“Who are you?” Anne had demanded.
“I’m Captain Donohue of this district. The meeting must be stopped.”
Capable and cool-headed Anne had replied, “Very well, we’ll write this down and I’ll read it to the audience. ‘I, Captain Thomas Donohue, of the Twenty-sixth Precinct, at the order of Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, Secretary to Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, have ordered this meeting closed.’”
The listeners had sat petrified while she had read them this strange admission. No hissing or booing then. They had just sat. It was one thing to have the hall shut by a mistaken or misguided police captain; a very different thing to have it done by a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Monsignor Dineen was now stationed in the back of the hall, and Anne pointed him out to me, of medium size, in plain attire, calmly directing the police by a casual nod of the head or a whisper to a man who acted as runner between him and the Captain on the platform.
Confusion and tumult continued for at least an hour. Newspaper men were scribbling stories; those who could not get in were creating commotion outside; the reserves had been summoned. It was bedlam. Miss Winsor tried to speak two or three times; I, at least ten. But I knew that I had to keep on until I was arrested in order that free speech might be made the issue. To allow yourself to be sent home at the order of the police was accepting the police point of view as to what was moral. Moreover you were bound for the principle of the thing to carry it into the court for a legal decision; if the pulpit and press were denied you, you must take it to the dock.
Captain Donohue kept repeating to me, “Please get off this stage before you cause disorder.” Police now began to hustle the audience towards half a dozen exits, and finally Miss Winsor and I were put under arrest; Robert McC. Marsh, Mrs. Delafield’s son-in-law, offered to act as our counsel.
Juliet said to an officer, “Why don’t you arrest me too?”
“Well, you can come along if you like,” he agreed. So we walked together up Broadway to the station at West Forty-seventh Street, policemen flanking us. The crowd, still jeering the reserves, who had been trying vainly to clear the way, fell in line and marched behind us. A patrol wagon then took us to night court where we were arraigned before Magistrate McQuade. Someone had telephoned J.J. and he came up later, but Mr. Marsh had already taken care of the necessary formalities. We were released on our own recognizances, to appear at court the following morning.
It was now some time after midnight, but we all went back to Juliet’s apartment. Harold Cox was shocked, not only by the roughness of the police, but also by the supineness of the audience, which had done nothing but make a noise. “Had this been in London, they would never have been able to stop the meeting! We would have defended our rights, used every chair and door and window to barricade the place, even though we might have been beaten in the end.”