Political Prisoners
Finding that a Suffrage Committee in the House and a report in the
Senate had not silenced our banners, the Administration cast about for
another plan by which to stop the picketing. This time they turned
desperately to longer terms of imprisonment. They were indeed hard
pressed when they could choose such a cruel and stupid course.
Our answer to this policy was more women on the picket line, on the
outside, and a protest on the inside of prison.
We decided, in the face of extended imprisonment, to demand to be
treated as political prisoners. We felt that, as a matter of principle,
this was the dignified and self-respecting thing to do, since we had
offended politically, not criminally. We believed further that a
determined, organized effort to make clear to a wider public the
political nature of the offense would intensify the Administration’s
embarrassment and so accelerate their final surrender.
It fell to Lucy Burns, vice chairman of the organization, to be the
leader of the new protest. Miss Burns is in appearance the very symbol
of woman in revolt. Her abundant and glorious red hair burns and is not
consumed—a flaming torch. Her body is strong and vital. It is said that
Lucy Stone had the “voice” of the pioneers. Lucy Burns without doubt
possessed the “voice” of the modern suffrage movement. Musical,
appealing, persuading—she could move the most resistant person. Her
talent as an orator is of the kind that makes for instant intimacy with
her audience. Her emotional quality is so powerful that her
intellectual capacity, which is quite as great, is not always at once
perceived.
I find myself wanting to talk about her as a human being rather than as
a leader of women. Perhaps it is because she has such winning, lovable
qualities. It was always difficult for her to give all of her energy
and power to a movement. She yearned to play, to read, to study, to be
luxuriously indolent, to revel in the companionship of her family, to
which she is ardently devoted; to do any one of a hundred things more
pleasant than trying to reason with a politician or an unawakened
member of her own sex. But for these latter labors she had a most
gentle and persuasive genius, and she would not shrink from hours of
close argument to convince a person intellectually and emotionally.
Unlike Miss Paul, however, her force is not nonresistant. Once in the
combat she takes delight in it; she is by nature a rebel. She is an
ideal leader for the stormy and courageous attack—reckless and yet
never to the point of unwisdom.
From the time Miss Burns and Miss Paul met for the first time in Cannon
Row Police Station, London, they have been constant co- workers in
suffrage. Both were students abroad at the time they met. They were
among the hundred women arrested for attempting to present petitions
for suffrage to Parliament. This was the first time either of them had
participated in a demonstration. But from then on they worked together
in England and Scotland organizing, speaking, heckling members of the
government, campaigning at bye- elections; going to Holloway Prison
together, where they joined the Englishwomen on hunger strike. Miss
Burns remained organizing in Scotland while Miss Paul was obliged to
return to America after serious illness following a thirty day period
of imprisonment, during all of which time she was forcibly fed.
Miss Burns and she did not meet again until 1913—three years having
intervened—when they undertook the national work on Congress.
Throughout the entire campaign Miss Burns and Miss Paul counseled with
one another on every point of any importance. This combination of the
cool strategist and passionate rebel—each sharing some of the
attributes of the other-has been a complete and unsurpassed leadership.
You have now been introduced, most inadequately, to Lucy Burns, who was
to start the fight inside the prison.
She had no sooner begun to organize her comrades for protest than the
officials sensed a “plot,” and removed her at once to solitary
confinement. But they were too late. Taking the leader only hastened
the rebellion. A forlorn piece of paper was discovered, on which was
written their initial demand, It was then passed from prisoner to
prisoner through holes in the wall surrounding leaden pipes, until a
finished document had been perfected and signed by all the prisoners.
This historic document-historic because it represents the first
organized group action ever made in America to establish the status of
political prisoners—said:
To the Commissioners of the Distinct of Columbia:
As political prisoners, we, the undersigned, refuse to work while in
prison. We have taken this stand as a matter of principle after careful
consideration, and from it we shall not recede.
This action is a necessary protest against an unjust sentence. In
reminding President Wilson of his pre-election promises toward woman
suffrage we were exercising the right of peaceful petition, guaranteed
by the Constitution of the United States, which declares peaceful
picketing is legal in the District of Columbia. That we are unjustly
sentenced has been well recognized—when President Wilson pardoned the
first group of suffragists who had been given sixty days in the
workhouse, and again when Judge Mullowny suspended sentence for the
last group of picketers. We wish to point out the inconsistency and
injustice of our sentences—some of us have been given sixty days, a
later group thirty days, and another group given a suspended sentence
for exactly the same action.
