enforce the provisions of this article.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association immediately rallied to
the support of the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment; they continued to give to
it their undivided work for two years.
But the Congressional Union—I quote the vigorous words of the Report of
the Congressional Union for the year 1914:
The Congressional Union immediately announced its determination to
support only the original Amendment, known popularly as the Susan B.
Anthony Amendment, and in Congress as the Bristow-Mondell Amendment.
It maintained that to work at the same time for two Suffrage
amendments to the National Constitution would enable the enemies of
the bill to play one against the other. Believing that one amendment
only must be supported, it felt that it was wise to support the
amendment which would give Suffrage itself rather than an amendment
which, after the same expenditure of effort would give _only another
method of obtaining Suffrage_—that is, would merely establish the
initiative on the Suffrage question. The Union, moreover, feeling
that the bane of the Suffrage cause at present was too many and not
too few referendums, held that to pass a Federal Amendment—which
would inaugurate thirty-nine referendum campaigns would involve the
movement in a dissipation of resources such as its enemies would
most deeply desire. Finally, it held that the passage of one
Suffrage amendment to the National Constitution would make it
extremely difficult to pass another; so that if the Shafroth Bill
became a law, it would probably indefinitely postpone the passage of
the Anthony Amendment, and doom the movement to years of referendum
campaigns.
Not at all daunted by the action of the Senate in defeating the Susan B.
Anthony Amendment, nor by the introduction there of the Shafroth-Palmer
Amendment, the Congressional Union at once secured the re-introduction
in the Senate of the defeated Amendment. The measure was out of the
Senate only twenty-two hours. The following day, Senator Bristow
introduced a resolution identical with the one which had been lost. On
April 7, it was again reported from the Woman Suffrage Committee, and
took its place on the Calendar of the Senate. This was just a year from
the date of its original introduction to this Senate. It was the second
favorable report of the Senate Committee in one Congress.
Here we leave the work with Congress for a while, and take up the matter
of the education of the President. We must go back a few months.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
PRESSURE ON THE PRESIDENT
ALTHOUGH five different deputations—Congressional Union members; college
women; women voters; New Jersey women; women from all the States—had
called on the President, it was apparent that he had undergone no change
in his attitude toward the Suffrage question. On February 2, 1914,
therefore, another deputation, the sixth—and an exceedingly interesting
one—marched to the White House. This deputation included women from the
industrial world and they represented more than fifty trades in which
women are engaged. They carried banners which bore quotations from the
President’s _New Freedom_: “We Have Got to Humanize Industry,” and “I
Absolutely Protest Against Being Put into the Hands of Trustees.”
At the mass-meeting, preliminary to waiting upon the President, Melinda
Scott, an organizer of the Women’s Trade Union League, said:
No one could be serious when they maintained that the ballot will
not help the working woman. It has helped the working-man to better
his conditions and his wages. Men of every class regard the ballot
as their greatest protection against the injustice of other men.
Women even more than men need the ballot to protect their especial
interests and their right to earn a living.... We want a law that
will prohibit home-work.... We hear about the sacredness of the
home. What sacredness is there about a home when it is turned into a
factory, where we find a mother, very often with a child at her
breast, running a sewing machine? Running up thirty-seven seams for
a cent. Ironing and pressing shirts seventy cents a dozen, and
children making artificial flowers for one cent a gross. Think of
it—one hundred and forty flowers for one cent. Taking stitches out
of coats, helping their mothers where they have finished them for
six cents a coat. These women have had no chance to make laws that
would protect themselves or their children....
The organized working woman has learnt through her trade union the
power of industrial organization, and she realizes what her power
would be if she had the ballot.... Men legislating as a class for
women and children as a class have done exactly what every other
ruling class has done since the history of the world. They
discriminate against the class that has no voice. Some of the men
say, “You women do not need a ballot; we will take care of you.” We
have no faith in man’s protection.... Give us the ballot, and we
will protect ourselves.
This army of four hundred arrived safely, with perfect police escort, at
the doors of the White House. They were amazed to learn that the
President would see only twenty-five of the women. He had said he would
“receive the delegation.” The selected number then went in, the
remaining three hundred and seventy-five waited in line outside.
Margaret Hinchey, a laundry worker of New York, said:
Mr. President: It is shaking and trembling, I, as a laundry worker,
come here to speak in behalf of the working women of the United
States. I have read about you, and think you are fair, square, on
the level, and so much a real democrat, that I believe when it is
made clear to you how much we working women, who organize in the
factories, the mills, the laundries, and the stores, can help every
true democrat, you will use your power to wipe out this great
injustice to women by giving us a vote.
Rose Winslow said:
Mr. President: I am one of the thousands of women who work in the
sweated trades, and have been since a child, who give their lives to
build up these tremendous industries in this country, and at the end
of the years of work, our reward is the tuberculosis sanatorium or
the street. I do not think to plead with you, Mr. President, nor
make a regular speech. I do not speak to Presidents every day; it
hasn’t been my job, so I don’t do it very gracefully.
Here the President interrupted Miss Winslow by stating that he did not
see why she should be so nervous, as Presidents are perfectly human.
Miss Winslow then continued:
Yes, I know, and that is why I can speak to you, because you are
human and have a heart and mind and can realize our great need. I do
not need to remind you how we women need the ballot, etc.
The President said:
I need not tell you that a group of women like this appeals to me
very deeply indeed. I do not have to tell you what my feelings are,
but I have already explained—because I feel obliged to explain—the
limitations that are laid upon me as the leader of a Party. Until
the Party, as such, has considered the matter of this very supreme
importance and taken its position, I am not at liberty to speak of
it; and yet, I am not at liberty to speak as an individual, for I am
not an individual. As you see, I either speak to it in a message, as
you suggest, or I do not speak at all. That is the limitation I am
under, and all I can say to you ladies, is that the strength of your
agitation in this matter undoubtedly will make a profound
impression.
In view of later opinions of the President in regard to his
leadership—and in view of the fact that later even Democratic
Congressmen referred to his “dictatorship”—his attitude to the women
this day was most interesting.
Mrs. Glendower Evans, who was in charge of the deputation, said:
We understand your position and its difficulties quite well, Mr.
President, but nevertheless we ask, where can we look for political
action? We recognize that the verdict must come not from you alone,
but from the whole Party. I do not ask you to break with your Party.
What I ask is, will you use your influence within your Party? I do
not ask the impossible, though I might from you, for you have done
the impossible.
It is apparent that the President’s education was progressing. He was
beginning to be struck with the strength of the Woman Suffrage
agitation; although he still believed himself powerless to help in the
work with Congress.
Early in June, 1914, the National Federation of Women’s Clubs meeting in
Chicago, had given its indorsement, as an organization, to Woman
Suffrage. Following this action by the Federation, another
delegation—the seventh—of five hundred club women under the leadership
of Mrs. Harvey W. Wiley, waited upon the President on June 30. I quote
from the _Suffragist_:
The deputation had assembled for a preliminary mass-meeting at the
Public Library.... Leaving the Library, the deputation, which
extended over several blocks, marched in single files to the White
House.... It passed through the Arcade and into the East Room....
Women were massed about the State Apartment, filling it from end to
end, and leaving a hollow square in which Mrs. Ellis Logan and Mrs.
Wiley and Rheta Childe Dorr awaited the President’s arrival.
Preceded by his aide, the President entered....
“Mr. President,” said Mrs. Dorr, “we are well aware that you are the
busiest of men. I shall therefore go directly to the point and tell
you that our reason for calling on you today is to ask you if you
will not use your powerful influence with Congress to have the
Bristow-Mondell Amendment passed in this session.”
The President replied:
Mrs. Wiley and Ladies: No one can fail to be impressed by this great
company of useful women, and I want to assure you that it is to me
most impressive. I have stated once before the position which, as
leader of a Party, I feel obliged to take, and I am sure you will
not wish me to state it again. Perhaps it would be more serviceable
if I ventured upon the confident conjecture that the Baltimore
Convention did not embody this very important question in the
platform which it adopted because of its conviction that the
principles of the Constitution which allotted these questions to the
State were well-considered principles from which they did not wish
to depart.
You have asked me to state my personal position in regard to the
pending measure. It is my conviction that this is a matter for
settlement by the States, and not by the Federal Government, and,
therefore, that being my personal conviction, and it being obvious
that there is no ground on your part for discouragement in the
progress you are making, and my passion being local self-government
and the determination by the great communities into which this
nation is organized of their own policy and life, I can only say
that since you turned away from me as a leader of a Party and asked
me my position as a man, I am obliged to state it very frankly, and
I believe that in stating it I am probably in agreement with those
who framed the platform to which allusion has been made.
I think that very few persons, perhaps, realize the difficulty and
the dual duty that must be exercised, whether he will or not, by a
President of the United States. He is President of the United States
as an executive charged with the administration of the law, but he
is the choice of a Party as a leader in policy. The policy is
determined by the Party, or else upon unusual and new circumstances
by the determination of those who lead the Party. This is my
situation as an individual. I have told you that I believed that the
best way of settling this thing and the best considered principles
of the Constitution with regard to it, is that it should be settled
by the States. I am very much obliged to you.
The President paused. He looked relieved. There was a moment’s
silence, and then Mrs. Dorr said:
“May I ask you this question? Is it not a fact that we have very
good precedents existing for altering the electorate by
Constitutional Amendment?”
The President’s face changed. “I do not think,” he said, “that that
has anything to do with my conviction as to the best way that it
could be done.”
“It has not,” agreed Mrs. Dorr, “but it leaves room for the women of
the country to say what they want through the Constitution of the
United States.”
“Certainly it does,” the President said hastily, “there is good
room. But I have stated my conviction. I have no right to criticize
the opinions of those who have different convictions and I certainly
would not wish to do so.”
Mrs. Wiley stepped forward. “Granted that it is a State matter,” she
said, “would it not give this great movement an impetus if the
Resolution now pending before Congress were passed?”
“But the Resolution is for an Amendment to the Constitution,” the
President objected.
“The States would have to pass upon it before it became an
Amendment,” said Mrs. Wiley. “Would it not be a State matter then?”
“Yes,” the President interrupted, “but by a very different process,
for by that process it would be forced upon the minority; they would
have to accept it.”
“They could reject it if they wished to,” said Mrs. Dorr.
“Three-fourths of the States would have to pass it.”
