, a professor of classics at Wake Forest College. Poteat’s visit was part of the UWW Campaign at ECTTS, coordinated by the Y.W.C.A., meant to explain the war effort and solicit further pledges for continued support for soldiers stationed abroad. Although the war had ended, it would still be months before all American troops returned home. Earlier an education program coordinated by the Y.W.C.A. had informed students about the UWW Campaign and encouraged their support for it. In response to Dr. Poteat’s address and musical performance, combined with the elation occasioned by the armistice, the Training School ended up raising $1,238.60, well over the $700.00 first pledged.

Student efforts continued November 21 with a “Victory Celebration” sponsored by the Poe Literary Society. President Robert H. Wright deemed it one of that society’s “greatest contributions … ever made to the school or to the community.” As part of the celebration, the Poe Society presented “a magnificent American flag, the duplicate of the parade flag of the Army” to the school for use on state occasions. President Wright received the flag and thanked the society for its “a great service.” He added, “May it ever wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” With jubilant patriotism, Wright noted that the stars on the flag “represented the individual freedom of states in the most glorious government the world has ever known.”

The Rev. Dr. Hugh M. Birckhead (1876-1929), pastor of the Emmanuel Church, Baltimore, was the main speaker for the occasion. Rev. Birckhead had served in WWI as an investigator for the American Red Cross, examining conditions in front line trenches, towns under shellfire, and hospitals for repatriates and refugees. His travels took him to London during six air raids, Dunkirk when under fire, and onboard an allied ship chased by a German U-boat. Birckhead also met with General John J. Pershing and was hosted at Buckingham Palace by the King of England. Many from the community attended the Victory Celebration, with some having to drive quite a distance from remote locations in the county.

Cognizant of his female audience, Rev. Birckhead suggested that “memory of any war is kept alive by the women of the country.” He added, “We must remember the 11,000,000 new-made graves in which men lie, and we must remember the women of this generation must fight their way through life and raise their children alone.” Prophetically, Birckhead observed that “the morrow of victory is more perilous than the eve.” In closing, however, he sounded an optimistic, unabashedly nationalistic note, quoting Emerson, “America is God’s last chance to save the world.” In her brief diary account of the occasion, Mabel Grant thoughtfully recorded Birckhead’s memorable allusion to Emerson.

Not to be outdone, the rival Lanier Literary Society soon sponsored a song recital featuring a return visit of Dr. Poteat, with the door admission, 50 cents, going to help meet the society’s pledge to the UWW Campaign.  The Greenville Daily News declared this event, held on November 30, “a brilliant success,” adding that the Lanier Society netted enough to meet their pledge for the UWW Campaign. The audience enjoyed Dr. Poteat’s performance, calling him back for encores. Poteat’s “baritone voice, full of richness and power,” stirred the audience as he sang “Marseillaise” and, once again, “When the Boys Come Home.” His repertoire that evening also included several “Songs of Nations” as well as four “Negro Spirituals,” among them “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Armistice celebrations staged by the Poe and Lanier Societies, along with other activities undertaken by ECTTS students, contributed to the end of the war and the beginning of peacetime culture, helping to define both dimensions of WWI in terms of the high political ideas they and their country extolled. In doing so, the Training School student body served the campus, community, and nation, and furthered, along civil, educated lines, women’s progress toward suffrage two years later with the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Sources

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Citation Information

Title: ECTTS and the End of WWI

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication: 4/6/2020

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