Jailed for Freedom Part 22

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That higher authorities than the Was.h.i.+ngton police were responsible for the amazing policy of rough house employed against the suffrage pickets has been suspected from the very beginning. Police power in Was.h.i.+ngton is sufficient to protect a handful of women against a whole phalanx of excited or inspired government clerks and uniformed hoodlums, if that power were used.

. . . In our nation's capital, women have been knocked down and dragged through the streets by government employees-including sailors in uniform. The police are strangely absent at such moments, as a rule, and arrive only in time to arrest a few women . . . .

Perhaps the inscriptions on the suffrage banners were not tactful. It is sometimes awkward indeed to quote the President's speeches after the speeches have "grown cold." Also a too vigorous use of the word "democracy" is distasteful to some government dignitaries, it seems. But right or wrong, the suffragists at Was.h.i.+ngton are ent.i.tled to police protection, even though in the minds of the Administration they are not ent.i.tled to the ballot.

Perhaps, even in America, we must have a law forbidding people to carry banners demanding what they consider their political rights. Such a law would, of course, prohibit political parades of all kinds, public ma.s.s meetings and other demonstrations of one set of opinions against another set. Such a law has been proposed by Senator Myers of Montana, the author of the latest censors.h.i.+p and anti-free speech bill. It may be necessary to pa.s.s the law, if it is also necessary that the public voice be stilled and the nation become dumb and subservient.

But until there is such a law . . . people must be protected while their actions remain within the law. If their opinions differ from ours, we must refrain from smas.h.i.+ng their faces, if a certain number of people believe that they have the right to vote we may either grant their claim or turn them sadly away, but we may not roll them into the gutter; if they see fit to tell us our professions of democracy are empty, we may smile sorrowfully and murmur a prayer for their ignorance but we may not pelt them with rotten eggs and fire a shot through the window of their dwelling; if, denied a properly

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dignified hearing, they insist upon walking through the streets with printed words on a saucy banner, we may be amazed at their zeal and pitiful of their bad taste, but even for the sake of keeping their accusations out of sight of our foreign visitors (whom we have trained to believe us perfect) we may not send them to jail . . . .

All this suffrage shouting in Was.h.i.+ngton has as its single object the attainment of President Wilson's material support for equal suffrage . . . .

President Wilson's word would carry the question into Congress . . .

Would there be any harm in letting Congress vote on a suffrage resolution? That would end the disturbance and it would make our s.h.i.+eld of national justice somewhat brighter.

It looks like President Wilson's move.

Between these opposing currents of protest and support, the Administration drifted helplessly. Unwilling to pa.s.s the amendment, it continued to send women to prison.

On the afternoon of September 4th, President Wilson led his first contingent of drafted "soldiers of freedom" down Pennsylvania Avenue in gala parade, on the first lap of their journey to the battlefields of France. On the same afternoon a slender line of women-also "soldiers of freedom"-attempted to march in Was.h.i.+ngton.

As they attempted to take up their posts, two by two, in front of the Reviewing Stand, opposite the White House, they were gathered in and swept away by the police like common street criminals- their golden banners scarcely flung to the breeze.

MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN BE DENIED A VOICE IN A GOVERNMENT WHICH IS CONSCRIPTING THEIR SONS?

was the offensive question on the first banner carried by Miss Eleanor Calnan of Ma.s.sachusetts and Miss Edith Ainge of New York.

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The Avenue was roped off on account of the parade. There was hardly any one pa.s.sing at the time; all traffic had been temporarily suspended, so there was none to obstruct. But the Administration's policy must go on. A few moments and Miss Lucy Branham of Maryland and Mrs. Pauline Adams of Virginia marched down the Avenue, their gay banners waving joyously in the autumn sun, to fill up the gap of the two comrades who had been arrested. They, too, were shoved into the police automobile, their banners still high and appealing, silhouetted against the sky as they were hurried to the police station.

The third pair of pickets managed to cross the Avenue, but were arrested immediately they reached the curb. Still others advanced. The crowd began to line the ropes and to watch eagerly the line of women indomitably coming, two by two, into the face of certain arrest. A fourth detachment was arrested in the middle of the Avenue on the trolley tracks. But still they came.

A few days later more women were sent to the workhouse for carrying to the picket line this question:

"President Wilson, what did you mean when you said: 'We have seen a good many singular things happen recently. We have been told there is a deep disgrace resting upon the origin of this nation.

The nation originated in the sharpest sort of criticism of public policy. We originated, to put it in the vernacular, in a kick, and if it be unpatriotic to kick, why then the grown man is unlike the child. We have forgotten the very principle of our origin if we have forgotten how to object, how to resist, how to agitate, how to pull down and build up, even to the extent of revolutionary practices, if it be necessary to readjust matters.

