Death of a Great Lady

When the S.S. Leviathan docked at Cherbourg fortnight ago, the most distinguished member of its passenger list had contracted a slight cold. She was Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, who had just turned over her great Ophir Hall at Purchase, N. Y., to Siarn's visiting King (TIME, April 20. et seq.), had sailed away to spend her seventy-third spring in France.

Plump, busy Mrs. Reid hurried to Paris where she inspected the new plant of the Paris Herald, European adjunct of her New York Herald Tribune, over which her son, Ogden, and his talented wife, Helen, now preside. Her cold was no better. After looking over the preparations of her new Paris town house and satisfying herself that all went well at Reid Hall--residence for U. S. female students--she took a train for Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the Riviera. There, at her daughter Lady Ward's Villa Rosemary, the cold grew worse. Bronchial complications set in; her heart became affected. Dr. Robert Louis Levy, chief of the cardiac department of New York's Presbyterian Medical Center, was summoned by plane from Paris, but oxygen and his skill were no match for pneumonia and an aged heart. When Ambassador Edge, at the personal request of President Hoover, telephoned Cap Ferrat next morning he was told that Mrs. Reid had died quietly ten minutes before. Her body was taken to Paris, to the home of Ogden Mills, which General Pershing made his War headquarters. Thence to the American Episcopal Cathedral of the Holy Trinity for her funeral services.

John Ruskin once said that the Ideal Woman did not find roses in her path, she left them there. The fact that Elisabeth Mills found her path rose-strewn only aided her to leave many more behind. The roses she found were big round silver ones which her father, Darius Ogden Mills, reached down and plucked from the depths of the Comstock Lode. Darius Ogden Mills left his bank clerking job in Buffalo, N. Y., in the frantic year 1849, went to California. By the time his daughter Elisabeth was born in New York nine years later, he and John W. Mackay had amassed the kind of money that starts timocratic dynasties. With a background of intelligence and wealth, Elisabeth Mills was destined to become the financial and gracious helpmate of a great diplomat and an eminent public benefactress. The year 1881 marked the first milestone for both elements in her conspicuous career. Aged 23, she married Whitelaw Reid, potent editor of the New York Tribune. The same year she helped organize the New York Chapter of the American Red Cross. Her philanthropic apprenticeship had been served in assisting her father with his famed Mills Hotels for poor folk and his nursing school at Bellevue Hospital, New York. Active Elisabeth Reid bore her husband a son and a daughter in short order, went with him when he was appointed Minister to France in 1889. She had her first taste of diplomacy and liked it. She founded the American Art Students' Club--now Reid Hall--made a place for herself in the capital's bon ton, no easy feat. Back in the U. S., she shared her husband's political set-back in 1892 when he was defeated for the vice-presidency. Five years later she went with him to England when he was special ambassador to Queen Victoria's Jubilee. Again, when an-other touch of U. S. swank was needed, the Reids were sent to the coronation of Edward VII. In 1905 President Roosevelt made Whitelaw Reid Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, first-ranking U. S. diplomatic post. In London the Reids were phenomenally popular and achieved a social prestige never before or since equalled by Americans. Seven years later Whitelaw Reid died. Although her husband was dead, although in that decade no woman of genuine good taste could have or would have considered entering politics, Mrs. Reid's reputation as a great lady of U. S. diplomacy and public affairs had scarcely begun. She took over her husband's paper, watched it jealously. Tribune men give her full credit for the acquisition of James Gordon Bennett's and Frank Munsey's Herald. She refinanced the unprofitable Paris Herald, made it pay. She helped found a sanatorium and nurses' training school at Saranac Lake, N. Y., a hospital (St. Luke's) in San Francisco, another at San Mateo, Calif, in memory of her parents. She gave the central chancel window of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine in memory of her husband, founded in his name a London settlement house and seaside resort. Good churchwoman, she built the Episcopal residence at Manila, helped build the Episcopal cathedral there. Through her Red Cross work, she is credited with having instituted the U. S. Army Nursing Corps during the Spanish-American War. During the War she turned her Paris art students' club into a hospital for french officers, later for U. S. officers. As Chairman of the American Red Cross in London, she saw that nurses had ponchos, that soldiers at cold way stations had food. Her diplomatic talent snipped red tape, got little, necessary things done. King George made her a Lady of Grace of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem.

Not without public honor in her own country, Mrs. Reid was chosen, along with Elihu Root, a presidential elector-at-large in 1924. Staunch Republican, she was glad to cast her honorary vote for Calvin Coolidge. Last year she was appointed to the Port of New York's survey to devise improvements in customs inspection. To her the State Department turned, last month, in search of shelter for its royal guests from Siam.

Last week, with long black mourning rules down the columns on the Herald Tribune's editorial page, with eulogies pouring forth from the world's great men, the nation mourned the death of one of its few authentically great ladies.

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