“Yes,” the President said, with distinct annoyance, “but the other
fourth could not reject it.”
“Mr. President,” said Mrs. Dorr, “don’t you think that when the
Constitution was framed it was agreed that when three-fourths of the
States wanted a reform, the other fourth should accept it also?”
The President was plainly disconcerted. He stepped back.
“I cannot say,” he replied frigidly, “what was agreed upon. I can
only say that I have tried to answer your question, and I do not
think it is quite proper that I submit myself to cross-examination.”
“Very well,” Mrs. Dorr said quietly. “We will not cross-examine you
further.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” said Mrs. Wiley, “for your courtesy in
receiving us.”
The President bowed. “I am very much obliged to you,” he said. “It
has been a very pleasant occasion.”
In the _Suffragist_ Lucy Burns said editorially:
The President has told a deputation of club women that they must win
political freedom from State Legislatures; but not from him, not
from Congress.
This position is obvious pretense. The national government has the
power, granted it by the constitution, to enfranchise women. It has,
therefore, the duty of doing so, if women’s claim to enfranchisement
is just.
The President knows as well as we do the enormous difficulty of
winning the vote by amending the Constitution of thirty-nine
different States. It is amazing that a man can be found who will
calmly direct women to take up this great burden when men are
responsible for their need. Men alone, in all but ten States, have
the power to change our laws. The good or evil of these laws is
their praise or blame. It is a public injustice today that men deny
to women in the ballot a means of self-protection which they are
glad to possess themselves. Men are ethically on the
defensive—particularly the men, or group of men, who from time to
time monopolize political power. For the President of the United
States, who incorporates in himself the power of the whole nation,
and who is, therefore, more responsible than any other person today
for the subjugation of women, to declare that he washes his hands of
their whole case, is to presume upon greater ignorance among women
than he will find they possess.
Nevertheless, we are specifically informed by the President that it
is “not proper” for us to “cross-examine” him on the grounds of his
refusal to help us.
Only fitfully do women realize the astounding arrogance of their
rulers.
And later:
Some few curious commentaries cropped up editorially. Under the
caption, “Heckling the President,” the _New York Times_ says: “It
certainly was not proper. The President of the United States is not
to be heckled or hectored or made a defendant.... To catechise him
when he had finished his speech to them is a thing never done by
similar delegations of men.”
The _Times_ has not grasped the fact that no similar delegation of
men is possible. Men approach their own representative. If he
disagrees with them, they have a legitimate remedy in their own
hands, and can choose another representative at a duly appointed
time. Women approach the President as members of a disfranchised
class. The President does not represent them. He bears no
constitutional relation to them whatever. If the President rejects
their appeal, they have no legal means of redress. If they may not
question the President on the justice of his refusal to help them,
cannot question him gently and reasonably as they did—their position
is indeed a subservient one.
And who told the _Times_ that men never question the President
“after he had finished his speech to them?” While the Tariff Bill
was before Congress, representatives of men’s interests argued with
him for hours. But they were men, and voters.
On January 6, 1915, another deputation—the eighth—of one hundred and
fifty Democratic women appeared before the President. Mrs. George A.
Armes, President of the Association of the National Democratic Women of
America, introduced the speakers, Alberta Hill and Dr. Frances G. Van
Gasken. He greeted Miss Hill with marked cordiality and listened
attentively as she briefly and with great earnestness pointed out that,
while the Federal Government protected men in the exercise of
citizenship throughout the United States, a woman lost her right to vote
when she crossed the line from a Suffrage to a non-Suffrage State. Miss
Hill read the following extracts from the speech delivered by Mr. Wilson
on the occasion of the formation of the Wilson and Marshall League at
Spring Lake, New Jersey, two months after his nomination.
When the last word is said about politics, it is merely the life of
all of us from the point of view of what can be accomplished by
legislation and the administration of public offices. I think it is
artificial to divide life up into sections: it is all of one piece
though you can’t attend to all pieces of it at once.
And so when the women, who are in so many respects at the heart of
life, begin to take an interest in politics, then you know that all
the lines of sympathy and intelligence and comprehension are going
to be interlaced in a way which they have never been interlaced
before; so that our politics will be of the same pattern with our
life. This, it seems to me, is devoutly to be wished.
And so when the women come into politics, they come in to show us
all those little contacts between life and politics, on account of
which I, for myself, rejoice that they have come to our assistance;
they will be as indispensable as they are delightful.
The President listened with close attention, a smile quivering at the
corners of his mouth. As she concluded, a ripple of amusement ran around
the circle of auditors, and the President laughed outright.
“I cannot argue as well as you can,” he told Miss Hill with evident
enjoyment. He said further:
I am most unaffectedly complimented by this visit that you have paid
me. I have been called on several times to say what my position is
in the very important matter that you are so deeply interested in. I
want to say that nobody can look on the fight you are making without
great admiration, and I certainly am one of those who admire the
tenacity and the skill and the address with which you try to promote
the matter that you are interested in.
But I, ladies, am tied to a conviction which I have had all my life
that changes of this sort ought to be brought about State by State.
If it were not a matter of female Suffrage, if it were a matter of
any other thing connected with Suffrage, I would hold the same
opinion. It is a long standing and deeply matured conviction on my
part and therefore I would be without excuse to my own
constitutional principles if I lend my support to this very
important movement for an amendment to the Constitution of the
United States.
Frankly I do not think that this is the wise or the permanent way to
build. I know that perhaps you unanimously disagree with me but you
will not think the less of me for being perfectly frank in the
avowal of my own convictions on that subject; and certainly that
avowal writes no attitude of antagonism, but merely an attitude of
principle.
I want to say again how much complimented I am by your call and also
by the confidence that you have so generously expressed in me, Mrs.
Armes. I hope that in some respect I may live to justify that
confidence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII
THE STRUGGLE WITH THE RULES COMMITTEE
WE now return to the work in Congress. Again it is necessary to go back
into history a few months.
All these months, the work of organizing the nation-wide demonstration
of May 2—which had been decided upon at the opening meeting of the
Congressional Union for 1914—had been going on.
The Congressional Union sent organizers into all the States of the Union
to make plans for the demonstration. Minnie E. Brooke went through every
State in the South. Mabel Vernon, one of the organizers for the
Congressional Union, traveled through the southwestern part of the
country and up through California, ending her trip in Nevada. Crystal
Eastman of the Executive Committee took care of the Northwestern States,
Emma Smith DeVoe covered the Far Western States; Jessie Hardy Stubbs,
the Middle Western States; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and Alice Paul, assisted
by Olive Hasbrouck, New England and the Middle Atlantic States.
On February 12, the National American Woman Suffrage Association
promised its co-operation also, and from that date aided in making the
demonstration a success.
The demonstration—taking the form of parades in most cases, meetings in
a few—occurred in at least one great city in every State. The following
resolution was adopted at the various gatherings.
Resolved, that this meeting calls upon Congress to take immediate
and favorable action upon the Bristow-Mondell Resolution
enfranchising women.
The culminating demonstration occurred May 9 in Washington. There was a
mass-meeting at the Belasco Theatre, and following this a procession
starting promptly at three o’clock, marched to the Capitol. At the foot
of the Capitol steps, the enormous gathering sang the _Woman’s March_.
Then five hundred and thirty-one delegates representing every
Congressional and Senatorial district in the country, bearing
resolutions passed at the country-wide demonstrations, marched up the
long steps into the great Rotunda of the Capitol. A Committee of
Senators and Representatives awaited the delegates, received the
resolutions and introduced them on the floor of each House of Congress.
Here, as always, Alice Paul visualized her work in pageantry. On this
occasion, that pageantry was particularly beautiful. Zona Gale writes in
the _Suffragist_:
“I shall watch it, but it will not mean anything to me,” said a
visitor to me on Saturday, but that night she said: “I leaned out of
my window, and held my screen up with one hand, and let the sun beat
in my face for the forty minutes that you were passing, and I wept.
To think of your being part of it—and caring like that—and the men
there on the sidewalk holding back, _by what right_, what you ask!”
The effect of this lengthened—and therefore accumulative—nation-wide
demonstration was immediately felt at the national Capitol. Between the
dates of the demonstration throughout the States May 2, and the
demonstration in Washington, May 9, the Judiciary Committee reported the
Mondell Resolution without recommendation, but with an overwhelming
vote, to the House. This marked an epoch in the Suffrage work in the
United States; for Suffrage had never been debated on the floor of the
House, and not since 1890 had it progressed beyond the Committee stage
in the House. The Resolution rested on May 5 at the foot of the highly
congested House calendar. On May 13, Representative Mondell introduced a
Resolution asking time for an early consideration of the Suffrage
Amendment. The adoption of this Resolution meant that the Amendment
would be taken up, debated, and voted on.
The Rules Committee, to which the Resolution was referred, failed to act
upon it. Suffragists began to besiege the Rules Committee. The Rules
Committee, however, proved unamenable to argument, discussion, or
entreaty.
Later in the year, in a speech at the Newport Conference, Lucy Burns
said of the Rules Committee that it “adopted devious means for avoiding
action on the Suffrage Resolution. It was difficult for them to vote
against it, and it seemed difficult for them to vote for it. They
apparently decided that the best policy for them to pursue was to take
no action at all, so they hit upon the happy expedient of holding no
meetings whatever.”
A detailed account of the action of the Rules Committee proves the
adamancy of Party control. It gives some idea of the obstacles which
ingenious politicians can put in the way of citizens, even though those
citizens are making a perfectly legitimate request.
Mr. Henry, the Chairman of the Rules Committee, had declared in the
spring that he thought it was out of the power of his Committee to take
action (i.e. on the matter of the Suffrage Resolution _which was only to
allot time in the House for the discussion of the Suffrage Amendment_)
since the Suffrage Amendment had not been favorably acted upon at the
last Democratic Caucus: “You may tell this to the Press. You may tell it
to the newspapers,” Mr. Henry said; “my hands are tied.”
However, early in June, the _Suffragist_ says, “Mr. Henry’s view of his
political helplessness weakened slightly.” He promised to report out the
Suffrage Resolution. But he could not be prevailed upon to state when he
would do so. The Congressional Union, therefore, organized a series of
deputations which visited the Rules Committee during all the long, hot
summer and the long, hot fall. Deputations from nearly every State in
the Union and from nearly every occupation and profession of women
waited upon the members of the Rules Committee. The reader must remember
always that they were asking—not that the Amendment be passed—only that
a few hours be set aside for the discussion of the Suffrage question in
the House of Representatives. Repeated deputations called upon
individual members of the Committee. On June 10, the Committee met, but
decided to postpone action on the Suffrage question till July 1. Mr.
