Balch, Emily Greene (1867–1961)

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Balch, Emily Greene (1867–1961)

Second American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, whose name is synonymous with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization she helped direct in its formative years. Born Emily Greene Balch on January 8, 1867, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts; died on January 9, 1961, at Cambridge, Massachusetts; daughter of Francis Vergnies Balch (an attorney) and Ellen (Nelly) Maria (Noyes) Balch (a former school teacher); never married; no children.

Selected writings:

Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (Charities Publication Committee, 1910); Approaches to the Great Settlement (B.W. Huebsch, 1918); Occupied Haiti (The Writers Publishing Company, 1927, reprinted, Garland, 1972); The Miracle of Living (Island Press, 1941); Vignettes in Prose (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1952).

Although it was only in 1946 (when she received the Nobel Peace Prize) that Emily Greene Balch became known throughout the world, she had long been revered within the peace movement. Indeed, her name—like that of her close friend Jane Addams —was held synonymous with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the leading women's peace organization in the world. In the process, Balch had helped spearhead what had never been attempted before, the effort of women acting together as women to end global conflict. She once said, "Lovers of our own lands, we are citizens of the world, conscious partakers in the sacrament of all human life or more truly of all sentient life."

Stemming from colonial Yankee ancestry, Emily Greene Balch was born on January 8, 1867, in Jamaica Plain (now part of Boston), Massachusetts. Her father Frank Vergnies Balch was a prosperous lawyer concentrating on estates and corporate interests. A compassionate and cultured man, Frank had enlisted as a private in the Civil War and had served as secretary to the reformist Senator Charles Sumner (Rep.-Massachusetts). Her mother Nelly Noyes Balch had taught in the pioneering community of Mattoon, Illinois, before marriage. Cousins by

blood, the Balches raised their six children in the tradition of liberal Unitarianism. Emily later wrote of her upbringing:

The whole atmosphere was permeated by what you might call Neo-Puritanism without its rigors, narrowness or introspection, but colored and controlled through and through by complete acceptance of the rule of conscience and by a warm and generous sense of the call to service.

Always a stellar student, Balch led her classes at the school of Miss Catherine Innis Ireland, a female academy in Boston. In 1886, Balch entered Bryn Mawr College, where she concentrated in the humanities: the classics, philosophy, and modern languages. Earning her A.B. in 1889 as a member of the charter class, she was the first recipient of the Bryn Mawr European fellowship, the highest honor the college bestowed. As her interests had turned to "the social question," Balch first spent a year under the tutelage of Bryn Mawr sociologist Franklin H. Giddings. In 1890, she traveled to France, where her research was directed by Professor Emile Levasseur. In 1893, the American Economic Association published her findings under the title Public Assistance of the Poor in France, a work long recognized as a pioneer sociological study.

Upon returning to the United States in 1891, Balch launched her first career: social work. She immediately apprenticed herself to Charles W. Birtwell, general secretary of the Boston Children's Aid Society. Within several years, she had composed a manual on treatment of juvenile offenders. In December 1892, Balch helped launch Denison House, a settlement house in Boston, which she directed for a year and which led to her crusade for the alleviation of sweatshops. In 1894, she joined the Federal Labor Union, part of the American Federation of Labor, and attended one state labor meeting as a representative of the Cigar Makers Union.

Concluding, however, that she preferred college teaching to social work, she decided in 1893 to embark on her second career. Thanks to her father's financial support, she undertook a series of brief academic programs, often under the direction of an extremely distinguished faculty. The year 1893 saw her at the Harvard Annex, now Radcliffe College. In 1895, she worked at the University of Chicago with sociologist Albion Small. The academic year 1895–96 was spent at the University of Berlin, where she was taught by such renowned professors as Gustav Schmoller, Georg Simmel, and Adolph Wagner.

In 1896, Balch began her academic career at Wellesley College. Advancing slowly up the academic ladder, she received a five-year appointment in 1913 as professor and chair of the department of economics and sociology. Though as a teacher she was absent-minded and disorganized, sometimes forgetting to return exams or tell a class she would be out of town, she attracted students by her intense moral involvement with her subject matter. She taught Wellesley's first course in sociology as well as courses in immigration, the theory of consumption, and the economic roles of women. Her course in socialism used Karl Marx's Capital as its text.

Her pedagogy was soon known for its innovation. For example, she personally escorted her pupils to reform schools, prisons, and institutions for "paupers and the feeble-minded." In one course, she had her students design "social maps" of Boston's North End. Soon parents began protesting that their daughters were being asked to investigate brothels.

