August Riots
Imprisoning women had met with considerable public disapproval, and
attendant political embarrassment to the Administration. That the
presidential pardon would end this embarrassment was doubtless the hope
of the Administration. The pickets, however, returned to their posts in
steadily increasing numbers. Their presence at the gates was desired by
the Administration no more now than it had been before the arrests and
imprisonments. But they had found no way to rid themselves of the
pickets. And as another month of picketing drew to an end the
Administration ventured to try other ways to stop it and with it the
consequent embarrassment. Their methods became physically more brutal
and politically more stupid. Their conduct became lawless in the
extreme.
Meanwhile the President had drafted the young men of America in their
millions to die on foreign soil for foreign democracy. He had issued a
special appeal to women to give their work, their treasure and their
sons to this enterprise. At the same time his now gigantic figure stood
obstinately across the path to our main objective. It was our daily
task to keep vividly in his mind that objective. It was our
responsibility to compel decisive action from him.
Using the return of Envoy Root from his mission to Russia as another
dramatic opportunity to speak to the President we took to the picket
line these mottoes:
TO ENVOY ROOT
YOU SAY THAT AMERICA MUST THROW ITS MANHOOD TO THE SUPPORT OF LIBERTY.
WHOSE LIBERTY?
THIS NATION IS NOT FREE. TWENTY MILLION WOMEN ARE DENIED BY THE
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES THE RIGHT TO REPRESENTATION IN THEIR OWN
GOVERNMENT.
TELL THE PRESIDENT THAT HE CANNOT FIGHT AGAINST LIBERTY AT HOME WHILE
HE TELLS US TO FIGHT FOR LIBERTY ABROAD.
TELL HIM TO MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY BEFORE HE ASKS THE MOTHERS
OF AMERICA TO THROW THEIR SONS TO THE SUPPORT OF DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE.
ASK HIM HOW HE CAN REFUSE LIBERTY TO AMERICAN CITIZENS WHEN HE IS
FORCING MILLIONS OF AMERICAN BOYS OUT OF THEIR COUNTRY TO DIE FOR
LIBERTY.
At no time during the entire picketing was the traffic on Pennsylvania
Avenue so completely obstructed as it was for the two hours during
which this banner made its appearance on the line. Police captains who
three weeks before were testifying that the police could not manage the
crowds, placidly looked on while these new crowds increased.
We did not regard Mr. Wilson as our President. We felt that he had
neither political nor moral claim to our allegiance. War had been made
without our consent. The war would be finished and very likely a bad
peace would be written without our consent. Our fight was becoming
increasingly difficult—I might almost say desperate. Here we were, a
band of women fighting with banners, in the midst of a world armed to
the teeth. And so it was not very difficult to understand how high
spirited women grew more resentful, unwilling to be a party to the
President’s hypocrisy, the hypocrisy so eager to sacrifice life without
stint to the vague hope of liberty abroad, while refusing to assist in
the peaceful legislative steps which would lead to self-government in
our own country. As a matter of fact the President’s constant oratory
on freedom and democracy moved them to scorn. They were stung into a
protest so militant as to shock not only the President but the public.
We inscribed on our banner what countless American women‘ had long
thought in their hearts.
The truth was not pleasant but it had to be told. We submitted to the
world, through the picket line, this question:
KAISER WILSON
HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN HOW YOU SYMPATHIZED WITH THE POOR GERMANS BECAUSE
THEY WERE NOT SELF GOVERNED?
20,000,000 AMERICAN WOMEN ARE NOT SELF-GOVERNED. TAKE THE BEAM OUT OF
YOUR OWN EYE.
We did not expect public sympathy at this point. We knew that not even
the members of Congress who had occasionally in debate, but more
frequently in their cloak rooms, and often to us privately, called the
President “autocrat”—“Kaiser”—“Ruler”—“King”—“Czar”—would approve our
telling the truth publicly.
Nor was it to be expected that eager young boys, all agog to fight
Germans, would be averse to attacking women in the meantime. They were
out to fight and such was the public hysteria that it did not exactly
matter whom they fought.
