Chapter 13

August Riots

Imprisoning women had met with considerable public disapproval, and attendant political embarrassment to the Administration. That the presidential pardon would end this embarrassment was doubtless the hope of the Administration. The pickets, however, returned to their posts in steadily increasing numbers. Their presence at the gates was desired by the Administration no more now than it had been before the arrests and imprisonments. But they had found no way to rid themselves of the pickets. And as another month of picketing drew to an end the Administration ventured to try other ways to stop it and with it the consequent embarrassment. Their methods became physically more brutal and politically more stupid. Their conduct became lawless in the extreme.

Meanwhile the President had drafted the young men of America in their millions to die on foreign soil for foreign democracy. He had issued a special appeal to women to give their work, their treasure and their sons to this enterprise. At the same time his now gigantic figure stood obstinately across the path to our main objective. It was our daily task to keep vividly in his mind that objective. It was our responsibility to compel decisive action from him.

Using the return of Envoy Root from his mission to Russia as another dramatic opportunity to speak to the President we took to the picket line these mottoes:

TO ENVOY ROOT

YOU SAY THAT AMERICA MUST THROW ITS MANHOOD TO THE SUPPORT OF LIBERTY.

WHOSE LIBERTY? THIS NATION IS NOT FREE. TWENTY MILLION WOMEN ARE DENIED BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES THE RIGHT TO REPRESENTATION IN THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT.

TELL THE PRESIDENT THAT HE CANNOT FIGHT AGAINST LIBERTY AT HOME WHILE HE TELLS US TO FIGHT FOR LIBERTY ABROAD.

TELL HIM TO MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY BEFORE HE ASKS THE MOTHERS OF AMERICA TO THROW THEIR SONS TO THE SUPPORT OF DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE.

ASK HIM HOW HE CAN REFUSE LIBERTY TO AMERICAN CITIZENS WHEN HE IS FORCING MILLIONS OF AMERICAN BOYS OUT OF THEIR COUNTRY TO DIE FOR LIBERTY.

At no time during the entire picketing was the traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue so completely obstructed as it was for the two hours during which this banner made its appearance on the line. Police captains who three weeks before were testifying that the police could not manage the crowds, placidly looked on while these new crowds increased.

We did not regard Mr. Wilson as our President. We felt that he had neither political nor moral claim to our allegiance. War had been made without our consent. The war would be finished and very likely a bad peace would be written without our consent. Our fight was becoming increasingly difficult—I might almost say desperate. Here we were, a band of women fighting with banners, in the midst of a world armed to the teeth. And so it was not very difficult to understand how high spirited women grew more resentful, unwilling to be a party to the President’s hypocrisy, the hypocrisy so eager to sacrifice life without stint to the vague hope of liberty abroad, while refusing to assist in the peaceful legislative steps which would lead to self-government in our own country. As a matter of fact the President’s constant oratory on freedom and democracy moved them to scorn. They were stung into a protest so militant as to shock not only the President but the public. We inscribed on our banner what countless American women‘ had long thought in their hearts.

The truth was not pleasant but it had to be told. We submitted to the world, through the picket line, this question:

KAISER WILSON HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN HOW YOU SYMPATHIZED WITH THE POOR GERMANS BECAUSE THEY WERE NOT SELF GOVERNED? 20,000,000 AMERICAN WOMEN ARE NOT SELF-GOVERNED. TAKE THE BEAM OUT OF YOUR OWN EYE.

We did not expect public sympathy at this point. We knew that not even the members of Congress who had occasionally in debate, but more frequently in their cloak rooms, and often to us privately, called the President “autocrat”—“Kaiser”—“Ruler”—“King”—“Czar”—would approve our telling the truth publicly.

Nor was it to be expected that eager young boys, all agog to fight Germans, would be averse to attacking women in the meantime. They were out to fight and such was the public hysteria that it did not exactly matter whom they fought.

