The Suffragist, March 3, 1917.

1. The Peaceful Picketing

Before we examine the consideration which actuated the National Woman’s Party in waging the picket campaign of 1917, let us see where President Wilson stood at the beginning of the war; let us briefly recapitulate the steps which brought him there.

It will be remembered that, shortly after the President took his seat in March, 1913, he told a deputation from the Congressional Committee that Suffrage was a question to which he had given no thought and on which he had no opinion. During the year, no longer stating that he knew nothing about Suffrage, he gave as a reason for inaction that the Congressional program was too crowded to consider it. By the end of the year, he had reached the point where he stated that he could take no action on the Suffrage Amendment until commanded by his Party.

In 1914, he continued to state that he was prohibited from acting because of being bound by his Party until June, when he seized on the excuse of States Rights further to explain his inaction. In the autumn of 1915 he first came out personally for Suffrage by voting for it in New Jersey but still refused to support it in Congress. His next step forward came in June, 1916, when he caused the principle of Suffrage to be recognized in the Party platform, though as yet neither he nor the Party had endorsed the Federal Amendment. In September of that same year—after the Woman’s Party had begun its active campaign in the Suffrage States—the President took another step and addressed a Suffrage Convention of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association. But as yet he was not committed to the Federal Amendment, had not begun to exert pressure on Congress.

The situation of the President and the Woman’s Party at this juncture may be summed up in this way. Wilson, himself, was beginning to realize that the Suffrage Amendment must ultimately pass. But he had just been re-elected. He was safe for four years; he could take his time about it. The Woman’s Party on the other hand, realized that the President being safe for four years, no political pressure could be exerted upon him. They realized that they must devise other methods to keep Suffrage, as a measure demanding immediate enactment, before him.

In the meantime, a feeling of acute discontent was growing in the women of the United States. The older women—and they were the third generation to demand the vote—were beginning to ask how long this period of entreaty must be protracted. The younger women—the fourth generation to demand the vote—were becoming impatient with the out-worn methods of their predecessors. Moreover, when the disfranchised women of the East visited the enfranchised States of the West, their eyes were opened in a practical way to the extraordinary injustice of their own disfranchisement. Equally, the enfranchised women of the West, moving to Eastern States, resented their loss of this political weapon. On many women in America the militant movement of England had produced a profound impression.

A new note had crept into the speeches made by the members of the Woman’s Party—the note of this impatience and resentment. It will be remembered that Mrs. Kent told the President that the women voters of the West were accustomed to being listened to with attention by politicians, and that they resented the effort to make it seem that they were merely trying to bother a very busy official. Mrs. Blatch had told him that the time had gone by when she would stand on street corners and ask the vote from every Tom, Dick, and Harry; that she was determined to appeal instead to the men who spoke her own language and who had in charge the affairs of the government.

Doris Stevens, in an interview in the Omaha Daily News for June 29, 1919, voices perfectly what her generation was feeling.

A successful young Harvard engineer said to me the other day, “I don’t believe you realize how much men objected to your picketing the White House. Now I know what I’m talking about. I’ve talked with men in all walks of life, and I tell you they didn’t approve of what you women did.”

This last with warmer emphasis and a scowl of the brow. “I don’t suppose you were in a position to know how violently men felt about it.”

I listened patiently and courteously. Should I disillusion him? I thought it was the honest thing to do. “Why, of course men didn’t like it. Do you think we imagined they would? We knew they would disapprove. When did men ever applaud women fighting for their own liberty? We are approved only when we fight for yours!”

“You don’t mean to say you planned to do something knowing men would not approve?”

I simply had to tell him, “Why, certainly! We’re just beginning to get confidence in ourselves. At last we’ve learned to make and stand by our own judgments.”

“But going to jail. That was pretty shocking.”

“Yes, indeed it was. It not only shocked us that a government would be alarmed enough to do such a thing, but what was more to the point, it shocked the entire country into doing something quickly about Woman Suffrage.”

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It will be seen by the foregoing pages of this book that Suffragists had exhausted every form of Suffrage agitation known to the United States. In particular, they had sent to the President every kind of deputation that could possibly move him.

They decided to send him a perpetual deputation.

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Alice Paul, in explanation of her strategy in this matter, uses one of the vivid figures that are so typical of her: “If a creditor stands before a man’s house all day long, demanding payment of his bill, the man must either remove the creditor or pay the bill.”

At first, the President tried to remove the creditor. Later he paid the bill.

At ten o’clock on January 10, 1917, the day after the deputation to the President, twelve women emerged from Headquarters and marched across Lafayette Square to the White House. Four of them bore lettered banners, and eight of them carried purple, white, and gold banners of the Woman’s Party. They marched slowly—a banner’s length apart. Six of them took up their stand at the East gate, and six of them at the West gate. At each gate—standing between pairs of women holding on high purple, white, and gold colors—two women held lettered banners. One read:

MR. PRESIDENT WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE?

The other read:

HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?

These were the first women to picket the White House.

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The first picket line appeared on January 10, 1917; the last, over a year and a half later. Between those dates, except when Congress was not in session, more than a thousand women held lettered banners, accompanied by the purple, white, and gold tri-colors, at the White House gates, or in front of the Capitol. They picketed every day of the week, except Sunday; in all kinds of weather, in rain and in sleet, in hail, and in snow. All varieties of women picketed: all races and religions; all cliques and classes; all professions and parties. Washington became accustomed to the dignified picture—the pickets moving with a solemn silence, always in a line that followed a crack in the pavement; always a banner’s length apart; taking their stand with a precision almost military; maintaining it with a movelessness almost statuesque. Washington became accustomed also to the rainbow splash at the White House gates—“like trumpet calls,” somebody described the banners. Artists often spoke of the beauty of their massed color. In the daytime, those banners gilded by the sunlight were doubly brilliant, but at twilight the effect was transcendent. Everywhere the big, white lights—set in the parks on such low standards that they seemed strange, luminous blossoms, springing from the masses of emerald green shrubbery—filled the dusk with bluish-white splendor, and, made doubly colorful by this light, the long purple, white, and gold ribbon stood out against a background beautiful and appropriate; a mosaic on the gray of the White House pavement; the pen-and-ink blackness of the White House iron work; the bare, brown crisscross of the White House trees, and the chaste colonial simplicity of the White House itself.

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With her abiding instinct for pageantry and for telling picturesqueness of demonstration, Alice Paul soon punctuated the monotony of the picketing by special events. Various States celebrated State days on the picket line. Maryland was the first of these, and the long line of Maryland women bearing great banners, extended along Pennsylvania Avenue the entire distance from the East gate to the West gate. Pennsylvania Day, New York Day, Virginia Day, New Jersey Day, followed. The Monday of every week was set aside finally for District of Columbia Day.

The New York delegation carried on their banners phrases from President Wilson’s book, The New Freedom.

On College Day, thirteen colleges were represented, the biggest group from Goucher College, Baltimore. Then came Teachers’ Day; Patriotic Day, and Lincoln Day. On Patriotic Day, one of the banners read:

On Lincoln Day, they said:

WHY ARE YOU BEHIND LINCOLN?

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR WOMEN ASKED FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM.

THEY WERE TOLD TO WAIT—THIS WAS THE NEGRO’S HOUR.

IN 1917, AMERICAN WOMEN STILL ASK FOR FREEDOM.

WILL YOU, MR. PRESIDENT, TELL THEM TO WAIT—THAT THIS IS THE PORTO RICAN’S HOUR?

On Sunday, February 18, came Labor Day on the picket line. It was, of course, impossible for wage-earning women to picket the White House on any other day. They represented not only office workers, but factory workers from the great industrial centers. Many of them had come from other cities.

Susan B. Anthony’s birthday, February 15, was celebrated impressively, although it rained and snowed heavily. Three new banners appeared that day. The first—big enough and golden enough even to suit that big, golden woman—bore quotations from Susan B. Anthony:

The second Susan B. Anthony banner said:

The third Susan B. Anthony banner said:

On March 2, 1917, the Congressional Union and its Western organization, the Woman’s Party, met in joint convention and organized themselves into the National Woman’s Party.

On that occasion, Alice Paul said:

We feel that by combining the Congressional Union and the Woman’s Party we shall bring about a unity in organization which will make impossible duplication, difference of opinion, and divergence of method. By uniting we make, moreover, for unity of spirit in the whole Suffrage movement, bringing the voters and non-voters together in a movement in which they should both be integral parts.

The original purpose for which the Woman’s Party, as an organization confined to women voters alone, was formed, has, we believe, been served. In the first three years of our work we endeavored to call the attention of political leaders and Congress to the fact that women were voting and that these voting women were interested in Suffrage. But words alone did not have much effect. We found we had to visualize the existence of voting women out in the West and their support of the Suffrage Amendment. The Woman’s Party was formed as one means of doing this.

The Woman’s Party did, I believe, have an effect on the political leaders. It was very clear, I think, at the convention in Chicago and in St. Louis that the idea that women were voting and that those women were interested in the Federal Amendment was at last appreciated. This November’s election completed our work in getting that fact into the minds of Congressmen and political leaders. There is no longer any need to draw a line around women voters and set them off by themselves in order to call attention to them. They now enter into the calculations of every political observer.

If we amalgamate and make ourselves one great group of voters and non-voters all working for the Federal Amendment, the question arises: What name shall we be called by, the Congressional Union or the Woman’s Party? Our Executive Committee felt that we ought to keep the name of the Woman’s Party, because it stands for political power.

The objections brought against this are, I think, two. First, that non-voters should not, according to custom, be part of a political Party; second, that if they are included, that Party will not command as much respect as would a Party composed solely of voters. There are non-voters in the Socialist, the Progressive, and the Prohibition Parties; there is no reason why, if we are interested in precedent and custom, they should not be in our Party also. As to the second point: The Congressional Union has the reputation of being an active, determined, and well-financed organization. When the political world realizes that this young Woman’s Party has been strengthened by the influx of twenty-five thousand workers of the Congressional Union ready to give their service and money it will consider that the Woman’s Party stands for more power than if formed of the women of the Western States only.

All of us in the Congressional Union feel an affection for it. But that is no reason for continuing the organization. The Congressional Union has served a useful purpose, we believe. But now that we have created the Woman’s Party we ought, it seems to me, to develop and make that the dominant Suffrage factor in this country because that, through its name and associations, throws the emphasis more than does the Congressional Union on the political power of women.

The following officers were elected unanimously at the morning session: Chairman of the National Woman’s Party, Alice Paul; Vice-Chairman, Anne Martin; Secretary, Mabel Vernon; Treasurer, Gertrude Crocker. The executive board elected were: Lucy Burns, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, Mrs. J. W. Brannan, Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Abby Scott Baker, Mrs. William Kent, Maud Younger, Doris Stevens, Florence Bayard Hilles, Mrs. Donald Hooker, Mrs. J. A. H. Hopkins, and Mrs. Lawrence Lewis.

At that Convention, various resolutions were passed; the most notable in regard to the attitude of the National Woman’s Party towards the rapidly developing war situation. That resolution runs as follows:

Whereas the problems involved in the present international situation, affecting the lives of millions of women in this country, make imperative the enfranchisement of women,

Be it resolved that the National Woman’s Party, organized for the sole purpose of securing political liberty for women, shall continue to work for this purpose until it is accomplished, being unalterably convinced that in so doing the organization serves the highest interests of the country.

And be it further resolved that to this end we urge upon the President and the Congress of the United States the immediate passage of the National Suffrage Amendment.

It was decided to present these resolutions to the President. Shortly after, Dudley Field Malone, Collector of the Port of New York, on behalf of the Woman’s Party, informed the President that a deputation would visit him for that purpose.

This demonstration was not so much a protest at the failure of the first administration to pass the Anthony Amendment, or at the adjournment of Congress without passing it, as a presentation of the demands of the National Woman’s Party immediately upon the opening of President Wilson’s second term.

During the first three days in March, Washington filled steadily with inauguration crowds. When they got off the train, the Great Demand banner of the National Woman’s Party confronted them, and girls handed them slips inviting them to the demonstration of the National Woman’s Party at the White House on Inauguration Day and to the mass-meeting of the National Woman’s Party to be held that night. Girls also stood in theatre lobbies, handing out more of these slips. Girls made the rounds of the government departments, handing out still more. Everywhere great posters said:

Inauguration Day dawned a day of biting wind and slashing rain.

Outside Headquarters was turmoil; inside a boiling activity. Hundreds of women were preparing to picket the White House. To accommodate them, a rubber company, hastily summoned, had commandeered one room and was selling rain-coats; tarpaulin hats; rubbers.

An extraordinary, a magnificent demonstration followed. To the music of several bands, nearly a thousand pickets circled the White House four times—a distance of four miles. Vida Milholland, the younger sister of Inez Milholland, marched at the head, carrying on a golden banner her sister’s last words for Suffrage.

The Great Demand banner followed, carried by Mrs. Benton Mackaye:

Beulah Amidon carried the Suffrage banner which Inez Milholland bore in the first Suffrage procession in New York:

Behind there came hundreds of women bearing the purple, white, and gold. They were divided according to States; and before each division marched the State flag of the division. The drenching rain fell steadily. The pavements turned to shallow lakes, and the banners—their brilliancy accentuated by the wet—threw long, wavy reflections on the glassy, gray streets. They were of course expecting this demonstration at the White House, and, as though it were dangerous, unusual precautions had been taken against it. Every gate was locked. The Washington force of police officers, augmented by police from Baltimore and by squads of plain-clothes men, guarded the grounds without and within. Gilson Gardner said the President seemed to think the women were going to steal his grass roots.

There was no one at the locked gates to receive the women or the resolutions except the guards; these guards protested that they had not been ordered to receive either. The women visited every gate, but received the same answer. The cards of the leaders were finally handed over to a guard to present at the White House. He tried to deliver them, but was reprimanded for leaving his post, and sent back. Learning that the cards would be delivered at the end of the day, as is the custom with visiting-cards of casual visitors at the White House, the thousand pickets took up their march again.

Gilson Gardner wrote of this demonstration:

The weather gave this affair its character. Had there been fifteen hundred women carrying banners on a fair day, the sight would have been a pretty one. But to see a thousand women—young women, middle-aged and old women—and there were women in the line who had passed their three score and ten—marching in a rain that almost froze as it fell; to see them standing and marching and holding their heavy banners, momentarily growing heavier—holding them against a wind that was half gale—hour after hour, until their gloves were wet, their clothes soaked through; to see them later with hands sticky from the varnish from the banner poles—bare hands, for the gloves had by this time been pulled off, and the hands were blue with cold—to see these women keep their lines and go through their program fully, losing only those who fainted or fell from exhaustion, was a sight to impress even the dulled and jaded senses of one who has seen much.

One young woman from North Dakota I saw clinging to the iron pickets around the White House, her banner temporarily abandoned, fighting against what was to her a new feeling, faintness resulting from the pain in her hands. She was brought to the automobile in which I was riding before she actually fell to the ground; but after a short rest she was back in the line, and finished with the others.

There is no doubt that what Gilson Gardner said was true—the weather gave this affair its character.

People passing by, thrilled by the gallantry of the marchers, joined the procession. And as Gilson Gardner says, it was not because it was a pretty sight, or because these women were all young. Anna Norris Kendall of Wisconsin, seventy-two years old, and the Rev. Olympia Brown, eighty-two years old, one of the pioneer Suffragists of the country, both took part.

That day, a newly elected Congressman drove about Washington, showing the city to his wife. He had always been a Suffragist. She had always been an anti-Suffragist. The sudden sight of the thousand women marching in the rain not only converted her, but it produced such an effect on her she burst into tears.

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Later, President Wilson sent a letter to the National Woman’s Party, acknowledging the resolutions presented to him by the deputations of March 4, and concluded: “May I not once more express my sincere interest in the cause of Woman Suffrage?”

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Congress adjourned on March 3, 1917. The pickets adjourned with it. On April 2, a Special War Session of Congress convened. The Suffragist gives an interesting description of that interesting day.

Just half an hour before Congress formally opened, the Suffrage sentinels at the Capitol took their places.... There was tensity in the atmosphere. The Capitol grounds were overrun with pacifists from many cities wearing white-lettered badges; and with war advocates, as plainly labeled, with partisan demands. They swarmed over the Capitol grounds unmolested, though extra precautions were taken throughout the day and in the evening when troops of cavalry were called out. The silent sentinels stood unmoved the while for democracy while peace and war agitation eddied around them.

The pickets convened with Congress. They continued to stand at the gates of the White House, but they extended their line to the Capitol. Three pickets, led by Elsie Hill, took up their station by the House entrance and three by the Senate entrance. At night—this evoked from the newspapers sly allusions to the Trojan horse—they used to store their banners in the House Office Building.

On April 7, the United States declared itself to be at war with Germany.

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After war was declared, the Woman’s Party continued—and continued with an increasing force and eloquence—to demand the enfranchisement of the women of the United States by Constitutional Amendment. This brought down upon their heads a storm of criticism; antagonism; hostility. But Alice Paul was not deflected by it from her purpose. She recalled that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, Suffragists of that day, were entreated to relinquish their Suffrage work in favor of war work. They were promised that, at the end of the war, they would be enfranchised. Susan B. Anthony complied with great reluctance, carried on, against her will, by the majority of those who surrounded her.

At the end of the war, the black man was enfranchised. The white women had been asking for the vote ever since.

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Every effort was made to shake this young leader in her fearless stand. All kinds of people came to her and begged her to give up the picketing. One strong friend, a newspaper man, said, “It’s as though you opened the windows and said, ‘There’s a nice big cyclone coming. Come out of your cyclone-cellars, girls, and let’s go in it!’” Denunciations, violence, mobs, murders were predicted.

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There was no officer of the National Woman’s Party who did not realize what it meant to go on with such a fight at such a time.

They determined, whatever befell, not to lower their banners; to hold them high.

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Alice Paul announced in the editorial columns of the Suffragist, that members of the Woman’s Party would, if they so desired, work for war through various organizations, especially organized for war work, but that the Woman’s Party itself would continue to work only for the enfranchisement of women.

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The eyes of the world were now turned on the White House. Distinguished men from all over the country visited the President. Foreign missions came one after another.

Picturesque events continued to happen on the picket line. Arthur Balfour, the leader of the British Mission, called at the White House to pay his respects. He was confronted with forty pickets. Their banners were inscribed with the President’s own words:

WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WHICH WE HAVE ALWAYS HELD NEAREST OUR HEARTS—FOR DEMOCRACY, FOR THE RIGHT OF THOSE WHO SUBMIT TO AUTHORITY TO HAVE A VOICE IN THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS.—President Wilson’s War Message, April 2, 1917.