Conscious, therefore, of having acted in accordance with the highest
standards of citizenship, we ask the Commissioners of the District to
grant us the rights due political prisoners. We ask that we no longer
be segregated and confined under locks and bars in small groups, but
permitted to see each other, and that Miss Lucy Burns, who is in full
sympathy with this letter, be released from solitary confinement in
another building and given back to us.
We ask exemption from prison work, that our legal right to consult
counsel be recognized, to have food sent to us from outside, to supply
ourselves with writing material for as much correspondence as we may
need, to receive books, letters, newspapers, our relatives and friends.
Our united demand for political treatment has been delayed, because on
entering the workhouse we found conditions so very bad that before we
could ask that the suffragists be treated as political prisoners, it
was necessary to make a stand for the ordinary rights of human beings
for all the inmates. Although this has not been accomplished we now
wish to bring the important question of the status of political
prisoners to the attention of the commissioners, who, we are informed,
have full authority to make what regulations they please for the
:District prison and workhouse.
The Commissioners are requested to send us a written reply so that we
may be sure this protest has reached them.
Signed by,
MARY WINSOR, LUCY BRANHAM, ERNESTINE HARA, HILDA BLUMBERG, MAUD MALONE,
PAULINE F. ADAMS, ELEANOR. A. CALNAN, EDITH AINGE, ANNIE ARNEIL,
DOROTHY J. BARTLETT, MARGARET FOTHERINGHAM.
The Commissioners’ only answer to this was a hasty transfer of the
signers and the leader, Miss Burns, to the District Jail, where they
were put in solitary confinement. The women were not only refused the
privileges asked but were denied some of the usual privileges allowed
to ordinary criminals.
Generous publicity was given to these reasonable demands, and a
surprisingly wide-spread protest followed the official denial of them.
Scores of committees went to the District Commissioners. Telegrams
backing up the women’s demand again poured in upon all responsible
administrators, from President Wilson down. Not even foreign diplomats
escaped protest or appeal.
Miss Vera Samarodin sent to the Russian Ambassador the following
touching letter, concerning her sister, which is translated from the
Russian:—
The Russian Ambassador,
Washington, D.C.
Excellency:
I am appealing to you to help a young Russian girl imprisoned in the
workhouse near Washington. Her name is Nina Samarodin. I have just come
from one of the two monthly visits I am allowed to make her, as a
member of her family.
The severity and cruelty of the treatment she is receiving at Occoquan
are so much greater than she would have to suffer in Russia for the
simple political offense she is accused of having committed that I hope
you will be able to intercede with the officials of this country for
her.
Her offense, aside from the fact that she infringed no law nor
disturbed the peace, had only a political aim, and was proved to be
political by the words of the judge who sentenced her, for he declared
that because of the innocent inscription on her banner he would make
her sentence light.
Since her imprisonment she has been forced to wear the dress of a
criminal, which she would not in Russia; she has had to eat only the
coarse and unpalatable food served the criminal inmates, and has not
been allowed, as she would in Russia, to have other food brought to
her; nor has she, as she would be there been under the daily care of a
physician. She is not permitted to write letters, nor to have free
access to books and other implements of study. Nina Samarodin has
visibly lost in weight and strength since her imprisonment, and she has
a constant headache from hunger.
Her motive in holding the banner by the White House, I feel, cannot but
appeal to you, Excellency, for she says it was the knowledge that her
family were fighting in Russia in this great war for democracy, and
that she was cut off from serving with them that made her desire to do
what she could to help the women of this nation achieve the freedom her
own people have.
Will you, if it is within your power, attempt to have her recognized as
a political prisoner, and relieve the severity of the treatment she is
receiving for obeying this impulse born of her love of liberty and the
dictates of her conscience?
I have, Excellency, the honor to be,
Respectfully, your countrywoman,
(Signed) VERA SAMARODIN,
Baltimore, Maryland.
Another Russian, Maria Moravsky, author and poet, who had herself been
imprisoned in Czarist Russia and who was touring America at the time of
this controversy, expressed her surprise that our suffrage prisoners
should be treated as common criminals. She wrote:[1] “I have been twice
in the Russian prison; life in the solitary cell was not sweet; but I
can assure you it was better than that which American women suffragists
must bear.
[1] Reprinted from The Suffragist, Feb. 8, 1919.
“We were permitted to read and write; we wore our own clothes; we were
not forced to mix with the criminals; we did no work. (Only a few women
exiled to Siberia for extremely serious political crimes were compelled
to work.) And our guardians and even judges respected us; they felt we
were victims, because we struggled for liberty.”
The Commissioners, who bad to bear the responsibility of an answer to
these protests and to the demand of the prisoners, contended to all
alike that political prisoners did not exist.
