General John Pershing created a fund at The New York Community Trust to honor America’s first woman war correspondent. The fund carries the legacy of this trailblazing writer by supporting the journalists and literary workers of today and tomorrow.
Eleanor Franklin Egan (1879-1925)
“I was standing by the rail when the submarine came up—all by myself … I remember the instantaneous of the flash of fire and the reverberating boom.”
It was 1915 in the Mediterranean Sea, and as passengers on the civilian ship scrambled for lifeboats, Eleanor Franklin Egan was pushed overboard. She struggled to keep her head above water as she stared into the muzzle of a submarine’s 1,200-pound gun trained on the ship’s waterline. Then she saw the submarine’s captain, and he was weeping.
“For God’s sake, go back to your ship!” the Austrian commander yelled in perfect English. “We are no murderers.” His cries were too late, for bedlam had broken out.
Eleanor was rescued, but 25 passengers drowned, 14 of them children, whose terrified mothers tried to toss them into lifeboats then threw themselves into the sea. The crew of the submarine, meanwhile, stood by for five hours, trying to rescue as many passengers as possible. The shot fired over the ship’s bow had been meant simply as a warning, the commander insisted.
Her account of surviving the submarine’s deadly encounter with the British passenger ship Barulos in the Mediterranean Sea in 1915 made headlines around the globe. Although she had moved to New York City to pursue an acting career, Eleanor Franklin Egan became a renowned journalist and America’s first female war correspondent.
She was born Bertha Eleanor Pedigo on April 28, 1877, in Lawrence County, Indiana, to Henry Pedigo and Biantha Graves. After her mother died, she was sent to an orphanage in Terre Haute, where she was adopted by Martha Howard. After her adoptive mother died, she moved to Kansas City to stay with a relative.
Her first marriage, to Joel D. Franklin in 1895, ended in divorce. Having done some acting work in Kansas City, Eleanor moved to Manhattan in 1898 to perform in The Moth to the Flame. She later received rave reviews for her starring role in Fedora.
When her stage career stalled, Eleanor became a theater critic, then chief of staff for Leslie’s Weekly, a literary and news magazine. In 1903, she was sent overseas to cover the pogroms in Russia, and in 1904-1905, the Russo-Japanese War and the Russian Revolution.
Eleanor’s second husband, Martin Egan, was a former Associated Press reporter she met in Yokohama, Japan. They were married on July 19, 1905. Together, they edited the Manila Times, and she worked as a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post.
Between 1914 and 1918, British and Indian troops fought the Ottoman Turks in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and Eleanor traveled to the war zone to cover the British military actions. In November 1917, she was sitting in an outdoor theater in occupied Baghdad’s city square, watching a one-night performance of Hamlet. Next to her sat Lt. Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, commander-in-chief of the British forces.
Between them, on a small table, were “two cups, a pot of coffee, a bowl of sugar, and a jug of milk,” she recounted in her 1918 book, War in the Cradle of the World. Fortunately, Eleanor drank her coffee black. Four days later, the general died of cholera, apparently contracted from that jug of milk. There were whispers that the milk was intentionally contaminated.
“To me it seems very strange that I should be writing all this. It was by the merest chance that I was there—his guest when he died,” she wrote in Cradle of the World, adding that she felt “like an intruder upon the scene of a great historic event with which, if there be an eternal fitness of things, I could have no possible connection.”
While Eleanor chased stories around the Eastern Hemisphere, her husband returned to New York to work for J. P. Morgan & Co. in public relations. He also supported Eleanor’s work from afar, using his journalistic and banking contacts to find her useful sources in Europe and Asia.
When one of Morgan’s partners, Henry P. Davison, became head of the American Red Cross during the war, he asked Martin to go to Washington with him. Martin was soon drafted as a civilian aide to Gen. John J. Pershing during armistice negotiations in Paris.
After the war, Eleanor reported on the famine during Russia’s civil war (1917-1922), the famine in China during the time of the warlords (1916-1927), and the economic advances in the Philippines, where she strongly supported American rule. Her eyewitness accounts were factual, yet remarkably personal.
In 1919, she wrote of hunger and desperation during the conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijani militias. Villages were plundered and innocent civilians sent into exile as refugees. “I thought it very likely that starving persons might go out and gather grasses and greens of various sorts to be prepared for food,” she wrote, “but that men, women and children should gather like cattle in herds to graze, this I did not believe—not until I saw it.”
Although Eleanor was a working woman who traveled the world, she opposed the women’s suffrage movement. She later said she was wrong.
In an essay published in May 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post, headlined “Women in Politics to the Aid of Their Party,” she confessed: “The trouble with me was that I did not think far enough. My vision was restricted by old-fashioned conservatism and prejudice … I feel like apologizing to the women of the combat battalions who have done all the fighting and who now bear all the scars.”
In 1922, President Warren G. Harding appointed Eleanor to the advisory committee of the Washington Disarmament Conference, acknowledging that she had a unique insight into global conflict, particularly growing tensions in East Asia.
“The possibilities for women on the advisory committee . . . are exactly as those for the men, if the women are sufficiently earnest and willing to undertake the necessary investigation of all objects that come before the committee,” she said in an interview with The Brooklyn Citizen. “My appointment is a compliment to our craft,” she said, “for President Harding, being a newspaper man himself, knows how much reporters give to getting facts correctly.”
Two years later, she traveled to India to write about the upheaval and changed mood stirred by the Gandhi-led Indian independence movement of noncooperation and civil disobedience. Shortly after returning to New York, she was diagnosed with the intestinal infection giardia. She died January 17, 1925, at age 45. One of the pallbearers at her funeral was Herbert Hoover, then U.S. secretary of commerce.
Acting on behalf of a number of Eleanor’s friends, Gen. Pershing founded the Eleanor Franklin Egan Memorial Foundation, which was later transferred to The New York Community Trust. The fund is used for the assistance, encouragement, and aid of writers, editors, and other literary workers.
Causes supported include PEN America, New York Writers Coalition, Asian-American Writers’ Workshop and Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.