This quotation from the President’s words became a slogan among the Suffragists.

The pickets recalled that when Arthur Balfour used to emerge into Downing Street, where the English militants were producing a demonstration, he always wore a bunch of violets in his buttonhole, to show his sympathy with them.

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The spring brought its usual beautiful metamorphosis to Washington. If the pickets had seemed beautiful in the winter, they were quadruply so when the fresh green came. Everywhere that luxuriance of foliage, exquisitely tender and soft, which marks Washington, made an intensive background for their great golden banners and their tri-color. The pickets found it a delightfully humorous coincidence that, when they came to take up their station at the White House, the White House lawns were ablaze with their tri-color—the white of hyacinths, the purple of azalea, and the gold of forsythia. The Little White House itself was not exempt from this burst of bloom. The huge wistaria vine on its faÇade turned to a purple cascade; and out of it spirted the purple, white, and gold of their tri-color and the red, white, and blue of the national banner. When the French Commission, including Joffre and Viviani, passed all this massed color, they leaped to their feet, waving their hats and shouting their approval.

On June 20, the Mission headed by Bakmetief, sent by the new Russian Republic which had just enfranchised its women, was officially received by President Wilson. When they reached the White House gates, they were confronted by a big banner—since known as the “Russian” banner—borne by Lucy Burns and Mrs. Lawrence Lewis.

The appearance of this banner produced strange results. A man standing at the White House gates leaped at it—the instant the Russian Mission had vanished—and tore the sign from its supports.

The crowd closed in around them. The two women continued to stand facing them. Nina Allender, who saw this from across the street, said that the surging back and forth of straw hats as the crowd closed in upon the women gave her a sense of faintness. “One instant the banners were there, the next there were only bare sticks.”

Later, a prominent member of the Mission said to a no less prominent American, “You know, it was very embarrassing for us, because we were in sympathy with those women at the gates.”

The next day, June 21, Lucy Burns and Katherine Morey carried a banner which was the duplicate of the one borne the day before to the lower White House gate. Before they could set it up some boys destroyed it. The police did not interfere; they looked placidly on. Immediately other banners were sent off from Headquarters. Hazel Hunkins carried one which said harmlessly:

The crowds gathered and surged up and down the street but the two pickets stood motionless. Nothing happened for a while. Then a man, who stopped to congratulate Miss Hunkins, was applauded by the crowd. It is an interesting example of mob psychology that after this applause such an incident as happened five minutes later could happen. A woman of the War Department, who had been boasting that morning in her office that she was going to do this, attacked Hazel Hunkins. She tore the banners and spat on them. The avenue was crowded with government clerks and they immediately fell on the banners and destroyed them after a struggle. Katherine Morey, who was lunching at Headquarters, says in almost Bunyanesque language: “And I heard a great roar.” She ran towards the White House gates and saw that the mobs had charged the pickets, had torn the banners into shreds. The mob then rushed to the other gate, picketed by Catherine Lowry and Lillian Crans. After a struggle, their banners also were destroyed. Lillian Crans ran to Headquarters for another banner, carrying the news of what had happened.

Immediately, there emerged from the Little White House four women led by Mabel Vernon, carrying purple, white, and gold banners. It was a moment of tension, and the pickets were white-faced with that tension. This silent, persistent courage had, however, its inevitable effect on the crowd. It fell back. Before it could recover from its interval of indecision, the police met the groups of girls, and conducted them to their places. Police reserves ultimately appeared, and cleared the crowd from Pennsylvania Avenue. The pickets kept guard the rest of the day in peace. One of them even did her war-time knitting.

About this time a prominent newspaper man was sent to Alice Paul by the powers that be, on a mission of intervention. He told her it was feared the President might be assassinated by some one in the crowds that the pickets collected.

“Is the Administration willing to have us make this public?” Alice Paul asked.

“Oh, no!” was the answer.

Alice Paul replied, “The picketing will go on as usual.”

So now Major Pullman, Chief of Police for the District of Columbia, called at Headquarters. He told Alice Paul that if the pickets went out again they would be arrested. Alice Paul answered in effect:

“Why has picketing suddenly become illegal? Our lawyers have assured us all along that picketing was legal. Certainly it is as legal in June as in January.” She concluded, “The picketing will go on as usual.”

Major Pullman then told her again that the pickets would be arrested if they went out.

Alice Paul replied, “The picketing will go on as usual.”

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The next morning, June 22, Miss Paul telephoned Major Pullman that the pickets were going out with the banners. Rows of policemen stood outside Headquarters. However, that did not daunt the pickets. Suffragists began to come out; return; emerge again. All this made so much coming and going that, when Mabel Vernon appeared, carrying a box under her arm, nobody paid any attention. That box, however, contained a banner. Miss Vernon crossed to the park and sat down. Presently Lucy Burns came out of Headquarters and walked leisurely in one direction; a little later Katherine Morey came out, and strolled in another direction. At a given moment these two women met at the East gate of the White House. Mabel Vernon joined them with the banner. They set it up and stood undisturbed in front of the White House for several minutes. Suddenly one of the policemen caught sight of them: “The little devils!” he exclaimed: “Can you beat that!”

The banner carried the President’s own words: “We shall fight for the things, etc.”

The day before the police had been in a bad quandary. Now they were in a worse one: it did not seem reasonable to arrest such a banner. One policeman did, however, start to do so. “My God, man, you can’t arrest that,” another policeman remonstrated. “Them’s the President’s own words.” They did make the arrest, though—after seven minutes of indecision. When the prisoners arrived at the police station Lucy Burns asked what the charge was: “Charge! Charge!” the policeman said, obviously much puzzled: “We don’t know what the charge is yet. We’ll telephone you that later.”

These two, Lucy Burns and Katherine Morey, were the first of the long list of women to be arrested for picketing the White House. They were, however, never brought to trial.

If any one says to me: “Why the picketing for Suffrage?” I should say in reply, “Why the fearless spirit of youth? Why does it exist and make itself manifest?”

Is it not really that our whole social world would be likely to harden and toughen into a dreary mass of conventional negations and forbiddances—into hopeless layers of conformity and caste, did not the irrepressible energy and animation of youth, when joined to the clear-eyed sham-hating intelligence of the young, break up the dull masses and set a new pace for laggards to follow?

What is the potent spirit of youth? Is it not the spirit of revolt, of rebellion against senseless and useless and deadening things? Most of all, against injustice, which is of all stupid things the stupidest?

Such thoughts come to one in looking over the field of the Suffrage campaign and watching the pickets at the White House and at the Capitol, where sit the men who complacently enjoy the rights they deny to the women at their gates. Surely, nothing but the creeping paralysis of mental old age can account for the phenomenon of American men, law-makers, officials, administrators, and guardians of the peace, who can see nothing in the intrepid young pickets with their banners, asking for bare justice but common obstructors of traffic, naggers—nuisances that are to be abolished by passing stupid laws forbidding and repressing to add to the old junk-heap of laws which forbid and repress? Can it be possible that any brain cells not totally crystallized could imagine that giving a stone instead of bread would answer conclusively the demand of the women who, because they are young, fearless, eager, and rebellious, are fighting and winning a cause for all women—even for those who are timid, conventional, and inert?

A fatal error—a losing fight. The old stiff minds must give way. The old selfish minds must go. Obstructive reactionaries must move on. The young are at the gates!

Lavinia Dock.

The Suffragist, June 30, 1917.

This hostility in June had worked up suddenly after the five quiet months, during which the Woman’s Party had been peacefully picketing the White House. Perhaps their immunity was at first due to the fact that when the picketing in January began, the people in Washington did not expect it to last. “When the rain comes, they will go,” Washingtonians said, and then, as the line still continued to appear, “When the snow comes, they will go.” But, instead of going with the rain, the pickets waited for Smith, the janitor, to bring them slickers and sou’westers. And instead of leaving with the snow, they only put on heavier coats. The pickets became an institution.

It is true, too, that, though that picket line was a surprise to every one (and to many a shock) to some it was a joke.

There was one Congressman, for instance, who took it humorously. He said to Nina Allender, when the Suffragists began to picket the Special War Session of Congress:

“The other day, a man covered the gravestones in a cemetery with posters which read: ‘Rise up! Your country needs you!’ Now that was poor publicity. I consider yours equally poor.”

“But,” replied Mrs. Allender, “we are not picketing a graveyard. We are picketing Congress. We believe there are a few live ones left there.”

The Congressman admitted that he had laid himself wide open to this.

But, from the very beginning, there were those who did not consider it a joke. The first day the pickets appeared, a gentleman—old and white-haired—stopped to stare at the band of floating color. He read the words:

MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?

Then he took off his hat, and held it off, bowing his white head to each of the six silent sentinels. Having passed them, he covered his head again. But he repeated this reverential formality as he passed the six women at the other gate.

One Washingtonian took his children out to see the picket line. He told them he wanted them to witness history in the making.

That first day when the President came out for his daily afternoon drive, he seemed utterly unaware of the pickets; but the next day he laughed with frank good-nature as he passed, and thereafter he too bared his head as he drove between them.

It was the intention at first for these sentinels to keep complete silence. But, as the throngs hurrying past began to question them, continued to question them, conversation became inevitable.

The commonest question, of course, was, “Why are you doing this?”

The pickets always answered, “The President asked us to concert public opinion before we could expect anything of him. We are concerting it upon him.” The second most popular question was, “Why don’t you go to Congress?” The answer, “We have—again and again and again; and they tell us if the President wants it, it will go through.”

That hurrying crowd was made up of many types. In the early morning and the late afternoon, government clerks predominated. Almost as many were the sight-seers from every part of the country. Then there were diplomats, newspapermen, schoolboys, and schoolgirls, and the matinÉe crowds. In the streets came the endless file of motor-cars, filled mainly with women going to teas. Many people pretended not to see the sentinels. They would walk straight ahead with an impassive expression, casting furtive, side-long glances at the banners. Again and again, the pickets enjoyed the wicked satisfaction of seeing them walk straight into the wire wickets which enclosed the Pennsylvania Avenue trees. At first, Congressmen tried not to see what was going on. After a while, however, they too stopped to chat with the pickets. One Congressman told Mrs. Gilson Gardner that he felt there was “something religious about that bannered picket line; that it had already become to him a part of the modern religion of this country.”

Another Congressman, who had been opposed at first to the picketing, called out one day, “That’s right. Keep it up! Don’t let us forget you for a moment!”

All kinds of pretty incidents occurred. Once, Ex-Senator Henry W. Blair visited the picket line. He had been a friend of Susan B. Anthony, and he made the first speech ever delivered in the Senate in favor of Suffrage. White-haired, keen-eyed, walking with a crutch and a stick, he came along the line of pickets, greeting each one of them in turn—ninety years old.

“And I, too, have been a picket,” said General Sherwood to them.

“I salute you as soldiers in a great revolution,” said one chance passer-by to the Women Workers’ Delegation on Labor Day. And—struck apparently by the high spiritual quality in the beautiful procession—a woman, a stranger to them, remarked to the pickets: “I wonder if you realize what a mediÆval spectacle you young women present. You have made us realize that this cause is a crusade.”

Workmen digging trenches in the streets discussed the matter among themselves. Picketing is an institution very dear to the heart of Labor. These men showed their sympathy by devising and making supports for the banners. They offered to make benches for the pickets, but agreed with the women when they said that sentinels must stand, not sit, at their posts.

When the Confederate Reunion occurred in Washington, many of the feeble, white-haired men in their worn Confederate grey and their faded Confederate badges, stopped to talk with the pickets. I quote the Suffragist:

“We-all came out early to see the sights,” said one. “We went three times around this place, and I thought the big house in the center was the White House. But we weren’t sure—not until you girls came out with your flags and stood here. ‘This is sure enough where the President lives,’ I said, ‘here are the Suffrage pickets and there are the purple and gold flags we read about down home.’ You are brave girls.”

One old soldier, hat off, said, “I have picketed in my time. And now it is your turn, you young folks. You have the courage. You are going to put it through.”

That was the note many of them sounded. “Girls, you are right,” a third encouraged them. “I have been through wars, and I know. You-all got to have some rights.”

Even the anti-Suffragists were moved sometimes. One of them said: “I have never been impressed by Suffragists before, but the sincerity you express in being willing to stand here in all weathers for the thing you believe in makes me think that there is something in the Suffrage fight after all.”

And yet, Suffragists themselves were occasionally antagonistic. “You have put the Suffrage cause back fifty years!” said one. She little suspected that, within a year, the House of Representatives would have passed the Amendment; within less than two years thereafter the Senate.

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People went further than words. Many paused to shake hands. Many asked to be allowed to hold the banners for a moment.

Once a bride and groom—very young—stopped. The groom talked to one picket, the bride to another. The man said: “I think this is outrageous. I have no sympathy with you whatever. I wouldn’t any more let my wife——” At that moment the little bride came rushing up, radiant. “Oh, do you mind,” she said to her husband, “if I hold one of those banners for a while?”

“No, if you want to,” the bridegroom answered.

And she took her stand on the picket line.

Children stopped to spell out the inscriptions, and sometimes asked what they meant.

Once, a group of boys from a Massachusetts school inquired what the colors stood for, and asked to have the slogan translated. As by one impulse, they lifted their hats and said, “You ought to have it now.”

Occasionally, distinguished visitors leaving the White House would smile their appreciation and approval. On one occasion Theodore Roosevelt beamed vividly on the pickets, waving his hat as he passed. As the weather changed and the winter storms began, the gaiety in the attitude of their audience deepened to a real admiration. With the rains, the pickets appeared in slickers and rubber hats. This was not, of course, unendurable. But, when the freezing cold came, often with snow and swirling winds, picketing became a real hardship. There were days when it was almost impossible to stand on the picket line for more than half an hour at a time. At regular intervals, Smith, the janitor, assisted at times by a little colored boy, used to appear from Headquarters, trundling a wheelbarrow. That wheelbarrow was piled high with hot bricks covered with gunny-sacking. He would distribute the bricks among the pickets and they would stand on them. An observer said that, when the relay of pickets, leaving at the end of the day, stepped down from the bricks at the word of command, it was like a line of statues stepping from their pedestals.

But others—and sometimes strangers—sought to mitigate for the pickets the rigors of the freezing weather. One woman, coming regularly every day in her car, brought thermos bottles filled with hot coffee. On one occasion, a young girl—a passing volunteer—came on picket duty in a coat too light and shoes too low. While she stood there, a closed limousine drew up to the curb. A woman alighted and forced the girl to retire to her car and put on her fur coat and her gaiters. The stranger held the banner while the warming-up process was going on. She offered to organize a committee, made up of older women, who would collect warm clothing for the pickets. In point of fact, the Virginia and Philadelphia branches of the Congressional Union presented the pickets with thick gloves, spats, and slickers for rainy days. Thousands of men and women from all over the country sent suggestions for their comfort.

Official kindness, even, was not lacking. One superlatively cold day, an attachÉ of the President invited the whole company of pickets into the East Room of the White House. The superintendents of the Treasury Building and the War Department Annex extended to them similar invitations.

The police were, at the beginning, friendly, not only in words but in acts. An officer stopped one day, after telephoning at the near police box, to say: “You are making friends every minute. Stick to it! Do not give up. We are with you and admire your pluck.” The majority of them did not like to do what afterwards they had to do.

As for the White House guards—they were the champions of the pickets. At the outbreak of the war, the White House gates were closed for the first time in its history. The pickets without often informed the guards within as to the kind of vehicle that demanded entrance of them. The guards came to treat them as comrades patrolling the same beat. Once, when the pickets were five minutes late, one of these guards said: “We thought you weren’t coming, and we’d have to hold down this place alone.”

When the pickets reconvened with the Special War Session of the Sixty-fifth Congress on April 2, the White House police were most demonstrative in their welcome. They were glad to see them back: they said they had missed them. And indeed they had come to look on the women as a kind of auxiliary police force. Once, when somebody asked a policeman, “When is the President coming out?” Mary Gertrude Fendall said, “I guess you’d like a dollar for every time people ask you that.” The policeman answered, “I’d rather have a dollar for every time they ask when are the Suffragists coming out?” The country at large had accepted the pickets. The directors of the sight-seeing busses pointed them out as one of the city’s sights. Tourists said, oftener and oftener, “Well, we weren’t quite sure where the White House was until we saw you pickets.” And when these tourists used to crowd about the gates, waiting for the President’s limousine to come out, and the signal was flashed that the Presidential motor had started, the guards pressed the crowds away. “Back!” they would order. “Back! Back! All back but the pickets! No one allowed inside the line but the pickets!”

As can be imagined, Headquarters was a busy place during the picketing; and sometimes a hectic one. Later, of course, when the arrests began, and mobs besieged it, it seethed with excitement. It was not easy always to find women with the leisure and the inclination to serve on the picket line before the arrests. But, when arrests began and imprisonments followed, naturally it became increasingly difficult.

Many members of the Woman’s Party in Washington looked on their picketing as a part of the day’s work. Mrs. William Kent, who said that no public service she had ever done gave her such an exalted feeling, always excused herself early from teas on Monday. “I picket Mondays from two to six,” she explained simply.

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Watchers said that those high groups of purple, white, and gold banners coming down the streets of Washington were like the sails, magically vivid and luminous, of some strange ship. They were indeed the sails of a ship—the mightiest that women ever launched—but only the women who manned those sails saw that ship.

“I have no son to give my country to fight for democracy abroad and so I send my daughter to Washington to fight for democracy at home.”

It will be remembered that the arrest of Lucy Burns and Katherine Morey—the first of a series extending over more than a year—occurred on June 22.

On June 23, Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and Gladys Greiner were arrested in front of the White House. On the same day, Mabel Vernon and Virginia Arnold were arrested at the Capitol.

On June 25, twenty women bore Suffrage banners to their stations. The slogans on these banners were:

Twelve women were arrested. They were: Mabel Vernon, Lucy Burns, Gladys Greiner, Katherine Morey, Elizabeth Stuyvesant, Lavinia Dock, Berta Crone, Pauline Clarke, Virginia Arnold, Maude Jamison, Annie Arniel, and Mrs. Townsend Scott.

On Tuesday, June 26, nine women were arrested for carrying the same banners. They included some of the women from the day before, and, in addition, Vivian Pierce and Hazel Hunkins.

