That is my case. That is my appeal. Many may deny its validity, if they choose, but no one can brush aside or answer the arguments upon which it is based. The executive tasks of this war rest upon me. I ask that you lighten them and place in my hands instruments, spiritual instruments, which I do not now possess, which I sorely need, and which I have daily to apologize for not being able to employ.
In this speech, the President had said: “The voices of foolish and intemperate agitators do not reach me at all.”
It was generally felt that the President, there, indicated the Woman’s Party. Commenting on that phrase the next day, the Republican Senators remarked, “Why it was that which brought him there!”
During the course of the debate between Poindexter and Pitman, Poindexter asked, “Wasn’t it the pickets that got the President?”
The next afternoon when the vote was called for, and the last Senator had answered to his name, the presiding officer announced the result:
“The joint resolution does not pass.”
The Suffrage Amendment still lacked two votes.
Miss Younger says in her Revelations of a Lobbyist:
Stunned, as though unable to grasp it, hundreds of women sat there. Then slowly the defeat reached their consciousness, and they began slowly to put on their hats, to gather up their wraps, and to file out of the galleries, some with a dull sense of injustice, some with burning resentment. In the corridors they began to form in groups. Every one wanted to discuss it. But Alice Paul took my arm.
“Come,” she said, “we must find out about the short-term candidates and go into the election campaign at once.”