I have forgotten my history, if that be not true history."'

The Administration had not yet abandoned hope of removing the pickets. They persisted in their policy of arrests and longer imprisonments.

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Chapter 6

Prison Episodes

During all this time the suffrage prisoners were enduring the miserable and petty tyranny of the government workhouse at Occoquan. They were kept absolutely incommunicado. They were not allowed to see even their nearest relatives, should any be within reach, until they had been in the inst.i.tution two weeks.

Each prisoner was allowed to write one outgoing letter a month, which, after being read by the warden, could be sent or withheld at his whim.

All incoming mail and telegrams were also censored by the Superintendent and practically all of them denied the prisoners.

Superintendent Whittaker openly boasted of holding up the suffragists' mail: "I am boss down here," he said to visitors who asked to see the prisoners, or to send in a note. "I consider the letters and telegrams these prisoners get are treasonable. They cannot have them." He referred to messages commending the women for choosing prison to silence, and bidding them stand steadfast to their program.

Of course all this was done in the hope of intimidating not only the prisoners, but also those who came wanting to see them.

It was the intention of the women to abide as far as possible by the routine of the inst.i.tution, disagreeable and unreasonable as it was. They performed the tasks a.s.signed to them. They ate the prison food without protest. They wore the coa.r.s.e prison clothes.

But at the end of the first week of detention

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they became so weak from the shockingly bad food that they began to wonder if they could endure such a system. The petty tyrannies they could endure. But the inevitable result of a diet of sour bread, half-cooked vegetables, rancid soup with worms in it, was serious.

Finally the true condition of affairs trickled to the outside world through the devious routes of prison messengers.

Senator J. Hamilton Lewis, of Illinois, Democratic whip in the Senate, heard alarming reports of two of his const.i.tuents, Miss Lucy Ewing, daughter of Judge Ewing, niece of Adlai Stevenson, Vice-President in Cleveland's Administration, niece of James Ewing, minister to Belgium in the same Administration, and Mrs.

William Upton Watson of Chicago. He made a hurried trip to the workhouse to see them. The fastidious Senator was shocked-shocked at the appearance of the prisoners, shocked at the tale they told, shocked that "ladies" should be subjected to such indignities. "In all my years of criminal practice," said the Senator to Gilson Gardner, who had accompanied him to the workhouse, "I have never seen prisoners so badly treated, either before or after conviction." He is a gallant gentleman who would be expected to be uncomfortable when he actually saw ladies suffer. It was more than gallantry in this instance, however, for he spoke in frank condemnation of the whole "shame and outrage"

of the thing.

It is possible that he reported to other Administration officials what he had learned during his visit to the workhouse for very soon afterwards it was announced that an investigation of conditions in the workhouse would be held. That was, of course, an admirable maneuver which the Administration could make. "Is the President not a kind man? He pardoned some women. Now he investigates the conditions under which others are imprisoned.

Even though they are lawless women, he wishes them well treated."

It would sound "n.o.ble" to thousands.

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Immediately the District Commissioners announced this investigation, Miss Lucy Burns, acting on behalf of the National Woman's Party, sent a letter to Commissioner Brownlow. After summing up the food situation Miss Burns wrote:

When our friends were sent to prison, they expected the food would be extremely plain, but they also expected that . . enough eatable food would be given them to maintain them in their ordinary state of health. This has not been the case.

The testimony of one of the prisoners, Miss Lavinia Dock, a trained nurse, is extremely valuable on the question of food supplied at Occoquan. Miss Dock is Secretary of the American Federation of Nurses. She has had a distinguished career in her profession. She a.s.sisted in the work after the Johnstown flood and during the yellow fever epidemic in Florida. During the Spanish war she organized the Red Cross work with Clara Barton.

'I really thought,' said Miss Dock, when I last saw her, 'that I could eat everything, but here I have hard work choking down enough food to keep the life in me.'

I am sure you will agree with me that these conditions should be instantly remedied. When these and other prisoners were sentenced to prison they were sentenced to detention and not to starvation or semi-starvation.

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 prisoners in Occoquan are sometimes seriously afflicted with disease, this practice is appallingly negligent.

Concerning the general conditions of the person, I am enclosing with this letter, affidavit of Mrs. Virginia Bovee, an ex-officer of the workhouse . . . . The prisoners for whom I am counsel are aware that cruel practices go on at Occoquan. On one occasion they heard Superintendent Whittaker kicking a woman in the next room. They heard Whittaker's voice, the sound of blows, and the woman's cries.

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