What could the papers do? Weren't they in the hands of the "big cinch," as a certain combination of business men in St. Louis is known? Naturally they refused to print a line. You never step on your own toe, do you, or hit yourself in the face—if you can help it?
One must admit that things looked bad for the League. How were girls who raced at machines all day, who had neither money nor the voice of the press, to rouse this sluggish, corrupt city to the menace of sending to the legislature men like E.J. Troy, pledged body and soul to the manufacturers? How could they waken the public to woman's bitter necessity for shorter hours? The case looked hopeless, but Mrs. Knefler merely set her teeth, and got busy—decidedly busy.
She planned a campaign that no other St. Louis woman in her class would have had the courage to tackle. Mrs. Knefler is a member of the club that is the St. Louis clubwomen's "holy of holies." They have a club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in self-culture. As a group their consciousness of the city's industrial problems is still nebulous. The high light in which Mrs. Knefler's work must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of self-culture women, with a few—only a few—rash daughters shivering around preparatory to taking their first cold plunge in the suffrage pool.
In such an atmosphere Cynthelia Knefler planned and carried out the biggest, the most modern and strategic campaign for the working woman ever waged outside a suffrage state. It was done simply because her heart was filled with the need of the thousands of helpless, unorganized girls for protection from the greed of organized capital.
There are moments when love gives vision and raises us head and shoulders above our group. So it was with Cynthelia Knefler, brought up in this conservative city, educated in a prunes-and-prisms girls' school, steeped in the Southern idea that no "lady" would ever let her picture or her opinions get into the newspapers, and that making public speeches was quite unthinkable!
The press was silent, but at least Mrs. Knefler could speak to the labor unions. She and two other women appealed to every labor union in St. Louis with a speech against E.J. Troy. They fought him—not as a man, but as a representative of the "big interests." Mrs. Knefler made seventy-six speeches in that one month before the primaries. That meant hurrying from hall to hall on hot summer nights and making two speeches, and sometimes three and four, while her friends were wearing white muslin and sitting on the gallery, to get the cool of the evening.
Mrs. Knefler's mind was working like a trip-hammer that month; seeking ways and means for rousing the busy, unthinking, conglomerate mass of people to the real issue. Money in the League was scarce. There are no rich members. But out of their wages and out of raffles and entertainments the League had a small reserve. Part of this they used to print sixty thousand cards. So that when you went in to get a shave your glance was caught, as the barber turned your head, by this red ticket" "Scratch E.J. Troy." When you stopped in for a loaf of bread, a red ticket behind the glass of the case advised you to "Scratch E.J. Troy." When you went in for a drink, there leaped into sight dozens of little red tickets: "Scratch E.J. Troy."
There are always some men, though, who are moved only by the big, noisy things of life. Only Schneider's band sounds like music to them; only "Twenty Buckets of Blood, or Dead Man's Gulch" appeals to them as literature; and the only speaker is the man who rips out Old Glory and defies forked lightning. In a political campaign the little red ticket is lost on that kind of man. Mrs. Knefler understood this. So one hot July day huge posters in high, wood-block letters screamed from billboards and the walls of saloons and barber shops and labor halls: "Union men and friends, Scratch E.J. Troy."
All this printing and bill-posting was expensive for working girls. They came back at the Central Labor body again. "Your sympathy is great, but your funds are better," they said.
"You've tackled too big a job," the Labor leaders told the girls, with a benevolent air. "He's the candy around this town—E.J. Troy is. It would take a mint of money to beat E.J. Troy."