Anna Ella Carroll 1850s political career What made Anna get into politics? Carroll joined the American Party (the Know Nothing Party) following the demise of the Whigs. Where was she when she started the american party? I don't know.
What else did she do in her political years?
What else did Anna Ella Carroll do in her political years aside from starting the American Party??
Carroll entered the national political arena in the 1850s, following her father's appointment as Naval Officer for the District of Baltimore by Whig President Zachary Taylor. Shortly thereafter, Taylor died and Carroll's commission was signed by Millard Fillmore. In 1854, Carroll joined the American Party (the Know Nothing Party) following the demise of the Whigs. At the time much political realignment was going on nationwide. The same year the Republican Party was formed. The Southern pro-slavery Democrats took over control of their party's leadership in Congress due to the defeat of many Northern Democrats following the passage of the unpopular Kansas-Nebraska Act in May. In Maryland, large numbers of immigrants, largely Irish and German Catholics, had flooded into Baltimore during the Great Famine in Ireland and the 1848 Revolutions in Germany. They took work in the port and railroad yards. Due to this rapid increase in population density, there was competition with free people of color for housing and jobs; street crime became a problem and relief rolls rose. At the same time, planters were a strong force in the state; many Catholic and Episcopalian planters resided on the Eastern Shore, which continued as primarily agricultural. In 1853, the Maryland Know Nothing party was formed, initially from three nativist groups. Yet beginning in February, it took in large numbers of striking laborers from the ironwork's factory in Baltimore, whom the Democratic Party had refused to support. In opposing the pro-slavery Democrats, the Know Nothings became a powerful, but divisive, party in the state. They were pro-Union, pro-labor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant. Along with other reformers, Anna Carroll campaigned by writing against urban machine corruption, crime, and what was perceived as the political threat of the power of the Catholic Church. In Maryland the Catholic planter/urban vote could combine to establish a pro-slavery state government. In 1856, the Whig Party split nationally into Northern and Southern factions due to the slavery issue. During the 1856 presidential election, Carroll supported and campaigned on behalf of Fillmore, the Know Nothing candidate. Carroll wrote many articles and pamphlets and she toured the Northeast on his behalf. Considered a moderate, Fillmore carried the state of Maryland, his only victory in the election. For the 1856 campaign, Anna Carroll published two party books that greatly extended her political and press contacts: The Great American Battle, or, The Contest Between Christianity and Political Roman-ism and The Star of the West, and influential pamphlets such as "The Union of the States". The former book was a virulent criticism of the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church under the papacy of Pius IX (see anti-clericalism). In 1857 Carroll was the chief publicist for Governor Thomas H. Hicks of Maryland; he credited his victory to her writings. In 1858, she took up the cause of former Congressman John Minor Botts, a Unionist from Virginia, in his presidential bid. She published a series of articles in the New York Evening Express newspaper on the 1860 candidates under the pseudonym "Hancock." Others over time appeared in the influential National Intelligencer, among other venues. CANNOTANSWER
campaigned by writing against urban machine corruption, crime, and what was perceived as the political threat of the power of the Catholic Church.
Anna Ella Carroll (August 29, 1815 – February 19, 1894) was an American politician, pamphleteer and lobbyist. She was born in to a very wealthy and prominent family in her state and city: her great-grandfather was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the last surviving signers and a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and later in the new Congress of the United States, her father was the Governor of Maryland from 1830–1831, and her mother was the daughter of a Baltimore physician. She was also the eldest of eight children. She played a significant role as an adviser to the Lincoln presidential cabinet during the American Civil War (1861-1865). She also wrote many pamphlets criticizing slavery. She died on February 19, 1894, at the age of 79.

Early life
Anna Carroll was born in 1815 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland into a prominent upper-class, religiously mixed Catholic-Protestant family. Her father was Thomas King Carroll, a planter who served as Maryland governor in 1830; he owned a  tobacco plantation in Somerset County. The eldest of eight children, Anna was educated and trained by her father to be his aide. She was likely tutored in the law by him. This allowed her access into the male world of politics.

Anna contributed to her family's income by establishing a girls' school at their home of  Kingston Hall. Little is known about her life between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.

1850s political career
Carroll entered the national political arena in the 1850s, following her father's appointment as Naval Officer for the District of Baltimore by Whig President Zachary Taylor. Shortly thereafter, Taylor died and Carroll's commission was signed by Millard Fillmore. In 1854, Carroll joined the American Party (the Know Nothing Party) following the demise of the Whigs. At the time much political realignment was going on nationwide. The same year the Republican Party was formed. The Southern pro-slavery Democrats took over control of their party's leadership in Congress due to the defeat of many Northern Democrats following the passage of the unpopular Kansas–Nebraska Act in May.