And so those excited boys of the Army and Navy attacked the women and the banner. The banner was destroyed. Another was brought up to take its place. This one met the same fate. Meanwhile a crowd was assembling in front of the White House either to watch or to assist in the attacks. At the very moment when one banner was being snatched away and destroyed, President and Mrs. Wilson passed through the gates on their way to a military review at Fort Myer. The President saw American women being attacked, while the police refused them protection.

Not a move was made by the police to control the growing crowd. Such inaction is always a signal for more violence on the part of rowdies. As the throng moved to and fro between the White House and our Headquarters immediately opposite, so many banners were destroyed that finally Miss Lucy Burns, Miss Virginia Arnold and Miss Elizabeth Stuyvesant took those remaining to the second and third floor balconies of our building and hung them out. At this point there was not a picket left on the street. The crowd was clearly obstructing the traffic, but no attempt was made to move them back or to protect the women, some of whom were attacked by sailors on their own doorsteps. The two police officers present watched without interference while three sailors brought a ladder from the Belasco Theater in the same block, leaned it against the side of the Cameron House, the Headquarters, climbed up to the second floor balcony, mounted the iron railing and tore down all banners and the American flag. One sailor administered a severe blow in the face with his clenched fist upon Miss Georgina Sturgis of Washington.

“Why did you do that?” she demanded.

The man halted for a brief instant in obvious amazement and said, “I don’t know.” And with a violent wrench he tore the banner from her hands and ran down the ladder.

The narrow balcony was the scene of intense excitement.

But for Miss Burns’ superb strength she would have been dragged over the railing of the balcony to be plunged to the ground. The mob watched with fascination while she swayed to and fro in her wrestle with two young sailors. And still no attempt by the police to quell the riot!

The climax came when in the late afternoon a bullet was fired through one of the heavy glass windows of the second floor, embedding itself in the ceiling. The bullet grazed past the head of Mrs. Ella Morton Dean of Montana. Captain Flather of the 1st Precinct, with two detectives, later examined the holes and declared they had been made by a 38 caliber revolver, but no attempt was ever made to find the man who had drawn the revolver.

Meanwhile eggs and tomatoes were hurled at our fresh banners flying from the flag poles on the building.

Finally police reserves were summoned and in less than five minutes the crowd was pushed back and the street cleared. Thinking now that they could rely on the protection of the police, the women started with their banners for the White House. But the police looked on while all the banners were destroyed, a few paces from Headquarters. More banners ,went out,—purple, white and gold ones. They, too, were destroyed before they reached the White House.

This entire spectacle was enacted on August 14, within a stone’s throw of the White House.

Miss Paul summed up the situation when she said:

“The situation now existing in Washington exists because President Wilson permits it. Orders were first handed down to the police to arrest suffragists. The clamor over their imprisonments made this position untenable. The police were then ordered to protect suffragists. They were then ordered to attack suffragists. They have now been ordered to encourage irresponsible crowds to attack suffragists. No police head would dare so to besmirch his record without orders from his responsible chief. The responsible chief in the National Capital is the President of the United States.”

Shortly after the incident of the “Kaiser banner” I was speaking in Louisville, Kentucky. The auditorium was packed and overflowing with men and women who had come to hear the story of the pickets.

Up to this time we had very few members in Kentucky and had anticipated in this Southern State, part of President Wilson ,’s stronghold, that our Committee would meet with no enthusiasm and possibly with warm hostility.

I had related briefly the incidents leading up to the picketing and the Government’s suppressions. I was rather cautiously approaching the subject of the “Kaiser banner,” feeling timid and hesitant, wondering how this vast audience of Southerners would take it. Slowly I read the inscription on the famous banner, “Kaiser Wilson, have you forgotten how you sympathized with the poor Germans because they were not self-governed? Twenty million American women are not self-governed. Take the beam out of your own eye.”

I hardly reached the last word, still wondering what the, intensely silent audience would do, when a terrific outburst of applause mingled with shouts of “Good! Good! He is, he is!” came to my amazed ears. As the applause died down there was almost universal good-natured laughter. Instead of the painstaking and eloquent explanation which I was prepared to offer, I had only to join in their laughter.

