Lost Voices for Peace: Mrs. Agnes Waters
“. . . these enemies of our form of government do not want a woman in the White House, especially a pistol-packin’ mama like me.’”
-Mrs. Agnes Waters
Mrs. Agnes Waters moved from New York to Washington DC in the midst of the Great War where she began work at the War and Justice Department, campaigning for suffrage in alliance with the National Women’s Party (NWP). She would later run for president under the NWP in 1952. Her time in Washington was filled with anti-war and pro-human activism. She not only protested the lowering of the draft age, but she made frequent and vehement calls for peace before congress in light of the looming Second World War.
It should not be surprising that these calls for peaceful negotiations with the Axis powers made her unpopular in Washington. The idea of peace was mocked in the capitol then as it is now, which is evident from the excerpt from the pamphlet below which begins with criticisms against Mrs. Waters.
She used her platform in the capitol to protest the lowering of the draft age as well as to call out what she saw to be injustices against the nation by its own political system. During one testimony, she declared her determination to “arrest, try, and hang for treason any bureaucrat or other communist guilty of the crime of conspiracy to get us into this war,” which when objectively compared to the actions of those she’s threatening and the number of human lives they tossed away as canon fodder, comes across as quite reasonable.
The roads Agnes Waters paved for women cannot be understated. As a widowed mother of seven she knew what it meant to be a woman who fights not for war but for peace. Strangely enough this is a much harder fight to win in Washington, even today. She opposed the UN, understanding as few still do the implication of a new totalitarian world government which would effectively send the worlds children into never-ending wars and financial ruin, a prediction that has arguably come to fruition as we look at the devastation caused by international political factions on nations who, for lack of better words, “wont play ball.” Perhaps her keen sense of discernment came from her reverence to history which she expressed frequently in her testimonies and speeches.
“America was placed under the guidance and protection of a woman since her discovery by St. Christopher Columbus,” Waters said. “The figure of a woman stands at all our mastheads above the Stars and Stripes. She is ‘Columbia, the gem of the ocean.’”
-Mrs. Agnes Waters
Mrs. Waters also held leading positions in radically important organizations of the time such as the ‘Widows of World War I Veterans’ and the ‘National Blue Star Mothers,’ the latter of which I have included an excerpt of below.
Copies of her correspondence with Congress are available by request and I am hopeful to have that request granted by the Stanford library as soon as possible. Her reputation for frequent swearing and fierce passion for peace only further my interest and admiration for her, especially when the majority of Washington was hell-bent on another war.
As for the National Blue Star Mothers organization itself, it began as ‘The Crusading Mothers of Pennsylvania’ in support of Charles Coughlin, a Catholic anti-war, anti-Marxist, and anti-Zionist activist who faced charges of sedition for his Christian views which he expressed on his radio show ‘The Golden Hour of the Little Flower,’ starting in 1926. There are a variety of associated newsletters and pamphlets associated with the organization and its members—too many to list here—but in general it’s safe to say that even in the 1920’s, before even the Second World War, Zionism had infiltrated the media and federal government, and was cracking down on free speech and Christians.
Waters, Coughlin, and all of the men and women who worked with them held beleifs deeply rooted in a desire to protect future generations from the ravages of war and to hold leaders accountable for their decisions. They did not win the fight, but that doesn’t mean they fought in vain. As long as we remember them and read the words they wrote as they struggled, the fight for peace is not over. I hope that hearing her story inspires you as much as it inspired me and I hope to do more work on these lost American voices.
- by M. Shultz
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