President Wilson Appeals to the Senate Too Late
The next day the Administration completely reversed its policy. Almost
the first Senate business was an announcement on the floor by Senator
Jones, Chairman of the Suffrage Committee, that the suffrage amendment
would be considered in the Senate September 26th. And Senator Overman,
Chairman of the Rules Committee, rather shyly remarked to our
legislative chairman that he had been “mistaken yesterday.” It was “now
in the legislative program.” The Senate still stood 6Q votes for and 34
against the amendment—2 votes lacking. The President made an effort
among individual Democrats to secure them. But it was too feeble an
effort and he failed.
Chairman Jones took charge of the measure on the floor. The debate
opened with a long and eloquent. speech by Senator Vardaman of
Mississippi, Democrat, in support of the amendment. “My estimate of
woman,” said he, in conclusion, “is well expressed in the words
employed by a distinguished author who dedicated his book to a ‘Little
mountain, a great meadow, and a woman,’ ‘To the mountain for the sense
of time, to the meadow for the sense of space, and of everything.’”
Senator McCumber of North Dakota, Republican, followed with a curious
speech. His problem was to explain why, although opposed to suffrage,
he would vote for the amendment. Beginning with the overworked “cave
man” and “beasts of the forests,” and down to the present day, “the
male had always protected the female” He always would! Forgetting
recent events in the Capital, he went so far as to say, “ . . . In our
courts she ever finds in masculine nature an asylum of protection, even
though she may have committed great wrong. While the mind may be
convinced beyond any doubt, the masculine heart finds it almost
impossible to pronounce the word ‘guilty’ against a woman.” Scarcely
had the galleries ceased smiling at this idea when he treated them to a
novel application of the biological theory of inheritance. “The
political field,” he declared, “always has been and probably always
will be an arena of more or less bitter contest. The political battles
leave scars as ugly and lacerating as the physical battles, and the
more sensitive the nature the deeper and more lasting the wound. And as
no man can enter this contest or be a party to it and assume its
responsibilities without feeling its blows and suffering its wounds,
much less can woman with her more emotional and more sensitive nature.
“But . . . you may ask why should she be relieved from the scars and
wounds of political contest? Because they do not affect her alone but
are transmitted through her to generations yet to come . . . . “
The faithful story of the sinking ship was invoked by the Senator from
North Dakota. One might almost imagine after listening to Congressional
debates for some years that traveling on sinking ships formed a large
part of human experience. “Fathers, sons, and brothers,” said the
Senator in tearful voice, “guarding the lifeboats until every woman
from the highest to the lowest has been made safe, waving adieu with a
smile of cheer on their lips, while the wounded vessel slowly bears
them to a strangling death and a watery tomb, belie the charge . . “
that woman needs her citizenship as a form of protection.
In spite of these opinions, however, the Senator was obliged to vote
for the amendment because his state had so ordered.
Senator Hardwick of Georgia, Democrat, felt somewhat betrayed that the
suffrage plank in the platform of his party in 1916, recommending state
action, should be so carelessly set aside. “There is not a Democratic
Senator present,” said Mr. Hardwick, “who does not know the history
that lies back of the adoption of that plank. There is not a Democratic
Senator who does not know that the plank was written here in Washington
and sent to the convention and represented the deliberate voice of the
administration and of the party on this question, which was to remit
this question to the several States for action . . . .
“The President of the United States . . . was reported to have sent
this particular plank . . .from Washington, supposedly by the hands of
one of his Cabinet officers.” The fact that his own party and the
Republican party were both advancing on suffrage irritated him into
denouncing the alacrity with which “politicians and senators are trying
to get on the band wagon first.”
Senator McKellar of Tennessee, Democrat, reduced the male superiority
argument to simple terms when he said: “ . . . Taking them by and
large, there are brainy men and brainy women, and that is about all
there is to the proposition.”
Our armies were sweeping victorious toward Germany. There was round on
round of eloquence about the glories of war. Rivers of blood flowed.
And always the role of woman was depicted as a contented binding of
wounds. There were those who thought woman should be rewarded for such
service. Others thought she ought to do it without asking anything in
return. But all agreed that this was her role. There was no woman’s
voice in that body to protest against the perpetuity of such a rôle.
The remarks of Senator Reed of Missouri, anti-suffrage Democrat, typify
this attitude. “. . . Women in my state believe in the old-fashioned
doctrine that men should fight the battles on the red line; that men
should stand and bare their bosoms to the iron hail; and that back of
them, if need be, there shall be women who may bind up the wounds and
whose tender hands may rest upon the brow of the valiant soldier who
has gone down in the fight.
