As the twentieth century began, Julia had become a national treasure. She was still committed to all her long-standing causes, but she was also drawn to protesting new forms of injustice. To her anxious and protective children, she seemed even more errant and intractable than before. To the American public, she seemed to symbolize the triumphant spirit of a nation that had survived a terrible test.
Born just three days after Queen Victoria, Howe had always had a mischievous connection to her; on her honeymoon, she had written a parody of “God Save the Queen” for the ladies cabin. In old age, she came more and more to resemble Victoria. In formal photographs they look very much alike in their black gowns and lace caps, “nearly always askew,” as one biographer notes.1 Jack Elliott helped Howe create her more modern regal image, making her “a lovely coronet” out of gold braid for parties.2 American journalists increasingly compared Howe to the monarch, one of them boasting after her eightieth birthday gala that “when Vic celebrated her 80th birthday . . . she got no ovation equal to that given this octogenarian.”3 When Victoria died in January 1901, though, Howe felt “quite overcome” and wrote an obituary for the Woman’s Journal.
As the new century began, she was combining the traditional role of an old-fashioned Boston matriarch with an iron determination to live on her own terms. John Jay Chapman, who knew her in her old age, perceived her as a woman “of unfailing gaiety,” the “pet of her numerous children,” and “the Mother Superior of the latest generation of nonconformist philanthropy in Boston.”4 Her self-image was closer to the Mother Superior than to the queen, although she did not take either very seriously. She often wore the white cashmere “Pope’s dress” Jack had designed for her in Italy to lectures and meetings, and dreamed of an interview with a female Pope, a majestic alter ago: “I asked on leaving whether I might kiss her hand. She said ‘you may kiss my hand.’ I found it fat and far from beautiful. As I left her, me thought that her countenance relaxed, and she looked like a tired old woman.”5 No one who saw Julia in these last years, however, described her as looking tired. The gaiety Chapman saw was partly her genuine love of fun, and partly an act of will. An elderly relative had told her that when she quailed at the prospect of a strenuous task, she must do it immediately; and she followed that stern precept, mastering her fatigue with stubborn self-discipline. She joked, but did not complain, about old age; the social expectations that old ladies would be wrinkled, white-haired, and bent made it easier for her to accept aging. Certainly none of the women her age she knew were looking any better or any younger.
Children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren still took a lot of her time. Laura and Henry Richards had seven children, Flossy and David Hall had five, and they all came to Oak Glen for long visits. Maud and Jack Elliott were childless, as were Harry Howe and his wife, Fannie. Julia confided to Annie some years earlier that she thought Fannie lacked “the education which motherhood, or barring this, the habit of self-denial gives.”6 She got on well with Fannie, but they were never close. Harry was by far the wealthiest of the children (he built a summer home in Bedford Hills, a copy of Lawton’s Valley), and she thought that his distinguished and prosperous scientific career gave Fannie a privileged, even pampered, life. As the only son, moreover, Harry was free from the intense emotional bonds connecting her to her daughters; he sent her a generous monthly check in her last years instead. She was immensely proud of his academic achievements, medals, speeches, honorary degrees, and prizes. In a metallurgical parallel to Chev’s Order of Saint Saviour, Harry had been to Russia to receive the cross of the Order of Saint Stanislaus from the czar. “Dearest boy,” she wrote to him, “… If your father were only here, to share our great rejoicing!”7
All the daughters had bequests from Charles Sumner, as well as from their father and Uncle Sam. Laura, Flossy, and Maud all became professional writers. Laura wrote or edited ninety-five books for children and adults, including the story “Captain January” (1902), which was made into one of Shirley Temple’s most popular movies in 1936. Flossy had become a suffragist as well as a journalist, but in 1909, Julia was worried about her financial hardships: “Flossy has struggled most bravely with poverty,” she wrote in her journal, but “has been happy, adoring her excellent, but irritable and despondent husband.”8 After David Hall died, Flossy did better supporting herself and her family. Maud was a productive, hustling journalist, with a Remington typewriter and a keen marketing sense. Julia adored “Zacko,” her pet name for Jack Elliott; Maud seemed happy with him and promoted him tirelessly, but Julia worried that with “no child to draw her into the future,” Maud would take it hardest when her mother died.9 And Julia Romana continued to haunt her: “My heart still aches with the thought that I might have done better by her, as by the others.”10 Of Chev, and their thirty-three years together, she thought very little. On their anniversary most years, she would reflect on their marriage and regret that she had not understood how to establish a working marital contract with him. But she did not linger in the past.