In Maryland, large numbers of immigrants, largely Irish and German Catholics, had flooded into Baltimore during the Great Famine in Ireland and the 1848 Revolutions in Germany. They took work in the port and railroad yards. Due to this rapid increase in population density, there was competition with free people of color for housing and jobs; street crime became a problem and relief rolls rose. At the same time, planters were a strong force in the state; many Catholic and Episcopalian planters resided on the Eastern Shore, which continued as primarily agricultural. In 1853, the Maryland Know Nothing party was formed, initially from three nativist groups. Yet beginning in February, it took in large numbers of striking laborers from the ironwork's factory in Baltimore, whom the Democratic Party had refused to support. In opposing the pro-slavery Democrats, the Know Nothings became a powerful, but divisive, party in the state. They were pro-Union, pro-labor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant.

Along with other reformers, Anna Carroll campaigned by writing against urban machine corruption, crime, and what was perceived as the political threat of the power of the Catholic Church. In Maryland the Catholic planter/urban vote could combine to establish a pro-slavery state government. In 1856, the Whig Party split nationally into Northern and Southern factions due to the slavery issue. During the 1856 presidential election, Carroll supported and campaigned on behalf of Fillmore, the Know Nothing candidate. Carroll wrote many articles and pamphlets and she toured the Northeast on his behalf. Considered a moderate, Fillmore carried the state of Maryland, his only victory in the election.

For the 1856 campaign, Anna Carroll published two party books that greatly extended her political and press contacts: The Great American Battle, or, The Contest Between Christianity and Political Roman-ism and The Star of the West, and influential pamphlets such as "The Union of the States". The former book was a virulent criticism of the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church under the papacy of Pius IX  (see anti-clericalism). In 1857 Carroll was the chief publicist for Governor Thomas H. Hicks of Maryland; he credited his victory to her writings. In 1858, she took up the cause of former Congressman John Minor Botts, a Unionist from Virginia, in his presidential bid. She published a series of articles in the New York Evening Express newspaper on the 1860 candidates under the pseudonym "Hancock." Others over time appeared in the influential National Intelligencer, among other venues.

Secession role
With the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, Carroll freed her slaves. She began to work to oppose the secession of the Southern states and helped keep Maryland loyal to the Union. Lincoln's election set off the secession movement, which began with South Carolina's exit on December 20, 1860. The first six states to secede were those that held the largest number of slaves. In February 1861, the Confederate government was formed in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time Carroll was advising Governor Thomas H. Hicks on compromise efforts in the Congress. After Virginia seceded, she sent him intelligence on Confederate plans that might have resulted in a coup d'état of Washington, D.C., had  Maryland  seceded.

During the summer of 1861, Carroll wrote a political pamphlet in response to a speech given on the floor of the senate by the Hon. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. He had argued that Lincoln had acted in violation of the Constitution by mustering state militias into service following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, suspending the writ of habeas corpus, and imposing martial law and a naval blockade. In her reply pamphlet, which was widely circulated by the Lincoln administration, Carroll made informed legal arguments, later used by Attorney General Edward Bates, stating that Lincoln had acted in accordance with the Constitution.  She noted that, as the chief enforcement officer of the nation, Lincoln could use all his powers to enforce federal law in the Southern states.  Those powers included his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.  Under an agreement made with the government, by 1862 Carroll had produced three more war powers pamphlets that presented able constitutional arguments supporting the federal government's actions. Governor Hicks wrote that her documents did more to elect a Union man as his successor than "all the rest of the campaign documents together."

