The politics of remembrance: The gold star mothers' pilgrimage and America's fading memory of the great war

Journal of Military History

Volumn 72, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 371-411

  Budreau, Lisa M ^a  

^a Office of the Surgeon General   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61049412903     PISSN: 08993718     EISSN: 15437795     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jmh.2008.0133     Document Type: Article

References (169)

1. "Liberty Memorial Museum of World War One," in Kansas City Area Archivists, The Dusty Shelf 19, no. 3 (1999-2000): 10. I am indebted to Duran Cart for drawing my attention to the Kendall Collection.
2. "Sentiment Changes on Soldier Dead," New York Times [NYT], 15 May 1921, Section 2, 1:7.
3. Figures varied over the years from between 30,902, stated in American Battle Monuments Commission, American Armies and Battlefields in Europe, 2d. ed. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1938), 459
4. [hereafter ABMC Guide], to current figures of 31,945;
5. see Mark Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon (London: Macmillan Press, 1997), 181.
6. The cost of the pilgrimages was originally estimated to be about $3 million; however, the actual figure was $5,386,367. War Dept., Washington, to the President, 18 April 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Official File 461," Gold Star Mothers, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
7. The original estimate was reported in the NYT, 7 July 1929, 9:4.
8. Published material on the Gold Star pilgrimages is scarce. In his classic 1980 work, Over Here, David Kennedy devoted several pages to the burial of American bodies overseas and the eventual repatriation of others. He was misinformed, though, when he claimed that most deceased soldiers' next of kin "had eventually consented to leave them where they lay." David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
9. The subject was later resurrected in the pages of G. Kurt Piehler's Remembering War the American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
10. Piehler has also credited Kennedy for stimulating his interest in this subject, which culminated in his seminal work focusing on war and commemoration in the United States. While he devotes only one chapter to the First World War, Piehler offers a valuable analysis of the agents of memory that emerged from the government's efforts to create identity and meaning in the aftermath of the First World War. A more recent addition to the pilgrimage history is John W. Graham's The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the 1930s: Overseas Grave Visitations by Mothers and Widows of Fallen U.S. World War I Soldiers (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2005).
11. Yet, mention of the Gold Star pilgrims is absent from the sociopolitical historical narrative of Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1992);
12. Margaret R. Higonnet, Sonya Michel, et al., Behind the Lines, Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987);
13. Linda K. Kerber, Women's America, Refocusing the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982);
14. and Linda K. Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
15. Similarly, recent scholarship with a dedicated "maternal" focus or books treating women's activism of the 1920s and 1930s, forgoes any mention of the Gold Star Mothers, e.g. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World (London: Routledge, 1993).
16. Joy Damousi's study of maternal bereavement in Australia does not mention the Gold Star Mothers. Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss, Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31.
17. I refer often to private collections, American Legion auxiliary reports, Gold Star Mother association reports, and records of the Quartermaster Corps, Record Group (RG) 92, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland.
18. See also Mary Sine Clark, "If They Consent to Leave Them Over There," Virginia Cavalcade 50, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 135-41;
19. and Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 277.
20. The National Archives in College Park, Maryland, contained a wealth of information, as did the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
21. ABMC Guide, 459.
22. For British statistics, see David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 26.
23. For American statistics, see ABMC Guide, 459.
24. Memo from the War Department to the Office of the QM Corps, Col. Chambers, dated 15 May 1919, from H. R. Lemly, Major, QMC, General H. L. Rogers' Private File, Box 26, RG 92, NARA.
25. Meigs, Optimism at Armageddon, 145.
26. Undated sample letter to the mother of Lt. Oliver Judd Kendall, First Division Museum, Cantigny, Illinois, A. Woods, Historian, to author, February 2002;
27. also War Department to Miss Lida Cain, Louisville, Kentucky, 21 March 1919, John Cain Burial File, Quartermaster Corps, RG 92, NARA.
