LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Alice Paul | [Frontispiece] |
| Lucy Burns at the Head of the “Prison Specialists” | [16] |
| Why is the Girl from the West Getting all the Attention? Cartoon by Nina Allender | [76] |
| The Suffragist’s Dream. Cartoon by Nina Allender | [146] |
| Inez Milholland in the Washington Parade, March 3, 1913 | [184] |
| Joy Young at the Inez Milholland Memorial Service | [188] |
| Wage Earners Picketing the White House, February, 1917 | [200] |
| The Thousand Pickets try vainly to Deliver Their Resolutions to the President, March 4, 1917 | [204a] |
| A Thousand Pickets Marching Around the White House, March 4, 1917 | [204b] |
| Obeying Orders, Washington Police Arresting White House Pickets Before the Treasury Building | [256a] |
| The Patrol Wagon Waiting the Arrival of the Suffrage Pickets | [256b] |
| Burning the President’s Words at the Lafayette Monument, Washington | [356a] |
| A Summer Picket Line | [356b] |
| Lucy Branham Burning the President’s Words at the Lafayette Monument | [364b] |
| The Russian Envoy Banner, August, 1917 | [364b] |
| One of the Watchfires of Freedom | [396a] |
| A Policeman Scatters the Watchfire | [396b] |
| Suffragist Rebuilding the Fire Scattered by the Police | [398a] |
| The Last Suffragist Arrested. The Fire Burns On | [398b] |
| The Oldest and the Youngest Pickets | [448] |
| The Flag Complete | [462] |
| Every Good Suffragist the Morning after Ratification. Cartoon by Nina Allender | [470] |
PART ONE
1913 and 1914
I
INTRODUCTION
In 1912 the situation in the United States in regard to the enfranchisement of women was as follows:
Agitation for an amendment to the National Constitution had virtually ceased. Before the death of Susan B. Anthony in 1906, Suffragists had turned their attention to the States. Suffrage agitation there was persistent, vigorous, and untiring; in Washington, it was merely perfunctory. The National American Woman Suffrage Association maintained a Congressional Committee in Washington, but no Headquarters. This Committee arranged for one formal hearing before the Senate and the House Committee of each Congress. The speeches were used as propaganda mailed on a Congressman’s frank. The Suffrage Amendment had never in the history of the country been brought to a vote in the National House of Representatives, and had only once, in 1887, been voted upon in the Senate. It had not received a favorable report from the Committee in either House since 1892 and had not received a report of any kind since 1896. Suffrage had not been debated on the floor of either House since 1887. In addition, the incoming President, Woodrow Wilson, if not actually opposed to the enfranchisement of women, gave no appearance of favoring it; the great political Parties were against it. Political leaders generally were unwilling to be connected with it. Congress lacked—it is scarcely exaggeration to say—several hundreds of the votes necessary to pass the Amendment. Last of all the majority of Suffragists did not think the Federal Amendment a practical possibility. They were entirely engrossed in State campaigns.
On the other hand, the Suffrage movement, itself, was virile and vital. The fourth generation of women to espouse this cause were throwing themselves into the work with all the power and force of their able, aroused, and emancipate generation. The franchise had been granted in six States: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, California. With the winning of Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912, the movement assumed a new importance in the national field. These victories meant that there were approximately two million women voters in the United States, that one-fifth of the Senate, one-seventh of the House and one-sixth of the electoral vote came from Suffrage States.
It was in December, 1912, as Chairman of the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, that Alice Paul came to Washington.
In the next eight years, this young woman was to bring into existence a new political Party of fifty thousand members. She was to raise over three-quarters of a million dollars. She was to establish a Headquarters in Washington that became the focus of the liberal forces of the country. She was to gather into her organization hundreds of devoted workers; some without pay and others with less pay than they could command at other work or with other organizations. She was to introduce into Suffrage agitation in the United States a policy which, though not new in the political arena, was new to Suffrage—the policy of holding the Party in power responsible. She was to institute a Suffrage campaign so swift, so intensive, so compelling—and at the same time so varied, interesting, and picturesque—that again and again it pushed the war news out of the preferred position on the front pages of the newspapers of the United States. She was to see her Party blaze a purple, white, and gold trail from the east to the west of the United States; and from the north to the south. She was to see the Susan B. Anthony Amendment pass first the House and then the Senate. She was to see thirty-seven States ratify the Amendment in less than a year and a half thereafter. She was to see the President of the United States move from a position of what seemed definite opposition to the Suffrage cause to an open espousal of it; move slowly at first but with a progress which gradually accelerated until he, himself, obtained the last Senatorial vote necessary to pass the Amendment.
What was the training which had developed in Alice Paul this power and what were the qualities back of that training, which made it possible for her to invent so masterly a plan, to pursue it so resistlessly?
II
ALICE PAUL
I watched a river of women,
Rippling purple, white and golden,
Stream toward the National Capitol.
Along its border,
Like a purple flower floating,
Moved a young woman, worn, wraithlike,
With eyes alight, keenly observing the marchers.
Out there on the curb, she looked so little, so lonely;
Few appeared even to see her;
No one saluted her.
Yet commander was she of the column, its leader;
She was the spring whence arose that irresistible river of women
Streaming steadily towards the National Capitol.
Katherine Rolston Fisher,
The Suffragist, January 19, 1918.
It is an interesting coincidence that the woman who bore the greatest single part in the Suffrage fight at the beginning—Susan Anthony—and the woman who bore the greatest single part at the end—Alice Paul—were both Quakers.
It is very difficult to get Alice Paul to talk about herself. She is not much interested in herself and she is interested, with every atom of her, in the work she is doing. She will tell you, if you ask her, that she was born in Moorestown, New Jersey, and then her interest seems to die. She apparently does not remember herself very clearly either as a child or a young girl. That is not strange. So intently has she worked in the last eight years and so intensely has she lived in that work that each year seems to have erased its predecessor. She is absolutely concentrated on now. I asked Alice Paul once what converted her to Woman Suffrage. She said that she could not remember when she did not believe in it. She added, “You know the Quakers have always believed in Woman Suffrage.”
Anne Herendeen, in a vivacious article on Alice Paul in Everybody’s Magazine for October, 1919, says, describing a visit to Moorestown:
“What do you think of all these goings-on?” I asked her mother. She sighed.
“Well, Mr. Paul always used to say, when there was anything hard and disagreeable to be done, ‘I bank on Alice.’”
The degree of education in Alice Paul’s life and the amount of social service which she had performed are a little staggering in view of her youth. Just the list of the degrees she achieved and the positions she held before she started the National Woman’s Party covers a typewritten page. They have even an unexpected international quality. One notes first—and without undue astonishment—that she acquired a B.A. at Swarthmore in 1905; an M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1907; a Ph.D. at the same university in 1912. This would seem enough to fill the educational leisure of most young women, but it does not by any means complete Alice Paul’s student career. She was a graduate of the New York School of Philanthropy in 1906. She was a student at the Woodbrooke Settlement for Social Work at Woodbrooke, Birmingham, and in the University of Birmingham, England, in 1907-08; a graduate student in sociology and economics in the School of Economics of the University of London in 1908-09.
She was, in addition, a Resident Worker of the New York College Settlement in 1905-06; a Visitor for the New York Charity Organization Society in the summer of 1906; a Worker in the Summer Lane Settlement, and a Visitor in the Charity Organization Society of Birmingham, England, during the winter of 1907-08; Assistant-secretary to the Dalston Branch of the Charity Organization Society in London for a half year in 1908; a Visitor for the Peel Institute for Social Work at Clerkenwell, London, for a half year in 1908-09; a Resident Worker for the Christian Social Union Settlement of Hoxton, London, in the summer of 1908. She was also in charge of the Women’s Department of the branch of adult schools at Hoxton in the summer of 1908.
I asked Mabel Vernon, who went to Swarthmore with her, about Alice Paul. Her impressions were a little vague—mainly of a normal, average young girl who had not yet begun to “show.” She remembered that, although biology was her specialty, Miss Paul was catholic in her choice of courses; how—as though it were something she expected to need—she took a great deal of Latin; and that—as though at the urge of the same intuition—she devoted herself to athletics. She had apparently no athletic gifts; yet before she left Swarthmore she was on the girls’ varsity basketball team, was on her own class hockey team, and had taken third place in the women’s tennis tournament. She was a rosy, rounded, vigorous-looking girl then. When Mabel Vernon saw her next, she had been hunger-striking in England and was thin to the point of emaciation.
I asked Alice Paul herself about her work with the poor in England. She said, looking back on it—and it is apparently always a great effort for her to remove her mental vision from the present demand—that her main impression was of the hopelessness of it all, that there seemed nothing to do but sweep all that poverty away. The thing that she remembers especially now is that they were always burying children.
The first great, outstanding fact of Alice Paul’s training is that in the English interregnum which divided her American education, she joined the Pankhurst forces. In the beginning all her work was of the passive kind. She attended meetings and ushered. She was about to go home; indeed she had bought her passage when the Pankhursts asked her to join a deputation to Parliament. This deputation, which consisted of more than a hundred women, and was led by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, was arrested at the entrance to Parliament. They were detained in the policemen’s billiard room of the Cannon Row Police Station, the only place at that station large enough to hold so many women.
The second great outstanding fact of Alice Paul’s career in England is that she met Lucy Burns.
Lucy Burns was born in Brooklyn. The facts of her education, although superficially not so multitudinous as those of Alice Paul, are even more impressive in point of international quality. She was graduated from Packer Institute in 1899 and from Vassar College in 1902. She studied at Yale University in 1902-03, at the University of Berlin in 1906-08, at the University of Bonn in 1908-09. She joined the Woman’s Social and Political Union of London in 1909 and she worked as an organizer in Edinburgh and the east of Scotland in 1909-12.
Lucy Burns thinks she first met Alice Paul at a Suffrage demonstration. Alice Paul thinks she first met Lucy Burns in that same policemen’s billiard room of the Cannon Row Police Station, London. Both these young women remember their English experiences in flashes and pictures. They worked too hard and too militantly to keep any written record; and successive hardships wiped away all traces of their predecessors. At any rate, Alice Paul says that she spoke to Miss Burns because she noticed that she wore a little American flag. Sitting on the billiard table, they talked of home. Alice Paul also says that Lucy Burns, a student at that time of the University of Bonn in Germany, had come to England for a holiday. She entered the militant movement a few weeks after she landed and this was her first demonstration.
The women were held for trial, giving bail for their appearance. Alice Paul had engaged passage home, but she had to cancel it as the trial did not occur until after the date of her sailing. The case was appealed in the courts and was finally dropped by the government.
From this time on, the paths of the two girls kept crossing. Frequently, indeed, they worked together. The next time Alice Paul was arrested, however, Lucy Burns was not with her. This was at Norwich. Winston Churchill, a member of the cabinet, was holding a meeting. Outside, Alice Paul spoke at a meeting too—a protest against the government’s stand on Woman Suffrage. On this occasion, she was released without being tried. At the next Suffrage demonstration—at Limehouse in London—both girls assisted. On this occasion, Lloyd George was holding a meeting. Miss Paul and Miss Burns were arrested for trying to speak at a protest meeting outside, and were sentenced to two weeks in Holloway Jail. They went on a hunger-strike; but were released after five days and a half.
After they recovered from this experience, Miss Paul and Miss Burns motored to Scotland with Mrs. Pankhurst and other English Suffragists, in order to assist with the Scottish campaign. At Glasgow, the party organized a demonstration outside of a meeting held by Lord Crewe, a member of the cabinet. Arrested, they were released without trial. Proceeding northward, Miss Paul assisted in organizing the Suffrage campaign in East Fife, the district of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. At Dundee, Miss Paul and Miss Burns took part in a demonstration outside a meeting held by Winston Churchill. The two American girls and an English Suffragist were sentenced to ten days in Dundee Prison. After four days of hunger-strike, all were released. Each night during their imprisonment, great crowds of citizens marched round the prison singing Scotch songs as a means of showing their sympathy with the campaign. Upon their release, the Suffragists were welcomed at a mass-meeting over which the Lord Mayor presided. Thence they went to Edinburgh where they assisted in organizing a procession and pageant in Princess Street—one of the most beautiful and famous thoroughfares of the world. The pageant of the Scotch heroines who had made sacrifices for liberty is still remembered in Scotland for its beauty. The next job was less agreeable. The two American girls were sent to Berwick-on-Tweed to interrupt with a protest a meeting of Sir Edward Grey, then Minister of Foreign Affairs. Miss Paul made the interruption, was arrested, but was released on the following day without going to trial. Miss Burns was not arrested that time.
Next in Bermondsey, one of the slum districts of London, they waged a plain, old-fashioned electoral campaign to defeat a candidate. When this was over, Miss Paul, in company with a Miss Brown, was sent to make a Suffrage protest at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the Guildhall. They were arrested, of course, and were sentenced to thirty days in Holloway Jail. They hunger struck, and were forcibly fed. This experience left its mark on Miss Paul’s health for some time; it was several weeks after her release before she was strong enough to travel. But in January, 1910, she sailed for America—and arrived the pale, emaciated creature who so shocked Mabel Vernon.
Lucy Burns tells an amusing story of Alice Paul’s experiences in England. Lord Crewe was to speak at a meeting at Glasgow, and Alice Paul was delegated to represent the Suffragists at that meeting and to heckle the speaker. That meant that she must conceal herself in the building, where the meeting was to take place, the night before. The building was a big, high one—St. Andrew’s Hall, the girls remember the name—and it was surrounded by a high, formidable iron fence. The night before Lucy Burns walked with Alice Paul to the Hall and helped her to climb to the top of this fence. Then Alice Paul jumped down into the grounds and Lucy Burns left her there. There was some building going on at this hall and with great difficulty Alice Paul climbed the scaffolding to the high second story and settled herself on a roof to spend the night. It rained all night; and of course she had no protection against the wet. And after all this discomfort, when daylight broke, laborers coming to work on a neighboring building observed the strange phenomenon of a woman lying on a second-story roof. They reported her and she was ignominously led down and out.
In the summer of 1912, Lucy Burns returned to America. Alice Paul visited her in Long Island. For some time now, Alice Paul had been considering the Suffrage situation of the United States in its national aspect. Here, she broached to Lucy Burns her idea of working for a Constitutional Amendment in Washington—her belief that with six States enfranchised—with six States that could be used as a lever on Congress—the time had come when further work in State campaigns was sheer waste. More even than English conditions, American conditions favored the policy of holding the Party in power responsible in regard to Suffrage. In England, there was no body of women completely enfranchised. In America there were approximately two million women voters who, completely enfranchised, could command a hearing from the politicians. She felt that such a campaign in America would be more productive of result for still another reason. In pursuing that policy in England, the Suffragists were often placed in the embarrassing position of defeating Suffragists and putting in anti-Suffragists. But in America, no matter what Party was in power, only Suffrage senators and representatives could be elected from the Suffrage States. In other words, if, in defeating the Party in power they defeated Suffragists—as was inevitable in the Suffrage States—other Suffragists as inevitably took their places. Moreover, there was no immediate motive urging senators and representatives from the Suffrage States—although often they were individually helpful—to convert senators and representatives of their own Party from non-Suffrage States. Were their Party in jeopardy at home, however, that motive was instantly supplied. Also, Alice Paul thought that it was more dignified of women to ask the vote of other women than to beg it of men.
Alice Paul was the first to apply this policy to the Suffrage situation in the United States. As late as 1917, other Suffrage leaders, as well as members of Congress, were reiterating that there was no such thing as a Party in power in the United States, that that idea was brought from England by Alice Paul and was not adapted to our American institutions.
The two girls concocted a scheme for starting federal work in Washington. They went with it to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, to Anna Howard Shaw, to Harriot Stanton Blatch, to Mary Ware Dennett. Lucy Burns pictures Alice Paul at that last interview—“a little Quakerish figure, crumpled up in her chair and for the first time I noticed how beautiful her eyes were.” Finally Alice Paul went to the Convention of the National American Association at Philadelphia. She talked with Jane Addams. Alice Paul suggested that she be allowed to come to Washington at her own expense to begin work on Congress for the passing of a Constitutional Amendment. She agreed to raise the necessary money. Jane Addams brought this suggestion before the Board of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, urged its acceptance. It was approved. The Board appointed a Committee consisting of Alice Paul, Chairman; Lucy Burns, Vice-chairman; Crystal Eastman. Later in Washington, Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and Mary Beard joined that Committee. Alice Paul went first to Philadelphia and collected money for a few days. Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, who, Miss Paul says, was one of the first to say, “I have always believed that the way to get Suffrage is by a federal amendment,” gave her name; gave money; collected money.
And so—all alone—Alice Paul came to Washington.
III
ALICE PAUL AND LUCY BURNS
Alice Paul is a slender, frail-looking young woman, delicately colored and delicately made. The head, the neck, the long slim arms, and the little hands look as though they were cut out of alabaster. The dense shadowy hair, scooping with deeper accessions of shadow into great waves, dipping low on her forehead and massing into a great dusky bunch in her neck, might be carved from bronze. It looks too heavy for her head. Her face has a kind of powerful irregularity. Its prevailing expression is of a brooding stillness; yet when she smiles, dimples appear. Her eyes are big and quiet; dark—like moss-agates. When she is silent they are almost opaque. When she talks they light up—rather they glow—in a notable degree of luminosity. Her voice is low; musical; it pulsates with a kind of interrogative plaintiveness. When you ask her a question, there ensues, on her part, a moment of a stillness so profound, you can almost hear it. I think I have never seen anybody who can keep so still as Alice Paul. But when she answers you, the lucidity of exposition, the directness of expression! Always she looks you straight in the eye, and when she has finished speaking she holds you with that luminous glow. Her tiny hands make gestures, almost humorous in their gentleness and futility, compared with the force of her remarks.
