Clara D. Noyes

by Roger Noyes, Slingerlands, NY (rlnoyes@gmail.com). He is the great-great nephew of Clara D. Noyes.

Well before the U.S. entered World War I, the War Department and its medical auxiliary, the American Red Cross, sought a carefully guided process to recruit nurses for a global cause – caring for sick, wounded and dying soldiers at home and abroad.

American Red Cross Nursing Service Director Jane Delano had already begun this monumental effort; but she desperately needed help. “The work has grown to such proportions during the last two years that it seems to me most unsafe to have only one person with a knowledge of its various ramifications,” wrote Delano in a 1916 letter to Clara D. Noyes, the 46-year-old leader of Bellevue Hospital’s Nursing School in New York City.

The letter mounted a vigorous appeal. “There is a tremendous piece of work to be done and your country certainly needs you,” Delano pleaded, coaxing Noyes to join her in Washington.

By training, by aptitude, and by circumstance, Clara Noyes – my great-great-aunt and the subject of my new book, Clara D. Noyes, R.N.: Life of a Global Nursing Leader – was the ideal candidate to help lead what became the first large-scale mobilization of women (20,000 in all) to serve in wartime. Noyes had trained at the revered Johns Hopkins nursing program in Baltimore; she had proven her executive mettle running several nursing schools; and she had entered the upper ranks of organized nursing’s first professional associations, a network of like-minded peer nursing leaders whom she could call upon to further cultivate and help swell nursing’s ranks for wartime service.

Noyes was meticulous, conscientious and, above all, a staunch defender of nursing’s professional standards. This was vital, as the Red Cross sought to maintain a delicate balancing act: recruit as many nurses as possible for service with the U.S. Army and Navy Nurse Corps while maintaining rigorous criteria so that nursing’s wartime relief work was a truly skilled enterprise. As President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed, and as Noyes repeated in several speeches to nursing audiences, “This is no war for amateurs!”

Indeed, the mania of war had opened the floodgates, as would-be nurses applied in droves for Red Cross service even if they had little or no advance training as registered nurses. The influx prompted Noyes to famously quip: “There are moments when I wonder whether we can stem the tide and control the hysterical desire on the part of thousands, literally thousands, to get into nursing … The most vital thing in the life of our profession is the protection of the use of the word nurse.” 

Arriving at Red Cross National Headquarters in the fall of 1916, a few months before official U.S. entry into the war, Noyes was tasked with approving nurse enrollments for duty, standardizing surgical dressings for use in the war front, recruiting nurses, ensuring adequate nursing equipment and supplies, and guarding against efforts to weaken nursing professional standards as wartime anxieties buoyed the demand for Red Cross personnel.

But as the war raged, another, parallel crisis soon emerged: the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Noyes and Delano found themselves engaged in yet another balancing act – to ensure an adequate infrastructure of “home defense” nurses for domestic care during one of the world’s worst disease outbreaks while also supplying enough nurses for overseas reinforcement to serve the troops.

When the war ended, Jane Delano embarked on a fateful inspection tour of Europe in April 1919. On her travels, she succumbed to infection during surgery for mastoiditis, finding herself comforted in death by American Red Cross nurses at a base hospital in Savenay, France. Clara Noyes, having served by Delano’s side throughout the war’s duration, was a natural choice to assume the mantle as Red Cross Nursing Director. 

Noyes would later work alongside then-former President William Howard Taft in the post-war years to advocate – and gain – military rank for nurses who otherwise were ill-treated in the chain of command. She also developed of schools of nursing throughout post-war Europe. And she continued to oversee the Red Cross’s nursing response work during civilian disasters, most notably the Mississippi Flood of 1927.

Clara Noyes died just as she had lived: with her hands at the wheel. On June 3, 1936, while driving to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, she collapsed at the steering column of her Chevy, succumbing to a heart attack. Her niece, Lucy, “riding with her, prevented a collision by pulling the emergency break.”

As I note in the book, “even her death, like much of her work in life, involved a crisis that would have been even bigger had it not been for the quick thinking of someone by her side … Clara Noyes had pressed 20,000 nurses into wartime disaster work; and, in her time of death, her quick-thinking niece had similarly warded off disaster, preventing the hand of death from taking more than one life.”

These are just some of the broad outlines of Clara Noyes’s life story; but history gains its vitality in the exploration of the “how” and “why” behind these important events. My hope is that this book not only shines light on a little-known figure in the history of nursing but to also explore larger historical trends connected to Clara Noyes’s life story, from racial issues, to women’s rights causes and other important intersections between nursing and the larger currents of American history.

Roger L. Noyes is the author of “Clara D. Noyes, R.N.: Life of a Global Nursing Leader” (Shires Press) about his great-great aunt, Clara Noyes, a Red Cross nursing leader during and after World War I. He is also communications director for the Home Care Association of New York State, an organization which represents visiting nurse associations and other home care agencies in New York.

Photo credits: All photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress.