When Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt was made president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in December, 1915, the crusade to get votes for women had gone on for nearly three-quarters of a century. Her election marked the beginning of the end of the prolonged struggle.

As successor to Susan B. Anthony, she had served an earlier term in the presidency of the Association from 1900 to 1904. Between the latter date and 1915 she took part in suffrage campaigns in every part section of this country, and, through her leadership of the International Alliance for Woman Suffrage, she became familiar with the methods used in many other parts of the world. She brought to the closing years of suffrage activity in the United States tireless devotion, extraordinary executive ability and breadth of vision such as only the greatest of statesmen have possessed.

Once when she was to speak in Boston, I asked her to send me press material about herself. Her reply was characteristic.

“I hardly know what to tell you about myself for use in the papers,” she wrote. “I do not think there is much to say about me except that I have given my life to the suffrage work and that I have performed all the various obligations which an enlistment in the Cause puts upon one. I have opened the doors of churches and halls and lighted the kerosene lamps; attended to the babies while the meeting was in progress; made the speech; taken the collection; pronounced the benediction; organized the Club or Committee, etc., etc., and have held all the offices imaginable from club president up and down and sidewise.

As I look back upon it, this seems to be a record of drudgery, doing each day what the cause seemed to demand of me, but I do not perceive in that record any glorious headlines to attract public attention. If you find any it will be due to your imagination.”

In spite of having a name which few persons outside its 014ranks ever mastered, the National American Woman Suffrage Association by 1915 had grown to be a large and powerful organization. Its 44 State auxiliaries, each made up of local branches, had a total membership of more that two millions. The national headquarters occupied a whole floor in an office building in New York and many of the state and local branches maintained their own separate headquarters. For the fiscal year 1916-1917, the national expenditures were $110,222.07, and the combined receipts of national, state and local treasuries were $803,729. 1 Aside from the clerical force and from trained organizers and publicists, the workers were unpaid. No organization ever had a more loyal following of volunteers.

Mrs. Catt, who realized the waste of time and strength in the State by State way of getting votes for women, was determined that all the Association's resources should be used to bring about the adoption of a federal amendment for woman suffrage. Yet she knew that the Congress was not likely to submit such an amendment until women were able to vote at national elections in more than twelve States. She had to chart a course between opposing difficulties in order to make the federal amendment possible.

Her first efforts as president were directed toward arousing enthusiasm about the Amendment among the suffragists themselves. For that purpose she carried on, during the early months of 1916, a series of conferences in different parts of the country. These conferences led up to a systematic canvass of the delegates to national political conventions in order to get support for a federal amendment plank in the party platforms that year. As a part of the program huge demonstrations were planned in the convention cities in the hope 015of proving to the delegates the widespread demand for the suffrage plank.

In Chicago, where the Republicans met in June, the demonstration was arranged in the form of a procession of women to escort Mrs. Catt and Dr. Shaw to the meeting-place of the Resolutions Committee, to which they were to present the Association's request. When the day came, there was such a high wind and drenching rain that it seemed as if the procession would have to be given up. But a hastily called conference of suffragists voted to go on with it. So early that afternoon, while a storm-pelted baby elephant, borrowed from the Zoo to head the procession, waited dejectedly for the start to be made, more than five thousand women joined the rain-soaked ranks that marched to the convention hall. By an ironic twist of fortune, the first section, wet and bedraggled, sloshed into the room just as one of the anti-suffrage women was assuring the Resolutions Committee that women themselves did not want the vote. No more convincing refutation of that statement was ever made.

But in the spite of the growth of suffrage sentiment in the country and of the nation-wide appeal of the suffragists to the delegates, the Republican platform had as its only suffrage plank this statement: “The Republican Party, reaffirms its faith in ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people,’ as a measure of justice to one-half the adult people of this country, favors the extension of suffrage to women, but recognizes the right of each State to settle this question for itself.”

Our disappointment when we heard Senator Lodge read those last words was indeed bitter, for they made the plank a practical denial of what the Association had requested.

