[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 149 (Tuesday, September 24, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6378-S6379]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

  SA 3296. Mr. SCHUMER (for Mr. Tester) proposed an amendment to the 
bill S. 815, to award a Congressional Gold Medal to the female 
telephone operators of the Army Signal Corps, known as the ``Hello 
Girls''; as follows:

        Strike all after the enacting clause and insert the 
     following:

     SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

       This Act may be cited as the ``Hello Girls Congressional 
     Gold Medal Act of 2024''.

     SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

       Congress finds the following:
       (1) On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war 
     against Germany. As a historically neutral nation, the United 
     States was unprepared to fight a technologically modern 
     conflict overseas. The United States called upon American 
     Telephone and Telegraph (referred to in this section as 
     ``AT&T'') to provide equipment and trained personnel for the 
     Army Signal Corps in France. AT&T executives in Army uniform 
     served at home under the provisions of the Act entitled ``An 
     Act for making further and more effectual provision for the 
     national defense, and for other purposes.'', approved June 3, 
     1916 (referred to in this section as the ``National Defense 
     Act of 1916''), which allowed for the induction of 
     individuals with specialized skills into a reserve force.
       (2) When General John Pershing sailed for Europe in May of 
     1917 as head of the American Expeditionary Forces (referred 
     to in this section as the ``AEF''), he took telephone 
     operating equipment with him in recognition of the inadequacy 
     of European circuitry and with the understanding that 
     telephones would play a key role in battlefield 
     communications for the first time in the history of war.
       (3) From May to November of 1917, the AEF struggled to 
     develop the telephone service necessary for the Army to 
     function under battlefield conditions. Monolingual 
     infantrymen from the United States were unable to connect 
     calls rapidly or communicate effectively with their French 
     counterparts to put calls through over toll lines that linked 
     one region of the country with another. The Army found that 
     the average male operator required 60 seconds to make a 
     connection. That rate was unacceptably slow, especially for 
     operational calls between command outposts and the front 
     lines.
       (4) During this time, in the United States, telephone 
     operating was largely sex-segregated. Hired for their speed 
     in connecting calls, women filled 85 percent of the telephone 
     operating positions in the United States. It took the average 
     female operator 10 seconds to make a connection.
       (5) On November 8, 1917, General Pershing cabled the War 
     Department and wrote, ``On account of the great difficulty of 
     obtaining properly qualified men, request organization and 
     dispatch to France a force of women telephone operators all 
     speaking French and English equally well.''. To begin, 
     General Pershing requested 100 women under the command of a 
     commissioned captain, writing that ``All should have 
     allowances of Army nurses and should be uniformed.''.
       (6) The War Department sent press releases to newspapers 
     across the United States to recruit women willing to serve 
     for the duration of the war and face the hazards of submarine 
     warfare and aerial bombardment. These articles emphasized 
     that patriotic women would be ``full-fledged soldier[s] under 
     the articles of war'' and would ``do as much to help win the 
     war as the men in khaki who go `over the top.' ''. All women 
     selected would take the Army oath.
       (7) More than 7,600 women volunteered for the 100 positions 
     described in paragraph (5), and the first recruits took the 
     Army oath on January 15, 1918.
       (8) Like nurses and doctors at the time, female Signal 
     Corps members had relative rather than traditional ranks and 
     were ranked as Operator, Supervisor, or Chief Operator. When 
     promoted, the women were required to swear the Army oath 
     again.
       (9) Telephone operators were the first women to serve as 
     soldiers in non-medical classifications, and the job of the 
     operators was to help win the war, not to mitigate the harms 
     of the war. In popular parlance, they were known as the 
     ``Hello Girls''.
       (10) Signal Corps Operators wore Army uniforms and Army 
     insignia always, as well as standard-issue identity disks in 
     case of death, and were subject to court martial for 
     infractions of the military code.
       (11) Unbeknownst to the women operators and their immediate 
