A Socialite's Call to the Mexican Border
Mrs. Seth Barton French, a veteran of the European war, seeks to establish hospitals on the Mexican border amid rising tensions.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mrs. Seth Barton French, prominent in New York and Newport society, who has just returned to her home after completing a 7,000-mile tour in behalf of the allied hospital work and Servian relief fund, has applied to Secretary of War Baker for permission to go to the Mexican border for the organization of hospitals there. Mrs. French was among the first women who offered their services as nurses in the European war. She had charge of one of the American hospitals in France and stood alone on the banks of the Aisne with shells bursting about her, watching an artillery duel between the British and Germans. 'It was my good fortune to drive several staff officers to the lines in my car,' she says. 'As a result I saw a small slice of the battle of the Aisne. I could see shells bursting in the air, and suddenly the whole scene of the artillery duel spread before me from the high plateau on which I was standing. It was so exciting that the thought never occurred to me that I was in danger.'
“It was so exciting that the thought never occurred to me that I was in danger, and even when shrapnel burst a few hundred feet away I was so engrossed with the spectacle that my own person seemed wholly unimportant.”
In 1916, the threat of conflict on the Mexican border was a dominant civic anxiety for Americans, much like modern debates over the militarization of the southern frontier. Mrs. French’s transition from the trenches of Europe to the geopolitical flashpoints of North America reflects how 'border security' became a defining obsession for the American public during the Great War era.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.