A high-handed detail of this arrest was that the women were overpowered by the police before they had proceeded half a block.

Most of these women were released after each arrest. The last six to be arrested were asked to return to court for trial.

On June 27, six American women were tried in the police court of the District of Columbia.

These women were: Virginia Arnold, Lavinia Dock, Maud Jamison, Katherine Morey, Annie Arniel, Mabel Vernon.

The women defended themselves. Mabel Vernon, who conducted the case, demanded that the banners they had carried be exhibited in court. It made a comic episode in the midst of the court proceedings when the policeman, who had been sent for them, returned, bristling all over his person with banner sticks, and trailing in every direction the purple, white, and gold. The courtroom crowd burst out laughing when they read the legend:

MR. PRESIDENT, YOU SAY “LIBERTY IS THE FUNDAMENTAL DESIRE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.”

There was a technical discussion as to how much sidewalk space the young women occupied, and how near the White House palings they stood. The Suffrage group had photographs which showed the deserted pavements at the time of the arrests.

The women cross-examined the police who testified that there was no crowd at that time of the morning and that the women stood with their backs to the White House fence.

The Judge said: “If you had kept on moving, you would be all right.”

“I find these defendants guilty as charged,” was his verdict, “of obstructing the highway in violation of the police regulations and the Act of Congress, and impose a fine of twenty-five dollars in each case, or in default of that, three days’ imprisonment.”

The six young women refused to pay the fine. They were each sentenced to three days in the District jail.

When the first pickets came out of jail, a hundred women, representing many States, gave them a reception breakfast in the garden of Cameron House.

A subsequent chapter will relate the prison experiences of these women and of the long line of their successors.

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The next picket line went out on Independence Day, July 4, 1917. Five women marched from Headquarters bearing purple, white, and gold banners. They were: Helena Hill Weed, Vida Milholland, Gladys Greiner, Margaret Whittemore, Iris Calderhead. Helena Hill Weed carried a banner:

Following the advice of the Judge, they kept moving. Across the street, a crowd had gathered in expectation of arrests. Standing about were policemen—a newspaper man said twenty-nine. The police walked along parallel with the women, and the crowd followed them. As the banner bearers crossed the street to the White House, the police seized them before they could get onto the sidewalks. An augmenting crowd surged about them. Some of the onlookers protested, but most of them took their cue from the police, and tore the flags away from the women. Apart from the pickets, Kitty Marion, who for some weeks had been selling the Suffragist on the streets, was attacked by a by-stander who snatched her papers away from her, tearing one of them up. Miss Marion was arrested. She protested at the behavior of her assailant and he was arrested too. Hazel Hunkins, who was not a part of the procession, came upon a man who had seized one of the banners carried by the pickets and was bearing it away. Miss Hunkins attempted to get it from him, and she also was arrested.

The police commandeered automobiles, and commenced bundling the women into them.

Immediately another group of women came marching up Pennsylvania Avenue on the opposite side of the street. This second group contained Mrs. Frances Green, Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Lucile Shields, Joy Young, Elizabeth Stuyvesant, Lucy Burns. Joy Young, who is a little creature, led this group. They reached the West gate of the White House, and there the police arrested them. A Washington paper described with great glee how, like a tigress, little Joy Young fought to retain her banner, and how finally three policemen managed to overpower her. The women were booked for “unlawful assembly” all except Kitty Marion, who was charged with “disorderly conduct.”

Helena Hill Weed and Lucy Burns cross-examined the witnesses on behalf of the women. Mrs. Weed insisted that the torn, yellow banner should be brought into court. Throughout the trial, it hung suspended from the Judge’s bench—GOVERNMENTS DERIVE THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED. Lucy Burns, examining the police officers, asked why citizens carrying banners on June 21 were protected by the police, and on July 4 arrested for doing the same thing. The officer replied that they were protected on June 21 because he had no orders for that day. The orders which came later were, he said, not to allow picketing, though he admitted there were no directions about seizing banners. The women brought out by skillful cross-questioning that it was the action of the police which had collected a disorderly crowd, and not the marching of the two groups of women; that at the former trial of a group of Suffrage pickets, the Judge himself had declared that marching pickets did not violate the law.

Lucy Burns summed up the case for the Suffragists as follows:

I wish to state first—she said—as the others have stated, that we proceeded quietly down the street opposite the White House with our banners; that we intended to keep marching; that our progress was halted by the police, not the crowd. There was no interference on the part of the crowd until after the police had arrested us and turned their backs on the crowd. Our contention is as others have stated that the presence of the crowd there was caused by the action of the police and the previous announcement of the police that they would arrest the pickets, and not by our action which was entirely legal.

In the second place I wish to call your attention to the fact that there is no law whatever against our carrying banners through the streets of Washington, or in front of the White House. It has been stated that we were directed by the police not to carry banners before the White House, not to picket at the White House. That is absolutely untrue. We have received only one instruction from the chief of police and that was delivered by Major Pullman in person. He said that we must not carry banners outside of Headquarters. We have had no other communication on this subject since that time.

We, of course, realized that that was an extraordinary direction, because I don’t think it was ever told an organization that it could not propagate its views, and we proceeded naturally to assume that Major Pullman would not carry out that order in action because he would not be able to sustain it in any just court.

We have only been able since to judge instructions by the action of the police, and the actions of the police have varied from day to day, so that as a point of fact, we don’t know what the police have been ordered to do—what is going to be done. On one occasion we stepped out of Headquarters with a banner—the so-called Russian banner—and it was torn to fragments before we had reached the gate of our premises, although Major Pullman had given no notice to us at that time. Another time we proceeded down Madison Place with banners, walking in front of the Belasco Theatre, and were arrested. Another time we were allowed to proceed down Madison Place and the north side of the Avenue and were not molested.

Now the district attorney has stated that on account of the action of this court a few days ago, we knew and deliberately did wrong. But we were advised then by the Judge—and he was familiar with the first offense—that we would have been all right if we had kept on walking. On July 4 we kept on walking and this is the result of that action.

I myself was informed on June 22 by various police, that if I would keep on walking, my action would be entirely legal. We were innocent of any desire to do anything wrong when we left our premises.

It is evident that the proceedings in this court are had for the purpose of suppressing our appeal to the President of the United States, and not for the purpose of accusing us of violating the police regulations regarding traffic in the District of Columbia.

The eleven women were found “Guilty,” and sentenced to pay a fine of twenty-five dollars or to serve three days in the District jail. They refused to pay the fine, and were sent to jail. The case against Hazel Hunkins was dismissed. Kitty Marion was found “Not Guilty,” of disorderly conduct.

In the meantime, Alice Paul had been seized with what looked like a severe illness. A physician finally warned her that she might not live two weeks. It was decided, on July 14, to send her to a hospital in Philadelphia for treatment. The day before she left, a meeting of the Executive Board was held at her bedside in the Washington hospital. Although later diagnosis proved more favorable, and Miss Paul was to be away from Washington only a month, many of the women present at that meeting believed that they would never see her again. That was a poignant moment, for the devotion of her adherents to their leader can neither be described nor measured. But they felt that there was only one way to serve her if she left them forever and that was to carry out her plans.... The next day they went out on the picket line.

That next day was the French national holiday—July 14. The Woman’s Party had, as was usual with them when they planned a demonstration, announced this through the press.

On the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, therefore, three groups of women carrying banners, one inscribed with the French national motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and the Woman’s Party colors, marched one after another from Headquarters.

In the first group were Mrs. J. A. H. Hopkins, Mrs. Paul Reyneau, Mrs. B. R. Kincaid, Julia Hurburt, Minnie D. Abbot, Anne Martin.

In the second group were, Amelia Himes Walker, Florence Bayard Hilles, Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Janet Fotheringham.

In the third group were Mrs. John Winters Brannan, Mrs. John Rogers, Jr., Louise P. Mayo, Doris Stevens, Mary H. Ingham, Eleanor Calnan.

A big crowd, attracted by the expectation of excitement, had collected outside Headquarters. The police made no effort to disperse them. When the first group appeared, there was some applause and cheering. They crossed the street, and took up their station at the upper gate of the White House. As nothing happened to the first group, the second group, led by Amelia Himes Walker, emerged from Headquarters and took up a position at the lower gate of the White House. However, the instant the two groups had established themselves, the policemen, who had been making a pretense of clearing the sidewalks, immediately arrested them.

The third group of pickets, however, came forward undismayed, their flags high. The crowd applauded them; then fell back and permitted the pickets to take their places. The police in this third case waited for four minutes, watches in hand. Then they arrested the women on the charge of “violating an ordinance.”

At the station the sixteen women were booked for “unlawful assembly.” On July 17, Judge Mullowny, sentenced the sixteen women to sixty days in Occoquan Workhouse on the charge of “obstructing traffic.”

A detailed consideration of the treatment of the pickets in Occoquan and the Jail is reserved for a later chapter. It will, therefore, be stated briefly here that these sixteen women were pardoned by the President after three days in Occoquan. However, they were submitted to indignities there such as white prisoners were nowhere else compelled to endure. When J. A. H. Hopkins and Gilson Gardner were permitted to visit their wives, they did not at first recognize them in the haggard, exhausted-looking group of creatures in prison garb, sitting in the reception room. One of the women, however, seeing her husband, half rose from her chair.

“You sit down!” Superintendent Whittaker yelled, pointing his finger at her.

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J. A. H. Hopkins, who had been a member of the Democratic National Campaign Committee of 1916, went immediately to the President and told him the conditions under which these women were being held. Gilson Gardner, a well-known newspaper man who had supported Wilson throughout the previous election campaign, wrote a long communication to the President on the same subject. Dudley Field Malone, Collector of the Port of New York and one of the President’s closest friends and warmest advisors, who was later in so gallant a way to show his disapproval of the Suffrage situation, saw the President also. President Wilson professed himself as being “shocked” at his revelations. He said he did not know what was going on at Occoquan.

“After this, Mr. President,” Mr. Malone replied, “you do know.”

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After her release, Mrs. J. A. H. Hopkins wanted to find out whether this pardon also meant that the President supported their Amendment. She therefore wrote him the following letter:

My dear Mr. President:

The pardon issued to me by you is accompanied by no explanation. It can have but one of two meanings—either you have satisfied yourself, as you personally stated to Mr. Hopkins, that I violated no law of the country, and no ordinance of this city, in exercising my right of peaceful petition, and therefore you, as an act of justice, extended to me your pardon, or you pardoned me to save yourself the embarrassment of an acute and distressing political situation.

In this case, in thus saving yourself, you have deprived me of the right through appeal to prove by legal processes that the police powers of Washington despotically and falsely convicted me on a false charge, in order to save you personal or political embarrassment.

As you have not seen fit to tell the public the true reason, I am compelled to resume my peaceful petition for political liberty. If the police arrest me, I shall carry the case to the Supreme Court if necessary. If the police do not arrest me, I shall believe that you do not believe me guilty. This is the only method by which I can release myself from the intolerable and false position in which your unexplained pardon has placed me.

Mr. Hopkins and I repudiate absolutely the current report that I would accept a pardon which was the act of your good nature.

In this case, which involves my fundamental constitutional rights, Mr. Hopkins and myself do not desire your Presidential benevolence, but American justice.

Furthermore, we do not believe that you would insult us by extending to us your good-nature under these circumstances.

This pardon without any explanation of your reasons for its issuance, in no way mitigates the injustice inflicted upon me by the violation of my constitutional civil right.

Respectfully yours,

Alison Turnbull Hopkins.

After having written this letter, quite alone and at the crowded hour of five o’clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Hopkins carried a banner to the White House gates, and stood there for ten minutes. The banner said: WE ASK NOT PARDON FOR OURSELVES BUT JUSTICE FOR ALL AMERICAN WOMEN. A large and curious crowd gathered, but nobody bothered her. While she stood there, the President passed through the gates and saluted.

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On Monday, July 23, exactly a month from the time that the police had first interfered with the picketing and the Suffragists, the daily Suffrage picket was resumed. The crowds streaming home in the afternoon from the offices, laughed when they saw the banners at the White House gates again. Some stopped to congratulate the women.

Time went on and still the President did nothing about putting the Amendment through. As always when it was not strikingly brought to his attention, Suffrage seemed to pass from his mind. It became again necessary to call his attention to the Amendment. Often it seemed as though the President’s attention could be gained only by calling the country’s attention to his inaction.

Within a week appeared a new banner. Elihu Root, the Special Envoy of the United States to Russia, had just come home from a country which had enfranchised its women. With the other members of the American Mission to Russia, he called at the White House, and at the gates he was confronted by these words:

For two hours, Lucy Ewing and Mary Winsor stood holding this banner. It attracted the largest crowd that the pickets had as yet experienced. But the police managed them perfectly—although in the courts there had been plenty of testimony that they could not manage similar crowds—and without a word of protest—although half a block was completely obstructed for two hours.

The following day saw scenes the most violent in the history of the pickets. This was August 14. Catherine Flanagan’s story of this period of terror is one of the most thrilling in the annals of the Party:

That day a new banner was carried for the first time by Elizabeth Stuyvesant—the “Kaiser” banner. The banner read:

I do not remember when Elizabeth took this banner out, but I think she was on the four o’clock shift. For a half an hour people gathered about the banner. The crowd grew and grew. You felt there was something brewing in them, but what, you could not guess. Suddenly it came—a man dashed from the crowd and tore the banner down. Immediately, one after another, the other banners were torn down. As fast as this happened, the banner bearers went back to Headquarters; returned with tri-colors and reinforcements; took up their stations again. Finally the whole line of pickets, bannerless by this time, marched back to Headquarters. The crowd, which was fast changing into a mob, followed us into Madison Place. As the pickets emerged again, the mob jumped them at the very doors of Cameron House, tore their banners away from them and destroyed them. By this time the mob, which had become a solid mass of people, choking the street and filling the park, had evolved a leader, a yeoman in uniform, who incited everybody about him to further work of destruction. Suddenly, as if by magic, a ladder appeared in their midst. A yeoman placed it against Cameron House, and accompanied by a little boy, he started up. He pulled down the tri-color of the Woman’s Party which hung over the door. In the meantime, it was impossible for us to take any banners out. We locked the door, but two strange women, unknown to the Woman’s Party, came in. They opened a window on the second floor and were about to push the ladder, on which the sailor and the little boy still stood, back into the street when Ella Morton Dean drew them away.

At the other side of the house and at the same moment, another member of the crowd climbed up the balcony and pulled down the American flag which hung beside the tri-color. Immediately Virginia Arnold and Lucy Burns appeared on the balcony carrying, the one the Kaiser banner and the other the tri-color. The crowd began to throw eggs, tomatoes, and apples at them, but the two girls stood, Virginia Arnold white, Lucy Burns flushed, but—everybody who saw them comments on this—with a look of steady consecration, absolutely motionless, holding the tri-color which had never before been taken from its place over the door at Headquarters.

Suddenly a shot rang out from the crowd. A bullet went through a window of the second story, directly over the heads of two women who stood there—Ella Morton Dean and Georgiana Sturgess—and imbedded itself in the ceiling of the hall. The only man seen to have a revolver was a yeoman in uniform, who immediately ran up the street. By this time Elizabeth Stuyvesant had joined Lucy Burns and Virginia Arnold on the balcony; others also came. Three yeomen climbed up onto the balcony and wrested the tri-color banners from the girls. As one of these men climbed over the railing, he struck Georgiana Sturgess. “Why did you do that?” she demanded, dumbfounded. The man paused a moment, apparently as amazed as she. “I don’t know,” he answered; then he tore the banner out of her hands and descended the ladder. Lucy Burns, whose courage is physical as well as spiritual, held her banner until the last moment. It seemed as though she were going to be dragged over the railing of the balcony, but two of the yeomen managed to tear it from her hands before this occurred. New banners were brought to replace those that had disappeared.

While this was going on, Katherine Morey and I went out the back way of Headquarters, made our way to the White House gates, unfurled a Kaiser banner, and stood there for seventeen minutes unnoticed. There was a policeman standing beside each of us, but when the yeoman who had led the mob and who was apparently about to report for duty, tore at the banner, they did not interfere. We were dragged along the pavements, but the banner was finally destroyed.

By this time the crowd had thinned a little in front of Headquarters. The front door had been unlocked when we went back. Five different times, however, we and others, led always by Lucy Burns, made an effort to bear our banners to the White House gates again. Always, a little distance from Headquarters, we were beset by the mob and our banners destroyed.

About five o’clock, the police reserves appeared and cleared the street. Thereupon, every woman who had been on picket duty that day, bearing aloft the beautiful tri-color, went over to the White House gates, marched up and down the pavements three times. The police protected us until we started home. When, however, our little procession crossed the street to the park, the crowd leaped upon us again, and again destroyed our banners. Madeline Watson was knocked down and kicked. Two men carried her into Headquarters.

While the crowd was milling its thickest before Headquarters, somebody said to a policeman standing there, “Why don’t you arrest those men?” “Those are not our orders,” the policeman replied.

Twenty-two lettered banners and fourteen tri-color flags were destroyed that day.

During all the early evening, men were trying to climb over the back fence of the garden to get into Cameron House. None of us went to bed that night. We were afraid that something—we knew not what—might happen.

The next day, August 15, was only a degree less violent. The Suffrage pickets went on duty as usual at twelve o’clock, and picketed all that afternoon.

All the afternoon yeomen, small boys, and hoodlums attacked the women without hindrance. Elizabeth Stuyvesant was struck by a soldier who destroyed her flag. Beulah Amidon was thrown down by a sailor, who stole her flag. Alice Paul was knocked down three times. One sailor dragged her thirty feet along the White House sidewalk in his attempts to tear off her Suffrage sash, gashing her neck brutally. They were without protection until five o’clock.

During this time they lost fifty tri-color banners and one Kaiser banner.

The pickets were, of course, constantly going back to Headquarters for new banners, and constantly returning with them.

At five o’clock, in anticipation of the President’s appearance, and while still the turmoil was going on, five police officers quickly and efficiently cleared a wide aisle in front of each gate, and as quickly and as efficiently drove the mob across the street. The President, however, left by a rear gate.

On the next day, August 16, the policy toward the pickets changed again. Fifty policemen appeared on the scene, and instead of permitting Suffragists to be attacked by others, they attacked them themselves. Virginia Arnold was set upon by three police officers. Before she could relinquish her banner to them, her arms were twisted and her hands bruised. Elizabeth Stuyvesant, Natalie Gray, and Lucy Burns were all severely handled by the police. Elizabeth Smith and Ruth Crocker, who were carrying furled flags, were knocked down. When men, more chivalrous-minded than the crowd, came to their rescue, they were arrested.

