Chapter 33

A Farewell to President Wilson

The Republican Congress elected in November, 1918, would not sit until December, 1919—such is our unfortunate system—unless called together by the President in a special session. We had polled the new Congress by personal interviews and by post, and found a safe two-thirds majority for the amendment in the House. In the new Senate we still lacked a fateful one vote.

Our task was, therefore, to induce the President to call a special session of Congress at the earliest possible moment, and to see that he did not relax his efforts toward the last vote.

“He won’t do it!” . . .”President Wilson will never let the Republican Congress come together until the regular time.” . . . “Especially with himself in Europe!” The usual points of objection were raised. But we persisted. We felt that the President could win this last vote. And the fear that a Republican Congress might, if he did not, was an accelerating factor.

One feature of the campaign to force a special session was a demonstration in New York, on the eve of President Wilson’s return to Europe, at the time he addressed a mass meeting in the Metropolitan Opera House on behalf of his proposed League of Nations. The plan of demonstration was to hold outside of the Opera House banners addressed to President Wilson, and to consign his speech to the flames of a torch at a public meeting nearby.

It was a clear starry night in March when the picket line of 26 women proceeded with tri-colored banners from New York headquarters in Forty-first street to the Opera House. As we neared the corner of the street opposite the Opera House and before we could cross the street a veritable battalion of policemen in close formation rushed us with unbelievable ferocity. Not a word was spoken by a single officer of the two hundred policemen in the attack to indicate the nature of our offense. Clubs were raised and lowered and the women beaten back with such cruelty as none of us had ever witnessed before.

The women clung to their heavy banner poles, trying to keep the banners above the maelstrom. But the police seized them, tore the pennants, broke the poles, some of them over our backs, trampled them underfoot, pounded us, dragged us, and in every way behaved like frantic beasts. It would have been so simple quietly to detain our little handful until after the President’s speech, if that seemed necessary. But to launch this violent attack under the circumstances was madness. Not a pedestrian had paid any except friendly attention to the slender file of women. But the moment this happened an enormous crowd gathered, made up mostly of soldiers and sailors, many of whom had just returned from abroad and were temporarily thronging the streets of New York. They joined forces with the police in the attack.

Miss Margaretta Schuyler, a beautiful, fragile young girl, was holding fast a silken American flag which she had carried at the head of the procession when a uniformed soldier jumped upon her, twisted her arms until she cried in pain, cursed, struggled until he had torn her flag from its pole, and then broke the pole across her head, exulting in his triumph over his frailer victim.

When I appealed to the policeman, who was at the moment occupied solely with pounding me on the back, to intercept the soldier in his cruel attack, his only reply was: “Oh, he’s helping me.” He thereupon resumed his beating of me and I cried, “Shame, shame! Aren’t you ashamed to beat American women in this brutal way?” I offered no other resistance. “If we are breaking any law, arrest us! Don’t beat us in this cowardly fashion!”

“We’ll rush you like bulls,” was his vulgar answer, “we’ve only just begun.”

Another young woman, an aviatrice, was seized by the coat collar and thrown to the pavement for trying to keep hold of her banner. Her fur cap was the only thing that saved her skull from serious injury. As it was, she was trampled under foot and her face severely cut before we could rescue her with the assistance of a sympathetic member of the crowd. The sympathetic person was promptly attacked by the policeman for helping his victim to her feet. There were many shouts of disapproval of the police conduct and many cheers for the women from the dense crowd.

By this time the crowd had massed itself so thickly that we could hardly move an inch. It was perfectly apparent that we could neither make our way to the Opera House nor could we extricate ourselves. But the terrors continued. Women were knocked down and trampled under foot, some of them almost unconscious, others bleeding from the hands and face; arms were bruised and twisted; pocketbooks were snatched and wrist-watches stolen.

When it looked as if the suffocating melee would result in the death or permanent injury to some of us, I was at last dragged by a policeman to the edge of the crowd. Although I offered not the slightest resistance, I was crushed continuously in the arm by the officer who walked me to the police station, and kept muttering: “You’re a bunch of cannibals,—cannibals,—Bolsheviks.”

Upon arriving at the police station I was happily relieved to find eve of my comrades already there. We were all impartially cursed at; told to stand up; told to sit down; forbidden to speak to one another; forbidden even to smile at one another. One by one we were called to the desk to give our name, age, and various other pieces of information. We stood perfectly silent before the station lieutenant as he coaxingly said, “You’d better tell.”—“You’d better give us your name.”—“You’d better tell us where you live—it will make things easier for you.” But we continued our silence.

Disorderly conduct, interfering with the police, assaulting the police (Shades of Heaven! assaulting the police!), were the charges entered against us.

We were all locked in separate cells and told that we would be taken to the Woman’s Night Court for immediate trial.

While pondering on what was happening to our comrades and wondering if they, too, would be arrested, or if they would just be beaten up by the police and mob, a large, fat jail matron came up and began to deliver a speech, which, ran something like this:

“Now, shure and you ladies must know that this is goin’ a bit too far. Now, I’m for suffrage alright, and I believe women ought to vote, but why do you keep botherin’ the President? Don’t you know he has got enough to think about with the League of Nations, the Peace Conference and fixin’ up the whole world on his mind?”

In about half an hour we were taken from our cells and brought before the Lieutenant, who now announced, “Well, you ladies may go now,—I have just received a telephone order to release you.”

We accepted the news and jubilantly left the station house, returning at once to our comrades. There the battle was still going on, and as we joined them we were again dragged and cuffed about the streets by the police and their aids, but there were no more arrests. Elsie Hill succeeded in speaking from a balcony above the heads of the crowd:

“Did you men turn back when you saw the Germans coming? What would you have thought of any one who did? Did you expect us to turn back? We never turn back, either—and we won’t until democracy is won! Who rolled bandages for you when you were suffering abroad? Who bound your wounds in your fight for democracy? Who spent long hours of the night and the day knitting you warm garments? There are women here to-night attempting to hold banners to remind the President that democracy is not won at home; who have given their sons and husbands for your fight abroad. What would they say if they could see you, their comrades in the fight over there, attacking their mothers, their sisters, their wives over here? Aren’t you ashamed that you have not enough sporting blood to allow us to make our fight in our own way? Aren’t you ashamed that you accepted the help of women in your fight, and now to-night brutally attack them?”

And they did listen until the police, in formation—looking now like wooden toys—advanced from both sides of the street and succeeded in entirely cutting off the crowd from Miss Hill.

The meeting thus broken up, we abandoned a further attempt that night. As our little, bannerless procession filed slowly back to headquarters, hoodlums followed us. The police of course gave us no protection and just as we were entering the door of our own building a rowdy struck me on the side of the head with a heavy banner pole. The blow knocked me senseless against the stone building; my hat was snatched from my head, and burned in the street. We entered the building to find that soldiers and sailors had been periodically rushing it in our absence, dragging out bundles of our banners, amounting to many hundreds of dollars, and burning them in the street, without any protest from the police.

One does not undergo such an experience without arriving at some inescapable truths, a discussion of which would interest me deeply but which would be irrelevant in this narrative.

“Two hundred maddened women try to see the President” . . . “Two hundred women attack the police,” and similar false headlines, appeared the next morning in the New York papers. It hurt to have the world think that we had attacked the police. That was a slight matter, however, for that morning at breakfast, aboard the George Washington, the President also read the New York papers. He saw that we were not submitting in silence to his inaction. It seems reasonable to assume that on sailing down the harbor that morning past the Statue of Liberty the President had some trouble to banish from his mind the report that “two hundred maddened women” had tried to “make the Opera House last night.”