“But, sir, that is woman’s work, and it has been woman’s work always .
. . . The woman who gave her first born a final kiss and blessed him on
his way to battle,” had, according to the Senator from Missouri, earned
a “crown of glory . . . gemmed with the love of the world.”
And with Senator Walsh of Montana, Democrat, “The women of America have
already written a glorious page in the history of the greatest of wars
that have vexed the world. They, like Cornelia, have given, and freely
given, their jewels to their country.”
Some of us wondered.
Senator McLean of Connecticut, anti-suffrage Republican, flatly stated
“that all questions involving declarations of war and terms of peace
should be left to that sex which must do the fighting and the dying on
the battlefield.” And he further said that until boys between 18 and 21
who had just been called to the colors should ask for the vote, “their
mothers should be and remain both proud and content” without it. He
concluded with an amusing account of the history of the ballot box.
“This joint resolution,” he said, “goes beyond the seas and above the
clouds. It attempts to tamper with the ballot box, over which mother
nature always has had and always will have supreme control; and such
attempts always have ended and always will end in failure and
misfortune.”
Senator Phelan of California, Democrat, made a straightforward,
intelligent speech.
Senator Beckham of Kentucky, Democrat, deplored the idea that man was
superior to woman. He pleaded “guilty to the charge of Romanticism.” He
said, “But I look upon woman as superior to man.” Therefore he could
not trust her with a vote. He had the hardihood to say further, with
the men of the world at each other’s throats, . . . “Woman is the
civilizing, refining, elevating influence that holds man from
barbarism.” We charged him with ignorance as well as romanticism when
he said in closing, “It is the duty of man to work and labor for woman;
to cut the wood, to carry the coal, to go into the fields in the
necessary labor to sustain the home where the woman presides and by her
superior nature elevates him to higher and better conceptions of life.”
Meanwhile Senator Shafroth of Colorado, Democrat, lifelong advocate of
suffrage, was painstakingly asking one senator after another, as he had
been for years, “Does not the Senator believe that the just powers of
government are derived from the consent of the governed?” and then—“But
if you have the general principle acknowledged that the just powers of
government are derived from the consent of the governed.” . . . and so
forth. But the idea of applying the Declaration of Independence to
modern politics fairly put them to sleep.
These samples of senatorial profundity may divert, outrage, or bore us,
but they do not represent the real battle. It is not that the men who
utter these sentiments do not believe them. More is the pity, they do.
But they are smoke screens—mere skirmishes of eloquence or foolishness.
They do not represent the motives of their political acts.
The real excitement began when Senator Pittman of Nevada, Democrat,
attempted to reveal to the senators of his party the actual seriousness
of the political crisis in which the Democrats were now involved. He
also attempted to shift the blame for threatened defeat of the
amendment to the Republican side of the chamber. There was a note of
desperation in his voice, too, since he knew that President Wilson had
not up to that moment won the two votes lacking. The gist of Senator
Pittman’s remarks was this: The Woman’s Party has charged the Senate
Woman Suffrage Committee, which is in control of the Democrats, and the
President himself, with the responsibility fob obstructing a vote on
the measure. “I confess,” said he, that this is “having its effect as a
campaign argument” in the woman suffrage states.
Senator Wolcott of Delaware, Democrat, interrupted him to ask if this
was “the party that has been picketing here in Washington?” Senator
Pittman, having just paid this tribute to our campaign in the West,
hastened to say that it was, but that there was another association,
the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which had always
conducted its campaign in a “lady-like—modest—and intelligent way” and
which had “never mixed in politics.”
Waving a copy of the Suffragist in the air, Senator Pittman began his
attempt to shift responsibility to the Republican side, for the
critical condition of the amendment. He denounced the Republicans for
caucusing on the amendment and deciding unanimously to press for a
vote, when they the Republicans] knew there were two votes lacking. He
scored us for having given so much publicity to the action of the
caucus and declared with vehemence that a “trick” had been executed
through Senator Smoot which he would not allow to go unrevealed.
Senator Pittman charged that the Republicans had promised enough votes
to pass the amendment and that upon that promise the Democrats had
brought the measure on the floor; that the Republicans thereupon
withdrew enough votes to cause the defeat of the amendment. Whether or
not this was true, at any rate, as Senator Smoot pointed out, the
Democratic Chairman in charge of the measure could at any moment send
the measure back to Committee, safe from immediate defeat. This was
true, but not exactly a suggestion to be welcomed by the Democrats.