And so those excited boys of the Army and Navy attacked the women and
the banner. The banner was destroyed. Another was brought up to take
its place. This one met the same fate. Meanwhile a crowd was assembling
in front of the White House either to watch or to assist in the
attacks. At the very moment when one banner was being snatched away and
destroyed, President and Mrs. Wilson passed through the gates on their
way to a military review at Fort Myer. The President saw American women
being attacked, while the police refused them protection.
Not a move was made by the police to control the growing crowd. Such
inaction is always a signal for more violence on the part of rowdies.
As the throng moved to and fro between the White House and our
Headquarters immediately opposite, so many banners were destroyed that
finally Miss Lucy Burns, Miss Virginia Arnold and Miss Elizabeth
Stuyvesant took those remaining to the second and third floor balconies
of our building and hung them out. At this point there was not a picket
left on the street. The crowd was clearly obstructing the traffic, but
no attempt was made to move them back or to protect the women, some of
whom were attacked by sailors on their own doorsteps. The two police
officers present watched without interference while three sailors
brought a ladder from the Belasco Theater in the same block, leaned it
against the side of the Cameron House, the Headquarters, climbed up to
the second floor balcony, mounted the iron railing and tore down all
banners and the American flag. One sailor administered a severe blow in
the face with his clenched fist upon Miss Georgina Sturgis of
Washington.
“Why did you do that?” she demanded.
The man halted for a brief instant in obvious amazement and said, “I
don’t know.” And with a violent wrench he tore the banner from her
hands and ran down the ladder.
The narrow balcony was the scene of intense excitement.
But for Miss Burns’ superb strength she would have been dragged over
the railing of the balcony to be plunged to the ground. The mob watched
with fascination while she swayed to and fro in her wrestle with two
young sailors. And still no attempt by the police to quell the riot!
The climax came when in the late afternoon a bullet was fired through
one of the heavy glass windows of the second floor, embedding itself in
the ceiling. The bullet grazed past the head of Mrs. Ella Morton Dean
of Montana. Captain Flather of the 1st Precinct, with two detectives,
later examined the holes and declared they had been made by a 38
caliber revolver, but no attempt was ever made to find the man who had
drawn the revolver.
Meanwhile eggs and tomatoes were hurled at our fresh banners flying
from the flag poles on the building.
Finally police reserves were summoned and in less than five minutes the
crowd was pushed back and the street cleared. Thinking now that they
could rely on the protection of the police, the women started with
their banners for the White House. But the police looked on while all
the banners were destroyed, a few paces from Headquarters. More banners
,went out,—purple, white and gold ones. They, too, were destroyed
before they reached the White House.
This entire spectacle was enacted on August 14, within a stone’s throw
of the White House.
Miss Paul summed up the situation when she said:
“The situation now existing in Washington exists because President
Wilson permits it. Orders were first handed down to the police to
arrest suffragists. The clamor over their imprisonments made this
position untenable. The police were then ordered to protect
suffragists. They were then ordered to attack suffragists. They have
now been ordered to encourage irresponsible crowds to attack
suffragists. No police head would dare so to besmirch his record
without orders from his responsible chief. The responsible chief in the
National Capital is the President of the United States.”
Shortly after the incident of the “Kaiser banner” I was speaking in
Louisville, Kentucky. The auditorium was packed and overflowing with
men and women who had come to hear the story of the pickets.
Up to this time we had very few members in Kentucky and had anticipated
in this Southern State, part of President Wilson ,’s stronghold, that
our Committee would meet with no enthusiasm and possibly with warm
hostility.
I had related briefly the incidents leading up to the picketing and the
Government’s suppressions. I was rather cautiously approaching the
subject of the “Kaiser banner,” feeling timid and hesitant, wondering
how this vast audience of Southerners would take it. Slowly I read the
inscription on the famous banner, “Kaiser Wilson, have you forgotten
how you sympathized with the poor Germans because they were not
self-governed? Twenty million American women are not self-governed.
Take the beam out of your own eye.”
I hardly reached the last word, still wondering what the, intensely
silent audience would do, when a terrific outburst of applause mingled
with shouts of “Good! Good! He is, he is!” came to my amazed ears. As
the applause died down there was almost universal good-natured
laughter. Instead of the painstaking and eloquent explanation which I
was prepared to offer, I had only to join in their laughter.
