Jailed for Freedom

by Doris Stevens

Some of us wondered.

Senator McLean of Connecticut, anti-suffrage Republican, flatly stated “that all questions involving declarations of war and terms of peace should be left to that sex which must do the fighting and the dying on the battlefield.” And he further said that until boys between 18 and 21 who had just been called to the colors should ask for the vote, “their mothers should be and remain both proud and content” without it. He concluded with an amusing account of the history of the ballot box. “This joint resolution,” he said, “goes beyond the seas and above the clouds. It attempts to tamper with the ballot box, over which mother nature always has had and always will have supreme control; and such attempts always have ended and always will end in failure and misfortune.”

Senator Phelan of California, Democrat, made a straightforward, intelligent speech.

Senator Beckham of Kentucky, Democrat, deplored the idea that man was superior to woman. He pleaded “guilty to the charge of Romanticism.” He said, “But I look upon woman as superior to man.” Therefore he could not trust her with a vote. He had the hardihood to say further, with the men of the world at each other’s throats, . . . “Woman is the civilizing, refining, elevating influence that holds man from barbarism.” We charged him with ignorance as well as romanticism when he said in closing, “It is the duty of man to work and labor for woman; to cut the wood, to carry the coal, to go into the fields in the necessary labor to sustain the home where the woman presides and by her superior nature elevates him to higher and better conceptions of life.”

Meanwhile Senator Shafroth of Colorado, Democrat, lifelong advocate of suffrage, was painstakingly asking one senator after another, as he had been for years, “Does not the Senator believe that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed?” and then—“But if you have the general principle acknowledged that the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed.” . . . and so forth. But the idea of applying the Declaration of Independence to modern politics fairly put them to sleep.

These samples of senatorial profundity may divert, outrage, or bore us, but they do not represent the real battle. It is not that the men who utter these sentiments do not believe them. More is the pity, they do. But they are smoke screens—mere skirmishes of eloquence or foolishness. They do not represent the motives of their political acts.

The real excitement began when Senator Pittman of Nevada, Democrat, attempted to reveal to the senators of his party the actual seriousness of the political crisis in which the Democrats were now involved. He also attempted to shift the blame for threatened defeat of the amendment to the Republican side of the chamber. There was a note of desperation in his voice, too, since he knew that President Wilson had not up to that moment won the two votes lacking. The gist of Senator Pittman’s remarks was this: The Woman’s Party has charged the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee, which is in control of the Democrats, and the President himself, with the responsibility fob obstructing a vote on the measure. “I confess,” said he, that this is “having its effect as a campaign argument” in the woman suffrage states.

Senator Wolcott of Delaware, Democrat, interrupted him to ask if this was “the party that has been picketing here in Washington?” Senator Pittman, having just paid this tribute to our campaign in the West, hastened to say that it was, but that there was another association, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which had always conducted its campaign in a “lady-like—modest—and intelligent way” and which had “never mixed in politics.”

Waving a copy of the Suffragist in the air, Senator Pittman began his attempt to shift responsibility to the Republican side, for the critical condition of the amendment. He denounced the Republicans for caucusing on the amendment and deciding unanimously to press for a vote, when they the Republicans] knew there were two votes lacking. He scored us for having given so much publicity to the action of the caucus and declared with vehemence that a “trick” had been executed through Senator Smoot which he would not allow to go unrevealed. Senator Pittman charged that the Republicans had promised enough votes to pass the amendment and that upon that promise the Democrats had brought the measure on the floor; that the Republicans thereupon withdrew enough votes to cause the defeat of the amendment. Whether or not this was true, at any rate, as Senator Smoot pointed out, the Democratic Chairman in charge of the measure could at any moment send the measure back to Committee, safe from immediate defeat. This was true, but not exactly a suggestion to be welcomed by the Democrats.

“Yes,” replied Senator Pittman, “and then if we move to refer it back to the committee, the Senator from Utah would say again, ‘The Democrats are obstructing the passage of this amendment . . . . We told you all the time they wanted to kill it.’ . . . If we refer it back to the committee, then we will be charged, as we have been all the time in the suffrage states, with trying to prevent a vote on it, and still the Woman’s Party campaign will go on as it is going on now; and if we vote on it they will say: ‘We told you the Democrats would kill it, because the President would not make 332 on his side vote for it’.”