Suffragists -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
And so on the third day of the riotous attacks, when it was clear that
the pickets would persist, the Chief of Police called at headquarters
to announce to Miss Paul that “orders have been changed and henceforth
women carrying banners will be arrested”
Meanwhile the pickets heard officers shout to civilian friends as they
passed—“Come back at four o’clock.”
Members of the daily mob announced at the noon hour in various nearby
restaurants that “the suffs will be arrested to-day at 4 o’clock.”
Four o’clock is the hour the Government clerks begin to swarm
homewards. The choice of this hour by the police to arrest the women
would enable them to have a large crowd passing the White House gates
to lend color to the fiction that “pickets were blocking the traffic.”
Throughout the earlier part of the afternoon the silent sentinels stood
unmolested, carrying these mottoes:
ENGLAND AND RUSSIA ARE ENFRANCHISING WOMEN IN WAR-TIME.
HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOB LIBERTY?
THE GOVERNMENT ORDERS OUR BANNERS DESTROYED BECAUSE THEY TELL THE
TRUTH.
At four o’clock the threatened arrests took place. The women arrested
were Miss Lavinia Dock of Pennsylvania, Miss Edna Dixon of Washington,
D. C., a young public school teacher; Miss Natalie Gray of Colorado,
Mrs. Win. Upton Watson and Miss Lucy Ewing of Chicago, and Miss
Catherine Flanagan of Connecticut.
Exactly forty minutes were allowed for the trial of these six women.
One police officer testified that they were “obstructing traffic.”
None of the facts of the hideous and cruel manhandling by the mobs and
police officers was allowed to be brought out. Nothing the women could
say mattered. The judge pronounced : “Thirty days in Occoquan workhouse
in lieu of a $10.00 fine.”
And so this little handful of women, practically all of them tiny and
frail of physique, began the cruel sentence of 30 days in the
workhouse, while their cowardly assailants were not even reprimanded,
nor were those who destroyed over a thousand dollars’ worth of banners
apprehended.
The riots had attracted sufficient attention to cause some anxiety in
Administration circles. Protests against us and others against the
rioters pressed upon them. Congress was provoked into a little
activity; activity which reflected some doubt as to the wisdom of
arresting women without some warrant in law.
Two attempts were made, neither of which was successful, to give the
Administration more power and more law.
Senator Culberson of Texas, Democrat, offered a bill authorizing
President Wilson at any time to prohibit any person from approaching or
entering any place—in short blanket authority granting the President or
his officials limitless power over the actions of human beings.
Realizing that this could be used to prohibit picketing the White House
we appeared before a committee hearing on the bill and spoke against
it. The committee did not have the boldness to report such a bill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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