The lobbying was immensely more detailed and complicated than an outsider would ever suspect. All the time, of course, they were working for the passing of the Anthony Amendment. That was their great objective, but, as in all warfare, the campaign for the great objective was divided into many tiny campaigns. At the beginning of the Congressional Union work in Washington, for instance, they lobbied Senators and Representatives to march in the big parade of March 3, 1913. Later they lobbied them to go to mass-meetings, to attend conventions. In 1916, when they were having such difficulty with the Judiciary Committee, they lobbied Republicans and Democratic members of that Committee to get them to act. By a follow-up system, they sent other lobbyists in a few days to see if they had acted. When the Suffrage Envoys came back from the West, they lobbied Congressmen to receive them. In the Presidential election of 1916, they lobbied Congress first to get Suffrage planks in both Party platforms and when these planks proved unsatisfactory, they lobbied the Republican Suffragists in Congress to get Hughes to come out for the Federal Amendment and when Hughes came out for it, they lobbied the Democratic Congressmen to get the President to come out for it. When the Special War Session met, in April, 1917, fifty Woman’s Party lobbyists lobbied Congress—covering it in a month. When the Irish Mission visited Congress, and two hundred and fifty voted for the freedom of Ireland, they lobbied these Congressmen to vote for the freedom of women. When the arrests of the pickets began, they lobbied their Congressmen to go to see their constituents in jail. The Woman’s Party kept track of how Congressmen voted on different measures and wherever it was possible, they linked it up with Suffrage. To the Congressmen who voted against war, they sent lobbyists who could show what an influence for peace the women could be. To those who voted for war, they sent the women, who were war workers, to show how women could work for war.
Before the six years’ campaign of the Woman’s Party was over, the Republicans were sometimes sending Congressmen of one State to convert the unconverted ones of another, and, in the end, the young Democratic Senators had actually appointed a committee to get Suffrage votes from their older confrères. After Congress passed the Amendment, they lobbied the Congressmen to write the governors to call special sessions of the Legislature in the interests of ratification; then they lobbied them to write the Legislators; then they lobbied them to write political leaders.
Perhaps the hardest interval in their work was that which followed the campaign of 1916. Wilson had been elected again on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” The Republicans did not want to hear anything about the women voters of the West. The Woman’s Party lobbyists, who were often more informed on the Republican situation in parts of the West than were the Republicans themselves, had to educate them. They had to show them how remiss the Republicans themselves had been during that campaign, how Hughes for instance came out for Suffrage in the East, where women did not vote, and never mentioned it in the West, where they did. It was not easy work. Sometimes Congressmen would take up papers or letters and examine them, while the lobbyist was talking. Nevertheless, she would continue. And then, inevitably the degree of her information, her clear and forceful exposition of the situation, would arouse interest. Often in the end, the erstwhile indifferent Congressman would shake hands and bow her out.
As to the mechanics of lobbying work, perhaps nothing is more interesting than the cards themselves of the famous card-index.
No. 1—Contains the member’s name and his biography as contained in the Congressional Directory.
No. 2—A key card has these headings:
Ancestry, Nativity, Education, Religion, Offices Held, General Information.
No. 3—A sub-card under the foregoing, as are those yet to be given, contains these headings: Birth, Date, Place, Number of Children, Additional Information.
Nos. 4, 5, and 6—Are respectively for Father, Mother, Brothers. They have headings to elicit full information on these subjects, as Nativity, Education, Occupation.
No. 7—Education: Preparatory School and College.