28. Testimony of Col. Chas. Pierce, in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Expenditures in the War Department, War Expenditures: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3 (Foreign Expenditures) of the Select Committee on Expenditures in the War Department, House of Representatives, Sixty-sixth Congress, second session, vol. 3 (Washington: GPO, 1920), 3447.
29. "Unpardonable," editorial, American Legion Weekly, 9 September 1921, 12;
30. and "13,000 Change their minds," NYT, 16 April 1921, 1:4.
31. "Return of U.S. Dead," NYT, 4 January 1920, Section 2, 1:1;
32. "Sentiment Changes on Soldier Dead," NYT, 15 May 1921, Section 2, 1:7.
33. Though figures vary, this 70 percent figure is based on the approximate 45,588 bodies shipped to the United States and 764 to European places of birth. See War Department and Cemeteries correspondence, January 1931, Box 345, RG 407, NARA;
34. also, Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 97.
35. The ABMC guidebook states the number remaining "unknown" is 4,431. This includes 1,643 buried in unidentified graves in Europe, 1,537 whose grave is the sea, and 1,250 whose remains are nonrecoverable. However, the book was published in 1938 and figures have since risen. ABMC Guide, 459.
36. "Pleas for Unknown," NYT, 31 May 1920, 3. Names of those without a grave were carved on the ceiling of cemetery chapels, but this work was incomplete when the Gold Star pilgrimages began in 1930.
37. An earlier commission had visited the cemeteries in 1921 and prepared tentative plans. Revised plans were approved on 17 April 1923 by a board that included the Assistant Secretary of War, General of the Armies John J. Pershing, and the Quartermaster General. Cemetery Expenditures, 25 April 1930, GRS (3) 333.9, Box 772, RG 159, NARA.
38. Monro MacCloskey, Hallowed Ground, Our National Cemeteries (New York: Richards Rosen Press, Inc., 1968), 50.
39. The decision to leave Americans buried in England was a rather late one. See "Report of Major General John F. O'Ryan [former commander of 27th U.S. Division], on Duty Abroad," 16 August 1920, published pamphlet (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Company, 1923), 40.
40. Daniel J. Sherman, "Art, Commerce and Memory," in Commemorations, the Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 188.
41. Lt. Col. H. de Watteville, "A Motor Tour along the Western Front," Army Quarterly 16 (January 1928): 394.
42. Similarly, David Lloyd posits that tourism declined because "the scenes of destruction were no longer as inherently interesting as they had been." Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, 105.
43. Palmer D. Edmunds, "Should We Forget the War?" American Legion Weekly, 5 December 1925, 14, 16.
44. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, eds., Hollywood's World War I Motion Picture Images (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 3.
45. The release of Wings occurred just after Charles A. Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris in May 1927.
46. Rollins and O'Connor, Hollywood's World War I Motion Picture Images, 96.
47. John Limon, Writing After War, American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 84. This boom was replicated in Great Britain, beginning in 1927 and peaking in 1930.
48. Cather "presents the American soldier as a good-natured hired hand." Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 32.
49. Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 162.
50. Attributed to a speech by President Coolidge in 1927 proclaiming that America was "entering upon a new era of prosperity." Maury Klein, Rainbow's End, The Crash of 1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xvi-xviii and 125.
51. ABMC Annual Report for 1925 indicates $3 million, or "less than $1.50 per soldier who served abroad," was allocated for the project. Annual Report of the ABMC, Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1925, p. 38, RG 117, NARA.
52. Architectural historian Ron Robin asserts that the nation's First World War commemorative architecture overseas was linked to the government's metamorphic approach to international affairs. Ron Robin, Enclaves of America, The Rhetoric of American Political Architecture Abroad, 1900-1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 65.
53. Robin, Enclaves of America, 65.
54. French First World War historian Annette Becker also believes that the American monuments represent a departure from traditional isolationism, claiming, "they [the Americans] rejected, at least temporarily, their separation, their isolationism." Les Monuments aux Morts - Mémoire de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Éditions Errance, 1988), 137. [The translation is mine.]
