There was no one at the locked gates to receive the women or the resolutions except the guards; these guards protested that they had not been ordered to receive either. The women visited every gate, but received the same answer. The cards of the leaders were finally handed over to a guard to present at the White House. He tried to deliver them, but was reprimanded for leaving his post, and sent back. Learning that the cards would be delivered at the end of the day, as is the custom with visiting-cards of casual visitors at the White House, the thousand pickets took up their march again.
Gilson Gardner wrote of this demonstration:
The weather gave this affair its character. Had there been fifteen hundred women carrying banners on a fair day, the sight would have been a pretty one. But to see a thousand women—young women, middle-aged and old women—and there were women in the line who had passed their three score and ten—marching in a rain that almost froze as it fell; to see them standing and marching and holding their heavy banners, momentarily growing heavier—holding them against a wind that was half gale—hour after hour, until their gloves were wet, their clothes soaked through; to see them later with hands sticky from the varnish from the banner poles—bare hands, for the gloves had by this time been pulled off, and the hands were blue with cold—to see these women keep their lines and go through their program fully, losing only those who fainted or fell from exhaustion, was a sight to impress even the dulled and jaded senses of one who has seen much.
One young woman from North Dakota I saw clinging to the iron pickets around the White House, her banner temporarily abandoned, fighting against what was to her a new feeling, faintness resulting from the pain in her hands. She was brought to the automobile in which I was riding before she actually fell to the ground; but after a short rest she was back in the line, and finished with the others.
There is no doubt that what Gilson Gardner said was true—the weather gave this affair its character.
People passing by, thrilled by the gallantry of the marchers, joined the procession. And as Gilson Gardner says, it was not because it was a pretty sight, or because these women were all young. Anna Norris Kendall of Wisconsin, seventy-two years old, and the Rev. Olympia Brown, eighty-two years old, one of the pioneer Suffragists of the country, both took part.
The Thousand Pickets Try Vainly to Deliver Their Resolutions to the President, March 4, 1917.
A Thousand Pickets Marching Around the White House, March 4, 1917.