In the endless discussions at Headquarters—discussions that consider every subject on earth and change constantly in personnel and point of view—she is always the most silent. But when at last she speaks, often there ensues a pause; she has summed it all up. Superficially she seems cold, austere, a little remote. But that is only because the fire of her spirit burns at such a heat that it is still and white. She has the quiet of the spinning top.
As for her mentality ... her capacity for leadership ... her vision.... There is no difference of opinion in regard to Alice Paul in the Woman’s Party. With one accord, they say, “She is the Party.” They regard her with an admiration which verges on awe. Mentally she walks apart; not because she has any conscious sense of superiority, but because of the swiftness, amplitude, and completeness with which her mind marches—her marvelous powers of concentration and her blazing devotion to the work.
I think no better description can be given of her than to quote the exact phrases which her associates use in talking of her. Winifred Mallon speaks of her “burning sincerity.” Helena Hill Weed imputes a “prescience” to her. Anne Martin says, “She is the heart, brain, and soul of the Woman’s Party,” and “Her mind moves with the precision of a beautiful machine.” Nina Allender sums her up as “a Napoleon without self-indulgence.” She said that when at the hearing in 1915, Congressmen tried to tangle Alice Paul they found it an impossibility; everything in Alice Paul’s mentality was so clear; there was nothing to tangle. She added, “There are no two minds to Alice Paul.” “My mother describes her,” she concluded, “as a flame undyingly burning.”
This is Maud Younger’s tribute:
She has in the first place a devotion to the cause which is absolutely self-sacrificing. She has an indomitable will. She recognizes no obstacles. She has a clear, penetrating, analytic mind which cleaves straight to the heart of things. In examining a situation, she always bares the main fact; she sees all the forces which make for change in that situation. She is a genius for organization, both in the mass and in detail. She understands perfectly, in achieving the big object, the cumulative effect of multitudes of small actions and small services. She makes use of all material, whether human or otherwise, that comes along. Her work has perpetual growth; it never stagnates; it is always branching out. She is never hampered or cluttered. She is free of the past. Her inventiveness and resourcefulness are endless. She believes absolutely in open diplomacy. She believes that everything should be told; our main argument with her was in regard to the necessity for secrecy in special cases. She is almost without suspicion; and sometimes with a too-great tendency towards kind judgment in the case of the individual. It seems incredible that with all these purely intellectual gifts, she should possess an acute appreciation of beauty; a gift for pageantry; an amazing sense of humor.
Lucy Burns says:
When Alice Paul spoke to me about the federal work, I knew that she had an extraordinary mind, extraordinary courage and remarkable executive ability. But I felt she had two disabilities—ill-health and a lack of knowledge of human nature. I was wrong in both. I was staggered by her speed and industry and the way she could raise money. Her great assets, I should say, are her power, with a single leap of the imagination, to make plans on a national scale; and a supplementary power to see that done down to the last postage stamp. But because she can do all this, people let her do it—often she has to carry her own plans out down to the very last postage stamp. She used all kinds of people; she tested them through results. She is exceedingly charitable in her judgments of people and patient. She assigned one inept person to five different kinds of work before she gave her up. Her abruptness lost some workers, but not the finer spirits. The very absence of anything like personal appeal seemed to help her.
Lucy Burns at the Head of the “Prison Specialists.”
These Women, All of Whom Served Terms in Jail, Are Wearing
a Reproduction of Their Prison Garb.
Photo Copr. Harris and Ewing, Washington, D. C.
Lucy Burns is as different a type from Alice Paul as one could imagine. She is tall—or at least she seems tall; rounded and muscular; a splendidly vigorous physical specimen. If Alice Paul looks as though she were a Tanagra carved from alabaster, Lucy Burns seems like a figure, heroically sculptured, from marble. She is blue-eyed and fresh-complexioned; dimpled; and her head is burdened, even as Alice Paul’s, by an enormous weight of hair. Lucy Burn’s hair is a brilliant red; and even as she flashes, it flashes. It is full of sparkle. She is a woman of twofold ability. She speaks and writes with equal eloquence and elegance. Her speeches before Suffrage bodies, her editorials in the Suffragist are models of clearness; conciseness; of accumulative force of expression. Mentally and emotionally, she is quick and warm. Her convictions are all vigorous and I do not think Lucy Burns would hesitate for a moment to suffer torture, to die, for them. She has intellectuality of a high order; but she overruns with a winning Irishness which supplements that intellectuality with grace and charm; a social mobility of extreme sensitiveness and swiftness. In those early days in Washington, with all her uncompromising militantism, Lucy Burns was the diplomat of the pair; the tactful, placating force.
I asked a member of the Woman’s Party who had watched the work from the beginning what was the difference between the two women. She answered, “They are both political-minded. They seemed in those early days to have one spirit and one brain. Both saw the situation exactly as it was, but they went at the problem with different methods. Alice Paul had a more acute sense of justice, Lucy Burns, a more bitter sense of injustice. Lucy Burns would become angry because the President or the people did not do this or that. Alice Paul never expected anything of them.”
Both these women had the highest kind of courage. Lucy Burns—although she admits that at Occoquan Workhouse, she suffered from nameless terrors—has a mental poise that is almost unsusceptible to fear. Alice Paul—although she can with perfect composure endure arrest, imprisonment, hunger-striking—acknowledges timidities. She does not like to listen to horrors of any description, especially ghost-stories. They say though that, in the movies, she always particularly enjoyed pirates.
IV
F STREET AND THE EARLY DAYS
When Alice Paul arrived in Washington in December, 1912, she found a discouraging state of things. She had been given the address of Headquarters, but Headquarters had vanished. She had been given a list of people to whom she could turn for help, but most of them had died or moved away. At that time, Mrs. William Kent, who was subsequently to become one of her constant and able assistants, was Chairman of the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Two years before, when her husband was elected to Congress, Mrs. Kent came to Washington. When she was asked to become Chairman of this Committee she was told that it would entail no work. She must merely see that the bill was introduced and arrange hearings before the two committees. There was no thought of putting the Amendment through, and no lobbying for it. The National Association allowed Mrs. Kent ten dollars. At the end of the year she returned change. There were a few Suffrage clubs in Washington, but their activity was merely social. Alice Paul saw that the work had to be started from the very beginning. First of all they had to have Headquarters. She hired a little basement room at 1420 F Street. At a formal opening on January 2, 1913, Mrs. William Kent, presiding, introduced Alice Paul as her successor; and a plan for federal work was laid before the Suffragists of the District of Columbia. Of course no one at the meeting guessed that she was present at a historic occasion.
Alice Paul began work at once. Nina Allender says that one Sunday a stranger called. She was wearing “a slim dress and a little purple hat and she was no bigger,” Mrs. Allender held up her forefinger, “than that.” The call was brief and it was unaccompanied by any of the small talk or the persiflage which distinguishes most social occasions. But when the door closed, a few moments later, mother and daughter looked at each other in amazement. Mrs. Evans had promised to contribute to Suffrage a sum of money monthly. Mrs. Allender had promised to contribute to Suffrage a sum of money monthly. Mrs. Evans had agreed to do a certain amount of work monthly. Mrs. Allender had agreed to do a certain amount of work monthly. Their amazement arose partly from the fact that they had not been begged, urged, or argued with—they had simply been asked; and partly from the fact that, before the arrival of this slim little stranger, they had no more idea of contributing so much money or work than of flying. But they agreed to it the instant she requested it of them.
This is a perfect example of the way Alice Paul works. There may be times when she urges, even begs; but they appear to be rare. She often forgets to thank you when you say yes; for she has apparently assumed that you will say yes. She does not argue with you when you say no—but you rarely say no. She has only to ask apparently. Perhaps it is part the terseness with which she puts her request. Perhaps it is part her simple acceptance of the fact that you are not going to refuse. Perhaps it is her expectation that you will understand that she is not asking for herself but for Suffrage. Perhaps it is the Quaker integrity which shines through every statement. Perhaps it is the intensity of devotion which blazes back of the gentleness of her personality and the inflexibility of purpose which gives that gentleness power. At any rate, it is very difficult to refuse Alice Paul.
A member of the Woman’s Party, meeting her for the first time in New York and riding for a short distance in a taxicab with her, says that Alice Paul turned to her as soon as they were alone:
“Will you give a thousand dollars to the Woman’s Party?”
“No, I haven’t that amount to give.”
“Will you give one hundred dollars?”
“No.”
“Will you give twenty-five dollars?”
“No.”
“Will you——”
“I’ll give five dollars.”
Mrs. Gilson Gardner says that one day, in the midst of the final preparations for the procession of March 3, she came to Headquarters. Alice Paul, it was apparent, was in a state of considerable perturbation. At the sight of Mrs. Gardner she said, “There’s Mrs. Gardner! She’ll attend to it.” She went on to explain. “The trappings for the horses have been ruined. Will you order some more? They must be delivered tomorrow night.” Mrs. Gardner says that she had no more idea how to order a trapping than a suspension bridge, but—magic-ed as always by Alice Paul’s personality—she emitted a terrified “Yes,” and started out. She walked round and round the block a dozen times, reviewing her problem, and casting about her looks of an appalled desperation. Suddenly she espied a little tailor shop, and in it, at work, a little tailor. She approached and confided her problem to him. Mrs. Gardner kept shop while he went to Headquarters and got the measurements. He delivered the trappings on time.
Later in the history of the Woman’s Party, Margery Ross came to Washington to spend the winter with a cousin.
She was young and pretty. She established herself there and began to enjoy herself. She was a Suffragist. One day, out of a clear sky, Alice Paul said: “Miss Ross, will you go to Wyoming on Saturday, and organize a State Convention there within three weeks?” “Why, Miss Paul,” the girl faltered, “I can’t. My plans are all made for the winter. I’ve only just got here.” Nevertheless, in a few days, Miss Ross started for Wyoming. There were only eight members of the Congressional Union in that State, and yet three weeks later she had achieved a State Convention with one hundred and twenty delegates.
Perhaps, however, the story which best illustrates Miss Paul’s power to make people work is one of Nina Allender’s. One must remember that Mrs. Allender is an artist. One day Alice Paul telephoned her to ask her if she would go the next day to Ohio to campaign for the Woman’s Party. Mrs. Allender, who had no more expectation of going to Ohio than to the moon, replied: “I’m sorry. It’s impossible. You see, we have just moved. The place is being papered and painted, and I’ve got to select the wallpaper.” “Oh, that’s all right,” Alice Paul suggested. “I’ll send a girl right up there. She’ll pick your paper for you and see that it’s put on.” In the end, of course, Mrs. Allender chose her own paper. But although she did not go to Ohio the next day, she went within a week.
When Alice Paul asked Maud Younger to deliver the memorial address on Inez Milholland, Miss Younger was at first staggered by the idea. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how to do it.”
“Oh,” directed Alice Paul in a dégagé way, “just write something like Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.”
The first Headquarters consisted of one long basement room, partitioned at the back into three small rooms of which two were storerooms, and one Miss Paul’s office. This opened into a court. Later when the Suffragist was published, they had rooms upstairs; sometimes one, sometimes more, according to their funds. By the first anniversary, they had expanded to ten rooms. Later still, they had two whole floors.
Almost all the work was done by volunteers. All kinds of people worked for them. Comparatively idle women of the moneyed class gave up matinées, teas, and other social occasions; stenographers, who worked all day long, labored until midnight. Anybody who dropped into Headquarters for any purpose was put to work. Once a distinguished lawyer from a western city called on business with Alice Paul.
“Would you mind addressing a few envelopes?” asked Alice Paul when the business was concluded. The distinguished lawyer, whose own office was of course manned by a small army of stenographers, smiled; but he took off his coat and went to work.
Alice Paul’s swift, decisive leadership was accepted, unquestioningly. Her word was immutable. One day an elderly woman was observed at a typewriter, painfully picking at it with a stiff forefinger. It was obvious that with a great expenditure of time and energy, she was accomplishing nothing.
“Why are you doing that?” somebody asked curiously.
“Because Alice Paul told me to,” was the plaintive answer.
Most of the work was done in the big front room. The confusion of going and coming of the volunteer workers; the noise of conflicting activity; conversation; telephones; made concentrated thinking almost impossible. The policeman on the beat said that a light burned in Headquarters all night long. That was true. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns used to work far into the morning because then, alone, were they assured of quiet. There were times though when Alice Paul worked all day, all night and sitting up in bed, into the next morning. She never lost time. Later when she picketed the White House, she used to take a stenographer with her and dictate while on picket duty.
Volunteer work is of course not always to be depended upon. It is eccentric and follows its own laws. There would be periods when Headquarters would be flooded with help. There came intervals when it was almost empty. Sara Grogan, herself a devoted adherent, tells how in this case, she used to go out on the streets and ask strangers to help. Volunteer workers—if they were housekeepers or the mothers of families—learned, on their busy days, to give F Street a wide berth. As they had no time to give and as it was impossible to say no to Alice Paul, the streets about Headquarters were as closed to them as the streets of his creditors to Dick Swiveller. It was perhaps this experience which taught Alice Paul what later became one of her chief assets—her power to put to use every bit of human material that came her way; which developed in her that charitable willingness, when this human material failed in one direction, to try it in another; and another; and another. Rarely did she reject any offer of help, no matter how untrained or seemingly untrainable it was. I asked Mabel Vernon how she got so much work—and such splendid work of all kinds—out of amateurs. She answered, “She believed we could do it and so she made us believe it.”
In those days, Alice Paul herself was like one driven by a fury of speed. She was a human dynamo. She made everybody else work as hard as possible, but she drove—although she did drive—nobody so hard as herself. Winifred Mallon said, “I worked with Alice Paul for three months before I saw her with her hat off. I was perfectly astonished, I remember, at that mass of hair. I had never suspected its existence.” For a long time, Alice Paul deliberately lived in a cold room, so that she could not be tempted to sit up late to read. It was more than a year before she visited the book-shop opened by a friend because, she said, “I should be tempted to buy so many books there.” Anne Martin says that she believes Alice Paul made a vow not to think or to read anything that was not connected with Suffrage until the Amendment was passed. There was certainly no evidence of her reading anything else. They make the humorous observation at Headquarters now that the instant the Amendment had passed both Houses, Alice Paul began to permit herself the luxury of one mental relaxation—the reading of detective stories. But in those early days she worked all the time and she worked at everything. Somebody said to Lucy Burns, “She asks nothing of us that she doesn’t do herself,” and Lucy Burns answered dryly, “Yes, she’s annoyingly versatile.”
Not only did Alice Paul ask you to work but after you had agreed to it, she kept after you. “She ‘nagged’ us”-they say humorously at Headquarters. Once, just before leaving for Chicago, Alice Paul appointed a certain young person chairman of a certain committee, with power to select chairmen of ten other committees to arrange for a demonstration when the Suffrage Special returned. This was four weeks off and yet in three days from Chicago came a telegram: “Wire me immediately the names of your chairmen!”
But just as Alice Paul never thanked herself for what she was doing, it never occurred to her to thank anybody else. And perhaps she had an innate conviction that it was egregious personally to thank people for devotion to a cause. However that did not always work out in practice, naturally.
Once a woman, a volunteer, who had worked all the morning reported to Alice Paul at noon. She retailed what she had done. Alice Paul made no comment whatever, but asked her immediately if she would go downtown for her. The woman refused; went away and did not come back. Alice Paul asked a friend for an explanation of her absence. “She is offended,” her friend explained. “You did not thank her for what she did.” “But,” exclaimed Alice Paul, “she did not do it for me. She did it for Suffrage. I thought she would be delighted to do it for Suffrage.” After that, however, Alice Paul tried very hard to remember to thank everybody. Once a party member said to her, as she was leaving Headquarters, “I have a taxi here, Miss Paul—can’t I take you anywhere?” “No,” Alice Paul answered abruptly. She was halfway down the stairs when she seemed to remember something. Instantly she turned back and said, “Thank you!” Another time, somebody else announced that she was offended because Alice Paul had not thanked her, and was going to leave. A friend went to Alice Paul.
“Mrs. Blank is leaving us. I am afraid you have offended her.”
“Where is she?” Alice Paul demanded, “I will apologize at once.”
“For what?” the friend inquired.
“I don’t know,” Alice Paul answered, “anything!”
Like Roosevelt, Alice Paul had a remarkable news sense. She was the joy of newspaper men. Ninety per cent of the Woman’s Party bulletins got publicity as against about twenty per cent of others. A New Orleans editor said they were the best publicity organization in the country. Gilson Gardner compares her to a Belasco, staging the scene admirably but, herself, always in the background.
Later, when the first stress was over, her companions spoke of the joy of work with her. They marveled at that creative quality which made her put over her demonstrations on so enormous a scale and the beauty with which she inundated them.
Maud Younger tells of going with her one night to the Capitol steps, when she painted imaginatively, on the scene which lay outstretched before her, the great demonstration which she was planning: wide areas of static color here, long lines of pulsating color there, laid on in great splashes and welts, like a painter of the modern school. Above all, her companions took a fearful joy in the serene way in which she brushed aside red tape, ignored rules. She would decide on some unexpected, daring bit of pioneer demonstration. Her companions would report to her regarding restrictions. “What an absurd rule,” she would remark, and then proceed calmly to ignore it. “Oh, Miss Paul, we can’t do that!” was the commonest exclamation with which the fellow workers greeted her plans. But always they did do it because she convinced them that it could be done. After the death of Inez Milholland, Alice Paul decided to hold a memorial service in Statuary Hall at the Capitol.