“Yes,” replied Senator Pittman, “and then if we move to refer it back
to the committee, the Senator from Utah would say again, ‘The Democrats
are obstructing the passage of this amendment . . . . We told you all
the time they wanted to kill it.’ . . . If we refer it back to the
committee, then we will be charged, as we have been all the time in the
suffrage states, with trying to prevent a vote on it, and still the
Woman’s Party campaign will go on as it is going on now; and if we vote
on it they will say: ‘We told you the Democrats would kill it, because
the President would not make 332 on his side vote for it’.”
That was the crux of the whole situation. The Democrats had been
manaeuvered into a position where they could neither afford to move to
refer the amendment back to the committee, nor could they afford to
press it to a losing vote. They were indeed in an exceedingly
embarrassing predicament.
Throughout hours of debate, Senator Pittman could not get away from the
militants. Again and again, he recited our deeds of protest, our
threats of reprisal, our relentless strategy of holding his party
responsible for defeat or victory.
“I should like the Senator,” interpolated Senator Poindexter of
Washington, Republican, “so long as he is discussing the action of the
pickets, to explain to the Senate whether or not it is the action of
the pickets . . . the militant . . . woman’s party, that caused the
President to change his attitude on the subject. Was he coerced into
supporting this measure—after he had for years opposed it—because he
was picketed? When did the President change his attitude? If it was not
because he was picketed, will the Senator explain what was the cause of
the change in the President’s attitude?”
Mr. Pittman did not reply directly to these questions.
Senator Reed of Missouri, anti-Administration Democrat, consumed hours
reading into the Congressional Record various press reports of militant
activities. He dwelt particularly upon the news headlines, such as,
“Great Washington Crowd Cheers Demonstration at White House by National
Woman’s Party.” . . .
“Suffragists Burn Wilson ‘Idle Words’ . . .”
“Money Instead of Jeers Greet Marchers and Unique Protest Against
Withholding Vote” . . .
“Apply Torch to President’s Words . . . Promise to Urge Passage of
Amendment Not Definite Enough for Militants.”
“Suff’s Burn Speech . . .,Apply Torch to Wilson’s Words During
Demonstration-Symbol of ‘Indignation’—Throngs Witnessing Doings in
Lafayette Square Orderly and Contribute to Fund—President Receives
Delegation of American Suffrage Association Women.”
Senator McKellar of Tennessee, Democrat, asked Mr. Reed if he did not
believe that we had a right peaceably to assemble under the “first
amendment to our Constitution which I shall read: Congress shall make
no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Mr. Reed made no direct answer.
Lest the idea get abroad from the amount of time they spent in
discussing the actions of the “wicked militants,” that we had had
something to do with the situation which had resulted in Democratic
despair, Senator Thomas of Colorado, the one Democrat who had never
been able to conceal his hostility to us for having reduced his
majority in 1914, arose to pay a tribute to the conservative suffrage
association of America. Their “escutcheon,” he said, “is unstained by
mob methods or appeals to violence. It has neither picketed Presidents
nor populated prisons . . . . It has carried no banners flaunting
insults to the Executive,” while the militants on the other hand have
indulged in “much tumult and vociferous braying, all for notoriety’s
sake.” . . . The galleries smiled as he counseled the elder suffrage
leaders “not to lose courage nor yet be: fainthearted,” for this
“handicap” would soon be overcome. It would have taken an abler man
than Senator Thomas, in the face of the nature of this debate, to make
any one believe that we had been a “handicap” in forcing them to their
position. He was the only one hardy enough to try. After this debate
the Senate adjourned, leaving things from the point of view of party
politics, tangled in a hopeless knot. It was to untie this knot that
the President returned hastily from New York in answer to urgent
summons by long distance telephone, and went to the Capitol to deliver
his memorable address.
Mr. Vice President and Gentlemen of the Senate: The unusual
circumstances of a world war in which we stand and are judged in the
view not only of our own people and our own consciences but also in
view of all nations and all peoples will, I hope, justify in your
thought, as it does in mine, the message I have come to bring you. I
regard the concurrence of the Senate in the constitutional amendment
proposing the extension of the suffrage to women as vitally essential
to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we
are engaged. I have come to urge upon you the considerations which have
led me to that conclusion. It is not only my privilege, it is also my
duty to appraise you of every circumstance and element involved in this
momentous struggle which seems to me to affect its very processes and
its outcome. It is my duty to win the war and to ask you to remove
every obstacle that stands in the way of winning it.
