The Story of the Woman's PartyGillmore, Inez Haynes
History
The Story of the Woman's Party
Gillmore, Inez Haynes
National Woman's Party; Paul, Alice, 1885-1977; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
After we had established our Headquarters we interviewed the _Kansas
City Star_, one of the largest papers in the State. After we had
talked with the associate editor and told him what our plan was,
that we intended to send a daily bulletin to the eight hundred and
eight papers in the State of Kansas, that we were going to every one
of the large towns in the State of Kansas, and have just as many
meetings as possible, and that we would distribute fifty thousand
pieces of literature, he looked at us and said, “Do you realize that
this will take eight men and eighteen stenographers?” I said,
“Possibly, but two women are going to do it.” And two women did do
it. The result of that interview was a two and a half column
editorial on the editorial page of the _Star_. It was the first time
that an interview with a woman had ever appeared on the editorial
page, and they told us that even Mr. Bryan had not received two and
a half columns on that page. All of our bulletins were very well
published after the _Kansas City Star_ had taken up our cause. The
women of Kansas co-operated with us, and the Progressives and
Republicans invited us to speak at their big rallies. Strange as it
may seem no one seemed to think we were on the wrong track but the
Democrats.
After we had been there for a while we found that the main contest
was the Senatorial fight, and so we figured out just how we could
keep Mr. Neely out of the Senate. Every one said that as Mr. Murdock
was running as a Progressive, and Mr. Curtis as a Republican, it
would divide the vote and give the victory to the Democratic Party.
We knew that Mr. Neely had received a very large vote from his own
district when he ran for Congress—over four thousand majority. So we
made up our minds that the thing to do was to reduce the vote in his
own district. We thought that this would help to defeat Mr. Neely,
and it did. He received from his own district a majority of only
eight hundred; that is, the Democratic majority went down to eight
hundred from four thousand. In many of the other districts, his
majority was still lower. Mr. Taggart, who had a three thousand
majority two years ago, went down to three hundred, and Miss Trax
was largely responsible for that. We have letters from many of the
leading politicians of Kansas saying that our work has been most
effective. We have felt all through Kansas that our work was very
encouraging.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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