Immediately on the receipt of your answer to my first letter to your executive committee, instead of sending you a personal reply I wrote again to the entire committee, answering the various points presented by you, Mr. and Mrs. Barker and others. This I did to save writing the same thing to half a dozen different people, as well as to make sure that I should get your official action upon what seemed to me most important matters; but to this date I have received not only no official answer, but no information which shows my letter to have been acted upon. Nor have I heard from any member of the committee that you have mapped out any plan of campaign, or have accepted and proposed to work on the one which I outlined last November at the Aberdeen meeting, and twice over have stated in my letters.
You, personally, say to me that you must have the national funds put into your treasury before you can plan work. Now, my dear sir, as a business man you never would give your money to any person or committee until they had presented to you a plan for using it which met your approval. Then I have had no indication of any intention on the part of your executive committee or State organizer to hold any series of suffrage meetings or conventions. The only ones written of are W. C. T. U. county and district conventions. California's suffrage lecturer, I am informed, is to be introduced to the State at the First District W. C. T. U. Convention.
Now, I want to say to you individually, and to the executive committee generally, that the National-American South Dakota committee will pay the money entrusted to them only to suffrage lecturers and suffrage conventions. We shall not pay it to any individual or association for any other purpose, or in any other name, than suffrage for women, pure and simple. We talked this over fully in your executive committee meeting at Aberdeen last fall, and all agreed that, while the temperance societies worked for suffrage in their way, the suffrage campaign should be carried forward on the basis of the one principle. Our national money will not go to aid Prohibition leagues, Grand Army encampments, Woman's Relief Corps, W. C. T. U. societies or any others, though all, we hope, will declare and work for the suffrage amendment. We can not ally ourselves with the Prohibition or Anti-Prohibition party—the Democrats or the Republicans. Each may do splendid work for suffrage within its own organization, and we shall rejoice in all that do so; but the South Dakota and the National-American Associations must stand on their own ground.
Co-operation is what our committee desire, and we stand ready to aid in holding three series of county conventions with three sets of speakers, at least one of each set a national speaker, beginning on May 1 and continuing until the school election, June 24. I am feeling sadly disappointed that every voting precinct of every county has not been visited, and will not have been by the 1st of May, as was agreed upon at Aberdeen. Still, I want to begin now and henceforth push the work; but the entire fund would not pay every single man and woman in the State who helps, hence every one who can must work without cost either to the State or national committee.
On the 7th of April Miss Anthony wrote to the State secretary:
Yours mailed April 3 is received. The National-American committee have only about $1,300 yet in hand, and we have arranged a trip through your State for Rev. Anna Shaw. When your committee did not answer my telegram, I could not wait longer for fear of losing Miss Shaw's good work before the students of your various educational institutions, and having had urgent importunities from Mrs. D. W. Mayer to send some of our very best speakers to Vermillion so that the 600 students there might be roused to thought before separating for the summer, I felt the cause could not afford to lose Miss Shaw's effective services and so mapped out her route, and telegraphed and wrote asking that she be advertised.
Now, my dear friends, once for all, I want to say on behalf of our South Dakota committee, the National-American Association, and the friends who have placed money in our hands—that we shall no more turn it over to you to appropriate as your executive committee please, without our voice or vote, than you would turn over the money entrusted to your care to our committee to spend as we choose, without your voice or vote. But while we shall retain our right to expend the national fund in accordance with our best judgment, we shall in future, as I have several times written your committee, hold ourselves ready to help defray the cost of whatever work you present to us. I have once verbally, and twice or oftener by letter, presented a plan of campaign asking your adoption of it, or of one which suited you better, telling you that we would co-operate with you in executing the plan and paying therefor; and to all of my propositions to help, the one reply has been: "The wheels are blocked until you turn the money over to us. You in Washington can not run the South Dakota campaign." Now nearly five months have elapsed, and, so far as reported, the resident committee have adopted no plan and had no organizers at work in the different counties.
Rev. Anna Shaw made her lecture tour throughout the State, and wrote Miss Anthony that the people everywhere were most anxious for her to come and there was not the slightest disaffection except on the part of two or three persons who wished to handle the funds. To these Miss Shaw said:
What our committee object to, and what they have no right to do by the vote of our convention, is to put a dollar of our money into your treasury to be spent without our consent or for any purpose of which we do not approve. For example, not one of us, myself least of all, will consent to take out of the contributions from friends of suffrage one dollar to pay towards a salary of $100 a month to any man as secretary. We do not pay our national secretary a cent, and we have no doubt there are plenty of women in the State of Dakota who would be glad to do the secretary's work for love of the cause. I understand it has been planned, and the statement has gone out, that your committee propose to cut loose from Miss Anthony. Now if you do, you cut loose from the goose that lays the golden egg for the South Dakota work; you cut loose from all the national speakers and workers and all the money given.
Miss Anthony wrote Alice Stone Blackwell:
I fully agree with you and dear Mrs. Wallace about not antagonizing the prohibition and W. C. T. U. people who made the 6,000 majority last fall in South Dakota; but I also feel that we must not antagonize the license people, for they are one-half of the voters, lacking only 6,000, and fully 6,000 of the Prohibition men are anti-suffragists and can not be converted. Hence it is also vastly important that the license men shall not have just cause to feel that our national suffrage lecturers are W. C. T. U. agents. That is my one point—that we shall not at the outset repel every man who is not a Prohibitionist.
But we shall see. I surely am as earnest a prohibitionist and total abstainer as any woman or man in South Dakota or anywhere else. But they have prohibition, and now are after suffrage; therefore it should not be the old prohibition and W. C. T. U. yardstick in this campaign, but instead it must be the woman suffrage yardstick alone by which every man and every woman shall be measured. Best assured I shall try not to offend a single voter, of whatever persuasion, for it is votes we are after now. I hope to make such a good showing of work done in this spring campaign, that our friends will feel like giving another and larger contribution to help on the fall canvass.
The editors of the two suffrage papers, the officers of the National-American Association, the largest contributors to the fund and the other members of the committee, all sustained Miss Anthony in her position. Zerelda G. Wallace published the following notice: "Having pledged to the committee on work in South Dakota one month's services in the projected suffrage campaign in that State, I wish to announce publicly that all I do there will be done under the direction of the South Dakota committee of which Susan B. Anthony is chairman."
Finally, on April 15, the executive committee of South Dakota forwarded their plan, which included a provision that "every dollar expended should pass through the State treasury, and that the State executive committee should have control of all plans of work and decide what lecturers should be engaged;" but by the time it reached Washington Miss Anthony was well on her way to South Dakota. When she arrived she found that it was just as she had been informed, the disaffection was confined to a few persons, but the body of workers made her welcome and she was cordially received throughout the State. Mrs. Emma Smith DeVoe, State lecturer and one of the ablest women, at once placed her services at Miss Anthony's disposal, and in a short time nearly all were working in harmony with the national plan.
The autumn previous, when Miss Anthony was attending a convention in Minneapolis, H. L. Loucks and Alonzo Wardall, president and secretary of the South Dakota Farmers' Alliance, had made a journey expressly to ask her to come into the State to conduct this canvass. She had replied that she never again would go into an amendment campaign unless it was endorsed and advocated by at least one of the two great political parties. They assured her that the Farmers' Alliance dominated politics in South Dakota, that it held the balance of power, and the year previous had compelled the Republicans to put a prohibition plank in their platform and, through the influence of the Alliance, that amendment had been carried by 6,000 majority. They were ready now to do the same for woman suffrage. It was wholly because of the assurance of this support that Miss Anthony took the responsibility of raising the funds and conducting the campaign in South Dakota.