“Oh, Miss Paul, we can’t do that! Memorial services are held there only for those whose statues are in the Hall.” But in the end she did it. When her Committee spoke about it to the officials who have Statuary Hall in charge they said, “One thing we cannot permit. You cannot go up into the gallery because the doors open from that gallery into rooms containing old and valued books and those books might be stolen.” The police said, “No, you must not hang curtains over those openings in case a Senator wants to pass through.” Later the police themselves were helping Alice Paul to place the purple, white, and gold pennants about the gallery; they themselves were piling around their standards, in order to hold them straight, those same old and valued books; they themselves were standing on stepladders to help her hang curtains before those unsealable openings.
When the Suffrage Special returned, Alice Paul decided to hold a welcoming banquet in the dining-room of the beautiful new Washington railroad station. She sent somebody to ask this privilege of the authorities. At first, of course, they said, no, but in the end, of course, they said, yes. The Woman’s Party hired a band to help in the welcome. Alice Paul observed that the man who played the horn was so tall that he obscured an important detail in the decoration. She asked him to stand in another part of the band group. Of course he answered that that was impossible, that the horn always stood where he was standing, but in the end, of course, he stood where Alice Paul told him to stand.
Late in the history of the Woman’s Party, somebody discovered that Alice Paul had never seen an anti-Suffragist. At a legislative hearing during ratification they pointed out one to her—a beautiful one. “She looks like a Botticelli,” Alice Paul said—and gazed admiringly at her for the rest of the hearing.
Her companions marveled, I reiterate, at Alice Paul’s creative power. That did not manifest itself in demonstrations alone. Her policy had creative quality. It had a wide sweep. It moved on wings and with accumulating force and speed. Her work in Washington started slowly, though with sureness of attack, but all the time it heightened and deepened. From 1913 to 1919 it never faltered. Sometimes changes in outside affairs made changes in her self-evolved plan, but they never stopped it, never even slowed it. From the beginning she saw her objective clearly; and always she made for it. Activities that may often have seemed to the callow-minded but the futile militancy of a group of fanatics were part of a perfectly co-ordinated plan. Moreover, she had always reserve ideas and always a buried ace. Sapient members of the Party—those who were close to her—believe that she used only a part of an enormous scheme; that she was prepared far into the future and for any possible contingency. They wonder sometimes how far that creative impulse reached ... what form it would later ... and later ... and later have taken. Yet she proceeded slowly, giving every new form of agitation its chance; prudent always of her reserves. The instant one kind of demonstration exhausted its usefulness, she moved to the next. She wasted no time on side issues, on petty hostilities, on rivalries with other organizations.
But the quality that, above all, informed her other qualities, the quality that she first of all brought to the Suffrage situation, the quality that made her associates regard her with a kind of awe, was her political-mindedness, and political-mindedness was not at all uncommon in the Woman’s Party. It was, perhaps, its main asset, although initiative and efficiency, speed, and courage of the most daring order marked it. But Alice Paul’s political-mindedness had quality as well as quantity. When Hughes was made the Republican nominee for the 1916 election, Alice Paul asked him to declare for National Suffrage. He was exceedingly dubious. It is obvious that, in asking favors of a politician, it is necessary to prove to him that action on his part will not hurt him in the matter of votes and may help him. On this point, Alice Paul said in effect:
“Your Party consists of two factions, the old, stand-pat Republicans and the Progressives. Now, if you put a Suffrage plank in your platform, you will not alienate the Progressives, because the Progressives have a Suffrage plank, and the old stand-pat Republicans will not vote for a Democrat no matter what you put in your platform.”
When in the same election campaign Hughes went West, and the West turned to Wilson, it became evident, however much the Woman’s Party diminished the prestige of Wilson, it could not defeat him. Numerous advisers suggested to Alice Paul to withdraw her speakers from the campaign.
Alice Paul answered, “No; if we withdraw our speakers from the campaign, we withdraw the issue from the campaign. The main thing is to make the Suffrage Amendment a national issue that the Democrats will not want to meet in another campaign.”
After the election, somebody said to her, “The people of the United States generally think you made a great mistake in fighting Wilson. They think your campaign a failure.” Alice Paul answered, “In this case, it is not important what the people think but what the Democratic leaders know.”
The most magical thing about Alice Paul’s political-mindedness was, however, a quality which is almost indescribable. Perhaps it should be symbolized by some term of the fourth dimension—although Helena Hill Weed’s happy word “prescience” comes near to describing it. Maud Younger gives an extraordinary example of this. She says again and again, lobbyists would come back from the Capitol with the news of some unexpected manœuver which perplexed or even blocked them. Congressmen, themselves, would be puzzled over the situation. Again and again, she has seen Alice Paul walk to the window, stand there, head bent, thinking. Then, suddenly she would come back. She had seen behind the veil of conflicting and seemingly untranslatable testimony. She had, in Maud Younger’s own words, cloven “straight to the heart of things.” Often her lobbyists had the experience of explaining to baffled members of Committees in Congress the concealed tactics of their own Committee.
It was small wonder that they were so busy at Headquarters during those first months. They were preparing for a monster demonstration in the shape of a procession which was to occur on March 3, 1913, on the eve of President Wilson’s first inauguration. That procession, which was really a thing of great beauty, brought Suffrage into prominence in a way the Suffragists had not for an instant anticipated. About eight thousand women took part. The procession started from the Capitol, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House and ended in a mass-meeting at the Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Although a permit had been issued for the procession, and though this carried with it the right to the street, the police failed to protect the marchers as had been rumored they would. The end of the Avenue was almost impassable to the parade. A huge crowd, drawn from all over the country, had appeared in Washington for the Inauguration festivities. They chose to act in the most rowdy manner possible and many of the police chose to seem oblivious of what they were doing. Disgraceful episodes occurred. Secretary of War Stimson had finally to send for troops from Fort Meyer. There was an investigation of the action of the police by a Committee of the Senate. The official report is a thick book containing testimony that will shock any fine-minded American citizen. Ultimately, the Chief of Police for the District of Columbia was removed.
The investigation, however, kept the Suffrage procession in the minds of the public for many weeks. It almost over-shadowed the Inauguration itself.
On this occasion, the banner—in a slightly modified form to be afterwards always known as the Great Demand banner—was carried for the first time. This banner marched peremptorily through the history of the Woman’s Party until the Suffrage Amendment was passed. It said:
WE DEMAND AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE
UNITED STATES ENFRANCHISING THE WOMEN OF THE COUNTRY.
On March 3 there arrived in Washington a man who was that day a simple citizen of the United States. The next day he was to become the President of the United States. As Woodrow Wilson drove from the station through the empty streets to his hotel, he asked, “Where are the people?”
The answer was, “Over on the Avenue watching the Suffrage Parade.”
V
MAKING THE FEDERAL AMENDMENT AN ISSUE
The first great demonstration of the Congressional Committee—the procession of March 3—had been designed to attract the eye of the country to the Suffragists. It succeeded beyond their wildest hopes. Thereafter it became a part of the policy of the Congressional Committee—later, the Congressional Union, and later still, the National Woman’s Party—to keep the people watching the Suffragists. The main work of the Congressional Committee, however, focussed directly on Congress, as of course Congress alone could pass a Constitutional Amendment. They appealed to Congress constantly, by different methods, and through different avenues. They appealed to Congress through the President of the United States, through political leaders, through constituents. It is one way of describing their system to say that they worked on Congress by a series of electric shocks delivered to it downwards from the President, and by a constant succession of waves delivered upwards through the people. This pressure never ceased for a moment. It accumulated in power as the six years of this work went on.
When President Wilson arrived in Washington for his inauguration, the first thing brought to his notice was Suffrage agitation. The Congressional Committee thereafter kept Suffrage constantly before him. If not actually opposed to Suffrage in 1913, Woodrow Wilson had every appearance of opposition; certainly he was utterly indifferent to it. But Alice Paul believed that he was amenable to education on the subject, and she proceeded to educate him. Her theory proved to be true, but the process took longer than she had anticipated. Her methods of course aroused storms of criticism; but in the end they triumphed. The President’s action during the six years’ siege was the attitude of all politicians. That is to say, for a long time he made general statements of a vaguely encouraging nature to the Suffragists, but for a long time he actually did nothing. Every accepted method of convincing him of the justice of the cause was tried. Deputation after deputation waited on him and stated their case. Then he began to move. He came out for Woman Suffrage as a principle; he voted for it in New Jersey but he still believed that the enfranchisement of woman must come by States. In 1917, his position, except for these minor admissions, was exactly that of 1913. As far as the Suffrage Amendment was concerned, he had not budged an inch. The Woman’s Party then tried desperate remedies and afterward more and more desperate remedies. These always produced results—towards the end, immediate results. But at the beginning of this period, the Suffragists found that the instant they relaxed, the President relaxed; his attention departed from Suffrage. This always happened. Then the Congressional Committee began to exert a little more pressure, and the President’s attention came back to Suffrage. In the long attacking process to which Alice Paul subjected him, she put him in untenable position after untenable position. He moved from each one of them by some new concession. In the end, he himself procured the last vote necessary to pass the Amendment in the Senate.
Alice Paul admires Woodrow Wilson profoundly. She admires his powers of leadership; his ideals; his persistence; his steadfastness; his resolution. “He is a man,” she says, “who considers one thing at a time. Suffrage was not in his thought at all until we, ourselves, injected it there. And it was not in the center of his thought until the picketing was well along.” She believed always that, when the President was made to think that he must act in regard to Suffrage, he would put it through.
Immediately after his inauguration, President Wilson announced that a special session of Congress would be called on April 7. At once the Congressional Committee decided to bring to his attention the fact that there was no subject which more urgently demanded treatment in this session than Woman Suffrage. Three deputations were therefore organized to ask him to recommend the Federal Amendment in the message by which he should convene this special session. These deputations—and all subsequent ones—were organized by Alice Paul.
The first deputation waited on President Wilson on March 17. This deputation consisting of four women was led by Alice Paul herself. Although individual Suffragists had interviewed previous presidents, this was the first deputation which had ever appeared with a request for action before a President of the United States. President Wilson’s reply to their remarks was that the subject would receive his most careful attention.
The episode was one of the most amusing of the early history of the Congressional Committee. The President received the deputation in the White House offices. When they entered, they found four chairs arranged in a row with one in front of them, like a class about to be addressed by a teacher. The atmosphere was so tense that all the women felt it and were frightened. Alice Paul spoke first and said that women wanted Suffrage considered by Congress at once, as the most important issue before the country. All spoke in turn. One woman was so terrified that she petrified when her turn came. “Don’t be nervous,” the President reassured her and she finally proceeded. To this first group the President made the statement that so astounded Suffragists all over the country—that Suffrage had never been brought to his attention, that the matter was entirely new. He added that he did not know his position and would like all information possible on the subject.
The Congressional Committee gave him time to give the subject this careful attention, and then a second deputation waited on the President on March 28 to furnish him with the information he lacked. This deputation was led by Elsie Hill, and it represented the College Equal Suffrage League. The President replied to their remarks that this session of Congress would be so occupied with the tariff and the currency that the Suffrage measure could not be considered.
A third deputation waited on the President on March 31. It was led by Dr. Cora Smith King, and it was composed of influential members of the National Council of Women Voters. This delegation told the President that the women voters, who numbered approximately two million, were much interested in the proposed Suffrage Amendment. They also asked him to recommend it in his message. His reply to them was the same as to the college women: that this special session would be so occupied with the tariff and currency that the Suffrage measure could not be considered.
In the meantime, the Congressional Committee had notified Suffragists all over the United States that a Suffrage Amendment would be introduced in this special session of Congress; asking them to urge the President to indorse Suffrage in his forthcoming message; and to request their Representative in Congress to support Suffrage when it was introduced. Letters poured into Washington from the remotest corners of the country.
This was the beginning of that intimacy which the Congressional Committee—afterwards the Congressional Union, afterwards the National Woman’s Party—established with its sympathizers and members all over the country. In the nature of things—the political situation being changeable, and demanding always subtle, delicate, and often swift and decisive handling—the actual work at Washington had to be planned and executed by a limited number. But those few must be able, forceful, and swiftly executive spirits. Their adherents all over the country were however kept as closely and constantly as possible in touch with that changing situation.
In addition, the Congressional Committee did all possible preliminary work with the incoming members of this Congress. The result on the Progressive members was encouraging. Although there was a Woman Suffrage Committee in the Senate, there was none in the House. Thitherto, the Suffrage question had been sent to the Judiciary Committee, the graveyard of the House. As a result of the work of the Congressional Committee, the Progressive Caucus, which met before the new Congress assembled, gave its unqualified indorsement to the proposal to create a Woman Suffrage Committee in the House. The Congressional Committee canvassed the Democratic members of the House and urged them to take similar action. The Democratic Caucus, however, entirely ignored the question.
Having brought Suffrage to the attention of the new President by the monster procession of March 3, the Congressional Committee proceeded to bring it to the attention of the new Congress by a second great demonstration. This was in support of the Federal Amendment, and it took place on the opening day of the special session of the Sixty-third Congress, April 7, 1913. Delegates from each of the 435 Congressional districts in the United States assembled at Washington, bringing petitions from the men and women of their districts, asking for the passing of the Amendment. After the mass-meeting, the delegates marched, each behind her State banner, to the doors of Congress. The procession was greeted at the steps of the Capitol by a group of Congressmen. One of them welcomed the petitioners in a speech pledging his support to their cause. They then led the delegation into the Rotunda, where a long receiving line of members of Congress repeated his welcome. The Suffragists took places which had been set aside for them in the galleries of the Senate and the House and watched the presentation of the petitions.
Immediately after the petitions were presented, Representative Mondell (Republican) of Wyoming, and Senator Chamberlain (Democrat) of Oregon introduced the Suffrage Amendment. In the Senate this resolution was referred to the Woman’s Suffrage Committee, and in the House to the Judiciary Committee. Named, as is customary, after those who introduced it, the measure was known first as the Chamberlain-Mondell Amendment, and later as the Bristow-Mondell Amendment. It was in reality the famous Susan B. Anthony Amendment—first introduced into Congress in 1878 by Senator Sargent of California—exactly as she drew it up. The Anthony Amendment runs as follows:
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. Congress shall have power by appropriate legislation to enforce the provisions of this article.
On that same day—April 7, 1913—resolutions were introduced in the House to create a Woman Suffrage Committee similar to that in the Senate. This was only a tiny gain; for that Committee was not actually created until September, 1917. But a little later occurred what was a decided gain—the Senate created a Majority Committee on Woman Suffrage. The Woman Suffrage Committee in the Senate had been a Minority Committee thitherto. That meant that, as its Chairman belonged to the Minority Party, its existence was purely nominal.
All these four months, the five women who constituted the Congressional Committee had been working at a tremendous speed. They had been made into a Committee on the understanding that the Committee would itself raise the money necessary for its work. Four months’ experience had convinced them that the work of securing a Federal Amendment required a much greater effort than five women, working alone, could possibly give to it. The various State associations composing the National American Woman Suffrage Association were engrossed in their State campaigns. Little could be expected from them in the way of personal service or financial aid. When the Congressional Committee appealed to individuals, they found that these individuals were giving their time and service to the particular State in which they lived. The Congressional Committee realized that they must have an organization back of them to assist with work and money, whose sole object was national work. The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage was therefore formed by the Congressional Committee, with the approval of the President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
The Congressional Union described itself as “a group of women in all parts of the country who have joined together in the effort to secure the passage of an Amendment to the United States Constitution enfranchising women.” It offered its members the privilege of making the offices at Washington their headquarters while in the city. It adopted colors—at the happy suggestion of Mrs. John Jay White—of purple, white, and gold. The Union grew rapidly, and was later admitted as an auxiliary to the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The Congressional Committee acted as the Executive Committee of this Congressional Union. Throughout the year the Union was of great assistance to the Committee. It reinforced its work in every possible way.
The Suffrage resolution was now before the Committees in both Houses. The Congressional Union concentrated on securing a hearing before the Senate Committee. Every effort was made to focus the attention of Suffragists and of the country at large on the situation. A hearing was arranged before the Committee, at which Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, presided. In addition to this public hearing, the members of the Senate Committee were interviewed. And pursuing its course of keeping Suffragists in touch with what was happening at Washington, the Congressional Committee circularized Suffragists all over the country with letters which informed them that the resolution was before the Senate Committee, and asked them to write to this Committee urging a favorable report.
After six months of work occurred the first political triumph of the Congressional Union. On May 13, the Senate Committee voted to make a favorable report upon the Suffrage resolution. There, however, matters rested—with a favorable vote, but still in the Committee. The Suffragists, however, besieged the Committee with requests to make the report and finally, on June 13, the report was made to the Senate—the first favorable one in twenty-one years. This put the measure on the Senate Calendar.
Immediately the Congressional Union turned its attention to proving to the Senate how widespread was the support of this measure in the United States.
A petition was circulated in every State in the Union. It asked for the passage of the Amendment, and was addressed to the Senate. Thousands of signatures were obtained. During June and July, these petitions were collected and brought to Washington. Their arrival at the Capitol on July 31 was the occasion of the third great demonstration. The petitioners came from every State, and they came in every possible way. They came by train, by motor, by caravan. They held meetings and collected signatures to the great petition in the districts through which they passed. All the delegations converged in the little town of Hyattsville, outside Washington. There—at the village grandstand, they were met by members of the Congressional Union and of the Woman Suffrage Committee of the Senate. The reading clerk of the House of Representatives announced the members of the delegations as they arrived in their several motors. Members of the Senate Committee addressed them on behalf of the Congressional Committee of the Congressional Union. The Mayor of Hyattsville delivered to them the key of the town. Mary Ware Dennett replied for the delegates, and accepted the key of the town from the Mayor. The automobiles then formed into a procession, of which the first motor carried the members of the Senate Committee. The long line of cars, fluttering flags, and pennants, and each bearing the banner of its State delegation, proceeded from Hyattsville along the old Bunker Hill Road to the Capitol. There, the petitions were handed to the various Senators. Three Senators spoke against Suffrage, but twenty-two in presenting the petitions spoke in favor of it.
