<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.19412">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><FONT size=3 face="Times New Roman"> </FONT>
<DIV id=node-55871 class="node node-views_article clear-block">
<DIV class=node-header><SPAN class=submitted><FONT size=4>Published on Sunday,
May 9, 2010 by </FONT><A
href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050610a.html"><FONT size=4>Consortium
News</FONT></A><FONT size=4> </FONT></SPAN>
<DIV class=node-title>
<H2 class=title><FONT size=4>The Original Anti-War Mother's
Day</FONT></H2></DIV>
<DIV class=author><FONT size=4>by Gary Kohls </FONT></DIV></DIV>
<DIV class="node-content clear-block prose">
<DIV class=node-body>
<P><FONT size=4>In 1870 - 140 years ago - the disastrous human consequences of
the American Civil War were becoming increasingly apparent, especially to the
mothers of sons and the wives of husbands who had watched as these men proudly
and patriotically marched off to "glorious" war a decade earlier. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Some of these women had probably (and regretfully) participated
in the pre-war flag-waving fervor that war planners and profiteers cunningly
elicit from the poor and working classes who will be doing the dirty
work.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Everything changed, however, when the killing and maiming
started and the permanent war wounded struggled back home with desperate needs
for medical and mental health care.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Julia Ward Howe was a life-long abolitionist and therefore
probably a reluctant supporter of the Union Army's anti-slavery rationale for
going to war against the pro-slavery Confederate South. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>A compassionate and well-educated middle child of an upper-class
family, Howe was also a poet who, in the early days of the Civil War, wrote "The
Battle Hymn of the Republic" using many biblically-based lyrics.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Though she later became a pacifist and a famous antiwar
activist, her fervent anti-slavery attitudes inspired her to write that still
famous song; and she did it in one sitting, in the pre-dawn darkness of Nov. 18,
1861.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Originally, Howe had thought of her song as an abolitionist
anthem. However, because of some militant-sounding lyrics and the eminently
marchable tune, the song soon was adopted by the Union Army as its most
inspiring war song. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>At the time, the Civil War also had not yet degenerated into the
wholesale mutual mass slaughter made possible by the advances in weaponry that
were destined to make obsolete the cavalry, the bayonet and the
sword.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4><B>Grim Images </B><B></B></FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>In part because of the relatively uncensored battlefield
journalism of the time and the grim images of dead soldiers made possible by the
invention of the camera, it didn't take too long for peace-loving,
justice-oriented activists to recognize that war was the equivalent of hell on
earth.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, 600,000 American
soldiers were dead, with no accurate count of the likely much larger number of
soldiers wounded, disabled or missing in action.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Women saw their sons and husbands returning home broken in body
and spirit - definitely not as heroes, as had been the pre-war hope - and the
minds of Howe and other women were changed about the lie that war is
glorious.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>The families of the returning Civil War veterans, both North and
South, also discovered that many of the soldiers who had no visible scars were
emotionally disabled, a problem that actually grew worse after they were home
and out of "harm's way."</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>The healing effect of time didn't work like it was supposed to
with these psychologically wounded veterans. The so-called "unwounded ones"
often suffered melancholy, had nightmares, couldn't function in society and
turned suicidal, homicidal and/or anti-social.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Many of the most infamous train and bank robbers and serial
killers of the late 1800s got their start as Civil War soldiers, most famously
the members of the James gang.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Because of normal society's inability to deal with massive
numbers of war-traumatized veterans, the first "veterans homes" were constructed
for the long-term care of the tens of thousands of invalided ex-soldiers who
otherwise might have died homeless, hungry and helpless.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Many of these unfortunates were diagnosed as having "Soldiers'
Heart," also known in the Civil War era as "Nostalgia," a commonly incurable
malady better known today as "Combat-Induced PTSD" (posttraumatic stress
disorder).</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>The horrors of the Civil War even changed those the conflict
made famous. Speaking to a graduating class of military cadets years later,
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman uttered his famous truth about the nature
of warfare as part of a rebuke to the era's "chicken-hawks," people who call for
war without having experienced it.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>"I confess without shame that I am tired and sick of war,"
Sherman said. "Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither
heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for more blood, more
vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell."</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>By 1870, Julia Ward Howe had been deeply affected both by the
ongoing agonies of Civil War veterans and the carnage occurring overseas in the
Franco-Prussian War. Though very short, that war resulted in almost 100,000
killed in action plus another 100,000 lethally wounded or sickened.</FONT></P>
<P><B><FONT size=4>The First Mother's Day </FONT></B></P>
<P><FONT size=4>So, as a humanist who cared about suffering people - as well as
a feminist and a suffragette who advocated social justice - Howe penned her
"Mother's Day Proclamation" in 1870 as an appeal to mothers to spare their sons
and the sons of others from the depredations of war.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>The Mother's Day Proclamation was partly a lament for the
useless deaths and partly a call to action to stop future wars. The call was
directed, not to men, many of whom may have felt proud for their "service," but
to women, who often have proved more thoughtful and humane about issues of human
suffering.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Then, on June 2, 1872, in New York City, Julia Ward Howe held
the first "Mother's Day" as an anti-war observance, a practice Howe continued in
Boston for the next decade before it died out.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>The modern Mother's Day, with its apolitical message, emerged in
the early Twentieth Century, with Howe's original intent largely erased from the
mainstream consciousness. Howe's vision of an antiwar mother's call to action
was watered-down into an annual expression of sentimentality.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Like most other holidays (including religious ones), Mother's
Day in capitalist America has been transformed into just another expectation of
gift-buying and gift-giving. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>What was originally a call to mobilize outraged mothers to keep
their sons and husbands from going off half-cocked to kill and die for some
corporate war profiteer or other, became just another opportunity to market
non-essential consumer goods. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Note in Howe's proclamation below how strongly she felt that
wives and mothers should never have to be put in the position of comforting or
applauding their soldier-husbands or soldier-sons when they come home from war
"reeking of carnage."</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>In her view, the prevention of such "reeking" was so much
simpler than the attempt to reverse the consequences of the "carnage" of
war.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Howe also felt that mothers should never allow war-making
institutions to make killers out of their sons whom they had raised to be
ethical, humane people with love for humankind.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>One must wonder, too, what Howe meant when she referred to
"irrelevant agencies." One can only assume that the same American military,
governmental, corporate and bureaucratic agencies that have been messing things
up in Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico and all over the world
were also operating in the last half of the 1800s. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Wall Street and the military/industrial/congressional/media
complex - the entities that dominate U.S. policymaking today - were probably in
operation then, too, though surely with less exorbitant salaries, bonuses,
contracts and cost overruns.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Given the ongoing horrors of war, perhaps it's finally time for
people of good will to recall Julia Ward Howe's peacemaking vision on this
Mother's Day, 2010.</FONT></P>
<P><B><FONT size=4>Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870:
</FONT></B></P>
<P><FONT size=4>"Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have
hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>"Say firmly: 'We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for
caresses and applause. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have
taught them of charity, mercy and patience. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.' </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>"From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with
our own. It says, 'Disarm, disarm!' </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does
not wipe out dishonor, nor does violence indicate possession. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest
day of counsel. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the
dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the
great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred
impress, not of Caesar but of God. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=4>"In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that
a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and
held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent
with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the
amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests
of peace." </FONT></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>