Often—very often indeed—the waiting crowds broke into spontaneous applause when group after group marched from Headquarters into the certainty of arrest. Those who were Anglo-Saxons inevitably admired the sporting quality of these women.
Perhaps a negro street sweeper summed it up better than anybody else. He said: “I doan know what them women want, but I know they ain’t skeered!”
The reader is probably asking by this time what was the effect of the picketing on the Woman’s Party itself. The first reaction was exactly what he would guess—that members resigned in large numbers. The second, however, was one which he might not expect—that new members joined in large numbers. In other words, the militant action which alienated some women brought others into the organization; women who were aroused by the simple and immediate demands of the Woman’s Party and by the courage and the forthrightness with which it pushed those demands; women who had become impatient at the impasse to which the older generation of Suffrage workers had brought the Suffrage Amendment. The majority of the people who deserted came back later.
As far as money was concerned, the effect was magical. In some months during the picketing the receipts were double what they had been the corresponding months of the previous year when there had been no picketing. Once those receipts jumped as high as six times the normal amount. This was what happened in England during the militant period.
4. The Court and the Pickets
“So long as you send women to prison for asking for justice, so long will women be ready to go in such a cause.”
Anne Martin to the judge before whom she was tried.
After Judge Waddill’s decision that the commitment of the pickets to Occoquan was illegal, the pickets filed sixteen suits for damage. Eight of these were against Whittaker, Superintendent of the Workhouse at Occoquan, and his assistant, Captain Reams, on account of their brutal treatment of the women while at Occoquan Workhouse. They were filed in the United States Court for the Western District of Virginia at Richmond. The other eight were against the Commissioners of the District of Columbia and Superintendent Zinkham of the District Jail for the unlawful transfer of the pickets to the institution of Whittaker at Occoquan. These suits were filed in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia at Washington.
The appeals in the cases of two groups of women arrested August 23 and 28 came up in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on January 8, 1918, before Chief Justice Smyth, and Justices Robb and Van Orsdel. Matthew O’Brien, of Washington, and Dudley Field Malone, of New York, appeared for the Suffragists. Corporation Counsel Stevens conducted the case for the government.
“Suppose,” suggested Justice Robb, “some upholders of Billy Sunday should go out on the streets with banners on which were painted some of Billy’s catch phrases, and should stand with their backs to the fence, and a curious crowd gathered, some of whom created disorder and threw stones at the carriers of the banners. Who should be arrested, those who created the disorder, or the banner carriers?”