Henry left immediately for Texas. A large deputation came to Washington
to be present at the July 1 meeting. Many of the most prominent members
of the Club women’s Deputation of five hundred, who had called the
afternoon of June 30 on the President, remained in Washington overnight,
so that they might be present at the meeting.
When, however, they arrived at the Committee room, they were told that
the Committee would not meet, although no notice had been given of any
change of date of the meeting. Mr. Henry had not returned to Washington.
There was a quorum of the Committee in town; but the Democratic members
said that they were bound by a “gentlemen’s agreement” among themselves
not to meet. August 1 was set for the next meeting.
On July 13, a deputation of more than a hundred members of the
Congressional Union, led by Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Mrs. Gilson
Gardner, called upon the individual members of the Rules Committee. They
asked each member to sign a petition requesting the Acting Chairman, Mr.
Pou, to call the Committee together for the purpose of reporting out the
Resolution on the Suffrage Amendment. This petition was signed by the
two Republican members of the Committee in Washington, and the one
Progressive member. The two Democratic members then in Washington
refused to sign. The petition was presented to Mr. Pou in his office by
Representative Mondell.
Mr. Pou rose from his chair, viewing with amazement the numbers of the
deputation as they filed into the room till all available space was
occupied, leaving the majority of their number in the corridor. Mr. Pou
definitely declined to call the meeting, although a quorum of the
Committee was in the city, and although all of the Republican members on
the Committee and the Progressive member had requested a meeting. Mr.
Pou stated that he was bound by a “gentleman’s agreement” entered into
by the Democratic members to hold no meetings of the Committee before
August 1. He said, “The Democratic members agreed not to hold any
meetings until August 1. In view of that understanding, I would not feel
at liberty to call the Committee together.... When the Republicans were
in charge, they decided what they were going to do; now that we are in
charge, we decide what we are going to do.”
On August 1, a deputation consisting of Lucy Burns and Mrs. Gilson
Gardner from the Congressional Union accompanied by Maude F. Clark,
called upon Mr. Pou. The forthright Lucy Burns began. “Mr. Pou, today is
the first day of August. You told us when a Committee of our
Organization called upon you in July that the Democratic members of the
Committee had a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ not to hold a meeting until
August 1. Now that the day has come we should be glad to know when a
meeting of your Committee will be held to consider House Resolution 514,
allotting time for the consideration of the Suffrage Amendment in the
House.”
Mr. Pou informed the delegation that Mr. Henry, Chairman of the Rules
Committee, would return to Washington on Monday, August 3, and that a
meeting of the Committee would be called for that day. Among other
things, Mr. Pou made the significant statement, “The Rules Committee has
in its keeping the policy of the Democratic Party in Congress.”
On August 3, a second delegation from the Congressional Union,
consisting of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Dr. Clara E.
Ludlow, went to attend the promised meeting at the office of the
Chairman, Mr. Henry. The elusive Mr. Henry was at last visible in the
flesh. He informed these women that no meeting of the Committee had been
called for that day. He did not know when it would be called, nor what
measures it would consider. He suggested that they call again in a few
days.
On August 28, the Rules Committee finally met. A deputation from the
Congressional Union presented themselves at the door. The deputation
consisted of Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Minnie E. Brooke, Mrs. S. B. McDuffie,
Virginia Arnold.
At the door of the Committee room, Mr. Henry’s secretary declared that
it would be impossible for him to take a message or a card to Mr. Henry.
“I should be glad, then,” said the gently diplomatic Mrs. Gardner, “to
send a card to other members of the Committee.”
“The Chairman has given orders,” said the secretary, “that no messages
may be sent in to the Committee room.”
“I quite understand,” said Mrs. Gardner, “that Mr. Henry can speak for
the majority members of the Committee, but surely not for the Republican
and Progressive members, and I should like your permission to send word
in to one of them.”
The secretary maintained that this was against Mr. Henry’s specific
orders.
Mrs. Gardner then went on very gently: “It is not the desire of the
deputation to disturb the Committee; but, on the other hand, it is the
sense of the deputation that it is necessary to send the Committee a
message. What would you suggest that we do?”
The secretary considered and decreed, “A message might be sent in by
telephone.” Mrs. Gardner accepted the use of Mr. Henry’s desk telephone,
called up Representative Kelly who was attending the meeting in the
adjoining Committee room, and asked if he would bring the Suffrage
Resolution to the attention of the Committee. Mr. Kelly promptly
promised to call up the Suffrage Resolution if it were possible to do
so. This colloquy effectively brought the matter before the Committee.
The Suffrage Resolution was brought up, but a substitute motion that the
Committee adjourn was immediately made and carried. It was a tie vote,
but Mr. Henry, as chairman, cast the deciding vote. The Committee
accordingly adjourned without having taken action on the Suffrage
Resolution.
The Congressional Union, undaunted, maintained its siege of the Rules
Committee until Congress adjourned in October. Throughout the remaining
months of that Congressional Session, however, the Rules Committee
continued its policy of evasion. No action was taken before adjournment.
Of course, all this blocking of their efforts on the part of the
Democrats made inevitable the election policy which the Congressional
Union was about to adopt—that of holding them “responsible.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX
THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE WOMEN VOTERS
IN the meantime, the Congressional Union had been forming an Advisory
Council which continued to Support the Congressional Union—and later the
Woman’s Party—with advice and work during the rest of its history. The
personnel of the Advisory Council has changed from time to time; but
always it has been a large body and an able one.
The list of membership has included many famous names; women political
leaders; women trades-unionists; women of wealth and position; women
active in their communities. It included professional women of every
sort; doctors, lawyers, clergymen. It included artists of every
description; actors, singers, painters, sculptors. It included
publicists of every kind; fictionists, poets, dramatists, essayists. It
included social workers of every class. And these women have represented
all parts of the Union.
On August 29 and 30, this newly-formed Advisory Council met at Newport.
Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont did everything to make the occasion a success. She
threw open Marble House which, hung with the great purple, white, and
gold banners of the Congressional Union and flooded with golden light,
made an extraordinary background for the deliberations of the
Conference. In every way possible for her she used the beauty and social
prestige of Newport to give the occasion dignity, prominence, and
publicity. Her daughter, the Duchess of Marlborough, had joined the
Congressional Union just previous to this Conference. Little she thought
and little the Congressional Union thought that as an English woman, she
would be a voter, would be elected to the London City Council before her
mother, an American woman, was enfranchised.
Here, for the first time, the plan of holding the Democratic Party—the
Party in power—responsible for the slowness with which the Suffrage work
was progressing, and, in consequence, of working against it, was adopted
as a program actually to be carried out.
Lucy Burns made a magnificent speech on that occasion. She pointed out
that the Democratic Party was in complete possession of the National
Government, controlling the Presidential chair, the Senate, possessing
an overwhelming majority in the House. She analyzed the working of
Congress: she showed that our government is a government by Party: that
no measures of importance had passed through the Sixty-third Congress
without the backing of the Party in power: and that no measure could
pass that Congress if opposed by that Party.
She amplified this thesis. She showed that the President, the leader of
the Party, had seven times refused his powerful aid to the movement. She
showed that in the Senate the Democratic leaders blocked the Suffrage
measure by bringing it to a vote at a time when they acknowledged it
would be defeated. She showed that in the House, the Rules Committee had
consistently blocked the Amendment, both by preventing the creation of a
Suffrage Committee and by preventing consideration of the Amendment in
the House. And she proved by the words of the acting chairman of the
Rules Committee that that Committee had in its keeping “the policy of
the Democratic Party.” She showed that the Democratic Caucus had taken
definite action against the Suffrage Amendment. It had declared that
Suffrage was not a question for national consideration and so it had
refused to sanction the creation of a Suffrage Committee.
Alice Paul, first asking the press to withdraw, outlined the proposed
election program. She asked the members of the Conference not to reveal
it until the middle of September when the Congressional Union would be
ready to put it into practical operation. This is her speech on that
occasion:
From the very beginning of our work in Washington, we have followed
one consistent policy from which we have not departed a single
moment. We began our work with the coming in of the present Congress
and immediately went to the Party which was in control of the
situation and asked it to act. We determined to get the Amendment
through the Sixty-third Congress, or to make it very clear who had
kept it from going through. Now, as has been shown, the Democrats
have been in control of all branches of the Government and they are
therefore responsible for the non-passage of our measure.
The point is first, who is our enemy and then, how shall that enemy
be attacked?
We are all, I think, agreed that it is the Democratic Party which is
responsible for the blocking of the Suffrage Amendment. Again and
again that Party has gone on record through the action of its
leaders, its caucus, and its committees so that an impregnable case
has been built up against it. We now lay before you a plan to meet
the present situation.
We propose going into the nine Suffrage States and appealing to the
women to use their votes to secure the franchise for the women of
the rest of the country. All of these years we have worked primarily
in the States. Now the time has come, we believe, when we can really
go into national politics and use the nearly four million votes that
we have to win the vote for the rest of us. Now that we have four
million voters, we need no longer continue to make our appeal simply
to the men. The struggle in England has gotten down to a physical
fight. Here our fight is simply a political one. The question is
whether we are good enough politicians to take four million votes
and organize them and use them so as to win the vote for the women
who are still disfranchised.
We want to attempt to organize the women’s vote. Our plan is to go
out to these nine States and there appeal to all the women voters to
withdraw their support from the Democrats nationally until the
Democratic Party nationally ceases to block Suffrage. We would issue
an appeal signed by influential women of the East addressed to the
women voters as a whole asking them to use their vote this one time
in the national election against the Democratic Party throughout the
whole nine States. Every one of these States, with one exception, is
a doubtful State. Going back over a period of fourteen years, each
State, except Utah, has supported first one Party and then another.
Here are nine States which politicians are thinking about and in
these nine States we have this great power. If we ask those women in
the nine Suffrage States as a group to withhold their support from
this Party as a group which is opposing us, it will mean that votes
will be turned. Suppose the Party saw votes falling away all over
the country because of their action on the Trust question—they would
change their attitude on Trust legislation. If they see them falling
away because of their attitude on Suffrage they will change their
attitude on Suffrage. When we have once affected the result in a
national election, no Party will trifle with Suffrage any longer.