I had assumed that the Senate would concur in the amendment because ho
disputable principle is involved but only a question of the method by
which the suffrage is to be extended to women. There is and can be no
party issue involved in it. Both of our great national parties are
pledged, explicitly pledged, to equality of suffrage for the women of
the country. Neither party, therefore, it seems to me, can justify
hesitation as to the method of obtaining it, can rightfully hesitate to
substitute federal initiative for state initiative, if the early
adoption, of the measure is necessary to the successful prosecution of
the war and if the method of state action proposed in party platforms
of 1916 is impracticable within any reasonable length of time, if
practicable at all. And its adoption is, in my judgment, clearly
necessary to the successful prosecution of the war and the successful
realization of the objects for which the war is being fought.
That judgment, I take the liberty of urging upon you with solemn
earnestness for reasons which I shall state very frankly and which I
shall hope will seem as conclusive to you as they have seemed to me.
This is a peoples’ war, and the peoples’ thinking constitutes its
atmosphere and morale, not the predilections of the drawing room or the
political considerations of the caucus. If we be indeed democrats and
wish to lead the world to democracy, we can ask other peoples to accept
in proof of our sincerity and our ability to lead them whither they
wish to be led nothing less persuasive and convincing than our actions.
Ours professions will not suffice. Verification must be forthcoming
when verification is asked for. And in this case verification is asked
for, asked for in this particular matter. You ask by whom? Not through
diplomatic channels; not by Foreign Ministers, not by the intimations
of parliaments. It is asked for by the anxious, expectant, suffering
peoples with whom we are dealing and who are willing to put their
destinies in some measure in our hands, if they are sure that we wish
the same things that they wish. I do not speak by conjecture. It is not
alone the voices of statesmen and of newspapers that reach me, and the
voices of foolish and intemperate agitators do not reach me at all!
Through many, many channels I have been made aware what the plain,
struggling, workaday folk are thinking upon whom the chief terror and
suffering of this tragic war falls. They are looking to the great,
powerful, famous democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for
which they have so long waited; and they think, in their logical
simplicity, that democracy means that women shall play their part in
affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them. If we reject
measures like this, in ignorance or defiance of what a new age has
brought forth, of what they have seen but we have not, they will cease
to follow or to trust us. They have seen their own governments accept
this interpretation of democracy,—seen old governments like Great
Britain, which did not profess to be democratic, promise readily and as
of course this justice to women, though they had before refused it, the
strange revelations of this war having made many things new and plain
to governments as well as to peoples.
Are we alone to refuse to learn the lesson? Are we alone to ask and
take the utmost that women can give,—service and sacrifice of every
kind,—and still say that we do not see what title that gives them to
stand by our sides in the guidance of the affairs of their nation and
ours? We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit
them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toil and not
to a partnership of privilege and of right? This war could not have
been fought, either by the other nations engaged or by America, if it
had not been for the services of the women,—services rendered in every
sphere,—not only in the fields of effort in which we have been
accustomed to see them work, but wherever men have worked and upon the
very skirts and edges of the battle itself. We shall not only be
distrusted but shall deserve to be distrusted if we do not enfranchise
them with the fullest possible enfranchisement, as it is now certain
that the other great free nations will enfranchise them. We cannot
isolate our thought or our action in such a matter from the thought of
the rest of the world. We must either conform or deliberately reject
what they propose and resign the leadership of liberal minds to others.
The women of America arc too noble and too intelligent and too devoted
to be slackers whether you give or withhold this thing that is mere
justice; but I know the magic it will work in their thoughts and
spirits if you give it them. I propose it as I would propose to admit
soldiers to the suffrage, the men fighting in the field for our
liberties and the liberties of the world, were they excluded. The tasks
of the women lie at the very heart of the war, and I know how much
stronger that heart will beat if you do this just thing and show our
women that you trust them as much as you in fact and of necessity
depend upon them.
Have I said that the passage of this amendment is a vitally necessary
war measure, and do you need further proof? Do you stand in need of the
trust of other peoples and of the trust of our women? Is that trust an
asset or is it not? I tell you plainly, as commander-in-chief of our
armies and of the gallant men in our fleets, as the present spokesman
of this people in our dealings with the men and women throughout the
world who are now our partners, as the responsible head of a great
government which stands and is questioned day by day as to its
purposes, its principles, its hopes, whether they be serviceable to men
everywhere or only to itself, and who must himself answer these
questionings or be shamed, as the guide and director of forces caught
in the grip of war and by the same token in need of every material and
spiritual resource this great nation possesses,—I tell you plainly that
this measure which I urge upon you is vital to the winning of the war
and to the energies alike of preparation and of battle.
