The Norweb Collection - An American Legacy

Emery May was born into great wealth and social privilege, facts she was acutely aware of and which caused her some embarassment. She was very conscious of never wanting for anything she needed, and she seems to have wondered if she could ever accomplish anything on her own, without the benefit of her family's money and position. Some of her less well-off friends from Cleveland teased her, telling her that everything came too easily for her, and she took their taunting to heart. Her diary records her feelings in this way:

Perhaps. . . I will get some more sympathy for others which everybody seems to think I lack ... working for others where no one knows I have more than the clothes on my back-perhaps they will forget to say "No, you can't understand. It seems a little thing to you. You have never had to think of material things."

Through her grandfather Liberty's genealogical research into her family's history she had developed an awareness of her own place in history, and with that feeling came a sense of a great debt owed to her forebears. She wrote in her diary, before leaving for Japan:

For nineteen years hundreds, yes, hundreds of people have given their work, their time, their patience, consciously and unconsciously, to fit me for life and now is coming the chance to test my powers, to see whether the machine they have equipped will run in spite of the flaws or will have to be. helped throughout its entire course. Please, God, the test will be gone through successfully, but I am not overconfident.

Emery May recorded the test she had set herself in her diary. Under the entry for July 6, 1916 she wrote: "It came over me with such a shock that to get an appointment in the American Ambulance and to sail to France in September was within my power. I say was, is is more what I mean, for I am going if I have to move heaven and earth." True to her decision, she sailed from New York for Bordeaux aboard the 5.5. Rochambeau on September 30, 1916. As a measure of the seriousness of her test, it should not be forgotten that the Lusitania had been sunk more than a year previously, and that German submarines were instructed to sink any surface vessel refusing to stop when so ordered.

France 1916-1918

The S.S. Rochambeau had an uneventful passage to Bordeaux, but the precautions the ship took against submarine attack frightened Emery Maya little. One day out from Bordeaux, October 8, Emery May recorded in her diary: "Portholes blanketed. All lights out on deck. No lights in lower cabins. Stayed up until twelve" She must have been nervous so close to the French coast, as everyone knew that German submarines considered any vessel a day's sail off the coast a fair target for their torpedoes.

After staying overnight in Bordeaux, she boarded a train for Paris. Her diary entry is interesting, as it gives the reader some of the flavor of wartime France: "Tuesday, October 10. Got up early to take train for Paris. Crowded. French officers and soldiers. Many widows. Reached Paris six o'clock. Went up to Hotel Brighton. Paris quite dark. Heard of submarine raid off coast of U.S.A"

Emery May was accompanied to France by a Miss Upton, her guardians' choice as a chaperone. In Paris, the pair found hotel accommodations through friends, and three days later Emery May registered for volunteer work with the ambulance service.

The American Ambulance Emery May referred to in her diary was one of several humanitarian aid groups organized in the United States prior to our country's entry into the first World War. We do not know which particular ambulance group Emery May was attached to in 1916-1917. It may have been a local Cleveland organization affiliated with the American Red Cross, or part of the ambulance group organized as early as 1870, to assist victims of the Franco-Prussian War. Her diaries do not make her affiliation clear, and a check of the American Red Cross archives does not reveal her name as an overseas volunteer with that organization.

Interestingly, Westover School, Emery May's high school, was active in American Red Cross affairs. In 1918, two years after she graduated from there, Westover organized a local chapter and paraded their junior nurses during commencement day celebrations.

The Cleveland chapter of the American Red Cross was active with preparations for assisting the war's wounded long before America opened hostilities with the Central Powers. On July 4, 1916 the Cleveland chapter established teaching centers for prospective nurses in houses along Euclid Avenue, the fashionable street in the city. There, nurses received instruction and supplies were readied for shipment overseas. Cleveland's social circle was not large, and notice of the teaching centers could not have escaped Emery May's attention. Six months later, an ambulance corps was organized among the undergraduates at Western Reserve University. In May 1917 the Lakeside Unit departed for France, where it received official status as American Red Cross Base Hospital Unit Number 4.

Her job, in the beginning, could not have seemed much of a challenge at all, as she was put to work wrapping parcels for soldiers at the front, writing letters and addressing envelopes, and other secretarial duties. Nevertheless, she faithfully showed up to work each morning, at least in the beginning. Her adventurous spirit was not satisfied with sedentary work, however, and she began looking around for other ways to test herself.