Wartime role

In the fall of 1861, Carroll traveled to St. Louis to work with secret agent, Judge Lemuel Dale Evans, who had been appointed by Secretary of State William H. Seward to assess the feasibility of a Union invasion of Texas. Carroll worked on her second war powers paper at the Mercantile Library. She also gathered information from the head librarian, who was the brother of Confederate General Joe Johnston. She took military matters into her own hands when she initiated an interview with a riverboat pilot, Capt. Charles M. Scott, about the feasibility of the planned Union Mississippi River expedition. Scott told her that he and other pilots thought the advance ill-conceived because there were many defensible points on the Mississippi River that could be reinforced. It could take years just to open up the river to navigation by trying to broach those points. Carroll questioned Scott about the feasibility of using the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers for a Union invasion of the South. Scott provided Carroll with technical navigation details. Based on this information, Carroll wrote a memorandum to Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott and Attorney General Edward Bates in late November 1861, advocating that the combined army-navy forces change their invasion route from the Mississippi to the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, Major General Henry W. Halleck was planning the same movement without Lincoln's knowledge. Upon learning that Confederates were possibly sending reinforcements west from Virginia, Halleck ordered Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote to immediately move on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers in a telegram dated January 30. Scott was dispatched to the Midwest to mobilize reinforcements for Halleck on the night of January 29. On February 6, Fort Henry fell to Foote's gunboats and on February 13, Fort Donelson fell to Grant's and Foote's combined forces. These comprised the first two "real victories" of the Civil War for the Union, as Gen. William Sherman wrote later. At the time Carroll's role in the effort was kept secret. Immediately following the war, she gave credit for the plan to Capt. Charles Scott in a letter printed in a leading Washington newspaper. Years later, Assistant Secretary of War Scott and Senator Wade testified to her critical role before Congress.

During the remainder of the war, Carroll worked with Lincoln on issues pertaining to emancipation and colonization of American slaves. She and Aaron Columbus Burr lobbied him to establish a colony of freedmen in British Honduras, today Belize. Although Carroll had freed her own slaves, she lobbied Lincoln against issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. She feared that this action would cost the support of Southern Unionists and resistance to the Union would be stiffened. But, she wrote that Lincoln did have the constitutional right to free the slaves as a temporary war measure under his power as commander-in-chief, since the proclamation would help cripple the organized forces of the rebellion. Yet the measure was not a transfer of title and would have to be suspended once the war emergency ended. To free the slaves required a constitutional amendment.

Postwar life and death
In the postwar years, Carroll traveled with Lemuel Evans to report on his role in the Texas constitutional convention to draw up a new state constitution.  She was active in the Republican Party in Maryland and continued her political writing career. After 1870, however, she had to devote much time to trying to gain payment for $5,000 which she insisted that the government still owed her for her wartime publications. She went through twenty years of congressional hearings. Every military committee but one voted in her favor, but no bills passed the Congress. She filed a claim in the United States Court of Claims in 1885, but was denied. Justice J. Nott wrote that the documents she used to back up her claim were "impressive" but "valueless as blank paper" because "they establish no judicial fact." Despite the rulings against her claim—or, more likely, because of those negative rulings—Carroll received support from women's and suffrage organizations. The suffragists commissioned a biography of her in 1891 by Sarah Ellen Blackwell.

Anna Ella Carroll died of Bright's disease, a kidney ailment, on February 19, 1894. She is buried at Old Trinity Church, near Church Creek, Maryland, beside her parents and other members of her family. The epitaph on her grave reads, "A woman rarely gifted; an able and accomplished writer."

In 1959, the state historical society unveiled a monument to Carroll with the words, "Maryland's Most Distinguished Lady. A great humanitarian and close friend of Abraham Lincoln. She conceived the successful Tennessee Campaign and guided the President on his constitutional war powers."  The gravestone was inscribed with 1893 as the year of her death, but a Washington, D.C., death certificate lists the correct death year of 1894. Surviving letters in her writing exist from that year before her death.

Later evaluation
Well into the 20th century, Carroll was hailed as a feminist heroine whose contributions were denied because of her sex. Some scholars, however, have attempted to discredit her tale, arguing that she was more a "relentless self-promoter" than the "woman who saved the Union," as novelists, playwrights, and suffragists called her. Carroll had condemned the Emancipation Proclamation and recommended colonization of blacks. Yet research published in 2004 unveiled new sources, primarily Maryland political histories and Lincoln administration records, that analyze the Maryland Know Nothing party in a new progressive light. These materials generally support (but slightly diminish) Carroll's role in the Tennessee River campaign.  A plan nearly identical to Carroll's was printed in the New York Times two weeks prior to the date Carroll said she sent her plan to the War Department in Washington; a similar version was printed in late December. Original sources found in Carroll's papers, housed in the Maryland State Archives, remain problematic as source material. Many of them, purportedly from leading politicians of the time, are in her handwriting, a distinctive scrawl.

See also
 Carroll family

Notes

References

Janet L. Coryell, Neither Heroine Nor Fool:  Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland, Kent, OH:  Kent State University Press,  .

