A Farewell to President Wilson
The Republican Congress elected in November, 1918, would not sit until
December, 1919—such is our unfortunate system—unless called together by
the President in a special session. We had polled the new Congress by
personal interviews and by post, and found a safe two-thirds majority
for the amendment in the House. In the new Senate we still lacked a
fateful one vote.
Our task was, therefore, to induce the President to call a special
session of Congress at the earliest possible moment, and to see that he
did not relax his efforts toward the last vote.
“He won’t do it!” . . .”President Wilson will never let the Republican
Congress come together until the regular time.” . . . “Especially with
himself in Europe!” The usual points of objection were raised. But we
persisted. We felt that the President could win this last vote. And the
fear that a Republican Congress might, if he did not, was an
accelerating factor.
One feature of the campaign to force a special session was a
demonstration in New York, on the eve of President Wilson’s return to
Europe, at the time he addressed a mass meeting in the Metropolitan
Opera House on behalf of his proposed League of Nations. The plan of
demonstration was to hold outside of the Opera House banners addressed
to President Wilson, and to consign his speech to the flames of a torch
at a public meeting nearby.
It was a clear starry night in March when the picket line of 26 women
proceeded with tri-colored banners from New York headquarters in
Forty-first street to the Opera House. As we neared the corner of the
street opposite the Opera House and before we could cross the street a
veritable battalion of policemen in close formation rushed us with
unbelievable ferocity. Not a word was spoken by a single officer of the
two hundred policemen in the attack to indicate the nature of our
offense. Clubs were raised and lowered and the women beaten back with
such cruelty as none of us had ever witnessed before.
The women clung to their heavy banner poles, trying to keep the banners
above the maelstrom. But the police seized them, tore the pennants,
broke the poles, some of them over our backs, trampled them underfoot,
pounded us, dragged us, and in every way behaved like frantic beasts.
It would have been so simple quietly to detain our little handful until
after the President’s speech, if that seemed necessary. But to launch
this violent attack under the circumstances was madness. Not a
pedestrian had paid any except friendly attention to the slender file
of women. But the moment this happened an enormous crowd gathered, made
up mostly of soldiers and sailors, many of whom had just returned from
abroad and were temporarily thronging the streets of New York. They
joined forces with the police in the attack.
Miss Margaretta Schuyler, a beautiful, fragile young girl, was holding
fast a silken American flag which she had carried at the head of the
procession when a uniformed soldier jumped upon her, twisted her arms
until she cried in pain, cursed, struggled until he had torn her flag
from its pole, and then broke the pole across her head, exulting in his
triumph over his frailer victim.
When I appealed to the policeman, who was at the moment occupied solely
with pounding me on the back, to intercept the soldier in his cruel
attack, his only reply was: “Oh, he’s helping me.” He thereupon resumed
his beating of me and I cried, “Shame, shame! Aren’t you ashamed to
beat American women in this brutal way?” I offered no other resistance.
“If we are breaking any law, arrest us! Don’t beat us in this cowardly
fashion!”
“We’ll rush you like bulls,” was his vulgar answer, “we’ve only just
begun.”
Another young woman, an aviatrice, was seized by the coat collar and
thrown to the pavement for trying to keep hold of her banner. Her fur
cap was the only thing that saved her skull from serious injury. As it
was, she was trampled under foot and her face severely cut before we
could rescue her with the assistance of a sympathetic member of the
crowd. The sympathetic person was promptly attacked by the policeman
for helping his victim to her feet. There were many shouts of
disapproval of the police conduct and many cheers for the women from
the dense crowd.
By this time the crowd had massed itself so thickly that we could
hardly move an inch. It was perfectly apparent that we could neither
make our way to the Opera House nor could we extricate ourselves. But
the terrors continued. Women were knocked down and trampled under foot,
some of them almost unconscious, others bleeding from the hands and
face; arms were bruised and twisted; pocketbooks were snatched and
wrist-watches stolen.