A few minutes later a telegram was brought to the platform announcing
further arrests. I read:
“Six more women sentenced to-day to 30 days in Occoquan workhouse.”
Instant cries of “Shame! Shame! It’s an outrage!” Scores of men and two
women were on their feet calling for the passage of a resolution
denouncing the Administration’s policy of persecution. The motion of
condemnation was put. It seemed as if the entire audience seconded it.
It went through instantly, unanimously, and again with prolonged shouts
and applause.
The meeting continued and I shall never forget that audience. It
lingered to a late hour, almost to midnight, asking questions, making
brief “testimonials” from the floor with almost evangelical fervor.
Improvised collection baskets were piled high with bills. Women
volunteered for picket duty and certain imprisonment, and the following
day a delegation left for Washington.
I cite this experience of mine because it was typical. Every one who
went through the country telling the story had similar experiences at
this time. Indignation was swift and hot. Our mass meetings everywhere
became meetings of protest during the entire campaign.
And resolutions of protest which always went immediately by wire from
such meetings to the President, his cabinet and to his leaders in
Congress, of course created increasing uneasiness in Democratic
circles.
On August 15th the pickets again attempted to take their posts on the
line.
On this day one lettered banner and fifty purple, white and gold flags
were destroyed by a mob led by sailors in uniform. Alice Paul was
knocked down three times by a sailor in uniform and dragged the width
of the White House sidewalk in his frenzied attempt to tear off leer
suffrage sash.
Miss Katharine Morey of Boston was also knocked to the pavement by a
sailor, who took her flag and then darted off into the crowd. Miss
Elizabeth Stuyvesant was struck by a soldier in uniform and her blouse
torn from her body. Miss Maud Jamison of Virginia was knocked down and
dragged along the sidewalk. Miss Beulah Amidon of North Dakota was
knocked down by a sailor.
In the midst of these riotous scenes, a well-known Washington
correspondent was emerging from the White House, after an interview
with the President. Dr. Cart’ Grayson, the President’s physician,
accompanying him to the door, advised:
“You had better go out the side entrance. Those damned women are in the
front.”
In spite of this advice the correspondent made his exit through the
same gate by which he had entered, and just in time to ward off an
attack by a sailor on one of the frailest girls in the group.
The Administration, in its desperation, ordered the police to
lawlessness. On August 16th, fifty policemen led the mob in attacking
the women. Hands were bruised and arms twisted lit’ police officers and
plainclothes men. Two civilians who tried to rescue the women from the
attacks of the police were arrested. The police fell upon these young
women with more brutality even than the mobs they had before
encouraged. Twenty-five lettered banners and 123 Party flags were
destroyed by mobs and police on this afternoon.
As the crowd grew more dense, the police temporarily retired from the
attack. When their activities had summoned a sufficiently large and
infuriated mob, they would rest. And so the passions of the mob
continued unchecked upon these irrepressible women, and from day to day
the Administration gave its orders.
Finding that riots and mob attacks had not terrorized the pickets, the
Administration decided again to arrest the women in the hope of ending
the agitation. Having lost public sympathy through workhouse sentences,
having won it back by pardoning the women, the Administration felt it
could afford to risk losing it again, or rather felt that it had
supplied itself with an appropriate amount of stage-setting.
And so on the third day of the riotous attacks, when it was clear that
the pickets would persist, the Chief of Police called at headquarters
to announce to Miss Paul that “orders have been changed and henceforth
women carrying banners will be arrested”
Meanwhile the pickets heard officers shout to civilian friends as they
passed—“Come back at four o’clock.”
Members of the daily mob announced at the noon hour in various nearby
restaurants that “the suffs will be arrested to-day at 4 o’clock.”
Four o’clock is the hour the Government clerks begin to swarm
homewards. The choice of this hour by the police to arrest the women
would enable them to have a large crowd passing the White House gates
to lend color to the fiction that “pickets were blocking the traffic.”
Throughout the earlier part of the afternoon the silent sentinels stood
unmolested, carrying these mottoes:
ENGLAND AND RUSSIA ARE ENFRANCHISING WOMEN IN WAR-TIME.
HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOB LIBERTY?
THE GOVERNMENT ORDERS OUR BANNERS DESTROYED BECAUSE THEY TELL THE
TRUTH.
At four o’clock the threatened arrests took place. The women arrested
were Miss Lavinia Dock of Pennsylvania, Miss Edna Dixon of Washington,
D. C., a young public school teacher; Miss Natalie Gray of Colorado,
Mrs. Win. Upton Watson and Miss Lucy Ewing of Chicago, and Miss
Catherine Flanagan of Connecticut.
Exactly forty minutes were allowed for the trial of these six women.
One police officer testified that they were “obstructing traffic.”
None of the facts of the hideous and cruel manhandling by the mobs and
police officers was allowed to be brought out. Nothing the women could
say mattered. The judge pronounced : “Thirty days in Occoquan workhouse
in lieu of a $10.00 fine.”
And so this little handful of women, practically all of them tiny and
frail of physique, began the cruel sentence of 30 days in the
workhouse, while their cowardly assailants were not even reprimanded,
nor were those who destroyed over a thousand dollars’ worth of banners
apprehended.
The riots had attracted sufficient attention to cause some anxiety in
Administration circles. Protests against us and others against the
rioters pressed upon them. Congress was provoked into a little
activity; activity which reflected some doubt as to the wisdom of
arresting women without some warrant in law.
Two attempts were made, neither of which was successful, to give the
Administration more power and more law.
Senator Culberson of Texas, Democrat, offered a bill authorizing
President Wilson at any time to prohibit any person from approaching or
entering any place—in short blanket authority granting the President or
his officials limitless power over the actions of human beings.
Realizing that this could be used to prohibit picketing the White House
we appeared before a committee hearing on the bill and spoke against
it. The committee did not have the boldness to report such a bill.
Senator Myers of Montana, an influential member of the Democratic
majority, introduced into the Senate a few days later a resolution
making it illegal to picket the White House. The shamelessness of
admitting to the world that acts for which women had been repeatedly
sentenced to jail, and for which women were at that moment lying in
prison, were so legal as to make necessary a special act of Congress
against them, was appalling. The Administration policy seemed to be
“Let us put women in jail first—let us enact a law to keep them there
afterwards,”
This tilt between Senator Brandegee, of Connecticut, antisuffrage
Republican, and Senator Myers, suffrage Democrat, took place when Mr.
Myer’s presented his bill:
MR. BRANDEGEE: . . . Was there any defect in the legal proceedings by
which these trouble makers were sentenced and put in jail a few weeks
ago?
MR. MYERS: None that I know of. I am not in a position to pass upon
that. I do not believe any was claimed . . . .
MR. BRANDEGEE: Inasmuch as the law was sufficient to land them in jail
. . . I fail to see why additional legislation is necessary on the
subject.
MR. MYERS: There seems to be a doubt in the mind of some whether the
present law is sufficient and I think it ought to be put beyond doubt.
I think . . . the laws are not stringent or severe enough . . . .
MR. BRANDEGEE : They were stringent enough to land the malefactors in
jail . . . .
In spite of Senator Myers’ impassioned appeal to his colleagues, be was
unable to command any support for his bill. I quote this from his
speech in the Senate August 18, 1917:
MR. MYERS: Mr. President, I wish to say a few words about the bill I
have just introduced. It is intended for the enactment of better and
more adequate legislation to prevent the infamous, outrageous,
scandalous, and, I think, almost treasonable actions that have been
going on around the White House for months past, which President of the
United States have been a gross insult to the and to the people of the
United States; I mean the so-called picketing of the White House. . .
These disgusting proceedings have been going on for months, and if
there is no adequate law to stop them, I think there ought to be.
“I believe the President, in the generosity of his heart, erred when he
pardoned some of the women who have been conducting these proceedings,
after they had been sentenced to 60 days in the workhouse. I believe
they deserved the sentence, and they ought to have been compelled to
serve it . . . .
“I for one am not satisfied longer to sit here idly day by day and
submit to having the President of the United States insulted with
impunity before the people of the country and before all the world. It
is a shame and reproach.