While at Wellesley, she was almost a quintessential progressive. In 1903, she was a founder and president of the Boston Women's Trade Union League, an organization promoting the unionization of female laborers. In 1913, she helped draft a minimum-wage bill for Massachusetts (which the legislature failed to enact) and aided in organizing the state's first Conference of Charities. She served on the Municipal Board of Trustees in charge of delinquent and neglected children of Boston (1897–98), the Massachusetts State Commission on Industrial Education (1908–09), the Progressive Party's committee on immigration (1912), the Massachusetts commission on immigration (1913–14), and the Boston City Planning Board (1914–17).

In 1906, Balch declared herself a socialist. Three years later, with her Wellesley faculty colleague Vida Scudder , she organized a socialist conference in Boston. Her views, however, were always similar to those of the British Fabians. Balch never accepted Marx's theories of surplus value, the class struggle, and the economic interpretation of history. Writes her biographer, Mercedes M. Randall:

The existing competitive system seemed to her to be so bad that she hated to appear to acquiesce in it. A system in which production was shaped not with the purpose of making what was needed and making it beautiful and good of its kind, but with the purpose of making a profit, appeared to her a basic topsy-turvydom which had widespread vicious results.

Finding Slavic immigration to the U.S. a significant and neglected research topic, Balch visited ethnic communities as far distant as Texas and Colorado. She spent the summer of 1904 in the mining villages of Pennsylvania; in the winter, she boarded in bohemian tenements on New York's Upper East Side. In 1905, she spent much of the year in Austria-Hungary, researching at her own expense. Treating such groups as Bohemians, Moravians, and Ruthenians all separately, she delved into place of origin, the various types of immigrant, and degrees of success in the New World. The result: her magnum opus, a pioneering work entitled Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (1910). The book was unique, combining statistics on population, taxes, and wages with such cultural material as Bohemian nursery rhymes and the odyssey of a Ruthenian poet in Canada. The study refuted many stereotypes: that the steamship companies, not the immigrants themselves, were responsible for the exodus from Europe; that the immigrants were drawn from Europe's lowest classes; and that the national character of the Slavs retarded their political and cultural development.

William Ernest Hocking, speaking of Emily Greene Balch">
No life known to me has been so consistently and almost exclusively devoted to the cause of peace and with such pervasive good judgment and effect.
—William Ernest Hocking, speaking of Emily Greene Balch

World War I marked Balch's third career and the one by which she will be remembered: peace activist. Although a pacifist since the Spanish-American War, Balch was particularly jolted by the Great War: "When the World War broke out in 1914 my reaction to it was largely a sense of tragic interruption of what seemed to me the real business of our times—the realization of a more satisfactory economic order."

In January 1915, the Women's Peace Party was formed, with the world-famous settlement worker Jane Addams elected president. Balch became active in the Boston and Wellesley branch, and, once she received a sabbatical, in Crystal Eastman 's more radical New York City branch. Balch was one of the 42 American delegates to the International Congress of Women, which convened on April 28 at The Hague. Here she met with women from belligerent and neutral nations alike, who collectively offered a unique plan to end the conflict: the neutral countries should establish machinery for continuous mediation, not even waiting for the belligerents to stop fighting. Other resolutions called for the repudiation of all annexations, democratic parliaments for all peoples, compulsory arbitration, equal rights for women, a permanent international court, and liberty of commerce. Along with Jane Addams and bacteriologist Alice Hamilton , Balch co-edited the greater part of the proceedings. Its title: Women at the Hague (1915).

One of the Congress' six envoys chosen to secure international backing for its plan, Balch first visited the rulers of neutral Scandinavian countries. She then journeyed to Russia, where she was able to see Sergei Sazanov. (The Russian foreign minister failed to tell the group that he had already entered into secret agreements with Britain and France over Constantinople and the Straits.) In July, Balch conferred with British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey, U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

Balch's efforts ended in failure, for which she always blamed Wilson. On August 19, 1915, the president had assured Balch that he would offer U.S. mediation if the opportunity arose. But Wilson privately feared that Balch's solution would fail, costing the U.S. any possible influence among the belligerents. Six days later, Lansing bluntly told her that any conference of continuous mediation was impractical. Furthermore, the secretary was scandalized at the idea of proposing terms. Yet Balch's efforts were not entirely in vain, for the war aims of the pacifists had a profound effect on Wilson.

In the spring of 1916, Balch was one of 12 members of Henry Ford's unofficial Stockholm Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation. On August 9, 1916, she would personally meet with President Wilson over the Stockholm plan. She also made two studies for the Stockholm group's Committee on Constructive Peace: one proposed a rehabilitation fund, to be endowed by neutral powers; the other recommended an international administration of colonies that resembled the League of Nations mandate system.

Eastman, Crystal (1881–1928)

American suffragist and pacifist. Born June 25, 1881, in the village of Canandaigua, New York; died in 1928; daughter of ministers; sister of Max Eastman, who was editor of The Masses and The Liberator.