In the late afternoon, the crowd grew denser. The police, therefore, ceased their efforts, and waited while the crowd attacked the women and destroyed their banners An officer threatened to arrest one young woman who defended her banner against an assailant.

“Here, give that up!” called the second officer to a girl who was struggling with a man for the possession of her flag.

During these days of mob attacks, the pickets had been put to it to get outside Headquarters to some coign of vantage where they could stand for a few seconds before the inevitable rush. For the first time in the history of their picketing the girls could not carry their banners on poles. Either the mobs seized them or the policemen who lined the sidewalks outside Headquarters. The pickets carried them inside their sweaters and hats, in sewing bags, or pinned them, folded in newspapers or magazines, under their skirts. One picket was followed by crowds who caught a gleam of yellow at the hem of her gown. When they got to the White House, the pickets held the banners in their hands. Lucy Burns kept sending out relays with new banners to take the place of those which were torn.

Catherine Flanagan says that on August 16 when the four o’clock shift of the picket line started out, Lucy Burns pointed to rolls of banners done up in various receptacles and said, “Take out as many of these as you can carry and keep them concealed until it is necessary to use them.” The eight pickets distributed the banners in different parts of their clothes, and approaching the White House by various routes, suddenly lined themselves against the White House fence, each unfurling a Kaiser banner at the word of command. They were faced by forty policemen, policewomen, and secret service men. Instantly the police were on them. The pickets held the banners as long as it was physically possible—it took three policemen to remove each banner. The policemen heaved sighs of relief, as though their work for the day was done, turned, and moved to the edge of the pavement. Instantly, eight more banners appeared and as instantly they fell on the pickets again. This happened seven times. As often as the police turned with captured banners in their hands, reinforcing pickets in the crowd handed fresh banners to the pickets at the gates. Fifty-six Kaiser banners were captured this day. When the Kaiser banners were exhausted, the eight pickets returned to Headquarters and soon emerged bearing the tri-color. The tactics of the police changed then. They did not, themselves, attack the pickets, but they permitted the crowds to do so. In all, one hundred and forty-eight flags were destroyed.

---

On August 17, Major Pullman, police head of Washington, called upon Alice Paul, and warned her that young women carrying banners would be arrested.

Alice Paul replied, “The picketing will go on as usual.”

In a letter to his friend, Major Pullman, quoted in the Suffragist of August 25, Gilson Gardner put the case concisely and decisively....

You must see, Pullman, that you cannot be right in what you have done in this matter. You have given the pickets adequate protection; you have arrested them and had them sent to jail and the workhouse, you have permitted the crowds 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 these 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 it was not right and that you were “lenient,” when you 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 in place of the settled laws of the land. That would justify a charge of “Kaiserism” right here in our Capitol 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 I find that they are most happy when they are permitted to do their duty. They did not like that dirty business of permitting a lot of sailors and street riffraff to rough the girls....

It is not my opinion alone when I say that the women were entitled to police protection, not arrest. President Wilson has stated repeatedly that these women were entirely within their legal and constitutional rights, and that they should not have been molested. Three reputable men, two of them holding office in this Administration, have told me what the President said, and I have no reason to doubt their word. If the President has changed his mind he has not changed the law or the Constitution, and what he said three weeks ago is just as true today.

In excusing what you have done, you say that the women have 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 on 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 bearers than you have to arrest the owner of the Washington Post. So long as the law against obscenity and profanity is observed, you have no business with the words on the banners. 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.

During the entire afternoon of that day—August 17—the day that Major Pullman called on Alice Paul—the sentinels stood at their posts. One of the banners read:

Another:

At intervals of fifteen minutes—for two hours—the pickets were told by a captain of police that they would be arrested if they did not move. But they held their station. At half-past four, the hour at which the thousand of government clerks invade the streets, there was enough of a crowd to give the appearance that the pickets were “blocking traffic.” Lavinia Dock; Edna Dixon; Natalie Gray; Madeline Watson; Catherine Flanagan; Lucy Ewing, were arrested soon after four o’clock. Their trial lasted just forty minutes. One police officer testified that they were obstructing traffic. They all refused to pay the ten-dollar fine, which, though it would have released them, would also have been an admission of guilt, and Police Magistrate Pugh sentenced them to serve thirty days in the Government Workhouse.

---

On August 23, six women appeared at the White House, bearing banners. They were, Pauline Adams; Gertrude Hunter; Clara Fuller; Kate Boeckh; Margaret Fotheringham; Mrs. Henry L. Lockwood. All of their banners quoted words from the President’s works:

In ten minutes they were all arrested. When they appeared before Police Magistrate Pugh, Clara Kinsley Fuller said in part:

I am the editor, owner, and publisher of a daily and weekly newspaper in Minnesota. I pay taxes to this government, yet I have nothing to say in the making of those laws which control me, either as an individual or as a business woman. Taxation without representation is undemocratic. For that reason, I came to Washington to help the Federal Amendment fight. When I learned that President Wilson said that picketing was perfectly legal, I went on the picket line and did my bit towards making democracy safe at home, while our men are abroad making democracy safe for the world.

Margaret Fotheringham, a school-teacher, said:

I have fifteen British cousins who are in the fighting line abroad. Some are back very badly wounded, and others are still in France. I have two brothers who are to be in our fighting line. They were not drafted; they enlisted. I am made of the same stuff that those boys are made of; and, whether it is abroad or at home, we are fighting for the same thing. We are fighting for the thing we hold nearest our hearts—for democracy.

To these pleas, Judge Pugh answered that the President was “not the one to petition for justice”; that the people of the District virtuously refrained from picketing the White House for the vote for themselves “for fear the military would take possession of the streets.”

I quote the Suffragist of September 2.

Here is a sample of Judge Pugh’s logic:

“These ladies have been told repeatedly that this law was ample to prevent picketing in front of the White House, or anywhere else on the sidewalks of the District of Columbia; that it was not the fashion to petition Congress in that way, to stand in front of the White House, the President’s mansion, to petition somebody else, a mile and a half away. The President does not have to be petitioned.... You ladies observe all the laws that give you benefits, property rights that legislatures composed of men have passed ... and those that are aimed at preserving the peace and good order of the community you do not propose to observe.”

And much more to the same effect, which proved that Judge Pugh knew nothing of the long vigil of the pickets at the doors of Congress, and apparently nothing of the President’s actual dictatorship.

Finally he admitted that he did not care to send “ladies of standing” to jail, and would refrain if they promised to stop picketing, although they were not charged with picketing. In the face of the dead silence that followed, he pronounced sentence: A fine of twenty-five dollars or thirty days at Occoquan Workhouse. Every woman refused to pay the fine.

Attorney Matthew O’Brien represented the women in the District Court, appealing finally from the judgment of the court.

On August 28, the same women, with Cornelia Beach, Vivian Pierce, Maud Jamison, and Lucy Burns, were again arrested, and given the same sentence. An appeal was granted them again, the Judge announcing that this was the last appeal he would give in the picketing cases until a decision had been given by the Court of Appeals.

---

On September 4, the day of the parade of the drafted men, thirteen women were arrested. They were: Abby Scott Baker, Dorothy Bartlett, Annie Arniel, Pauline Adams, Mrs. W. W. Chisholm, Lucy Burns, Margaret Fotheringham, Lucy Branham, Julia Emory, Eleanor Calnan, Edith Ainge, Maude Malone, Mary Winsor.

The banner these women bore was inscribed:

They were sent to Occoquan for sixty days.

At this vivid interval in the history of the Woman’s Party occurred a notable incident.

Dudley Field Malone, who had long been a staunch friend of the Woman’s Party—and one of the few men who had been willing to make a sacrifice for Suffrage—resigned his position as Collector of the Port of New York as a protest against the intolerable Suffrage situation. This was a beau geste on the part of Mr. Malone. There are those who believe that that gallant deed will go rolling down the centuries gathering luster as it rolls. It had an inevitable effect, not only on the members of the Woman’s Party, but on the members of other Suffrage organizations as well, and it produced a profound impression on the country at large.

His letter of resignation reads as follows:

The President,

The White House,

Washington, D. C.

Dear Mr. President:

Last autumn, as the representative of your Administration, I went into the Woman Suffrage States to urge your re-election. The most difficult argument to meet among the seven million voters was the failure of the Democratic Party, throughout four years of power, to pass the Federal Suffrage Amendment, looking towards the enfranchisement of all the women in the country. Throughout those States, and particularly in California, which ultimately decided the election by the votes of women, the women voters were urged to support you, even though Judge Hughes had already declared for the Federal Suffrage Amendment, because you and your Party, through liberal leadership, were more likely nationally to enfranchise the rest of the women of the country than were your opponents.

And if the women of the West voted to re-elect you, I promised them I would spend all my energy, at any sacrifice to myself, to get the present Democratic Administration to pass the Federal Suffrage Amendment.

But the present policy of the Administration, in permitting splendid American women to be sent to jail in Washington, not for carrying offensive banners, nor for picketing, but on the technical charge of obstructing traffic, is a denial even of their constitutional right to petition for, and demand the passage of, the Federal Suffrage Amendment. It, therefore, now becomes my profound obligation actively to keep my promise to the women of the West.

In more than twenty States it is a practical impossibility to amend the State constitutions; so the women of those States can only be enfranchised by the passage of the Federal Suffrage Amendment. Since England and Russia, in the midst of the great war, have assured the national enfranchisement of their women, should we not be jealous to maintain our democratic leadership in the world by the speedy national enfranchisement of American women?

To me, Mr. President, as I urged upon you in Washington two months ago, this is not only a measure of justice and democracy, it is also an urgent war measure. The women of the nation are, and always will be, loyal to the country, and the passage of the Suffrage Amendment is only the first step toward their national emancipation. But unless the government takes at least this first step toward their enfranchisement, how can the government ask millions of American women, educated in our schools and colleges, and millions of American women in our homes, or toiling for economic independence in every line of industry, to give up by conscription their men and happiness to a war for democracy in Europe while these women citizens are denied the right to vote on the policies of the government which demands of them such sacrifice?

For this reason many of your most ardent friends and supporters feel that the passage of the Federal Suffrage Amendment is a war measure which could appropriately be urged by you at this session of Congress. It is true that this Amendment would have to come from Congress, but the present Congress shows no earnest desire to enact this legislation for the simple reason that you, as the leader of the Party in power, have not yet suggested it.

For the whole country gladly acknowledges, Mr. President, that no vital piece of legislation has come through Congress these five years except by your extraordinary and brilliant leadership. And millions of men and women today hope that you will give the Federal Suffrage Amendment to the women of the country by the valor of your leadership now. It will hearten the mothers of the nation, eliminate a just grievance, and turn the devoted energies of brilliant women to a more hearty support of the government in this crisis.

As you well know, in dozens of speeches in many States I have advocated your policies and the war. I was the first man of your Administration, nearly five years ago, publicly to advocate preparedness, and helped to found the first Plattsburg training camp. And if, with our troops mobilizing in France, you will give American women this measure for their political freedom, they will support with greater enthusiasm your hope and the hope of America for world freedom.

I have not approved all the methods recently adopted by women in the pursuit of their political liberty; yet, Mr. President, the Committee on Suffrage of the United States Senate was formed in 1883, when I was one year old; this same Federal Suffrage Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1878; brave women like Susan B. Anthony were petitioning Congress for the Suffrage before the Civil War, and at the time of the Civil War men like William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, and Wendell Phillips assured the Suffrage leaders that if they abandoned their fight for Suffrage, when the war was ended the men of the nation, “out of gratitude,” would enfranchise the women of the country!

And if the men of this country had been peacefully demanding for over half a century the political right or privilege to vote, and had been continuously ignored or met with evasion by successive Congresses, as have the women, you, Mr. President, as a lover of liberty, would be the first to comprehend and forgive their inevitable impatience and righteous indignation. Will not this Administration, re-elected to power by the hope and faith of the women of the West, handsomely reward that faith by taking action now for the passage of the Federal Suffrage Amendment?

In the port of New York, during the last four years, billions of dollars in the export and import trade of the country have been handled by the men of the customs service; their treatment of the traveling public has radically changed, their vigilance supplied the evidence for the Lusitania note; the neutrality was rigidly maintained; the great German fleet guarded, captured, and repaired; substantial economies and reforms have been concluded, and my ardent industry has been given to this great office of your appointment. But now I wish to leave these finished tasks, to return to my profession of the law, and to give all my leisure time to fight as hard for the political freedom of women as I have always fought for your liberal leadership.

It seems a long seven years, Mr. President, since I first campaigned with you when you were running for Governor of New Jersey. In every circumstance throughout those years, I have served you with the most respectful affection and unshadowed devotion. It is no small sacrifice now for me, as a member of your Administration, to sever our political relationship. But I think it is high time that men in this generation, at some cost to themselves, stood up to battle for the national enfranchisement of American women. So in order effectively to keep my promise made in the West, and more freely to go into this larger field of democratic effort, I hereby resign my office as Collector of the Port of New York, to take effect at once, or at your earliest convenience.

Yours respectfully,

Dudley Field Malone.

On September 13, six pickets left Headquarters at half-past four in the afternoon. They were: Katherine Fisher, Mrs. Frederick Willard Kendall, Mrs. Mark Jackson, Ruth Crocker, Nina Samardin, Eleanor Gwinter. The two lettered banners were borne by Miss Fisher and Mrs. Kendall:

They marched straight to the lower gate. A crowd had already collected there. Another crowd lined the edge of the sidewalk across the street on Lafayette Square. There were two police officers on the White House sidewalk, and several across the way.

The crowd made way for the group of pickets, and they took their accustomed places at the gate. For a few minutes nothing happened. During all these days of roughness and riot, it had been very difficult to take pictures. It seemed as though the thing the police most feared was the truth. They would not permit the moving-picture men to record these vivid events. They even confiscated cameras. Photographers ran the risk always of having their cameras destroyed. On this day, Gladys Greiner, a Suffragist, was taking pictures of the crowd. As she leveled her kodak at a police captain, he kicked her. She continued to take her pictures nevertheless. A sailor and a marine, both in uniform, instead of moving as the police had ordered, came closer and closer to the pickets. Suddenly, the sailor snatched the banner from the pole. The two men tore the banner into pieces; passed the scraps to their friends. The police looked on without interference. Then they arrested the women. They were taken to Judge Mullowny.

Judge Mullowny had been away for two months from the bench. In the meantime, his ideas on the offense of picketing had undergone another change. His first decision in regard to the Suffragists was that they obstructed traffic, and, in regard to the banners, that they “had nothing to do with the case.” Later, he decided that the banners were “treasonable.” Now, in regard to their banner, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?, he decided: “Since this banner is unlikely to give offense, I will give you women a light sentence this time.”

All evidence except that of the two policemen was ruled out. In regard to the conduct of the police captain in kicking Miss Greiner, the Judge said: “I have nothing to do with those things; they have nothing to do with the case.”

He asked, “Would you pay a fine instead of going to prison, if I made the fine fifty cents?”

“Not if you made it five cents,” replied Mrs. Kendall, who spoke for the six prisoners.

He therefore sentenced them to thirty days in the government workhouse.

On September 22, four more Suffragists were arrested. They were Peggy Baird Johns, Margaret Wood Kessler, Ernestine Hara, Hilda Blumberg. They carried a new banner this time, quoting words from an early work of the President. It said:

PRESIDENT WILSON, WHAT DID YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAID, “WE HAVE SEEN A GOOD MANY SINGULAR THINGS HAPPEN RECENTLY. WE HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT IT IS UNPATRIOTIC TO CRITICIZE PUBLIC ACTION. WELL, IF IT IS, THERE IS A DEEP DISGRACE RESTING UPON THE ORIGIN OF THIS NATION. THIS 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 IS 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 Suffragist of September 29 describes this event:

When the pickets this week took up their stations at the East gate of the White House, and unfurled the “seditious” utterance of the President himself, the banner was almost immediately confiscated by the two police officers who had hurried to the spot. They seemed anxious to keep from the little pressing crowd the fact that the President had once been not only a Democrat, but a democrat.

The two officers then stood directly in front of the little group of women carrying tri-colored flags, with their backs to what crowd there was. More than half of the wide White House sidewalks were vacant of pedestrians. The officers had evidently been ordered to let the crowd collect for a certain number of minutes before they arrested the women. They betrayed not the slightest interest in the spectators, but watched their victims with bored attention as they waited for the patrol....

The four young women were, on the following day, after the usual court proceeding, sentenced to thirty days in the government workhouse for “obstructing traffic.”

A brief statement was made by each of the little group. “We are not citizens,” said these young women. “We are not represented. We were silently, peacefully attempting to gain the freedom of twenty million women in the United States of America. We have broken no law. We are guilty of no crime. We have been illegally arrested. We demand our freedom, and we shall continue to ask for it until the government acts.”

They were given thirty days in the workhouse.

The last picketing of the Emergency War Session of the Sixty-fifth Congress took place on October 6, the day Congress adjourned. There were eleven women in this picket line: Dr. Caroline Spencer, Vivian Pierce, Louise Lewis Kahle, Rose Winslow, Joy Young, Matilda Young, Minnie Henesy, Kate Heffelfinger, Maud Jamison, Lou C. Daniels.

Alice Paul led them. Congress was adjourning. The work of the Woman’s Party was going on smoothly. For the first time, Alice Paul felt that she had the leisure to go to jail.

In the Suffragist of October 13, Pauline Jacobson of the San Francisco Bulletin thus describes their arrest:

I had had much of the Western prejudice against the “militant movement” that the live Suffrage battle had become in this country. I had thought from the newspaper reports that have gone forth concerning the action of these “militant Suffragists,” that “picketing” was rowdy and unlovely. I found it a silent, a still thing—a thing sublime....

The sun, which never seems bright to me under these paler Eastern skies, slanted chill and thin through the falling golden foliage of autumn trees lining the broad avenue on which the White House stands. Diagonally across, flying the Suffrage colors, stands the handsome old Cameron House, the Headquarters of the Woman’s Party.

Suddenly that chill avenue vista became vibrant with color, with fluttering banners, wide-striped of purple, white, and gold, borne aloft on tall, imposing, war-like spears. Down the Avenue they fluttered slowly, as if moved by some mysterious force. Then I saw the force that was sending those banners forward through the careless crowds.

