The Boston Journal of August 20, 1917, said in an editorial written by Herbert N. Pinkham, Jr.:
That higher authorities than the Washington police were responsible for the amazing policy of rough house employed against the suffrage pickets has been suspected from the very beginning. Police power in Washington is sufficient to protect a handful of women against a whole phalanx of excited or inspired government clerks and uniformed hoodlums, if that power were used.
. . . In our nation’s capital, women have been knocked down and dragged through the streets by government employees—including sailors in uniform. The police are strangely absent at such moments, as a rule, and arrive only in time to arrest a few women . . . .
Perhaps the inscriptions on the suffrage banners were not tactful. It is sometimes awkward indeed to quote the President’s speeches after the speeches have “grown cold.” Also a too vigorous use of the word “democracy” is distasteful to some government dignitaries, it seems. But right or wrong, the suffragists at Washington are entitled to police protection, even though in the minds of the Administration they are not entitled to the ballot.
Perhaps, even in America, we must have a law forbidding people to carry banners demanding what they consider their political rights. Such a law would, of course, prohibit political parades of all kinds, public mass meetings and other demonstrations of one set of opinions against another set. Such a law has been proposed by Senator Myers of Montana, the author of the latest censorship and anti-free speech bill. It may be necessary to pass the law, if it is also necessary that the public voice be stilled and the nation become dumb and subservient.
But until there is such a law . . . people must be protected while their actions remain within the law. If their opinions differ from ours, we must refrain from smashing their faces, if a certain number of people believe that they have the right to vote we may either grant their claim or turn them sadly away, but we may not roll them into the gutter; if they see fit to tell us our professions of democracy are empty, we may smile sorrowfully and murmur a prayer for their ignorance but we may not pelt them with rotten eggs and fire a shot through the window of their dwelling; if, denied a properly dignified hearing, they insist upon walking through the streets with printed words on a saucy banner, we may be amazed at their zeal and pitiful of their bad taste, but even for the sake of keeping their accusations out of sight of our foreign visitors (whom we have trained to believe us perfect) we may not send them to jail . . . .
All this suffrage shouting in Washington has as its single object the attainment of President Wilson’s material support for equal suffrage . . . .
President Wilson’s word would carry the question into Congress . . .
Would there be any harm in letting Congress vote on a suffrage resolution? That would end the disturbance and it would make our shield of national justice somewhat brighter.
It looks like President Wilson’s move.