14 May Mothers Day and the Golden Rule

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Baltimore Sun by Lou Curran

A call to end war
The roots of Mother’s Day
GROUNDED IN ABOLITIONIST’S GOLDEN RULE

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In 1870 Julia Ward Howe, above, wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” a call to action that asked mothers to unite in promoting world peace. Howe was an American poet, author, abolitionist and suffragette, best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In 1872 Howe asked for the celebration of a “Mother’s Day for Peace” on June 2 of every year, but she was not successful.

As the commercial world gears up to convince us all to celebrate Mother’s Day in increasingly extravagant material ways, it’s worth looking back at the original anti-war inspiration for this $32 billion annual boondoggle (at least according to Forbes last year).

Slavery abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, sadly better known for her militaristic Civil War paean, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” experienced a profound epiphany once she realized the scope of that war’s carnage. That included more than 600,000 dead (about 2% of the United States population at the time) and millions injured.

Taking up her quill again in 1870, she penned this “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” a cry for a national day to honor all mothers everywhere by renouncing war:

“Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough 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 council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

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.”

Her heartfelt proclamation, undeniable in its raw truth, resonated with her fellow peace advocates and suffragettes including one Ann Jarvis with whom she campaigned for a “Mother’s Day For Peace.” Ann’s eventual ailing health and death in 1905 inspired her daughter, Anna Jarvis, to successfully launch a Mothers’ Day campaign with a memorial service to honor Ann and all women.

Anna’s seminal celebration featured her distribution of 500 white carnations, symbolizing the purity and enduring qualities of a mother’s love. This was quickly seized upon by the floral, card and confection industries of the time and some of the rest of this history is evident all around us. Opposed to the exploitation of the occasion, Anna later campaigned to repudiate Mother’s Day but was committed to a sanitarium for the last four years of her life, the costs, whether ironically or deliberately, paid for by the very industries she’d opposed.

In Baltimore, the anti-war roots of this new national day were not forgotten as immediately. In 1919, following World War I, a public celebration of the now officially singular “Mother’s Day” involved the planting of 51 trees in a memorial Grove Of Remembrance in Druid Hill Park — one for each state plus Baltimore City, the U.S. Allies and the wartime President Woodrow Wilson. It’s still there with new trees since added for our subsequent wars, the core message all but ignored.

Julia Howe’s 1870 Proclamation addressed her Christian world but embraced every woman everywhere. Her proposal was an incarnation of the ancient Golden Rule — “Treat others the same way you want others to treat you!”

On this year’s Mother’s Day, Sunday May 14, the original restored peace sailboat, the “Golden Rule,” will be docked in Philadelphia, “The City of Brotherly Love.” The Golden Rule is on a 15-month, 11,000-mile “Great Loop” voyage managed by its owners, the non-profit organization Veterans For Peace. It celebrated the 65th anniversary of its first 1958 effort to stop open-air nuclear bomb testing in the Marshall Islands here in Baltimore this past May 1. Officially welcomed and saluted by the Baltimore City Council and its president and the Havre de Grace City Council and mayor, it sails these days to continue raising awareness of our need to abolish these insane doomsday weapons of indiscriminate destruction.

Specifically, the Golden Rule Project advocates for non-partisan global endorsement of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a treaty already ratified by 68 nations with 24 more in the pipeline. It has also been endorsed so far by 19 thoughtful members of the U.S. House of Representatives including Maryland’s Jamie Raskin and Glenn Ivey. Not a bad start, but nowhere near enough.

This Mother’s Day, urge your member of Congress to endorse House Resolution 77 “Embracing the Goals of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the Back From The Brink campaign.” Make Mother’s Day really mean something again!

If not now, when?

— Louis Brendan Curran, Baltimore

The writer is a retired Baltimore assistant public defender.