Behaving like an old lady with an ebony cane and a white wicker wheelchair, moreover, was not at all to her taste. As recorded in her journal, almost every morning began with headache and depression, which she overcame by uplifting self-talk. Despite vertigo, sore eyes, severe cough, grippe, bronchitis, toothache, knee pains, a lump in her right breast (the doctor thought it was cancerous but could be treated with medicine; it eventually went away), “brain fog,” and tonsillitis, she was always toiling on a “screed,” for her huge schedule of readings, lectures, sermons, meetings, articles, and celebrations. She insisted on making her own bed every day, took a cold bath every morning, and took two long walks a day. Maud had set up an elaborate finicky routine for her, including twice-daily knee massages. “I hate to be rubbed!” Julia moaned, and by the 1900s, she had trimmed the program down, especially the healthful dietary restrictions.11 It would be plum cake and mince pie to the end, and she would playfully compete with her grandchildren for the tastiest desserts. The daughters insisted on a half-hour nap at noon, but she detested it, resisted it, and checked her watch for the end of the wasted minutes. She took pride in writing an article on gambling in under an hour, at the urgent request of a newspaper. In 1900, she took a long, solitary midwestern lecture tour from January to May, with stops in Minneapolis, Madison, and Duluth, and was taxed by the effort but sustained by her humor. She was still forgetting where she put the keys to her moneybag, and once prayed to St. Anthony of Padua that, if he would help her, she “would take pains to find out who he was.”12 (The keys turned up right away, but St. Anthony was not invoked on further occasions.)
Her support for women’s suffrage remained strong, but her vision of women’s future was more visionary than legislative; the “new woman world,” she wrote, was “like the rising up from the sea of a new continent.”13 In 1908, she had a utopian “vision of the world regenerated by the combined labor and love of Men and Women,” in which they stood “side-by-side, shoulder to shoulder, a calm lofty and indomitable purpose lighting every face with a glory not of this earth.”14 In her imaginings of a radiant future of sexual equality, Howe shared characteristics with socialist feminists like Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, rather than the single-minded campaigners for the vote. She also kept up her advocacy for racial equality, and at a benefit for the Tuskegee Institute she met a number of the black leaders of the coming generation, Paul Dunbar and his wife, Alice Dunbar-Nelson; W. E. B. DuBois; and Booker T. Washington. With the Boston black activist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, she supported the racial integration of women’s clubs and spoke out against lynching. Hate mail addressed to “Mrs. Howe, Negro Sympathizer, Boston” was delivered to her home. On December 1, 1900, she dreamed that she was telling Chev, “with the old feeling of reluctance, that I was going away for a lecture.” Indeed she was going away, moving further and further away from the role he had imposed on her.
Modern technology delighted her. She took readily to the long-distance telephone, to driving with her sons-in-law in fast cars, and to her grandson Hal Richards’s motorcycle. Maud and Laura had an electric elevator installed at Beacon Street, which she adored. “Watching her ascent,” her daughters wrote, “clad in white, a smile on her lips, her hand waving farewell, one could only think of ‘the chariot of Israel’ …”15 She loved her phonograph, and listened almost every evening to operas, Handel, Beethoven, and Chopin, repeating the music at her piano; although she tried to listen to modern music, she disliked even Tchaikovsky. She expanded her reading, although her literary taste and style had been formed in her youth. Studying the plays of D’Annunzio, attending a lecture on Whitman and the “new poetry” (she found Whitman overrated), or hearing W. B. Yeats speak on the revival of letters in Ireland did not inspire her to envision a new world of literature any more than the friendship of Oscar Wilde had made her an aesthete. Realism knocked when she had a visit from a “bumptious but very candid and genuine” young author named Upton Sinclair, “who admires my Battle Hymn and wants to write a three-volume novel about our Civil War.”16
