Who Owned This Book? Elizabeth Seeber

I often wonder about the people whose names I find written in copies of old books I buy, but I rarely do anything more. But I was so impressed by G. E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia when I reread it recently that I began to wonder who would have bought it. My copy — the U. S. edition published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York in 1933 — is signed, “Elizabeth Seeber, 10 Mitchell Pl.”

Who was Elizabeth Seeber? Well, I did a little rooting around the Internet and learned that she was a single woman every bit as courageous and independent as Trevelyan herself. Born into a German-American dairy-farming family living near Canajoharie in upstate New York in 1881, she worked for several years before entering Smith College in 1905. After graduating three years later, she went to work as a teacher of math and German at East Orange High School in New Jersey that fall. She switched to the New York City public school system a year or two later, first at Flushing High School and later at Newtown, and remained a teacher for most of the next forty years.

Even before the U. S. entered World War One, she helped organized fundraisers for displaced French and Belgian civilians. Then in the fall of 1917, as U. S. troops began shipping out for France, a group of Smith alumnae decided to organize a volunteer unit to provide moral support near the frontline. Equipped with field kitchen equipment and other gear to allow them to provide refreshments, a few hours’ respite, and entertainment to troops on their short relief periods while serving on the front lines. When the first group of ten women sailed for France in the spring of 1918, Seeber was among them.

The women spent several months in Paris making their administrative and logistical arrangements, and then the first group left for the front. Seeber was their unofficial correspondent. In August she wrote,

. . . One day in June Mr. Chesley, the regional director, came into our station and said he wanted a strong person with strong nerves to go to a city as near the front as women work. He looked at me and I began to pack up. I knew the minute I saw the house that that was where I belonged. It is an adorable house facing the Marne, with a little walled-in rose garden front and back. The back one has pretty green lattice work over the brick wall and lots of ramblers vining over it. Of course, in the center there is a rose tree and a garden seat and table. Think what that meant to the men right in from the trenches!

How the boys did love that house!

They came in sometimes as early as six in the morning — boys who had been at the batteries all night — and they were there as late as they dared stay at night. I think perhaps they loved the kitchen best of all. They said the only thing they didn’t like about it was that it made them homesick. They are so glad to see an American and sometimes look and look at you as if you couldn’t be real. You would never doubt for one moment that the work was worthwhile if you could have spent just one day with me there. We knew of course that the offensive was coming and one day the boys said their leave was up at five instead of nine because they had to be back ready for action. I’ve never heard such a frightful murderous roar as the artillery made— the sky was just one glare of light….

I’m helping at the canteen here and visiting the hospital and taking lemonade to all the wards, and so forth. It’s rather wearing, but the patients do like to have us come. There are no women nurses, and while the care is excellent, men apparently do not care to get on quite without women. They are the very bravest chaps I’ve ever seen. They don’t want to hear a word about the “hero stuff,” so I just put on my freshest summer dress and white shoes, and smile and talk merrily when I have all I can do to keep the tears back.

“I have all sorts of plans,” she confided. “There is scarcely a pane of glass in the house, the spaces are filled in with that thick, oiled cloth the French use, but before winter something will have to be done.”

She sent a second letter in early September:

Two weeks ago I rushed into Paris to hunt up furnishings for our house and was most successful in getting an order from the Y. and in finding the things I wanted. Amy Ferris helped in the buying of curtains, — windows have to be curtained to keep in the light at night, — and they are lovely. Since then Jean and I have worked almost day and night making huge curtains, valences, cushions, table covers, and simple lamp shades — the result is almost the prettiest house in France, we think. The men like it immensely because it looks so American.

I also hunted up an ice cream freezer and a gas oven so we can easily make ice cream and pies. I don’t suppose you can realize the devotion of the ordinary American boy to pie — it’s touching…. Almost all our men are eating at French messes and miss really American food. One day some of the officers were longing for ice cream, and we said, “All right, get the ice and salt, furnish a man to grind it, and you shall have it.” In an hour’s time it was all done and a cake besides, and they were as happy as boys. We let them all lick the dasher and hang around while things were being done, and one of them said, “Well, for one hour Sherman was wrong!

Even after Armistice was declared on November 11th, the Smith women stayed busy. Seeber wrote late in that month,

When the Second Division was brought out of the lines they began giving them passes to Chalons and all at once we were simply swamped with boys — their first day off in eight or nine months, and they stood in line sometimes more than an hour just to get to the counter in our little store; there was never a murmur. Luck was with us for with the arrival of the hordes came a carload of supplies. For two days our two men were unloading it, leaving Jean and me to do everything — tend store at the maddest rate you ever saw — I can beat any cash girl at Childs’ now — make and serve hot chocolate and try to keep the house in some sort of order.

The first day the boys had 24-hour passes and of course they couldn’t all find places to sleep, so we let them have the lower floor of our house and there 35 or 40 of them slept on the floor, with no blankets, but quite as cheerful as could be. They had to leave town at 7 A. M., so Jean and I arose at 5:30 to get breakfast for them — hot chocolate, bread and butter and jam with seconds all around. Before we finished we had fed about 70.

When the American Army moved in as part of the occupation forces along the Rhine in late 1918, the Smith College canteen was integrated with a larger YMCA organization assigned to support the 3rd Division, and Seeber remained there until it was disbanded in July 1919.

She returned to New York City and resumed teaching at Newtown High School in the fall of 1919. Aside from several sabbaticals, she remained there for the next 28 years. In the mid-1920s she enrolled as a graduate student in education at Columbia, but appears not to have finished that course.

In the May 1931 edition of the German Quarterly, Henry Holt and Company announced two new texts for teaching German coming out the next month. The second was Klein Heini, edited by Seeber — a new edition “prepared especially for young American students.” The book was a young adult novel written by Richard Hennings with the original title of Klein Heini: ein Grossstadtjunge (“Little Heini: a Big City Boy”). The book must have done well enough, because Seeber renewed her copyrights again in the late 1950s.

In 1933, she wrote the Smith Alumnae Quarterly that she was taking a sabbatical year (after over 20 years of teaching) and “can’t decide whether to buy a tiny house in the country and provide for my old age, or to go forth on the Seven Seas. In the next update, we learn what she decided: “Elizabeth Seeber has bought a place in Kent (Ct.) where she has been spending her sabbatical.” She remained an active Smith alumna for many years. Her name pops up in the New York Times ever so often — the first time in 1915, the last in the late 1940s — as the organizer of fundraisers by the Smith Club in Manhattan and hostess of teas for dignitaries such as Mrs. Dwight Morrow.

We know from her inscription that by 1933 she was living at 10 Mitchell Place, and from census reports we know she had an apartment to herself. She was still living there, according to the three-sentence obituary that ran in the New York Times in June 1964. The Times managed to get one fact wrong in that brief piece, stating that “Miss Seeber served with the American Red Cross in France throughout World War I”–the sort of thing that gets passed along by a friend or relative filling in gaps from whatever comments Elizabeth herself might have made over the years.

In Appius and Virginia, Trevelyan’s spinster, Virginia Hutton, worries about becoming a useless old woman living out her days in a women’s hotel in London:

She would go back to Earl’s Court and her bed-sitting-room – gas fire and griller, separate meters; to her consumption of novels from the lending library; her bus rides to the confectioner’s; her nightly sipping of conversation and coffee in the lounge: to middle-age in a ladies’ residential club. Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus.

It’s clear this was something Elizabeth Seeber probably never worried about.

I will have to look into my books’ previous owners more often.