We, of course, are a little body to undertake this—but we have to
begin. We have not very much money; there are not many of us to go
out against the great Democratic Party. Perhaps this time we won’t
be able to do so very much, though I know we can do a great deal,
but if the Party leaders see that some votes have been turned they
will know that we have at least realized this power that we possess
and they will know that by 1916 we will have it organized. The mere
announcement of the fact that Suffragists of the East have gone out
to the West with this appeal will be enough to make every man in
Congress sit up and take notice.
This last week one Congressman from a Suffrage State came to us and
asked us if we would write just one letter to say what he had done
in Congress to help us. He said that one letter might determine the
election in his district. This week the man who is running for the
Senatorial election in another Suffrage State came to us and asked
us to go out and help him in his State—asked us simply to announce
that he had been our friend. Now if our help is valued to this
extent, our opposition will be feared in like degree.
Our plan is this: To send at least two women to each of those nine
States. We would put one woman at the center who would attend to the
organizing, the publicity and the distribution of literature. We
would have literature printed showing what the Democratic Party has
done with regard to Suffrage in the Sixty-third Congress. We would
have leaflets printed from the Eastern women appealing to the
Western women for help, and we would have leaflets issued showing
how much the enfranchised woman herself needs the Federal Amendment
because most important matters are becoming national in their
organization and can only be dealt with by national legislation. We
could reach every home in every one of those nine States with our
literature, without very great expense. One good woman at the center
could make this message, this appeal from Eastern women, known to
the whole State. The other worker would attend to the speaking and
in six weeks could easily cover all the large towns of the State.
[Illustration: WHY IS THE GIRL FROM THE WEST GETTING ALL THE ATTENTION?
Nina Allender in _The Suffragist_.]
This is the plan that we are considering, and that we are hoping to
put through. We would be very much interested to hear what you think
about it and want, of course, to have your co-operation in carrying
it through.
* * * * *
The Conference voted to unite behind the Bristow-Mondell Amendment in
Congress and to support an active election campaign against candidates
of the Democratic Party. It raised over seven thousand dollars to meet
the expense of this campaign.
* * * * *
The details of the election campaign project were immediately worked
out; organizers were selected and after a farewell garden party on
September 14, they started for the nine enfranchised States.
Headquarters were opened in San Francisco under Lucy Burns and Rose
Winslow; in Denver, Colorado, under Doris Stevens and Ruth Noyes; in
Phœnix, Arizona, under Jane Pincus and Josephine Casey; in Kansas City,
Kansas, under Lola C. Trax and Edna S. Latimer; at Portland, Oregon,
under Jessie Hardy Stubbs and Virginia Arnold; in Seattle, Washington,
under Margaret Whittemore and Anne McCue; at Cheyenne, Wyoming, under
Gertrude Hunter; at Salt Lake City, Utah, under Elsie Lancaster; at
Boise City, Idaho, under Helena Hill Weed.
In these centers, open-air, drawing-room, and theatre meetings followed
each other in rapid succession. In many districts, the campaigners
canvassed from door to door. Window-cards, handbills, cartoons,
moving-picture films, and voiceless speeches, calling upon the women
voters to refuse their support to the Party which had blocked the
National Suffrage Amendment, appeared everywhere from Seattle to Phœnix.
A pithily worded _Appeal to the Women Voters_ was placed in the hands of
the women voters. Press bulletins describing the campaign against the
Democratic candidates for Congress and reiterating the record made by
the Democratic Party on the Suffrage question, were issued daily.
Literature dealing with the record of the Democratic Party and with the
value to the woman voter of a national Suffrage Amendment, were sent to
innumerable homes in every Suffrage State.
The _Suffragist_, which teemed with reports of what these vigorous
campaigners were doing, presents pictures which could have occurred
nowhere in the world but the United States, and nowhere in the United
States but the West. The speakers were interesting, amusing, full of
information and enthusiasm. With a sympathy and understanding typically
western, men and women responded immediately, responded equally to this
original campaign.
All the time, of course, these speakers were educating the people of the
United States in regard to the work of Congress. This was a new note in
Suffrage campaigns; but it was the policy of the Congressional Union at
all times whether campaigns were being waged or not.
From the _Suffragist_ of September 19, I quote from a report of the
enterprising Jessie Hardy Stubbs, who actually began her work on board
the North Coast, Limited:
Here we are—all bound for the field of battle. Miss McCue, Miss
Whittemore and I are together. Miss Whittemore joined us at Chicago
full of earnestness and zeal. We have put up signs in each car that
there will be a meeting tonight in the observation car, and that we
will speak on the record of the Democratic Party in Congress and
Women Suffrage. There is much interest. We have sold ten
_Suffragists_ today on board the train, secured new subscribers to
the _Suffragist_, and contributions for the campaign.
Doris Stevens writes in the _Suffragist_ of October 3:
Friday afternoon, Mrs. Lucius M. Cuthbert, a daughter of ex-Senator
Hill, gave us a drawing-room meeting in her beautiful Denver home.
She invited representative women from all Parties to come and hear
of the work of the Union, to which invitation about one hundred
women responded. One Democratic lady came up to me after the meeting
and said, “I had no idea you women had been so rebuffed by my Party.
I am convinced that my duty is to the women first, and my Party
second.” Another: “You have almost convinced me that we women must
stand together on this national issue.” And so it went. And, as our
charming hostess pointed out, the applause was often led by a
prominent Democratic woman. Offers of help, loans of furniture, and
general expressions of eagerness to aid were made on every side. The
meeting was a splendid success, judging from the large number of
women who joined the Union and the generous collection which was
given.
In the _Suffragist_ of October 10, Lola Trax writes:
The meeting at Lebanon was especially well advertised. The moving
picture shows had run an advertising slide; the Wednesday prayer
meeting had announced my coming, and the Public Schools had also
made announcements to their pupils. The Ladies’ Aid Society invited
me to speak in the afternoon, while they were quilting; and thus
another anti-Suffrage argument was shattered; for quilting and
politics went hand in hand.
At Phillipsburg the meeting was on the Court House green. It is
fifty-seven miles from Phillipsburg to Osborne and the trip has to
be made by freight. I was on the road from six-thirty o’clock in the
morning until three P.M. About a dozen passengers were in the
caboose on the freight, and we held a meeting and discussion which
lasted about forty-five minutes. Upon reaching Osborne at three
o’clock I found about one hundred people assembled for an auction
sale in the middle of the street. Cots, tables, and chairs were to
be offered at sacrifice prices. The temptation to hold a meeting
overcame fatigue. I jumped into an automobile nearby and had a most
interested crowd until the auctioneer came. I had been unable to
secure the Town Hall because a troupe of players were making a one
night stand in the town. The meeting at night was also in the open
air.
In the _Suffragist_ of October 10, Jessie Hardy Stubbs continues:
On Tuesday evening, September 28, I spoke in the Public Library,
explaining our mission in Oregon. Mr. Arthur L. Moulton, Progressive
Candidate for Congress from the Third District presided, and made a
very clever introductory speech. Many questions were asked by
Democratic women which brought out a spirited defense on the part of
several of those present. One Democratic woman maintained that it
would be a most ungrateful position on the part of the Oregon women
to vote against Chamberlain, who had always been a friend of
Suffrage, whereupon a distinguished-looking woman arose and said:
“Oh, no. It would merely be a case of not loving Chamberlain less,
but of loving Suffrage more.”
I spoke before the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union last night, and expect
to address every union before the campaign is over. There are only
two women’s unions here; the garment workers and the waitresses. We
intend to make a canvass of the stores and meet the clerks
personally and to get into all the factories, as far as possible,
where women are employed, and urge these western women voters to
stand by the working women of the East. Tonight we have our first
open-air meeting.
In the _Suffragist_ of October 31, Gertrude Hunter writes of the
campaign in Wyoming:
The meeting last Saturday night was most encouraging. It was a
stormy night, and we went in an auto twenty miles from here, through
snow banks, and every other difficulty to a rally at a branch home.
This was at Grand Canon, and a strongly Democratic precinct. Every
one was wildly enthusiastic over the meeting, even the Democratic
women telling me how much they appreciated our position. We had a
dance immediately after, and I danced with the voters (male) until
one-thirty in the morning, when we were all taken to the railroad
station in a lumber wagon and four-horse team, a distance of a mile
and a half, and came in on a train at two-thirty A.M. I sold twenty
_Suffragists_ and could have disposed of more if I had had them with
me.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights we have big meetings
scheduled.
We are now at Egbert on our regular schedule, and in such a
snowstorm as I never saw before. However, we have had a good morning
in spite of it.
This town is like the others, consisting of a station, a store, and
post-office. Not a residence in the place. The people all drove from
miles around in a high wind and most unfavorable weather to attend
the meeting.
We had the thirty-five mile drive to make to a neighboring town for
another meeting and we did it every mile through a high wind and
torrents of rain, that flooded the trail with water, as we went over
prairie and plowed fields. We did it, however, with only one
blow-out, and two very narrow escapes from being completely turned
over, getting in at two this morning.
Tomorrow night I shall go to Campstool, where there is a big supper
and dance.
I had another very interesting meeting this week at a town fifty
miles from here. The “town” consists of a station, the post-office,
general store, and a little restaurant; no houses, and only one or
two families living there. The meeting was in the schoolhouse and
the voters came from miles and miles to attend, at least one hundred
and fifty of them, on horseback, in wagons, buggies, and autos.
Every one was much interested. The minister, at whose house I was
entertained for the afternoon, lived two and one-half miles out in
the country, said afterward that the meeting was a thrill to most of
them, who had never heard a Suffrage speech in their lives.
These are the solid voters of the community. Many are from the
eastern States who are homesteading here. I distributed the
literature to every one.
I will probably reach the same number of voters every day this week,
or perhaps a few more, as the next town we are going into, Burns, is
a trifle larger than Hillsdale.
Miss Brandeis is going from house to house in Cheyenne, distributing
our literature and soliciting memberships.
* * * * *
The campaign over, four of these victorious campaigners were welcomed
home on the afternoon of November 15, by an enormous audience at the
Columbia Theatre in Washington:
Mrs. Latimer said:
The very first thing they said to us in Kansas was, “Well, you are a
long way from home!” and we thought so too.