When it looked as if the suffocating melee would result in the death or
permanent injury to some of us, I was at last dragged by a policeman to
the edge of the crowd. Although I offered not the slightest resistance,
I was crushed continuously in the arm by the officer who walked me to
the police station, and kept muttering: “You’re a bunch of
cannibals,—cannibals,—Bolsheviks.”
Upon arriving at the police station I was happily relieved to find eve
of my comrades already there. We were all impartially cursed at; told
to stand up; told to sit down; forbidden to speak to one another;
forbidden even to smile at one another. One by one we were called to
the desk to give our name, age, and various other pieces of
information. We stood perfectly silent before the station lieutenant as
he coaxingly said, “You’d better tell.”—“You’d better give us your
name.”—“You’d better tell us where you live—it will make things easier
for you.” But we continued our silence.
Disorderly conduct, interfering with the police, assaulting the police
(Shades of Heaven! assaulting the police!), were the charges entered
against us.
We were all locked in separate cells and told that we would be taken to
the Woman’s Night Court for immediate trial.
While pondering on what was happening to our comrades and wondering if
they, too, would be arrested, or if they would just be beaten up by the
police and mob, a large, fat jail matron came up and began to deliver a
speech, which, ran something like this:
“Now, shure and you ladies must know that this is goin’ a bit too far.
Now, I’m for suffrage alright, and I believe women ought to vote, but
why do you keep botherin’ the President? Don’t you know he has got
enough to think about with the League of Nations, the Peace Conference
and fixin’ up the whole world on his mind?”
In about half an hour we were taken from our cells and brought before
the Lieutenant, who now announced, “Well, you ladies may go now,—I have
just received a telephone order to release you.”
We accepted the news and jubilantly left the station house, returning
at once to our comrades. There the battle was still going on, and as we
joined them we were again dragged and cuffed about the streets by the
police and their aids, but there were no more arrests. Elsie Hill
succeeded in speaking from a balcony above the heads of the crowd:
“Did you men turn back when you saw the Germans coming? What would you
have thought of any one who did? Did you expect us to turn back? We
never turn back, either—and we won’t until democracy is won! Who rolled
bandages for you when you were suffering abroad? Who bound your wounds
in your fight for democracy? Who spent long hours of the night and the
day knitting you warm garments? There are women here to-night
attempting to hold banners to remind the President that democracy is
not won at home; who have given their sons and husbands for your fight
abroad. What would they say if they could see you, their comrades in
the fight over there, attacking their mothers, their sisters, their
wives over here? Aren’t you ashamed that you have not enough sporting
blood to allow us to make our fight in our own way? Aren’t you ashamed
that you accepted the help of women in your fight, and now to-night
brutally attack them?”
And they did listen until the police, in formation—looking now like
wooden toys—advanced from both sides of the street and succeeded in
entirely cutting off the crowd from Miss Hill.
The meeting thus broken up, we abandoned a further attempt that night.
As our little, bannerless procession filed slowly back to headquarters,
hoodlums followed us. The police of course gave us no protection and
just as we were entering the door of our own building a rowdy struck me
on the side of the head with a heavy banner pole. The blow knocked me
senseless against the stone building; my hat was snatched from my head,
and burned in the street. We entered the building to find that soldiers
and sailors had been periodically rushing it in our absence, dragging
out bundles of our banners, amounting to many hundreds of dollars, and
burning them in the street, without any protest from the police.
One does not undergo such an experience without arriving at some
inescapable truths, a discussion of which would interest me deeply but
which would be irrelevant in this narrative.
“Two hundred maddened women try to see the President” . . . “Two
hundred women attack the police,” and similar false headlines, appeared
the next morning in the New York papers. It hurt to have the world
think that we had attacked the police. That was a slight matter,
however, for that morning at breakfast, aboard the George Washington,
the President also read the New York papers. He saw that we were not
submitting in silence to his inaction. It seems reasonable to assume
that on sailing down the harbor that morning past the Statue of Liberty
the President had some trouble to banish from his mind the report that
“two hundred maddened women” had tried to “make the Opera House last
night.”