55. John Milton Cooper Jr., "The Great War and American Memory," Virginia Quarterly Review 79 (Summer 2003): 77.
56. In November 1917, Privates Thomas Enright and Merle Hay, and Corporal James Gresham became the first U.S. Army combat fatalities in the war. See Meirion and Susie Harries, The Last Days of Innocence, America at War, 1917-1918 (New York: Random House, 1997), 5; and the ABMC Guide, 423.
57. The Women's Committee was an auxiliary branch of the parent body, the National Council of Defense. "Gold Star as Mourning," NYT, 13 November 1917, 7:3.
58. "Mourning is Harmful," NYT, 14 November 1917, 14:5.
59. Woodrow Wilson to Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, 16 May 1918, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur Link, 69 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966-94), 48: 28; the Wilson Papers are held at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
60. Caroline Seaman Read to Woodrow Wilson, 3 May 1918, in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 48: 28.
61. Holly Fenelon, Gold Star Mother Association historian, to author, 20 November 2001.
62. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 2, 530.
63. Italics are Damousi's. Labour of Loss, 4.
64. Samuel Dickstein, a Lithuanian immigrant, served as a Democratic representative from New York (1922-46) and chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He was later known for initiating the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (1934-35) and creating the House Un-American Activities Committee. Quartermaster General, Misc. File 1922-1935, Gold Star Pilgrimage, Series E-1896, Box 345, RG 92, NARA [hereafter GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA].
65. The Gold Star Association of America, 15 February 1924, letter addressed to A. Platt Andrew, Congressman, 6th District, Mass., HR68A-H131, 68th Congress, H.R. Committee on Military Affairs, RG 233, NARA.]
66. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Military Affairs, To Authorize Mothers and Unmarried Widows of Deceased World War Veterans Buried in Europe to Visit the Graves: Hearings before the United States House Committee on Military Affairs, Seventieth Congress, first session, on Jan. 27, 1928 (Washington: GPO, 1928)
67. [hereafter House Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, January 27, 1928], p. 27.
68. Emma Kessler Sweet, San Francisco, to Senator Hiram Bingham, in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, To Authorize Mothers and Unmarried Widows of Deceased World War Veterans Buried in Europe to Visit the Graves: Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Com mittee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventieth Congress, first session, on H.R. 5494, May 14, 1928 (Washington: GPO, 1928)
69. [hereafter Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, May 14, 1928], p. 18.
70. Reference is made to Theodore Roosevelt's editorial in the Kansas City Star on the occasion of the death of his son Quentin in a flying accident; he wrote, "We feel that where the tree falls there let it lie." November 1918, Box 180, ABMC file, RG 117, NARA.
71. Mrs. Ethel Nock, Member of the Committee of Legislation, American War Mothers, in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, To Authorize Mothers and Unmarried Widows of Deceased World War Veterans Buried in Europe to Visit the Graves: Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventieth Congress, second session, on H.R. 5494, S. 2681, S. 5332, Part 2, February 12, 1929 (Washington: GPO, 1929)
72. [hereafter Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, February 12, 1929].
73. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 368-69.
74. J. S. Hallowes, "Mothers of Men and Militarism," produced by the International Council of Women (London: Headley Brothers, 1916), 25.
75. Robert D. Ward, "Against the Tide: The Preparedness Movement of 1923-1924," Military Affairs 38, no. 2 (April 1974): 59-61.
76. Kennedy notes that in the days leading up to America's entry into the war, the Wilson administration worried that "'women, especially those in the prewar women's peace movement, might constitute a subversive element in the nation, detrimental to wartime unity and the smooth functioning of selective service.'" Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens, Women and Subversion during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1, 4.
77. House Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, January 27, 1928.
78. Anna Stein, Brooklyn, New York, Office of the Inspector General, Correspondence, 1917-1934, p. 32, Box 1149, RG 159, NARA.
79. Condolence letter from Theodore Roosevelt, Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, February 12, 1929, p. 25.