There were eleven women, each bearing high her colored banner. The leader, a woman frail, and slight, and very pale, her eyes and face really lit with exaltation of purpose, carried a white flag on which was printed: “Mr. President, what will you do for Woman Suffrage?” Then behind them followed the others with the vivid purple and gold flags on the spear-headed staffs. They looked neither to the right nor to the left. They seemed to me to walk so lightly that the great banners carried them; and there was the glow in all of their eyes though their faces were quite unsmiling.

The street in an instant had become alive with people who gathered about, followed, or lined the curbs, men and women—the women for the most part curious, the men for the most part disdainful, insolent, or leering. It was not a Western crowd; there was no generosity in it.

But silently, perceived by all but perceiving none, the women marched straight ahead. As they neared the White House a sailor sprang forward and tore the banner from one picket, threw it on the ground, and trampled on it. The young girl who had carried it stooped down and silently rescued her banner. I thought there was tenderness in the way she smoothed it out and tried to fasten it again to her tall staff. Four banners were torn and mutilated like that. Each girl, without a word, like the first, tried to protect her flag.

And then, like a flash, those eleven women, a few feet apart, were flanking either side of the wide White House gates like living statues, only their colored banners fluttering upward. They stood facing the coming and going crowd silently. There was the pale little leader with her staff bare; the crowd had torn away that simple question on the white flag....

Then came shouted orders, the sudden waving of blue-coated arms, and the elbowing to the front of blue coats with much gold braid. The police were scattering the curious crowd. Above their orders came the clang of the patrol. Next the eleven statues had disappeared from the White House gates. They were being crowded to the front by the fat officer in the uniform. They were still silent and still proud. There was something majestic even in the way each stooped her head to enter the small door of the patrol wagon. And the last uniformed officer who had gathered together the brilliant flags sat in front, where they still fluttered triumphant in the wind as the patrol clanged off and the crowd shouted.

I followed them to the police station. It seemed to me there was strange delay in the procedure of accepting bail for people charged with so simple an offense—for they were charged with “obstructing traffic.” That same day, I had seen dense crowds watching the World Series returns, with mounted police to clear a space for the cars. There were no arrests for blocking traffic. They were finally released on bail for trial the following Monday.

The eleven women were tried on October 8. They refused to recognize the Court. They would not be sworn. They would not question witnesses. They would not speak in their own behalf.

Alice Paul said—I quote the Suffragist:

We do not wish to make any plea before this Court. We do not consider ourselves subject to this Court since, as an unenfranchised class, we have nothing to do with the making of the laws which have put us in this position.

The Judge did not sentence the eleven women. He suspended sentence and restored the bail furnished by the Suffragists for their appearance. For this surprising change of front, no reason was given. Though apparently inconsistent, it was perfectly consistent with the policy of an Administration quite dazed and uncertain in regard to its treatment of the picketing women.

In point of fact, the Court did not sentence the women because Congress was adjourning. They did not dismiss the charge, however.

Regarding the freeing of the pickets Miss Paul said:

We are glad that the authorities have retreated at last from their untenable position, and grown wary of prosecuting women for peacefully petitioning for political liberty.

The action of the Court this morning makes more glaring than ever the injustice of holding nineteen women on sixty and thirty day sentences in Occoquan Workhouse for the same offense of petitioning for liberty which we committed. We will use our unexpected freedom to press our campaign with ever-increasing vigor.

On October 15, four pickets, under suspended sentence from their picketing of October 6, went out again. They were Rose Winslow, Kate Heffelfinger, Minnie Henesy, Maud Jamison. The police were taken absolutely by surprise. It was ten minutes before the patrol wagons appeared. In the meantime, of course, a crowd gathered to see what was going to happen. When the patrol stopped at the curb, an officer approached the pickets. “Move on!” he ordered, and, before the pickets could move on, or even make a reply—“I will put you under arrest,” and immediately, “You are under arrest.” Rose Winslow, one of the pickets, lifted her banner high, and marched with the air of a conqueror to the waiting patrol. The crowd burst into spontaneous applause.

In court Rose Winslow said:

We have seen officers of the law permit men to assault women, to destroy their banners, to enter their residences. How, then, can you ask us to have respect for the law? We thought that by dismissing the Suffragists without sentence this Court had finally decided to recognize our legal right to petition the government. We shall continue to picket because it is our right. On the tenth of November there will be a long line of Suffragists who will march to the White House gates to ask for political liberty. You can send us to jail, but you know that we have broken no law. You know that we have not even committed the technical offense on which we were arrested. You know that we are guiltless.

Judge Mullowny gave them the choice between a twenty-five dollar fine and six months in the district workhouse. They, of course, refused to pay the fine.

---

At half-past four on October 20, Alice Paul led a deputation of three pickets to the West gate of the White House. The others were Dr. Caroline Spencer, Gladys Greiner, Gertrude Crocker. Alice Paul carried a banner with the words of President Wilson which had appeared recently on the posters for the Second Liberty Bond Loan of 1917:

Dr. Caroline Spencer’s banner bore the watchword of ’76:

They were arrested as soon as the police had permitted what seemed a sufficient crowd to gather, placed in the patrol wagon, and taken to the district jail.

The officer testified as follows—the italics are my own:

I made my way through the crowd that was surrounding them, and told the ladies they were violating the law by standing at the gates, and would not they please move on.

Assistant District Attorney Hart asked: Did they move on?

Lee answered: They did not, and they did not answer either.

Hart: What did you do then?

Lee: Placed them under arrest.

The two women who carried the banners—Alice Paul and Caroline Spencer—were sentenced to seven months in jail; the other two pickets were offered the choice of a five dollar fine or thirty days, and, of course, took the thirty days.

On the same occasion, Rose Winslow and those who were arrested with her, Maud Jamison, Kate Heffelfinger, Minnie Henesy—both on October 4 and October 15—came up for further sentence. Rose Winslow described very vigorously the confusion of the Suffragists who, she admitted, were not more nonplussed than Judge Mullowny admitted the Court was. She said:

You sentence us to jail for a few days, then you sentence us to the workhouse for thirty days, then sixty, and then you suspend sentence. Sometimes we are accused of carrying seditious banners, then of obstructing traffic. How do you expect us to see any consistency in the law, or in your sentences?

The Court smiled, and pronounced an additional thirty days, saying: “First, you will serve six months, and then you will serve one month more.”

---

Alice Paul had been in jail ever since October 20. When the news first got out, women came from all over the country to join the picket forces. It was decided that on November 10, forty-one women should go out on the picket line as a protest against her imprisonment. But on the night of November 9, these forty-one women—accompanied by sympathizers and friends—went down to the jail where their leader was confined. Headquarters had heard from Alice Paul from time to time, and Alice Paul had heard from Headquarters—by means of a cleaning-woman in the jail. In her Jailed for Freedom, Doris Stevens tells how she went down to the jail and talked to Alice Paul from the yard. Catherine Flanagan and Mrs. Sophie Meredith had communicated with her in this same manner. And once Vida Milholland came and sang under her window. But this was the first time that a deputation visited their imprisoned leader.

The house in which Warden Zinkham lived was close to the wing in which Alice Paul was imprisoned. The leader of the delegation, Katherine Morey, accompanied by Catherine Flanagan, went to Zinkham’s door and rang the bell; asked to see him. They were told that he was ill and could not be seen. Immediately, the two girls gave a prearranged signal to the silent crowd of pickets back of them. With one accord, they ran and grouped themselves under Alice Paul’s window. Before the guards could rush upon them and push them out of the yard, they had managed to call up to her their names; the large sum of money which that day had come into the Treasury; that forty-one of them would protest against her imprisonment on the picket line the next day.

---

The next morning, the picket line of forty-one women marched from Headquarters in five groups. The first was led by Mrs. John Winters Brannan.

As usual, the pickets bore golden-lettered banners. As usual, they bore purple, white, and gold flags. As usual, they walked slowly—always a banner’s length apart. They moved over to Pennsylvania Avenue; took up their silent statuesque position at the East and West gates of the White House.

The thick stream of government clerks, hastening with home-going swiftness, paused to look at them. Involuntarily they applauded the women when they were arrested. This happened almost immediately, the police hurrying the pickets into the line of waiting patrols. Suddenly the crowd raised a shout:

“There come some more!”

The second picket line numbered ten women.

They also bore golden lettered banners. They also bore flags of purple, white, and gold. They were arrested immediately.

The applause continued to grow and grow in volume.

Immediately a third group appeared, and after they had been arrested, a fourth; and, on their arrest, a fifth. For half an hour a continuous line of purple, white, and gold blazed its revolutionary path through the grayness of the November afternoon.

Mary A. Nolan of Florida headed the fifth group of pickets. Little, frail, lame, seventy years old, her gallantry elicited from the two lines of onlookers applause, cheers, calls of encouragement.

“Keep right on!” one voice emerged from the noise. “You’ll make them give it to you!”

The women of the first group were: Mrs. John Winters Brannan, Belle Sheinberg, L. H. Hornesby, Paula Jakobi, Cynthia Cohen, M. Tilden Burritt, Dorothy Day, Mrs. Henry Butterworth, Cora Weeks, Peggy Baird Johns, Elizabeth Hamilton, Ella Guilford, Amy Juengling, Hattie Kruger.

The women of the second group were: Agnes H. Morey, Mrs. William Bergen, Camilla Whitcomb, Ella Findeisen, Lou Daniels, Mrs. George Scott, Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Elizabeth McShane, Kathryn Lincoln.

The women of the third group were: Mrs. William Kent, Alice Gram, Betty Gram, Mrs. R. B. Quay, Mrs. C. T. Robertson, Eva Decker, Genevieve Williams.

The women of the fourth group were: Mrs. Charles W. Barnes, Kate Stafford, Mrs. J. H. Short, Mrs. A. N. Beim, Catherine Martinette.

The women of the fifth group were: Mrs. Harvey Wiley, Alice Cosu, Mary Bartlett Dixon, Julia Emory, Mary A. Nolan, Lucy Burns.

The forty-one women were tried on November 12. They were charged with “obstructing traffic,” and pleaded “Not Guilty.” The police sergeants and plain-clothes men gave their testimony which was refuted absolutely by witnesses for the defendants—Helena Hill Weed, Olivia Dunbar Torrence, Marie Manning Gasch, Mary Ingham.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan said:

The responsibility for an agitation like ours against injustice rests with those who deny justice, not those who demand it. Whatever may be the verdict of this Court, we shall continue our agitation until the grievance of American women is redressed.

Mrs. Harvey Wiley said:

I want to state that we took this action with great consecration of spirit. We took this action with willingness to sacrifice our personal liberty in order to focus the attention of the nation on the injustice of our disfranchisement, that we might thereby win political liberty for all the women of the country. The Constitution says that Congress shall not in any way abridge the right of citizens peacefully to assembly and petition. That is exactly what we did. We peacefully assembled and then proceeded with our petition to the President for the redress of our grievance of disfranchisement. The Constitution does not specify the form of petition. Ours was in the form of a banner. To say that we “broke traffic regulations” when we exercised our constitutional right of petition is therefore unconstitutional.

Judge Mullowny admitted the embarrassment of the Administration.

“The trouble of the situation is that the Court has not been given power to meet it,” he complained. “It is very, very puzzling.”

A little after three o’clock, he dismissed the pickets without imposing sentence. He said he would take the case under advisement.

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An hour later, twenty-seven of the women who had just been tried—with, in addition, Mrs. William L. Colt, Elizabeth Smith, Matilda Young, Hilda Blumberg—emerged from Headquarters. They walked twice up and down in front of the White House before they took their places at the gates.

The police were dumbfounded by their unexpected onslaught. There were no patrols waiting. But they pulled themselves together, arrested the pickets, and commandeered cars in which to take them to the police headquarters.

The thirty-one women were ordered to appear in court on November 14. There, after waiting all the morning, Judge Mullowny told them to come back Friday.

At Headquarters, it was believed that this was not only a challenge to the quality of their spirit, but to the degree of their patience.

Many women had come from a long distance to make this protest. Not all could spare the time, money, and vitality. Their answer to that challenge was instant and convincing. On the afternoon of November 13, the picket line went out again—thirty-one of them.

The pickets blazed their way through dense, black throngs. The crowd was distinctly friendly.

Suddenly one of the banners disappeared; another and another until six of them were destroyed; the bare poles proceeded on their way however. The same person accomplished all this—the uniformed yeoman who dragged Alice Paul across thirty feet of pavement on August 15. But this time, the crowd—friendly—manifested its disapproval, and the police arrested him. The pickets stood for a long time, their line stretching from gate to gate, until they began to think that the Administration had changed its tactics. Then suddenly the patrol wagon gong sounded in the distance. Presently they were all arrested.

Many of the pickets had been tried the day before. As their bail had not been refunded, they refused to give more. They were kept that night in the house of detention. As this institution had but two rooms with eight beds each, some of the women slept on the floor. They were tried and sentenced the next day. One of them—the aged Mrs. Nolan—got six days, three fifteen days, twenty-four thirty days, two—Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and Mrs. John Winters Brannan—sixty days, and one—Lucy Burns—six months.

It was this group of women who went through the Night of Terror, subsequently to be described.

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On November 17, three more women—Mrs. Harvey Wiley, Mrs. William Kent, and Elizabeth McShane—were sentenced to fifteen days on the November 10 charges.

All these prisoners except four were sent to the Occoquan Workhouse.

Habeas corpus proceedings became necessary—owing to conditions which will presently be set forth—and a writ was procured; but only after numberless obstacles were surmounted. The case came up in the United States District Court at Alexandria, Virginia, with Judge Edmund Waddill sitting. Judge Waddill ordered the prisoners transferred to the jail on the ground that they should have been confined there instead of at Occoquan Workhouse. Later the Court of Appeals reversed this decision. In the meantime, brought to the jail, the government was faced with the necessity of forcibly feeding the majority of these women, already weakened from hunger-striking.

Here, perhaps, is the place to tell of a curious incident that happened during Alice Paul’s jail term. For this to strike the reader with the force it deserves, he must remember that Alice Paul was held almost incommunicado, that she saw but two friends from the outside, and then only for a few minutes, that she could not confer with her counsel, Dudley Field Malone, who had to overcome extraordinary obstacles—had finally to threaten habeas corpus proceedings and to see high officials who were his personal friends—to get to her. Two newspaper men were admitted, but they were friendly to the Administration.

One evening, at nine o’clock—an hour when all the prisoners were supposed to be in bed—the door opened and a stranger entered her room. He proved to be David Lawrence, a newspaper man, very well known as one who was closely associated with the Administration. He did not say that he had come from the Administration, but, of course, it is obvious that if he had not been in favor with the Administration, he would not have been admitted. He stayed two hours, and Miss Paul talked over the situation with him.

I now quote Miss Younger, who has told this episode on many platforms:

He asked Miss Paul how long she and the other pickets would give the Administration before they began picketing again. She said it would depend upon the attitude the Administration and Congress seemed to be taking toward the Federal Amendment. He said he believed the prohibition bill would be brought up and passed, and after that was out of the way the Suffrage bill would be taken up.

He asked if we would be content to have it go through one House this session and wait till the next session for it to pass the other House. Miss Paul said that if the bill did not go through both Houses this session, the Woman’s Party would not be satisfied.

Then the man said he believed that the President would not mention Suffrage in his message at the opening of Congress, but would make it known to the leaders of Congress that he wanted it passed and would see that it passed.

He said in effect: Now the great difficulty is for these hunger-strikers to be recognized as political prisoners. Every day you hunger-strike, you advertise the idea of political prisoners throughout the country. It would be the easiest thing in the world for the Administration to treat you as political prisoners; to put you in a fine house in Washington; give you the best of food; take the best of care of you; but if we treat you as political prisoners, we would have to treat other groups which might arise in opposition to the war program as political prisoners too, and that would throw a bomb in our war program. It would never do. It would be easier to give you the Suffrage Amendment than to treat you as political prisoners.

On November 27 and 28, a few days after Miss Paul’s strange experience—suddenly, quite arbitrarily, and with no reason assigned—the government released all the Suffrage prisoners.

The speakers of the Woman’s Party began telling this story of the visit to Alice Paul’s cell, everywhere. It finally appeared in the Milwaukee Leader and in the San Francisco Bulletin in an article written by John D. Barry. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage immediately questioned the truth of this episode.

Congress reconvened on December 3. The President, true to David Lawrence’s prophecy, did not mention Suffrage in his message to Congress. However, on January 9, 1918, on the evening of the victorious vote in the House—as will subsequently and in more detail again be told—the President declared for the Federal Amendment.

Minnie Bronson, the General Secretary of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, immediately sent Alice Paul a letter of apology for questioning the truth of her statement. In that letter, she repeats Maud Younger’s statement in regard to this visit to Alice Paul in prison, and says:

The inference contained in this article that the President of the United States would under cover assist a proposition which he had publicly and unqualifiedly repudiated, seemed to us unworthy of his high office, and we felt justified in defending him from what seemed an unwarranted and unbelievable accusation.

However, the President’s subsequent public support of the Federal Suffrage Amendment, his announcement coming on the eve of the vote in the House of Representatives, indicates the truth of your original assertion, and we therefore deem it incumbent upon ourselves to apologize for having questioned Miss Younger’s statement.

We are sending a copy of this letter to the President and members of Congress.

Very truly yours,

Minnie Bronson.

Perhaps a word should be said of description—and even of explanation—in regard to the crowds who harried the Suffragists. Of course, in all crowds there is a hoodlum element, and if that element is not held down by the police, it rapidly becomes the controlling power; tends to become more and more destructive. The police, as has been indicated from time to time, adopted various policies. At first, they maintained order. Then they began to permit the rowdy element in the crowds to do as it pleased. Later, they even worked with these destructive forces.

Men were heard to say, one to another, “Stick around here. Something’s going to happen this afternoon. I saw it this morning.” To them, of course, it was merely an entertaining exhibition.

An enlisting sergeant used often to make his way through the crowds saying, “Now you have shown your spirit, boys, come and enlist!”

At all times, however, the people who annoyed, and later ill-treated the girls, were very young men—often in uniform. After a while there appeared men in plain clothes with groups of men in khaki, or yeomen, who were obviously in the crowd for the purpose of making trouble for the Suffragists. These people did not like cameras, and the moving picture people who, appreciating the news value of the situation, tried to get views of the crowd, did so at the risk of having their cameras smashed. Indeed, Helena Hill Weed once dispersed a crowd by pointing a camera at them. This was the worst element the pickets had to deal with—unthinking young men of a semi-brutalized type. Of course, boys took their cue from their elders, and snatched or destroyed banners where they could. After a demonstration, you would come across groups of them, marching with the tattered banners that they had managed to steal.

