Often of course the pickets stood against the White House fence, an enormous mob packed in front of them, with the knowledge that police protection—according to the orders of the day—might be given them or might not.... Sometimes that crowd would edge nearer and nearer until there was but a foot of smothering, terror-fraught space between them and the pickets. Literally those women felt they had their backs to the wall. Occasionally they had to mount the stone coping! Always too they feared that any sudden movement within the packed, slowly approaching hostile crowd might foam into violence. Occasionally, when the police followed orders to protect the pickets, violent things happened to people in the crowd. Catherine Flanagan saw a plain-clothes man hit six sailors over the head in succession with a billy. They went down like nine pins. Yet when after hours of a seemingly impressive waiting the actual struggle came—something—some spiritual courage bigger than themselves—impelled them to hold on to their banner poles to the last gasp. They were big in circumference—those banner poles—but the girls clutched them so tightly that often it took three policemen to wrench them away. Catherine Flanagan had deep gashes on the inside of her palms where her own nails had penetrated her flesh and great wounds on the outside of her hands where the policemen had dug their nails into them. Virginia Arnold’s hands and arms were torn as though in a struggle with some wild beast.
Yet, I repeat, Headquarters saw its lighter moments even in those most troubled times. And during those most troubled times, that gay spirit of youth managed to maintain itself. The onlookers marveled at it. But it was only because it was a spiritual quality—youth of the soul, in addition to youth of the body—that it could endure. During the course of the eight years of its history, the members of the Woman’s Party had been subjected to disillusion after disillusion. The older ones among them bore this succession of shocks with that philosophy which a long experience in public affairs engenders. But the younger ones—believing at first, as youth always believes, in the eternal verities, and in their eternal prevalence—witnessed faith-shaking sights and underwent even more faith-shaking experiences.
In their contact with public men, they saw such a man as Borah for instance—perhaps the chief of the Knights of the Double Cross—give the Woman’s Party what virtually amounted to his pledged word to support the Amendment and then coolly repudiate it. They saw Moses of New Hampshire play a quibbling trick on them which involved them in weeks of the hardest kind of work only calmly to ignore his own pledge at the end. They contended with such differing personalities as the cold, cultured mind, immutably set in the conventions of a past generation, of Henry Cabot Lodge; the unfairness, or fatuity, or brutality of such men as Penrose of Pennsylvania, Thomas of Colorado, Wadsworth of New York, Reed of Missouri, Brandegee of Connecticut, Hoke Smith of Georgia.
When the picketing began, they saw outside forces get their Headquarters from them; saw them influence scores of property owners sometimes after an advance rent had been paid, not to let houses to them; saw them try to influence the people who gave money, to withhold such financial support; saw them try to influence the newspapers to be less impartial in their descriptions of Woman’s Party activities. As the picketing went on and the burning of the President’s words and the Watchfires succeeded it—while they were exercising their inalienable right of peaceful protest—they knew the experience of being harried by mobs at the very door of the President of the United States; harried while the President passed in his carriage through their midst; later to be harried in collaboration by both mobs and police. Under arrest and in prison, they underwent experiences which no one of them would have believed possible of the greatest republic in the world. They were held incommunicado; they could see neither counsel nor Party members. They were offered food filled with worms. They were submitted to incredible brutalities.
And yet, I have said that spirit of youth prevailed. It prevailed because they were speaking for their generation. They developed a sense of devotion to their ideal of freedom which would have stopped short of no personal sacrifice, not death itself. They developed a sense of comradeship for each other which was half love, half admiration and all reverence. In summing up a fellow worker, they speak first of her “spirit,” and her “spirit” is always beautiful, or noble, or glorious, or some such youth-loved word.
Once, when one party of pickets, about to leave Occoquan, was in the dining-room, a fresh group, just sentenced, were brought into luncheon and placed at another table. Conversation was not permitted. Not a word was spoken, but with one accord the released pickets raised their water-glasses high, then lowered them and drank to their comrades.
Yes, that was their strength—spirit of youth. Lavinia Dock said, “The young are at the gates.” The young stormed those gates and finally forced them open. They entered. And leaving behind all sinister remembrance of the battle, they turned their faces towards the morning.
THE END