Anne Morgan's War: Rebuilding Devastated France, 1917-1924

Anne Morgan’s War: Rebuilding Devastated France, 1917–1924

This exhibit highlights the small team of American women who left the United States to devote themselves to relief work in France during and after World War I. Their leader was Anne Morgan (1873–1952), a daughter of the financier Pierpont Morgan. As she rallied potential volunteers and donors on speaking tours across the United States, Morgan harnessed the power of documentary photography to foster a humanitarian response to the plight of French refugees. Anne Morgan’s War: Rebuilding Devastated France, 1917–1924 is on view through November 21, 2010.

With haunting views of ruined French towns, portraits of refugees, and tableaux of American volunteers at work, the exhibition explores not only the human cost of war but also the potency of photographic propaganda and the influence of women’s activism. The show traces the fieldwork of the American Committee for Devastated France, the volunteer civilian relief organization that Morgan created with her friend Anne Murray Dike (1879–1929). Morgan, with her commanding presence and social prominence, took the lead in fundraising efforts, while Dike, trained as a physician, organized activities in the field.

Works on view are drawn from two major collections: fifty photographs and a montage of silent films are on loan from the Franco-American Museum, Château de Blérancourt, France, a national museum housed in the seventeenth-century château that served as the base of operations for the American Committee. Photograph albums, personal letters, sound recordings, and archival documents are drawn from the papers of Anne Morgan at The Morgan Library & Museum.

When the first American volunteers arrived in northeastern France in 1917, they witnessed destruction on an astonishing scale. Several years of war had decimated the French countryside. “You can travel in a motor going forward in a straight line for fifteen hours and see nothing but ruins,” Anne Murray Dike explained in 1919. People had lost nearly everything — not only their homes and livelihoods but a whole generation of young men.

As early as 1914, Anne Morgan had recognized the fund-raising potential of film, hosting the first New York screening of the Chicago Tribune’s groundbreaking war newsreels. Over the next few years, millions of Americans crowded into theaters to watch similar footage, a portion of the box office proceeds often benefiting organizations such as the Red Cross. When Morgan’s own relief committee launched operations in France in 1917, the moving image became a central tool in its publicity campaign. While the earliest films were produced in cooperation with the French army’s well-established cinema unit, the American Committee later formed its own dedicated filmmaking team.

American Volunteers at Work

The American Committee for Devastated France was one of many relief organizations — often founded and staffed by women — that sprang up in the United States during the First World War. The group was relatively small (some 350 women of a total of 25,000 who served abroad during the war), but the effects of its commitment were profound. Side by side with the people of northeastern France, these women created an astonishing array of services to revitalize life in a region considered by many to be beyond redemption.

Committee applicants were required to speak French, hold a driver’s license, and — in most cases — pay their own expenses, which could amount to $1,500 for a typical six-month stint. The requisite blue martial uniforms could be made to order for $45 at B. Altman Co. As she recruited volunteers, Anne Morgan made clear that an earnest commitment was expected. “We do not want sightseers who would like to go over for half a year to view France’s battlefields,” she told The New York Times.

Sporting bobbed hair and working attire, committee drivers, or chauffeuses, struck the people of Picardy as the embodiment of the modern woman. Few French women of the time were licensed to drive, but American volunteers (including Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with the American Fund for French Wounded) took the wheel in service to a range of relief organizations.

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Anne Morgan’s War: Rebuilding Devastated France, 1917–1924

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