An Athens, Ohio woman's film about an extraordinary ancestor premiered in Athens, Ohio in May of 2014. That descendant, Amy Abercrombie, first produced a full-length film in 2011, in which a lovely young character set in 1885 was adapted from an unpublished novel written by her grandmother, a writer, Rebecca Hooper Eastman. "But at the time, I was unaware that there really was a Ruth Holden," Abercrombie noted, "a cousin of my grandmother, and she was an actual heroine of World War I. And when I learned about this remarkable person, I was compelled to make a documentary film about the real Ruth Holden."
Ruth was born in 1890 in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and in her brief time on earth, her accomplishments were astounding. A brilliant paleobotanist, graduate of Radcliffe College, with a master's from Harvard, she was awarded a prestigious fellowship at Newnham College of Cambridge University in England. She and her mother had traveled to England to attend events with the militant suffragists there, but when the Great War broke out, she volunteered her services, first as a Red Cross nurse, and then to work with refugees and hospitals in Russia.
"I believe she was the only American woman to work in Russia during the war," Abercrombie says. She learned Russian and drove trucks to various hospitals with vital supplies, undoubtedly saving many lives. She learned to repair vehicles when they broke down. She helped in hospitals, using her Russian to interview patients. Very much a free spirit and ahead of her time, she had a personality that endeared her to everyone she met.
Numerous letters to her family in Attleboro survive, and the documentary is based on those letters, as well as things her friends and colleagues had to say about her. Frustrated when President Wilson waffled about the US entering the war, Ruth strongly hoped it would come to pass. She writes of "weak-kneed pacifists," but as she saw more and more of the horrors of war visiting hospitals, her views moderated and she felt the US should go to war "only if necessary." This came to be a few short weeks before her death in April of 1917, perhaps of tuberculosis, in Kazan, Russia. She was buried there in her favorite wood. Her family, completely devastated by her loss, was never able to bring her body back home to Massachusetts. She was twenty-seven years of age.
Philosopher Josiah Royce, her professor at Harvard, credited Ruth Holden with "the most profound original thinking of any student in my years of teaching." Professor Jeffries said about Ruth, she was "a masculine strength of intellect cloaked in a woman's tenderness." It was characteristic of her effect on people that it always surprised her friends to hear such things. Each thought, "I know she is great, profound, original; I thought I was the only one who recognized her greatness."
Copies of the documentary film, Ruth Holden, Heroine of the Great War, are available by contacting sassafras2233@earthlink.net $10 including postage.
