The Great Ideals Marching Through Her

As the United States entered World War I, Angela Morgan picked up her pen. Her poetry was deeply political, calling for peace and social change. Her papers at the Bentley reveal a career that burned brightly for a short time and the struggles she endured to change hearts and minds through the written word.

By Madeleine Bradford

In the hands of the women packed into a large conference room in the Hague, a poem titled “The Battle Cry of the Mothers” rustled. Louise Carnegie—a philanthropist married to industrialist Andrew Carnegie—loved this poem so much that she paid to print 150,000 copies. In 1915, the New York Tribune called the poem “peace propaganda.” World War I had started just one year before.

The author, Angela Morgan, stood onstage at The Hague, reading:

Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, fruit of our age-long mother pain, they have caught your life in the nations’ mesh, they have bargained you out for their paltry gain, and they build their hope on the shattered breast of the child we sang to rest. On the shattered breast and the wounded cheek—O God! If the mothers could only speak!

Morgan’s poem was a call for peace from the soldiers’ mothers, and it would quickly become the most famous poem that she ever wrote.

On the main stage, behind a long table, massive, feathery palm leaves arched into the air above the leaders of the 1915 International Congress of Women, many of whom had struggled to even attend this conference.

Belgian delegates had trouble getting passports. Several countries simply refused to let their delegates go. The ship taken by the American delegates, the Noordam, was halted in English waters and required political pressure from Jane Addams, the conference’s leader, to be allowed to pass. But even this wasn’t a guarantee of safety, since the wartime crossing from the United States to Europe was littered with floating mines and submarines skulking in the waters below.

All the women on the Noordam—including Addams, Morgan, her friend Rebecca Shelley, U-M alum Alice Hamilton, and many others—risked their lives by traveling.

In the end, the conference produced a resolution with 20 points, outlining attendees’ ideas about how peace should be achieved.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote a widely publicized letter calling the women’s peace movement “base and silly,” denouncing them as “foolish.”

The war did not end that year, and, with the United States’ entry to the fight in 1917, public opinion would soon turn sharply against these women who had risked everything to advocate for peace.

To Strike Splendor from the Core

At the beginning of her life, Morgan could not have imagined that she would end up on that stage, pleading for international peace.

Born Nina Lillian Morgan circa 1873, Morgan and her family embodied a national struggle. Her father, Colonel Albert Talmon Morgan, was a white man, while her mother, Carolyn Victoria Highgate, who taught at a Freedman’s Bureau “Sabbath School,” was multiracial.

Together, as an interracial couple in Yazoo City, Mississippi, they faced a community that was hostile to their very existence. An abolitionist, Albert described “the jeers, the scorn, and the blows of the enemy” that his family bore, in his book Yazoo; or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South.

Albert was elected sheriff, but his community was deeply divided. His political opponent, Francis P. Hilliard, refused to relinquish his office after Albert was elected, and gunfire erupted on both sides as part of the conflict.

At the end of it, Hilliard was dead.

Morgan’s father was accused of murder, despite the fact that witnesses saw Hilliard walking toward Albert at the time, and the wound was reportedly on the back of his head. Albert was jailed, then released, but community discontent grew.

The threat of lynching forced him to flee with his family to Washington, D.C.

Albert moved from position to position, haunted by the specter of perpetual debt, and he abandoned his wife and children to go gold prospecting in Colorado around the year 1890. His wife was left to fend for a hungry family.

To help earn money, Morgan and her sisters formed a singing troupe, known as the Angela Sisters, and echoed in her later pen name: “Angela Morgan.” Yet when she wrote about the struggles of her life, she did so often in a bracingly optimistic tone.

“Life bombards us human beings with every sort of experience, in order to strike splendor from the core,” she wrote in her draft autobiography, now archived in the Angela Morgan papers at the Bentley Library.

Spiritual Dynamite

From the beginning, Morgan desperately wanted to be a poet. “I do not remember a time when I was not writing, or craving to write,” she wrote in her autobiography.

But the stark reality was that becoming a poet by trade required free time and money, neither of which Morgan had.

So, she became a journalist, writing for newspapers like the Okolona Messenger, the New York Tribune, and the San Francisco Call, while writing poetry on the side. While reporting, she witnessed the depth of human suffering in impoverished areas, courts, and jails.

The empathy that Morgan had for the people she met is echoed in her poetry. Writing about a poor woman named Filippa, she pled with America’s wealthiest citizens:

You, whose yachts and whose motors, whose houses and lands, are bought by the labor of Filippa’s hands, do you know of a way that the body be fed, save by bread? [ . . . ] Do you dream she could thrive on the pittance you give? Speak! How is Filippa to live?

Morgan’s poetry and her desire for social reform were intertwined. In her autobiography, she wrote: “I shall never rest till I write the kind of poem that has enough real spiritual dynamite in it to help make this world a better place to live in. I want to write something that will help to do away with war and poverty and misery. I want to feel that my poems enter the souls and hearts of people and actually help them in their daily living.”