Bibliography
Baltimore, Maryland. Maryland Historical Society, Library, Manuscripts Department, A. E. Carroll papers, 1822–1890, MS 1224; Carroll, Cradock, Jensen family papers, 1738–1968, MS 1976.
Blackwell, Sarah Ellen. A Military Genius: Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland, ("the great unrecognized member of Lincoln's cabinet"). Vol. 1. Washington, D. C.: Judd & Detweiler printers, 1891.
Carroll, Anna Ella. "Hancock" [pseud.] series, written for the 1860 presidential election, New York Evening Express, 23 June 1859, 8 July 1859, 15 July 1859, 5 September 1859.
___, Reply [to the speech of the Hon. John C. Breckinridge, delivered in the U.S. Senate, 16 July 1861]. Washington, D. C.: Henry Polkinhorn, 1861.
___. The Constitutional Power of the President to Make Arrests and Suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus Examined, in Blackwell, Vol. 2, The Life and Writings of Anna Ella Carroll.
___, The Great American Battle, or, the Contest between Christianity and Political Romanism. New York and Auburn, N. Y.: Miller, Orton & Milligan, 1856.
. The Relation of the National Government to the Revolted Citizens Defined. Washington, D.C.: Henry Polkinhorn, 1862.
___. The Star of the West, or, National Men and National Measures. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Miller, Orton & Milligan, 1857.
___. The War Powers of the General Government. Washington, D. C.: Henry Polkinhorn, 1861.
Coryell, Janet L.  "Anna Ella Carroll and the Historians," Civil War History 35 (June 1989): 120–137.
_. "Duty with Delicacy: Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland," Women in American Foreign Policy: Lobbyists, Critics and Insiders," ed. Edward Crapol.  Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987.
_. Neither Heroine Nor Fool:  Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland.  Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990.
Greenbie, Sydney, and Marjorie Barstow Greenbie, Anna Ella Carroll and Abraham Lincoln'', Tampa: University of Tampa Press, 1952.
Washington, D. C., National Archives, Legislative Records Section, Anna Ella Carroll file (plus Carroll's claims and memorials submitted to Congressional committees, printed privately by her).
Lincoln's and Stanton's papers, Congressional records, biographies of Thomas H. Hicks and Thomas A. Scott, and the official records of the U. S. Army and Navy during the Civil War, and more.

1815 births
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19th-century American writers
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Maryland Know Nothings
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Horia Mosadiq is an Afghan human rights activist, political analyst and journalist. She has faced personal threats for her work as an activist and journalist. Mosadiq currently works for Amnesty International.

Biography 

Mosadiq was a child when Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets in 1979. Mosadiq started studying journalism at Kabul University in 1992. She was forced to stop attending college and left Afghanistan shortly after Najibullah's government was overturned. She and her family sought refuge in Pakistan in 1995, where she worked in Islamabad as a journalist for United Press International. Mosadiq eventually finished her master's degree in Public Relations from Berkeley University.

After the United States and Britain invaded Afghanistan in 2002, she moved back to her home country and began working for Amnesty International in Kabul, which only stayed open until 2003. After that, she did various jobs for different human rights agencies. She also provided political commentary for Newsweek in 2004.

Mosadiq began getting threats from those who did not like her activism. In 2008, Amnesty International helped her and her family moved to London where she started working for Amnesty International under a work permit visa. Her husband had been shot at and her daughter's face slashed. Mosadiq says that "As long as the threats were directed to me, I didn't care because when you decide what to do, you are also aware of the dangers. But when everything was directed against my family, it was quite difficult to see your family paying for what you do."

Mosadiq currently works for Amnesty International as their Afghanistan Researcher. She first started working for them in this capacity in 2008.  As a member of Amnesty International, she travels frequently between London and Kabul. Mosadiq provided the research for the Amnesty International report, "Fleeing war, Finding Misery: The Plight of the Internally Displaced in Afghanistan." She also reported to CNN news in an interview, that while human rights gains have occurred very slowly since 2002 in Afghanistan, Amnesty International has seen some progress over time.

References

External links 
 Horia Mosadiq discusses women's rights in Afghanistan (audio clip)

Afghan human rights activists
Afghan journalists
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Afghan activists
Afghan women activists
Afghan women journalists
Kabul University alumni
21st-century Afghan women writers
21st-century Afghan writers
Political journalists Else Peerenboom-Missong (born Else Peerenboom; 13 October 1893 – 31 August 1958) was a German economist who became a politician (Catholic Centre Party, CDU). Between 1930 and 1933 she served as a member of the Reichstag (German parliament).   She withdrew from politics during the twelve Nazi years, but in 1933 had spoken out personally to the Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), in condemnation of the Concordat between the Holy See and the German Nazi State.  This may have been one of various reasons why she was kept under close Gestapo surveillance. In the wake of the assassination attempt against Hitler in July 1944 she was one of those arrested and briefly detained in the context of what came to be known as Aktion Gitter. After the war she contributed significantly to the establishment of the CDU (party) in the Rhineland region.