80. Mrs. Jennie F. Walsh, Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, May 14, 1928, p. 5.
81. It was customary for the army to give each mother or widow a flag when the soldier was buried. Apparently, none was given when the grave was unknown. Mathilda Burling to William H. Hart, Quartermaster General, Washington, D.C., 23 January 1924, Hart Burial Files, Entry 1942, RG 92, NARA.
82. Mathilda Burling to General John J. Pershing, Western Union Telegraph Co., 6 December 1928, container 37, Pershing Papers, Library of Congress.
83. The general makes specific reference to the poorer mothers as being the ones most deserving of the trip abroad. John J. Pershing to Mathilda Burling, 28 November 1928;
84. Burling claimed to be representing "mothers throughout the country." Mrs. Mathilda Burling, in Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, February 12, 1929.
85. The House passed the bill on 20 February 1928, without debate. The Senate, on the other hand, debated the bill for months. Mrs. Mathilda A. Burling, Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, May 14, 1928, p. 4.
86. Plant notes that mothers presented the loss of their sons in a highly possessive manner, claiming, in a sense, that these bodies were their own. Rebecca J. Plant, "The Repeal of Mother Love: Momism and the Reconstruction of Motherhood in Philip Wylie's America" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 147.
87. Molly Ladd-Taylor, "'My Work Came Out of Agony and Grief,' Mothers and the Making of the Sheppard-Towner Act," in Mothers of a New World, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 337;
88. Plant, "The Repeal of Mother Love," 121.
89. See "Other Uses for $5,000,000," editorial, NYT, 7 February 1930;
90. NYT editorials, 17 and 22 January 1933;
91. and Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings, February 12, 1929.
92. Eve Zibart, "Every Four Years: The Real Political Parties," Washington Post, 14 January 2005, Weekend. The law specifying that the President take office on 20 January rather than the traditional 4 March was not enacted until 1933.
93. Robert H. Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge, American Presidency Series, ed. Donald R. McCoy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 109.
94. Mrs. Coolidge experienced enormous grief over her son's death, possibly influencing her husband's decision to approve this legislation on behalf of other mothers. Mrs. Coolidge also wrote a song entitled "The Open Door" on the anniversary of her son's death, which was sung by a Gold Star Mother during services at Arlington Cemetery in 1930. "Gold Star Mothers Honored," Washington Post, 12 May 1930, 3:2.
95. Mrs. Ethel Nock was the editor and vice president of the local chapter of American War Mothers in the District of Columbia. American War Mother 6, no. 1 (March 1929): 10;
96. "National Affairs," Time Magazine, 19 May 1930, 13.
97. A list of proposed legislation begins with H.R. 4109, 68th Congress, 20 December 1923
98. and ends with Public Resolution No. 227, 71st Congress (H.R. 4138), 15 May 1930; GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
99. War Department, John T. Harris, Major, to Mrs. Stella E. Smith, Dumont, N.J., 28 June 1929, Burial Files;
100. and Corporal Orville J. Miller, Iowa, 24 March 1933, Burial Files, RG 92, NARA.
101. Minutes of the First Meeting of the Executive Board of the National American War Mothers, Louisville, Kentucky, 29-30 September 1920, p. 20, National American War Mothers Archives, Washington, D.C.
102. The precise number of additional women who benefited is difficult to calculate, but it raised the approximate cost another 11 percent. "Status of Gold Star Mothers," Army and Navy Register, 30 November 1929, 509;
103. and Letter of Transmittal, Patrick J. Hurley, War Department, 6 December 1929, in Pilgrimage for the Mothers and Widows of Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines of the American Forces Now Interred in the Cemeteries of Europe as Provided by the Act of Congress of March 2, 1929 (Washington: GPO, 1930), p. iii.
104. On this use of the dead, see Michael C. Kearl and Anoel Rinaldi, "The Political Uses of the Dead as Symbols in Contemporary Civil Religions," Social Forces 61, no. 3 (March 1983): 693-708.