“We shall be happy to establish a precedent,” said the women.
“But in America,” stammered the Commissioners, “there is no need for
such a thing as political prisoners.”
“The very fact that we can be sentenced to such long terms for a
political offense shows that there does exist, in fact, a group of
people who have come into conflict with state power for dissenting from
the prevailing political system,” our representatives answered.
We cited definitions of political offenses by eminent criminologists,
penologists, sociologists, statesmen and historians. We declared that
all authorities on political crime sustained our contention and that we
clearly came under the category of political, if any crime. We pointed
as proof to James Bryce, George Sigerson, Maurice Parmelee and even to
Clemenceau, who defined the distinction between political offenses and
common law crimes thus: “ . . . theoretically a crime committed in the
interest of the criminal is a common law crime, while an offense
committed in the public interest is a political crime.”[1]
[1] Speech before the French Chamber of Deputies May 16, 1876,
advocating amnesty for those who participated in the Commune of 1871.
From the Annales de la Chambre des Députés, 1876, v. 2, pp. 44-48.
We called to their attention the established custom of special
treatment of political prisoners in Russia, France, Italy and even
Turkey.[2]
[2] Those interested in the question of political prisoners and their
treatment abroad may want to read Concerning Political Prisoners,
Appendix 6.
We told them that as early as 1872 the International Prison Congress
meeting in London recommended a distinction in the treatment of
political and common law criminals and the resolution of recommendation
was “agreed upon by the representatives of all the Powers of Europe and
America—with the tacit concurrence of British and Irish officials.”[3]
[3] Siegerson, Political Prisoners at Home and Abroad, p. 10.
Mr. John Koren, International Prison Commissioner[4] for the United
States, was throughout this agitation making a study of this very
problem. As chairman of a Special Committee of the American Prison
Association, empowered to investi- gate the problem of political
prisoners for America, he made a report at the annual meeting of the
American Prison Associ- ation in New York, October, 1919, entitled “The
Political Of fenders and their Status in Prison”[5] in which he says:
[4] Appointed and sponsored by the Department of State as delegate to
the International Prison Congress.
[5] Mr. Koren discusses the political offender from the penological,
not the social, point of view.
“The political offender . . . must be measured by a different rule, and
. . . is a creature of extraordinary and temporary conditions . . . .
“There are times in which the tactics used in the pursuit of political
recognition may result in a technical violation of the law for which
imprisonment ensues, as witness the suffragist cases in Washington . .
. . These militants were completely out of place in a workhouse, . . .
they could not be made to submit to discipline fashioned to meet the
needs of the derelicts of society, and . . . they therefore destroyed
it for the entire institution.”
There was no doubt in the official mind but that our claim was just.
But the Administration would not grant this demand, as such, of
political prisoners. It must continue to persuade public opinion that
our offense was not of a political nature; that it was nothing more
than unpleasant and unfortunate riotous conduct in the capital. The
legend of “a few slightly mad women seeking notoriety” must be
sustained. Our demand was never granted, but it was kept up until the
last imprisonment and was soon reinforced by additional protest
tactics. Our suffrage prisoners, however, made an important
contribution toward establishing this reform which others will
consummate. They were the first in America to organize and sustain this
demand over a long period of time. In America we maintain a most
backward policy in dealing with political prisoners. We have neither
regulation nor precedent for special treatment of them. Nor have we
official flexibility.
This controversy was at its height in the press and in the public mind
when President Wilson sent the following message, through a New York
State suffrage leader, on behalf of the approaching New York referendum
on state woman suffrage:
“May I not express to you my very deep interest in the campaign in New
York for the adoption of woman suffrage, and may I not say that I hope
no voter will be influenced in his decision with regard to the great
matter by anything the so-called pickets may have done here in
Washington. However justly they may have laid themselves open to
serious criticism, their action represents, I am sure, so small a
fraction of the women of the country who are urging the adoption of
woman suffrage that it would be most unfair and argue a narrow view to
allow their actions to prejudice the cause itself. I am very anxious to
see the great state of New York set a great example in this matter.”
This statement showed a political appreciation of the growing power of
the movement. Also it would be difficult to prove that the “small
fraction” had not shown political wisdom in injecting into the campaign
the embarrassment of a controversy which was followed by the above
statement of *the President. In the meantime he continued to imprison
in Washington the “so-called pickets” whom he hoped would not influence
the decision of the men voters of New York. It will be remembered, in
passing, that the New York voters adopted suffrage at this time,
although they had rejected it two years earlier. If the voters of New
York were influenced at all by the “so-called pickets,” could even
President Wilson himself satisfactorily prove that it had been an
adverse influence?