I was [training] in the hospital.” Elm gradu- ated from nursing school in 1916 and received an appointment as supervisor of wards at the Episcopal Hospital there the following year. A clipping from an unidentified newspaper ar- ticle from 1917 indicates that she participated as a suffragette in a demonstration in front of the White House. The United States declared war against
the Central Powers that April. Encouraged by the hierarchy of the Protestant Episcopal Church to help in the war effort, nurses from various church-affiliated hospitals volun- teered to serve in the Nurse Corps. This was not such an unusual step. Most Wisconsin Oneidas at the time were members of the Episcopal Church. Oneida men had served honorably in the United States military since the American Revolution.
In December
1917, Elm and members of Base Hospital 34, the Episcopal Nurse Unit, sailed on the Le- viathan for Liverpool. The ship was formerly a German transatlantic
luxury passenger
liner owned by the Hamburg–American Line and the largest passenger vessel in the world when it was launched in 1913. It had been confiscated by the United States government at the onset of hostilities and converted to an American troopship. By April 1918, the Episcopal Unit had es-
tablished its base hospital in the Grand Semi- naire at Nantes in Brittany, 35 miles from France’s Atlantic coast. Over a nine-month period, the makeshift hospital provided medical care for more than 9,000 patients. Elm later recounted the psychological toll she faced in nursing so many soldiers. In the 1942 WPA interview, she said, “Life overseas was not very easy. Although I was in a base hospital [not at a field hospital at the front], I saw a lot of the horrors of war. I nursed many a soldier with a leg cut off, or an arm.” After the war, she temporarily served as
an army nurse in the Baltic States and even during the Allies’
intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution from 1918
to 1920. She returned to the United States, and in 1922 married James E. Sinnard. She later worked in several hospitals, including at Wood Veterans Hospital in Milwaukee, before her death in 1949.
(CHARLOTTE) EDITH ANDERSON
(Charlotte) Edith Anderson was born on the Six Nations Reserve in 1891. She was the youngest of eight children of Mary Thomas and John Anderson. Known to her Mohawk people as Emily and later to her nursing col- leagues as “Andy,” she attended the day school on the reserve and later Brantford Collegiate Academy. Interested in a career in the health sciences, she applied for admission to nurs- ing programs in Ontario, but was turned down because of her race. Determined to pursue her dream and overcome roadblocks caused by discrimination, she applied and was admitted to the nursing school at New Rochelle Hospital in Westchester County, just outside of New York City. The nursing
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 31
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARMY MEDICAL DEPARTMENT CENTER OF HISTORY AND HERITAGE
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