After the Republicans had fallen back upon state rights as an excuse for evading our demand, there was little hope of anything better from the traditional supporters of that doctrine at the Democratic convention in St. Louis a week later. Nevertheless, thousands of suffragists gathered there to form, with their yellow banners and parasols, a golden lane along the street through which the delegates to the convention had to pass on the opening day. Even the Democratic donkey was not forgotten in the preparations.

In St. Louis, as Chicago, the public demonstration and hearings were the smallest part of the suffrage work. Delegates who had been speeded on their way by deputations of suffragists in their own districts found other deputations from their States awaiting them in the convention city. Friends among the delegates were enlisted to talk with opponents; the help of leaders in every delegation was solicited; interviews were arranged; letters and telegrams besought the inclusion of our plank in the platform.

The last evening that the Democratic Resolutions Committee was in session, Mrs. Catt invited me to her room in the hotel. I found her sewing a fresh white front into a blue dress and our talk was mostly about the past experiences in suffrage campaigns. Shortly before ten she stopped her work and remarked that, as the next day was likely to be harassing, we ought to get plenty of sleep that night.

“But aren't you going to stay up to hear what the Resolutions Committee reports?” I exclaimed.

“Nobody knows how late they will be and there's nothing we can do now, anyway; so we may as well go to bed,” was the reply of a woman who never wasted energy on non-essentials.

The next morning we heard the expected, but none the less disheartening, news that the Democratic Resolutions Committee had 017given us another state rights plank, “We favor the extension of the franchise to women of the country, State by State, on the same terms as to the men.”

A minority report, which opposed woman suffrage in any form, was brought to the convention floor by Governor Ferguson of Texas, who, with impassioned oratory, informed the delegates that God had made woman to be the angel of the fireside and that it was man's duty to keep her out of the mire of politics. If he could have foreseen his future impeachment and removal from officer under conditions that made it illegal for him to run again and the consequent putting forward of his wife, with his approval, as a candidate for his place, he would doubtless have chosen a different line of argument that day. After his minority report had been defeated by a huge majority, the president of the Texas Woman Suffrage Association organized a parade of women from that State, carrying the Texas flag draped with pieces of a black crepe dress which she sacrificed for the occasion.

That same afternoon, Mrs. Catt, who was not in the habit of sitting down with the disappointment, held a meeting of the National Executive Board, which decided that, in view of the failure of both major parties to endorse the federal method of enfranchising women, an emergency convention of the whole Association ought to be called.

That convention met at Atlantic City in September, to consider ways in which more effective action for the amendment might be taken. Both presidential candidates were invited to make addresses. Hon. Charles E. Hughes, who was in the far West at the time, declined the invitation, but issued a statement expressing approval of a Federal woman suffrage amendment. President Wilson, 018who had previously advocated only the State by State method, came to Atlantic City and gave, in his speech there, the first intimation that he would support the Federal Amendment.

“I have come to fight not for you but with you, and in the end I think we shall not quarrel over the method,” was his assurance to the vast audience, listening as if life hung on his words.

At the close of the convention, Mrs. Catt had a session of the Executive Council, made up of the national officers of the Association and the presidents of its State branches. During the unusual heat of the preceding week she had conducted three meetings a day. She had borne, with no outward sign of disturbance, the responsibility of having the President as speaker at a time when fears for his safety were specially acute. She had found opportunity to confer with women from every part of the country, whose help was needed for the carrying out of her plans. That afternoon she intended to get a binding pledge of their cooperation.

The look of the crowded stuffy room in the basement of the hotel where the Council met, is something I shall always remember; the tired faces of most of the women there; the huge map of the United States, hung on one of the walls; and, most vividly of all, Mrs. Catt herself, when, after the routine business of the Council was over, she took up the typed pages in which she had outlined the work of for the coming year.