105. Hugh Clout, After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France after the Great War (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 274-75.
106. Pierre Berton, Vimy (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1986), Chapter 4.
107. All Canadian pilgrims paid their own expenses. Veterans Limited, Ottawa, Guidebook to Vimy, ed. John Hundevad, Collection of Vernon Kingsley Gill, Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum (IWM), London, United Kingdom.
108. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, 199, 188.
109. This percentage is based on 20,000 attendees (an approximate figure) against the 700,000 official membership estimates for 1927.
110. "Pilgrimage of Mothers to Europe's War Graves," NYT, 23 February 1930, Section 9, 8.
111. The War Department insisted that coffins be provided in case of death during the pilgrimages. War Department to Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Subject: Liaison Detail, 9 July 1931, Papers of Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. (1893-1960), Army War College Library, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Funeral details were also prearranged with a New York business that stood ready if called. Funerals file, New York, Box 6, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
112. "Winnebago Woman Here Seeks Grave of Warrior Son," New York Herald, Paris ed., 27 May 1933;
113. Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 277;
114. Mary Sine Clark, "If they consent to leave them over there," Virginia Cavalcade, Summer 2001, 135;
115. Richard A. Serrano, Poignant Protest," Los Angeles Times, 15 September 2002, 16;
116. "Black and Gold Stars," Nation 131, no. 3394 (23 July 1930): 85;
117. and Maj. Gen. B. F. Cheatham, USA, Retired, "Report War Mothers Pilgrimage" to Quartermaster General, Washington, D.C., 9 August 1930, p. 2
118. GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA [hereafter Cheatham, "Report War Mothers Pilgrimage," p. 2].
119. Reference the YWCA residence in New York, see Hotel Pennsylvania file, Box 3, and Box 348, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
120. Correspondence showed that if the U.S. States Shipping Lines had agreed to accommodate the black women, they would have lost money during the height of the tourist season from white passengers who refused to sail. By purchasing separate sailings for the black women, the government assured the company against lost revenue. J. L. DeWitt Memo to Secretary of War, 1 May 1930, GSM Pilgrimages, Herbert Hoover Correspondence, Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa. "Colored Mothers Given Special Ship," Washington Post, 11 July 1930, 1.
121. "55 Negro Mothers Feted," Chicago Tribune, Paris ed., 22 July 1930;
122. "Jazz Tunes Cheer Colored Mothers," New York Herald, Paris ed., 26 August 1930.
123. See also Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 86-87.
124. "55 Negro Mothers Feted."
125. Several French-speaking black nurses from Harlem Hospital in New York were recruited. Fred R. Moore to Col. Williams, 13 June 1930, Hotel Pennsylvania file, Box 3, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
126. Davis Papers; and Marvin E. Fletcher, America's First Black General (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000).
127. Walter Francis White (1893-1955).
128. While in France in the late 1920s, White wrote Rope and Faggot: a Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Knopf, 1929), the highly acclaimed study of lynchings in America.
129. Walter White to Secretary of War (1930), GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
130. White claims to have learned of the government's plan to segregate a total of 219 participating black women in March 1930. He then wrote to the War Department and obtained confirmation of the ruling. "Capital Rebuffs Gold Star Negroes," NYT, 30 May 1930.
131. White to Secretary of War (1930), GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
132. Admitting discrimination would have violated Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case in 1896 which adopted a "separate but equal" constitutional standard. Quote from Cheatham, "Report War Mothers Pilgrimage," p. 2;
133. see War Department Response, Secretary of War to Walter White. Also, "Capital Rebuffs Gold Star Negroes," GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
134. DeWitt, Memorandum for the Diary, 1 May 1930, Herbert Hoover Library. Hoover was likely to be at least modestly concerned about the racial discontent since blacks had voted approximately 70 percent Republican.
135. See Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell the Party of Lincoln, Black Politics in the Age of F.D.R. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
136. DeWitt's report to the Secretary of War, 20 May 1930, File 319;
137. from the GSM scrapbook, see the Afro-American, Baltimore ed., 18 January 1930, 4 April 1931;
138. Washington Tribune, 5 June 1931, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA;
139. Serrano, "Poignant Protest";
140. and Kennedy, Over Here, 368.