Celebrity was beginning to exact its twentieth-century toll. People pestered her for blurbs and recommendations, personal poems, and money for higher education or funeral expenses. They wanted advice; they wanted to exploit her; they wanted her to sign photographs and scraps of cloth used for autograph quilts. A Mrs. Eugenia H. Allison, from New Decatur, Alabama, wanted her views on “The Literary Tendencies and Forces of Our Age.” Mrs. Anna C. Bird of East Walpole, Massachusetts, sought her opinion of “Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen.” Mr. R. Bache of Washington, DC, wanted to publish an essay of his own under her name. A malodorous Reverend George Vaughan came to the house and bragged about his eminence until she gave him a dollar to get rid of him. One Tennessee woman wanted Howe to pay for her musical education; another wrote mysteriously to order “Secret Confessions of a Priest,” enclosing forty cents’ worth of stamps. And they all wanted her to speak at their tea parties, club events, and flower shows, dance at the firemen’s ball, dine at the banquet of the Shoe and Leather Trade, join the Paint and Oils Association at their annual dinner. “I do verily believe,” Laura grumbled, “that people of this sort would persist in their efforts if they knew that Mammy would be in her coffin the next day. They would say, ‘Oh, if that is the case, we must have her last appearance!’ ”17 Maud was fighting her every step of the way, preventing her from going to a meeting of the Authors Club, pleading “so piteously . . . not to go to give a lecture that I could not deny her,” imploring her with tears not to go to church and face drafts and exposures, or sending a telegram forbidding her to go to damp Oak Glen.18
Meanwhile, she became involved with new social issues: the abolition of the death penalty, the protection of Italian immigrants, Indian affairs, the Pennsylvania coal miners’ strike. With regard to the rebellion of the Armenians against the Turks, she backed the Armenians, or rather, opposed the Turks. During one crisis in 1903, she supported American intervention in the conflict: “Our own warship is where it should be. I would to God that we might hear the thunder of its guns.”19 Four thousand Armenian Americans turned out to cheer her in a Faneuil Hall rally in 1904. She went to hear Jane Addams talk about her experiments with settlement houses, and to a women’s club lecture on anti-Semitism. In November 1904, she went to a meeting of the Council of Jewish Women and they asked her to recite the “Battle Hymn,” making her nervous: “I had feared that the last verse might trouble them, but it did not.”20 In June 1904, when she received her first honorary degree, from Tufts University, the students gave her the college yell twice. That same month, she wrote in her journal: “In the night I dreamed of one whose memory has entered deeply into my life. Though I tried to recite before him my Flag poem and then my Battle hymn, in both broke down. Strange this recurrence of a figure not seen with mortal vision in many years!”21 Why should these events trigger memories of Horace Binney Wallace? Perhaps she longed to show him how far she had come.
Tribute followed tribute. On her eighty-sixth birthday in 1905, the Boston Authors Club commissioned a volume of sixty quatrains in her honor and hosted a festival of readings modeled on the Welsh Eistedfodd. She responded with mock self-deprecation:
Why, bless you, I ain’t nothing or nobody, nor much,
If you look in your directory, you’ll find a thousand such;
I walk upon the level ground, I breathe upon the air,
I study at a table, and reflect upon a chair.
I wrote a pretty book one time, then I wrote a play,
And a friend who went to see it said she fainted right away.
Then I got up high to speculate upon the Universe,
And folks who heard me found themselves no better and no worse.
Yes, I’ve had a lot of birthdays and I’m growing very old,
That’s why they make so much of me, if once the truth were told.