As much as Morgan wanted to transform society into a more equitable and peaceful place, her writing was sometimes influenced by broader social ideas about gender that conflicted with her goals.
In a few poems, she wrote as if all women were homemakers, going against her own ideals of social reform. However, although she idealized the role of homemaker, she found that it wasn’t for her; after Morgan married a man named Peter Sweningson in 1900, she quickly separated from, then divorced, her husband.

She also believed women should have a voice in government, and the freedom to pursue their own careers.

Despite her prolific output, it was a struggle to get her poetry heard.

“Everybody recognizes man’s right to put his work first, whereas the girl’s or the woman’s right is constantly questioned,” she wrote.

In the end, she became her own advocate. She acted as her own secretary, kept her calendar and meticulous notes of correspondence, and sent out her poems to others to read.

It was one of those letters that led to Morgan sitting in Mark Twain’s parlor.

The Great Ideals

According to an article by Edith Davies in the magazine Progress, archived in the Angela Morgan papers, Twain invited Morgan to speak with him after receiving one of her poems in the mail. He was moved by the poem, and sent it to Collier’s, a popular magazine, “with a personal note.”

It was accepted for publication. Morgan had her first real champion.

She also found a patron in philanthropist and socialite Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, who in 1914 funded Morgan’s first book of poetry, The Hour Has Struck. This gave Morgan the freedom to quit journalism and focus on verse.

She described writing poetry as an overwhelming experience.

“The terrible injustice of war overpowered me and drove deep into my very soul,” she wrote. “One day it seemed to me it was like a sword in my heart and I was ready to weep with the suffering of the world. That night, sitting up very late after my mother had gone to bed and the teacher had retired, the whole poem came swinging into consciousness.”

She wrote until three in the morning. Then, she sent the poem, “The Battle Cry of the Mothers,” to her patron, who showed it to Louise Carnegie.

“I received from Emily [Vanderbilt Sloane] a rapturous letter informing me that Mrs. Andrew Carnegie was so impressed by these verses that she would purchase them, have them printed, and distributed by the thousands,” Morgan recorded.

The floodgates opened. Suddenly, Morgan’s poetry was in demand; newspapers and magazines were asking for her work. At last, she could share “the great ideals that were marching through” her.

He Is Not Unknown

Now a professional poet, Morgan produced a flurry of work, beginning with a book titled Utterance, and Other Poems. She continued writing about peace, acting as a voice of empathy for working women, people in poverty, soldiers, and the families that suffered their loss.

In 1921, when the “Unknown Soldier” was brought home from Europe to the United States, where his tomb was constructed, it was Angela Morgan’s poem that was read over his coffin as he lay in the Capitol rotunda:

He is known to the cloud-borne company, whose souls but late have gone. Like wind-flung stars through lattice bars, they throng to greet their own; with voice of flame they sound his name, who died to us unknown.

Morgan’s words were a reminder that this soldier, at some point in his life, was named and loved.

This poem was widely published in newspapers such as the Bismarck Tribune, which included above it, in all capital letters: “HE IS NOT UNKNOWN.”

See Us As We Are

The support of Morgan’s wealthy patrons, ladies she imagined living in “fairyland,” did not last. Supporting first her mother, then father, and at least one sister in a sanatorium, Morgan found herself in the grips of poverty once more, struggling to keep herself and her family fed.

She begged the rich ladies who had so loved her poetry during the war to buy a few copies of her books for their libraries. They refused.

“If I once began giving books to the Carnegie libraries, I should open such a floodgate that there would be no end,” Louise Carnegie wrote to Emily Vanderbilt Sloane in 1924. Fairyland had run dry.

Morgan’s financial struggles would fill the rest of her life, until finally the famous “poetess” declared bankruptcy in 1935.

But she wrote that she did not regret writing her poems, despite all her struggles—and despite the towering stature they seemed to create in the minds of her readers.

“Oh dear,” one of her readers reportedly told her, “I’ve been reading your poetry with such deep reverence, supposing you to be an awesome individual, and here you are just a human being like everybody else.”

Morgan wrote: “Again and again I have been confronted with questions of this sort from women whose preconceived idea of me almost demanded that I should look the part of a prophetess or priestess.”

Morgan herself was fascinated by spiritualism and religion, but she remained very much a human being.
According to The New York Times, Angela Morgan died “after a long sickness” in 1957 at the New York home of friends Mr. and Mrs. Warren Meyer, who helped care for her in the years leading up to her death.

Many of Morgan’s papers languished in a warehouse in Philadelphia, from which they were rescued by her friend and fellow pacifist, U-M alum Rebecca Shelley. Shelley brought them to Battle Creek, Michigan, then to the Bentley Historical Library, to be preserved.

The Angela Morgan papers at the Bentley include 61 boxes full of poems, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, diaries, speeches, newspaper clippings, and more, and are open to the public.