Life

Provenance and early years 
Else Peerenboom was born in Brauna (Kamenz, Saxony), to where her parents had recently relocated in connection with her father's work for the forestry service. Peerenboom is a Dutch name, and Johann Alexander Peerenboom, her father, was from Grieth, close to the Prussian frontier with the Netherlands. Her mother, born Maria Dillmann, came from Linz am Rhein. In August 1898, aged just 35, her father died and his widow returned from Saxony to Linz where she moved in to live with her still unmarried brother in the house where the two of them had grown up. Anton Dillmann ran a successful hardware and household goods store and took good care of his sister's daughter, financing and encouraging her schooling and study. He was a man of deep political interest with a strong sense of social duty which, sources indicate, he was able to inculcate in his niece.

She attended middle school, switching in 1899/1900 to the senior girls' school run by the Franciscan nuns in Linz.   Then, in 1908/09, she was sent for two and a half years to the "Sacre Cœur" boarding school at Blumenthal/Vaals, just across the border in the Netherlands, where she passed speaking exams in French and English and broadened her knowledge of the world more generally. The "Sacre Cœur" was a prestigious internationally oriented school, intended to attract the daughters of the wealthy. One fellow pupil who later found fame was an American girl called Rose Elizabeth FitzGerald.  Else Peerenboom would remain in lifelong contact, by letter, with the woman who later married a famously successful investor and became the mother of three famous sons in the world of United States politics, including John F. Kennedy. After her time at Vaals it might have been anticipated that she would find a suitable husband and "settle down", but instead Else Peerenboom found a college in Koblenz where she studied for and in July 1912 obtained a qualification as a languages teacher. She now returned to Linz where for two and a half years she worked as a teaching assistant back at the convent school.

Higher education 
In August 1913, on Catholics' Day Else Peerenboom had an important discussion with her uncle, Anton Dillmann, which gave new momentum to her intellectual ambitions. They had just returned from a lecture on "Catholic Academics and the Church", delivered by their distant cousin, Wilhelm Marx, in which the speaker had highlighted the shortage of Catholic academics in Germany in the aftermath of the priestly emigrations that had resulted from the church:state confrontation known as the "Kulturkampf". Peerenboom decided to undertake further study in order to be able to reduce that shortage. However, to undertake university-level study she would need to pass the Abitur (school final exam). The Abitur, and university-level education, had traditionally been a male preserve, and women had only been permitted to study for and attempt the exam since 1908. The idea that a girl from the conservative heartland of the Prussian western provinces might progress towards tertiary education was still challenging, and there were formidable practical difficulties. However, with the continuing backing of her uncle she was able to prepare for the exam as an "external student" at a boys' only secondary school in Münster.   By 1917, when she received news that she had passed her Abitur, she was 23. The path to higher education was now open to her, however.   She applied to the University of Bonn and was admitted to embark on the study of modern languages and applied economics ("Nationalökonomie").   Her studies took in time at Munich during 1918, and concluded, between 1919 and 1921, at Freiburg i.B.   It was at Freiburg that in 1921 she received her doctorate. Her dissertation, which earned her a "magna cum laude" commendation, dealt with "Jean Jaurès as philosopher, socialist and politician" ("Jean Jaurès als Philosoph, Sozialist und Politiker").

Caritas 
On 1 November 1921 she began work for the German Caritas, the catholic charitable organisation, which then as now had its main offices at Freiburg im Breisgau. She took charge of the Statistics Department, and over the next couple of years compiled two substantial volumes of statistical reports on the organisation's activities.   In 1925 she also took on a teaching position at what was then known as the Soziale Frauenschule of the Catholic University of Applied Sciences Freiburg. Very soon afterwards she was given headship of the institution. Her approach to the role involved encouraging self-reliance and self-motivation on the part of the students. However, conservative (male) Caritas managers felt that this threatened a dangerous absence of discipline and control. Positions became polarised and in 1927 Else Peerenboom left German Caritas. She nevertheless remained committed to the Caritas ideals for the rest of her life.

