Natalie "Tulane" Scott's "Class of 1909" paper tag.

Natalie’s propensity for embracing just causes emerged early in her life, in New Orleans as a 17 year old Newcomb College student she and her 1909 classmates lead a campus crusade to gain academic, athletic, and social opportunities for the Newcomb woman at least equal to the favored Tulane men.  Earning her way into Newcomb on scholarship, Natalie graduated with honors, then devoted a year in postgraduate Greek studies in Washington, D.C. before joining the Newcomb faculty.  She earned a masters degree at Tulane University, by that time proficient in French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Greek.  In 1914, she embraced the great cause of World War I, first as a fundraiser for war refugees, then as a Louisiana Red Cross leader.

A hero in war
In 1917, Natalie went to war as a Red Cross worker in France, working six months in the headquarters for Colonel Alexander Lambert until the Germans threatened to overrun Paris.  As a volunteer, Natalie worked night and day with the tens of thousands of refugees pouring into Paris; then she volunteered for duty in a French battlefront evacuation hospital as a ward nurse and translator.  When the Germans bombed her hospital, Natalie climbed repeatedly to the hard-hit top floor, amidst explosions of the night air raid, to pull wounded soldiers from the rubble, to carry them below to safety; the bombing raids upon her hospital went on for weeks.  She returned to America a war heroine, the only American woman in the war to earn France’s highest medal for courage, the Croix de Guerre. 

A pioneer preservationist
Back in New Orleans by 1920, Natalie embraced new challenges: restoration of the squalid, dilapidated French Quarter; creating America’s finest community theater, the Petite Theatre du Vieux Carre; instigating the most productive intellectual colony, artists, painters, literati, performers, and journalists, in America’s Southern history, the French Quarter Renaissance.  In 1929, Sherwood Anderson described her as “the best newspaperwoman in America.”  Today her decade of colorful, humorous, and very personal Sunday columns and feature stories in the New Orleans States Item compose a treasure chest for researchers tracing the 1920s careers of Anderson, William Spratling, William Faulkner, the pioneering Double Dealer literary magazine, the city’s social and charitable causes, French Quarter restoration, the Vieux Carré inhabitants, their work and play.  Her column advocated causes such as woman’s suffrage, the League of Nations, fundraising for the war’s victims, the blind and disabled.