I will probably reach the same number of voters every day this week, or perhaps a few more, as the next town we are going into, Burns, is a trifle larger than Hillsdale.
Miss Brandeis is going from house to house in Cheyenne, distributing our literature and soliciting memberships.
The campaign over, four of these victorious campaigners were welcomed home on the afternoon of November 15, by an enormous audience at the Columbia Theatre in Washington:
Mrs. Latimer said:
The very first thing they said to us in Kansas was, “Well, you are a long way from home!” and we thought so too.
Kansas, as you know, is a very large State and is an agricultural State, and the consequence was that we had to get in touch with all the farmers and so it was necessary for us to do a great deal of traveling.
After we had established our Headquarters we interviewed the Kansas City Star, one of the largest papers in the State. After we had talked with the associate editor and told him what our plan was, that we intended to send a daily bulletin to the eight hundred and eight papers in the State of Kansas, that we were going to every one of the large towns in the State of Kansas, and have just as many meetings as possible, and that we would distribute fifty thousand pieces of literature, he looked at us and said, “Do you realize that this will take eight men and eighteen stenographers?” I said, “Possibly, but two women are going to do it.” And two women did do it. The result of that interview was a two and a half column editorial on the editorial page of the Star. It was the first time that an interview with a woman had ever appeared on the editorial page, and they told us that even Mr. Bryan had not received two and a half columns on that page. All of our bulletins were very well published after the Kansas City Star had taken up our cause. The women of Kansas co-operated with us, and the Progressives and Republicans invited us to speak at their big rallies. Strange as it may seem no one seemed to think we were on the wrong track but the Democrats.
After we had been there for a while we found that the main contest was the Senatorial fight, and so we figured out just how we could keep Mr. Neely out of the Senate. Every one said that as Mr. Murdock was running as a Progressive, and Mr. Curtis as a Republican, it would divide the vote and give the victory to the Democratic Party. We knew that Mr. Neely had received a very large vote from his own district when he ran for Congress—over four thousand majority. So we made up our minds that the thing to do was to reduce the vote in his own district. We thought that this would help to defeat Mr. Neely, and it did. He received from his own district a majority of only eight hundred; that is, the Democratic majority went down to eight hundred from four thousand. In many of the other districts, his majority was still lower. Mr. Taggart, who had a three thousand majority two years ago, went down to three hundred, and Miss Trax was largely responsible for that. We have letters from many of the leading politicians of Kansas saying that our work has been most effective. We have felt all through Kansas that our work was very encouraging.
We had many interesting things happen. The second day we were in the Seventh District we held seven meetings. Six meetings had been planned, but after we reached Dodge City we found there was a political meeting in progress out on the prairie and they telephoned in and asked one of us to come out there and speak to them. If any of you have ever been to Kansas, you know they have schools everywhere, though for miles and miles you never see a house and you wonder where the children come from to go to the schools. At eleven o’clock at night we arrived at the schoolhouse where the meeting was held, and found three hundred people waiting to hear a Suffrage speech. After the meeting the women came up and said, “That is just what we need. We are glad to help the Eastern women, but we do not know anything about it. We are so glad you have come to tell us these things because we did not know them.”