In the third group were Mrs. John Winters Brannan, Mrs. John Rogers, Jr., Louise P. Mayo, Doris Stevens, Mary H. Ingham, Eleanor Calnan.
A big crowd, attracted by the expectation of excitement, had collected outside Headquarters. The police made no effort to disperse them. When the first group appeared, there was some applause and cheering. They crossed the street, and took up their station at the upper gate of the White House. As nothing happened to the first group, the second group, led by Amelia Himes Walker, emerged from Headquarters and took up a position at the lower gate of the White House. However, the instant the two groups had established themselves, the policemen, who had been making a pretense of clearing the sidewalks, immediately arrested them.
The third group of pickets, however, came forward undismayed, their flags high. The crowd applauded them; then fell back and permitted the pickets to take their places. The police in this third case waited for four minutes, watches in hand. Then they arrested the women on the charge of “violating an ordinance.”
At the station the sixteen women were booked for “unlawful assembly.” On July 17, Judge Mullowny, sentenced the sixteen women to sixty days in Occoquan Workhouse on the charge of “obstructing traffic.”
A detailed consideration of the treatment of the pickets in Occoquan and the Jail is reserved for a later chapter. It will, therefore, be stated briefly here that these sixteen women were pardoned by the President after three days in Occoquan. However, they were submitted to indignities there such as white prisoners were nowhere else compelled to endure. When J. A. H. Hopkins and Gilson Gardner were permitted to visit their wives, they did not at first recognize them in the haggard, exhausted-looking group of creatures in prison garb, sitting in the reception room. One of the women, however, seeing her husband, half rose from her chair.
“You sit down!” Superintendent Whittaker yelled, pointing his finger at her.
J. A. H. Hopkins, who had been a member of the Democratic National Campaign Committee of 1916, went immediately to the President and told him the conditions under which these women were being held. Gilson Gardner, a well-known newspaper man who had supported Wilson throughout the previous election campaign, wrote a long communication to the President on the same subject. Dudley Field Malone, Collector of the Port of New York and one of the President’s closest friends and warmest advisors, who was later in so gallant a way to show his disapproval of the Suffrage situation, saw the President also. President Wilson professed himself as being “shocked” at his revelations. He said he did not know what was going on at Occoquan.
“After this, Mr. President,” Mr. Malone replied, “you do know.”