A few minutes later a telegram was brought to the platform announcing further arrests. I read:

“Six more women sentenced to-day to 30 days in Occoquan workhouse.”

Instant cries of “Shame! Shame! It’s an outrage!” Scores of men and two women were on their feet calling for the passage of a resolution denouncing the Administration’s policy of persecution. The motion of condemnation was put. It seemed as if the entire audience seconded it. It went through instantly, unanimously, and again with prolonged shouts and applause.

The meeting continued and I shall never forget that audience. It lingered to a late hour, almost to midnight, asking questions, making brief “testimonials” from the floor with almost evangelical fervor. Improvised collection baskets were piled high with bills. Women volunteered for picket duty and certain imprisonment, and the following day a delegation left for Washington.

I cite this experience of mine because it was typical. Every one who went through the country telling the story had similar experiences at this time. Indignation was swift and hot. Our mass meetings everywhere became meetings of protest during the entire campaign.

And resolutions of protest which always went immediately by wire from such meetings to the President, his cabinet and to his leaders in Congress, of course created increasing uneasiness in Democratic circles.

On August 15th the pickets again attempted to take their posts on the line.

On this day one lettered banner and fifty purple, white and gold flags were destroyed by a mob led by sailors in uniform. Alice Paul was knocked down three times by a sailor in uniform and dragged the width of the White House sidewalk in his frenzied attempt to tear off leer suffrage sash.

Miss Katharine Morey of Boston was also knocked to the pavement by a sailor, who took her flag and then darted off into the crowd. Miss Elizabeth Stuyvesant was struck by a soldier in uniform and her blouse torn from her body. Miss Maud Jamison of Virginia was knocked down and dragged along the sidewalk. Miss Beulah Amidon of North Dakota was knocked down by a sailor.

In the midst of these riotous scenes, a well-known Washington correspondent was emerging from the White House, after an interview with the President. Dr. Cart’ Grayson, the President’s physician, accompanying him to the door, advised:

“You had better go out the side entrance. Those damned women are in the front.”

In spite of this advice the correspondent made his exit through the same gate by which he had entered, and just in time to ward off an attack by a sailor on one of the frailest girls in the group.

The Administration, in its desperation, ordered the police to lawlessness. On August 16th, fifty policemen led the mob in attacking the women. Hands were bruised and arms twisted lit’ police officers and plainclothes men. Two civilians who tried to rescue the women from the attacks of the police were arrested. The police fell upon these young women with more brutality even than the mobs they had before encouraged. Twenty-five lettered banners and 123 Party flags were destroyed by mobs and police on this afternoon.

As the crowd grew more dense, the police temporarily retired from the attack. When their activities had summoned a sufficiently large and infuriated mob, they would rest. And so the passions of the mob continued unchecked upon these irrepressible women, and from day to day the Administration gave its orders.

Finding that riots and mob attacks had not terrorized the pickets, the Administration decided again to arrest the women in the hope of ending the agitation. Having lost public sympathy through workhouse sentences, having won it back by pardoning the women, the Administration felt it could afford to risk losing it again, or rather felt that it had supplied itself with an appropriate amount of stage-setting.

And so on the third day of the riotous attacks, when it was clear that the pickets would persist, the Chief of Police called at headquarters to announce to Miss Paul that “orders have been changed and henceforth women carrying banners will be arrested”

Meanwhile the pickets heard officers shout to civilian friends as they passed—“Come back at four o’clock.”

Members of the daily mob announced at the noon hour in various nearby restaurants that “the suffs will be arrested to-day at 4 o’clock.”

Four o’clock is the hour the Government clerks begin to swarm homewards. The choice of this hour by the police to arrest the women would enable them to have a large crowd passing the White House gates to lend color to the fiction that “pickets were blocking the traffic.”

Throughout the earlier part of the afternoon the silent sentinels stood unmolested, carrying these mottoes:

ENGLAND AND RUSSIA ARE ENFRANCHISING WOMEN IN WAR-TIME.

HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOB LIBERTY?

THE GOVERNMENT ORDERS OUR BANNERS DESTROYED BECAUSE THEY TELL THE TRUTH.

At four o’clock the threatened arrests took place. The women arrested were Miss Lavinia Dock of Pennsylvania, Miss Edna Dixon of Washington, D. C., a young public school teacher; Miss Natalie Gray of Colorado, Mrs. Win. Upton Watson and Miss Lucy Ewing of Chicago, and Miss Catherine Flanagan of Connecticut.

Exactly forty minutes were allowed for the trial of these six women. One police officer testified that they were “obstructing traffic.”

None of the facts of the hideous and cruel manhandling by the mobs and police officers was allowed to be brought out. Nothing the women could say mattered. The judge pronounced : “Thirty days in Occoquan workhouse in lieu of a $10.00 fine.”

And so this little handful of women, practically all of them tiny and frail of physique, began the cruel sentence of 30 days in the workhouse, while their cowardly assailants were not even reprimanded, nor were those who destroyed over a thousand dollars’ worth of banners apprehended.

The riots had attracted sufficient attention to cause some anxiety in Administration circles. Protests against us and others against the rioters pressed upon them. Congress was provoked into a little activity; activity which reflected some doubt as to the wisdom of arresting women without some warrant in law.

Two attempts were made, neither of which was successful, to give the Administration more power and more law.

Senator Culberson of Texas, Democrat, offered a bill authorizing President Wilson at any time to prohibit any person from approaching or entering any place—in short blanket authority granting the President or his officials limitless power over the actions of human beings. Realizing that this could be used to prohibit picketing the White House we appeared before a committee hearing on the bill and spoke against it. The committee did not have the boldness to report such a bill.

Senator Myers of Montana, an influential member of the Democratic majority, introduced into the Senate a few days later a resolution making it illegal to picket the White House. The shamelessness of admitting to the world that acts for which women had been repeatedly sentenced to jail, and for which women were at that moment lying in prison, were so legal as to make necessary a special act of Congress against them, was appalling. The Administration policy seemed to be “Let us put women in jail first—let us enact a law to keep them there afterwards,”

This tilt between Senator Brandegee, of Connecticut, antisuffrage Republican, and Senator Myers, suffrage Democrat, took place when Mr. Myer’s presented his bill:

MR. BRANDEGEE: . . . Was there any defect in the legal proceedings by which these trouble makers were sentenced and put in jail a few weeks ago?

MR. MYERS: None that I know of. I am not in a position to pass upon that. I do not believe any was claimed . . . .

MR. BRANDEGEE: Inasmuch as the law was sufficient to land them in jail . . . I fail to see why additional legislation is necessary on the subject.

MR. MYERS: There seems to be a doubt in the mind of some whether the present law is sufficient and I think it ought to be put beyond doubt. I think . . . the laws are not stringent or severe enough . . . .

MR. BRANDEGEE : They were stringent enough to land the malefactors in jail . . . .

In spite of Senator Myers’ impassioned appeal to his colleagues, be was unable to command any support for his bill. I quote this from his speech in the Senate August 18, 1917:

MR. MYERS: Mr. President, I wish to say a few words about the bill I have just introduced. It is intended for the enactment of better and more adequate legislation to prevent the infamous, outrageous, scandalous, and, I think, almost treasonable actions that have been going on around the White House for months past, which President of the United States have been a gross insult to the and to the people of the United States; I mean the so-called picketing of the White House. . . These disgusting proceedings have been going on for months, and if there is no adequate law to stop them, I think there ought to be.

“I believe the President, in the generosity of his heart, erred when he pardoned some of the women who have been conducting these proceedings, after they had been sentenced to 60 days in the workhouse. I believe they deserved the sentence, and they ought to have been compelled to serve it . . . .

“I for one am not satisfied longer to sit here idly day by day and submit to having the President of the United States insulted with impunity before the people of the country and before all the world. It is a shame and reproach.

