The Pittsburgh Press (March 2, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
The Red Cross
By Florence Fisher Parry
All around the ballroom of the hotel, suspended from the gallery, hung the huge white banners, each with a Red Cross in its center. They stood out purely and simply against the clatter and clutter of the diners met to celebrate the opening of the 1946 Red Cross Drive.
At the long Speakers’ table sat especially distinguished workers. The Mayor looked very tired and pale. Beside him sat Douglas Poteat, executive vice chairman of the American Red Cross, a young, dedicated-looking man who could have been a poet or a preacher.
The guests were quiet and serious, plainly not met for festive celebration, but rather taking time out of their busy lives to break bread with each other in token of their readiness to work together, a united army. So many women there were in their Red Cross uniforms. The War could still be waging, as indeed to these workers it is, and Mr. Poteat scarcely needed to remind them of the solemn words of dedication spoken so many years ago at Gettysburg:
“Let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have born the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; and do all to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
The familiar symbol
I looked at the many crosses hanging heavy there, and remembered that none, save one, of all the hundreds and hundreds of crosses that have been Man’s symbol of aspiration since the beginning of history was so revered as this symbol of all the best attributes of the human heart, known everywhere on earth as a sign of comfort and reassurance and salvation.
And I found myself thinking what a long way we had come in our steep, slow assent from man’s primeval savagery to this.
Strangely enough, it was regarded as a religious symbol from the very dawn of man’s civilization, and even the swastika was used as a religious emblem in India and China at least 10 centuries before the Christian era.
Oh, yes, there are hundreds, hundreds of variations of the cross: beautiful and ugly; benignant and cruel. But of them all, two stand out high above the rest: the Cross of Jesus and the Red Cross.
I shall not set down here figures and statistics and histories of the Red Cross, although the record holds a drama of sacrifice and miraculous achievement beyond the power of chronicler to record. Figures can never tell the story of what has been done in peace and in war, in flood, storm and earthquake, in time of famine and pestilence. The statements do not contain the human side of the record. You would have to look for that in the secret places of the heart; millions, among whom stands yonder G.I. just returned from some lone outpost of the Aleutians, from some hot desert in Egypt, from some coral reef in the Pacific. He could tell you, but he will never tell you. There are depths in human experience that words can never plumb.
Now Mr. Poteat reminded us how, for a time, the work of the Red Cross must increase. Evidence of this need is plain to see. He reminded us too, that all through the War the Red Cross continued in its peacetime work of disaster relief, and gave of itself as freely to the non-combat domestic front as it ever had done.
I looked, as he spoke, into the faces of his attent audience of workers, and I recognized many, indeed most, of Pittsburgh’s finest citizens, men and women who, not content to live their own lives, extended their interests and activities far, far beyond the normal call of good citizenship.
Service – men
In every community there are men and women whom we have learned to count upon when the need for selfless service arises. They are invariably very busy men and women, productive, successful usually, factors in their community. They are more than public-spirited, for to be public-spirited is to possess a spirit for the PUBLIC good, for community improvement, progress, enterprise. But these men and women are more than this. They are SERVICE-spirited. They possess a sense of dedication. They are, in a sense, salvation-jets, servants of mercy, reclaimers of human life.
The Red Cross attracts such persons. Its mission is mercy and it attracts the merciful.
How far indeed have we come from the day when the cross was an instrument of torture! How has man progressed, how has the human heart refined, how has the human soul enlarged, that it should have created, maintained and extended this great agency of mercy known now to all the people of the world!
And now in our community the Red Cross asks our help. It asks our interest and our understanding of the tremendous problems it must deal with in this awful and complex aftermath of war. It asks your sympathy and support.
It is the purest cause on earth, closest of all causes to the cause of Christ.
To help the Red Cross is to help Him who preached Faith, Hope and Charity, and who told us that the greatest of these is Charity.