“I hope this bill . . . will receive careful consideration and that it
may be enacted into law and may be found an adequate preventive and
punishment for such conduct.”
This bill, which died a well-deserved death, is so amusing as to
warrant reproduction. Although lamenting our comparison between the
President and the Kaiser, it will be seen that Senator Myers brought
forth a thoroughly Prussian document:
A BILL
For the better protection and enforcement of peace and order and the
public welfare in the District of Columbia.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives o f the United
States o f America in Congress assembled, That when the United States
shall be engaged in war it shall be unlawful for any person or persons
to carry, hold, wave, exhibit, display, or have in his or her
possession in any public road, highway, alley, street, thoroughfare,
park, or other public place in the District of Columbia, any banner,
flag, streamer, sash, or other device having thereon any words or
language with reference to the President or the Vice President of the
United States, or any words or language with reference to the
Constitution of the United States, or the right of suffrage, or right
of citizenship, or any words or language with reference to the duties
of any executive official or department of the United States, or with
reference to any proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United
States, or with reference to any law or proposed law of the United
States, calculated to bring the President of the United States or the
Government of the United States into contempt, or which may tend to
cause confusion, or excitement, or obstruction of the streets or
sidewalks thereof, or any passage in any public place.
Sec. 2. That any person committing any foregoing described offense
shall, upon conviction thereof, for each offense be fined not less than
$100 nor more than $1,000 or imprisoned not less than thirty days nor
more than one year, or by both such fine and imprisonment.
Voices were raised in our behalf, also, and among them I note the
following letter written to Major Pullman by Gilson Gardner:[1]
[1] The distinguished journalist who went to Africa to meet Theodore
Roosevelt and accompanied him on his return journey to America.
Mr. Raymond Pullman,
Chief of Police,
Washington, D. C.
My dear Pullman,—
I am writing as an old friend to urge you to get right in this matter
of arresting the suffrage pickets. Of course the only way for you to
get right is to resign. It has apparently become impossible for you to
stay in office and do your duty. The alternative is obvious.
You must see, Pullman, that you cannot be right in what you have done
in this matter. You have given the pickets adequate protection; but you
have arrested them and had them sent to jail and the workhouse; you
have permitted the crowd to mob them, and then you have had your
officers do much the same thing by forcibly taking their banners from
them. In some of the actions you must have been wrong. If it was right
to give them protection and let them stand at the White House for five
months, both before and after the war, it was not right to do what you
did later.
You say that it was not right when you were “lenient” and gave them
protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a
matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to
substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy m place of
the settled laws of the land. This would justify a charge of
“Kaiserism” right here in our capital city.
The truth is, Pullman, you were right when you gave these women
protection. That is what the police are for. When there are riots they
are supposed to quell them, not by quelling the “proximate cause,” but
by quelling the rioters.
I know your police officers now quite well and know that they are most
happy when they are permitted to do their duty. They did not like the
dirty business of permitting a lot of sailors and street rifraff to
rough the girls. All that went against the grain, but when you let them
protect the pickets, as you did March third, when a thousand women
marched around and around the White House, the officers were as
contented as they were efficient.
Washington has a good police force and there has never been a minute
when they could not have scattered any group gathered at the White
House gates and given perfect protection to the women standing there.
You know why they did not do their duty.
In excusing what you have done, you say that the women carried banners
with “offensive” inscriptions on them. You refer to the fact that they
have addressed the President as “Kaiser Wilson.” As a matter of fact
not an arrest you have made—and the arrests now number more than
sixty—has been for carrying one of those “offensive” banners. The women
were carrying merely the suffrage colors or quotations from President
Wilson’s writings.
But, suppose the banners were offensive. Who made you censor of
banners? The law gives you no such power. Even when you go through the
farce of a police court trial the charge is “obstructing traffic”;
which shows conclusively that you are not willing to go into court on
the real issue.
No. As Chief of Police you have no more right to complain of the
sentiments of a banner than you have of the sentiments in an editorial
in the Washington Post, and you have no more right to arrest the
banner-bearer than you have to arrest the owner of the Washington Post
. . . . Congress refused to pass a press censorship law. There are
certain lingering traditions to the effect that a people’s liberties
are closely bound up with the right to talk things out and those who
are enlightened know that the only proper answer to words is words.