“I hope this bill . . . will receive careful consideration and that it may be enacted into law and may be found an adequate preventive and punishment for such conduct.”

This bill, which died a well-deserved death, is so amusing as to warrant reproduction. Although lamenting our comparison between the President and the Kaiser, it will be seen that Senator Myers brought forth a thoroughly Prussian document:

A BILL

For the better protection and enforcement of peace and order and the public welfare in the District of Columbia.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives o f the United States o f America in Congress assembled, That when the United States shall be engaged in war it shall be unlawful for any person or persons to carry, hold, wave, exhibit, display, or have in his or her possession in any public road, highway, alley, street, thoroughfare, park, or other public place in the District of Columbia, any banner, flag, streamer, sash, or other device having thereon any words or language with reference to the President or the Vice President of the United States, or any words or language with reference to the Constitution of the United States, or the right of suffrage, or right of citizenship, or any words or language with reference to the duties of any executive official or department of the United States, or with reference to any proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States, or with reference to any law or proposed law of the United States, calculated to bring the President of the United States or the Government of the United States into contempt, or which may tend to cause confusion, or excitement, or obstruction of the streets or sidewalks thereof, or any passage in any public place.

Sec. 2. That any person committing any foregoing described offense shall, upon conviction thereof, for each offense be fined not less than $100 nor more than $1,000 or imprisoned not less than thirty days nor more than one year, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Voices were raised in our behalf, also, and among them I note the following letter written to Major Pullman by Gilson Gardner:[1]

[1] The distinguished journalist who went to Africa to meet Theodore Roosevelt and accompanied him on his return journey to America.

Mr. Raymond Pullman, Chief of Police, Washington, D. C.

My dear Pullman,—

I am writing as an old friend to urge you to get right in this matter of arresting the suffrage pickets. Of course the only way for you to get right is to resign. It has apparently become impossible for you to stay in office and do your duty. The alternative is obvious.

You must see, Pullman, that you cannot be right in what you have done in this matter. You have given the pickets adequate protection; but you have arrested them and had them sent to jail and the workhouse; you have permitted the crowd to mob them, and then you have had your officers do much the same thing by forcibly taking their banners from them. In some of the actions you must have been wrong. If it was right to give them protection and let them stand at the White House for five months, both before and after the war, it was not right to do what you did later.

You say that it was not right when you were “lenient” and gave them protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy m place of the settled laws of the land. This would justify a charge of “Kaiserism” right here in our capital city.

The truth is, Pullman, you were right when you gave these women protection. That is what the police are for. When there are riots they are supposed to quell them, not by quelling the “proximate cause,” but by quelling the rioters.

I know your police officers now quite well and know that they are most happy when they are permitted to do their duty. They did not like the dirty business of permitting a lot of sailors and street rifraff to rough the girls. All that went against the grain, but when you let them protect the pickets, as you did March third, when a thousand women marched around and around the White House, the officers were as contented as they were efficient.

Washington has a good police force and there has never been a minute when they could not have scattered any group gathered at the White House gates and given perfect protection to the women standing there.

You know why they did not do their duty.

In excusing what you have done, you say that the women carried banners with “offensive” inscriptions on them. You refer to the fact that they have addressed the President as “Kaiser Wilson.” As a matter of fact not an arrest you have made—and the arrests now number more than sixty—has been for carrying one of those “offensive” banners. The women were carrying merely the suffrage colors or quotations from President Wilson’s writings.

But, suppose the banners were offensive. Who made you censor of banners? The law gives you no such power. Even when you go through the farce of a police court trial the charge is “obstructing traffic”; which shows conclusively that you are not willing to go into court on the real issue.

No. As Chief of Police you have no more right to complain of the sentiments of a banner than you have of the sentiments in an editorial in the Washington Post, and you have no more right to arrest the banner-bearer than you have to arrest the owner of the Washington Post . . . . Congress refused to pass a press censorship law. There are certain lingering traditions to the effect that a people’s liberties are closely bound up with the right to talk things out and those who are enlightened know that the only proper answer to words is words. When force is opposed to words there is ground for the charge of “Kaiserism.” . .