And I love the shade in summer, and in winter love the sun,
And I’m just learning how to live, my wisdom’s just begun.22
Age brought less welcome surprises. Michael Anagnos died on July 7, 1906, and in mid-August she learned from his executors that he had been married and divorced in Greece before the Howes met him, and had left behind a son named Polychronos. She kept the news to herself; certainly it is not mentioned in her daughters’ biography, which stresses her grief over his death. Perhaps the comment in her journal that she was “much troubled in the effort to compose a poem” for his memorial service suggests her efforts to preserve his standing as the perfect son-in-law.23 Dreams of men other than Chev, in August and September, may have been her way of processing the information about Michael. She dreamed that she was engaged to Edward Twisleton, her English friend from the 1850s, but “suddenly remembered that dear Chev was still living.” In another dream, a “King Edward” wearing a black-and-gold medieval gown kissed her hand. In the last of the dreams, Edwin Booth came to call and the children sent him away, to her dismay.24
In January 1908, she had the satisfaction of seeing her standing as poet recognized when she was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (The second woman was not chosen until 1930.) Yet, rather endearingly, she never got over her fears of being forgotten or put “out of the running,” or the pain of the bad review of Later Lyrics. As late as 1907, she worried that her article for a magazine would be rejected. At Longfellow’s centennial service in Cambridge, she was hurt that no one asked her to read a poem. In 1909, in the same month that she received an honorary doctorate from Brown, she was upset because she was not invited to speak at the Margaret Fuller Centenary, and came home with her poem to Margaret still in her pocket, although she “was probably the only person present who had ever heard one or more of Margaret’s monologues, miscalled ‘Conversations.’ ”25 She woke up at 4:00 a.m. one morning, brooding again about Robert Browning’s “great rudeness to me in a London party. I said to myself, ‘I need not reproach myself about the poem I wrote as my feeling in writing it was one of genuine affection and homage.’ Browning was deeply offended at my description of his lodgings: ‘the chairs were queer and rotten,’ but it had been exactly my own experience in Rome in expensive lodgings, in 1843, and was merely a feature of my word picture. Still, the experience is a very painful one, quite unexpected.”26
On her ninetieth birthday, her friends and family gathered at Beacon Street to honor her. A journalist from Munsey’s Magazine described her as “the grand old woman of America” and admired the way she looked in her “picturesque and becoming Norman hat.” He spoke to one of her many grandchildren, “who admitted that there were no geniuses among them, but no imbeciles or degenerates either.”27
In her last months she was still writing poetry, and fighting with Maud to let her go to read her works: a poem called “The Capitol” for the American Academy of Arts and Letters in DC; a centenary poem on James Freeman Clarke; a poem on Abraham Lincoln to be read at Symphony Hall, Boston; and a final collection of her verse, At Sunset. She was still revising, too, following one of her mottoes: “Never print a poem or a speech until it has been delivered; always give the eleventh hour its chance!”28
Her last public speech was at the end of May 1910, when she went to plead on behalf of pure milk legislation at the Boston State House. “Her presence, the presence of the old Sybil, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, was extraordinarily romantic,” Maud eulogized. “It lifted the whole occasion out of the realm of the commonplace into that of the poetic.”29 Her private end was not quite so poetic. In June she had a bad fall carrying her chamber pot to the bathroom, broke a rib, and needed a private nurse, an imposition she endured until the end of the summer, when she demanded that the nurse be dismissed. Maud had to give in. In her “Notes on the Last Summer of JWH’s Life,” she explained that the “last fiery flash of the cold gray eyes and the red hot temper, completely cowed and quelled the old daughters!” But she also understood Julia’s “last stand for freedom” as the natural result of her lifelong battle for independence. “I think she was balked so much in her youth, first by her own father . . . then by Papa, that her first ideal of happiness was to be let alone, and allowed to have one’s own way.”30
In October 1910, Julia roused herself somewhat grumpily to go to Northampton and accept a third honorary degree, from Smith College. To Maud, the ceremony was another romantic apotheosis and picture opportunity. “A curving gallery was filled with white-clad girls, some two thousand of them,” she wrote. “As she entered, they rose like a flock of doves, and with them the whole audience.” As Howe came forward to get her degree, they sang the “Battle Hymn” again. Asked by a Boston paper for a motto for the women of America, she declared “Up to Date!”—a succinct and unsentimental epitaph for a woman who lived for the present and the future.31
Julia’s serene death of pneumonia a week later provided many sentimental tableaux, but it had long been expected; all her children except Harry were at her bedside. She was buried with Chev and Sammy at Mount Auburn Cemetery, but even on her tombstone her male relations got top billing. The inscription reads
JULIA WARD HOWE
DAUGHTER OF
SAMUEL WARD
WIFE OF
SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE
At the memorial service held by the city of Boston on January 8, 1911, any hint of Julia’s playing a subsidiary role to her husband was excised. Mayor Fitzgerald set the tone of the evening when he called her “a representative character” who “typifies and stands for the nineteenth century.” The young wife who had once felt excluded by Boston society had become the queen of the city. As John Jay Chapman wrote, “Of course everybody in Boston knew her. One couldn’t help knowing her. The policemen knew her; the school-children sang her ‘Battle-Hymn of the Republic’; the statesmen, scholars, scientists, and publicists for a generation regarded her as one of their cherished institutions and as a pillar of the crumbling world.”32 All of the speakers tacitly acknowledged her preeminence. William H. Lewis, a graduate of Harvard Law School, the first black United States District Attorney, and a celebrated spokesman for civil rights, drew on familiar metaphors when he elevated her above Chev: “Fifty years she reigned over us, queen of all our hearts” with her “Prince Consort, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe . . . I find but one parallel to two such lives in all history, that of which Tennyson sings in the Idylls of the King,—Victoria and Albert the Good.”33
Chev had become the prince consort to Julia’s queen, and his reputation continued to decline. As early as 1917, the Boston Transcript lamented that “it is rather a pity, that the brilliancy of Mrs. Howe’s achievements in her great age, and her ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ have given off such a blaze of glory around her name that that of her husband is rather lost in the dazzle.”34 A reader agreed that Mrs. Howe’s name, of course, would always be held in “sweet remembrance,” but it was “sad to observe that the name of the noble character who, in his middle age, wooed and wedded her . . . should have begun to be dropped out of the cyclopedias, as has been noticed to be the case.”35 Writing a book about Newport in 1944, Maud reflected on the way history had treated her parents. “Nothing is so strange to me as the fact that today, when every school child can repeat ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ and hardly a day passes without some reference to my mother in radio or press,—my father, whose towering personality dwarfed all the rest of the family, is forgotten.”36 In the 1940s Julia was even named one of the “Wonder Women of History,” a series published in every issue of the Wonder Woman comic books.