Peerenboom now worked in Mönchengladbach for the People's Association for Catholic Germany ("Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland"), but left in 1928, entering government service as temporary acting manager of the local welfare department for the Münster region. where the regional president ("Regierungspräsident") was Rudolf Amelunxen. Amelunxen and Peerenboom already knew one another from Amelunxen's time as a hands-on Prussian Welfare Minister, when Peerenboom had been compiling statistics on catholic charitable activities. Peerenboom's temporary appointment ended at the end of 1929 and she moved to Düsseldorf, taking a position with the National Catholic Women's and Mothers' Association ("Zentralverband katholischer Frauen- und Müttervereine Deutschlands") that involved responsibility for political education.  She started by sending round a short memorandum which she entitled, not without irony, "Gedanken zu einer Palastrevolution" ("Thoughts on a Palace Revolution"). In it she drew attention to the way that the national executive was purportedly committed to making its members independent self-confident women, even though, apart from herself the authority over the organisation was exercised entirely by men. Almost immediately two more women were added to the national executive. Peerenboom believed strongly that political education and citizenship schooling for women were particularly necessary at this time, as political tensions across the country grew, and extremist parties gained support at the expense of moderates.

Reichstag 
By 1930 Else Peerenboom had been in contact with the Catholic Centre Party for some time. Her professional and political career were strongly influenced by her distant cousin, Wilhelm Marx, who was a leading figure in the party and at various stages during the 1920s served as Chancellor of Germany.   Sources do not spell out precisely how and when she actually joined the party.   In the 1930 General Election she stood as a Centre Party candidate for election to the Reichstag and was successful, becoming one of the 5 women among the 68 Centre Party members. At this point she was elected because her name was high enough up on a party list. She was re-elected in the next three general elections, in each of which she stood not as a "list candidate", but as a candidate for the Koblenz-Trier electoral district. These were years of crisis, however. In the first general election of 1932 the Nazi Party and the Communist Party won, between them, more than half the seats in the Reichstag. There was no question of the Nazis and Communists governing in coalition which each other, and for the more moderate parties that were committed to democracy, notably the Centre Party, there could be no question of entering into a coalition with the post-democratic extremist parties. The Reichstag was accordingly deadlocked and Reichstag members were relatively powerless. German chancellors governed with the backing of the president. Controversially, the situation emerged whereby after 1930 Article 48 of the constitution was invoked with increasing frequency, meaning that legislation was passed not by parliamentary votes but on the basis of a succession of emergency presidential decrees. In January 1933 the Nazi Party took power. In the Reichstag proceedings were dominated by the enabling legislation which had various effects, including the ending parliamentary democracy. The Nazi Party still did not have an overall majority in the Reichstag and needed the votes of other parties in order to get the infamous Enabling Act through the Reichstag. In the end it was passed on 23 March 1933, but only with the parliamentary support of the Centre Party. Centre Party leaders had received assurances regarding their party's continued existence, the protection of Catholics' civil and religious liberties, religious schools and the retention of civil servants affiliated with the Centre Party. During the run-up to the vote there were intense discussions among the Centre Party Reichstag members in the course of which a group of perhaps twelve or fourteen members, lead by former chancellor Heinrich Brüning, refused to accept the leadership decision to back the Enabling Legislation. A "trial vote" ahead of the parliamentary vote took place within the parliamentary group in which, according to the writers Monika Storm and Manfred Berger, Peerenboom was among those voted to oppose the party leadership. This cannot be proven, however. What is clear is that in the Reichstag vote itself the Centre Party chairman, Ludwig Kaas, delivered the Centre Party votes in support of the enabling legislation. The hope that it would be possible to subject the National Socialist government to any wort of parliamentary control proved a fatal error. Government took over full legislative competence. Political parties were dissolved. Irrespective of assurances received earlier in the year, the Catholic Centre Party "dissolved itself" on 5 July 1933.   That ended Else Peerenboom's Reichstag career, and it effectively ended her political involvement within Germany for the next twelve years.

Nazi years 
Early in 1934, she accompanied young Catholic women on a visit to Brazil. In the country's vast unspoilt woodland there were moves to try out a new farming based lifestyle, as an alternative to life in Nazi Germany. There were many in Germany who faced persecution or worse for reasons of race and / or politics, and not everyone was able or willing to escape to Moscow. Britain and France also operated increasingly restrictive immigration policies, in response to domestic pressures, as the 1930s progressed. Between 1934 and 1939 Peerenboom made repeated lengthy trips to various South American countries on behalf of the International Catholic Social League. Back in Germany she was involved in setting up training courses for young people willing to emigrate to South America. In 1936, during another lengthy visit, she prepaed the way for the establishment of Soziale Frauenschule ("Social Women's Schools") in Uruguay and Venezuela. She founded a "Social Women's School" in Montevideo  in 1937 and headed it up till 1939. While working in Uruguay, she also found time to prepare and publish a little book entitled "Einführung in die Wohlfahrtspflege" (loosely, "Introduction to welfare care") and to translate it into Portuguese.