141. Mrs. Lora Lee Cannon, Athens, Alabama, to Secretary of War, 22 May 1930;
142. Mrs. Hattie Cowon of Hartsville, Tennessee, 17 August 1931, Cemeterial Div., Records of the Office of Quartermaster General, NARA.
143. Preprinted cards addressed to the Secretary of War in Box 380, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
144. Letters continued to arrive at the War Department. Perry C. Thompson, Editor to Hon. George H. Dern, Secretary of War, 9 May 1933, Box 345.
145. For a reference to GSM pilgrimage splitting the black vote, see Lester A. Walton, "Vote for Roosevelt," The Crisis 39 (November 1932): 343;
146. "Division of Negro Vote is Discussed," Washington Post, 12 October 1930;
147. W. E. B. DuBois, "As the Crow Flies," The Crisis 37, no. 7 (July 1930): 221.
148. Mrs. W D. Rush of Atlanta, interviewed by the Afro-American, 9 August 1930;
149. Gold Star Pilgrimages Scrapbook, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
150. John J. Noll, "Crosses," American Legion Monthly, September 1930, 14;
151. Major Louis C. Wilson, QMC, "The War Mother Goes 'Over There,'" Quartermaster Review, May-June 1930, 21.
152. Noll, "Crosses," 15.
153. Col. Richard T. Ellis, U.S. Army, Officer-in-Charge, "Report on the activities in Europe of the American Pilgrimage Gold Star Mothers and Widows, 1930" (7 March 1931), Section I, 2, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
154. One added rite that failed to make it into the official report was the tossing of a sealed bottle overboard once the more ceremonious wreath was cast adrift to those lost at sea. Some of the bottles, containing names of Gold Star Mothers and Widows on each trip, were found years later by fishermen as far away as Iceland and Ireland. Mr. Tom O'Brien to War Dept., 25 October 1932;
155. Mr. Einar Eiriksson to War Dept., December 1931, QMC, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA;
156. see also Mrs. Belle M. Harner, "The Personal Travel Journal of Mrs. Belle M. Harner, A Gold Star Mother of the Great War," from the collection of Mr. William Dienna, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania (August-September 1931), Fenelon Collection, 6.
157. Contracts for medals during three years totaled approximately $15,000; "Contracts for Gold Star Mothers," Box 380, GSM Pilgrimage files, NARA.
158. Mrs. Lawrence, Office of the Inspector General Correspondence, 1917-1934, p. 68, Box 1149, RG 159, NARA.
159. Harner, "Personal Travel Journal."
160. "War Mothers Feel That Sons in Fitting resting Places after Pilgrimage to France," undated, Julia Duggan Hart Papers, Southwest Collection Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.
161. This is the first mention of Burlings true relationship to her son. See testimony of Col. Winfree, 190;
162. Mrs. Lawrence, 68;
163. and, Mrs. Stein, 33, Office of the Inspector General Correspondence, 1917-1934, Box 1149, RG 159, NARA.
164. For more on the hardships of these years, see T. H. Watkins, The Great Depression (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 44;
165. Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, The Bonus Army (New York: Walker and Company, 2004), 118.
166. When the American War Mothers' president was asked about black mothers joining in 1920, she responded, "There are Southern women here. Don't bring that up. The colored women have not asked to be organized." Minutes of the First Meeting of the Executive Board of the National American War Mothers, Louisville, Kentucky, 29-30 September 1920, National American War Mothers Archives, Washington, D.C.
167. Rothman writes: "Blood ties are the fundamental basis for reckoning kinship, and one of the few permanencies left in American life." Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1989), 32, 34.
168. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 25.
169. Collective memory is "embedded in the social structure, and changes when social bonds weaken or dissolve, or when new bonds replace them." See Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, paperback ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24.