There was just one thing for you to have done, Pullman, and that was to give full and adequate protection to these women, no matter what banners they carried or what ideas their banners expressed. If there is any law that can be invoked against the wording of the banners it was the business of others in the government to start the legal machinery which would abate them. It was not lawful to abate them by mob violence, or by arrests. And if those in authority over you were not willing that you thus do your duty, it was up to you to resign.

After all it would not be such a terrible thing, Pullman, for you to give up being Chief of Police, particularly when you are not permitted to be chief of police, but must yield your judgment to the district commissioners who have yielded their judgment to the White House. Being Chief of Police under such circumstances can hardly be worth while. You are a young man and the world is full of places for young men with courage enough to save their self- respect at the expense of their jobs. You did that once,-back in the Ballinger-Pinchot days. Why not now?

Come out and help make the fight which must be made to recover and protect the liberties which are being filched from us here at home. There is a real fight looming up for real democracy. You will not be alone. There are a lot of fine young men, vigorous and patriotic, in and out of the Administration who are preparing for this fight. Yours will not be the only resignation. But why not be among the first? Don’t wait. Let them have your resignation. now and let me be the first to welcome and congratulate you.

Sincerely, (Signed) GILSON GARDNER.

Representative John Baer of North Dakota, having witnessed for himself the riotous scenes, immediately introduced into the House a resolution[1] demanding an investigation of conditions in the Capital which permitted mobs to attack women. This, too, went to certain death. Between the members who did not dare denounce the Administration and the others who did dare denounce the women, we had to stand quite solidly on our own program, and do our best to keep them nervous over the next step in the agitation.

[1] See Appendix 3 for full text of resolution.

The press throughout the entire country at this time protested against mob violence and the severe sentences pronounced upon the women who had attempted to hold their banners steadfast.

The Washington (D. C.) Herald, August 19, printed the following editorial:

There is an echo of the President’s phrase about the “firm hand of stern repression” in the arrest, conviction and jailing of the six suffragists; a touch of ruthlessness in their incarceration at Occoquan along with women of the street, pickpockets and other flotsam and jetsam. Still, the suffragists are not looking for sympathy, and it need not be wasted upon them.

The police have arrived at a policy, although no one knows whether it will be sufficiently stable and consistent to last out the week . . . . Washington is grateful that the disgraceful period of rioting and mob violence in front of the White House is at an end, and another crisis in the militant crusade to bring the Susan B. Anthony amendment before Congress has been reached.

What is the next step? No one knows. Picketing doubtless will continue, or an effort will be made to continue it; and militancy, if the police continue to arrest, instead of giving the women protection, will pass into a new phase. The suffragists as well as the public at large are thankful that the police department has finally determined to arrest the pickets, instead of allowing them to be mobbed by hoodlums .

. . . The public eye will be on Occoquan for the next few weeks, to find out how these women bear up under the Spartan treatment that is in store for them. If they have deliberately sought martyrdom, as some critics have been unkind enough to suggest, they have it now. And if their campaign, in the opinion of perhaps the great majority of the public, has been misguided, admiration for their pluck will not be withheld.

The Boston Journal of August 20, 1917, said in an editorial written by Herbert N. Pinkham, Jr.:

That higher authorities than the Washington police were responsible for the amazing policy of rough house employed against the suffrage pickets has been suspected from the very beginning. Police power in Washington is sufficient to protect a handful of women against a whole phalanx of excited or inspired government clerks and uniformed hoodlums, if that power were used.

. . . In our nation’s capital, women have been knocked down and dragged through the streets by government employees—including sailors in uniform. The police are strangely absent at such moments, as a rule, and arrive only in time to arrest a few women . . . .

Perhaps the inscriptions on the suffrage banners were not tactful. It is sometimes awkward indeed to quote the President’s speeches after the speeches have “grown cold.” Also a too vigorous use of the word “democracy” is distasteful to some government dignitaries, it seems. But right or wrong, the suffragists at Washington are entitled to police protection, even though in the minds of the Administration they are not entitled to the ballot.