War returned in September 1939 and German civilians were forbidden by the police to undertake further stays or educational assignments abroad. Else Peerenboom was "grounded". In 1935 she had had a modest house built in her childhood hometown of Linz, to which she now retreated. (The house was subsequently destroyed by aerial bombing in March 1945.) Peerenboom had a close and longstanding friendship with Anton Missong (1882-1962):  her friend had worked for many years as head of the Cologne labour exchange ("Arbeitsamt"). More than ten years older than Peerenboom, by 1941 he had retired, and was also at something of a loose end. The two of them married in 1941 and shared their life together in the little riverside town of Linz. The marriage, it seems, took place only because Else Peerenboom-Missong was no longer able to pursue her overseas ambitions in South America. With wry Rhenish wit, she liked to joke that it was all the Nazis' fault that she had, slightly late in life, become a married woman.

On 20 July 1944 plotters attempted to kill Adolf Hitler. Hitler survived, but he was injured and government confidence was badly shaken. Contingency plans for an intensification of domestic opposition had long been in place. The authorities had compiled lists of all those who had been politically active as members of anti-Nazi political parties before 1933 and the abolition of democracy. Many of those originally listed had subsequently fled abroad or died, either of old age or as a result of government actions. Catholic Centre Party politicians were not initially scheduled for inclusion, but on 21 August the order was extended so that pre-1933 assembly members from the old Centre Party were included after all, although this broadening of the scope of "The Aktion" was partially rescinded two days later.  By that time, during the night of 21/22 August 1944 more than 5,000 people had been arrested by the authorities. Else Peerenboom-Missong was one of those arrested as part of what came to be known as "Aktion Gitter" (or, sometime, as "Aktion Gewitter"). Gestapo records at Düsseldorf had identified her as an "active representative of the Catholic Centre Party, who had played a key role in opposing National Socialism before the Nazis took power" ("... rührige Vertreterin des Zentrums, die sich vor der Machtübernahme in der Bekämpfung des Nationalsozialismus hervorragend mit betätigt hat"). A note attached to the file confirmed that she "had been particularly prominent in combatting National Socialism. [She] appeared as a speaker in Centre Party meetings"   ("Hat sich in der Bekämpfung des Nationalsozialismus besonders hervorgetan. [Sie] trat als Rednerin in Versammlungen der Zentrumspartei auf").   For several days she was held in Linz Prison at the District Court. She had been under constant Gestapo surveillance for many years, partly on account of her very public opposition to the so-called "Reichskonkordat" concluded between Nazi Germany and the Vatican back in 1933.   However, no evidence could be found of any involvement in the assassination attempt and she was released.

French occupation zone 
War ended in May 1945. Political activity outside the Nazi party was no longer expressly illegal. The victorious powers had already agreed among themselves that the western two thirds of Germany should be divided into military occupation zones. The southwest of the country, including Linz am Rhein, was administered as the French occupation zone. Since her marriage the former Else Peerenboom had chosen to be identified simply by her married name as Else Missong, but she now also returned to active politics, using for her public life the doubled name "Else Peerenboom-Missong" or "Else Missong-Peerenboom". (Sources differ over the sequence.)   She resumed contact with former colleagues from the old Centre Party. The goal was nothing less than the creation of a postwar Centre Party, but this time the party should be interdenominational. As a Roman Catholic party the old Centre party had effectively ruled itself out of contention in the Protestant north and east of Germany (and in northern Bavaria), thus reducing its political weight nationally. In addition, the industrial scale of the ethnic cleansing east of the Oder–Neisse line meant that even the traditionally catholic Rhineland was now home to large numbers of Protestants among the refugees. In June 1945 Peerenboom-Missong participated in the "(pre-)founding congress" of the Rhineland region Christian Democratic Union (CDU party), held at the Kolping House ("Kolpinghaus") in Cologne.   She became a member of the new party's Inter-zonal Unification Committee ("Zwischen-Zonen-Verbindungsausschuss"). However, as far as the military authorities were concerned the founding of political parties - at least of national political parties - was not expressly permitted in the French zone till 21 December 1945. On 31 January 1946 Peerenboom-Missong was there for the founding of the Christian Democratic Party for Rhineland-Hessen-Nassau.