Crystal Eastman, whose mother was the first woman to be ordained in the Congregational church in New York, was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In the summers, she and her brother Max Eastman frequently joined in the workings and gatherings of the Provincetown Players.

Remaining on leave from Wellesley, Balch returned to the U.S. in July 1916. Before and during U.S. belligerency, she participated in many peace groups, including the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She was particularly active in the American Neutral Conference Committee, which in February 1917 became the Emergency Peace Federation (EPF). That May, the EPF reorganized as the People's Council of America for Peace and Democracy, a more radical association. The People's Council not only sought a Wilsonian peace but denounced war profiteering, urged adequate wages for labor, and expressed sympathy with the upheaval in Russia. Once the U.S. entered the conflict, Balch promoted the cause of civil liberties and the cause of conscientious objectors. In March 1918, in cooperation with the American Union against Militarism, she edited Approaches to the Great Settlement, a collection of peace proposals.

In May 1918, the trustees of Wellesley College, by a two-vote margin, terminated her professorship. Some colleagues issued a statement ending in the words: "Even when differing from her in opinion or action we have respected her essential fair-mindedness, her courageous and conscientious regard for truth. We feel we have had in our midst a person of rare distinction and nobility." Yet, lacking any bitterness, Balch ignored the promptings of radical editor Oswald Garrison Villard and refused to appeal on the grounds of academic freedom. She said:

Much as I grieved that the well-known liberality of Wellesley College should have been over-strained by me, I could not be surprised, when after much discussion and much friendly advocacy of my reappointment, the Trustees decided against it.

As Balch wrote Wellesley president Ellen F. Pendleton , who had supported her cause, "The way of war is not the way of Christianity. I find it impossible to reconcile war with the truths of Jesus' teaching." Commented one angry colleague, "If the trustees persist in a policy like this, they will fill Wellesley College with a faculty of nonentities." About this time, she stopped calling herself a socialist, for the war had made her skeptical of all government power.

Towards the end of 1918, Balch joined the editorial staff of Villard's weekly magazine The Nation, contributing in particular to its international relations section. In May 1919, she attended the second International Congress of Women, held this time in Zurich. The Congress condemned the Versailles Treaty, then established itself as a permanent organization under the name of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). It elected Jane Addams its international president and established its headquarters in Geneva. For the 52-year-old Balch, the formation of the WILPF marked a crucial turning point. She served as secretary-treasurer, setting up the Geneva offices and establishing guidelines for the new organization.

Balch hoped that the new group would "mobilize the moral force of the women of the world against war, cruelty, and aggression." She said in 1920, "Reason and love and freedom in human relations—this is all our program." Yet as it always posited that all changes in the economic order should be nonviolent, the new body was too radical for the world's right, too tame for the world's left. It remained very much a middle-class organization.

In dealing with issues of world peace, Balch was fundamentally a pragmatist, favoring piecemeal reform over sweeping change. Intensely involved in the new League of Nations, Balch criticized the coercive provisions of its covenant and possessed no illusions concerning its ability to solve major conflicts. She sought to enlarge its membership, democratize its structure, and ensure that it recognized the rights of minorities. She was especially delighted when, in 1921, the League admitted Albania, a nation experiencing invasion by both Serbs and Italians. Similarly, she was gratified by the League's protection of Armenian, Syrian, and Greek refugees deported from Asia Minor. She was particularly concerned with the League's specialized agencies, those dealing with such matters as the opium trade, white slavery, international aviation, and disarmament. No utopian, she said in 1921, "The League, if it is to be a reality at all, must necessarily mirror the existing balance of power, but while it mirrors it, it modifies it. And modifies it for the better."

Pendleton, Ellen Fitz (1864–1936)

American educator. Born Ellen Fitz Pendleton in Westerly, Rhode Island, on August 7, 1864; died in 1936; daughter of Enoch Burrows and Mary Ette (Chapman) Pendleton; received an A.B., 1886, and A.M., 1891, from Wellesley; studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, 1889–90; awarded Litt.D., Brown University, 1911; LL.D., Mount Holyoke, 1912, and Smith, 1925; never married; no children.

From 1886 to 1888, Ellen Pendleton tutored in mathematics at Wellesley College; she was an instructor from 1888 to 1897, secretary from 1897 to 1901, dean and associate professor of mathematics from 1901 to 1911, and president of Wellesley from 1911 until her death in 1936.

In December 1922, Balch, experiencing bad health, resigned her post. Throughout the interwar period, she resided much of the time in the U.S. while—at one time or other—holding all the influential offices of the U.S. and international WILPF. Included were a brief second term as international secretary, this time without pay (1934–35); president of the American section (1931); and honorary international president (1937). She sponsored summer schools on peace education, helped develop WILPF branches in some 50 countries, and in general acted as the WILPF's minister without portfolio. Although the WILPF housed many pacifists within it, both she and Jane Addams used their influence to keep the body from being restricted to pacifists alone.

