At the request of Mrs. Johns I enclose a letter from Mr. Wagener, of Topeka. He gives the worst possible advice, and Mrs. Johns' letter seems to show that she is surrounded by bad advisers and in doubt as to her course. If there is anything which twenty-seven years' work has taught us, it is that a woman suffrage amendment can not be carried without at least one political party squarely behind it. In Colorado, for the first time, we have had a majority; and Mrs. Catt, and Mrs. Reynolds and Mrs. Stansbury of Denver, all say that the amendment could not have been carried if the Republican, Populist and many of the Democratic district conventions had not first endorsed it in their platforms. It thus became a live issue and the masses of voters became interested and enlightened.
On the other hand, our South Dakota experience is conclusive.... All three parties ignored it, and the press of the State joined in a conspiracy of silence. The campaign speakers were instructed not to name it. We had to rely for the discussions upon the efforts of suffragists as outsiders. Consequently ... we were beaten two to one. The same will surely be true in Kansas in 1894.... If we do not capture the Republican and Populist State conventions we shall be beaten in advance. All hinges on that!
I have just talked with Mrs. Lease, who fully agrees with me. The Republican convention will be the first to meet. If Mrs. Johns will go before the resolution committee and urge her plank, securing at least its presentation as a minority report offered in open session, it will stampede the convention and be carried. Then the Populists will put one in so as not to be behind the Republicans, and then we shall probably win. Do write Mrs. Johns to stand by her guns. No one but her can do this work, because she is personally dear to the Republicans. The fate of the amendment will be then and there decided.
Rev. Anna Shaw, vice-president-at-large, wrote Mrs. Johns in this vigorous language:
I must confess that while I can readily understand the abject cowardice and selfishness which prompt men and political tricksters to urge the abandonment of the plank, I can not understand how you or any other woman with a grain of sense can listen to such proposals for a moment. That endorsement is our only hope. If that fail us, our cause is lost in advance; for it will show the body of the party what the leaders think and feel on the subject, and be a tacit command to kill it. The hypocrisy of the whole business should not receive from women even a show of belief. What wonder men despise us as a shallow lot of simpletons, if we are deceived by so thin a pretense as this? I for one protest against it so strongly that if your committee agree to it and do not push party endorsement, I must decline to fool away my time in Kansas. If you give up that point I must refuse to go a single step or raise a dollar. I am sick of the weakness of women, forever dictated to by men. Experience has taught us what a campaign unendorsed means. Think of submitting our measure to the advice of politicians! I would as soon submit the subject of the equality of a goose to a fox. No; we must have party endorsement or we are dead.
If I am not to go to Kansas, I want to know it immediately. It is too late even now, for I refused twenty consecutive engagements for May in one State, thinking it was all given up to Kansas. The man or woman who urges surrender now is more a political partisan than a lover of freedom. I care nothing for all the political parties in the world except as they stand for justice. I can not tell you how even the suggestion of this surrender affects me. For the love of woman, do not be fooled by those men any longer.
Finally, as the case grew more hopeless, Miss Anthony, as president of the National-American Association, on March 11, sent the following:
To the Kansas Woman Suffrage Amendment Campaign Committee—Laura M. Johns, Bina M. Otis, Sarah A. Thurston, Annie L. Diggs and Others:
My Dear Friends: I have the letter of your chairman, Mrs. Johns, together with one she forwards from a lawyer of Topeka, with the added assertion that Judges Horton, Johnston et al., and leading editors and politicians, are begging your committee to cease to demand of the two great political parties, the Republican and People's, that they put a suffrage plank in their platforms; but instead, simply allow the amendment to go before the electors on its merits—that is to say, repeat the experiment as it has been made and has failed eight times over....