Kansas, as you know, is a very large State and is an agricultural
State, and the consequence was that we had to get in touch with all
the farmers and so it was necessary for us to do a great deal of
traveling.
After we had established our Headquarters we interviewed the _Kansas
City Star_, one of the largest papers in the State. After we had
talked with the associate editor and told him what our plan was,
that we intended to send a daily bulletin to the eight hundred and
eight papers in the State of Kansas, that we were going to every one
of the large towns in the State of Kansas, and have just as many
meetings as possible, and that we would distribute fifty thousand
pieces of literature, he looked at us and said, “Do you realize that
this will take eight men and eighteen stenographers?” I said,
“Possibly, but two women are going to do it.” And two women did do
it. The result of that interview was a two and a half column
editorial on the editorial page of the _Star_. It was the first time
that an interview with a woman had ever appeared on the editorial
page, and they told us that even Mr. Bryan had not received two and
a half columns on that page. All of our bulletins were very well
published after the _Kansas City Star_ had taken up our cause. The
women of Kansas co-operated with us, and the Progressives and
Republicans invited us to speak at their big rallies. Strange as it
may seem no one seemed to think we were on the wrong track but the
Democrats.
After we had been there for a while we found that the main contest
was the Senatorial fight, and so we figured out just how we could
keep Mr. Neely out of the Senate. Every one said that as Mr. Murdock
was running as a Progressive, and Mr. Curtis as a Republican, it
would divide the vote and give the victory to the Democratic Party.
We knew that Mr. Neely had received a very large vote from his own
district when he ran for Congress—over four thousand majority. So we
made up our minds that the thing to do was to reduce the vote in his
own district. We thought that this would help to defeat Mr. Neely,
and it did. He received from his own district a majority of only
eight hundred; that is, the Democratic majority went down to eight
hundred from four thousand. In many of the other districts, his
majority was still lower. Mr. Taggart, who had a three thousand
majority two years ago, went down to three hundred, and Miss Trax
was largely responsible for that. We have letters from many of the
leading politicians of Kansas saying that our work has been most
effective. We have felt all through Kansas that our work was very
encouraging.
We had many interesting things happen. The second day we were in the
Seventh District we held seven meetings. Six meetings had been
planned, but after we reached Dodge City we found there was a
political meeting in progress out on the prairie and they telephoned
in and asked one of us to come out there and speak to them. If any
of you have ever been to Kansas, you know they have schools
everywhere, though for miles and miles you never see a house and you
wonder where the children come from to go to the schools. At eleven
o’clock at night we arrived at the schoolhouse where the meeting was
held, and found three hundred people waiting to hear a Suffrage
speech. After the meeting the women came up and said, “That is just
what we need. We are glad to help the Eastern women, but we do not
know anything about it. We are so glad you have come to tell us
these things because we did not know them.”
The men in the West feel the same way. When I was waiting for a
freight train about five o’clock in the morning, a man came up and
said, “My wife was at your meeting yesterday afternoon, and I
thought I would tell you that I have voted the Democratic ticket for
forty years, but I have voted it the last time.” That is the spirit
of the men. Because they respect their women out there, they do not
like to feel that the men in the East and the Democratic Party do
not consider the woman movement. People would come in and say,
“Well, you are on the right track now,” and that seems to be the
spirit everywhere in Kansas.
Miss Pincus said:
I am sorry I cannot come to you with the air of a conquering hero,
but I am sure that any person who understands the situation in
Arizona will acknowledge that the purpose of our campaign was
accomplished. Despite the fact that the Democrats were in
control—had all the money in the State and owned nearly all the
newspapers—a Democratic leader came to my office one day and told me
that the Democrats were absolutely sure that the women of Arizona
would defeat Smith. He said the Democratic Party was scared to
death. It was most amusing. Every candidate who was running, even
for State and County offices, felt it necessary to declare that he
had always believed in Woman Suffrage, that his mother had believed
in Woman Suffrage and that his grandmother believed in it. I suppose
you know what action our friends Senator Smith and Congressman
Hayden took. Both of them telegraphed from Washington to the
Democratic State Convention in session at Phœnix and pledged
themselves absolutely to support national Woman Suffrage. Mr. Hayden
stood up on the floor of the House and filled three pages of the
_Congressional Record_ on his attitude on Woman Suffrage and Arizona
was simply flooded with this copy.
The women, we found, were very open to reason, and one thing I had
not expected to find was how chivalrous all the men were. I have
never been so overwhelmed with courtesy and chivalry as I was out in
Arizona. Every candidate from every county came into our
Headquarters to shake hands and say what a nice day it was and how
he had always been in favor of Woman Suffrage. Each political Party
in Arizona claims absolute credit for Woman Suffrage out there. To
me, coming from a plain campaign State, New York, it was most
encouraging to find all the men such good Suffragists, and I would
like to turn all anti-Suffragists into a Suffrage State to let them
see how women are treated at election time.
Mrs. Helena Hill Weed said:
I am very glad to be able to report that no Democrat will come to
the United States Senate or House of Representatives from Idaho—and
the Congressional Union had a hand in it.
We do not claim entire responsibility for the large Republican
victory, but we do claim the credit for turning many hundreds of
votes from the Democratic Party. When I reached Idaho I found the
question simmered down to the Senatorial race. The two candidates
were Senator Brady, Republican, and ex-Governor Hawley, who was
running on the Democratic ticket.
I began by sending out copies of all of our literature and the
current number of the _Suffragist_ to every editor, club woman,
minister, or other person of influence. I began with a meeting which
was organized by the working women in the hotel where I was
stopping. I told them of our work and what it meant. Many of the
women had worked in the East and they knew what conditions were
among the laboring women there, and they said they never before
realized that they could do anything to help the women in the East.
About three days after the meeting a woman came into my office and
said, “I want to tell you, Mrs. Weed, that that meeting is going to
bring out at least two hundred Republican votes in my ward which are
never cast, and is going to turn many more.” I positively could not
fill the requests that were made to speak and explain the
Congressional Union policy. Men and women of the labor unions were
much enthused over our work and we won hundreds and hundreds of
votes simply because our policy was non-partisan.
We put it straight up to Mr. Hawley that an indorsement of President
Wilson’s administration meant the indorsement of the
administration’s refusal to allow a discussion and a vote on
Suffrage. We put it up to him that it made no difference how good a
Suffragist he personally might be, if he ran on a platform which
contained, as did his, a blanket indorsement of _all_ of President
Wilson’s policies, including his refusal to allow a discussion and a
vote on Suffrage. We pointed out to him that his personal belief in
Suffrage was of little avail to us if he could not or would not
bring the Party which he was supporting to cease its hostility to
our Amendment. We reminded him of the Democratic Congressmen from
Suffrage States who had sat in the Sixty-third Congress and who had
professed a deep interest in Suffrage but who had accomplished
nothing as far as actually bringing Suffrage to pass was concerned,
because of the continued hostility of the Democratic Party which was
in control of all branches of the Government. We told him that we
felt duty bound to make known to the women voters the hostile record
of his national Party on Woman Suffrage, and to ask them to refuse
their support to that Party until it ceased blocking our Amendment.
They understood the point very quickly and saw that as far as the
individual was concerned there was nothing to choose from between
Mr. Hawley and Senator Brady—both were equally good Suffragists, as
far as their personal stand was concerned. It was only when it came
to considering their Party affiliations that one could discriminate
between them. We always emphasized the fact that we were not
indorsing the Republican, the Progressive, the Socialist, or the
Prohibition Party, but were merely asking the women to refuse
support to the Party which had the power to give Suffrage and which
up to the present had used its power only to block that measure. We
explained that we would have opposed any of the other Parties, had
they possessed the power which the Democratic Party possessed, and
had they used that power in the same obstructive way.
I am absolutely sure that the Congressional Union has the right
policy for us to follow and that through this policy we are going to
win the passage of the Federal Amendment.
Incidentally the referendum in 1914 in Nevada and Montana gave Suffrage
to women.
Although the Congressional Union never deviated from its policy of
devoting itself to the Federal Amendment, yet it was deeply interested
in the success of these referendum campaigns and gave aid when it seemed
needed. The Congressional Union sent Mabel Vernon, a national organizer,
to help in the Nevada campaign. At the close of the campaign an
enthusiastic audience welcomed Mabel Vernon home.
Miss Vernon said:
In the West they do not have the feeling that Suffrage is an old,
old story. They were very willing to go to a Suffrage meeting,
particularly in the mining camps, where to advertise that a woman is
going to speak is almost enough to cause them to close down the
mines in order that they might hear her. This summer Miss Martin,
the State president, and I went all over the State in a motor,
traveling about three thousand miles. We would travel sometimes one
hundred and twenty miles in order to reach a little settlement of
about one hundred people, sixty voters perhaps. We had the
conviction that if Suffrage was going to win in Nevada, it was going
to win through the votes of those people who lived in the remote
places. We knew Reno. We knew it well. We knew it was not to be
counted upon as giving any majority in favor of Suffrage. That was
the object of the motor trip this summer.
We traveled for miles and miles without seeing one sign of life.
There was only the sand, the sage-bush, and the sky. Even though we
did not arrive until ten o’clock at night at the place where we were
to speak, we always found our crowd waiting for us. There was one
mining camp, one of the richest camps there now, where the men said,
“We will give you ninety per cent, ladies, there is not a bit of
doubt about it.” When the returns came in from that camp, there were
eleven votes against it and one hundred and one for it. The
politicians laughed at us because we were so confident. “Don’t you
appreciate that many men who promised to vote for you just want to
make you feel good and haven’t any intention of doing it?” they
would say. When the returns came in I took a great deal of
satisfaction in showing them that the men had kept their promises.
