Chapter 16
An Interlude (Seven Months)
The President had finally thrown his power to putting the amendment through the House. We hoped he would follow this up by insisting upon the passage of the amendment in the Senate. We ceased our acts of dramatic protest for the moment and gave our energies to getting public pressure upon him, to persuade him to see that the Senate acted. We also continued to press directly upon recalcitrant senators of the minority party who could be won only through appeals other than from the President.
There are in the Senate 96 members—2 elected from each of the 48 states. To pass a constitutional amendment through the Senate, 64 votes are necessary, a two-thirds majority. At this point in the campaign, 58 senators were pledged to support the measure and 48 were opposed. We therefore had to win 11 more votes. A measure passed through one branch of Congress must be passed through the other branch during the life of that Congress, otherwise it dies automatically and must be born again in a new Congress. We therefore had only the remainder of the first regular session of the 65th Congress and, failing of that, the short second session from December, 1918, to March, 1919, in which to win those votes.
Backfires were started in the states of the senators not yet committed to the amendment. Organized demand for action in the Senate grew to huge proportions.
We turned also to the leading influential members of the respective parties for active help.
Colonel Roosevelt did his most effective suffrage work at this period in a determined attack upon the few unconvinced Republican Senators. The Colonel was one of the few leaders in our national life who was never too busy to confer or to offer and accept suggestions as to procedure. He seemed to have imagination about women. He never took a patronizing attitude nor did he with moral unction dogmatically tell you how the fight should be waged and won. He presupposed ability among women leaders. He was not offended, morally or politically, by our preferring to go to jail rather than to submit in silence. In fact, he was at this time under Administration fire, because of his bold attacks upon some of their policies, and remarked during an interview at Oyster Bay:
“I may soon join you women in jail. One can never tell these days.”
His sagacious attitude toward conservative and radical suffrage forces was always delightful and indicative of his appreciation of the political and social value of a movement’s having vitality enough to disagree on methods. None of the banal philosophy that “you can never win until all your forces get together” from the Colonel. One day, as I came into his office for an interview, I met a member of the conservative suffragists just leaving, and we spoke. In his office the Colonel remarked, “You know, I contemplated having both you and Mrs. Whitney come to see me at the same time, since it was on a similar mission, but I didn’t quite know whether the lion and the lamb would lie down together, and I thought I’d better take no chances . . . . But I see you’re on speaking terms,” he added. I answered that our relations were extremely amiable, but remarked that the other side might not like to be called “lambs.”
“You delight in being the lions-on that point I am safe, am I not?” And he smiled his widest smile as he plunged into a vivid expository attack upon the Senatorial opponents of suffrage in his own party. He wrote letters to them. If this failed, he invited them to Oyster Bay for the week-end. Never did he abandon them until there was literally not a shadow of hope to bank on.
When the Colonel got into action something always happened on the Democratic side. He made a public statement to Senator Gallinger of New Hampshire, Republican leader in the Senate, in which lie pointed to the superior support of the Republicans and urged even more liberal party support to ensure the passage of the amendment in the Senate. Action by the Democrats followed fast on the heels of this public statement.