“When is the shooting going to begin?” one little boy was heard to ask once.

In the very midst of the riots, one would come across older men cutting up banners into small pieces which they gave away as souvenirs.

Of course, there were chivalrous spirits who protested against the treatment of the pickets by the police—protested even after they were threatened with arrest. Some of them were actually arrested, and one of them fined.

Often—very often indeed—the waiting crowds broke into spontaneous applause when group after group marched from Headquarters into the certainty of arrest. Those who were Anglo-Saxons inevitably admired the sporting quality of these women.

Perhaps a negro street sweeper summed it up better than anybody else. He said: “I doan know what them women want, but I know they ain’t skeered!”

The reader is probably asking by this time what was the effect of the picketing on the Woman’s Party itself. The first reaction was exactly what he would guess—that members resigned in large numbers. The second, however, was one which he might not expect—that new members joined in large numbers. In other words, the militant action which alienated some women brought others into the organization; women who were aroused by the simple and immediate demands of the Woman’s Party and by the courage and the forthrightness with which it pushed those demands; women who had become impatient at the impasse to which the older generation of Suffrage workers had brought the Suffrage Amendment. The majority of the people who deserted came back later.

As far as money was concerned, the effect was magical. In some months during the picketing the receipts were double what they had been the corresponding months of the previous year when there had been no picketing. Once those receipts jumped as high as six times the normal amount. This was what happened in England during the militant period.

“So long as you send women to prison for asking for justice, so long will women be ready to go in such a cause.”

Anne Martin to the judge before whom she was tried.

After Judge Waddill’s decision that the commitment of the pickets to Occoquan was illegal, the pickets filed sixteen suits for damage. Eight of these were against Whittaker, Superintendent of the Workhouse at Occoquan, and his assistant, Captain Reams, on account of their brutal treatment of the women while at Occoquan Workhouse. They were filed in the United States Court for the Western District of Virginia at Richmond. The other eight were against the Commissioners of the District of Columbia and Superintendent Zinkham of the District Jail for the unlawful transfer of the pickets to the institution of Whittaker at Occoquan. These suits were filed in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia at Washington.

The appeals in the cases of two groups of women arrested August 23 and 28 came up in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on January 8, 1918, before Chief Justice Smyth, and Justices Robb and Van Orsdel. Matthew O’Brien, of Washington, and Dudley Field Malone, of New York, appeared for the Suffragists. Corporation Counsel Stevens conducted the case for the government.

“Suppose,” suggested Justice Robb, “some upholders of Billy Sunday should go out on the streets with banners on which were painted some of Billy’s catch phrases, and should stand with their backs to the fence, and a curious crowd gathered, some of whom created disorder and threw stones at the carriers of the banners. Who should be arrested, those who created the disorder, or the banner carriers?”

Mr. Stevens gave it as his opinion that both parties should be arrested.

“Did I make myself clear that the banner carriers were perfectly peaceful?” Justice Robb asked.

“When it is commonly known there is a forty-foot sidewalk there?” Justice Van Orsdel reinforced him.

“Well, then,” observed Attorney O’Brien, when he answered Mr. Stevens in his argument, “the honorable Justices obstruct traffic, according to learned counsel’s definition, when court adjourns, and they walk down the street together.”

On March 4, Judge Van Orsdel handed down the opinion, which was concurred in by the other two judges of the court, that in the case of those pickets who appealed, no information had been filed justifying their arrest and sentence. Since the offense of every other picket who was arrested was identical with that of these twelve who appealed their case, they were all illegally arrested, illegally convicted and illegally imprisoned. The Appellate Court thus reversed the decision of the District Police Court. In addition, it ordered the cases dismissed. All of the costs involved in the cases, it was decided, should be paid by the Court of the District of Columbia, for which an appropriation would have to be made by Congressional enactment.

Later, the case of Mrs. Harvey Wiley came up. It will be remembered that Mrs. Wiley was one of the forty-three women who picketed the President on November in the last picket line demonstration. She was sentenced to serve fifteen days in the District Jail. Dr. Wiley, her husband, appealed her case. Early in April the Court decided that there was no information filed justifying her arrest. So that she also was illegally arrested, illegally convicted, and illegally imprisoned.

Yet in spite of the brutalities to which the Courts sentenced the pickets, unconsciously they furthered the Suffrage cause. The women turned the Court sessions into Suffrage meetings. In defending their case at one of the early trials, the pickets, each taking up the story where the other left it, told the entire history of the Suffrage movement. Crowds thronged the Court. People attended these trials who had never been to a Suffrage meeting in their lives.

Evening at Occoquan. Rain pelts the workhouse roof. The prison matrons are sewing together for the Red Cross. The women prisoners are going to bed in two long rows. Some of the Suffrage pickets lie reading in the dim light. Through the dark, above the rain, rings out a cry.

We listen at the windows. (Oh, those cries from punishment cells!) A voice calls one of us by name. “Miss Burns! Miss Burns! Will you see that I have a drink of water?” Lucy Burns arises; slips on the coarse blue prison gown. Over it her swinging hair, red-gold, throws a regal mantle.

She begs the night-watch to give the girl water. One of the matrons leaves her war-bandages; we see her hasten to the cell. The light in it goes out. The voice despairing cries: “She has taken away the cup and she will not bring me water.” Rain pours on the roof. The Suffragists lie awake. The matrons work busily for the Red Cross. Katherine Rolston Fisher, The Suffragist, October 17, 1917.

The preceding two chapters have been concerned mainly with the treatment of the pickets at the hands of the law. We now approach a much graver matter—their treatment at the hands of the prison authorities. This chapter describes what is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the United States. It is futile to argue that what happened in the District Jail and at Occoquan Workhouse, and later at the abandoned Workhouse, was unknown to the Administration. The Suffragists, indeed, published it to the entire country. That the treatment to which the pickets were subjected was the result of orders from above is almost demonstrable. It must be remembered that the officials who are responsible for what happened to the pickets—the three Commissioners who govern the District of Columbia, the police court judges, the Chief of Police, the warden of the jail, the superintendent of Occoquan Workhouse, are directly or indirectly answerable to the President.

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When the first pickets came out of prison (arrested on June 27, 1917), their spirit was that of women who have willingly gone to jail for a cause—and was in consequence entirely without self-pity.

In a speech at a breakfast tendered them in the garden at Headquarters, Mabel Vernon sounded this note:

I do not want any one here to think we have been martyrs because of this jail experience we have had. There was no great hardship connected with it. It was a very simple thing to do—to be imprisoned for three days, really two nights and a day. Do not think we have gone through any great sacrifices.

But I do not feel patient about this experience. I do not want to go back to jail, and I do not want others to go, because it should not be necessary.

The jail in which the women were first imprisoned was the conventional big white-washed octagonal building with wings at both sides. This was as filthy then as any place could be. The bathroom, with its shower was a damp, dank, dark place. The jail was filled with vermin and rats. Julia Emory said that, in the night, prisoners could actually hear the light cell chairs being moved, so big and strong were the rats. The prisoners complained so constantly that finally the prison officials put poison about; but this did not decrease them. Then they brought a dog, but the dog was apparently afraid of the rats. The girls used to hear the matrons telling visitors that they had got rid of the rats by means of this dog. One night, Julia Emory beat three rats in succession off her bed. Alice Paul says that among her group of jailed pickets was one whose shrieks nightly filled the jail as the rats entered her cell.

On July 17, however, when the sixteen women charged with obstructing traffic went to Occoquan Workhouse, things got much worse. Occoquan is charmingly situated, and, judged superficially, seems a model institution. It consists of a group of white buildings placed in a picturesque combination of cultivated fields with distant hills. All about lie the pleasant indications of rural life—crops; cows grazing; agricultural implements; even flower gardens. The District Jail cannot compare with it for charm of situation. It has not even a pretense of the meretricious effect of cleanliness which Occoquan shows. Nevertheless, no picket who went to Occoquan emerged without a sinister sense of the horror of the place. Lucy Burns, of whom it may almost be said that she knows no fear, confesses that at Occoquan she suffered with nameless and inexplicable terrors. This evidence is all the more strange because, I reiterate, Occoquan has an effect of cleanliness, of open air, of comfort; almost of charm. One reason for this sinister atmosphere was that no question the pickets put was ever answered directly. If they asked to see Superintendent Whittaker, he was always out—they could see him tomorrow. If they made a request, it would be granted to them in two days, or next week. The women’s ward was a long, clean, sunny, airy room with two rows of beds—like a hospital ward. Here they put colored prisoners to sleep in the same room with the Suffragists. Moreover, they set the Suffragists to paint the lavatories used by the colored women. The matron who handled the bedclothes was compelled to wear rubber gloves, but the Suffragists were permitted no such luxury—even in painting the lavatories. Indeed, often they slept in beds in which the blankets had not been changed or cleaned since the last occupant. It seemed a part of their premeditated system in the treatment of the Suffragists that they made them all undress in the same bathroom, and, without any privacy, take shower baths one after another.

The punishment cells, of which later we shall hear in reference to the Night of Terror, were in another building. These were tiny brick rooms with tiny windows, very high up.

A young relative of one of the jail officials, in the uniform of an officer of the United States Army, used to come into this building at night, and look in through the undraped grating of these cells. Once he unlocked the door, and came into a room where two young pickets were sleeping. “Are you a physician?” one of them had the presence of mind to ask.

He answered that he was not. She lay down, and covered her head with the bedclothes. Presently he left.

There were open toilets in all these cells, and they could only be flushed from the outside. It was necessary always to call a man guard to do this. They came, or not, as they pleased.

In the Suffragist of July 28, 1917, occurs the first account of Occoquan, by Mrs. Gilson Gardner. Mrs. Gardner, it will be remembered, was one of that early group of sixteen pickets whom the President pardoned after three days.

She says:

The short journey on the train was pleasant and uneventful. From the station at Occoquan the women sent to the Workhouse were put into three conveyances; two were filled with white women and the third with colored women. In the office of the Workhouse we stood in a line and one at a time were registered and given a number. The matron called us by number and first name to the desk. Money and jewelry were accounted for and put in the safe. We were then sent to the dining-room. The meal of soup, rye bread, and water was not palatable....

From the dining-room we were taken to the dormitory. At one end of the long room, a white woman and two colored women were waiting for us. Before these women we were obliged, one by one, to remove all our clothing, and after taking a shower bath, put on the Workhouse clothes. These clothes consisted of heavy unbleached muslin chemises and drawers, a petticoat made of ticking, and a heavy dark gray cotton mother hubbard dress. The last touch was a full, heavy, dark blue apron which tied around the waist. The stockings were thick and clumsy. There were not enough stockings, and those of us who did not have stockings during our sojourning there were probably rather fortunate. We were told to wear our own shoes for the time being, as they did not have enough in stock. The one small rough towel that was given to us we were told must be folded and tucked into our aprons. The prisoners were permitted to have only what they could carry.

The dormitory was clean and cool and we longed to go to bed, but we were told we must dress and go into the adjoining room where Superintendent Whittaker would see us. Mr. Whittaker brought with him a man whom we afterward learned was a newspaper man. The superintendent informed us that for about an hour we could do as we chose, and pointing to the piano said that we might play and sing. The piano was not unlocked while we were there, but that night no one had a desire to sing. Although Mr. Whittaker’s words were few and not unpleasant, we realized that our presence did not cause him either embarrassment or regret.

We were told that one dormitory was given up to colored women; in the other one, the one in which we were to sleep, there would be both colored and white women. We had asked to be allowed to have our toilet things and were told we could not have them until the next morning, that is, we would be permitted to have our combs and toothbrushes then. But we were not permitted to have these until Thursday. One woman told us we must not lend our comb to other prisoners and must not mingle with the colored women....

The days were spent in the sewing-room. We were permitted to talk in low tones, two or three being allowed to sit together. While we were there, the sewing was very light. We turned hems on sheets and pillow slips and sewed on the machine. There were both white and colored women working in the sewing-room. The work was monotonous and our clothing extremely heavy.

The great nervous strain came at meal time. All the women ate in one big room. The white women sat at one side. The meal lasted thirty and sometimes forty minutes. The food to us was not palatable, but we all tried to be sensible and eat enough to keep up our strength. The real problem, however, was not the food; it was the enforced silence. We were not allowed to speak in the dining-room, and after a conscientious effort to eat, the silent waiting was curiously unpleasant....

The use of the pencil is forbidden at all times. Each inmate is permitted to write but two letters a month, one to her family and one business letter. All mail received and sent is opened and read by one of the officials. Next to our longing for our own toilet articles was our desire for a pencil and a scrap of paper. Another rule which makes life in the Workhouse more difficult than life in the jail is that the Workhouse prisoners are not permitted to receive any food sent in from outside.

We found that the other prisoners were all amazed at the excessive sentences we had received. Old offenders, they told us, received only thirty days.

In the Suffragist of August 11, Doris Stevens, who was a member of the same group says:

No woman there will ever forget the shock and the hot resentment that rushed over her when she was told to undress before the entire company, including two negress attendants and a harsh-voiced wardress, who kept telling us that it was “after hours,” and they “had worked too long already today,” as if it were our fault that we were there. We silenced our impulse to resist this indignity, which grew more poignant as each woman nakedly walked across the great vacant space to the doorless shower....

“We knew something was goin’ to happen,” said one negro girl, “because Monday,” (we were not sentenced until Tuesday) “the clo’es we had on were took off us and we were given these old patched ones. We was told they wanted to take stock, but we heard they were being washed for you-all Suffragists.”

It will be remembered that this was that early group of pickets whom the President pardoned after the appeals of J. A. H. Hopkins, Dudley Field Malone, and Gilson Gardner. Before leaving they were taken to Superintendent Whittaker.

Asking for the attention of Miss Burns and the rest of them, he said:

“Now that you are going, I have something to say to you.” And turning to Miss Burns, he continued, “And I want to say it to you. The next lot of women who come here won’t be treated with the same consideration that these women were.”

Mrs. Virginia Bovee, an officer of Occoquan Workhouse, was discharged in September. At that time Lucy Burns filed charges with Commissioner Brownlow of the District of Columbia concerning conditions in the Workhouse. Evidence is submitted on Whittaker’s brutal treatment of other prisoners, but our concern must be with his treatment of the Suffragists.

Lucy Burns says in that complaint:

The hygienic conditions have been improved at Occoquan since a group of Suffragists were imprisoned there. But they are still bad. The water they drink is kept in an open pail, from which it is ladled into a drinking cup. The prisoners frequently dip the drinking cup directly into the pail.

The same piece of soap is used for every prisoner. As the prisoners in Occoquan are sometimes afflicted with disease, this practice is appallingly negligent.

Mrs. Bovee’s affidavit reads in part:

The blankets now being used in the prison have been in use since December without being washed or cleaned. Blankets are washed once a year. Officers are warned not to touch any of the bedding. The one officer who has to handle it is compelled by the regulations to wear rubber gloves while she does so. The sheets for the ordinary prisoners are not changed completely, even when one has gone and another takes her bed. Instead, the top sheet is put on the bottom, and one fresh sheet given them. I was not there when these Suffragists arrived, so I do not know how their bedding was arranged. I doubt whether the authorities would have dared to give them one soiled sheet.

The prisoners with diseases are not always isolated, by any means. In the colored dormitory there are now two women in advanced stages of consumption. Women suffering from syphilis, who have open sores, are put in the hospital. But those whose sores are temporarily healed are put in the same dormitory with the others. There have been several such in my dormitory.

When the prisoners come, they must undress and take a shower bath. For this they take a piece of soap from a bucket in the storeroom. When they have finished, they throw the soap back in the bucket. The Suffragists are permitted three showers a week, and have only these pieces of soap which are common to all inmates. There is no soap at all in the washrooms.

The beans, hominy, rice, corn meal (which is exceedingly coarse, like chicken feed), and cereal have all had worms in them. Sometimes the worms float on top of the soup. Often they are found in the corn bread. The first Suffragists sent the worms to Whittaker on a spoon. On the farm is a fine herd of Holsteins. The cream is made into butter, and sold to the tuberculosis hospital in Washington. At the officers’ table, we have very good milk. The prisoners do not have any butter, or sugar, and no milk except by order of the doctor.

As time went on and great numbers of pickets were arrested, more and more indignities were put on them. They were, in every sense, political prisoners, and were entitled to the privileges of political prisoners. In all countries distinction is made in the treatment of political prisoners. Of course, the hope of the Administration was that these degrading conditions would discourage the picketing, and, of course, the results were—as has happened in the fight for liberty during the whole history of mankind—that more and more women came forward and offered themselves.

In the Suffragist for October 13, 1917 (“From the Log of a Suffrage Picket”), Katherine Rolston Fisher writes the following:

Upon entering Occoquan Workhouse, we were separated from the preceding group of Suffragists. Efforts were made by the officers to impress us by their good will towards us. Entirely new clothing, comfortable rooms in the hospital, and the substitution of milk and buttered toast for cold bread, cereal, and soup, ameliorated the trials of the table. The head matron was chatty and confidential. She told us of the wonderful work of the superintendent in creating these institutions out of the wilderness and of the kindness shown by the officers to inmates. She lamented that some of the other Suffragists did not appreciate what was done for them....

“Why are we segregated from all the white prisoners?” I asked the superintendent of the Workhouse. Part of the time we were not segregated from the colored prisoners, a group of whom were moved into the hospital and shared with us the one bathroom and toilet. “That is for your good and for ours,” was the bland reply....

That was quite in the tone of his answer to another inquiry made when the superintendent told me that no prisoner under punishment—that is, in solitary confinement—was allowed to see counsel. “Is that the law of the District of Columbia?” I inquired. “It is the law here because it is the rule I make,” he replied.

We learned what it is to live under a one-man law. The doctor’s orders for our milk and toast and even our medicine were countermanded by the superintendent, so we were told. Our counsel after one visit was forbidden, upon a pretext, to come again.

On Tuesday, September 18, we were made to exchange our new gingham uniforms for old spotted gray gowns covered with patches upon patches; were taken to a shed to get pails of paint and brushes, and were set to painting the dormitory lavatories and toilets. By this time we were all hungry and more or less weak from lack of food. A large brush wet with white paint weighs at least two pounds. Much of the work required our standing on a table or stepladder and reaching above our heads. I think the wiser of us rested at every opportunity, but we did not refuse to work.

All this time we had been without counsel for eight days....

The food, which had been a little better, about the middle of the month reached its zenith of rancidity and putridity. We tried to make a sport of the worm hunt, each table announcing its score of weevils and worms. When one prisoner reached the score of fifteen worms during one meal, it spoiled our zest for the game....

We had protested from the beginning against doing any manual labor upon such bad and scanty food as we received....

Mrs. Kendall, who was the most emphatic in her refusal, was promptly locked up on bread and water. The punishment makes a story to be told by itself. It clouded our days constantly while it lasted and while we knew not half of what she suffered....

All this time—five days—Mrs. Kendall was locked up, her pallid face visible through the windows to those few Suffragists who had opportunity and ventured to go to her window for a moment at the risk of sharing her fate.

Ada Davenport Kendall’s story runs as follows:

For stating that she was too weak from lack of food to scrub a floor and that the matron’s reply that there was no other work was “hypocritical,” Mrs. Kendall was confined in a separate room for four days for profanity. She was refused the clean clothing she should have on the day of her confinement, and was therefore forced to wear the same clothing for eleven days. She was refused a nightdress, or clean linen for the bed in the room. The linen on her bed was soiled from the last occupant and Mrs. Kendall lay on top of it all. The only toilet accommodation consisted of an open pail. Mrs. Kendall was allowed no water for toilet purposes during the four days, and was given three thin slices of bread and three cups of water a day. The water was contained in a small paper cup, and on several occasions it seeped through.

Friends of Mrs. Kendall’s obtained permission to see her. She was then given clean clothing, and taken from the room in which she was in solitary confinement. When the door opened upon her visitors, she fainted.

Aroused by an inspection of samples of food smuggled out to him by Suffrage prisoners, Dr. Harvey Wiley, the food expert, requested the Board of Charities to permit him to make an investigation of the food. “A Diet of Worms won one revolution, and I expect it will win another,” promulgated Dr. Wiley.

---

The most atrocious experience of the pickets at Occoquan was, however, on the night known to them generally as The Night of Terror. This happened to that group of Suffragists who were arrested on November 14, sentenced to Occoquan, and who immediately went on hunger-strike as a protest against not being treated as political prisoners and as the last protest they could make against their imprisonment. Whittaker was away when they arrived, and they were kept in the office which was in the front room of one of the small cottages. Out of these groups there always evolved a leader. If the group included the suave and determined Lucy Burns, she inevitably took command. If it included Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, equally velvet-voiced and immovable, she inevitably became spokesman. This group included both. The Suffragists were then still making their demand to be treated as political prisoners, and so, when the woman at the desk—a Mrs. Herndon—attempted to ask the usual questions, Mrs. Lewis, speaking for the rest, refused to answer them, saying that she would wait and talk to Mr. Whittaker.

“You will sit here all night then,” said Mrs. Herndon.

The women waited for hours.

Mrs. Lewis always describes what follows as a sinister reversal of a French tale of horror she read in her girlhood. In that story, people began mysteriously to disappear from a group. One of them would be talking one instant—the next he was gone; the space where he stood was empty. In this case, slowly, silently, and in increasing numbers, men began to appear from outside, three and then four.

Mrs. Herndon again tried to get the Suffragists to register, but they made no reply.

“You had better answer up, or it will be the worse for you,” said one man.

“I will handle you so you’ll be sorry you made me,” said another.

The Suffragists did not reply. Mrs. Nolan says that she could see that Mrs. Herndon was afraid of what was going to happen.

Suddenly the door burst open, and Whittaker came rushing in from a conference, it was later discovered, of the District of Columbia Commissioners at the White House—followed by men—more and more of them. The Suffragists had been sitting or lying on the floor. Mrs. Lewis stood up.

“We demand to be treated as political pris——” she began. But that was as far as she got.

“You shut up! I have men here glad to handle you!” Whittaker said. “Seize her!”

Two men seized Mrs. Lewis, dragged her out of the sight of the remaining Suffragists.

In the meantime, another man sprang at Mrs. Nolan, who, it will be remembered, was over seventy years old, very frail and lame. She says:

I am used to being careful of my bad foot, and I remember saying: “I will come with you; do not drag me. I have a lame foot.” But I was dragged down the steps and away into the dark. I did not have my feet on the ground. I guess that saved me.

It was black outside, and all Mrs. Nolan remembers was the approach to a low, dark building from which, made brilliantly luminous by a window light, flew the American flag.

As Mrs. Nolan entered the hall, a man in the Occoquan uniform, brandishing a stick, called, “Damn you! Get in there!” Before she was shot through this hall, two men brought in Dorothy Day,—a very slight, delicate girl; her captors were twisting her arms above her head. Suddenly they lifted her, brought her body down twice over the back of an iron bench. One of the men called: “The damned Suffrager! My mother ain’t no Suffrager! I will put you through hell!” Then Mrs. Nolan’s captors pulled her down a corridor which opened out of this room, and pushed her through the door.

Back of Mrs. Nolan, dragged along in the same way, came Mrs. Cosu, who, with that extraordinary thoughtfulness and tenderness which the pickets all developed for each other, called to Mrs. Nolan: “Be careful of your foot!”

The bed broke Mrs. Nolan’s fall, but Mrs. Cosu hit the wall. They had been there but a few minutes when Mrs. Lewis, all doubled over like a sack of flour, was thrown in. Her head struck the iron bed, and she fell to the floor senseless.

The other women thought she was dead. They wept over her.

Ultimately, they revived Mrs. Lewis, but Mrs. Cosu was desperately ill all night, with a heart attack and vomiting. They were afraid that she was dying, and they called at intervals for a doctor, but although there was a woman and a man guard in the corridor, they paid no attention. There were two mattresses and two blankets for the three, but that was not enough, and they shivered all night long.

In the meantime, I now quote from Paula Jakobi’s account. We go back to that moment in the detention room when they seized Mrs. Lewis.

“And seize her!” rang in my ears, and Whittaker had me by the arm. “And her!” he said, indicating Dorothy Day. Miss Day resisted. Her arm was through the handle of my bag. Two men pulled her in one direction, while two men pulled me in the opposite direction. There was a horrible mix-up. Finally, the string of the bag broke. Two men dragged her from the room. I saw it was useless to resist. The man at the right of me left me, and tightly grasped in the clutches of the man at my left, I was led to a distant building.

When Julia Emory, who was rushed along just after Mrs. Jakobi, entered the building, the two guards were smashing Dorothy Day’s back over the back of a chair; she was crying to Paula Jakobi for help; and Mrs. Jakobi, struggling with the other two guards, was trying to get to her. They placed Julia Emory in a cell opposite Lucy Burns.

Of the scene in the reception room of the Workhouse, Mrs. John Winters Brannan, who saw all this from a coign of vantage which apparently surveyed the whole room, says:

I firmly believe that, no matter how we behaved, Whittaker had determined to attack us as part of the government plan to suppress picketing.... Its (the attack’s) perfectly unexpected ferocity stunned us. I saw two men seize Mrs. Lewis, lift her from her feet, and catapult her through the doorway. I saw three men take Miss Burns, twisting her arms behind her, and then two other men grasp her shoulders. There were six to ten guards in the room, and many others collected on the porch—forty to fifty in all. These all rushed in with Whittaker when he first entered.

Instantly the room was in havoc. The guards brought from the male prison fell upon us. I saw Miss Lincoln, a slight young girl, thrown to the floor. Mrs. Nolan, a delicate old lady of seventy-three, was mastered by two men. The furniture was overturned, and the room was a scene of havoc.

Whittaker in the center of the room directed the whole attack, inciting the guards to every brutality.

The whole group of women were thrown, dragged, and hurled out of the office, down the steps, and across the road and field to the Administration Building, where another group of bullies was waiting for us. The assistant superintendent, Captain Reams, was one of these, armed with a stick which he flourished at us, as did another man. The women were thrown roughly down on benches.

In the meantime, Lucy Burns, fighting desperately all the way, had been deposited in a cell opposite.

As always, when she was arrested, she took charge of the situation. In her clear, beautiful voice, she began calling the roll one name after another, to see if all were there and alive. The guards called, “Shut up!” but she paid no more attention to them than if they had not spoken. “Where is Mrs. Lewis?” she demanded. Mrs. Cosu answered: “They have just thrown her in here.” The guard yelled to them that if they spoke again, he would put them in strait-jackets. Mrs. Nolan and Mrs. Cosu were so terrified that they kept still for a while.

But Lucy Burns went right on calling the roll. When she refused—at the guard’s orders—to stop this, they handcuffed her wrists and fastened the handcuffs above her head to the cell door. They threatened her with a buckle gag. Little Julia Emory could do nothing to help, of course, but she put her hands above her head in exactly the same position and stood before her door until they released Lucy Burns. Lucy Burns wore her handcuffs all night.

Mrs. Henry Butterworth, for some capricious reason, was taken away from the rest, and placed in a part of the jail where there were only men. They told her that she was alone with the men, and that they could do what they pleased with her. Her Night of Terror was doubly terrifying—with this menace hanging over her.

For a description of the rest of that night, and of succeeding days, I quote the account of Paula Jakobi:

I didn’t know at the time what happened to the other women. I only knew that it was hell let loose with Whittaker as the instigator of the horror. In the ante-chamber to the cells, some of the guards were standing, swinging night sticks in a menacing manner. We were thrust into cells; the ventilators were closed. The cells were bitter cold. There was an open toilet in the corner of the cell, which was flushed from the outside. We had to call a guard who had previously attacked us to flush them. The doors were barred, there were no windows. The doors were uncurtained, so that through the night the guard could look into the cell. There was no light in the room, only one in the corridor. Three of us were thrown into every cell. There was a single bed in each room and a mattress on the floor. The floors were filthy as were the blankets.

In the morning, we were roughly told to get up. No facilities for washing were given us. Faint, ill, exhausted, we were ordered before the superintendent. It was eight o’clock and we had had no food since the preceding day at twelve. None had been offered us, nor were any inquiries made about our physical condition. Whittaker asked my name; then whether I would go to the Workhouse and obey prison regulations and be under the care of the ladies. I told him I would not. I would not wear prison clothes, and I demanded the rights of political prisoners. He interrupted me with, “Then you’ll go to the male hospital”—he emphasized the “male”—“and be in solitary confinement. Do you change your mind?” I said “No!” and was taken to the hospital by a trusty.

Then followed a series of bullying, of privileges, and of curtailing them. The first day at three o’clock milk and bread were brought to the room. After I refused it, it was taken away. That evening some more milk and bread were brought. These were left in the room all night. The second day toast and milk were brought. These were left in the room all night. The third day the matron suggested an egg and coffee for breakfast. I told her I did not want anything to eat. This day at lunch time fried chicken and salad were brought in. Later Miss Burns passed a note which read, “I think this riotous feast which has just passed our doors is the last effort of the institution to dislodge all of us who can be dislodged. They think there is nothing in our souls above fried chicken.” No matter what was offered, a glass of milk and piece of bread were left from meal to meal, and once bouillon and bread was left.

The fast did not make me ill at this time, only weak. The second day there was slight nausea and headache; the third day, fever and dizziness; the fever remained, causing very dry, peeling skin and swollen lips. By the third day, I was rather nervous—there were no other manifestations except increasing weakness and aphasia. I could remember no names, and it was quite impossible to read.

We were summoned so often and so suddenly from our rooms to see Whittaker, or to have the rooms changed—we were in the same room scarcely two consecutive nights—that one was never sure when she would be searched and when the few remaining treasures would be taken from us, so I hid stubs of pencils in my pillow, ripping the ticking with a hairpin, and one pencil in the hem of the shade. The dimes and nickels for the trusty I placed in a row over the sill of the door, paper behind the steam radiator pipes. It was difficult to find places to secrete anything, for the only furniture in the room was a single iron bed and one chair. Notes to one another are passed by tapping furtively on the steampipe running through the walls; then, when the answer comes, passing the note along the pipe. Everything is conducive to concealment.

The second day our writing materials were asked for (I did not give up those I had hidden). Then we were summoned to Whittaker—each of the hunger-strikers. (There were now seventeen of us.) He had a stenographer with him. He asked my name; then, “Are you comfortable?” His manner was quite changed; he was as civil as he could be. I answered him with the little formula, “I demand the right to be treated as a political prisoner. I am now treated as a common criminal.”

He: If you have steak and vegetables, will you go to the Workhouse and obey rules?

I: I will not.

He: If you will promise not to picket any more and to leave Washington soon, I will let you go without paying any fine and I’ll take you to Washington in my own automobile.

I: I will not promise this.

He: What is it you want?

I: The right to keep my own clothes, to have nourishing food permanently, which will not be taken away and given back at your will, the right to send and receive mail, and above all, the right to see counsel and have fresh air exercise.

He: If I grant you all these things, will you go to the Workhouse and work?

I: I will not.

He: Are the matrons and interns kind to you?

I: Yes.

He: What food is left in your room?

I: Chiefly bread and milk, once bouillon and toast.

He: Anything else?

I: No.

He: Have you any request?

I: That I receive the rights due me—those of a political prisoner.

Whittaker will use these interviews in expurgated form, I am sure. When I said anything which did not please him, he said to the stenographer, “You needn’t put that down.”

After the above interviews, he absolutely refused to let our counsel who came from Washington see us.

After my visit to Whittaker this day, I was summoned to the Workhouse. My clothes were listed—those I wore—before two matrons, just as those of criminals are listed; then I was obliged to undress before the two matrons and two trusties, walk to a shower, take a bath, and dress before them in prison clothes. The clothes were clean, but so coarse that they rubbed my skin quite raw. They have two sizes of shoes for the prisoners—large and small.

The only message which reached me from “outside” was a telegram from a friend asking that I allow my bail to be paid. I answered that I would not. This day six girls in our section were taken away “somewhere.” The sense of some unknown horror suddenly descending is the worst of the whole situation. Whittaker’s suave manner was interrupted for a moment this day when he came into the hospital ward and saw Julia Emory in the corridor—she was returning from the wash-room—and taking Julia by the neck he threw her into her cell. “Get in there,” he snarled, or words to that effect.... I was coming out of an adjoining wash-room at the moment, and saw this.

This night I had a most vivid dream. The interne brought in a rabbit. He held it up and told us he would cook it for us. The women—our women—did not wait for him to cook it, but rushed toward him, pulled it from his hands, and tore the living animal into pieces and ate it. I awoke, sobbing.

Next evening, there was great commotion in our corridor. The doors, which did not lock, were held; there were rapid footsteps to and fro. Distressed sounds came from the room adjoining mine, and soon it was evident that Miss Burns was being forcibly fed. Half an hour earlier, her condition was found normal by the doctor, who strolled casually through our ward, looked in at the door, nodded, felt her pulse, and went on. Now Miss Burns was being forcibly fed. What could it mean? Then there were more hurried steps, and the men went to Mrs. Lewis’s room. Fifteen minutes later, they were both hurried into an ambulance and taken away—no one told us where. We had visions accentuated that night, of being separated, hurried out of sight to oblivion, somewhere away from every one we knew.

A detachment of the United States Marines guarded the place. The prisoners were kept incommunicado. That meant, not only were they not allowed visitors, but they were not allowed counsel—and counsel is one of the inalienable rights of citizenship.

In the meantime at Headquarters, the Suffragists, under the leadership of Doris Stevens, now that Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were both in prison, could not even find out where the prisoners were. They had received a jail sentence but were not in the District Jail. Katherine Morey, in great anxiety in regard to her mother, who was one of the prisoners, came from Boston to see her. She could not even locate her. Finally, she hit on the device of meeting the morning train, on which released prisoners always came from Occoquan, and one of them informed her that her mother was at the Workhouse.

In the meantime, sixteen of the women had gone on a hunger-strike. They were committed to Occoquan on Wednesday, November 14. By the following Sunday, Superintendent Whittaker became alarmed. He declared he would not forcibly feed any of them unless they signed a paper saying that they themselves were responsible for any injury upon their health. Of course, they all refused to do this, whereupon Superintendent Whittaker said: “All right, you can starve.” However, by Sunday night, he was a little shaken in this noble resolution. He went to Mrs. Lewis, and asked her what could be done. Mrs. Lewis answered that all they asked was to be treated as political offenders, which provided for exercise, receiving of mail and visitors, buying food and reading matter. He asked her to write this statement out in his name, as though he demanded it. On Monday he brought the statement to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia. Commissioner Gardner gave out a statement that such demands would never be granted.

In the meantime too, Matthew O’Brien, the counsel for the Woman’s Party, succeeded in getting an order from the Court which admitted him to Occoquan. He saw Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Brannan, and Miss Burns once; but afterwards in spite of his Court order, they refused him admission.

It had been part of the system in attempting to lower Miss Burns’s morale to take her clothes away from her. When Mr. O’Brien visited Miss Burns she was lying on a cot in a dark cell, wrapped in blankets. He came back to Headquarters filled with admiration for her extraordinary spirit. He said that she was as much herself as if they were talking in the drawing-room of Cameron House. Mrs. Nolan, released at the end of her six day sentence, also brought the news of what happened back to Headquarters. These were the things that made the Suffragists determine on habeas corpus proceedings. Mr. O’Brien applied to the United States District Court at Richmond for this writ. It was granted returnable on November 27. Mr. O’Brien, however, afraid that, in combination with the indignities to which they were being submitted, the women would collapse from starvation, made another journey to Judge Waddill, who set the hearing forward to the 23rd.

The next step was serving the writ on Superintendent Whittaker. This was done by a ruse. On the night of the 21st, Mr. O’Brien called at Superintendent Whittaker’s home. He was told that the Superintendent was not there. Mr. O’Brien went not far away, and telephoned that he would not return until the morning. Then he returned immediately to Superintendent Whittaker’s home, found him there, of course, and served the papers.

In the meantime, Superintendent Whittaker began to fear that Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and Lucy Burns would die. Unknown to the other prisoners—and thereby causing them the most intense anguish—he had them taken to the hospital of the District Jail. They had been forcibly fed at Occoquan, and the feeding was continued at the jail.

Mrs. Lewis writes:

I was seized and laid on my back, where five people held me, a young colored woman leaping upon my knees, which seemed to break under the weight. Dr. Gannon then forced the tube through my lips and down my throat, I gasping and suffocating with the agony of it. I didn’t know where to breathe from, and everything turned black when the fluid began pouring in. I was moaning and making the most awful sounds quite against my will, for I did not wish to disturb my friends in the next room. Finally the tube was withdrawn. I lay motionless. After a while I was dressed and carried in a chair to a waiting automobile, laid on the back seat, and driven into Washington to the jail hospital. Previous to the feeding I had been forcibly examined by Dr. Gannon, I struggling and protesting that I wished a woman physician.