The position that Nevada has geographically had a great deal to do
with it: We made a house-to-house canvass to find out if the
majority were in favor of Suffrage and we found that women out there
would say, “Of course I believe in Suffrage; I used to vote myself
in Idaho.” One woman told me, “I feel very much out of place here in
Nevada because I haven’t the right to vote. I voted for years in
Colorado.” It would have been an easy thing to prove that at least
seventy-five per cent of the women in Nevada were in favor of Woman
Suffrage. When the men said, “We are willing that Nevada women shall
have the vote when the majority of them want it,” we could say that
the majority of the women in the State of Nevada do want it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
X
CONGRESS TAKES UP THE SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT
THE effect of this campaign—the first of the kind in the history of the
United States—was as though acid had been poured into the milk of the
Democratic calm and security. Within a few days of the appearance of the
Congressional Union speakers, the Democratic papers were full of attacks
on the Congressional Union. The following from the _Wyoming Leader_ of
October 6 is typical of the way the Democratic papers handled the
Congressional Union workers:
Monday afternoon, they desecrated a charitable gathering of the
Ladies’ Hospital Aid.... If it was nothing more than the harmless
effort of a couple of women to earn some Congressional coin, it
might be overlooked, and these two women with fatherly tenderness,
told to go back home. But it involves an insult to the intelligent
citizenship of this State. It attempts to compromise and bring into
disrepute the practical workings of Woman Suffrage in this, the
original Suffrage State. It proposes to prostitute religion,
charity, fraternity, and society itself, to the ambition of a
place-and-plunder-hunting politician. These women go into gatherings
to insult and outrage harmony and good-will among women who
themselves avoid politics in their meetings.
They could not have selected a meeting at which it was so plainly
out of place as a meeting of hospital workers. These women had
gathered together to promote the good work of mercy and charity in
our community. They were Republicans, Progressives, and Democrats in
their preferences....
The editor of the _Leader_ has met and talked with these two women
and believes they do not realize the insult they are offering to the
women of Wyoming.
The Republican papers of course instantly came to the rescue of the
Congressional Union organizers. The _Cheyenne Tribune_ said editorially
on October 16:
Democratic newspapers like the _Wyoming Leader_ are finding fault
with the Woman Suffrage Congressional Union for sending
representatives into this State to work against the Democratic
candidate for Congress.
This is a free country, and Wyoming a Woman Suffrage State, and if
worthy, respectable women come into Wyoming, the first State to
grant the franchise to women, and conduct a decent campaign for the
principles of Woman Suffrage, they should be treated courteously and
given a respectful hearing.
They rightly hold the Democratic Party responsible for its
self-evident opposition to the cause of Woman Suffrage, and rightly
are seeking to defeat Democratic candidates for Congress by
endeavoring to get woman voters to vote against them.
As to the actual effects, I quote from the report of the Congressional
Union for Woman Suffrage for the year 1914:
One of the strongest proofs of the results accomplished in
Washington was given when Judge W. W. Black, Democratic candidate
for the United States Senate, called at the headquarters of the
Congressional Union in Seattle, and urged the organizers in charge,
in the words of the _Seattle Sunday Times_, “to go home and wage a
campaign for female Suffrage, and let the Democratic Congressional
candidates in this State alone. Judge Black disclaimed personal
interest,” continued the _Seattle Times_, “and insisted that his is
merely a fatherly concern for the two young Suffrage leaders. To
demonstrate that he was not concerned personally, Judge Black told
the two workers that he was going to be elected, anyway.”
Shortly before election day, Democratic leaders in Colorado formed a
Democratic woman’s organization for the purpose of actively
combating the Congressional Union’s work among the women voters.
Further striking evidence of the importance which the Democratic
leaders of Colorado attached to the Union’s activities was furnished
by a leaflet sent far and wide through the State, issued from the
Colorado Democratic State Headquarters, under the names of
Wellington H. Gates, Leo U. Guggenheim, and John T. Barnett,
National Democratic Committeemen. The leaflet began: “Permit us to
call your attention to the apparent aims and purposes of the
organization calling itself _The Congressional Union_.”
It then devoted four pages to letters and statements opposing the
policy of the Union, and ended with an appeal to the women voters to
elect the Democratic candidates for Congress “with larger majorities
than ever before, to show the world that the Democratic women of
Colorado are not only loyal, but consistent, voters.”
This was the last leaflet sent to the voters by the State Democratic
Committee. From the first word to the last, it dealt only with the
Congressional Union. Could better evidence be desired of the
important part which the Democrats themselves felt that Suffrage was
playing in the election?
Nowhere did the Congressional Union election work arouse greater
opposition than in Utah. “Intimidation, coercion, and what were
equivalent to threats of political banishment from the State of
Utah,” said the _Republican Herald_ of Salt Lake City (October 15),
“were exercised toward Miss Elsie Agnes Lancaster, the New York
Suffragist, by W. R. Wallace, the Democratic generalissimo, and his
gang of political mannikins.”
“They invited Miss Lancaster,” the _Herald_ continued, “to come to
Democratic State Headquarters, and there kept her on the grill for
two and a half hours. This term of cross-examination, during which
she was under fire of cross-questioning and denunciation from
practically all of the Democratic politicians present, was a vain
endeavor to have her bring to an immediate close her campaign
against the Democratic nominees for the United States Senate and
Congress. For two hours and a half, the hundred pounds of femininity
withstood the concentrated cross-fire of the ton of beef and brawn
represented by the dozen or more distinguished Democrats who acted
as attorney, judge, and jury all in one. After they had finished,
she went her way, telling Mr. Wallace that neither he nor his
hirelings could swerve her from her duty in Utah as a representative
of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.
“The greatest outburst of Generalissimo Wallace,” concludes the
_Herald_, “was when, in a moment of rage, he brought his fist down
on the table and threatened to advertise Miss Lancaster the country
over by means of the Associated Press as being in league with
‘sinister influences’ in Utah.”
One of the candidates for Congress from Kansas (Representative
Doolittle) called at the Washington Headquarters of the Union
shortly after the inauguration of work in Kansas, and urged the
Union to withdraw its campaigners from his district, at least, if
not over all the Western States. Finding the Union determined to
continue its opposition through the women voters, as long as his
Party continued its opposition to the National Amendment, Mr.
Doolittle delivered a speech in the House of Representatives
(occupying more than a page of the _Congressional Record_),
denouncing the Union, and assuring the members of Congress that its
appeal to the women voters was not authorized by the Suffragists of
the country.
Representative Hayden of Arizona also endeavored, in a speech in the
House, to answer the appeal of the Congressional Union to the
Western women to cast their votes against him, together with the
other national Democratic candidates. Nearly three pages of the
_Record_ was consumed by Mr. Hayden’s speech, which he reprinted,
and sent far and wide through the State of Arizona in an attempt to
counteract the havoc which it was apparently believed was being
wrought by the Congressional Union workers.
A prominent Democratic candidate for the Arizona Legislature
testified to the fear which the Union campaign had aroused among the
Democratic element in that State by an appeal to Dr. Cora Smith
King, a member of the Advisory Council of the Congressional Union,
urgently imploring her to use her influence with the Union to
terminate its election activities in Arizona. Dr. King replied: “The
more the local Democrats complain, the more they advertise the
slogan of the Congressional Union, that the Democrats put Suffrage
second to Party. Do, for Heaven’s sake, raise the Democratic roof in
Washington for involving you in this dilemma.”
Among the concrete results showing the effectiveness of the
Congressional Union election activities was the inclusion of a
Federal Suffrage Amendment plank in the platforms of each of the
State parties in Colorado, the first time that this occurred in that
State, and the inclusion of a similar plank in the Arizona
Democratic platform.
Another result was the conversion of Senator Smith of Arizona to a
belief in the Federal Amendment. On September 28, Senator Smith and
Representative Hayden, the two Democratic candidates who were
running for Congress from Arizona, sent the following telegram to
Mrs. Frances Munds, candidate for State Senatorship on the
Democratic ticket: “Our record in Congress shows that we are for
National Woman Suffrage. If you think best, offer as plank in State
platform the following: ‘We pledge our candidates for United States
Senator and Representative in Congress to vote at all times for
National Women Suffrage.’”
The Democratic Committee adopted and strengthened this platform.
All candidates, indeed, seemed to develop a marked increase in the
fervor of their allegiance to the Suffrage Amendment. Senator
Chamberlain of Oregon, in his last edition of street-car cards
before election day, headed his poster with a declaration of his
support of National Woman Suffrage as the leading argument for his
re-election.
Not only the Congressional candidates, but minor Democratic workers,
suddenly developed unsuspected interest in the cause of Woman
Suffrage. Said the _Examiner_ of Yuma, Arizona (October 24, 1914),
in commenting on the situation: “We view with amazement the efforts
of the Democratic bosses to be in favor of Equal Suffrage.”
And so in each of the States.
No more conclusive proof of the support given by the women voters to
the Union’s campaign could be afforded than the readiness with which
they became members and active workers.
* * * * *
In undertaking the election campaign, the Union had expected that in
the beginning only the humble members of the rank and file would
respond to its appeal. It had fully realized that the rank and file
are more easily reached by new work than are the leaders. It was
with amazement, therefore, as well as gratification that it greeted
the co-operation of the leading women voters of the West. Their
willingness to subordinate Party interest to the National Suffrage
cause furnished the strongest assurance of the speedy organization
of the women’s vote to such a power as to make it a determining
factor in the outcome of things at Washington.
The rank and file, however, equalled the leaders in the enthusiasm
with which they supported the campaign. Women who had never before
been active in Suffrage work were aroused to an effective support of
the Congressional Union’s policy. Said the _Tribune_ of Pendleton,
Oregon (October 16), for instance, in commenting on this situation:
“Large numbers of women who had not even registered until the
campaign of the Congressional Union began, have made it their duty
to do so in order that they may cast their ballot on this one issue
alone. They had not been especially interested in the general
political campaign, but seeing the opportunity to assist in the
enfranchisement of other women, they have come bravely to the front
with offers of assistance.”
One of the illuminating features of the campaign was the aid given
to the Union in its election work by prominent Democratic women.
This support came from the Democratic women of the East as well as
of the West. For example, Mrs. George A. Armes, President of the
District of Columbia Branch of the National Wilson and Marshall
League, wrote to the Chairman of the Union during the election days:
“I have come to the conclusion that the greatest service I can
render to the National Democratic Party is to help to bring it to
realize that true democracy involves Suffrage for women as well as
for men. I know that it will come to a realization of the truth if
it sees that it can no longer count upon the women’s vote in the
West if it opposes the Suffrage Amendment. I am, therefore, heartily
with the election campaign of the Congressional Union in its appeal
to the women voters to cast their votes against all Democratic
candidates for Congress.”
Women voted in the election for forty-five members of Congress. The
Democratic Party ran candidates for forty-three members in these States.
The Congressional Union opposed all these candidates. Out of the
forty-three Democratic candidates, only twenty were elected. In some of
these districts undoubtedly the women affected these results.
