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309 13. “HEARTS BRIMMING WITH PATRIOTISM” Katherine Edson, Alice Park, and the Politics of War and Peace, 1914–1921 eunice eichelberger Sometime after World War I, Katherine Philips Edson wrote that women had “entered politics at one of the most critical times in our History” and had “helped to win a world war.” However, she lamented, the “sacrifice of blood and treasure, poured out with hearts brimming with patriotism” had been taken advantage of by “heartless profiteers who have grown swollen and fat off the peoples’ sorrow and sacrifice.”1 Besides reflecting widespread disillusionment in the aftermath of World War I, Edson’s statement pointed to the connection between the growing political activism of women, particularly in the area of woman suffrage, and their activism during the period of World War I. California women displayed their patriotism in varying ways during World War I. Barbara Steinson has written that war-related activities and the continuing campaign for woman suffrage at the national level “drew unprecedented numbers of women into the public sector,” but many California women, including Katherine Edson and Alice Park, both of whom engaged in wide-ranging reform efforts and held important roles in the campaign for woman suffrage, had been activists well before the war.2 Edson and Park provide prominent examples of the differing forms that women’s patriotism took in the context of wartime. Edson apparently displayed little interest in the issues of war and peace during the years before the United States entered the war, but she then devoted her considerable energy to helping the war effort from her position as the most influential member of the California Industrial Welfare Commission and as a member of various government wartime agencies. Alice Park expressed her patriotism before American intervention by helping organize a local branch of the Woman’s Peace Party to oppose U.S. entry into the war and by participating in the Ford Peace Ship Expedition. After U.S. intervention, Park fought to uphold civil liberties in the face of government repression . At war’s end, a disillusioned Edson worked to prevent the coming of another war by serving on the Advisory Commission to the American eunice eichelberger 310 delegation at the Washington Limitation of Armaments Conference. Park continued her work for peace, civil liberties, and women’s rights for the rest of her long life. The lives of these two women illustrate the links between prewar engagement in politics by women and women’s wartime activism, and suggest that, as women became more politically active, they also became more interested and involved in issues of international affairs. The stories of Edson and Park also permit a consideration of the relationship of gender to their views and activism. War broke out in Europe in August 1914, following more than a decade of reform in the United States. Though the spirit of reform had come to California later than in other states, it proved to be particularly strong and productive once it appeared. Under the administration of Governor Hiram Johnson, the state enacted far-reaching reform legislation.3 The progressives ’ faith in progress and in the betterment of humanity undoubtedly added to the shock that many of them felt over the coming of war. In May 1915 the sinking of the English passenger liner the Lusitania by a German U-boat, with the loss of 162 American lives, aroused antiGerman sentiment but had little effect on the determination of the United States to stay out of the war. However, in early 1917 the resumption by the Germans of unrestricted submarine warfare, the sinking of U.S. ships, and the publication of a telegram from Arthur Zimmermann, the German secretary for foreign affairs, to the German ambassador to Mexico, proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico if the United States and Germany were to go to war, caused a sharp change in sentiment. The telegram angered Californians because the Germans offered to return to Mexico the territory in the southwest United States that Mexico had lost to the United States in the Mexican–American War and further suggested an alliance between Mexico and Japan, a country many Californians feared and against whose immigrants to California they discriminated.4 On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and, as many progressives had feared, the coming of war brought a halt to most reform efforts and also brought the abridgment of civil liberties. Katherine Philips Edson was the most prominent woman in California progressivism...

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