She is remembered today chiefly as the author of one great poem, but that is more than most poets achieve. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt, one of Julia’s friends and admirers, proposed that the “Battle Hymn” should be declared the national anthem, but the idea was defeated. Southerners thought the lyrics were too bloodthirsty, calling for their half of the nation to be trampled and crushed in a Northern holy war. And despite the tolerant response of the Jewish women in New Orleans, a Jewish citizen, Jacob B. Ascher, protested in a letter to the New York Times against the poem’s religious imagery: “The American Nation and Army are not all Christians. In both bodies there are many who prefer a different religion to what Christ taught; and there are many who have no religion at all.”37 In 1931, the unsingable “Star-Spangled Banner” became the American national anthem.
Over time, however, the “Battle Hymn” became an unofficial national anthem, and also an international anthem for times of heroic challenge, mourning, sacrifice, and faith. It was sung at the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was performed at the funerals of Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. It was quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. in his last sermon in Memphis in 1968. After September 11, 2001, it was performed at memorial concerts around the world.
Howe’s image too was transformed in the twentieth century. In 1978, she had come to seem like a relic of the dusty Victorian past. The book dealer and scholar Madeleine B. Stern disparaged the idea that critics had once praised Howe as “the most notable woman of letters” of her age. “It is more accurate,” she opined, “to regard her as ‘the Dearest Old Lady in America.’ ”38 But at exactly that moment, the wheel of history was turning. In the 1950s, Howe’s granddaughter and executor Rosalind Richards donated the Howe family’s huge archive of correspondence and journals to the Houghton Library at Harvard; they revealed the disappointment, frustration, anger, and rebellion behind Howe’s motherly mask. Louise Tharp looked at them in 1956 when she published her book about Howe, her sisters, and her brother Sam. Then in 1979, the historian Deborah Pickman Clifford published the first biography based on the archive, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. The academic scholars Mary H. Grant, Gary Williams, and Valarie Ziegler came to Harvard to do indispensable research on Howe’s life, ideas, and writing. In the twenty-first century, she is a new woman.
Julia began her life as a damsel imprisoned in an enchanted castle and ended it as an international icon. As a young woman, she had been a diva, flattered but excluded from any real knowledge of the world. As a young wife, she had painfully come to the realization that her husband could not be the partner she had dreamed of, no matter how many times she sacrificed her wishes to his command. As a mother, she slowly revised her concept of maternity and questioned its centrality to a woman’s life. For the first half of her life, she was a bystander to history, silenced or speaking with a soft and timid voice. During the Civil War, Julia understood that she was also fighting a domestic and personal civil war. Using her power struggles with her husband as lessons, she stepped out to claim her own voice and her own power, as a spokeswoman for women’s rights and then for the disempowered everywhere. She never became the great poet or playwright she had longed to be; she knew she would not live to see women enfranchised; she never achieved the level of feminine self-denial and scorn of material things that society still demands from its female saints. But as she wrote at the end, “I do not desire ecstatic, disembodied sainthood . . . I would be human, and American, and a woman.”39 She won her civil wars, and she earned her place in American history.