Lucy Burns was fed through the nose. Her note, smuggled out of jail, is as follows:

Wednesday, 12 M. Yesterday afternoon at about four or five, Mrs. Lewis and I were asked to go to the operating room. Went there and found our clothes. Told we were to go to Washington. No reason, as usual. When we were dressed Dr. Gannon appeared, said he wished to examine us. Both refused. Were dragged through halls by force, our clothing partly removed by force, and we were examined, heart tested, blood pressure and pulse taken. Of course such data was of no value after such a struggle. Dr. Gannon told me that I must be fed. Was stretched on bed, two doctors, matron, four colored prisoners present, Whittaker in hall. I was held down by five people at legs, arms, and head. I refused to open mouth, Gannon pushed the tube up left nostril. I turned and twisted my head all I could, but he managed to push it up. It hurts nose and throat very much and makes nose bleed freely. Tube drawn out covered with blood. Operation leaves one very sick. Food dumped directly into stomach feels like a ball of lead. Left nostril, throat, and muscles of neck very sore all night. After this I was brought into the hospital in an ambulance. Mrs. Lewis and I placed in same room. Slept hardly at all.

This morning Dr. Ladd appeared with his tube. Mrs. Lewis and I said we would not be forcibly fed. Said he would call in men guards and force us to submit. Went away and we not fed at all this morning. We hear them outside now cracking eggs.

We resume Paula Jakobi’s account:

We were summoned two days later to appear at Alexandria jail next day, Friday of that week—that would make nine days spent in the Workhouse.

A writ of habeas corpus had been issued for our unjust imprisonment at Occoquan when we had been sentenced to Washington jail. This day I fainted. It was now seven and a half days since I had started hunger-striking. Three young doctors came in to have a look at the hunger-strikers. They did not take our pulse; they just gazed and departed. Later in the day, I was told that I could not go to court next day if I did not eat, as they would not take the responsibility for my trip. They prepared to forcibly feed me. I concluded to eat voluntarily, since I had to break my fast, so that evening I had a baked potato and a baked apple. Next morning I ate no breakfast, but was threatened with forcible feeding at noon if I did not eat, so I ate again.

The next day we were taken to Alexandria Court House. There we found out why Miss Burns and Mrs. Lewis had been taken away from Occoquan. It was to prevent their appearance at Court, although it was shown that Whittaker had been removed after he had received the writ of habeas corpus. Our counsel pleaded for their appearance in Court. The warden of the Washington jail, where they now were, was so solicitous for their health that he feared to move them. Mr. Dudley Field Malone asked him whether they were being forcibly fed. The warden replied that they were. “How many men does it take to hold Miss Burns?” Mr. Malone quietly questioned, “while she is being forcibly fed?” Zinkham answered, “Four.” “Then, your Honor,” asked Mr. Malone, “don’t you think that if it takes four men to hold Miss Burns to give her forcible feeding, she is strong enough to appear in Court?”

Next day, both Mrs. Lewis and Miss Burns were at the trial.

It was found that our detention in the Workhouse was illegal and we were given our freedom on parole. I refused to accept it, and with twenty-two other prisoners was taken to Washington jail to finish my term of imprisonment.

The Suffragists were brought from Occoquan to the Court on November 23, according to schedule. Their condition was shocking. They all showed in their pallor and weakness the effect of the brutal rÉgime to which they had been subjected. The older women could hardly walk, and were supported by their younger and stronger companions. When they reached their chairs, they lay back in them, utterly worn out. Mrs. John Winters Brannan collapsed, and had to be taken from the Courtroom.

As Paula Jakobi has stated, Judge Waddill decided that the thirty-one Suffragists had been illegally committed to Occoquan Workhouse, and were entitled to liberation on bail pending an appeal or the return to the District Jail. Rose Winslow, it will be remembered, was tried at the same time as Alice Paul and received a sentence of seven months. Here are some extracts from the prison notes of Rose Winslow smuggled out to friends:

The women are all so magnificent, so beautiful. Alice Paul is as thin as ever, pale and large-eyed. We have been in solitary for five weeks. There is nothing to tell but that the days go by somehow. I have felt quite feeble the last few days—faint, so that I could hardly get my hair combed, my arms ached so. But today I am well again. Alice Paul and I talk back and forth though we are at opposite ends of the building and a hall door also shuts us apart. But occasionally—thrills—we escape from behind our iron-barred doors and visit. Great laughter and rejoicing!...

I told about a syphilitic colored woman with one leg. The other one was cut off, having rotted so that it was alive with maggots when she came in. The remaining one is now getting as bad. They are so short of nurses that a little colored girl of twelve, who is here waiting to have her tonsils removed, waits on her. This child and two others share a ward with a syphilitic child of three or four years, whose mother refused to have it at home. It makes you absolutely ill to see it. I am going to break all three windows as a protest against their boarding Alice Paul with these!

Dr. Gannon is chief of a hospital. Yet Alice Paul and I found we had been taking baths in one of the tubs here, in which this syphilitic child, an incurable, who has his eyes bandaged all the time, is also bathed. He has been here a year. Into the room where he lives came yesterday two children to be operated on for tonsillitis. They also bathed in the same tub. The syphilitic woman has been in that room seven months. Cheerful mixing, isn’t it? The place is alive with roaches, crawling all over the walls everywhere. I found one in my bed the other day....

In regard to the forcible feeding, she said:

Yesterday was a bad day for me in feeding. I was vomiting continually during the process. The tube has developed an irritation somewhere that is painful....

I fainted again last night. I just fell flop over in the bathroom where I was washing my hands, and was led to bed, when I recovered, by a nurse. I lost consciousness just as I got there again. I felt horribly faint until twelve o’clock, then fell asleep for awhile....

The same doctor feeds us both.... Don’t let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul vomits much. I do, too, except when I’m not nervous, as I have been every time but one. The feeding always gives me a severe headache. My throat aches afterward, and I always weep and sob, to my great disgust, quite against my will. I try to be less feeble-minded.

The final barbarity, however, in the treatment of the pickets came out in the experience of Alice Paul. Of course, the Administration felt that in jailing Alice Paul, they had the “ringleader.” That was true. What they did not realize, however, was that they had also jailed the inspired reformer, the martyr-type, who dies for a principle, but never bends or breaks. Miss Paul was arrested, it will be remembered, on October 20. The banner that she carried had, in the light of later events, a grim significance. It bore President Wilson’s own words:

Her sentence was seven months.

“I am being imprisoned,” said Miss Paul as she was taken from the District Police Court to the patrol wagon that carried her to jail, “not because I obstructed traffic, but because I pointed out to President Wilson the fact that he is obstructing the progress of justice and democracy at home while Americans fight for it abroad.”

When Alice Paul reached the jail, she found ten other Suffragists who had been brought there four days before from Occoquan. The air of this jail was stifling. There were about seventy-five women prisoners locked in three tiers of cells, and no window had been opened. The first appeal of the Suffragists to Alice Paul was for air.

Alice Paul, not committed to her cell yet, looked about her. High up she saw a little, round window with a rope hanging from it. She asked the matron why they did not open the window. “If we started opening windows, we should have to give the colored women more clothes,” the matron told her.

With her usual promptness and decision Alice Paul crossed the corridor and pulled the window open. There was no place to fasten the rope so she stood there holding it. The matron called for the guards. Two of them, unusually big and husky in comparison with Alice Paul’s ninety-five pounds, tried to take the rope away. It broke in her hands, the window closed, and the guards carried Miss Paul to her cell.

Alice Paul had brought, in the pocket of her coat, a volume of Browning. Before they closed the door, she threw it with what Florence Boeckel describes as a “desperate, sure aim,” through the window.

Miss Paul’s confrÈres say that it is amusingly symbolic of the perfection of her aim in all things that she hit one of the little panes of that far-away window. As the glass had not been repaired when the Suffragists left jail, they had the pure air they demanded. They said that the old-timers told them it was the first good air they had ever smelled in jail.

Alice Paul and Rose Winslow went on hunger-strike at once. This strike lasted three weeks and a day. The last two weeks they were forcibly fed. Both women became so weak that they were finally moved to the hospital.

Two or three alienists with Commissioner Gardner were brought in to examine Alice Paul. They usually referred to her in her presence as “this case.” One of the alienists, visiting her for the first time, said to the nurse, “Will this patient talk?” Alice Paul burst into laughter.

“Talk!” she exclaimed. “That’s our business to talk. Why shouldn’t we talk?”

“Well, some of them don’t talk, you know,” the alienist said.

“Well, if you want me to talk——” Weak as she was, Miss Paul sat up in bed and gave him a history of the Suffrage movement beginning just before the period of Susan B. Anthony and coming down to that moment. It lasted an hour. This alienist told the present writer that in his report to the authorities he said in effect:

“There is a spirit like Joan of Arc, and it is as useless to try to change it as to change Joan of Arc. She will die but she will never give up.”

Alice Paul says that she realized after a while that the questions of the alienists were directed towards establishing in her one of the well-known insane phobias—the mania of persecution. The inquiries converged again and again toward one point: “Did she think the President personally responsible for what was occurring?” As it happened her sincere conclusion in this matter helped in establishing their conviction of her sanity. She always answered that she did not think the President was responsible in her case—that he was perhaps uninformed as to what was going on.

Notwithstanding the favorable report of the alienist, after a while they removed Alice Paul from the hospital to the psychopathic ward. The conditions under which she lived here are almost incredibly sinister. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was hoped that they would affect Alice Paul’s reason; would certainly discredit the movement she led by making the world believe that she was mentally unbalanced. The room in which she was confined was big and square, pleasant enough. It had two windows, one of which they boarded up. They took off the wooden door and replaced it with a grated door. All day long patients—mentally unbalanced—came to that door and peered in at her. All night long, shrieks rang in her ears. Just before dawn would come an interval of quiet, then invariably it was broken by the long, harrowing, ululating cries of a single patient who kept this up for hours.

One of the alienists told the nurse to keep Miss Paul under observation. This observation consisted of flashing a light in her face every hour all night long. This—naturally—brought her with a start out of her sleep. She averaged, she says, only a little sleep between flashes. Of course one cannot but think that if she had been trembling on the verge of insanity, this process would certainly have pushed her over the edge.

The women nurses were almost unfailingly kind and thoughtful. One carried her kindness to the point of saying once, “You know, I don’t think you are insane.” Alice Paul says, it was staggering to have people express their friendliness for you by assuring you that they thought you were in your right mind. The doctor who forcibly fed her protested against having to do it. She was kept in the psychopathic ward a week incommunicado. When it was discovered where she was, Dudley Field Malone got her removed back to the hospital. Of course the forcible feeding went on.

In the files at Headquarters, there are dozens of affidavits made by the women who went to jail for picketing. It is a great pity that they cannot all be brought to the attention of a newly enfranchised sex. More burningly than anything else, these affidavits would show that sex what work lies before them, as far as penal institutions are concerned. I quote but one of them—that of Ada Davenport Kendall—because it sums up so succinctly and specifically the things that the prison pickets saw.

I went into Occoquan Prison as a prisoner on September 13, 1917.

I went in with the idea of obeying the regulations and of being a reasonable prisoner.

While there I saw such injustice, neglect, and cruelty on the part of the officials that I was forced into rebellion.

During my thirty days’ imprisonment I saw that commissioners and other officials made occasional visits but that the people in charge were usually warned and used much deception on the occasion of these visits. Specially prepared food replaced the wormy, fermenting, and meager fare of ordinary days. Girls too frail to work were hurried off the scrubbing and laundry gangs, and were found apparently resting. Sick women were hidden. Girls were hurried out of punishment cells as the visitors proceeded through the buildings, and were hidden in linen rooms or rooms of matrons already inspected.

While there I was treated with indignities. I was insulted by loud-mouthed officials at every turn, was stripped before other women, stripped of all toilet necessities, warm underwear, and ordinary decencies, was deprived of soap, tooth-brush, writing materials, and sufficient clothing and bed coverings. I was dressed first in clean garments, but the officials later punished me by putting me in unclean clothing and into a filthy bed in which a diseased negress had slept. In the hospital I was obliged to use the toilet which diseased negro women used, although there was a clean unused toilet in the building.

With the four other women who were sentenced with me I was fed food filled with worms and vile with saltpeter; food consisting of cast-off and rotting tomatoes, rotten horse meat and insect-ridden starches. There were no fats: no milk, butter, nor decent food of any kind. Upon this fare I was put at hard labor from seven a.m. until five p.m., with a short luncheon out. We were not allowed to use the paper cups we had brought, but were forced to drink from an open pail, from common cups.

After several days of driven labor this group was ordered to wash the floors and clean the toilets in the dormitory for the colored inmates. I protested for the whole group: said we would not do this dangerous work. For this I was put in solitary confinement which lasted for nearly seven days. Water was brought three times in the twenty-four hours, in a small paper cup. Three thin slices of bread were brought in twenty-four hours. Several times matrons with attendants came in and threatened me and threw me about. They searched me for notes or any writing, and threw me about and tore my clothes. I was allowed no water for toilet, and the only toilet convenience was an open bucket. No reading nor writing materials were allowed. Mail was cut off, as it was nearly all of the time while I was in prison. I was not allowed to see an attorney during this period. The bed had been slept in and was filthy, and there was no other furniture. After six days, influential friends were able to reach my case from outside the prison, and I was taken out of solitary confinement.

While in prison I heard men and women crying for help, and heard the sound of brutal lashes for long periods,—usually in the evening, after visitors were not expected.

I saw a woman have a hemorrhage from the lungs at nine in the morning—saw her lie neglected, heard the matrons refuse to call a doctor; and at eleven saw the woman carry a tobacco pail filled with water to scrub a floor; saw her bleeding while she was scrubbing, and when she cried a matron scolded her.

Saw a young dope fiend who was insane run out of a door, and heard a matron at the telephone order men to loose the bloodhounds upon this girl in the dark. Soon heard the dogs howling and running about.

Saw men with fetters on legs being driven to and from work.

Saw matrons choke and shake girls.

Was continually disgusted with lack of fair play in the institution.

Inmates were set to spy upon the others, and were rewarded or punished, as they played the game of the matrons.

Saw sick girls working in laundry. Saw diseased women sleeping, bathing, and eating with other inmates.

Saw armed men driving prisoners to work.

Saw milk and vegetables shipped to Washington, and rotting vegetables brought up from city market.

Saw unconscious women being brought from punishment cells.

Saw sick women refused medical help, and locked in the hospital without attendance to suffer. Saw them refused milk or proper food. Saw them refused rest, and once I saw the only medical attendant kick at a complaining inmate and slam the office door in her face.

Found that while the institution was supposed to build and improve inmates, they were ordinarily not allowed any recreation nor proper cleanliness. No classes were held, and no teaching of any sort was attempted. They were deprived of all parcels, and mail was usually withheld both coming and going. Visitors and attorneys were held up, and the prisoners usually absolutely shut away from help.

Found that no rules governing the rights of the prisoners had been codified by the Congressional Committee responsible for the institution, and was told by the superintendent that the prisoners had no rights and that the superintendent could treat the inmates as he liked.

Under that management, the matrons, while apparently ordinarily decent and often making a good first impression, were found to be brutal and unreasonable in their care of inmates.

The inmates were driven, abused, insulted. They were not allowed to speak in the dining-room or workrooms or dormitories. It was a place of chicanery, sinister horror, brutality, and dread.

No one could go there for a stay who would not be permanently injured. No one could come out without just resentment against any government which could maintain such an institution.

As has been told before Judge Waddill decided that the pickets had been illegally transferred from the Jail to Occoquan and they were sent back to the Jail. But between Occoquan and Jail occurred one night, in which the pickets were released in the custody of Dudley Field Malone, their counsel. They went immediately to Cameron House and broke their hunger-strike—spent the evening before the fire, talking and sipping hot milk. The next day they were committed to jail again and immediately started a new hunger-strike.

The government, however, undoubtedly appalled by the protests that came from all over the country, and perhaps, in addition, staggered at the prospect of forcibly feeding so many women, released them all three days later.

A mass-meeting was held at the Belasco Theatre early in December to welcome them. The auditorium was crowded and there was an overflow meeting of four thousand outside on the sidewalk. The police reserves, who had so often, in previous months, come out to arrest pickets, now came out to protect them from the thousands of people who gathered in their honor. Elsie Hill addressed this overflow meeting, which shivered in the bitter cold for over an hour, yet stayed to hear her story.

Inside, eighty-one women in white, all of whom had served in the Jail or the Workhouse, carrying lettered banners and purple, white, and gold banners, marched down the two center aisles of the theatre and onto the stage. There were speeches by Mrs. Thomas Hepburn, Dudley Field Malone, Mrs. William Kent, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, and Maud Younger. Then came an interval in which money was raised. Two touching details were sums of fifty cents and thirty cents pledged from Occoquan “because the Suffragettes helped us so much down there.” And Mrs. John Rogers, Jr., on behalf of the pickets gave “tenderest thanks for this help from our comrades in the Workhouse.”

Eighty-six thousand, three hundred and eighty-six dollars was raised in honor of the pickets.

On that occasion, prison pins which were tiny replicas in silver of the cell doors, were presented to each “prisoner of freedom.”

As Alice Paul appeared to receive her pin, Dudley Field Malone called, “Alice Paul,” and the audience leaped to its feet; the cheers and applause lasted until she disappeared at the back of the platform.

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It is a poignant regret to the present author that she cannot go further into conditions at the District Jail and at Occoquan in regard to the other prisoners there. But that is another story and must be told by those whose work is penal investigation. The Suffragists uncovered conditions destructive to body and soul; incredibly inhumane! One of the heart-breaking handicaps of the swift, intensive warfare of the pickets was that, although they did much to ameliorate conditions for their fellow prisoners, they could not make them ideal. Piteous appeal after piteous appeal came to them from their “comrades in the Workhouse.”

“If we go on a hunger-strike, will they make things better for us?” the other prisoners asked again and again.

“No,” the Suffragists answered sadly. “You have no organization back of you.”

However, in whatever ways were open to them the Suffragists offered counsel and assistance of all kinds.

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I asked one of the pickets once how the other prisoners regarded them. She answered: “They called us ‘the strange ladies.’”