Jailed for Freedom Part 23

I lay these facts before you with the knowledge that you will be glad to have the fullest possible information given you concerning the inst.i.tution for whose administration you as Commissioner of the District of Columbia are responsible.'

Very respectfully yours, (Signed) LUCY BURNS.

Mrs. Bovee, a matron, was discharged from the workhouse because she tried to be kind to the suffrage prisoners. She also gave them warnings to guide them past the possible contamination of hideous diseases. As soon as she was discharged from the workhouse she went to the headquarters of the Woman's Party and volunteered to make an affidavit. The affidavit of Mrs. Bovee follows:

I was discharged yesterday as an officer of Occoquan workhouse.

For eight months I acted as night officer, with no complaint as to my performance of my duties. Yesterday Superintendent Whittaker told me I was discharged and gave me two hours in which to get out. I demanded the charges from the matron, Mrs. Herndon, and I was told that it was owing to something that Senator Lewis has said.

I am well acquainted with the conditions at Occoquan. I have had charge of all the suffragist prisoners who have been there. I know that their mail has been withheld from them. Mrs. Herndon, the matron, reads the mail, and often discussed it with us at the officers' table. She said of a letter sent to one of the suffragist pickets now in the workhouse, "They told her to keep her eyes open and notice everything. She will never get that letter," said Mrs. Herndon. ,Then she corrected herself, and added, "Not until she goes away." Ordinarily the mail not given the prisoners is destroyed. The mail for the suffragists is saved for them until they are ready to go away. I have Seen three of the women have one letter each, but that is all. The three were Mrs. Watson, Miss Ewing, and I think Miss Flanagan.

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

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of the bedding. The one officer who handles 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 is gone and another takes her bed. Instead the top sheet is put on the bottom, and one fresh sheet is given them. I was not there when these suffragists arrived, and 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 disease are not always isolated, by any means.

In the colored dormitory there are two women in the 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 store room. When they are 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 wash rooms.

The beans, hominy, rice, cornmeal (which is exceedingly coa.r.s.e, 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 cornbread. 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 b.u.t.ter and sold to the tuberculosis hospital in Was.h.i.+ngton. At the officers' table we have very good milk. The prisoners do not have any b.u.t.ter or sugar, and no milk except by order of the doctor.

Prisoners are punished by being put on bread or water, or by being beaten. I know of one girl who has been kept seventeen days on only water this month in the "b.o.o.by house." The ,same was kept nineteen days on water last year because she .beat Superintendent Whittaker when he tried to beat her.

Superintendent Whittaker or his son are the only ones who beat the girls. Officers are not allowed to lay a hand on them in punishment. I know of one girl beaten until the blood had to be scrubbed from her clothing and from the floor of the

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"b.o.o.by house." I have never actually seen a girl beaten, but I have seen her afterwards and I have heard the cries and blows.

Dorothy Warfield was beaten and the suffragists heard the beating.

(Signed) MRS. VIRGINIA BOVEE.

Subscribed and sworn to before me this day of disgust, 1917.

JOSEPH H. BATT, Notary Public.

While the Administration was planning an investigation of the conditions in the workhouse, which made it difficult for women to sustain health through a thirty day sentence, it was, through its police court, sentencing more women to sixty day sentences, under the same conditions. The Administration was giving some thought to its plan of procedure, but not enough to master the simple fact that women would not stop going to prison until something had been done which promised pa.s.sage of the amendment through Congress.

New forms of intimidation and hards.h.i.+p were offered by Superintendent Whittaker.

Mrs. Frederick Kendall of Buffalo, New York, a frail and highly sensitive woman, was put in a "punishment cell" on bread and water, under a 'charge of "impudence." Mrs. Kendall says that her impudence consisted of "protesting to the matron that scrubbing floors on my hands and knees was too severe work for me as I had been unable for days to eat the prison food. My impudence further consisted in asking for lighter work."

Mrs. Kendall was refused the clean clothing she should have had the day she was put in solitary confinement and was thus forced to wear the same clothing eleven days. She was refused a nightdress or clean linen for the cot. Her only toilet accommodations was an open pail. For four days she was allowed no water for toilet purposes., Her diet consisted of three thin slices of bread and three cups of water, carried to her in a

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paper cup which frequently leaked out half the meager supply before it got to Mrs. Kendall's cell.

Representative and Mrs. Charles Bennet Smith, of Buffalo, friends of Mrs. Kendall, created a considerable disturbance when they learned of this cruel treatment, with the result that Mrs.

Kendall was finally given clean clothing and taken from her confinement. When she walked from her cell to greet Mrs.

Genevieve Clark Thompson, daughter of Champ Clark, Speaker of the House, and Miss Roberta Bradshaw, other friends, who, through the Speaker's influence, had obtained special permission to see Mrs.

Kendall, she fell in a dead faint. It was such shocking facts as these that the Commissioners and their investigating board were vainly trying to keep from the country for the sake of the reputation of the Administration.

For attempting to spear to Mrs. Kendall through her cell door, to inquire as to her health, while in solitary, Miss Lucy Burns was placed on a bread and water diet.

Miss Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the only woman member of Congress, was moved by these and similar revelations to introduce a resolution[1] calling for a Congressional investigation of the workhouse.

There were among the suffrage prisoners women of all shades of social opinion.

The following letter by Miss Gvinter, the young Russian worker, was smuggled out of the workhouse. This appeal to Meyer London was rather pathetic, since not even he, the only Socialist member in Congress, stood up to denounce the treatment of the pickets.

Comrade Meyer London:

I am eight years in this movement, three and a half years a member of the Socialist Party, Branches 2 and 4 of the Bronx, and I have been an active member of the Waist Makers' Union since 1910. I am from New York, but am now in Balti-

[1]For text of Miss Rankin's resolution see Appendix 3.

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more, where I got acquainted with the comrades who asked me to picket the White House, and of course I expressed my willingness to help the movement. I am now in the workhouse. I want to get out and help in the work as I am more revolutionary than the Woman's Party, yet conditions here are so bad that I feel I must stay here and help women get their rights. We are enslaved here.

I am suffering very much from hunger and nearly blind from bad nourishment. The food is chiefly soup, cereal with worms, bread just baked and very heavy. Even this poor food, we do not get enough. I do not eat meat. When I told the doctor that he said, "You must eat, and if you don't like it here, you go and tell the judge you won't picket any more, and then you can get out of here." But I told him that I could not go against my principles and my belief. He asked, "Do you believe you should break the law?" I replied, "I have picketed whenever I had a chance for eight years and have never broken the law. Picketing is legal."

Please come here as quickly as possible, as we need your help.

Will you give the information in this letter to the newspapers?

Please pardon this sc.r.a.p of paper as I have nothing else to write on. I would write to other comrades, to Hillquit or Paulsen, but you are in the Congress and can do more.

Yours for the Cause,

(Signed) ANNA GVINTER.

OCCOQUAN WORKHOUSE, Friday, Sept. 21.

Miss Gvinter swore to an affidavit when she came out in which she said in part:

. . . The days that we had to stand on scaffolds and ladders to paint the dormitories, I was so weak from lack of food I was dizzy and in constant danger of falling.

. . . When they told me to scrub the floors of the lavatories I refused, because I have to work for my living and I could not afford to get any of the awful diseases that women down there have.

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I obeyed all the rules of the inst.i.tution. The only times I stopped working was because I was too sick to work.