Even the anti-Suffragists were moved sometimes. One of them said: “I have never been impressed by Suffragists before, but the sincerity you express in being willing to stand here in all weathers for the thing you believe in makes me think that there is something in the Suffrage fight after all.”
And yet, Suffragists themselves were occasionally antagonistic. “You have put the Suffrage cause back fifty years!” said one. She little suspected that, within a year, the House of Representatives would have passed the Amendment; within less than two years thereafter the Senate.
People went further than words. Many paused to shake hands. Many asked to be allowed to hold the banners for a moment.
Once a bride and groom—very young—stopped. The groom talked to one picket, the bride to another. The man said: “I think this is outrageous. I have no sympathy with you whatever. I wouldn’t any more let my wife——” At that moment the little bride came rushing up, radiant. “Oh, do you mind,” she said to her husband, “if I hold one of those banners for a while?”
“No, if you want to,” the bridegroom answered.
And she took her stand on the picket line.
Children stopped to spell out the inscriptions, and sometimes asked what they meant.
Once, a group of boys from a Massachusetts school inquired what the colors stood for, and asked to have the slogan translated. As by one impulse, they lifted their hats and said, “You ought to have it now.”
Occasionally, distinguished visitors leaving the White House would smile their appreciation and approval. On one occasion Theodore Roosevelt beamed vividly on the pickets, waving his hat as he passed. As the weather changed and the winter storms began, the gaiety in the attitude of their audience deepened to a real admiration. With the rains, the pickets appeared in slickers and rubber hats. This was not, of course, unendurable. But, when the freezing cold came, often with snow and swirling winds, picketing became a real hardship. There were days when it was almost impossible to stand on the picket line for more than half an hour at a time. At regular intervals, Smith, the janitor, assisted at times by a little colored boy, used to appear from Headquarters, trundling a wheelbarrow. That wheelbarrow was piled high with hot bricks covered with gunny-sacking. He would distribute the bricks among the pickets and they would stand on them. An observer said that, when the relay of pickets, leaving at the end of the day, stepped down from the bricks at the word of command, it was like a line of statues stepping from their pedestals.