This was the second triumph of the Congressional Union. Suffrage was debated in Congress—the first time since 1887.
The Congressional Committee now turned its attention to the work of convincing Congress of the interest in the Amendment of the women voters of the West. A Convention of the National Council of Women Voters was held in Washington on August 13, 14, and 15. Emma Smith Devoe, National President of the Council, and Jane Addams, National Vice-President, presided. Upon a motion by Jane Addams, the Council passed the following Resolution, strongly indorsing the Amendment:
Whereas at the present time one-fifth of the Senate, one-seventh of the House, and one-sixth of the electoral vote comes from equal Suffrage States; and
Whereas, as a result of this political strength in Congress, due to the fact that four million women of the United States are now enfranchised, there is great hope of the passage in the near future of the Federal Suffrage Amendment; therefore be it
Resolved, That the National Council of Women Voters concentrate its efforts upon the support of this Federal Amendment.
The Rules Committee of the House of Representatives on August 14 then gave the Council a hearing on the question of creating a Suffrage Committee in the House.
The Convention ended in a mass-meeting at the Belasco Theatre, which, in spite of the midsummer heat of Washington, was crowded to the doors. The platform was filled with Congressmen from Suffrage States. The women speakers iterated and reiterated the demand of the women voters of the West for immediate action by Congress, and the Congressmen supported them.
In addition to these—processions, pilgrimages, petitions, deputations, and hearings, hundreds of public meetings organized by the Washington Headquarters—were held everywhere. A constant series of deputations from their own constituencies besieged the members of the Senate. All this was making its inevitable impression on Congress. Those days of the Sixty-third Congressional Session were crowded ones. The President had told the Suffragists that so much time must be given to the tariff and the currency that there would be none left for Women Suffrage. Yet more time was devoted to the Woman Suffrage question than ever before. On September 18, Senator Wesley L. Jones of Washington delivered a speech in the Senate, in which he urged that the Suffrage Resolution should be passed. In the House, a number of Representatives formerly opposed to the resolution now declared that they would support it when it came before them.
In the meantime, the tariff and currency had finally been disposed of. A new Congress was to convene on December 1. Ever since his inauguration, Suffrage agitation of a strong, dignified, and convincing character had been brought to the President’s attention. Suffragists hoped, therefore, that the President would feel that he could recommend the Suffrage Amendment to this new Congress. They decided, however, to present the matter to him in a forcible way. A fourth deputation of seventy-three women from his own State of New Jersey came to Washington in the middle of November.
This delegation arrived on Saturday afternoon, November 15. Until Monday morning, they tried in every possible way to arrange for an appointment with the President at the White House. Representative McCoy of New Jersey endeavored to assist them in this matter. Their efforts and his efforts were fruitless.
Monday morning, at 10 o’clock, Alice Paul telephoned the Executive Office that, as it was impossible to find out what hour would suit the convenience of the President, the delegation was on its way to the White House. She explained that they would wait there until the President was ready to receive them, or would definitely refuse to do so. The clerk at the Executive Office declared over the telephone that it would be impossible to see the President without an appointment. He assured Alice Paul that such a thing had never been done. Representative McCoy called up Headquarters, and reported his failure to secure an appointment. On being told that the delegation was going to call on the President anyway, he protested vehemently against its proceeding to the White House without the usual official preliminaries. Alice Paul’s answer was a single statement,—“The delegation has already started.”
In double file the seventy-three New Jersey women marched through Fifteenth Street, through Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Treasury Department, and up to the White House grounds. And, lo, as though their coming spread paralyzing magic, everything gave way before them. Two guards in uniform stood at the gate. They saluted and moved aside. The seventy-three women marched unchallenged through the grounds to the door of the Executive Office. An attendant there requested them courteously to wait until after their two leaders should be presented to the President by his Secretary.
The request that these seventy-three New Jersey women made to President Wilson was that he should support the Constitutional Amendment enfranchising women. President Wilson replied: “I am pleased, indeed, to greet you and your adherents here, and I will say to you that I was talking only yesterday with several Members of Congress in regard to the Suffrage Committee in the House. The subject is one in which I am deeply interested, and you may rest assured that I will give it my earnest attention.”
It is to be seen that the President’s education had progressed—a little. To previous delegations, he had stated merely that the tariff and currency would take so much of the attention of Congress that there would be no time for the Suffrage question. In advocating a Suffrage Committee in the House, he had made an advance—tiny, to be sure, but an advance.
In the last month of 1913 occurred in Washington the Forty-fifth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The Convention opened with a mass-meeting at the Columbia Theatre. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw presided. Jane Addams and Senator Helen Ring Robinson were the principal speakers. At the opening meeting of the Convention, Lucy Burns repeated the warning of the Congressional Union to the Democratic Party:
The National American Women Suffrage Association is assembled in Washington to ask the Democratic Party to enfranchise the women of America.
Rarely in the history of the country has a party been more powerful than the Democratic Party is today. It controls the Executive Office, the Senate, and more than two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives. It is in a position to give us effective and immediate help.
We ask the Democrats to take action now. Those who hold power are responsible to the country for the use of it. They are responsible, not only for what they do, but for what they do not do. Inaction establishes just as clear a record as does a policy of open hostility.
We have in our hands today not only the weapon of a just case; we have the support of ten enfranchised States—States comprising one-fifth of the United States, one-seventh of the House of Representatives and one-sixth of the electoral vote. More than three million, six hundred thousand women have a vote in Presidential elections. It is unthinkable that a national government which represents women, and which appeals periodically to the Suffrages of women, should ignore the issue of their right to political freedom.
We cannot wait until after the passage of the scheduled administration reforms. These reforms, which affect women, should not be enacted without the consent of women. Congress is free to take action on our question in the present Session. We ask the administration to support the Woman Suffrage Amendment in Congress with its full strength.
On December 4, a second meeting was held before the Rules Committee of the House on the creation of a Woman Suffrage Committee in the House of Representatives. Ida Husted Harper reminded the Rules Committee at this hearing that nine States and one Territory had enfranchised their women, and that nearly four million women could vote at a Presidential election. Mary Beard showed by an analysis of the vote which sent President Wilson to the White House that the Democratic strength was already threatened, and how it could strengthen itself by espousing the Suffrage Cause.
Notwithstanding the appeal of the seventy-three New Jersey women, the President’s message to Congress on December 2 failed to make any mention whatever of the Suffrage Amendment.
In consequence, a Committee representing each State in the Union was appointed by the Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to wait upon the President and protest. President Wilson was prevented by illness from seeing any visitors during the week the Convention met. The Convention, therefore, authorized the appointment of a Committee of fifty-five delegates, who should remain in Washington until the President was able to see them. The interview took place the following Monday at 12:30. This was the fifth deputation to President Wilson. The President said, according to the Washington Post of December 9:
I want you ladies, if possible—if I can make it clear to you—to realize just what my present position is. Whenever I walk abroad, I realize that I am not a free man; I am under arrest. I am so carefully and admirably guarded that I have not even the privilege of walking the street. That is, as it were, typical of my present transference from being an individual with his mind on any and every subject, to being an official of a great Government and, incidentally, or so it falls out under our system of Government, the spokesman of a Party. I set myself this strict rule when I was Governor of New Jersey and have followed it as President, and shall follow it as President, that I am not at liberty to urge upon Congress policies which have not had the organic consideration of those for whom I am spokesman.
In other words, I have not yet presented to any legislature my private views on any subject, and I never shall; because I conceive that to be a part of the whole process of government, that I shall be spokesman for somebody, not for myself.
When I speak for myself, I am an individual; when I speak for an organic body, I am a representative. For that reason you see, I am by my own principles shut out, in the language of the street, from starting anything. I have to confine myself to those things which have been embodied as promises to the people at an election. That is the strict rule I set for myself.
I want to say that with regard to all other matters I am not only glad to be consulted by my colleagues in the two Houses, but I hope that they will often pay me the compliment of consulting me when they want to know my opinions on any subject. One member of the Rules Committee did come to ask me what I thought about this suggestion of yours of appointing a special committee for consideration of the question of Woman Suffrage, and I told him that I thought it was a proper thing to do. So that as far as my personal advice has been asked by a single member of the Committee, it has been given to that effect. I wanted to tell you that to show you that I am strictly living up to my principles. When my private opinion is asked by those who are co-operating with me, I am most glad to give it; but I am not at liberty until I speak for somebody besides myself to urge legislation upon the Congress.
Dr. Shaw stepped forward to address the President within the circle of deeply attentive hearers, spoke very quietly and firmly in her clear and beautiful voice.
“Of the two—the President and Dr. Shaw,” said one of the spectators afterward, “Dr. Shaw spoke with greater authority, as if with the consciousness of a perfectly just cause. The President was less assured, more hesitating.”...
“As women are members of no political Party, to whom are they to look for a spokesman?” Dr. Shaw asked.
“You speak very well for yourself,” said the President, laughing.
“But not with authority,” said Dr. Shaw earnestly.
The deputation then left the President’s Office.
Editorially in the Suffragist of December 13 appears:
The rule that President Wilson has so strictly set for himself, is a rule not laid down in the Constitution nor in the practice of preceding Presidents, nor in the President’s own acts, nor in his own words.
Nevertheless, the statement of President Wilson to the President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association is of great value to the Suffrage movement. The President therein declares that he is only the spokesman of his Party and that he will initiate only legislation which has been endorsed by his Party. He puts the whole question of Federal legislation for Woman Suffrage directly up to the Democratic Party in Congress, and instructs Suffragists throughout the country to hold that Party responsible for the fate of the Constitutional Amendment enfranchising women. He has outlined for us, therefore, the policy of bringing effective pressure to bear on the national Democratic Party from all parts of the country, in an effort to make them realize soon what they must recognize finally, that it is more expedient for them as a Party to advocate Suffrage than to ignore and resist it.
Nevertheless, the President’s education had progressed another step. For the first time, he felt the necessity of explaining—and by implication—of excusing himself.
This visit to the President completed the principal work of the year 1913 on the part of the Congressional Committee and the Congressional Union.
Many things had been done in this year, in addition to what has already been indicated. A district of Columbia Branch of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage was organized; this was composed largely of Congressmen. Lectures, receptions, tableaux, benefits, teas had been given, and a Suffrage School opened in Washington. Seven large mass-meetings, exclusive of Convention meetings, were held at Washington. An uninterrupted series of indoor and outdoor meetings, numbering frequently from five to ten a day, constantly reminded Congress of the Suffrage question. A summer campaign, carried on by Mabel Vernon and Edith Marsden, covered the resort regions of New Jersey, Long Island, and Rhode Island, and extended into the South.
Twenty-seven thousand dollars had been raised at the Washington Headquarters, and spent. And there were results. The chief one was that it focussed the attention—not only of Suffragists themselves—but of politicians and the country at large on the Federal Amendment.
June, 1913, brought Presidential Suffrage to the women of Illinois. Only Presidential Suffrage; but that was very important. Astute women everywhere were watching the situation; drawing their own and independent conclusions.
Toward the end of the year, the Congressional Union established an official weekly organ, the Suffragist, edited by the well-known publicist, Rheta Childe Dorr. The first issue appeared on November 15, and it has been published ever since.
Lucy Burns, whose editorials were marvels of ironic logic, of forceful condensed expression, succeeded Mrs. Dorr. Then came Vivian Pierce, a trained newspaper woman; Sue White, well-known to Suffragists for her splendid work in Tennessee; Florence Boeckel, able, efficient, untiring. Pauline Clarke, Clara Wold, Elizabeth Kalb contributed supplementing editorial work.
The Suffragist has reported the activities first of the Congressional Union, and next of the Woman’s Party. It is an extremely entertaining periodical, always interesting, often brilliant, essentially readable. It contains editorials, reports, sketches, verse, cartoons. Many famous people have contributed articles. The reports of the workers in the Woman’s Party make much the most interesting reading however. Many famous artists have given it drawings. The most pertinent, though, are those contributed by a member of the Congressional Union—Nina Allender.
Mrs. Allender’s fertile and original pencil has traced during the entire eight years of its history a running commentary on the progress of the Woman’s Party. She has a keen political sense. She has translated this aspect of the feminist movement in terms that women alone can best appreciate. Her work is full of the intimate everyday details of the woman’s life from her little girlhood to her old age. And she translates that existence with a woman’s vivacity and a woman’s sense of humor; a humor which plays keenly and gracefully about masculine insensibility; a humor as realistic, but as archly un-bitter as that of Jane Austen. It would be impossible for any man to have done Mrs. Allender’s work. A woman speaking to women, about women, in the language of women.
There is no better place than here to emphasize the work of the Press Department. It will be apparent to the reader, as the story of the Woman’s Party unrolls itself, that the work of this department was very difficult and very delicate. The problem was twofold—to keep the action of the party always in the public eye and to bring out the underlying policy. This was not easy when the demonstrations of the Woman’s Party were of the kind whose initial effect was to antagonize. Nevertheless, the Press Department minimized that antagonism and minimized by a propaganda which was as restrained in expression as it was vivid in description. Newspaper men generally felt that they could depend on the Woman’s Party for news. Florence Brewer Boeckel, who has been press chairman since 1915, is responsible for this magnificent press campaign. But she has not lacked help. Eleanor Taylor Marsh, Alice Gram, Beulah Amidon, and Margaret Grahan Jones, have given her steady assistance.
Early in the year 1914, the Congressional Union resigned from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The constitution of the National Association permitted a Suffrage body to join it in one of two ways. By one, a new clause imposed a five per cent tax in dues upon its budget. By another, it paid annually one hundred dollars dues. The Congressional Union felt that a five per cent tax upon its budget would seriously cripple its work. The Union offered to become an associated body. The National Association refused this offer, and the Congressional Union, therefore, became an independent organization.
VI
PRESSURE ON CONGRESS
The Suffragist of January 24, 1914, carried the following editorial. In it is repeated the policy which the Congressional Union had in the beginning adopted—that of holding the party in power responsible.
The policy of the Congressional Union is to ask for a Woman Suffrage Amendment from the Party in power in Congress, and to hold them responsible for their answer to its request.
This policy is entirely non-partisan, in that it handles all Parties with perfect impartiality. If the Republicans were in power, we would regard them in their capacity as head of the Government as responsible for the enfranchisement of women. If the Progressives or Socialists should become the majority Party, and control the machinery of Congress, we would claim from them the right to govern ourselves, and would hold them responsible for a refusal of this just demand.
Today the Democrats are in power. They control the executive office, the Senate, and the House. They can, if they will, enfranchise women in the present session; their refusal to do so establishes a record which must necessarily be taken into consideration by women when the Party seeks the re-indorsement of the people at the polls.
This policy simply recognizes the effect of our American system of Government. Ours is a government by Parties. The majority by secret caucus, by the control of committees, by the power of patronage, by their appeal to Party responsibility, by the interest of Party solidarity, control the legislation of the House. The present government recognizes this method of administration with especial, and indeed admirable, frankness. It owes much of its popularity today to its willingness to assume full responsibility for all the legislation enacted in Congress; for whatever is done, and what is not done. The two great measures of the last session, tariff and currency, passed rapidly and successfully through both Houses by the frank use of Party discipline.
Let us by all means deal directly with the people who can give us what we want. The Democrats have it in their power to enfranchise women.... This is not only our most logical method of work, but it is also the most economical and expeditious. Assuming that the Democrats yield nothing in the present session, we can, when Congress closes, concentrate our forces on those points where the Party is weakest, and thus become a force worth bargaining with. At the present moment, the Senate is the weakest point in the Democratic armor. To defeat even a few Democratic Senators in November, 1914, would make a serious breach in the Party organization.... If, on the other hand, we set out to attack every anti-Suffragist in Congress, we should have hundreds to defeat, and every man would be safe in whose constituency we did not organize. Imagine that, if at the end of arduous labor, we had contrived to defeat a number of Democratic anti-Suffragists, and an equal number of Republican anti-Suffragists, we should by immense sacrifice have completely nullified our own efforts, and left the strength of the Parties just where it was before....
What should we do in our enfranchised States, if we confined ourselves to the plan of supporting individual Suffragists and attacking individual anti-Suffragists, irrespective of their Party affiliations? All the candidates for office in the enfranchised States are Suffragists. Is it suggested that we be inactive in the only places where we possess real political power? Our problem at the present moment is to use the strength of women’s votes in national elections so as to force attention to the justice of our claim from the present administration....
But the Congressional Union cannot make it too clear that we are not opposed to any Party today. We are asking the Democrats to help us; we are awaiting their answer. We will frame no policy for or against them or any other Party until this session closes, and the great opportunity of the present Administration has come to an end. We entertain steady and undiminished hopes that the Administration will recognize the justice and expediency of women’s claims to self-government. The movement is making immense strides in every part of the country; our present voting strength is great, and will undoubtedly be increased in the present year. It takes no great imaginative reach for the ordinary Congressman to foresee the day when Woman Suffrage will be an established fact throughout these United States.
There is already a strong sentiment in the Upper House for Woman Suffrage, and a rapidly-growing interest in it in the Lower House. We have no reason to expect wilful obstinacy from our American Congressmen. We Americans are adaptable and imaginative, and can shape ourselves with peculiar ease to coming events. The Democratic Party, if it is wise, will pass our Amendment through Congress in the present session.
