THE EMPTY CUP

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.
WOMAN’S PARTY SONG
Composed in Prison by the Suffrage Pickets
SHOUT THE REVOLUTION OF WOMEN
Tune (Scotch):
“Charlie Is My Darling.”
Shout the Revolution
Of Women, of Women,
Shout the Revolution
Of Liberty.
262Rise, glorious women of the earth,
The voiceless and the free,
United strength assures the birth
Of True Democracy.
Invincible our army,
Forward, forward,
Strong in faith we’re marching
To Victory.
Shout the Revolution
Of Women, of Women,
Shout the Revolution
Of Liberty.
Men’s revolutions born in blood
But ours conceived in peace
We hold a banner for a sword,
’Til all oppression cease,
Prison, death defying,
Onward, onward,
Triumphant daughters marching
To Victory.

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.

When the first pickets came out of prison (arrested on June 27, 1917), their spirit was that of women who have 263willingly 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 264Jail 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.

265He 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 266hour 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:

267No 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 268prisoners 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 269course, 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 270weighs 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.

271Aroused 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.

272Mrs. 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 273they 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 274Dorothy 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: 275“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. 276Whittaker 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............