The Story of the Woman's Party

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

Alice Paul replied, “The picketing will go on as usual.”

In a letter to his friend, Major Pullman, quoted in the Suffragist of August 25, Gilson Gardner put the case concisely and decisively....

You must see, Pullman, that you cannot be right in what you have done in this matter. You have given the pickets adequate protection; you have arrested them and had them sent to jail and the workhouse, you have permitted the crowds to mob them, and then you have had your officers do much the same thing by forcibly taking their banners from them. In some of these actions, you must have been wrong. If it was right to give them protection and let them stand at the White House for five months, both before and after the war, it was not right to do what you did later.

You say it was not right and that you were “lenient,” when you gave them protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy in place of the settled laws of the land. That would justify a charge of “Kaiserism” right here in our Capitol city.

The truth is, Pullman, you were right when you gave these women protection. That is what the police are for. When there are riots they are supposed to quell them, not by quelling the “proximate cause,” but by quelling the rioters.

I know your police officers now quite well and I find that they are most happy when they are permitted to do their duty. They did not like that dirty business of permitting a lot of sailors and street riffraff to rough the girls....

It is not my opinion alone when I say that the women were entitled to police protection, not arrest. President Wilson has stated repeatedly that these women were entirely within their legal and constitutional rights, and that they should not have been molested. Three reputable men, two of them holding office in this Administration, have told me what the President said, and I have no reason to doubt their word. If the President has changed his mind he has not changed the law or the Constitution, and what he said three weeks ago is just as true today.

In excusing what you have done, you say that the women have carried banners with “offensive” inscriptions on them. You refer to the fact that they have addressed the President as “Kaiser Wilson.” As a matter of fact, not an arrest you have made—and the arrests now number more than sixty—has been for carrying one of those “offensive” banners. The women were carrying merely the Suffrage colors or quotations from President Wilson’s writings.

But suppose the banners were offensive? Who made you censor of banners? The law gives you no such power. Even when you go through the farce of a police court trial, the charge is “obstructing traffic,” which shows conclusively that you are not willing to go into court on the real issue.

No. As chief of police you have no more right to complain of the sentiments on a banner than you have of the sentiments in an editorial in the Washington Post, and you have no more right to arrest the banner bearers than you have to arrest the owner of the Washington Post. So long as the law against obscenity and profanity is observed, you have no business with the words on the banners. Congress refused to pass a press censorship law. There are certain lingering traditions to the effect that a people’s liberties are closely bound up with the right to talk things out and those who are enlightened know that the only proper answer to words is words.