The first-year Congressional Committee, consisting of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Mary Beard, Crystal Eastman, and Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, continued their work in 1914 with the Congressional Union under the name of the Executive Committee of the Congressional Union; but it was increased by the addition of Mrs. William Kent, Elsie Hill, Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Mrs. Donald R. Hooker, and Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont.
The year opened with a meeting at the home of Mrs. William Kent in Washington. Plans for the coming year were submitted at that meeting. Among them was one for a nation-wide demonstration on May 2, in which resolutions supporting the Federal Amendment were to be passed. This was to be followed by a great demonstration in Washington on May 9, at which those resolutions should be presented to Congress. Among them also was another plan for the appeal to the women voters of the West for political action in support of a Federal Amendment, if that Amendment had not been passed before the next election. Nine thousand dollars were pledged on the spot for these undertakings. The work on the great demonstration of May 2 began at once, and was pushed rapidly during the opening months of the year.
In the meantime the work on Congress was continued. It will be remembered that a proposal for the formation of a Suffrage Committee in the House had been before the Rules Committee since April 7, 1913, that it had been the subject of two hearings arranged by the Congressional Union. The first action in regard to this was simple and decisive. The Democratic Members of the Rules Committee, who constituted a Majority Committee, met first, apart from their Republican and Progressive colleagues, and, by a vote of four to three, decided against the formation of a Suffrage Committee. They then went through the form of a meeting with the Republican and Progressive Members on January 24. The resolution, creating the Suffrage Committee, was lost by a vote of four to four.
The Congressional Union, however, realized that the final power with regard to Congressional action was with the Democratic Caucus. They determined therefore—in order that the responsibility for inaction or opposition might be placed on the Democrats as a Party—immediately to appeal to that Caucus to overturn the decision of the Rules Committee. The necessary signatures were secured to a petition calling for the Democratic Caucus of the House to take up the question of the formation of this much-desired Suffrage Committee. The Caucus met on February 3, 1914, to consider this subject. The Democratic Party had a choice of two courses. It could order the Rules Committee, which it of course controlled, to give a favorable report to the House on the resolution creating a Suffrage Committee. Or it could give no order at all of this kind; in which case it revealed itself as responsible for the adverse action of the Rules Committee.
What it did was to adopt a substitute resolution for the resolution providing for the creation of a Committee of Woman Suffrage.
That substitute resolution was: “Resolved, that the question of Woman Suffrage is a State and not a Federal question.”
This was the first time in the history of the country that either of the two great Parties had ever caucused on Woman Suffrage.
Editorially the Suffragist put the situation pithily to the women of America:
This is the definite lining up of the Democratic Party against Woman Suffrage as a national measure.... Unless the Democratic Party reconsiders its present position, Suffragists must necessarily regard that Party as an obstruction in the path of their campaign.... They (the Democratic Party) have three votes to lose in the Senate and they lose control of this government. There are nine States in which women vote for United States Senators. The result in the Senatorial elections in these States will undoubtedly depend largely upon the action on Suffrage taken by the Democratic Party.
Although the Congressional Union welcomed any simplification of the Congressional machinery as by the creation of a Suffrage Committee, its object was to secure action on the Suffrage Amendment. Since April 7, 1913, the Amendment had been before the Judiciary Committee in which it had been introduced by Representative Mondell. The Congressional Union asked for a hearing on the Amendment before this Committee. March 3, 1914, was set for that event.
Thitherto, these hearings had been dreary occasions, sparsely attended. There was the half-circle of Committee members, a trifle perfunctory in its attitude, the scattered, tiny audience, very little interested or stirred; the few Suffragists pleading—eloquently, it is true—but pleading; using the inevitable Suffrage arguments, unanswerable, but threadbare. The hearing of March 3 was very different. The Committee was electrically alert.... They listened intently.... For the first time at a Congressional hearing, propagandistic argument did not appear. The Suffragists appealed to the Committee to report the Suffrage Resolution to the House—not as a matter of justice to women—but as practical politics. They pointed out to the Committee that the women voters of the West would hold the Democratic Party responsible for the refusal of this Committee to make that report.
In the meantime, highly important things had been going on in the Senate. It will be remembered that the Suffrage Resolution had been placed upon the Senate Calendar in June, 1913. Ever since that date, it had been awaiting a vote. It could be voted on any time up to the close of the Sixty-third Congress (March 3, 1915).
At the beginning of the year 1914, more votes were pledged in its favor than had carried the Income Tax in the Senate, and sentiment in its favor was steadily increasing among the Senators. Moreover, the prospect that the Referendum elections of the coming autumn would add to the number of Suffrage States promised an increase of Suffrage strength in the Senate. There remained—as it transpired—a whole year before that Congress adjourned, in which the work of obtaining the vote could have gone on. These features of the situation made the Congressional Union most desirous that the Resolution should not be voted upon until every possible vote was won. However, Senator Ashurst, who had reported the Bill to the Senate, had it made “unfinished business” on March 2, 1914. It is the spirit of “unfinished business” that it must be brought up and voted on. In spite of the vigorous protests of the Congressional Union, and of many Suffragists in all parts of the country, it was brought to the vote on March 17. A two-thirds vote was necessary to carry it. It received thirty-five; a majority, it is true, of one vote; but failing of the necessary two-thirds majority by eleven. The Congressional Union blamed the Democratic leaders entirely for this premature vote, as they were fully informed that a vote at that time would mean defeat.
However, this was a memorable moment. It was the first time since 1887 that Suffrage had been voted upon in the Senate. And from the moment on March 2 when it was made “unfinished business” until March 17, when the vote was taken, the Senate debated it almost continuously.
On that same day—March 2—Senator Shafroth of Colorado introduced a resolution providing for a new Suffrage Amendment to the Federal Constitution. This was to become famous as the Shafroth-Palmer Resolution. It offered a path to the enfranchisement of women incredibly cluttered and cumbered. It reads:
Section 1. Whenever any number of legal voters of any State to a number exceeding eight per cent of the number of legal voters voting at the last preceding General Election held in such State shall petition for the submission to the legal voters of said State of the question whether women shall have equal rights with men in respect to voting at all elections to be held in such State, such question shall be so submitted; and if, upon such submission, a majority of the legal voters of the State voting on the question shall vote in favor of granting to women such equal rights, the same shall thereupon be deemed established, anything in the constitution or laws of such State to the contrary notwithstanding.
Compare this with the simplicity and directness of the original Susan B. Anthony Amendment:
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. Congress shall have power by appropriate legislation to enforce the provisions of this article.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association immediately rallied to the support of the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment; they continued to give to it their undivided work for two years.
But the Congressional Union—I quote the vigorous words of the Report of the Congressional Union for the year 1914:
The Congressional Union immediately announced its determination to support only the original Amendment, known popularly as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, and in Congress as the Bristow-Mondell Amendment. It maintained that to work at the same time for two Suffrage amendments to the National Constitution would enable the enemies of the bill to play one against the other. Believing that one amendment only must be supported, it felt that it was wise to support the amendment which would give Suffrage itself rather than an amendment which, after the same expenditure of effort would give only another method of obtaining Suffrage—that is, would merely establish the initiative on the Suffrage question. The Union, moreover, feeling that the bane of the Suffrage cause at present was too many and not too few referendums, held that to pass a Federal Amendment—which would inaugurate thirty-nine referendum campaigns would involve the movement in a dissipation of resources such as its enemies would most deeply desire. Finally, it held that the passage of one Suffrage amendment to the National Constitution would make it extremely difficult to pass another; so that if the Shafroth Bill became a law, it would probably indefinitely postpone the passage of the Anthony Amendment, and doom the movement to years of referendum campaigns.
Not at all daunted by the action of the Senate in defeating the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, nor by the introduction there of the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment, the Congressional Union at once secured the re-introduction in the Senate of the defeated Amendment. The measure was out of the Senate only twenty-two hours. The following day, Senator Bristow introduced a resolution identical with the one which had been lost. On April 7, it was again reported from the Woman Suffrage Committee, and took its place on the Calendar of the Senate. This was just a year from the date of its original introduction to this Senate. It was the second favorable report of the Senate Committee in one Congress.
Here we leave the work with Congress for a while, and take up the matter of the education of the President. We must go back a few months.
VII
PRESSURE ON THE PRESIDENT
Although five different deputations—Congressional Union members; college women; women voters; New Jersey women; women from all the States—had called on the President, it was apparent that he had undergone no change in his attitude toward the Suffrage question. On February 2, 1914, therefore, another deputation, the sixth—and an exceedingly interesting one—marched to the White House. This deputation included women from the industrial world and they represented more than fifty trades in which women are engaged. They carried banners which bore quotations from the President’s New Freedom: “We Have Got to Humanize Industry,” and “I Absolutely Protest Against Being Put into the Hands of Trustees.”
At the mass-meeting, preliminary to waiting upon the President, Melinda Scott, an organizer of the Women’s Trade Union League, said:
No one could be serious when they maintained that the ballot will not help the working woman. It has helped the working-man to better his conditions and his wages. Men of every class regard the ballot as their greatest protection against the injustice of other men. Women even more than men need the ballot to protect their especial interests and their right to earn a living.... We want a law that will prohibit home-work.... We hear about the sacredness of the home. What sacredness is there about a home when it is turned into a factory, where we find a mother, very often with a child at her breast, running a sewing machine? Running up thirty-seven seams for a cent. Ironing and pressing shirts seventy cents a dozen, and children making artificial flowers for one cent a gross. Think of it—one hundred and forty flowers for one cent. Taking stitches out of coats, helping their mothers where they have finished them for six cents a coat. These women have had no chance to make laws that would protect themselves or their children....
The organized working woman has learnt through her trade union the power of industrial organization, and she realizes what her power would be if she had the ballot.... Men legislating as a class for women and children as a class have done exactly what every other ruling class has done since the history of the world. They discriminate against the class that has no voice. Some of the men say, “You women do not need a ballot; we will take care of you.” We have no faith in man’s protection.... Give us the ballot, and we will protect ourselves.
This army of four hundred arrived safely, with perfect police escort, at the doors of the White House. They were amazed to learn that the President would see only twenty-five of the women. He had said he would “receive the delegation.” The selected number then went in, the remaining three hundred and seventy-five waited in line outside.
Margaret Hinchey, a laundry worker of New York, said:
Mr. President: It is shaking and trembling, I, as a laundry worker, come here to speak in behalf of the working women of the United States. I have read about you, and think you are fair, square, on the level, and so much a real democrat, that I believe when it is made clear to you how much we working women, who organize in the factories, the mills, the laundries, and the stores, can help every true democrat, you will use your power to wipe out this great injustice to women by giving us a vote.
Rose Winslow said:
Mr. President: I am one of the thousands of women who work in the sweated trades, and have been since a child, who give their lives to build up these tremendous industries in this country, and at the end of the years of work, our reward is the tuberculosis sanatorium or the street. I do not think to plead with you, Mr. President, nor make a regular speech. I do not speak to Presidents every day; it hasn’t been my job, so I don’t do it very gracefully.
Here the President interrupted Miss Winslow by stating that he did not see why she should be so nervous, as Presidents are perfectly human. Miss Winslow then continued:
Yes, I know, and that is why I can speak to you, because you are human and have a heart and mind and can realize our great need. I do not need to remind you how we women need the ballot, etc.
The President said:
I need not tell you that a group of women like this appeals to me very deeply indeed. I do not have to tell you what my feelings are, but I have already explained—because I feel obliged to explain—the limitations that are laid upon me as the leader of a Party. Until the Party, as such, has considered the matter of this very supreme importance and taken its position, I am not at liberty to speak of it; and yet, I am not at liberty to speak as an individual, for I am not an individual. As you see, I either speak to it in a message, as you suggest, or I do not speak at all. That is the limitation I am under, and all I can say to you ladies, is that the strength of your agitation in this matter undoubtedly will make a profound impression.
In view of later opinions of the President in regard to his leadership—and in view of the fact that later even Democratic Congressmen referred to his “dictatorship”—his attitude to the women this day was most interesting.
Mrs. Glendower Evans, who was in charge of the deputation, said:
We understand your position and its difficulties quite well, Mr. President, but nevertheless we ask, where can we look for political action? We recognize that the verdict must come not from you alone, but from the whole Party. I do not ask you to break with your Party. What I ask is, will you use your influence within your Party? I do not ask the impossible, though I might from you, for you have done the impossible.
It is apparent that the President’s education was progressing. He was beginning to be struck with the strength of the Woman Suffrage agitation; although he still believed himself powerless to help in the work with Congress.
Early in June, 1914, the National Federation of Women’s Clubs meeting in Chicago, had given its indorsement, as an organization, to Woman Suffrage. Following this action by the Federation, another delegation—the seventh—of five hundred club women under the leadership of Mrs. Harvey W. Wiley, waited upon the President on June 30. I quote from the Suffragist:
The deputation had assembled for a preliminary mass-meeting at the Public Library.... Leaving the Library, the deputation, which extended over several blocks, marched in single files to the White House.... It passed through the Arcade and into the East Room.... Women were massed about the State Apartment, filling it from end to end, and leaving a hollow square in which Mrs. Ellis Logan and Mrs. Wiley and Rheta Childe Dorr awaited the President’s arrival. Preceded by his aide, the President entered....
“Mr. President,” said Mrs. Dorr, “we are well aware that you are the busiest of men. I shall therefore go directly to the point and tell you that our reason for calling on you today is to ask you if you will not use your powerful influence with Congress to have the Bristow-Mondell Amendment passed in this session.”
The President replied:
Mrs. Wiley and Ladies: No one can fail to be impressed by this great company of useful women, and I want to assure you that it is to me most impressive. I have stated once before the position which, as leader of a Party, I feel obliged to take, and I am sure you will not wish me to state it again. Perhaps it would be more serviceable if I ventured upon the confident conjecture that the Baltimore Convention did not embody this very important question in the platform which it adopted because of its conviction that the principles of the Constitution which allotted these questions to the State were well-considered principles from which they did not wish to depart.
You have asked me to state my personal position in regard to the pending measure. It is my conviction that this is a matter for settlement by the States, and not by the Federal Government, and, therefore, that being my personal conviction, and it being obvious that there is no ground on your part for discouragement in the progress you are making, and my passion being local self-government and the determination by the great communities into which this nation is organized of their own policy and life, I can only say that since you turned away from me as a leader of a Party and asked me my position as a man, I am obliged to state it very frankly, and I believe that in stating it I am probably in agreement with those who framed the platform to which allusion has been made.
I think that very few persons, perhaps, realize the difficulty and the dual duty that must be exercised, whether he will or not, by a President of the United States. He is President of the United States as an executive charged with the administration of the law, but he is the choice of a Party as a leader in policy. The policy is determined by the Party, or else upon unusual and new circumstances by the determination of those who lead the Party. This is my situation as an individual. I have told you that I believed that the best way of settling this thing and the best considered principles of the Constitution with regard to it, is that it should be settled by the States. I am very much obliged to you.
The President paused. He looked relieved. There was a moment’s silence, and then Mrs. Dorr said:
“May I ask you this question? Is it not a fact that we have very good precedents existing for altering the electorate by Constitutional Amendment?”
The President’s face changed. “I do not think,” he said, “that that has anything to do with my conviction as to the best way that it could be done.”
“It has not,” agreed Mrs. Dorr, “but it leaves room for the women of the country to say what they want through the Constitution of the United States.”
“Certainly it does,” the President said hastily, “there is good room. But I have stated my conviction. I have no right to criticize the opinions of those who have different convictions and I certainly would not wish to do so.”
Mrs. Wiley stepped forward. “Granted that it is a State matter,” she said, “would it not give this great movement an impetus if the Resolution now pending before Congress were passed?”
“But the Resolution is for an Amendment to the Constitution,” the President objected.
“The States would have to pass upon it before it became an Amendment,” said Mrs. Wiley. “Would it not be a State matter then?”
“Yes,” the President interrupted, “but by a very different process, for by that process it would be forced upon the minority; they would have to accept it.”
“They could reject it if they wished to,” said Mrs. Dorr. “Three-fourths of the States would have to pass it.”
“Yes,” the President said, with distinct annoyance, “but the other fourth could not reject it.”
“Mr. President,” said Mrs. Dorr, “don’t you think that when the Constitution was framed it was agreed that when three-fourths of the States wanted a reform, the other fourth should accept it also?”
The President was plainly disconcerted. He stepped back.
“I cannot say,” he replied frigidly, “what was agreed upon. I can only say that I have tried to answer your question, and I do not think it is quite proper that I submit myself to cross-examination.”
“Very well,” Mrs. Dorr said quietly. “We will not cross-examine you further.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” said Mrs. Wiley, “for your courtesy in receiving us.”
The President bowed. “I am very much obliged to you,” he said. “It has been a very pleasant occasion.”
In the Suffragist Lucy Burns said editorially:
The President has told a deputation of club women that they must win political freedom from State Legislatures; but not from him, not from Congress.
This position is obvious pretense. The national government has the power, granted it by the constitution, to enfranchise women. It has, therefore, the duty of doing so, if women’s claim to enfranchisement is just.
The President knows as well as we do the enormous difficulty of winning the vote by amending the Constitution of thirty-nine different States. It is amazing that a man can be found who will calmly direct women to take up this great burden when men are responsible for their need. Men alone, in all but ten States, have the power to change our laws. The good or evil of these laws is their praise or blame. It is a public injustice today that men deny to women in the ballot a means of self-protection which they are glad to possess themselves. Men are ethically on the defensive—particularly the men, or group of men, who from time to time monopolize political power. For the President of the United States, who incorporates in himself the power of the whole nation, and who is, therefore, more responsible than any other person today for the subjugation of women, to declare that he washes his hands of their whole case, is to presume upon greater ignorance among women than he will find they possess.
