World War I -- Life Histories/Section 019/Elle Goode Hardeman

Overview

Elle Goode Hardeman was regent of the Liberty Hall Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). During World War I, the Liberty Hall Chapter sponsored the Fifth Company, Coast Artillery of the North Carolina National Guard and hospital wards at Camp Greene and Oteen Hospital in Buncombe County, NC.

Biography

Pre-War Life

Elle Goode was born July 17th, 1883. She and her parents, Samuel Watkins Goode and Lizzie Stone Goode, lived in Atlanta, Georgia.

On June 27th, 1906, she married Isaac Hardeman, Jr. of Charlotte, NC, in Atlanta and later moved to Charlotte. They had two daughters, Marion and Elizabeth. In Charlotte, Hardeman joined the local Liberty Hall Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. To join the DAR, one must prove relation to an American patriot or Revolutionary War veteran. Hardeman was descended from John Samuel Goode and Lieutenant James Hamilton, both patriots. She became regent of the chapter by the outbreak of World War I.

World War I

As regent during the war, Hardeman was involved with many causes on the home front. The Liberty Hall Chapter sponsored the Fifth Company, Coast Artillery of the N.C. National Guard, a company that lived and trained in the Charlotte-based Camp Greene. The chapter sent Thanksgiving and Christmas boxes to them, hosted the company when they were in Charlotte on furlough, and provided dinners with entertainment on base when they were away. The DAR also kept close contact with the mothers of those in the Fifth Company and managed a list of where the men travelled throughout the wartime, even as some of them were transferred to other companies. Through the DAR, she also supported many war bond drives, sold thrift stamps, and helped raise patriotism on the home front.

Hardeman is remembered for her “war scrapbooks,” in which she saved and pasted news articles, photographs, comics, letters, songs, and many other things relating to the war effort and particularly the events of the Fifth Company. Her scrapbooks are unique surviving objects from the war.

Post-War Life

Following the war, the Hardemans moved to Chapel Hill, NC, where they lived during World War II. Hardeman continued to scrapbook and began to include the activities of the United States Navy Pre-Flight School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following WWII, they returned to Charlotte, where Hardeman's husband died. She died herself on December 3rd, 1961 in a Charlotte hospital.

Social Issues

Women in the War

When the men went off to war in 1917, they needed support from those left back home. Their jobs needed to be filled, and they needed supplies on the front that only women could provide. A surge in patriotism and the needs of soldiers encouraged millions of women to take action, whether it was by filling the abandoned jobs to provide for their families or by raising money for the war effort through the sales of bonds and loans. Women organized a vast majority of the war savings campaigns, and they even bought them themselves.In Mecklenburg County, NC, where Hardeman lived, 815 women purchased liberty loans during the first year of the war, which added up to $145,200.

American women were involved with the war efforts in other ways as well. They knitted socks, scarves, and other things to send to the men abroad. They also cared for soldiers at home. In Charlotte, NC, women treated between 3,000 and 4,000 men from Camp Greene to home cooked meals in late autumn of 1917.

Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking, a way of recording memories and photographs a person wants to remember, was a huge part of Hardeman's life. She devoted hours to scrapbooking, and she was not the first to use scrapbooks as a form of military record keeping. In the United States, the practice of keeping "war scrapbooks" dates back to the Civil War, when Northerners and Southerners alike clipped newspaper articles for scrapbooks like Hardeman's. When people know they are living through historic events, they are inclined to save things that could help document the time for the future. Scrapbooks have been lauded for their ability to capture ephemera like tickets, greeting cards, coupons, and other artifacts of every-day life, and the memories associated with these things. However, the ways in which these are pasted "fracture chronology," as events that happened weeks or years apart can appear simultaneous depending upon how they are placed on the page.

During World War I, women at home were encouraged to keep war scrapbooks for their children, particularly those who were fighting. In an article from The Charlotte Observer that Hardeman kept, a mother is quoted as saying, "These are history making days, and if every mother should make a scrap book for her child, or children, think of what it would mean... After the war, when these children of today are men and women, these files will be of priceless value to them..."

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill archived Hardeman's scrapbooks following her death. They can be found in the Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.