Biographer Randall describes Balch at the height of her influence:

In appearance throughout her sixties and indeed through her seventies, Emily was still tall, unstooped, angular, with a fragility that denied her wiry tenacity. Her step was sprightly "tip-toeing along" as when she was a girl. Her gaze was calm, direct, her grey-blue eyes keen, observant, quizzical, kindly. She had the impersonal air, the gracious aloofness, the dignity of a woman immersed in great affairs.

In February 1926, along with five other Americans, Balch investigated conditions in Haiti, which had been occupied by U.S. marines since 1915. The resulting study, Occupied Haiti (1927), was basically her product. Finding the situation highly explosive, the report called on the U.S. to maintain such social services as roads, schools, and bridges while removing its troops. Haiti's government, it said, must be turned back over to the Haitians. In 1927, she personally presented the task force's findings to President Calvin Coolidge. Three years later, President Herbert Hoover adopted policies similar to those recommended by the WILPF group.

Despite her endorsement of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war, she believed that Germany should be allowed to rearm until other nations gave up their own weapons. When Japan attacked Mukden in September 1931, she called for an international administration of Manchuria that would insure treaty rights for all nations. The area, she said, needed a body of paid experts resembling the city-manager system of some American cities. Relying on her training in economics, she sought developmental loans at a low interest rate. Calling for an arms embargo on both China and Japan, she said, "fighting is not the solution … and to furnish arms to those we want to help is not truly to help them."

In 1936, however, Balch opposed the U.S. neutrality acts, saying they did not distinguish between aggressor and victim. Noninterference, she said, simply handed the initiative to the "unscrupulous and violent," encouraged international blackmail, and fostered "a greedy and cowardly isolationist nationalism." Between 1936 and 1939, she recommended nonmilitary international sanctions against aggressors, a reformed League of Nations, arbitration procedures, and a world economic conference.

During the Spanish Civil War, she sought mediation, outlining a scheme wherein a moderate Republican government would have ten years to plan in such sensitive areas as religion, education, and land reform. When in 1937 Japan invaded China, Balch called for a ban on raw materials and loans to Japan, saying, "We must not mind irritating the bully." In a small pamphlet, "Refugees as Assets" (1939), she appealed to the U.S. to open its gates to those seeking asylum from Nazi Germany.

When World War II broke out, she had some reservations about the practicality of her old remedy. She wrote in October 1939:

Of course, I long for mediation by a conference of neutrals … but I fear that such a conference could effect little actual accomplishment till the situation has matured one way or another. Yet in the period before that occurs they might be affecting the situation psychologically and getting seminal ideas into the minds of the peoples in a way that would be profoundly important.

Within the powerful American section of the WILPF, she called for unity between pacifists and non-pacifists, based on the common aims of civil liberties, aid to conscientious objectors, and keeping the nation out of war. Once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, she claimed that fighting was the only option and contributed to community war funds. She did attack the policy of unconditional surrender for unnecessarily prolonging the war and sought to alleviate the plight of interred Japanese-Americans.

In 1946, at age 79, Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Sharing the $17,000 prize with John R. Mott of the World Student Christian Movement, she donated most of the money to peace work, declaring, "This honor is not for me—it is for my organization." In that same year, she called for a women's peace party that would cooperate across national lines.

During the Cold War, she claimed that any war against communism, even if fought successfully, would leave conditions that would make more drastic oppression and collectivism inevitable. She lauded the specialized agencies of the United Nations and showed more faith in the U.N. General Assembly than in the Security Council. She retained her mistrust of government as such, saying that the sovereign state was:

a clumsy irregularly developed instrument for joint action excessively colored by considerations of power and prestige, in some directions meddling excessively with matters that ought to be left to the individual or to nongovernmental agencies or to non-governmental regulation, and again neglecting to control what needs governmental direction.

Balch found no reason to believe that a world state, even a federal one, would be run differently than a national one. She found the abolition of armed forces far too utopian a goal and placed much hope in ad hoc international agencies, run independently of participating governments and addressing themselves to such matters as agriculture, underdeveloped areas, airways, nuclear energy, the high seas, strategic bases, and polar regions. She sought the internationalization of major waterways, including Panama, Suez, the Dardanelles, and the Rhine and Danube rivers. In 1948, she endorsed the Marshall Plan but a year later opposed the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. In 1955, while calling President Dwight D. Eisenhower a man of peace, she opposed American efforts to rearm Western Europe and Japan and said that Taiwan should be internationalized. From 1924 until her death, she lived in Jamaica Plain, Wellesley, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. On January 9, 1961, Emily Greene Balch died of pneumonia.