Today is Veterans Day, a day when we give thanks to the brave men and women who make it their business to protect the rest of us. The sacrifices they make are many and I, for one, am truly grateful. Long before it became Veterans Day, it was the day on which some young women at Syracuse University found an organization of their own. Some of those early Gamma Phi Beta women also answered the call to duty and served in civilian capacities during World War I.
The haunting poem, In Flanders Fields, was written by John McCrae, M.D., a Lieutenant Colonel in the Canadian Army during World War I. He was a Zeta Psi.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
President Woodrow Wilson, a member of Phi Kappa Psi, proclaimed November 11, 1919, as the first commemoration of Armistice Day (the truce took place on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month although the treaty was signed months later). He said, “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…” After World War II, the day took on the name “All Veterans Day” to honor those of other conflicts. Somewhere along the way, the day became known as “Veterans Day.”
Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red is the display of poppies at the Tower of London. It was created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins and it was designed by Tom Piper. Each of the 888, 246 red poppies represents a World War I British military fatality. (The photo was taken in November 2014 by Linda Smith Tabb, a Pi Phi friend and world traveler extraordinaire.)
***
A church oyster supper was the first social event Frances Haven (Moss) attended after enrolling in Syracuse University in 1874. Her father, Dr. Erastus Otis Haven, had been recently elected Chancellor of the university. At that supper, she met the man who would later become her husband, Charles Melville Moss. She also met two members of Alpha Phi, a women’s fraternity founded at Syracuse in October of 1872. Instead of accepting the invitation to join Alpha Phi which had been offered to her, she joined with three other women – Mary A. Bingham (Willoughby), E. Adeline Curtis, and Helen M. Dodge (Ferguson) – and they created an organization of their own. The date was November 11, 1874. The organization is Gamma Phi Beta, the first of the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) organizations to use the term “sorority;” Syracuse Latin professor Frank Smalley coined the word for the women.*
World War I gave sorority women the opportunity to be of service to their country. There was much “war work” done by Gamma Phi Beta including these efforts:
“But there were those of us who went overseas, who, in their indefatigable energy and enthusiasm, carried the crescent into Italy and France and to whom came the wonderful privilege of seeing history in the making and of aiding the splendid men who had offered themselves to a great and glorious cause. Grace Banker (Iota) was chief operator of the American Telephone Service at Coblenz and received the Distinguished Service Medal from Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett for her work during the St. Mihiel drive (see http://wp.me/p20I1i-t6 for more information about her).
Grace Banker
“Mary Katherine Taylor (Delta) was with Base Hospital Number Three which was located at the foothills of the Vosges and had many thrilling experiences; Josephine Russell (Epsilon) did active service in canteen work at a huge artillery training camp in central France and later followed the troops of occupation into Germany; Mary Jones (Kappa), with Base Hospital Number Forty-nine, bore the official title of Red Cross Recreational Hut Director and on her arrival in the large hospital center at Allerey had the excitement of meeting Margaret Reiley (Lambda) who afterwards assisted her in the hut; Margaret Reiley, by the way, had an interesting experience which is worth the telling. One day, as she was gazing into a shop window at Paris, a strange soldier rushed up to her and began to shake her hand most vigorously while she endeavored to explain to him that he must think her some other auburn haired lass from the States. ‘No,’ he shouted, ‘You are the one I mean, for you wear a Gamma Phi pin and I’ve got a girl in Boston town that wears one, too. I haven’t seen anything that looked so good to me since I left home and after the war is over I’m going back to marry that Gamma Phi pin.’
“Jeanette Monroe (Kappa), as Red Cross Dietitian, served in Dijon, France, and for Red Cross Hospital Number One Hundred and One in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris; Ethel Cosgrove, of the same chapter, went to England for the Y.M.C.A. Canteen and served in Eagle Hut, London; from there to Liverpool. where, with a man secretary, she looked after a motor transport corps of two hundred boys; then to Paris where she conducted a Y.M.C.A. bookshop in the lobby of the Palais de Glace on the Champs Elysees; and finally to Prague, Czecho Slovakia, as business manager of a unit which conducted a summer training course in social service. Her work was carried on by permission of the government in the wonderful old Siteradels Castle, once the home of the Austrian governors; Julia Bell, also of Kappa, was Director of the Department of Personnel of the American Red Cross in Paris for a year then joined the Near East Relief and was sent to Tiflis in the Caucasus to work under Colonel W.N. Haskell, who had been appointed ‘Allied High Commissioner to Armenia’ by the Peace Conference in Paris; Mary Clarke (Kappa), in war work near Nancy, was under fire many times, was decorated by the French government, and brought a French protégé to America for education.
“Geraldine Doheny (Lambda) went abroad with the purpose of being a hut worker with the Red Cross but, after reporting in Paris, she was temporarily loaned for canteen service and assigned to duty in the Riviera. Florence French Dickson, of the same chapter, accompanied Base Hospital Number Fifty to France as Dietitian, this unit being composed almost entirely of University of Washington men. Marjorie Templin Wellhouse (Sigma), after assignment to a Base Hospital unit at Atlanta, was transferred to France; Nell Watts (Zeta) after splendid work as Chairman of the Goucher War Work Committee went overseas for reconstruction work; Minnie Mason Beebe (Alpha), a member of the faculty of Syracuse University, engaged in Y.W.C.A. work at the front; Mary Hungate Bennett (Pi) was dietitian at a large hospital in France and Sarah Cole Usinger (Pi) was also in France and now with her husband is doing reconstruction work in that country; Katharine Dame (Delta), through the Bryn Mawr Service Corps, became a member of the American Red Cross Tuberculosis Committee for Italy in the triple capacity of filing clerk librarian and translator; Lillian White Blanzino (Epsilon), who has lived in Italy for fourteen years, was a nurse in the Green Cross Hospital, the Italian branch of the Red Cross, while her husband was in seacoast defense and later on she was sent to America by Count Della Somagila, Managing Director of the Italian Red Cross, to raise five hundred thousand dollars for a surgical hospital in Rome.”
To read more…..
* For more on Dr. Frank Smalley and the word “sorority”
For more information on Dr. Erastus Haven, the father of Frances
© Fran Becque, www.fraternityhistory.com, 2014. All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed this post, please sign up for updates. Also follow me on twitter @GLOHistory and Pinterest www.pinterest.com/glohistory/