I quote the same report:
Basing our estimate on the charges made by friends of the candidates
whom we were forced, by reason of the action of their Party, to
oppose, the Congressional Union campaign defeated Representative
Neely of Kansas, Mr. Flegel of Oregon, and Representative
Seldomridge of Colorado; and contributed in large measure to the
defeat of Mr. Hawley of Idaho, Mr. James H. Moyle of Utah, and Mr.
Roscoe Drumheller of Washington, and greatly lessened the majorities
of Senator Smith of Arizona, Senator Thomas, and Mr. Keating of
Colorado.
The campaign of the Congressional Union accomplished exactly what
its members hoped and expected that it would accomplish. If their
purpose had been merely to unseat Democrats, they would, of course,
have taken the districts in the United States where the Democrats
had won by very slight majorities. When they went into such strongly
Democratic States as Arizona and Colorado, they did not expect to
unseat any of the Democratic candidates in those States. Their
purpose was to make Woman Suffrage an ever-present political issue
in the States where women have political power until all the women
of the United States shall be enfranchised, and to lay in those
States the foundations for permanent and constantly-growing support
of the franchise work at Washington. They succeeded in making the
record of the Democratic Party on Woman Suffrage (an issue which
would not otherwise have been heard of) widely known and hotly
discussed in the Suffrage States.
In the meantime, Suffrage had come up again and again in Congress. On
October 10, 1914, during discussion of the Philippine Bill, conferring a
greater measure of self-government on Filipino men, Representative Mann
of Illinois proposed on that date that the franchise measure in the Bill
be so amended as to give the vote to women on the Islands. This
Amendment was lost by a vote of fifty-eight to eighty-four. On October
12, Representative J. W. Bryan of Washington, Progressive, proposed
three other Amendments: One, making women eligible to vote in school
elections, which was lost by a vote of eleven to twenty-seven; one
giving the vote to women property-owners, which was lost by a vote of
nine to twenty-seven, and one giving the Philippine legislature power to
extend the right of Suffrage to women at any future time, which was lost
by a vote of eleven to twenty-seven. The Amendments were defeated by
strictly Party votes, the Democrats voting almost solidly against them,
while the Progressives and Republicans supported them.
This Session of Congress adjourned on October 4, 1914. At its close, the
Suffrage Amendment was upon the calendar of the Senate and the House,
ready for a vote. In the House, however, the Rules Committee must
apportion time for the vote. Mr. Mondell’s Resolution providing for
this—and for which successive deputations had besieged the Rules
Committee—was still before the Rules Committee.
The short Session—the last Session of the Sixty-third Congress—opened on
December 7. President Wilson’s message, read to Congress on December 8,
made no mention of the Woman Suffrage question, though it expressly
recommended the Bill granting further independence to the men of the
Philippines.
In December, therefore, Anne Martin, who had brought to brilliant
victory the campaign in Nevada, came to the Congressional Union’s
Headquarters in Washington. She called on the President to ask his
assistance in furthering the passage of the Bristow-Mondell Amendment.
In referring to the victory in Nevada, the President said: “That is the
way I believe it should come, by States.”
Miss Martin then pointed out to the President the immense difficulties
involved in State campaigns. She said: “The referendum campaigns are
killing work, and the women of America are working for the passage of
this Federal Amendment in order to end the long struggle.”
Miss Martin referred to the President’s attitude toward the Filipinos.
She said she had read with interest that part of his message to Congress
in which he advocated a larger measure of self-government for them. She
pointed out that Suffragists were asking for an extension of the same
right to American women, and urged him to give equal support to the
Amendment enfranchising his country-women.
* * * * *
The Congressional Union began to send deputations to the refractory
Rules Committee, immediately upon the return of the Committee members to
Washington. On December 9, Mrs. William Kent and Mrs. Gardner called
upon Chairman Henry as soon as he reached the city. To their great
astonishment, they were promptly assured by Mr. Henry that the Rules
Committee would report favorably House Resolution No. 514—providing time
for the consideration of the Suffrage Amendment in the House—which had
been before it since May 13.
“Mr. Henry said,” says the _Suffragist_ of December 12, “that he had
always desired to make a favorable report of the Suffrage rule;
certain ‘sinister influences,’ however, working upon some of the
members of this Committee had made it impossible for the Committee
to take action upon it during the last Session. Mr. Henry did not
state what the ‘sinister influences’ were, nor why they had been
removed immediately after the election.”
He also assured representatives of the Union that the Rules Committee
would shortly bring the Amendment to a vote in the House.
“There is every reason to believe,” said Mrs. Gilson Gardner commenting
on Mr. Henry’s glib change of front, “that the Party leaders have met
and studied the Democratic returns from the campaign States.”
On January 12, the Resolution on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was
debated for over six hours in the House and voted upon the same day. One
hundred and seventy-four votes were cast for the Amendment, two hundred
and four against it. Forty-six members were recorded as not voting. Of
the forty-six, twelve were paired in favor, and six paired against it.
The Amendment thus failed by seventy-eight votes of the necessary
two-thirds.
It is a favorite trick with politicians to bring up the Amendment in the
short session of a dying Congress. They can vote no and still have a
chance, in the new Congress, to redeem themselves before election.
The _Suffragist_ of January 23 quotes some of the reasons for opposing
the Amendment:
That Woman Suffrage cannot be supported because of a man’s respect,
admiration, and reverence for womanhood.
That five little colored girls marched in a Suffrage parade in
Columbus, Ohio.
That women must be protected against themselves. They think they
want to vote. As a matter of fact, they do not want to vote, and
man, being aware of this fact, is obliged to prevent them from
getting the ballot that they do not want.
That the ballot would degrade women.
That no man would care to marry a Suffragist.
That women do not read newspapers on street cars.
That women do not buy newspapers of Ikey Oppenstein, who keeps the
stand on the corner.
That no man would care to marry a female butcher.
That no man would care to marry a female policeman.
That Woman Suffrage is a matter for the States to determine.
That Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch once marched in a procession in
which she carried a banner inscribed, “One million Socialists vote
and work for Suffrage.”
That Inez Milholland married a Belgian and once referred to a
cabinet-officer as a joke.
That women fail to take part in the “duty of organized murder” and
might therefore vote against war.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART TWO
1915-1916
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WOMAN VOTERS APPEAL TO THE PRESIDENT AND TO CONGRESS
THE new—the Sixty-fourth—Congress did not meet until December in 1915.
This is the first and only summer in President Wilson’s administration
in which Congress was not in session. Normally, Congress meets every
other summer, but President Wilson has called three special sessions in
the alternate years. In consequence, that year in Washington is less
full than others with work with Congress or the President. In the
meantime, however, the Congressional Union did not permit the people of
the United States to forget the Suffrage fight.
Alice Paul now felt that it was necessary to swing in the support of the
country back of the Suffrage demand for the Federal Amendment. She felt
that this could only be accomplished by a nation-wide organization
which, dissipating no energy in State work, would focus on Congress.
At a meeting of the Advisory Council in New York City on Wednesday,
March 31, she outlined plans for the coming year. She said in part:
We want to organize in every State in the Union. We will begin this
by holding in each State a Convention on the same lines as this
Conference, at which we will explain our purposes, our plans, and
our ideals. At each of these Conferences, the members will select a
State Chairman, who will appoint a Chairman of each of the
Congressional constituencies in her State. Each Convention will also
adopt a plan of State organization, suited to the needs of their
locality. Each Convention too will send Representatives to a
culminating Convention of women voters, to be held at San Francisco
during the course of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, on September
14th, 15th, and 16th. At this first Convention of women voters to be
held on their own territory in behalf of the National Suffrage
Amendment, delegates will be appointed to go to Washington, D. C.,
the week Congress opens, to lay before their Representatives and the
leaders of the majority Party in Congress, the demand of women
voters for the national enfranchisement of women. During the opening
week in Congress, too, the pageant on the life of Susan B. Anthony,
along the lines which Hazel Mackaye has just outlined to you, will
be given. We want to make Woman Suffrage the dominant political
issue from the moment Congress reconvenes. We want to have Congress
open in the midst of a veritable Suffrage cyclone.
During the Sixty-third Congress, we have been able, with very little
organized support, to force action on the Federal Suffrage
Amendment. When we have an active body of members in every State in
the Union uniting in this demand, I believe that we will be able to
get our Amendment passed.
The organization of the various State Conventions progressed rapidly
from week to week. An incredible amount of work was done—and done with
the swift, broad, slashing strokes which always characterized the
Congressional Union work. This, of course, brought the Congressional
Union into prominence everywhere; but the eye of the country was held by
a new type of demonstration which, following her genius for picturesque
publicity, Alice Paul immediately began to produce. The stage was the
entire United States of America, and the leading woman in the—one would
almost call it a pageant—was Sara Bard Field of California. The prologue
opened at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915.
Through Mrs. Kent an exhibit booth for the Congressional Union for Woman
Suffrage was secured in the Educational Building at the Panama-Pacific
Exposition. The Record of the Sixty-third Congress was exhibited there,
and the people in charge invited detailed inspection from visitors. All
American visitors were asked to look up the record of their Congressman,
to discover how he voted on the Suffrage Amendment: they were asked to
sign the monster petition to Congress. This booth, always decorated with
purple, white, and gold, was to become during the year the scene of
meeting after meeting; all characterized by the picturesqueness which
would inevitably emerge from a combination of the Congressional Union
with California.
Sara Bard Field, in the _Suffragist_ of September 11, thus describes it:
A world passes by. It looks reverently at the firmly-sweet face of
Susan B. Anthony, whose portrait hangs upon the wall. It scans the
record of the vote of the Sixty-third Congress.... It peers with
curious smiles at the brief array of lady dolls which mutely
proclaim the voting and non-voting States for women, and the forces
which prevent Suffrage....
The first California Conference of the Congressional Union was held in
San Francisco June 1 and 2. Every part of the State and every political
Party was represented at the gathering. Florence Kelley, National
Secretary of the Consumers’ League, appealed to the women of the West
for aid in the battle of Eastern women for Suffrage in the following
eloquent words:
I come from a State in which women have been trying to get Suffrage
for twenty-seven years. We are forced to come to you women of
California and ask you to stand behind us; and we are thankful that
California has re-enlisted for Suffrage. Women in California have
talked to me about the ease with which they won Suffrage, and praise
their men-folk. I would like to say there was nothing the matter
with my father. He was a Suffragist. There is nothing the matter
with our men in the State of New York. Our trouble is with the
steerage. They inundate our shores year after year. We slowly
assimilate and convert; but each year there is the same work to do
over—the same battle with ignorance and foreign ideas of freedom and
the “place of woman.”