The one and only sure hope of carrying the amendment in Kansas is to have on its side all the aid of the political machinery of its two great parties. My one object in consenting to go into your campaign for May and June, was to create so strong a public demand as to make sure that every delegate elected to the State nominating conventions of the Republican and People's parties shall be instructed by his constituents, in county convention assembled, to vote for a woman suffrage plank in the platform. The moment your committee abandons this aim, I shall lose all interest in your work. You say: "Prominent Republicans are besieging us to relieve their party of the embarrassment of this demand." So did they besiege us twenty-seven years ago. No; not for a moment should you think of relieving the politicians from the duty of declaring for this amendment. If you do, you are unworthy the trust reposed in you. I surely never would have promised to go into your campaign, or begged the friends to contribute, had I dreamed of the possibility of your surrendering to the cowardice of political trimmers.
If the convention which meets first do not endorse the amendment, then the other will not; in which event, its discussion will not be germane in either party's fall campaign. On the other hand, if the first put a plank in its platform, the other will be sure to do so; and then the question will be a legitimate one to be advocated in the meetings of both parties and this will ensure the presentation of our cause to all the voters of the State.
By this means the two parties will run your amendment campaign, and you will not be compelled to make a separate suffrage campaign. That you can not do in any event, because (1st) you can not get either the speakers or the money necessary; and (2d) if you could get both, you would have only women in your meetings, and defeat would be just as certain as in the eight States which have had such separate woman's campaigns. Therefore, if you decide to abandon the demand for political endorsement and active help, as the first and chief object of this spring's work, you may count me out of it; for I will not be a party, even though a protesting one, to such a surrender of our only hope of success.
I came home for a rest over Sunday, after speaking five successive nights in five different counties, in our New York campaign, and these letters with the weak—the wicked—thought of not demanding of the political leaders to make their parties help carry the amendment, raged through my brain all night long. How to put the shame of surrender strongly enough was my constant study, sleeping and waking alike. No, a thousand times no, I say; and if you do yield to this demand at the behest of men claiming to be your friends, you make yourselves a party with those men to ensure your defeat. The speakers will advocate no measure, and the vast majority of men will vote for none, which is not approvingly mentioned in the platform. If you give up trying for political endorsement, or fail after trying, all hope of carrying the amendment will be gone. So, over and over I say, demand party help!
Lovingly but protestingly,
Susan B. Anthony.
Mrs. Johns, of course, indignantly rejected the imputation that she was not working night and day to secure a plank from the Republican convention. She was a most efficient manager, but the cause of her weakness and that of the other women, was that they were trying to serve two masters. The very fact that the Republican men were begging them not to ask for a plank, shows the power which the women already possessed in their municipal suffrage, and they should have had the courage to stand firm in their demands for recognition in the platform, for the dignity of their cause and their womanhood, whether there were hope of getting it or not. There is no doubt that Mrs. Johns did make an earnest effort to this end, but there is also no doubt that every Republican leader understood that even if the party did not endorse the suffrage amendment, she and her associates still would be no less Republicans and would work no less vigorously for the party's success. Miss Anthony's Kansas correspondence during 1894 comprises 300 letters and all confirm the statements thus briefly outlined.
The Republican politicians made the women believe if they would not insist on the party's placing itself on record and thus losing the support of the elements opposed to woman suffrage, all of them would vote for the amendment. Should the women of Kansas ever become politically free, the publication of these letters would be fatal to some aspiring male candidates, but so long as the men still have it in their power to grant to women or to withhold the full franchise, it is the part of wisdom to leave them on their files. There were many Kansas women, however, who refused to be deceived and sustained Miss Anthony's position. In April she wrote to one of the Republican leaders:
If the Republicans had two grains of political sense, they would see that for them to espouse the amendment and gain the glory, as they surely would, of lifting the women of the State into full suffrage, would give them new life, prestige and power greater and grander than they ever possessed; and they would not be halting and belittling themselves with such idiotic stuff and nonsense as their advice to let the amendment go to the electors of the State "on its own merits." But however politicians may waver, our suffrage women must not have a doubt, but must persist in the demand for full recognition in both platforms. We must exact justice and if they do not give it, the curse be on their heads, not ours.
The same month she wrote Mrs. Johns: