Daughter's Revolution

When the Daughters of the American Revolution hissed and sputtered before and during their annual "congress" in Washington last fortnight, over a subject called "blacklisting," observers concluded that the cause of the trouble was a policy of the Daughters which had been chosen by their high officials without the untitled mass of the membership knowing or caring much about it. Mrs. Helen Tufts Bailie of Cambridge, the Daughter who raised her voice against "blacklists," made little headway at the congress. She and her friends and their resolutions were soon silenced. The victory of President-General Mrs. Alfred J. Brosseau and her sister officers was complete. Mrs. Bailie, however, had a last word and said: "Like the victory of Bunker Hill, it will prove to be too costly. The revolution is well under way and cannot be stayed."

How far the "revolution" would go remained to be seen, but last week's developments proved Mrs. Bailie right in one respect. The "revolution" of the Daughters was not over. In New Haven, Conn., awakening to what Mrs. Bailie meant and what had happened to her, a dozen more Daughters--distinguished ones, too--not only rose in revolt, but marched right out of the D. A. R., resigned.

The D. A. R. "blacklist" protested by Mrs. Bailie and upheld by the Daughters' congress, had included a lengthy assortment of persons and organizations bracketed as socialists, pacifists, "radicals," enemies of national defense. The list was for the "guidance" of local D. A. R. chapters in Massachusetts, to know who could safely be invited to make speeches. The persons proscribed ranged from Ben Gitlow, communist, to that eminent, peace-loving scientist, President-emeritus David Starr Jordan of Stanford University.* The organizations included even such innocuities as the Y. M. and Y. W. C. A.

Perhaps what started the New Haven Daughters off to join, and surpass, Mrs. Bailie in protest, was the discovery that Prof. Irving Fisher, famed Yale economist, had been blacklisted. Mrs. Fisher was among the Daughters who resigned. Also, Mrs. Henry H. Townsend, a onetime Representative in Connecticut's legislature and Mrs. Josepha Whitney, first woman ever elected to New Haven's board of aldermen. Mrs. Winchester Bennett, a daughter-in-law of the Winchester Repeating Arms family, was another resigner.

That none of these Daughters were easily agitable or discontented ladies was clearer to outsiders than in the earlier case of Mrs. Bailie, though the latter's anti-blacklist utterances were at all times good-humored and restrained. But what seemed to clinch the "revolution's" seriousness and modesty was another name, a name which the U. S. public would surely have heard often before were its bearer not one of the most retiring persons imaginable--Mrs. William Lyon Phelps.

As everyone literate knows, William Lyon Phelps is a name to conjure with, not only at Yale University, where Dr. Phelps lectures in the English Department, but also in national literature, where his enthusiastic ejaculations, printed on the trade jackets of books, are usually sufficient to transform the obscurest "first novel" into a bestseller. In his page for Scribner's magazine, which he calls "As I like It," Dr. Phelps has talked about such personal things as his tobacco, pets, religion, sleeping habits, food, golf game, favorite novels, favorite poems, state of health, fears, hopes, joys, sorrows. But never, that his closest readers can recall, has Dr. Phelps mentioned his wife, and this has been taken by many as revealing, not only a shielding affection on his part, but resolute self-effacement upon hers.

Discovering, through the chance medium of the "revolution" within the Revolution, that there is a Mrs. William Lyon Phelps, the tremendous public to whom William Lyon Phelps is as familiar as Williams shaving cream or Lyons' toothpowder, wondered what she was like. Only a few persons could tell that she is grey-haired, short, almost plump; that her amiability is not exceeded by her famed husband's, nor her tact; that if he excels as a host, so does she as a hostess, reigning supreme at her tea-table or near another's, playing a quiet lioness to the Lyon. Mrs. Phelps has her favorites, eager ones, among the Yale undergraduates. There was a time, when her niece and namesake, Annabelle Hubbard, went to visit in New Haven, that Mrs. Phelps was the most popular chaperone for miles around the Old Yale Fence.* Annabelle Hubbard Phelps was born and brought up in small Huron City, Mich., and it is there, upon her inherited estate, that William Lyon Phelps has his private golf course, Yale banner and U. S. flag. Like the estate to the golf course, Annabelle Hubbard Phelps is the unobtrusive background to profound but sometimes playful William Lyon Phelps.

Resigning from the D. A. R., Mrs. Phelps did not essay the epigrammatic sort of thing which her husband would doubtless have struck off spontaneously. Instead, she joined Mrs. Whitney in a longish, formal statement of history and principles, including these two points:

"The D. A. R. should not try to suppress free speech when such is within the bounds set by the law of our country.

"The D. A. R. should encourage its membership to study the social problems of the day, especially the efforts of our Government to aid in establishing justice and goodwill among nations, and the relation of arms as means of national defense to the progress made in arbitration and the legal methods of settling disputes."

* Some of the blacklistees, and several persons who wished they were blacklistees, planned a dinner for Mrs. Bailie in Manhattan. They called each other "fellow conspirator." They set about incorporating themselves as the Sons and Daughters of the Blacklist. Funny speeches were advertised, by Heywood Broun, Art Young, Clarence Darrow, Dorothy Parker. Among the guests invited was President Calvin Coolidge, who once endorsed one of the alleged pacifist societies blacklisted by the D. A. R. Jane Addams, president of the International League for Peace and Freedom,'took her blacklisting by the Daughters more calmly. "I have more speaking engagements now than I can fill," she said, "so I don't mind not being asked to speak before them."

* Miss Hubbard, belle of more than one Yale "prom," was wooed and at last won by one Bartow Heminway, Yale '21. Both experienced national publicity last winter when their friend, Advertising Manager Rodney Chase of the Chase Brass Works in Waterbury, Conn., used their names in his series of advertisements containing the Wallop family, drawn by Cartoonist Gluyas ("Gleeful Gluyas") Williams.