Mrs. Kelley gave instance after instance of the humiliation to which
women working on the New York Suffrage petition had been put by
naturalized foreign residents. She pointed out the curious, paradoxical
inconsistency of granting foreigners the vote, and yet denying it to
American women.
She described with a real dramatic effect the incident of the
President’s trip to Philadelphia, when he welcomed a great army of
naturalized immigrants, and denied a hearing to American women.
“There are some of our men,” she commented, “the mechanics of whose
minds we do not understand. George Washington, you may remember, in
Woodrow Wilson’s _History of the United States_, had no mother.”
Mrs. Kelley told of the battle women, themselves sworn to enforce the
law, have to fight if they are without the ballot. She went into her
experiences as a voteless citizen of Illinois, when she was a factory
inspector there.
Eastern women have been degraded by sixty-eight years of beggary.
They have begged of the steerage; they have begged of politicians;
now they find it possible to come West and ask the co-operation of
their own sisters. But I come to you with a nobler argument when I
ask you to support the work of the Congressional Union for Woman
Suffrage. Do not do it for us, even though we have borne the rigor
and heat of the day in the long fight for enfranchisement. Do it for
the children of the future: let them come into a noble heritage
through us.
The climax of this Conference came the final day when, at the Inside Inn
ball-room of the Exposition, the representatives of the eleven
enfranchised States, the Territory of Alaska and in addition the
enfranchised nations, meeting on the same platform, told what freedom
for women had accomplished in their nations and States. The great
ball-room was decorated with purple, white, and gold banners of the
Union, and massed with golden acacia. Many of the women representatives
wore the costumes of their native land. Mayi Maki, a Finnish girl
typically blonde, in the striking peasant costume of Finland, spoke.
Mrs. Chem Chi, a Chinese woman, in the no less striking costume of
China, spoke. Representatives of New Zealand, the Isle of Man, Norway,
Iceland, and Denmark spoke.
The Congressional Union celebrated Bunker Hill Day, June 17, by another
charming occasion. It dedicated to the Massachusetts exhibit a miniature
reproduction of Bunker Hill monument, thrown into relief by a
black-velvet background, which bore the history of the notable women of
the State.
It was a brilliant day, sunny and clear. The Massachusetts Building, a
facsimile of the noble State House of Boston, situated between the
gorgeous bay of San Francisco and the iridescent Marin shore on the one
hand, and the long line of orientally colored Exposition Buildings on
the other, was decorated for the occasion with the red, white, and blue
of the national flag, and the white of the great State flag.
A procession of Suffragists, headed by Gail Laughlin, wearing the
purple, white, and gold regalia, and escorted by a special military
band, marched behind a large purple, white, and gold flag, and between
an avenue of purple, white, and gold flags up to the Massachusetts
Building, where they were confronted by a great banner, bearing the
words of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Gail Laughlin, who was educated in Massachusetts, said in part:
There were Pilgrim mothers in those days, as well as Pilgrim
Fathers, though they were singularly absent from history. You will
find nothing of them in the schoolbooks; you have to go to the
sources from which histories are made. Then Mary Warren, advisor of
Knox and Adams and Jefferson; and Hannah Winthrop and Abigail Adams
begin to stand out beside the men who are said to have made the
history of that time. Was it not Abigail Adams who wrote to her
husband at the Continental Congress when the very document we women
are now striving to change was drawn up: “If you do not free the
women of the nation, there will be another revolution.” I consider
Abigail Adams the first member of the Congressional Union for Woman
Suffrage.
There was Julia Ward Howe, the author of _The Battle Hymn of the
Republic_, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who so largely helped in the
freeing of the slaves; and Lucy Stone, that staunch Abolitionist and
Suffragist—all closely linked with Massachusetts’ great history. It
was Lucy Stone who, when protest was made that she injected “too
much suffrage” into her Abolitionist speeches, declared, “I was a
woman before I was an Abolitionist.”
Later, at a mass-meeting of the Congressional Union, Maud Younger, who,
in Washington, was to become so steadfast a worker for the Congressional
Union, spoke. Maud Younger is one of the most picturesque of the many
picturesque figures among the native daughters of California: a student
of economic conditions; a feminist; much traveled; an ex-president of
the Waitresses’ Union; her life is as inextricably mixed with the Labor
and Suffrage history of California as later it was bound with the
Woman’s Party. On this occasion, she said:
The burden of the women of the unenfranchised States, their
struggles, is ours more than it ever was; our freedom is not our own
while they are unenfranchised. I realized in the East that we women
can spend a lifetime for Suffrage, if we continue to work State by
State only. Do you realize that, since we won our vote in
California, Ohio has been twice defeated, and Michigan twice
defeated?... I heard Frank P. Walsh, Chairman of the Industrial
Railways Commission, say in Washington: “The ballot for women will
only come through the persistent and unremitting effort of the women
in the free States.”
Maud Younger was followed by Andrew Gallagher, equally important, and
equally as picturesque a figure among the Native Sons of California. Mr.
Gallagher is an ex-champion amateur heavyweight of the Pacific Coast; a
labor leader; a power in California politics. He said in part:
In those days when Suffrage hopes were dark in California, Labor
stood by women; as we stood for State Suffrage, so now we stand for
National Suffrage. If Labor can help to bring about the passage of
the National Woman Suffrage Amendment, then Labor will put its
shoulder to the wheel, and do all in its power to force its
adoption.
The Political Convention of Woman Voters held in San Francisco in
September at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, carried out all these
traditions of picturesqueness. Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont opened the
Convention. Mrs. Fremont Older, the novelist, spoke. Dr. Yami Kin, the
first woman physician in China—bringing to the event a picturesque touch
of internationalism by wearing a pale blue brocaded mandarin coat—spoke
in excellent English. Mme. Ali Kuli Khan, the wife of the Persian
Minister, and Mme. Maria Montessori, the famous Italian physician and
educator, also spoke.
Mrs. Belmont said:
We women of the North, of the South and of the East, branded on
account of sex, disfranchised as criminals and imbeciles, come to
the glorious West, where the broad vision of its men has seen
justice.
Mrs. Older said:
I thought that Woman Suffrage was like Utopia; when women were good
enough to vote, the men would give it to them; but I have learned
that Utopias are not given away; they must be fought for.
Dr. Yami Kin said:
All countries look to North and West for inspiration and help in
their march toward freedom.
Mme. Montessori said:
We have watched individual States in your country give justice to
women, one by one. Now we are waiting for the United States to
declare its women free.
The Convention passed Resolutions calling upon the Sixty-fourth Congress
to vote for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Sara Bard Field and Frances
Joliffe were selected as envoys to carry the Resolution across the
country to Congress. A plan was made for the envoys to travel slowly
eastward, holding meetings and collecting signatures to the petition;
arriving in Washington the day Congress assembled. Mabel Vernon acted as
advance guard for this expedition and was more responsible than anybody
else for its success.
The final ceremony of the Convention took place in the Court of
Abundance on the night of the day which had been designated by the
directors of the Exposition as the Congressional Union for Woman
Suffrage Day. On that evening, Mr. M. H. DeYoung, on behalf of the
directors of the Exposition, presented Mrs. Belmont for the
Congressional Union with a bronze medal in recognition of the work of
the Congressional Union. Ten thousand people gathered there to witness
it. They listened rapt to the speeches, and then—lighting their way by
thousands of golden lanterns—accompanied the envoys to the gates.
The national Suffrage Edition of the _San Francisco Bulletin_, edited by
Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, assisted by Doris Stevens as city editor, Mrs.
John Jay White as art editor and Alice Paul as telegraph editor,
charmingly described the scene:
The great place was softly and naturally lit except for the giant
tower gate flaming aloft in the white light, which focussed on it as
on some brilliant altar. Far below, like a brilliant flower bed,
filling the terraced side from end to end, glowed the huge chorus of
women, which was one of the features of the evening. Those at the
top—hardly women—were the girls of the Oriental School, from midget
size up, in quaintly colorful native costumes. In the foreground
were the Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian girls in their peasant
costumes, and, stretching the length of the stage, like a great
living flag of the Congressional Union, were massed Union members in
surplices of the organization colors. The effect was one of exotic
brilliancy.
Back of the stage, curtaining the great arch, fluttered the red,
white, and blue emblem of the nation that women have sacrificed as
much to upbuild as the men; but significantly waving with the Stars
and Stripes hung the great Suffrage banner, that ringingly declared:
WE DEMAND AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
ENFRANCHISING WOMEN. And the great crowd in the Court joined in the
swelling song that another band of women across the sea, fighting
for liberty, had originated. Every one was catching the words:
“Shout, shout, up with your song!
Cry with the wind, for the dawn is breaking.
March, march, swing you along,
Wide blow our banners, and hope is waking.”
And then came the envoys, delegated by women voters to carry the
torch of liberty through the dark lands and keep it burning. And the
dark mass below the lighted altar-tower caught the choristers’
spirit, and burst into cheers.
The chorus also sang the _Song of the Free Women_, written by Sara
Bard Field to the music of the _Marseillaise_.
The envoys spoke. Their words were greeted with cheers. One of the
nation’s greatest actresses, Margaret Anglin, said a few fitting
farewell words to them in the name of the women of the world.
Then, all at once, the great, brightly-colored picture and its dark
background began to disintegrate and fade. The Court darkened, but
bright masses of women were forming in procession to escort the
envoys to the gates of the Exposition. Orange lanterns swayed in the
breeze; purple, white, and gold draperies fluttered, the blare of
the band burst forth, and the great surging crowd followed to the
gates.
There, Ingeborg Kindstedt and Maria Kindberg, of Providence, Rhode
Island, who had purchased the car that is to take the crusaders on
their long journey, met the procession. The Overland car was covered
with Suffrage streamers. Miss Kindberg was at the wheel. To the wild
cheering of the crowd, Miss Joliffe and Mrs. Field, the two envoys
for Washington, were seated. The crowd surged close with final
messages. Cheers burst forth as the gates opened, and the big car
swung through, ending the most dramatic and significant Suffrage
Convention that has probably ever been held in the history of the
world.