Perhaps, even in America, we must have a law forbidding people to carry banners demanding what they consider their political rights. Such a law would, of course, prohibit political parades of all kinds, public mass meetings and other demonstrations of one set of opinions against another set. Such a law has been proposed by Senator Myers of Montana, the author of the latest censorship and anti-free speech bill. It may be necessary to pass the law, if it is also necessary that the public voice be stilled and the nation become dumb and subservient.

But until there is such a law . . . people must be protected while their actions remain within the law. If their opinions differ from ours, we must refrain from smashing their faces, if a certain number of people believe that they have the right to vote we may either grant their claim or turn them sadly away, but we may not roll them into the gutter; if they see fit to tell us our professions of democracy are empty, we may smile sorrowfully and murmur a prayer for their ignorance but we may not pelt them with rotten eggs and fire a shot through the window of their dwelling; if, denied a properly dignified hearing, they insist upon walking through the streets with printed words on a saucy banner, we may be amazed at their zeal and pitiful of their bad taste, but even for the sake of keeping their accusations out of sight of our foreign visitors (whom we have trained to believe us perfect) we may not send them to jail . . . .

All this suffrage shouting in Washington has as its single object the attainment of President Wilson’s material support for equal suffrage . . . .

President Wilson’s word would carry the question into Congress . . .

Would there be any harm in letting Congress vote on a suffrage resolution? That would end the disturbance and it would make our shield of national justice somewhat brighter.

It looks like President Wilson’s move.

Between these opposing currents of protest and support, the Administration drifted helplessly. Unwilling to pass the amendment, it continued to send women to prison.

On the afternoon of September 4th, President Wilson led his first contingent of drafted “soldiers of freedom” down Pennsylvania Avenue in gala parade, on the first lap of their journey to the battlefields of France. On the same afternoon a slender line of women—also “soldiers of freedom”—attempted to march in Washington.

As they attempted to take up their posts, two by two, in front of the Reviewing Stand, opposite the White House, they were gathered in and swept away by the police like common street criminals—their golden banners scarcely flung to the breeze.

MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN BE DENIED A VOICE IN A GOVERNMENT WHICH IS CONSCRIPTING THEIR SONS?

was the offensive question on the first banner carried by Miss Eleanor Calnan of Massachusetts and Miss Edith Ainge of New York.

The Avenue was roped off on account of the parade. There was hardly any one passing at the time; all traffic had been temporarily suspended, so there was none to obstruct. But the Administration’s policy must go on. A few moments and Miss Lucy Branham of Maryland and Mrs. Pauline Adams of Virginia marched down the Avenue, their gay banners waving joyously in the autumn sun, to fill up the gap of the two comrades who had been arrested. They, too, were shoved into the police automobile, their banners still high and appealing, silhouetted against the sky as they were hurried to the police station.

The third pair of pickets managed to cross the Avenue, but were arrested immediately they reached the curb. Still others advanced. The crowd began to line the ropes and to watch eagerly the line of women indomitably coming, two by two, into the face of certain arrest. A fourth detachment was arrested in the middle of the Avenue on the trolley tracks. But still they came.

A few days later more women were sent to the workhouse for carrying to the picket line this question:

“President Wilson, what did you mean when you said: ‘We have seen a good many singular things happen recently. We have been told there is a deep disgrace resting upon the origin of this nation. The nation originated in the sharpest sort of criticism of public policy. We originated, to put it in the vernacular, in a kick, and if it be unpatriotic to kick, why then the grown man is unlike the child. We have forgotten the very principle of our origin if we have forgotten how to object, how to resist, how to agitate, how to pull down and build up, even to the extent of revolutionary practices, if it be necessary to readjust matters. I have forgotten my history, if that be not true history.’”

The Administration had not yet abandoned hope of removing the pickets. They persisted in their policy of arrests and longer imprisonments.