When force is opposed to words there is ground for the charge of
“Kaiserism.” . .
There was just one thing for you to have done, Pullman, and that was to
give full and adequate protection to these women, no matter what
banners they carried or what ideas their banners expressed. If there is
any law that can be invoked against the wording of the banners it was
the business of others in the government to start the legal machinery
which would abate them. It was not lawful to abate them by mob
violence, or by arrests. And if those in authority over you were not
willing that you thus do your duty, it was up to you to resign.
After all it would not be such a terrible thing, Pullman, for you to
give up being Chief of Police, particularly when you are not permitted
to be chief of police, but must yield your judgment to the district
commissioners who have yielded their judgment to the White House. Being
Chief of Police under such circumstances can hardly be worth while. You
are a young man and the world is full of places for young men with
courage enough to save their self- respect at the expense of their
jobs. You did that once,-back in the Ballinger-Pinchot days. Why not
now?
Come out and help make the fight which must be made to recover and
protect the liberties which are being filched from us here at home.
There is a real fight looming up for real democracy. You will not be
alone. There are a lot of fine young men, vigorous and patriotic, in
and out of the Administration who are preparing for this fight. Yours
will not be the only resignation. But why not be among the first? Don’t
wait. Let them have your resignation. now and let me be the first to
welcome and congratulate you.
Sincerely,
(Signed) GILSON GARDNER.
Representative John Baer of North Dakota, having witnessed for himself
the riotous scenes, immediately introduced into the House a
resolution[1] demanding an investigation of conditions in the Capital
which permitted mobs to attack women. This, too, went to certain death.
Between the members who did not dare denounce the Administration and
the others who did dare denounce the women, we had to stand quite
solidly on our own program, and do our best to keep them nervous over
the next step in the agitation.
[1] See Appendix 3 for full text of resolution.
The press throughout the entire country at this time protested against
mob violence and the severe sentences pronounced upon the women who had
attempted to hold their banners steadfast.
The Washington (D. C.) Herald, August 19, printed the following
editorial:
There is an echo of the President’s phrase about the “firm hand of
stern repression” in the arrest, conviction and jailing of the six
suffragists; a touch of ruthlessness in their incarceration at Occoquan
along with women of the street, pickpockets and other flotsam and
jetsam. Still, the suffragists are not looking for sympathy, and it
need not be wasted upon them.
The police have arrived at a policy, although no one knows whether it
will be sufficiently stable and consistent to last out the week . . . .
Washington is grateful that the disgraceful period of rioting and mob
violence in front of the White House is at an end, and another crisis
in the militant crusade to bring the Susan B. Anthony amendment before
Congress has been reached.
What is the next step? No one knows. Picketing doubtless will continue,
or an effort will be made to continue it; and militancy, if the police
continue to arrest, instead of giving the women protection, will pass
into a new phase. The suffragists as well as the public at large are
thankful that the police department has finally determined to arrest
the pickets, instead of allowing them to be mobbed by hoodlums .
. . . The public eye will be on Occoquan for the next few weeks, to
find out how these women bear up under the Spartan treatment that is in
store for them. If they have deliberately sought martyrdom, as some
critics have been unkind enough to suggest, they have it now. And if
their campaign, in the opinion of perhaps the great majority of the
public, has been misguided, admiration for their pluck will not be
withheld.
The Boston Journal of August 20, 1917, said in an editorial written by
Herbert N. Pinkham, Jr.:
That higher authorities than the Washington police were responsible for
the amazing policy of rough house employed against the suffrage pickets
has been suspected from the very beginning. Police power in Washington
is sufficient to protect a handful of women against a whole phalanx of
excited or inspired government clerks and uniformed hoodlums, if that
power were used.
. . . In our nation’s capital, women have been knocked down and dragged
through the streets by government employees—including sailors in
uniform. The police are strangely absent at such moments, as a rule,
and arrive only in time to arrest a few women . . . .
Perhaps the inscriptions on the suffrage banners were not tactful. It
is sometimes awkward indeed to quote the President’s speeches after the
speeches have “grown cold.” Also a too vigorous use of the word
“democracy” is distasteful to some government dignitaries, it seems.