Nevertheless, we are specifically informed by the President that it is “not proper” for us to “cross-examine” him on the grounds of his refusal to help us.
Only fitfully do women realize the astounding arrogance of their rulers.
And later:
Some few curious commentaries cropped up editorially. Under the caption, “Heckling the President,” the New York Times says: “It certainly was not proper. The President of the United States is not to be heckled or hectored or made a defendant.... To catechise him when he had finished his speech to them is a thing never done by similar delegations of men.”
The Times has not grasped the fact that no similar delegation of men is possible. Men approach their own representative. If he disagrees with them, they have a legitimate remedy in their own hands, and can choose another representative at a duly appointed time. Women approach the President as members of a disfranchised class. The President does not represent them. He bears no constitutional relation to them whatever. If the President rejects their appeal, they have no legal means of redress. If they may not question the President on the justice of his refusal to help them, cannot question him gently and reasonably as they did—their position is indeed a subservient one.
And who told the Times that men never question the President “after he had finished his speech to them?” While the Tariff Bill was before Congress, representatives of men’s interests argued with him for hours. But they were men, and voters.
On January 6, 1915, another deputation—the eighth—of one hundred and fifty Democratic women appeared before the President. Mrs. George A. Armes, President of the Association of the National Democratic Women of America, introduced the speakers, Alberta Hill and Dr. Frances G. Van Gasken. He greeted Miss Hill with marked cordiality and listened attentively as she briefly and with great earnestness pointed out that, while the Federal Government protected men in the exercise of citizenship throughout the United States, a woman lost her right to vote when she crossed the line from a Suffrage to a non-Suffrage State. Miss Hill read the following extracts from the speech delivered by Mr. Wilson on the occasion of the formation of the Wilson and Marshall League at Spring Lake, New Jersey, two months after his nomination.
When the last word is said about politics, it is merely the life of all of us from the point of view of what can be accomplished by legislation and the administration of public offices. I think it is artificial to divide life up into sections: it is all of one piece though you can’t attend to all pieces of it at once.
And so when the women, who are in so many respects at the heart of life, begin to take an interest in politics, then you know that all the lines of sympathy and intelligence and comprehension are going to be interlaced in a way which they have never been interlaced before; so that our politics will be of the same pattern with our life. This, it seems to me, is devoutly to be wished.
And so when the women come into politics, they come in to show us all those little contacts between life and politics, on account of which I, for myself, rejoice that they have come to our assistance; they will be as indispensable as they are delightful.
The President listened with close attention, a smile quivering at the corners of his mouth. As she concluded, a ripple of amusement ran around the circle of auditors, and the President laughed outright.
“I cannot argue as well as you can,” he told Miss Hill with evident enjoyment. He said further:
I am most unaffectedly complimented by this visit that you have paid me. I have been called on several times to say what my position is in the very important matter that you are so deeply interested in. I want to say that nobody can look on the fight you are making without great admiration, and I certainly am one of those who admire the tenacity and the skill and the address with which you try to promote the matter that you are interested in.
But I, ladies, am tied to a conviction which I have had all my life that changes of this sort ought to be brought about State by State. If it were not a matter of female Suffrage, if it were a matter of any other thing connected with Suffrage, I would hold the same opinion. It is a long standing and deeply matured conviction on my part and therefore I would be without excuse to my own constitutional principles if I lend my support to this very important movement for an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Frankly I do not think that this is the wise or the permanent way to build. I know that perhaps you unanimously disagree with me but you will not think the less of me for being perfectly frank in the avowal of my own convictions on that subject; and certainly that avowal writes no attitude of antagonism, but merely an attitude of principle.
I want to say again how much complimented I am by your call and also by the confidence that you have so generously expressed in me, Mrs. Armes. I hope that in some respect I may live to justify that confidence.
VIII
THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RULES COMMITTEE
We now return to the work in Congress. Again it is necessary to go back into history a few months.
All these months, the work of organizing the nation-wide demonstration of May 2—which had been decided upon at the opening meeting of the Congressional Union for 1914—had been going on.
The Congressional Union sent organizers into all the States of the Union to make plans for the demonstration. Minnie E. Brooke went through every State in the South. Mabel Vernon, one of the organizers for the Congressional Union, traveled through the southwestern part of the country and up through California, ending her trip in Nevada. Crystal Eastman of the Executive Committee took care of the Northwestern States, Emma Smith DeVoe covered the Far Western States; Jessie Hardy Stubbs, the Middle Western States; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and Alice Paul, assisted by Olive Hasbrouck, New England and the Middle Atlantic States.
On February 12, the National American Woman Suffrage Association promised its co-operation also, and from that date aided in making the demonstration a success.
The demonstration—taking the form of parades in most cases, meetings in a few—occurred in at least one great city in every State. The following resolution was adopted at the various gatherings.
Resolved, that this meeting calls upon Congress to take immediate and favorable action upon the Bristow-Mondell Resolution enfranchising women.
The culminating demonstration occurred May 9 in Washington. There was a mass-meeting at the Belasco Theatre, and following this a procession starting promptly at three o’clock, marched to the Capitol. At the foot of the Capitol steps, the enormous gathering sang the Woman’s March. Then five hundred and thirty-one delegates representing every Congressional and Senatorial district in the country, bearing resolutions passed at the country-wide demonstrations, marched up the long steps into the great Rotunda of the Capitol. A Committee of Senators and Representatives awaited the delegates, received the resolutions and introduced them on the floor of each House of Congress.
Here, as always, Alice Paul visualized her work in pageantry. On this occasion, that pageantry was particularly beautiful. Zona Gale writes in the Suffragist:
“I shall watch it, but it will not mean anything to me,” said a visitor to me on Saturday, but that night she said: “I leaned out of my window, and held my screen up with one hand, and let the sun beat in my face for the forty minutes that you were passing, and I wept. To think of your being part of it—and caring like that—and the men there on the sidewalk holding back, by what right, what you ask!”
The effect of this lengthened—and therefore accumulative—nation-wide demonstration was immediately felt at the national Capitol. Between the dates of the demonstration throughout the States May 2, and the demonstration in Washington, May 9, the Judiciary Committee reported the Mondell Resolution without recommendation, but with an overwhelming vote, to the House. This marked an epoch in the Suffrage work in the United States; for Suffrage had never been debated on the floor of the House, and not since 1890 had it progressed beyond the Committee stage in the House. The Resolution rested on May 5 at the foot of the highly congested House calendar. On May 13, Representative Mondell introduced a Resolution asking time for an early consideration of the Suffrage Amendment. The adoption of this Resolution meant that the Amendment would be taken up, debated, and voted on.
The Rules Committee, to which the Resolution was referred, failed to act upon it. Suffragists began to besiege the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee, however, proved unamenable to argument, discussion, or entreaty.
Later in the year, in a speech at the Newport Conference, Lucy Burns said of the Rules Committee that it “adopted devious means for avoiding action on the Suffrage Resolution. It was difficult for them to vote against it, and it seemed difficult for them to vote for it. They apparently decided that the best policy for them to pursue was to take no action at all, so they hit upon the happy expedient of holding no meetings whatever.”
A detailed account of the action of the Rules Committee proves the adamancy of Party control. It gives some idea of the obstacles which ingenious politicians can put in the way of citizens, even though those citizens are making a perfectly legitimate request.
Mr. Henry, the Chairman of the Rules Committee, had declared in the spring that he thought it was out of the power of his Committee to take action (i.e. on the matter of the Suffrage Resolution which was only to allot time in the House for the discussion of the Suffrage Amendment) since the Suffrage Amendment had not been favorably acted upon at the last Democratic Caucus: “You may tell this to the Press. You may tell it to the newspapers,” Mr. Henry said; “my hands are tied.”
However, early in June, the Suffragist says, “Mr. Henry’s view of his political helplessness weakened slightly.” He promised to report out the Suffrage Resolution. But he could not be prevailed upon to state when he would do so. The Congressional Union, therefore, organized a series of deputations which visited the Rules Committee during all the long, hot summer and the long, hot fall. Deputations from nearly every State in the Union and from nearly every occupation and profession of women waited upon the members of the Rules Committee. The reader must remember always that they were asking—not that the Amendment be passed—only that a few hours be set aside for the discussion of the Suffrage question in the House of Representatives. Repeated deputations called upon individual members of the Committee. On June 10, the Committee met, but decided to postpone action on the Suffrage question till July 1. Mr. Henry left immediately for Texas. A large deputation came to Washington to be present at the July 1 meeting. Many of the most prominent members of the Club women’s Deputation of five hundred, who had called the afternoon of June 30 on the President, remained in Washington overnight, so that they might be present at the meeting.
When, however, they arrived at the Committee room, they were told that the Committee would not meet, although no notice had been given of any change of date of the meeting. Mr. Henry had not returned to Washington. There was a quorum of the Committee in town; but the Democratic members said that they were bound by a “gentlemen’s agreement” among themselves not to meet. August 1 was set for the next meeting.
On July 13, a deputation of more than a hundred members of the Congressional Union, led by Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Mrs. Gilson Gardner, called upon the individual members of the Rules Committee. They asked each member to sign a petition requesting the Acting Chairman, Mr. Pou, to call the Committee together for the purpose of reporting out the Resolution on the Suffrage Amendment. This petition was signed by the two Republican members of the Committee in Washington, and the one Progressive member. The two Democratic members then in Washington refused to sign. The petition was presented to Mr. Pou in his office by Representative Mondell.
Mr. Pou rose from his chair, viewing with amazement the numbers of the deputation as they filed into the room till all available space was occupied, leaving the majority of their number in the corridor. Mr. Pou definitely declined to call the meeting, although a quorum of the Committee was in the city, and although all of the Republican members on the Committee and the Progressive member had requested a meeting. Mr. Pou stated that he was bound by a “gentleman’s agreement” entered into by the Democratic members to hold no meetings of the Committee before August 1. He said, “The Democratic members agreed not to hold any meetings until August 1. In view of that understanding, I would not feel at liberty to call the Committee together.... When the Republicans were in charge, they decided what they were going to do; now that we are in charge, we decide what we are going to do.”
On August 1, a deputation consisting of Lucy Burns and Mrs. Gilson Gardner from the Congressional Union accompanied by Maude F. Clark, called upon Mr. Pou. The forthright Lucy Burns began. “Mr. Pou, today is the first day of August. You told us when a Committee of our Organization called upon you in July that the Democratic members of the Committee had a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ not to hold a meeting until August 1. Now that the day has come we should be glad to know when a meeting of your Committee will be held to consider House Resolution 514, allotting time for the consideration of the Suffrage Amendment in the House.”
Mr. Pou informed the delegation that Mr. Henry, Chairman of the Rules Committee, would return to Washington on Monday, August 3, and that a meeting of the Committee would be called for that day. Among other things, Mr. Pou made the significant statement, “The Rules Committee has in its keeping the policy of the Democratic Party in Congress.”
On August 3, a second delegation from the Congressional Union, consisting of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Dr. Clara E. Ludlow, went to attend the promised meeting at the office of the Chairman, Mr. Henry. The elusive Mr. Henry was at last visible in the flesh. He informed these women that no meeting of the Committee had been called for that day. He did not know when it would be called, nor what measures it would consider. He suggested that they call again in a few days.
On August 28, the Rules Committee finally met. A deputation from the Congressional Union presented themselves at the door. The deputation consisted of Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Minnie E. Brooke, Mrs. S. B. McDuffie, Virginia Arnold.
At the door of the Committee room, Mr. Henry’s secretary declared that it would be impossible for him to take a message or a card to Mr. Henry.
“I should be glad, then,” said the gently diplomatic Mrs. Gardner, “to send a card to other members of the Committee.”
“The Chairman has given orders,” said the secretary, “that no messages may be sent in to the Committee room.”
“I quite understand,” said Mrs. Gardner, “that Mr. Henry can speak for the majority members of the Committee, but surely not for the Republican and Progressive members, and I should like your permission to send word in to one of them.”
The secretary maintained that this was against Mr. Henry’s specific orders.
Mrs. Gardner then went on very gently: “It is not the desire of the deputation to disturb the Committee; but, on the other hand, it is the sense of the deputation that it is necessary to send the Committee a message. What would you suggest that we do?”
The secretary considered and decreed, “A message might be sent in by telephone.” Mrs. Gardner accepted the use of Mr. Henry’s desk telephone, called up Representative Kelly who was attending the meeting in the adjoining Committee room, and asked if he would bring the Suffrage Resolution to the attention of the Committee. Mr. Kelly promptly promised to call up the Suffrage Resolution if it were possible to do so. This colloquy effectively brought the matter before the Committee.
The Suffrage Resolution was brought up, but a substitute motion that the Committee adjourn was immediately made and carried. It was a tie vote, but Mr. Henry, as chairman, cast the deciding vote. The Committee accordingly adjourned without having taken action on the Suffrage Resolution.
The Congressional Union, undaunted, maintained its siege of the Rules Committee until Congress adjourned in October. Throughout the remaining months of that Congressional Session, however, the Rules Committee continued its policy of evasion. No action was taken before adjournment.
Of course, all this blocking of their efforts on the part of the Democrats made inevitable the election policy which the Congressional Union was about to adopt—that of holding them “responsible.”
IX
THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE WOMEN VOTERS
In the meantime, the Congressional Union had been forming an Advisory Council which continued to Support the Congressional Union—and later the Woman’s Party—with advice and work during the rest of its history. The personnel of the Advisory Council has changed from time to time; but always it has been a large body and an able one.
The list of membership has included many famous names; women political leaders; women trades-unionists; women of wealth and position; women active in their communities. It included professional women of every sort; doctors, lawyers, clergymen. It included artists of every description; actors, singers, painters, sculptors. It included publicists of every kind; fictionists, poets, dramatists, essayists. It included social workers of every class. And these women have represented all parts of the Union.
On August 29 and 30, this newly-formed Advisory Council met at Newport. Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont did everything to make the occasion a success. She threw open Marble House which, hung with the great purple, white, and gold banners of the Congressional Union and flooded with golden light, made an extraordinary background for the deliberations of the Conference. In every way possible for her she used the beauty and social prestige of Newport to give the occasion dignity, prominence, and publicity. Her daughter, the Duchess of Marlborough, had joined the Congressional Union just previous to this Conference. Little she thought and little the Congressional Union thought that as an English woman, she would be a voter, would be elected to the London City Council before her mother, an American woman, was enfranchised.
Here, for the first time, the plan of holding the Democratic Party—the Party in power—responsible for the slowness with which the Suffrage work was progressing, and, in consequence, of working against it, was adopted as a program actually to be carried out.
Lucy Burns made a magnificent speech on that occasion. She pointed out that the Democratic Party was in complete possession of the National Government, controlling the Presidential chair, the Senate, possessing an overwhelming majority in the House. She analyzed the working of Congress: she showed that our government is a government by Party: that no measures of importance had passed through the Sixty-third Congress without the backing of the Party in power: and that no measure could pass that Congress if opposed by that Party.
She amplified this thesis. She showed that the President, the leader of the Party, had seven times refused his powerful aid to the movement. She showed that in the Senate the Democratic leaders blocked the Suffrage measure by bringing it to a vote at a time when they acknowledged it would be defeated. She showed that in the House, the Rules Committee had consistently blocked the Amendment, both by preventing the creation of a Suffrage Committee and by preventing consideration of the Amendment in the House. And she proved by the words of the acting chairman of the Rules Committee that that Committee had in its keeping “the policy of the Democratic Party.” She showed that the Democratic Caucus had taken definite action against the Suffrage Amendment. It had declared that Suffrage was not a question for national consideration and so it had refused to sanction the creation of a Suffrage Committee.
Alice Paul, first asking the press to withdraw, outlined the proposed election program. She asked the members of the Conference not to reveal it until the middle of September when the Congressional Union would be ready to put it into practical operation. This is her speech on that occasion:
From the very beginning of our work in Washington, we have followed one consistent policy from which we have not departed a single moment. We began our work with the coming in of the present Congress and immediately went to the Party which was in control of the situation and asked it to act. We determined to get the Amendment through the Sixty-third Congress, or to make it very clear who had kept it from going through. Now, as has been shown, the Democrats have been in control of all branches of the Government and they are therefore responsible for the non-passage of our measure.
The point is first, who is our enemy and then, how shall that enemy be attacked?
We are all, I think, agreed that it is the Democratic Party which is responsible for the blocking of the Suffrage Amendment. Again and again that Party has gone on record through the action of its leaders, its caucus, and its committees so that an impregnable case has been built up against it. We now lay before you a plan to meet the present situation.
We propose going into the nine Suffrage States and appealing to the women to use their votes to secure the franchise for the women of the rest of the country. All of these years we have worked primarily in the States. Now the time has come, we believe, when we can really go into national politics and use the nearly four million votes that we have to win the vote for the rest of us. Now that we have four million voters, we need no longer continue to make our appeal simply to the men. The struggle in England has gotten down to a physical fight. Here our fight is simply a political one. The question is whether we are good enough politicians to take four million votes and organize them and use them so as to win the vote for the women who are still disfranchised.
We want to attempt to organize the women’s vote. Our plan is to go out to these nine States and there appeal to all the women voters to withdraw their support from the Democrats nationally until the Democratic Party nationally ceases to block Suffrage. We would issue an appeal signed by influential women of the East addressed to the women voters as a whole asking them to use their vote this one time in the national election against the Democratic Party throughout the whole nine States. Every one of these States, with one exception, is a doubtful State. Going back over a period of fourteen years, each State, except Utah, has supported first one Party and then another. Here are nine States which politicians are thinking about and in these nine States we have this great power. If we ask those women in the nine Suffrage States as a group to withhold their support from this Party as a group which is opposing us, it will mean that votes will be turned. Suppose the Party saw votes falling away all over the country because of their action on the Trust question—they would change their attitude on Trust legislation. If they see them falling away because of their attitude on Suffrage they will change their attitude on Suffrage. When we have once affected the result in a national election, no Party will trifle with Suffrage any longer.
