And all day long, and all evening long—any time—organizers with their harvests of facts and ideas were likely to appear from the remotest parts of the country. Young, enthusiastic, unconscious of bodily discomfort, if the beds were all full, they pulled a mattress onto the floor and slept there or curled up on a couch—anything so long as they could stay at the friendly, welcoming Headquarters. To middle age, it was all a revelation of the unsounded, unplumbed depths of endurance in convinced, emancipate, determined youth. There was no end to their strength apparently. Apparently there was no possibility of palling their spirit. Arriving at nine at night from Oregon, they would depart blithely the next morning at six for Alabama. To those women who had the privilege of taking part, either as active participants, or enthralled lookers-on, this will always stand out as one of their most thrilling life experiences. Katherine Rolston Fisher’s fine descriptive phrase in regard to it all inevitably recurs: “It was,” she says, “the renaissance of the Suffrage movement.”
Speed was their animating force: “The Suffrage Amendment passed at once,” their eternal motto.
In the nomenclature of the Great War, the pickets were the shock troops of the Suffrage forces. They took the first line trenches. The forces of the organization back of them secured and maintained these positions; held those trenches until the time came for the next advance. As for the organizers working all over the country, they were the air force and—still using the nomenclature of that great struggle—they were like the little, swift, quickly-turning chase-planes which so effectually harassed the huge enemy machines.
The Woman’s Party never grew so big nor its organization so cumbrous that its object was defeated by numbers and weight. It was distinguished always by quality rather than quantity, and its mechanical organization was sensitive and light. It lay over its members as delicately as a cobweb on the grass; and it responded as instantly as a cobweb to the touch of changing conditions. News from Washington went to the uttermost parts of the country as swiftly as electricity could bear it. The results in action were equally swift. That was because youth was everywhere, not only youth of body, but, perhaps more important, youth of spirit. Senators and Representatives frequently marveled at the power and strength of an organization which had come to fruition in so few years. Had they all visited Headquarters—as some of them did—I think that all would have understood.
II
LOBBYING
I have left until now all consideration of a department which had been, almost from the very beginning, of great importance to the Woman’s Party; the most important department of all; the crux of its work; a department which steadily augmented in importance—the lobbying.
From the moment in 1912 that the Suffragists started their work in Washington, relations had to be established with the House and the Senate. At first, tentative, a little wavering, irregular, the lobbying became finally astute, intensive, and constant. The lobby grew in numbers. After the Congressional Committee had become the Congressional Union, and had separated from the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the latter body sent its own lobbyists to Washington. The anti-Suffragists sent lobbyists too. By 1914, the stream had grown to a flood. The halls of Congress were never free from this invasion. The siege lasted without cessation as long as a Congress was in session. “This place looks like a millinery establishment,” a Congressman said once.
In the early days, the reception of the lobbyists at the hands of Congressmen lacked by many degrees that graciousness of which, at the very end, they were almost certain. A story of this early period taken from the Woman’s Party card-index, is most illuminating.
Two Suffrage lobbyists were calling on Hoke Smith. “As you are Suffragists,” Mr. Smith said, “you won’t mind standing.” He himself sat, lounging comfortably in his chair. He took out a big cigar, inserted it in his mouth, lighted it. The two women said what they had to say, standing, while Mr. Smith smoked contemptuously on.