“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.”
Mrs. S. H. B. Gray of Colorado.

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:
HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?
MR. PRESIDENT, YOU SAY “LIBERTY IS A FUNDAMENTAL
DEMAND OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.”
WE ADDRESS OUR DEMAND FOR THE BALLOT AT THIS TIME
IN NO NARROW, CAPTIOUS, OR SELFISH SPIRIT, BUT FROM
PUREST PATRIOTISM FOR THE HIGHEST GOOD OF EVERY CITIZEN
FOR THE SAFETY OF THE REPUBLIC AND AS A GLORIOUS EXAMPLE
TO THE NATIONS OF THE EARTH.

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.

221A 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.”

222The 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.

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:
GOVERNMENTS DERIVE THEIR JUST POWER FROM
THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.

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.

223Immediately 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 224arrested 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 225purpose 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.

226In 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.

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

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.”

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.

228As 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.

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 229attention 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:
TO ENVOY ROOT:
YOU SAY THAT AMERICA MUST THROW ITS MANHOOD IN THE
SUPPORT OF LIBERTY.
WHOSE LIBERTY?
THIS NATION IS NOT FREE. 20,000,000 WOMEN ARE DENIED
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES THE RIGHT TO
REPRESENTATION IN THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT.
TELL THE PRESIDENT THAT HE CANNOT FIGHT AGAINST
LIBERTY AT HOME WHILE HE TELLS US TO FIGHT FOR LIBERTY
ABROAD.
TELL HIM TO MAKE AMERICA FREE FOR DEMOCRACY BEFORE
HE ASKS THE MOTHERS OF AMERICA TO THROW THEIR SONS TO
THE SUPPORT OF DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE.
ASK HIM HOW HE COULD REFUSE LIBERTY TO AMERICAN
CITIZENS WHEN HE HAS FORCED MILLIONS OF AMERICAN BOYS
OUT OF THEIR COUNTRY TO DIE FOR LIBERTY.

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.

230The 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:
KAISER WILSON, HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YOUR SYMPATHY WITH
THE POOR GERMANS BECAUSE THEY WERE NOT SELF-GOVERNING?
TWENTY MILLION AMERICAN WOMEN ARE NOT SELF-GOVERNING.
TAKE THE BEAM OUT OF YOUR OWN EYE.

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, 231the 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 232times. 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 233instead 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 234routes, 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 235you 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 236liberties 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:
ENGLAND AND RUSSIA ARE ENFRANCHISING WOMEN IN WAR TIME;

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

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:
I TELL YOU SOLEMNLY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE CANNOT
POSTPONE JUSTICE ANY LONGER IN THESE UNITED
237STATES, AND I DON’T WISH TO SIT DOWN AND LET ANY MAN
TAKE CARE OF ME WITHOUT MY HAVING AT LEAST A VOICE IN
IT; AND IF HE DOESN’T LISTEN TO MY ADVICE I AM GOING TO
MAKE IT AS UNPLEASANT FOR HIM AS I CAN.

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 238of 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:
MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN BE DENIED A VOICE
IN THE GOVERNMENT THAT IS CONSCRIPTING THEIR SONS?

They were sent to Occoquan for sixty days.

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

239Dudley 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:
New York, N. Y., Sept. 7, 1917.

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 part............