But right or wrong, the suffragists at Washington are entitled to
police protection, even though in the minds of the Administration they
are not entitled to the ballot.
Perhaps, even in America, we must have a law forbidding people to carry
banners demanding what they consider their political rights. Such a law
would, of course, prohibit political parades of all kinds, public mass
meetings and other demonstrations of one set of opinions against
another set. Such a law has been proposed by Senator Myers of Montana,
the author of the latest censorship and anti-free speech bill. It may
be necessary to pass the law, if it is also necessary that the public
voice be stilled and the nation become dumb and subservient.
But until there is such a law . . . people must be protected while
their actions remain within the law. If their opinions differ from
ours, we must refrain from smashing their faces, if a certain number of
people believe that they have the right to vote we may either grant
their claim or turn them sadly away, but we may not roll them into the
gutter; if they see fit to tell us our professions of democracy are
empty, we may smile sorrowfully and murmur a prayer for their ignorance
but we may not pelt them with rotten eggs and fire a shot through the
window of their dwelling; if, denied a properly dignified hearing, they
insist upon walking through the streets with printed words on a saucy
banner, we may be amazed at their zeal and pitiful of their bad taste,
but even for the sake of keeping their accusations out of sight of our
foreign visitors (whom we have trained to believe us perfect) we may
not send them to jail . . . .
All this suffrage shouting in Washington has as its single object the
attainment of President Wilson’s material support for equal suffrage .
. . .
President Wilson’s word would carry the question into Congress . . .
Would there be any harm in letting Congress vote on a suffrage
resolution? That would end the disturbance and it would make our shield
of national justice somewhat brighter.
It looks like President Wilson’s move.
Between these opposing currents of protest and support, the
Administration drifted helplessly. Unwilling to pass the amendment, it
continued to send women to prison.
On the afternoon of September 4th, President Wilson led his first
contingent of drafted “soldiers of freedom” down Pennsylvania Avenue in
gala parade, on the first lap of their journey to the battlefields of
France. On the same afternoon a slender line of women—also “soldiers of
freedom”—attempted to march in Washington.
As they attempted to take up their posts, two by two, in front of the
Reviewing Stand, opposite the White House, they were gathered in and
swept away by the police like common street criminals—their golden
banners scarcely flung to the breeze.
MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN BE DENIED A VOICE IN A GOVERNMENT
WHICH IS CONSCRIPTING THEIR SONS?
was the offensive question on the first banner carried by Miss Eleanor
Calnan of Massachusetts and Miss Edith Ainge of New York.
The Avenue was roped off on account of the parade. There was hardly any
one passing at the time; all traffic had been temporarily suspended, so
there was none to obstruct. But the Administration’s policy must go on.
A few moments and Miss Lucy Branham of Maryland and Mrs. Pauline Adams
of Virginia marched down the Avenue, their gay banners waving joyously
in the autumn sun, to fill up the gap of the two comrades who had been
arrested. They, too, were shoved into the police automobile, their
banners still high and appealing, silhouetted against the sky as they
were hurried to the police station.
The third pair of pickets managed to cross the Avenue, but were
arrested immediately they reached the curb. Still others advanced. The
crowd began to line the ropes and to watch eagerly the line of women
indomitably coming, two by two, into the face of certain arrest. A
fourth detachment was arrested in the middle of the Avenue on the
trolley tracks. But still they came.
A few days later more women were sent to the workhouse for carrying to
the picket line this question:
“President Wilson, what did you mean when you said: ‘We have seen a
good many singular things happen recently. We have been told there is a
deep disgrace resting upon the origin of this nation. The nation
originated in the sharpest sort of criticism of public policy. We
originated, to put it in the vernacular, in a kick, and if it be
unpatriotic to kick, why then the grown man is unlike the child. We
have forgotten the very principle of our origin if we have forgotten
how to object, how to resist, how to agitate, how to pull down and
build up, even to the extent of revolutionary practices, if it be
necessary to readjust matters. I have forgotten my history, if that be
not true history.’”
The Administration had not yet abandoned hope of removing the pickets.
They persisted in their policy of arrests and longer imprisonments.