We, of course, are a little body to undertake this—but we have to begin. We have not very much money; there are not many of us to go out against the great Democratic Party. Perhaps this time we won’t be able to do so very much, though I know we can do a great deal, but if the Party leaders see that some votes have been turned they will know that we have at least realized this power that we possess and they will know that by 1916 we will have it organized. The mere announcement of the fact that Suffragists of the East have gone out to the West with this appeal will be enough to make every man in Congress sit up and take notice.
This last week one Congressman from a Suffrage State came to us and asked us if we would write just one letter to say what he had done in Congress to help us. He said that one letter might determine the election in his district. This week the man who is running for the Senatorial election in another Suffrage State came to us and asked us to go out and help him in his State—asked us simply to announce that he had been our friend. Now if our help is valued to this extent, our opposition will be feared in like degree.
Our plan is this: To send at least two women to each of those nine States. We would put one woman at the center who would attend to the organizing, the publicity and the distribution of literature. We would have literature printed showing what the Democratic Party has done with regard to Suffrage in the Sixty-third Congress. We would have leaflets printed from the Eastern women appealing to the Western women for help, and we would have leaflets issued showing how much the enfranchised woman herself needs the Federal Amendment because most important matters are becoming national in their organization and can only be dealt with by national legislation. We could reach every home in every one of those nine States with our literature, without very great expense. One good woman at the center could make this message, this appeal from Eastern women, known to the whole State. The other worker would attend to the speaking and in six weeks could easily cover all the large towns of the State.
Why Is the Girl from the West Getting All the Attention?
Nina Allender in The Suffragist.
This is the plan that we are considering, and that we are hoping to put through. We would be very much interested to hear what you think about it and want, of course, to have your co-operation in carrying it through.
The Conference voted to unite behind the Bristow-Mondell Amendment in Congress and to support an active election campaign against candidates of the Democratic Party. It raised over seven thousand dollars to meet the expense of this campaign.
The details of the election campaign project were immediately worked out; organizers were selected and after a farewell garden party on September 14, they started for the nine enfranchised States. Headquarters were opened in San Francisco under Lucy Burns and Rose Winslow; in Denver, Colorado, under Doris Stevens and Ruth Noyes; in Phœnix, Arizona, under Jane Pincus and Josephine Casey; in Kansas City, Kansas, under Lola C. Trax and Edna S. Latimer; at Portland, Oregon, under Jessie Hardy Stubbs and Virginia Arnold; in Seattle, Washington, under Margaret Whittemore and Anne McCue; at Cheyenne, Wyoming, under Gertrude Hunter; at Salt Lake City, Utah, under Elsie Lancaster; at Boise City, Idaho, under Helena Hill Weed.
In these centers, open-air, drawing-room, and theatre meetings followed each other in rapid succession. In many districts, the campaigners canvassed from door to door. Window-cards, handbills, cartoons, moving-picture films, and voiceless speeches, calling upon the women voters to refuse their support to the Party which had blocked the National Suffrage Amendment, appeared everywhere from Seattle to Phœnix. A pithily worded Appeal to the Women Voters was placed in the hands of the women voters. Press bulletins describing the campaign against the Democratic candidates for Congress and reiterating the record made by the Democratic Party on the Suffrage question, were issued daily. Literature dealing with the record of the Democratic Party and with the value to the woman voter of a national Suffrage Amendment, were sent to innumerable homes in every Suffrage State.
The Suffragist, which teemed with reports of what these vigorous campaigners were doing, presents pictures which could have occurred nowhere in the world but the United States, and nowhere in the United States but the West. The speakers were interesting, amusing, full of information and enthusiasm. With a sympathy and understanding typically western, men and women responded immediately, responded equally to this original campaign.
All the time, of course, these speakers were educating the people of the United States in regard to the work of Congress. This was a new note in Suffrage campaigns; but it was the policy of the Congressional Union at all times whether campaigns were being waged or not.
From the Suffragist of September 19, I quote from a report of the enterprising Jessie Hardy Stubbs, who actually began her work on board the North Coast, Limited:
Here we are—all bound for the field of battle. Miss McCue, Miss Whittemore and I are together. Miss Whittemore joined us at Chicago full of earnestness and zeal. We have put up signs in each car that there will be a meeting tonight in the observation car, and that we will speak on the record of the Democratic Party in Congress and Women Suffrage. There is much interest. We have sold ten Suffragists today on board the train, secured new subscribers to the Suffragist, and contributions for the campaign.
Doris Stevens writes in the Suffragist of October 3:
Friday afternoon, Mrs. Lucius M. Cuthbert, a daughter of ex-Senator Hill, gave us a drawing-room meeting in her beautiful Denver home. She invited representative women from all Parties to come and hear of the work of the Union, to which invitation about one hundred women responded. One Democratic lady came up to me after the meeting and said, “I had no idea you women had been so rebuffed by my Party. I am convinced that my duty is to the women first, and my Party second.” Another: “You have almost convinced me that we women must stand together on this national issue.” And so it went. And, as our charming hostess pointed out, the applause was often led by a prominent Democratic woman. Offers of help, loans of furniture, and general expressions of eagerness to aid were made on every side. The meeting was a splendid success, judging from the large number of women who joined the Union and the generous collection which was given.
In the Suffragist of October 10, Lola Trax writes:
The meeting at Lebanon was especially well advertised. The moving picture shows had run an advertising slide; the Wednesday prayer meeting had announced my coming, and the Public Schools had also made announcements to their pupils. The Ladies’ Aid Society invited me to speak in the afternoon, while they were quilting; and thus another anti-Suffrage argument was shattered; for quilting and politics went hand in hand.
At Phillipsburg the meeting was on the Court House green. It is fifty-seven miles from Phillipsburg to Osborne and the trip has to be made by freight. I was on the road from six-thirty o’clock in the morning until three P.M. About a dozen passengers were in the caboose on the freight, and we held a meeting and discussion which lasted about forty-five minutes. Upon reaching Osborne at three o’clock I found about one hundred people assembled for an auction sale in the middle of the street. Cots, tables, and chairs were to be offered at sacrifice prices. The temptation to hold a meeting overcame fatigue. I jumped into an automobile nearby and had a most interested crowd until the auctioneer came. I had been unable to secure the Town Hall because a troupe of players were making a one night stand in the town. The meeting at night was also in the open air.
In the Suffragist of October 10, Jessie Hardy Stubbs continues:
On Tuesday evening, September 28, I spoke in the Public Library, explaining our mission in Oregon. Mr. Arthur L. Moulton, Progressive Candidate for Congress from the Third District presided, and made a very clever introductory speech. Many questions were asked by Democratic women which brought out a spirited defense on the part of several of those present. One Democratic woman maintained that it would be a most ungrateful position on the part of the Oregon women to vote against Chamberlain, who had always been a friend of Suffrage, whereupon a distinguished-looking woman arose and said: “Oh, no. It would merely be a case of not loving Chamberlain less, but of loving Suffrage more.”
I spoke before the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union last night, and expect to address every union before the campaign is over. There are only two women’s unions here; the garment workers and the waitresses. We intend to make a canvass of the stores and meet the clerks personally and to get into all the factories, as far as possible, where women are employed, and urge these western women voters to stand by the working women of the East. Tonight we have our first open-air meeting.
In the Suffragist of October 31, Gertrude Hunter writes of the campaign in Wyoming:
The meeting last Saturday night was most encouraging. It was a stormy night, and we went in an auto twenty miles from here, through snow banks, and every other difficulty to a rally at a branch home. This was at Grand Canon, and a strongly Democratic precinct. Every one was wildly enthusiastic over the meeting, even the Democratic women telling me how much they appreciated our position. We had a dance immediately after, and I danced with the voters (male) until one-thirty in the morning, when we were all taken to the railroad station in a lumber wagon and four-horse team, a distance of a mile and a half, and came in on a train at two-thirty A.M. I sold twenty Suffragists and could have disposed of more if I had had them with me.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights we have big meetings scheduled.
We are now at Egbert on our regular schedule, and in such a snowstorm as I never saw before. However, we have had a good morning in spite of it.
This town is like the others, consisting of a station, a store, and post-office. Not a residence in the place. The people all drove from miles around in a high wind and most unfavorable weather to attend the meeting.
We had the thirty-five mile drive to make to a neighboring town for another meeting and we did it every mile through a high wind and torrents of rain, that flooded the trail with water, as we went over prairie and plowed fields. We did it, however, with only one blow-out, and two very narrow escapes from being completely turned over, getting in at two this morning.
Tomorrow night I shall go to Campstool, where there is a big supper and dance.
I had another very interesting meeting this week at a town fifty miles from here. The “town” consists of a station, the post-office, general store, and a little restaurant; no houses, and only one or two families living there. The meeting was in the schoolhouse and the voters came from miles and miles to attend, at least one hundred and fifty of them, on horseback, in wagons, buggies, and autos. Every one was much interested. The minister, at whose house I was entertained for the afternoon, lived two and one-half miles out in the country, said afterward that the meeting was a thrill to most of them, who had never heard a Suffrage speech in their lives.
These are the solid voters of the community. Many are from the eastern States who are homesteading here. I distributed the literature to every one.
I will probably reach the same number of voters every day this week, or perhaps a few more, as the next town we are going into, Burns, is a trifle larger than Hillsdale.
Miss Brandeis is going from house to house in Cheyenne, distributing our literature and soliciting memberships.
The campaign over, four of these victorious campaigners were welcomed home on the afternoon of November 15, by an enormous audience at the Columbia Theatre in Washington:
Mrs. Latimer said:
The very first thing they said to us in Kansas was, “Well, you are a long way from home!” and we thought so too.
Kansas, as you know, is a very large State and is an agricultural State, and the consequence was that we had to get in touch with all the farmers and so it was necessary for us to do a great deal of traveling.
After we had established our Headquarters we interviewed the Kansas City Star, one of the largest papers in the State. After we had talked with the associate editor and told him what our plan was, that we intended to send a daily bulletin to the eight hundred and eight papers in the State of Kansas, that we were going to every one of the large towns in the State of Kansas, and have just as many meetings as possible, and that we would distribute fifty thousand pieces of literature, he looked at us and said, “Do you realize that this will take eight men and eighteen stenographers?” I said, “Possibly, but two women are going to do it.” And two women did do it. The result of that interview was a two and a half column editorial on the editorial page of the Star. It was the first time that an interview with a woman had ever appeared on the editorial page, and they told us that even Mr. Bryan had not received two and a half columns on that page. All of our bulletins were very well published after the Kansas City Star had taken up our cause. The women of Kansas co-operated with us, and the Progressives and Republicans invited us to speak at their big rallies. Strange as it may seem no one seemed to think we were on the wrong track but the Democrats.
After we had been there for a while we found that the main contest was the Senatorial fight, and so we figured out just how we could keep Mr. Neely out of the Senate. Every one said that as Mr. Murdock was running as a Progressive, and Mr. Curtis as a Republican, it would divide the vote and give the victory to the Democratic Party. We knew that Mr. Neely had received a very large vote from his own district when he ran for Congress—over four thousand majority. So we made up our minds that the thing to do was to reduce the vote in his own district. We thought that this would help to defeat Mr. Neely, and it did. He received from his own district a majority of only eight hundred; that is, the Democratic majority went down to eight hundred from four thousand. In many of the other districts, his majority was still lower. Mr. Taggart, who had a three thousand majority two years ago, went down to three hundred, and Miss Trax was largely responsible for that. We have letters from many of the leading politicians of Kansas saying that our work has been most effective. We have felt all through Kansas that our work was very encouraging.
We had many interesting things happen. The second day we were in the Seventh District we held seven meetings. Six meetings had been planned, but after we reached Dodge City we found there was a political meeting in progress out on the prairie and they telephoned in and asked one of us to come out there and speak to them. If any of you have ever been to Kansas, you know they have schools everywhere, though for miles and miles you never see a house and you wonder where the children come from to go to the schools. At eleven o’clock at night we arrived at the schoolhouse where the meeting was held, and found three hundred people waiting to hear a Suffrage speech. After the meeting the women came up and said, “That is just what we need. We are glad to help the Eastern women, but we do not know anything about it. We are so glad you have come to tell us these things because we did not know them.”
The men in the West feel the same way. When I was waiting for a freight train about five o’clock in the morning, a man came up and said, “My wife was at your meeting yesterday afternoon, and I thought I would tell you that I have voted the Democratic ticket for forty years, but I have voted it the last time.” That is the spirit of the men. Because they respect their women out there, they do not like to feel that the men in the East and the Democratic Party do not consider the woman movement. People would come in and say, “Well, you are on the right track now,” and that seems to be the spirit everywhere in Kansas.
Miss Pincus said:
I am sorry I cannot come to you with the air of a conquering hero, but I am sure that any person who understands the situation in Arizona will acknowledge that the purpose of our campaign was accomplished. Despite the fact that the Democrats were in control—had all the money in the State and owned nearly all the newspapers—a Democratic leader came to my office one day and told me that the Democrats were absolutely sure that the women of Arizona would defeat Smith. He said the Democratic Party was scared to death. It was most amusing. Every candidate who was running, even for State and County offices, felt it necessary to declare that he had always believed in Woman Suffrage, that his mother had believed in Woman Suffrage and that his grandmother believed in it. I suppose you know what action our friends Senator Smith and Congressman Hayden took. Both of them telegraphed from Washington to the Democratic State Convention in session at Phœnix and pledged themselves absolutely to support national Woman Suffrage. Mr. Hayden stood up on the floor of the House and filled three pages of the Congressional Record on his attitude on Woman Suffrage and Arizona was simply flooded with this copy.
The women, we found, were very open to reason, and one thing I had not expected to find was how chivalrous all the men were. I have never been so overwhelmed with courtesy and chivalry as I was out in Arizona. Every candidate from every county came into our Headquarters to shake hands and say what a nice day it was and how he had always been in favor of Woman Suffrage. Each political Party in Arizona claims absolute credit for Woman Suffrage out there. To me, coming from a plain campaign State, New York, it was most encouraging to find all the men such good Suffragists, and I would like to turn all anti-Suffragists into a Suffrage State to let them see how women are treated at election time.
Mrs. Helena Hill Weed said:
I am very glad to be able to report that no Democrat will come to the United States Senate or House of Representatives from Idaho—and the Congressional Union had a hand in it.
We do not claim entire responsibility for the large Republican victory, but we do claim the credit for turning many hundreds of votes from the Democratic Party. When I reached Idaho I found the question simmered down to the Senatorial race. The two candidates were Senator Brady, Republican, and ex-Governor Hawley, who was running on the Democratic ticket.
I began by sending out copies of all of our literature and the current number of the Suffragist to every editor, club woman, minister, or other person of influence. I began with a meeting which was organized by the working women in the hotel where I was stopping. I told them of our work and what it meant. Many of the women had worked in the East and they knew what conditions were among the laboring women there, and they said they never before realized that they could do anything to help the women in the East. About three days after the meeting a woman came into my office and said, “I want to tell you, Mrs. Weed, that that meeting is going to bring out at least two hundred Republican votes in my ward which are never cast, and is going to turn many more.” I positively could not fill the requests that were made to speak and explain the Congressional Union policy. Men and women of the labor unions were much enthused over our work and we won hundreds and hundreds of votes simply because our policy was non-partisan.
We put it straight up to Mr. Hawley that an indorsement of President Wilson’s administration meant the indorsement of the administration’s refusal to allow a discussion and a vote on Suffrage. We put it up to him that it made no difference how good a Suffragist he personally might be, if he ran on a platform which contained, as did his, a blanket indorsement of all of President Wilson’s policies, including his refusal to allow a discussion and a vote on Suffrage. We pointed out to him that his personal belief in Suffrage was of little avail to us if he could not or would not bring the Party which he was supporting to cease its hostility to our Amendment. We reminded him of the Democratic Congressmen from Suffrage States who had sat in the Sixty-third Congress and who had professed a deep interest in Suffrage but who had accomplished nothing as far as actually bringing Suffrage to pass was concerned, because of the continued hostility of the Democratic Party which was in control of all branches of the Government. We told him that we felt duty bound to make known to the women voters the hostile record of his national Party on Woman Suffrage, and to ask them to refuse their support to that Party until it ceased blocking our Amendment.
They understood the point very quickly and saw that as far as the individual was concerned there was nothing to choose from between Mr. Hawley and Senator Brady—both were equally good Suffragists, as far as their personal stand was concerned. It was only when it came to considering their Party affiliations that one could discriminate between them. We always emphasized the fact that we were not indorsing the Republican, the Progressive, the Socialist, or the Prohibition Party, but were merely asking the women to refuse support to the Party which had the power to give Suffrage and which up to the present had used its power only to block that measure. We explained that we would have opposed any of the other Parties, had they possessed the power which the Democratic Party possessed, and had they used that power in the same obstructive way.
I am absolutely sure that the Congressional Union has the right policy for us to follow and that through this policy we are going to win the passage of the Federal Amendment.
Incidentally the referendum in 1914 in Nevada and Montana gave Suffrage to women.
Although the Congressional Union never deviated from its policy of devoting itself to the Federal Amendment, yet it was deeply interested in the success of these referendum campaigns and gave aid when it seemed needed. The Congressional Union sent Mabel Vernon, a national organizer, to help in the Nevada campaign. At the close of the campaign an enthusiastic audience welcomed Mabel Vernon home.