     officers, the legal counsel of the Army ruled internally on 
     March 20, 1918, that the women were not actually soldiers but 
     contract employees, even though the women had not seen or 
     signed any contracts. Military code allowed only for the 
     induction of men, and the code remained unchanged despite the 
     orders of General Pershing. Nevertheless, legal counsel also 
     recognized that the National Defense Act of 1916, which 
     allowed for the induction of members of the telephone 
     industry of the United States into the Armed Forces, imposed 
     no gender restrictions.
       (12) Four days later, on March 24, 1918, the first 
     contingent of operators began their official duties in 
     France. The operators arrived before most infantrymen of the 
     Armed Forces in order to facilitate logistics and deployment 
     and spent their first night in Paris under German 
     bombardment.
       (13) After the arrival of the operators, telephone service 
     in France improved immediately, as calls tripled from 13,000 
     to 36,000 per day.
       (14) The Army quickly recruited, trained, and deployed 5 
     additional contingents of female Signal Corps operators. With 
     these personnel, the number of calls increased to 150,000 per 
     day.
       (15) In addition to standard telephone operating, bilingual 
     Signal Corps members provided simultaneous translation 
     between officers from France and officers from the United 
     States, who were communicating by telephone.
       (16) The AEF fought their first major battles in the last 2 
     months of the war. By that point, the Signal Corps considered 
     the contributions of women to be so essential that, in 
     telephone exchanges closest to the front line, the Army 
     exclusively used women, in rotating 12-hour shifts. In the 
     rear, the Army established rotating 8-hour shifts and gave 
     male soldiers the overnight shift when telephone traffic was 
     slower.
       (17) Seven bilingual operators--
       (A) served at the Battles of St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne 
     under the immediate command of General Pershing;
       (B) staffed the Operations Boards through which orders to 
     advance, fire, and retreat were delivered to soldiers in the 
     trenches, to artillery units on alert, and to pilots awaiting 
     orders at French airfields; and
       (C) were awarded a ``Defensive Sector Clasp'' for the 
     Meuse-Argonne operation.
       (18) The Chief Operator supervising the Hello Girls, Grace 
     Banker of Passaic, New Jersey, was awarded the Distinguished 
     Service Medal. Out of 16,000 eligible Signal Corps officers, 
     Banker was one of only 18 individuals so honored.
       (19) Thirty additional operators received special 
     commendations, many signed by General Pershing himself, for 
     ``exceptionally meritorious and conspicuous services'' in 
     ``Advance Sections'' of the conflict.
       (20) The war ended on November 11, 1918. As of that date, 
     223 female operators served in France and had connected 
     26,000,000 calls for the AEF.
       (21) The Chief Signal Officer of the Army Signal Corps 
     wrote in his official report 2 days after the date on which 
     the war ended that ``a large part of the success of the 
     communications of this Army is due to . . . a competent staff 
     of women operators.''.
       (22) After the war ended, some women were ordered to 
     Coblenz in Germany for the occupation of that country and to 
     Paris for the Paris Peace Treaty of 1919 to continue 
     telephone operations, sometimes in direct support of 
     President Woodrow Wilson.
       (23) Two operators, Corah Bartlett and Inez Crittenden, 
     died in France in the service of the United States and were 
     buried there in military cemeteries with military ceremonies. 
     Those operators died of the same influenza pandemic that 
     killed more soldiers of the Armed Forces than combat 
     operations.
       (24) Women of the Army Signal Corps were ineligible for 
     discharge until formal release. Because of their role in 
     logistics, those women were among the last soldiers to come 
     home to the United States. The last Signal Corps operators 
     returned from France in January of 1920.
       (25) Upon arrival in the United States, the Army informed 
     female veterans that they had performed as civilians, not 
     soldiers, even though operators had served in Army uniform in 
     a theater of war surrounded by men who were similarly 
     engaged.
       (26) Despite the objections of General George Squier, the 
     top-ranking officer in the Signal Corps, the Army denied 
     Signal Corps women the veterans' benefits granted to male 
     soldiers and female nurses, such as--
       (A) hospitalization for disabilities incurred in the line 
     of duty;