And not to the winning of the war only. It is vital to the right
solution of the great problems which we must settle, and settle
immediately, when the war is over. We shall need then a vision of
affairs which is theirs, and, as we have never needed them before, the
sympathy and insight and clear moral instinct of the women of the
world. The problems of that time will strike to the roots of many
things that we have not hitherto questioned, and I for one believe that
our safety in those questioning days, as well as our comprehension of
matters that touch society to the quick, will depend upon the direct
and authoritative participation of women in our counsels. We shall need
their moral sense to preserve what is right and fine and worthy in our
system of life as well as to discover just what it is that ought to be
purified and reformed. Without their counselings we shall be only half
wise.
That is my case. This is my appeal. Many may deny its validity, if they
choose, but no one can brush aside or answer the arguments upon which
it is based. The executive tasks of this war rest upon me. I ask that
you lighten them and place in my hands instruments, spiritual
instruments, which I do not now possess, which I sorely need, and which
I have daily to apologize for not being able to employ. (Applause).
It was a truly beautiful appeal.
When the applause and the excitement attendant upon the occasion of a
message from the President had subsided, and the floor of the chamber
had emptied itself of its distinguished visitors, the debate was
resumed.
“If this resolution fails now,” said Senator Jones of Washington,
ranking Republican member of the Suffrage Committee, “it fails for lack
of Democratic votes.”
Senator Cummins of Iowa, Republican, also a member of the Suffrage
Committee, reminded opponents of the measure of the retaliatory tactics
used by President Wilson when repudiated by senators on other issues.
“I sincerely hope,” he said tauntingly, “that the President may deal
kindly and leniently with those who are refusing to remove this
obstacle which stands in his way. It has not been very long since the
President retired the junior Senator from Mississippi [Mr. Vardaman]
from public life. Why? Because he refused at all times to obey the
commands which were issued for his direction. The junior Senator from
Georgia [Mr. Hardwick] suffered the same fate. How do you hope to
escape? . . . My Democratic friends are either proceeding upon the
hypothesis that the President is insincere or that they may be able to
secure an immunity from him that these other unfortunate aspirants for
office failed to secure.”
Senator Cummins chided Senator Reed for denouncing “the so-called
militants who sought to bring their influence to bear upon the
situation in rather a more forcible and decisive method than was
employed by the national association. . . I did not believe in the
campaign they were pursuing (not one senator was brave enough to say
outright that he did). . . .
“But that was simply a question for them to determine; and if they
thought that in accordance with the established custom the President
should bring his influence to bear more effectively than he had, they
had a perfect right to burn his message; they had a perfect right to
carry banners in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, or
anywhere else; they had a perfect right to bring their banners into the
Capitol and display them with all the force and vigor which they could
command. I did not agree with them; but they also were making a
campaign for an inestimable and a fundamental right.
“What would you have done, men, if you had been deprived of the right
to vote? What would you have done if you had been deprived of the right
of representation? Have the militants done anything worse than the
revolutionary forces who gathered about the tea chests and threw them
into the sea? . . .
“I do not believe they [the militants] committed any crime; and while I
had no particle of sympathy with the manner in which they were
conducting their campaign, I think their arrest and imprisonment and
the treatment which they received while in confinement are a disgrace
to the civilized world, and much the more a disgrace to the United
States, which assumes to lead the civilized world in humane endeavor.
They disturbed nobody save that disturbance which is common to the
carrying forward of all propaganda by those who are intensely and
vitally interested in it. I wish they had not done it, but I am not to
be the judge of their methods so long as they confine themselves to
those acts and to those words which are fairly directed to the
accomplishment of their purposes. I cannot accept the conclusion that
because these women burned a message in Lafayette Park or because they
carried banners upon the streets in Washington therefore they are
criminals.”
The time had come to take the vote, but we knew we had not won. The
roll was called and the vote stood 62 to 34 [Oct. 1, 1918], counting
all pairs. We had lost by 2 votes.
Instantly Chairman Jones, according to his promise to the women,
changing his vote from “yea” to “nay,” moved for a reconsideration of
the measure, and thus automatically kept it on the calendar of the
Senate. That was all that could be done.
The President’s belief in the power of words had lost the amendment.
Nor could he by a speech, eloquent as it was, break down the opposition
in the Senate which he had so long protected and condoned.
Our next task was to secure a reversal of the Senate vote. We modified
our tactics slightly.