A close political ally directly after the war was Franz-Josef Wuermeling, a Linz businessman who was appointed to a brief term as mayor of the town during 1945. They worked together on creating what became the Rhineland component of the national CDU (party). The two had known each other since 1921 when they were both students studying for their doctorates in applied economics ("Nationalökonomie") at Freiburg. At that time they had worked together in the "Sozialstudentische Zentrale", respectively as chair and deputy chair of this catholic student group. Now Peerenboom-Missong addressed a letter to all the Lutheran Christians in the area in order to win their active collaboration over the creation of the new "Rhineland-Palatinate CDP" ("Christlich-Demokratische Partei Rheinland-Pfalz").   She undertook all the necessary written work involved in founding the new party: mailings, membership processing, preparation of speeches and, importantly, the translation of all proposed mail shot letters and other publications into French. Her fluency in French was a particular advantage during this period of occupation. She also travelled extensively in the region delivering speeches. The first meeting of party members took place at Linz on 28 May 1946. The party was formally constituted on 20 August 1946.

In Summer 1946 Wilhelm Boden, whom the military occupiers had appointed to serve as the first Minister-president of the newly constituted federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate ("Rhoiland-Palz"), appointed her to headship of the State Youth Department ("Landesjugendamt").   A few months later the first free and fair democratic local elections in more than thirteen years took place on 15 September 1946. Else Peerenboom-Missong was elected to the Linz  municipal council. Regional elections followed on 13 October 1946 and she was elected to the Neuwied district council, along with her political ally Franz-Josef Wuermeling. Also elected to the Neuwied council was Adolf Süsterhenn, another leading light of the Christian Democrats locally who had been active in Centre Party politics during the "Weimar" years.

It was also in 1946 that she became a member of the Advisory Constitutional Committee mandated to draft a constitution for Rhineland-Palatinate. Just as on the Neuwied district council, fellow members included Franz-Josef Wuermeling and Adolf Süsterhenn. The committee comprised 127 members, but Peerenboom-Missong was one of just five women among these.   It was in a speech to the constitutional committee, meeting on 22 November 1946 in the Koblenz City Theatre, that she addressed the need for immediate measures to be taken to address the dire health and insufficient nutrition affecting the population, resulting from a prolonged period of hunger and of physical and moral deprivation. She called for the establishment of a committee to tackle the starvation conditions:   "Our people want to work and to make amends, but they have no wish to become beggars. They want to live and should not starve ... We do not need a constitution for people in coffins:  the first priority is to ensure that people stay alive, if our work in this committee is to make sense for the future" ("Unser Volk will arbeiten, es will wiedergutmachen, aber es will nicht zum Bettler werden, es will leben, es darf nicht verhungern. (…) Für Gräber brauchen wir keine Verfassung, darum muss zuerst das Leben unserer Menschen wieder gesichert sein, wenn unsere Arbeit von heute überhaupt Sinn und Zukunft haben soll.“ ").  This impassioned speech became known as her "hunger speech" and was widely reported. It was, in fact, the first time she had addressed her fellow members of the Constitutional Committee. It would also be the last. Germany was still under military occupation and Hettier de Boislambert, the military governor was present. He interpreted the speech as criticism directed at the French authorities. As a result, Else Peerenboom-Missong came under pressure from her own party colleagues, and in a letter dated 28 December 1946 resigned from the Constitutional Committee. She resigned from her municipal and district council positions. She resigned from her State Youth Office job.   Greatly disappointed and not a little embittered at her treatment, she also resigned from the CDU.

Return to South America 
While her husband remained in Linz, Else Peerenboom-Missong now returned to South America, in many respects resuming the work she had been obliged to break off in 1939. She founded the "Social Women's Schools" ("Soziale Frauenschule") in Caracas (Venezuela) in 1947, and headed it up herself for two years. In 1949, suffering from Diabetes, she returned to West Germany (as the three "western occupation zones" - which included the Rhineland - became in May of that year).  In 1951 she took a consultancy-administrative post with the State Emigration Office in Bremen, with special responsibility for destinations in South America and Australia. Later that same year she was back in South America, however, this time working for the German embassy in Rio de Janeiro with a portfolio role covering social-welfare matters. She remained in Brazil for three years, but in 1954 her failing health forced her back to Linz.

Death 
This time her return was permanent. Else Peerenboom-Missong died in Cologne a few weeks short of her sixty-fifth birthday following a heart attack.

References 

1893 births
1958 deaths
People from Bautzen (district)
People from the Kingdom of Saxony
Centre Party (Germany) politicians
Christian Democratic Union of Germany politicians
Members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic
Members of the Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate