pleasure in the company of William and Mary Gannett of the First
Unitarian Church, whose liberal views appealed to her strongly. She
liked to have young people about her and followed the lives of all her
nieces and nephews with the greatest interest, spurring on their
ambitions and helping finance their education. The frequent visits of
"Niece Lucy" were a great joy during these years, as was the nearness
of "Niece Anna O,"[451] who married and settled in Rochester. The
young Canadian girl, Anna Dann, had become almost indispensable to her
and to Mary, as companion, secretary, and nurse, and her marriage left
a void in the household. Anna Dann was married at 17 Madison Street by
Anna Howard Shaw with Susan beaming upon her like a proud grandmother.
* * * * *
Longing to see one more state won for suffrage, Susan carefully
followed the news from the field, looking hopefully to California and
urging her "girls" to keep hammering away there in spite of defeats.
Her eyes were also on the Territory of Oklahoma, where a constitution
was being drafted preparatory to statehood. "The present bill for the
new state," she wrote Anna Howard Shaw, in December 1904, "is an
insult to women of Oklahoma, such as has never been perpetrated
before. We have always known that women were in reality ranked with
idiots and criminals, but it has never been said in words that the
state should ... restrict or abridge the suffrage ... on account of
illiteracy, minority, _sex_, conviction of felony, mental condition,
etc.... We must fight this bill to the utmost...."[452]
The brightest spot in the West was Oregon, where suffrage had been
defeated in 1900 by only 2,000 votes. In June 1905, when the National
American Association held its first far western convention in Portland
during the Lewis and Clark Exposition, Susan could not keep away,
although she had never expected to go over the mountains again. As she
traveled to Portland with Mary and a hundred or more delegates in
special cars, she recalled her many long tiring trips through the West
to carry the message of woman suffrage to the frontier. In
comparison, this was a triumphal journey, showing her, as nothing else
could, what her work had accomplished. Greeted at railroad stations
along the way by enthusiastic crowds, showered with flowers and gifts,
she stood on the back platform of the train with her "girls," shaking
hands, waving her handkerchief, and making an occasional speech.
Presiding over the opening session of the Portland convention,
standing in a veritable garden of flowers which had been presented to
her, she remarked with a droll smile, "This is rather different from
the receptions I used to get fifty years ago.... I am thankful for
this change of spirit which has come over the American people."[453]
On Woman's Day, she was chosen to speak at the unveiling of the statue
of Sacajawea, the Indian woman who had led Lewis and Clark through the
dangerous mountain passes to the Pacific, winning their gratitude and
their praise. In the story of Sacajawea who had been overlooked by the
government when every man in the Lewis and Clark expedition had been
rewarded with a large tract of land, Susan saw the perfect example of
man's thoughtless oversight of the valuable services of women. Looking
up at the bronze statue of the Indian woman, her papoose on her back
and her arm outstretched to the Pacific, Susan said simply, "This is
the first statue erected to a woman because of deeds of daring....
This recognition of the assistance rendered by a woman in the
discovery of this great section of the country is but the beginning of
what is due." Then, with the sunlight playing on her hair and lighting
up her face, she appealed to the men of Oregon for the vote. "Next
year," she reminded them, "the men of this proud state, made possible
by a woman, will decide whether women shall at last have the rights in
it which have been denied them so many years. Let men remember the
part women have played in its settlement and progress and vote to give
them these rights which belong to every citizen."[454]
* * * * *
Reporters were at Susan's door, when she returned to Rochester, for
comments on ex-President Cleveland's tirade against clubwomen and
woman suffrage in the popular _Ladies' Home Journal_. "Pure
fol-de-rol," she told them, adding testily, "I would think that Grover
Cleveland was about the last person to talk about the sanctity of the
home and woman's sphere." This was good copy for Republican newspapers
and they made the most of it, as women throughout the country added
their protests to Susan's. A popular jingle of the day ran, "Susan B.
Anthony, she took quite a fall out of Grover C."[455]
Susan, however, had something far more important on her mind than
fencing with Grover Cleveland--an interview with President Theodore
Roosevelt. Here was a man eager to right wrongs, to break monopolies,
to see justice done to the Negro, a man who talked of a "square deal"
for all, and yet woman suffrage aroused no response in him.
In November 1905, she undertook a trip to Washington for the express
purpose of talking with him. The year before, at a White House
reception, he had singled her out to stand at his side in the
receiving line. She looked for the same friendliness now. Memorandum
in hand, she plied him with questions which he carefully evaded, but
she would not give up.
"Mr. Roosevelt," she earnestly pleaded, "this is my principle request.
It is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you
leave the Presidential chair recommend to Congress to submit to the
Legislatures a Constitutional Amendment which will enfranchise women,
and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great
emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without
doing this."[456]
To this he made no response, and trying once more to wring from him
some slight indication of sympathy for her cause, she added, "Mr.
President, your influence is so great that just one word from you in
favor of woman suffrage would give our cause a tremendous impetus."
"The public knows my attitude," he tersely replied. "I recommended it
when Governor of New York."
"True," she acknowledged, "but that was a long time ago. Our enemies
say that was the opinion of your younger years and that since you have
been President you have never uttered one word that could be construed
as an endorsement."
"They have no cause to think I have changed my mind," he suavely
replied as he bade her good-bye. In the months that followed he gave
her no sign that her interview had made the slightest impression.
One of the most satisfying honors bestowed on Susan during these last
years was the invitation to be present at Bryn Mawr College in 1902
for the unveiling of a bronze portrait medallion of herself. Bryn
Mawr, under its brilliant young president, M. Carey Thomas, herself a
pioneer in establishing the highest standards for women's education,
showed no such timidity as Vassar where neither Susan nor Elizabeth
Cady Stanton had been welcome as speakers. At Bryn Mawr, Susan talked
freely and frankly with the students, and best of all, became better
acquainted with M. Carey Thomas and her enterprising friend, Mary
Garrett of Baltimore, who was using her great wealth for the
advancement of women. She longed to channel their abilities to woman
suffrage and a few years later arranged for a national convention in
their home city, Baltimore, appealing to them to make it an
outstanding success.[457]
Arriving in Baltimore in January 1906 for this convention, Susan was
the honored guest in Mary Garrett's luxurious home. Frail and ill, she
was unable to attend all the sessions, as in the past, but she was
present at the highlight of this very successful convention, the
College Evening arranged by M. Carey Thomas. With women's colleges
still resisting the discussion of woman suffrage and the Association
of Collegiate Alumnae refusing to support it, the College Evening
marked the first public endorsement of this controversial subject by
college women. Up to this time the only encouraging sign had been the
formation in 1900 of the College Equal Suffrage League by two young
Radcliffe alumnae, Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes Irwin. Now here, in
conservative Baltimore, college presidents and college faculty gave
woman suffrage their blessing, and Susan listened happily as
distinguished women, one after another, allied themselves to the
cause: Dr. Mary E. Woolley, who as president of Mt. Holyoke was
developing Mary Lyons' pioneer seminary into a high ranking college;
Lucy Salmon, Mary A. Jordan, and Mary W. Calkins of the faculties of
Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley; Eva Perry Moore, a trustee of Vassar and
president of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, with whom she
dared differ on this subject; Maud Wood Park, representing the younger
generation in the College Equal Suffrage League; and last of all, the
president of Bryn Mawr, M. Carey Thomas. After expressing her
gratitude to the pioneers of this great movement, Miss Thomas turned
to Susan and said, "To you, Miss Anthony, belongs by right, as to no
other woman in the world's history, the love and gratitude of all
women in every country of the civilized globe. We your daughters in
spirit, rise up today and call you blessed.... Of such as you were the
lines of the poet Yeats written:
'They shall be remembered forever,
They shall be alive forever,
They shall be speaking forever,
The people shall hear them forever.'"[458]
During the thundering applause, Susan came forward to respond, her
face alight, and the audience rose. "If any proof were needed of the
progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight,"
she said simply. "The presence on the stage of these college women,
and in the audience of all those college girls who will someday be the
nation's greatest strength, tell their story to the world. They give
the highest joy and encouragement to me...."[459]
During her visit at the home of Mary Garrett, Susan spoke freely with
her and with M. Carey Thomas of the needs of the National American
Association, particularly of the Standing Fund of $100,000 of which
she had dreamed and which she had started to raise. Now, like an
answer to prayer, Mary Garrett and President Thomas, fresh from their
successful money-raising campaigns for Johns Hopkins and Bryn Mawr,
offered to undertake a similar project for woman suffrage, proposing
to raise $60,000--$12,000 a year for the next five years.
"As we sat at her feet day after day between sessions of the
convention, listening to what she wanted us to do to help women and
asking her questions," recalled M. Carey Thomas in later years, "I
realized that she was the greatest person I had ever met. She seemed
to me everything that a human being could be--a leader to die for or
to live for and follow wherever she led."[460]
Immediately after the convention, Susan went to Washington with the
women who were scheduled to speak at the Congressional hearing on
woman suffrage. In her room at the Shoreham Hotel, a room with a view
of the Washington Monument which the manager always saved for her, she
stood at the window looking out over the city as if saying farewell.
Then turning to Anna Shaw, she said with emotion, "I think it is the
most beautiful monument in the whole world."[461]
That evening she sat quietly through the many tributes offered to her
on her eighty-sixth birthday, longing to tell all her friends the
gratitude and hope that welled up in her heart. Finally she rose, and
standing by Anna Howard Shaw who was presiding, she impulsively put
her hand on her shoulder and praised her for her loyal support. Then
turning to the other officers, she thanked them for all they had done.
"There are others also," she added, "just as true and devoted to the
cause--I wish I could name everyone--but with such women consecrating
their lives--" She hesitated a moment, and then in her clear rich
voice, added with emphasis, "Failure is impossible."[462]
* * * * *
In Rochester, in the home she so dearly loved, she spent her last
weeks, thinking of the cause and the women who would carry it on.
Longing to talk with Anna Shaw, she sent for her, but Anna, feeling
she was needed, came even before a letter could reach her. With Anna
at her bedside, Susan was content.
"I want you to give me a promise," she pleaded, reaching for Anna's
hand. "Promise me you will keep the presidency of the association as
long as you are well enough to do the work."[463]
Deeply moved, Anna replied, "But how can I promise that? I can keep it
only as long as others wish me to keep it."
"Promise to make them wish you to keep it," Susan urged. "Just as I
wish you to keep it...."
After a moment, she continued, "I do not know anything about what
comes to us after this life ends, but ... if I have any conscious
knowledge of this world and of what you are doing, I shall not be far
away from you; and in times of need I will help you all I can. Who
knows? Perhaps I may be able to do more for the Cause after I am gone
than while I am here."
A few days later, on March 13, 1906, she passed away, her hand in
Anna's.
* * * * *
Asked, a few years before, if she believed that all women in the
United States would ever be given the vote, she had replied with
assurance, "It will come, but I shall not see it.... It is inevitable.
We can no more deny forever the right of self-government to one-half
our people than we could keep the Negro forever in bondage. It will
not be wrought by the same disrupting forces that freed the slave, but
come it will, and I believe within a generation."[464]
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony, 1905]
She had so longed to see women voting throughout the United States, to
see them elected to legislatures and Congress, but for her there had
only been the promise of fulfillment in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and
Idaho, and far away in New Zealand and Australia.
"Failure is impossible" was the rallying cry she left with her "girls"
to spur them on in the long discouraging struggle ahead, fourteen more
years of campaigning until on August 26, 1920, women were enfranchised
throughout the United States by the Nineteenth Amendment.
Even then their work was not finished, for she had looked farther
ahead to the time when men and women everywhere, regardless of race,
religion, or sex, would enjoy equal rights. Her challenging words,
"Failure is impossible," still echo and re-echo through the years, as
the crusade for human rights goes forward and men and women together
strive to build and preserve a free world.
FOOTNOTES:
[446] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1325.
[447] Shaw, _The Story of a Pioneer_, p. 210.
[448] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1319.
[449] _Ibid._, p. 1336.
[450] Miss Anthony also carefully prepared her scrapbooks, her books,
and bound volumes of _The Revolution_, woman's rights and antislavery
magazines for presentation to the Library of Congress, inscribing each
with a note of explanation.
[451] Ann Anthony Bacon.
[452] _New York Suffrage Newsletter_, Jan., 1905.
[453] _History of Woman Suffrage_, V, p. 122.
[454] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1365. The statue of Sacajawea,
presented to the Exposition by the clubwomen of America, was the work
of Alice Cooper of Denver. Woman suffrage was again defeated in Oregon
in 1906.
[455] Harper, _Anthony_, III, pp. 1357, 1359.
[456] _Ibid._, pp. 1376-1377.
[457] The medallion, the work of Leila Usher of Boston, was
commissioned by Mary Garrett.
[458] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1395.
[459] _Ibid._, pp. 1395-1396.
[460] Sept., 1935, Statement, Una R. Winter Collection.
[461] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1409.
[462] _Ibid._
[463] Shaw, _The Story of a Pioneer_, pp. 230-232.
[464] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1259.
NOTES
[Transcriber's Note: All footnotes for the book were located here, on
pages 311-326. They have been relocated to immediately follow the
chapter where they are referenced.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Matilda Joslyn Gage Collection.
Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
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