California women had won suffrage planks from Republicans, Populists, and Prohibitionists, and the prospects looked bright. Rich women came to their aid, Mrs. Leland Stanford, with her railroad fortune, furnishing passes for all the speakers and organizers, and Mrs. Phoebe Hearst contributing $1,000 to their campaign. What warmed Susan's heart, however, was the spirit of the rank and file, the seamstresses and washerwomen, paying their two-dollar pledges in twenty-five-cent installments, the poorly clad women bringing in fifty cents or a dollar which they had saved by going without tea, and the women who had worked all day at their jobs, stopping at headquarters for a package of circulars to fold and address at night. The working women of California made it plain that they wanted to vote. Susan insisted upon carrying out what she called her "wild goose chase" over the state.[398] People crowded to hear her at farmers' picnics in the mountains, in schoolhouses in small towns, and in poolrooms where chalked up on the blackboard she often found "Welcome Susan B. Anthony." She was at home everywhere and ready for anything. The men liked her short matter-of-fact speeches and her flashes of wit. Her hopes were high that the friendly people she met would not fail to vote justice to women. She grew apprehensive, however, when the newspapers, pressured by their advertisers, one by one began to ignore woman suffrage. The Liquor Dealers' League had been sending letters to hotel owners, grocers, and druggists, as well as to saloons, warning that votes for women would mean prohibition and would threaten their livelihood. Word was spread that if women voted not one glass of beer would be sold in San Francisco. As in Kansas, liquor interests had persuaded naturalized Irish, Germans, and Swedes to oppose woman suffrage, so now in California, they appealed to the Chinese. On election day Susan was in San Francisco with Anna Howard Shaw and Ellen Sargent, watching and anxiously waiting for the returns. Telling the story of those last tense hours when women's fate hung in the balance, Anna Howard Shaw reported, "I shall always remember the picture of Miss Anthony and the wife of Senator Sargent wandering around the polls arm in arm at eleven o'clock at night, their tired faces taking on lines of deeper depression with every minute, for the count was against us.... When the final counts came in, we found that we had won the state from the north down to Oakland and from the south up to San Francisco; but there was not sufficient majority to overcome the adverse votes of San Francisco and Oakland. In San Francisco the saloon element and the most aristocratic section ... made an equal showing against us.... Every Chinese vote was against us."[399]