On Sunday, January 5, Julia Emory, Mary Dubrow, Annie Arniel, and Phœbe Munnecke started a fire in front of the White House. They burned the second speech on Liberty made by the President in Italy. All the time the bell pealed its solemn tocsin. The four sentinels were arrested. This time they refused to give bail and were sent to the house of detention. The fire had now burned all day and all night on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
All these sentinels were charged, when they were arrested, with breaking a Federal Park regulation. But when they came to court, they were charged with building a bonfire on a public highway between sunset and sunrise. Three of them went to prison for five days, and three for ten days. They all went on hunger-strike.
January 7, evidently the official mind changed. The fire which consumed the President’s speech on democracy delivered in Turin was allowed to burn for three hours. Nevertheless the crowd kept kicking it about, so that there was a line of flames across the pavement and trailing into the gutter. By hook or by crook—three of the Suffragists—Harriet Andrews, Mrs. A. P. Winston, Mrs. Edmund C. Evans—managed to keep it going.
At the end of three hours, new orders seemed to materialize out of the air; for then the police took a hand and put the fire out. With the extinction of the last ember, however, a second fire burst into flames at the base of the Lafayette Monument across the street. The police rushed to it, and put it out. Immediately another fire started at the opposite corner of the Park. And then fires became general ... here ... there ... everywhere....
The police arrested the three women who had kept the fire going. On the following day they were sentenced to five days in jail.
On the afternoon of that day, Mrs. M. Toscan Bennett and Matilda Young burned the speech that the President had just made at the statue of Columbus in Genoa. They were arrested at once, and they too were given five days in jail.
By this time, there were eleven women in jail, all on a hunger-strike.
On the afternoon of January 13, just as the thousands of government clerks began to pour down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, twenty-five Suffragists, each one bearing a banner of purple, white, and gold, came round the corner of Lafayette Square. They proceeded to the White House pavement, where they built a watchfire. The crowds, of course, stopped to watch the proceedings. Policemen finally broke through them and arrested three of the women. The other twenty-two closed in their line a little, and went on with their fire-building. The police returned, but they did not arrest the others. But they tried to break up the fire with huge shovels and a fire extinguisher. They tried to trample it out. But it was useless. Wherever a bit of the watchfire fell, it broke into flames. Finally, they arrested seventeen more women. Four remained, holding the purple, white, and gold banners.
Suddenly a great tongue of flame leaped upwards from the urn in Lafayette Square. The crowd rushed towards it. Then for a moment it seemed to go mad. A group of young men rushed over to the Headquarters; climbed up the pillars; tore down the flag, the uprights, and the pole. The bell ultimately crashed to the ground.