A BILL
For the better protection and enforcement of peace and order and the public welfare in the District of Columbia.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives o f the United States o f America in Congress assembled, That when the United States shall be engaged in war it shall be unlawful for any person or persons to carry, hold, wave, exhibit, display, or have in his or her possession in any public road, highway, alley, street, thoroughfare, park, or other public place in the District of Columbia, any banner, flag, streamer, sash, or other device having thereon any words or language with reference to the President or the Vice President of the United States, or any words or language with reference to the Constitution of the United States, or the right of suffrage, or right of citizenship, or any words or language with reference to the duties of any executive official or department of the United States, or with reference to any proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States, or with reference to any law or proposed law of the United States, calculated to bring the President of the United States or the Government of the United States into contempt, or which may tend to cause confusion, or excitement, or obstruction of the streets or sidewalks thereof, or any passage in any public place.
Sec. 2. That any person committing any foregoing described offense shall, upon conviction thereof, for each offense be fined not less than $100 nor more than $1,000 or imprisoned not less than thirty days nor more than one year, or by both such fine and imprisonment.
Voices were raised in our behalf, also, and among them I note the following letter written to Major Pullman by Gilson Gardner:[1]
[1] The distinguished journalist who went to Africa to meet Theodore Roosevelt and accompanied him on his return journey to America.
Mr. Raymond Pullman,
Chief of Police,
Washington, D. C.
My dear Pullman,—
I am writing as an old friend to urge you to get right in this matter of arresting the suffrage pickets. Of course the only way for you to get right is to resign. It has apparently become impossible for you to stay in office and do your duty. The alternative is obvious.
You must see, Pullman, that you cannot be right in what you have done in this matter. You have given the pickets adequate protection; but you have arrested them and had them sent to jail and the workhouse; you have permitted the crowd to mob them, and then you have had your officers do much the same thing by forcibly taking their banners from them. In some of the actions you must have been wrong. If it was right to give them protection and let them stand at the White House for five months, both before and after the war, it was not right to do what you did later.