Chapter 31

Boston Militants Welcome the President

It was announced that the President would return to America on February 24th. That would leave seven days in which he could act before the session ended on March 3d. We determined to make another dramatic effort to move him further.

Boston was to be the President’s landing place. Boston, where ancient liberties are so venerated, and modern ones so abridged. No more admirable place could have been found to welcome the President home in true militant fashion.

Wishing the whole world to know that women were greeting President Wilson, why they were greeting him, and what form of demonstration the greetings would assume, we announced our plans in advance. Upon his arrival a line of pickets would hold banners silently calling to the President’s attention the demand for his effective aid. In the afternoon they would hold a meeting in Boston Common and there burn the parts of the President’s Boston speech which should pertain to democracy and liberty. These announcements were met with official alarm of almost unbelievable extent. Whereas front pages had been given over heretofore to publishing the elaborate plans for the welcome to be extended to the President, eulogies of the President, and recitals of his great triumph abroad, now the large proportion of this space was devoted to clever plans of the police to outwit the suffragists. The sustained publicity of this demonstration was unprecedented. It actually filled the Boston papers for all of two weeks.

A “deadline,” a diagram of which appeared in the press, was to be established beyond which no suffragist, no matter how enterprising, could penetrate to harass the over-worked President with foolish ideas about the importance of liberty for women. Had not this great man the cares of the world on his shoulders? This was no time to talk about liberty for women! The world was rocking and a great peace conference was sitting, and the President was just returning to report on the work done so far. The Boston descendants of the early revolutionists would do their utmost to see that no untoward event should mar the perfection of their plans. They would see to it that the sacred soil of the old Boston Common should not be disgraced.

It was a perfect day. Lines of marines whose trappings shone brilliantly in the clear sunshine were in formation to hold back the crowds from the Reviewing stand where the President should appear after heading the procession in his honor. It seemed as if all Boston were on hand for the welcome. A slender file of twenty-two women marched silently into the sunshine, slipped through the “deadline,” and made its way to the base‘ of the Reviewing stand. There it unfurled its beautiful banners and took up its post directly facing the line of marines which was supposed to keep all suffragists at bay. Quite calmly and yet triumphantly, they stood there, a pageant of beauty and defiant appeal, which not even the most hurried passerby could fail to see and comprehend.

There were consultations by the officials in charge of the ceremonies. The women looked harmless enough, but had they not been told that they must not come there? They were causing no riot, in fact they were clearly adding much beauty—people seemed to take them as part of the elaborate ceremony—but officials seldom have sense of humor enough or adaptability enough to change quickly, especially when they have made threats. It would be a taint on their honor, if they did not “pick up” the women for the deed.

One could hear the people reading slowly the large lettered banner:

MR. PRESIDENT, YOU SAID IN THE SENATE ON SEPTEMBER 20 “WE SHALL NOT ONLY BE DISTRUSTED BUT WE SHALL DESERVE TO BE DISTRUSTED IF WE DO NOT ENFRANCHISE WOMEN.” YOU ALONE CAN REMOVE THIS DISTRUST NOW BY SECURING THE ONE VOTE NEEDED TO PASS THE SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT BEFORE MARCH 4.

The American flag carried by Miss Katherine Morey of Brookline held the place of honor at the head of the line and there were the familiar, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” and “Mr. President, what will you do for woman suffrage?” The other banners were simply purple, white and gold.

“When we had stood there about three quarters of an hour,” said Katherine Morey, “Superintendent Crowley came to me and said, ‘We want to be as nice as we can to you suffragette ladies, but you cannot stand here while the President goes by, so you might as well go back now.’ I said I was sorry, but as we had come simply to be there at that very time, we would not be able to go back until the President had gone by. He thereupon made a final appeal to Miss Paul, who was at headquarters, but she only repeated our statement. The patrol wagons were hurried to the scene and the arrests were executed in an exceedingly gentlemanly manner. But the effect on the crowd was electric. The sight of ‘ladies’ being put into patrols, seemed to thrill the Boston masses as nothing the President subsequently said was able to.

“We were taken to the House of Detention and there charged with ‘loitering more than seven minutes’.”

As Mrs. Agnes H. Morey, Massachusetts Chairman of the Woman’s Party, later remarked:

“It is a most extraordinary thing. Thousands loitered from curiosity on the day the President arrived. Twenty-two loitered for liberty, and only those who loitered for liberty were arrested.”

Realizing that the event of the morning had diverted public attention to our issue, and undismayed by the arrests, other women entered the lists to sustain public attention upon our demand to the President.

The ceremony on the Common began at three o’clock. Throngs of people packed in closely in an effort to hear the speakers, and to catch a glimpse of the ceremony, presided over by Mrs. Louise Sykes of Cambridge, whose late husband was President of the Connecticut College for Women. From three o’clock until six, women explained the purpose of the protest, the status of the amendment, and urged those present to help. At six o’clock came the order to arrest. Mrs. C. C. Jack, wife of Professor Jack of Harvard University, Mrs. Mortimer Warren of Boston, whose husband was head of a base hospital in France, and Miss Elsie Hill, daughter of the late Congressman Hill, were arrested and were taken to the House of Detention, where they joined their comrades.

“Dirty, filthy hole under the Court House,” was the general characterization of the House of Detention. “Jail was a Paradise compared to this depraved place,” said Miss Morey. “We slept in our clothes, four women to a cell, on iron shelves two feet wide. In the cell was an open toilet. The place slowly filled up during the night with drunks and disorderlies until pandemonium reigned. In the evening, Superintendent Crowley and Commissioner Curtis came to call on us. I don’t believe they had ever been there before, and they were painfully embarrassed. Superintendent Crowley said to me, “If you were drunk we could release you in the morning, but unfortunately since you are not we have got to take you into court.”

When the prisoners were told next morning the decision of Chief Justice Bolster to try each prisoner separately and in closed court, they all protested against such proceedings. But guards took the women by force to a private room. “The Matron, who was terrified,” said Miss Morey, “shouted to the guards, ‘You don’t handle the drunks that way. You know you don’t.’ But they continued to push, shove and shake the women while forcing them to the ante room.”

“As an American citizen under arrest, I demand a public trial,” was the statement of each on entering the judge’s private trial room.

While the trial was proceeding without the women’s cooperation,—some were tried under wrong names, some were tried more than once under different names, but most of them under the name of Jane Doe—vigorous protests were being made to all the city officials by individuals among the throngs who had come to the court house to attend the trial. This protest was so strong that the last three women were tried in open court. The judge sentenced everybody impartially to eight days in j ail in lieu of fines, with the exception of Miss Wilma Henderson, who was released when it was learned that she was a minor.

The women were taken to the Charles Street Jail to serve their sentences. “The cells were immaculately clean,” said Miss Morey, “but there was one feature of this experience which obliterated all its advantages. The cells were without modern toilet facilities. The toilet equipment consisted of a heavy wooden bucket, about two and a half feet high and a foot and a half in diameter, half filled with water. No one of us will ever forget that foul bucket. It had to be carried to the lower floor—we were on the third and fourth floors—every morning. I could hardly lift mine off the floor, to say nothing of getting it down stairs (Miss Morey weighs 98 pounds), so there it stayed. Berry Pottier managed to get hers down, but was so exhausted she was utterly unable to get it back to her cell.

“The other toilet facility provided was a smaller bucket of water to wash in, but it was of such a strangely unpleasant odor that we did not dare use it.”

The Boston reporters were admitted freely—and they wrote columns of copy. There was the customary ridicule, but there were friendly light touches such as, “Militant Highlights—To be roommates at Vassar College and then to meet again as cellmates was the experience of Miss Elsie Hill and Mrs. Lois Warren Shaw.” . . . “Superintendent Kelleher didn’t know when he was in Congress with Elsie Hill’s father he would some day have Congressman Hill’s daughter in his jail.”

And there were friendly serious touches in these pages of sensational news—such as this excerpt from the front page of the Boston Traveler of February 25, 1919. “The reporter admired the spirit of the women. Though weary from loss of sleep, the fire of a great purpose burned in their eyes . . . .

“It was a sublime forgetting of self for the goal ahead, and whether the reader is in sympathy with the principle for which these women are ready to suffer or not, he will be forced to admire the spirit which leads them on.”

Photographs of the women were printed day by day—giving their occupations, if any, noting their revolutionary ancestors, ascertaining the attitude of husbands and fathers. Mrs. Shaw’s husband’s telegram was typical of the support the women got. “Don’t be quitters,” he wired, “I have competent nurses to look after the children.” Mr. Shaw is a Harvard graduate and a successful manufacturer in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Telegrams of protest from all over the country poured in upon all the Boston officials who had had any point of contact with the militants. All other work was for the moment suspended. Such is the quality of Mrs. Morey’s organizing genius that she did not let a solitary official escape. Telegrams also went from Boston, and especially from the jail, to President Wilson.

Official Boston was in the grip of this militant invasion when suddenly a man of mystery, one E. J. Howe, appeared and paid the women’s fines. It was later discovered that the mysterious E. J. Howe alleged to have acted for a “client.” Whether the “client” was a part of Official Boston, no one ever knew. There were rumors that the city wished to end its embarrassment.

Sedate Boston had been profoundly shaken. Sedate Boston gave more generously than ever before to militant finances. And when the “Prison Special” arrived a few days later a Boston theatre was filled to overflowing with a crowd eager to hear more about their local heroines, and to cheer them while they were decorated with the already famous prison pin.

Something happened in Washington, too, after the President’s safe journey thither from Boston.