Miss Vernon said:
In the West they do not have the feeling that Suffrage is an old, old story. They were very willing to go to a Suffrage meeting, particularly in the mining camps, where to advertise that a woman is going to speak is almost enough to cause them to close down the mines in order that they might hear her. This summer Miss Martin, the State president, and I went all over the State in a motor, traveling about three thousand miles. We would travel sometimes one hundred and twenty miles in order to reach a little settlement of about one hundred people, sixty voters perhaps. We had the conviction that if Suffrage was going to win in Nevada, it was going to win through the votes of those people who lived in the remote places. We knew Reno. We knew it well. We knew it was not to be counted upon as giving any majority in favor of Suffrage. That was the object of the motor trip this summer.
We traveled for miles and miles without seeing one sign of life. There was only the sand, the sage-bush, and the sky. Even though we did not arrive until ten o’clock at night at the place where we were to speak, we always found our crowd waiting for us. There was one mining camp, one of the richest camps there now, where the men said, “We will give you ninety per cent, ladies, there is not a bit of doubt about it.” When the returns came in from that camp, there were eleven votes against it and one hundred and one for it. The politicians laughed at us because we were so confident. “Don’t you appreciate that many men who promised to vote for you just want to make you feel good and haven’t any intention of doing it?” they would say. When the returns came in I took a great deal of satisfaction in showing them that the men had kept their promises.
The position that Nevada has geographically had a great deal to do with it: We made a house-to-house canvass to find out if the majority were in favor of Suffrage and we found that women out there would say, “Of course I believe in Suffrage; I used to vote myself in Idaho.” One woman told me, “I feel very much out of place here in Nevada because I haven’t the right to vote. I voted for years in Colorado.” It would have been an easy thing to prove that at least seventy-five per cent of the women in Nevada were in favor of Woman Suffrage. When the men said, “We are willing that Nevada women shall have the vote when the majority of them want it,” we could say that the majority of the women in the State of Nevada do want it.
X
CONGRESS TAKES UP THE SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT
The effect of this campaign—the first of the kind in the history of the United States—was as though acid had been poured into the milk of the Democratic calm and security. Within a few days of the appearance of the Congressional Union speakers, the Democratic papers were full of attacks on the Congressional Union. The following from the Wyoming Leader of October 6 is typical of the way the Democratic papers handled the Congressional Union workers:
Monday afternoon, they desecrated a charitable gathering of the Ladies’ Hospital Aid.... If it was nothing more than the harmless effort of a couple of women to earn some Congressional coin, it might be overlooked, and these two women with fatherly tenderness, told to go back home. But it involves an insult to the intelligent citizenship of this State. It attempts to compromise and bring into disrepute the practical workings of Woman Suffrage in this, the original Suffrage State. It proposes to prostitute religion, charity, fraternity, and society itself, to the ambition of a place-and-plunder-hunting politician. These women go into gatherings to insult and outrage harmony and good-will among women who themselves avoid politics in their meetings.
They could not have selected a meeting at which it was so plainly out of place as a meeting of hospital workers. These women had gathered together to promote the good work of mercy and charity in our community. They were Republicans, Progressives, and Democrats in their preferences....
The editor of the Leader has met and talked with these two women and believes they do not realize the insult they are offering to the women of Wyoming.
The Republican papers of course instantly came to the rescue of the Congressional Union organizers. The Cheyenne Tribune said editorially on October 16:
Democratic newspapers like the Wyoming Leader are finding fault with the Woman Suffrage Congressional Union for sending representatives into this State to work against the Democratic candidate for Congress.
This is a free country, and Wyoming a Woman Suffrage State, and if worthy, respectable women come into Wyoming, the first State to grant the franchise to women, and conduct a decent campaign for the principles of Woman Suffrage, they should be treated courteously and given a respectful hearing.
They rightly hold the Democratic Party responsible for its self-evident opposition to the cause of Woman Suffrage, and rightly are seeking to defeat Democratic candidates for Congress by endeavoring to get woman voters to vote against them.
As to the actual effects, I quote from the report of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage for the year 1914:
One of the strongest proofs of the results accomplished in Washington was given when Judge W. W. Black, Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, called at the headquarters of the Congressional Union in Seattle, and urged the organizers in charge, in the words of the Seattle Sunday Times, “to go home and wage a campaign for female Suffrage, and let the Democratic Congressional candidates in this State alone. Judge Black disclaimed personal interest,” continued the Seattle Times, “and insisted that his is merely a fatherly concern for the two young Suffrage leaders. To demonstrate that he was not concerned personally, Judge Black told the two workers that he was going to be elected, anyway.”
Shortly before election day, Democratic leaders in Colorado formed a Democratic woman’s organization for the purpose of actively combating the Congressional Union’s work among the women voters.
Further striking evidence of the importance which the Democratic leaders of Colorado attached to the Union’s activities was furnished by a leaflet sent far and wide through the State, issued from the Colorado Democratic State Headquarters, under the names of Wellington H. Gates, Leo U. Guggenheim, and John T. Barnett, National Democratic Committeemen. The leaflet began: “Permit us to call your attention to the apparent aims and purposes of the organization calling itself The Congressional Union.”
It then devoted four pages to letters and statements opposing the policy of the Union, and ended with an appeal to the women voters to elect the Democratic candidates for Congress “with larger majorities than ever before, to show the world that the Democratic women of Colorado are not only loyal, but consistent, voters.”
This was the last leaflet sent to the voters by the State Democratic Committee. From the first word to the last, it dealt only with the Congressional Union. Could better evidence be desired of the important part which the Democrats themselves felt that Suffrage was playing in the election?
Nowhere did the Congressional Union election work arouse greater opposition than in Utah. “Intimidation, coercion, and what were equivalent to threats of political banishment from the State of Utah,” said the Republican Herald of Salt Lake City (October 15), “were exercised toward Miss Elsie Agnes Lancaster, the New York Suffragist, by W. R. Wallace, the Democratic generalissimo, and his gang of political mannikins.”
“They invited Miss Lancaster,” the Herald continued, “to come to Democratic State Headquarters, and there kept her on the grill for two and a half hours. This term of cross-examination, during which she was under fire of cross-questioning and denunciation from practically all of the Democratic politicians present, was a vain endeavor to have her bring to an immediate close her campaign against the Democratic nominees for the United States Senate and Congress. For two hours and a half, the hundred pounds of femininity withstood the concentrated cross-fire of the ton of beef and brawn represented by the dozen or more distinguished Democrats who acted as attorney, judge, and jury all in one. After they had finished, she went her way, telling Mr. Wallace that neither he nor his hirelings could swerve her from her duty in Utah as a representative of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.
“The greatest outburst of Generalissimo Wallace,” concludes the Herald, “was when, in a moment of rage, he brought his fist down on the table and threatened to advertise Miss Lancaster the country over by means of the Associated Press as being in league with ‘sinister influences’ in Utah.”
One of the candidates for Congress from Kansas (Representative Doolittle) called at the Washington Headquarters of the Union shortly after the inauguration of work in Kansas, and urged the Union to withdraw its campaigners from his district, at least, if not over all the Western States. Finding the Union determined to continue its opposition through the women voters, as long as his Party continued its opposition to the National Amendment, Mr. Doolittle delivered a speech in the House of Representatives (occupying more than a page of the Congressional Record), denouncing the Union, and assuring the members of Congress that its appeal to the women voters was not authorized by the Suffragists of the country.
Representative Hayden of Arizona also endeavored, in a speech in the House, to answer the appeal of the Congressional Union to the Western women to cast their votes against him, together with the other national Democratic candidates. Nearly three pages of the Record was consumed by Mr. Hayden’s speech, which he reprinted, and sent far and wide through the State of Arizona in an attempt to counteract the havoc which it was apparently believed was being wrought by the Congressional Union workers.
A prominent Democratic candidate for the Arizona Legislature testified to the fear which the Union campaign had aroused among the Democratic element in that State by an appeal to Dr. Cora Smith King, a member of the Advisory Council of the Congressional Union, urgently imploring her to use her influence with the Union to terminate its election activities in Arizona. Dr. King replied: “The more the local Democrats complain, the more they advertise the slogan of the Congressional Union, that the Democrats put Suffrage second to Party. Do, for Heaven’s sake, raise the Democratic roof in Washington for involving you in this dilemma.”
Among the concrete results showing the effectiveness of the Congressional Union election activities was the inclusion of a Federal Suffrage Amendment plank in the platforms of each of the State parties in Colorado, the first time that this occurred in that State, and the inclusion of a similar plank in the Arizona Democratic platform.
Another result was the conversion of Senator Smith of Arizona to a belief in the Federal Amendment. On September 28, Senator Smith and Representative Hayden, the two Democratic candidates who were running for Congress from Arizona, sent the following telegram to Mrs. Frances Munds, candidate for State Senatorship on the Democratic ticket: “Our record in Congress shows that we are for National Woman Suffrage. If you think best, offer as plank in State platform the following: ‘We pledge our candidates for United States Senator and Representative in Congress to vote at all times for National Women Suffrage.’”
The Democratic Committee adopted and strengthened this platform.
All candidates, indeed, seemed to develop a marked increase in the fervor of their allegiance to the Suffrage Amendment. Senator Chamberlain of Oregon, in his last edition of street-car cards before election day, headed his poster with a declaration of his support of National Woman Suffrage as the leading argument for his re-election.
Not only the Congressional candidates, but minor Democratic workers, suddenly developed unsuspected interest in the cause of Woman Suffrage. Said the Examiner of Yuma, Arizona (October 24, 1914), in commenting on the situation: “We view with amazement the efforts of the Democratic bosses to be in favor of Equal Suffrage.”
And so in each of the States.
No more conclusive proof of the support given by the women voters to the Union’s campaign could be afforded than the readiness with which they became members and active workers.
In undertaking the election campaign, the Union had expected that in the beginning only the humble members of the rank and file would respond to its appeal. It had fully realized that the rank and file are more easily reached by new work than are the leaders. It was with amazement, therefore, as well as gratification that it greeted the co-operation of the leading women voters of the West. Their willingness to subordinate Party interest to the National Suffrage cause furnished the strongest assurance of the speedy organization of the women’s vote to such a power as to make it a determining factor in the outcome of things at Washington.
The rank and file, however, equalled the leaders in the enthusiasm with which they supported the campaign. Women who had never before been active in Suffrage work were aroused to an effective support of the Congressional Union’s policy. Said the Tribune of Pendleton, Oregon (October 16), for instance, in commenting on this situation:
“Large numbers of women who had not even registered until the campaign of the Congressional Union began, have made it their duty to do so in order that they may cast their ballot on this one issue alone. They had not been especially interested in the general political campaign, but seeing the opportunity to assist in the enfranchisement of other women, they have come bravely to the front with offers of assistance.”
One of the illuminating features of the campaign was the aid given to the Union in its election work by prominent Democratic women. This support came from the Democratic women of the East as well as of the West. For example, Mrs. George A. Armes, President of the District of Columbia Branch of the National Wilson and Marshall League, wrote to the Chairman of the Union during the election days: “I have come to the conclusion that the greatest service I can render to the National Democratic Party is to help to bring it to realize that true democracy involves Suffrage for women as well as for men. I know that it will come to a realization of the truth if it sees that it can no longer count upon the women’s vote in the West if it opposes the Suffrage Amendment. I am, therefore, heartily with the election campaign of the Congressional Union in its appeal to the women voters to cast their votes against all Democratic candidates for Congress.”
Women voted in the election for forty-five members of Congress. The Democratic Party ran candidates for forty-three members in these States. The Congressional Union opposed all these candidates. Out of the forty-three Democratic candidates, only twenty were elected. In some of these districts undoubtedly the women affected these results.
I quote the same report:
Basing our estimate on the charges made by friends of the candidates whom we were forced, by reason of the action of their Party, to oppose, the Congressional Union campaign defeated Representative Neely of Kansas, Mr. Flegel of Oregon, and Representative Seldomridge of Colorado; and contributed in large measure to the defeat of Mr. Hawley of Idaho, Mr. James H. Moyle of Utah, and Mr. Roscoe Drumheller of Washington, and greatly lessened the majorities of Senator Smith of Arizona, Senator Thomas, and Mr. Keating of Colorado.
The campaign of the Congressional Union accomplished exactly what its members hoped and expected that it would accomplish. If their purpose had been merely to unseat Democrats, they would, of course, have taken the districts in the United States where the Democrats had won by very slight majorities. When they went into such strongly Democratic States as Arizona and Colorado, they did not expect to unseat any of the Democratic candidates in those States. Their purpose was to make Woman Suffrage an ever-present political issue in the States where women have political power until all the women of the United States shall be enfranchised, and to lay in those States the foundations for permanent and constantly-growing support of the franchise work at Washington. They succeeded in making the record of the Democratic Party on Woman Suffrage (an issue which would not otherwise have been heard of) widely known and hotly discussed in the Suffrage States.
In the meantime, Suffrage had come up again and again in Congress. On October 10, 1914, during discussion of the Philippine Bill, conferring a greater measure of self-government on Filipino men, Representative Mann of Illinois proposed on that date that the franchise measure in the Bill be so amended as to give the vote to women on the Islands. This Amendment was lost by a vote of fifty-eight to eighty-four. On October 12, Representative J. W. Bryan of Washington, Progressive, proposed three other Amendments: One, making women eligible to vote in school elections, which was lost by a vote of eleven to twenty-seven; one giving the vote to women property-owners, which was lost by a vote of nine to twenty-seven, and one giving the Philippine legislature power to extend the right of Suffrage to women at any future time, which was lost by a vote of eleven to twenty-seven. The Amendments were defeated by strictly Party votes, the Democrats voting almost solidly against them, while the Progressives and Republicans supported them.
This Session of Congress adjourned on October 4, 1914. At its close, the Suffrage Amendment was upon the calendar of the Senate and the House, ready for a vote. In the House, however, the Rules Committee must apportion time for the vote. Mr. Mondell’s Resolution providing for this—and for which successive deputations had besieged the Rules Committee—was still before the Rules Committee.
The short Session—the last Session of the Sixty-third Congress—opened on December 7. President Wilson’s message, read to Congress on December 8, made no mention of the Woman Suffrage question, though it expressly recommended the Bill granting further independence to the men of the Philippines.
In December, therefore, Anne Martin, who had brought to brilliant victory the campaign in Nevada, came to the Congressional Union’s Headquarters in Washington. She called on the President to ask his assistance in furthering the passage of the Bristow-Mondell Amendment.
In referring to the victory in Nevada, the President said: “That is the way I believe it should come, by States.”
Miss Martin then pointed out to the President the immense difficulties involved in State campaigns. She said: “The referendum campaigns are killing work, and the women of America are working for the passage of this Federal Amendment in order to end the long struggle.”
Miss Martin referred to the President’s attitude toward the Filipinos. She said she had read with interest that part of his message to Congress in which he advocated a larger measure of self-government for them. She pointed out that Suffragists were asking for an extension of the same right to American women, and urged him to give equal support to the Amendment enfranchising his country-women.
The Congressional Union began to send deputations to the refractory Rules Committee, immediately upon the return of the Committee members to Washington. On December 9, Mrs. William Kent and Mrs. Gardner called upon Chairman Henry as soon as he reached the city. To their great astonishment, they were promptly assured by Mr. Henry that the Rules Committee would report favorably House Resolution No. 514—providing time for the consideration of the Suffrage Amendment in the House—which had been before it since May 13.
“Mr. Henry said,” says the Suffragist of December 12, “that he had always desired to make a favorable report of the Suffrage rule; certain ‘sinister influences,’ however, working upon some of the members of this Committee had made it impossible for the Committee to take action upon it during the last Session. Mr. Henry did not state what the ‘sinister influences’ were, nor why they had been removed immediately after the election.”
He also assured representatives of the Union that the Rules Committee would shortly bring the Amendment to a vote in the House.
“There is every reason to believe,” said Mrs. Gilson Gardner commenting on Mr. Henry’s glib change of front, “that the Party leaders have met and studied the Democratic returns from the campaign States.”
On January 12, the Resolution on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was debated for over six hours in the House and voted upon the same day. One hundred and seventy-four votes were cast for the Amendment, two hundred and four against it. Forty-six members were recorded as not voting. Of the forty-six, twelve were paired in favor, and six paired against it. The Amendment thus failed by seventy-eight votes of the necessary two-thirds.
It is a favorite trick with politicians to bring up the Amendment in the short session of a dying Congress. They can vote no and still have a chance, in the new Congress, to redeem themselves before election.
The Suffragist of January 23 quotes some of the reasons for opposing the Amendment:
That Woman Suffrage cannot be supported because of a man’s respect, admiration, and reverence for womanhood.
That five little colored girls marched in a Suffrage parade in Columbus, Ohio.
That women must be protected against themselves. They think they want to vote. As a matter of fact, they do not want to vote, and man, being aware of this fact, is obliged to prevent them from getting the ballot that they do not want.
That the ballot would degrade women.
That no man would care to marry a Suffragist.
That women do not read newspapers on street cars.
That women do not buy newspapers of Ikey Oppenstein, who keeps the stand on the corner.
That no man would care to marry a female butcher.
That no man would care to marry a female policeman.
That Woman Suffrage is a matter for the States to determine.
That Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch once marched in a procession in which she carried a banner inscribed, “One million Socialists vote and work for Suffrage.”
That Inez Milholland married a Belgian and once referred to a cabinet-officer as a joke.
That women fail to take part in the “duty of organized murder” and might therefore vote against war.
PART TWO
1915-1916