Eleanor Franklin Egan
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Eleanor Franklin Egan (April 28, 1879 — January 17, 1925) was an American journalist and foreign correspondent for the ''
Saturday Evening Post ''The Saturday Evening Post'' is an American magazine published six times a year. It was published weekly from 1897 until 1963, and then every other week until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influ ...
''.


Early life

Bertha Eleanor Pedigo was born in 1879 (some sources give 1877), the daughter of Henry Pedigo and Bina Graves Pedigo. She lived for a time at the Rose Orphan Home in
Terre Haute, Indiana Terre Haute ( ) is a city in Vigo County, Indiana, United States, and its county seat. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the city had a population of 58,389 and Terre Haute metropolitan area, its metropolitan area had a populati ...
, and was raised by her adoptive family in
Kansas City, Missouri Kansas City, Missouri, abbreviated KC or KCMO, is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri by List of cities in Missouri, population and area. The city lies within Jackson County, Missouri, Jackson, Clay County, Missouri, Clay, and Pl ...
.


Career

Eleanor Pedigo Franklin moved to New York City in 1898 in search of an acting career, having done some theatre work in Kansas City. From there she became a theatre critic at ''
Leslie's Weekly ''Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper'', later renamed ''Leslie's Weekly'', was an American illustrated literary and news magazine founded in 1855 and published until 1922. It was one of several magazines started by publisher and illustrator Fr ...
'' magazine, and eventually moved into political journalism. In 1903 she was sent to Japan and later Russia; she covered the Russo-Japanese War, and the Russian Revolution for ''Leslie's'' and, from 1915 to 1925,
World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
and its aftermath for the ''
Saturday Evening Post ''The Saturday Evening Post'' is an American magazine published six times a year. It was published weekly from 1897 until 1963, and then every other week until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influ ...
''. In 1915, she survived the deadly submarine attack on the British passenger ship ''Barulos''. Her reporting from Armenia in 1919 featured eyewitness accounts of desperation:
''I did not believe that there were people anywhere down on their knees eating grass. I thought it very likely that starving persons might go out and gather grasses and greens of various sorts to be prepared for food, but that men, women and children should gather like cattle in herds to graze, this I did not believe – not until I saw it.''
She moved to the Philippines to co-edit the ''Manila Times'' with her second husband, and served as first president of the Philippine Anti-Tuberculosis Society while she was there. She served on the advisory committee of the 1922 Conference on the Limitation of Armament, in Washington, D. C. Egan helped First Lady
Helen Herron Taft Helen Louise Taft (née Herron; June 2, 1861 – May 22, 1943) was First Lady of the United States from 1909 to 1913 as the wife of President William Howard Taft. Born to a politically well-connected Ohio family, she took an early interest ...
to write her memoirs. She also published ''The War in the Cradle of the World'' (1917), about British military actions in Iraq. Her book is still studied as an early 20th-century American analysis of the region. Egan had opposed women's suffrage in print, but published an essay admitting to a change of heart soon after suffrage was won: "I feel like apologizing to the women of the combat battalions who have done all the fighting and who now bear all the scars."


Personal life

Eleanor Pedigo married twice; first, briefly, to Joel Dalbey Franklin in 1895; they divorced. Her second husband was journalist and publicist Martin Egan; they married in 1905, in Japan. She died in New York in 1925, aged 45 years, from
pneumonia Pneumonia is an Inflammation, inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as Pulmonary alveolus, alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of Cough#Classification, productive or dry cough, ches ...
secondary to
giardia ''Giardia'' ( or ) is a genus of anaerobic flagellated protozoan parasites of the phylum Metamonada that colonise and reproduce in the small intestines of several vertebrates, causing the disease giardiasis. Their life cycle alternates be ...
, a food- and water-borne parasite; among the honorary pallbearers at her funeral were
Herbert Hoover Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and ...
, James Harbord, and Newton W. Gilbert. Other prominent attendees were
Walter Lippmann Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining t ...
, Kathleen Norris,
Frank Munsey Frank Andrew Munsey (August 21, 1854 – December 22, 1925) was an American newspaper and magazine publisher, banker, political financier and author. He was born in Mercer, Maine, Mercer, Maine, but spent most of his life in New York City. The v ...
, Melville Elijah Stone, and Thomas W. Lamont."Funeral of Mrs. Egan; Many Prominent Men Attend Services for War Correspondent"
''New York Times'' (January 21, 1925): 21.


References


External links

*David Hudson
"‘A woman so curiously fear-free and venturesome’: Eleanor Franklin Egan reporting the Great Russian Famine, 1922"
''
Women's History Review ''Women's History Review'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of women's history published by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is June Purvis ( University of Portsmouth) and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is deputy editor. Abstracting and inde ...
'' 26(2)(April 2017): 195–212. *David Hudson
"'Having Seen Enough': Eleanor Franklin Egan and the Journalism of Great War Displacement"
in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, eds., ''Aftermaths of War: Women's Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923'' (BRILL 2011): 375–393. {{DEFAULTSORT:Egan, Eleanor 1870s births 1925 deaths American women journalists American women in World War I 20th-century American journalists