[[Page S6379]]

       (B) cash bonuses;
       (C) soldiers' pensions;
       (D) flags on their coffins; and
       (E) the Victory Medals promised them in France.
       (27) For the next 60 years, female veterans, led by Merle 
     Egan from Montana, petitioned Congress more than 50 times for 
     their recognition. In 1977, under the sponsorship of Senator 
     Barry Goldwater, Congress passed legislation to retroactively 
     acknowledge the military service of the Women's Airforce 
     Service Pilots (referred to in this section as ``WASPs'') of 
     World War II and ``the service of any person in any other 
     similarly situated group the members of which rendered 
     service to the Armed Forces of the United States in a 
     capacity considered civilian employment or contractual 
     service at the time such service was rendered''.
       (28) On November 23, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed 
     the legislation described in paragraph (27) into law as the 
     GI Bill Improvement Act of 1977 (Public Law 95-202; 91 Stat. 
     1433).
       (29) The Signal Corps telephone operators applied for, and 
     were granted, status as veterans in 1979.
       (30) Only 33 of the operators who had returned home after 
     the war were still alive to receive their Victory Medals and 
     official discharge papers, which were finally awarded in 
     1979.
       (31) One of the women, Olive Shaw from Massachusetts, 
     returned to the United States after the war, where she worked 
     on the professional staff of Congresswoman Edith Nourse 
     Rogers. Shaw lived to receive her honorable discharge and was 
     the first burial when the Massachusetts National Cemetery 
     opened on October 11, 1980. Shaw's uniform is on display at 
     the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, 
     Missouri.
       (32) Upon receipt of her honorable discharge at a ceremony 
     in her home in Marine City, Michigan, ``Hello Girl'' Oleda 
     Joure Christides raised the paper to her lips and kissed it. 
     The only thing Christides ever wanted from the Federal 
     Government was a flag on her coffin.
       (33) On July 1, 2009, President Barack Obama signed into 
     law Public Law 111-40 (123 Stat. 1958), which awarded the 
     WASPs the Congressional Gold Medal for their service to the 
     United States.
       (34) For their role as pioneers who paved the way for all 
     women in uniform, and for service that was essential to 
     victory in World War I, the ``Hello Girls'' merit similar 
     recognition.

     SEC. 3. CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL.

       (a) Award Authorized.--The Speaker of the House of 
     Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate 
     shall make appropriate arrangements for the award, on behalf 
     of Congress, of a single gold medal of appropriate design in 
     honor of the female telephone operators of the Army Signal 
     Corps (commonly known as the ``Hello Girls''), in recognition 
     of those operators'--
       (1) pioneering military service;
       (2) devotion to duty; and
       (3) 60-year struggle for--
       (A) recognition as soldiers; and
       (B) veterans' benefits.
       (b) Design and Striking.--For the purposes of the award 
     described in subsection (a), the Secretary of the Treasury 
     (referred to in this Act as the ``Secretary'') shall strike 
     the gold medal with suitable emblems, devices, and 
     inscriptions, to be determined by the Secretary.
       (c) Smithsonian Institution.--
       (1) In general.--After the award of the gold medal under 
     subsection (a), the medal shall be given to the Smithsonian 
     Institution, where the medal shall be available for display, 
     as appropriate, and made available for research.
       (2) Sense of congress.--It is the sense of Congress that 
     the Smithsonian Institution should make the gold medal 
     received under paragraph (1) available elsewhere, 
     particularly at--
       (A) appropriate locations associated with--
       (i) the Army Signal Corps;
       (ii) the Women in Military Service for America Memorial;
       (iii) the U.S. Army Women's Museum; and
       (iv) the National World War I Museum and Memorial; and
       (B) any other location determined appropriate by the 
     Smithsonian Institution.

     SEC. 4. DUPLICATE MEDALS.

       The Secretary may strike and sell duplicates in bronze of 
     the gold medal struck under section 3 at a price sufficient 
     to cover the costs of the medals, including labor, materials, 
     dies, use of machinery, and overhead expenses.

     SEC. 5. NATIONAL MEDALS.

       (a) National Medals.--Medals struck under this Act are 
     national medals for purposes of chapter 51 of title 31, 
     United States Code.
       (b) Numismatic Items.--For purposes of sections 5134 and 
     5136 of title 31, United States Code, all medals struck under 
     this Act shall be considered to be numismatic items.

     SEC. 6. AUTHORITY TO USE FUND AMOUNTS; PROCEEDS OF SALE.

       (a) Authority to Use Fund Amounts.--There is authorized to 
     be charged against the United States Mint Public Enterprise 
     Fund such amounts as may be necessary to pay for the costs of 
     the medals struck under this Act.
       (b) Proceeds of Sale.--Amounts received from the sale of 
     duplicate bronze medals authorized under section 4 shall be 
     deposited into the United States Mint Public Enterprise Fund.
                                 ______