To her preamble, which was a brief re-statement of reasons for undertaking a more energetic drive for the Amendment, I listened with a good deal of inward protest. I could not forget that the only woman suffrage planks in both the major party platform called for action by the separate States, not by the Congress. I believed that, hard as the State by State method was bound to be, we had to have a 019good many more States in which women could vote before the drive for a Federal amendment would be successful. Even after Mrs. Catt explained stated that the Association's Congressional Committee in Washington was to be enlarged and much more spacious headquarters taken there, I was still sceptical.

Then she began started to explain that no amount of work in Washington was likely to bring about the submission of the Amendment unless new victories were won in the States. At that point I began to listen more carefully, for it was clear that Mrs. Catt had no intention of letting her Federal program lessen efforts to secure State action. On the contrary, as I soon learned, her plan was essentially a demand for legislative activity in every part of the country during the coming sessions of the States legislatures.

Pointer in hand, she stepped to the map and traced four divisions of States, to each of which she assigned a particular form of legislative work.

First, she called on our organizations in the equal suffrage States and in Illinois to secure from their legislatures resolutions requesting the Congress to submit the Women Suffrage Amendment. In the case of the Income Tax Amendment, she explained told us , such resolutions from the State legislatures had proved extremely helpful.

Next she pointed out several States - New York among them - in which there was a chance of carrying a State constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. In all those States she urged our workers to prepare at once for a campaign to get their legislatures to submit such an amendment and the voters to support it.

For most the remaining States she advised trying for presidential suffrage, i.e., the right to vote for presidential electors, which could be given by the legislatures without referring 020the question to the voters.

Finally, for a few of the southern one-party States, where success in the primary is equivalent to an election, she told the delegates that they ought to make an attempt to get suffrage in the primaries for women, a form which could also be granted outright by the State legislatures.

In brief, confronted with the choice between work in State campaigns and work for a Federal amendment, Mrs. Catt declared, “We must do both and do them together”

When the fourfold plan had been made clear, she described the procedure necessary to put it into effect. An immediate start upon the work was imperative, she explained said , in order to have everything already at the beginning of the legislative sessions, most of which opened in January; for if our campaigns were simultaneous, the opposition, taken by surprise and unprepared for a fight on so many fronts at once, would be forced to concentrate on a few States or else to spread itself too thin to be effective. Then, warning her listeners that the plan would fail it its scope leaked out, she requested from them a definite pledge that they would disclose no details except such as were required in each State for its own project.

Last of all, she presented a compact to be signed by the representatives of suffrage associations in at least thirty-six States. She reminded us that, since a thirty-six was the minimum number of States necessary for the ratification of a Federal amendment, a failure on the part of a single State would mean ultimate defeat for all.

When the full number of signature had been affixed to the compact and we filed out of the room, I felt like Moses on the 021mountain top after the Promised Land had been shown to him and he knew that the long years of wandering in the Wilderness were soon to end. For the first time I saw our goal as possible of attainment in the near future. But we had to have swift and concerted action from every part of the country.. Could we get it? Could we get it?

Often since then, remembering how hard it was at best to win or vote in the Congress and the subsequent ratification by thirty-six States, I have speculated as to what would have happened if Mrs. Catt's plan had not been presented on that sultry afternoon in 1916. Undoubtedly a woman suffrage amendment would have been adopted at some time, even if Mrs. Catt had never been born; but if success had not come when it did the cause might easily have been caught in a period of post-war reaction and victory postponed for another half century. That women all over the United States were able to vote in 1920 is due, I believe, to the carrying out of that plan prepared and presented by an incomparable leader.

Before I left Atlantic City, Mrs. Catt had many promise to join the Association's Congressional Committee the following December. Though I had experience in most other forms of suffrage activity, I felt ill equipped for lobbying. In fact, after I had had time to think the plan over, I wrote her, “I am not a good lobbyist. I am afraid I am too much a reformer and too little an opportunist to be of use in Washington.” But she persisted in her wish to have me there.

My first meeting with our Congressional Committee was at its headquarters, then in an office building, on the Friday evening in November before the short session of 1916.

Filecases were what I saw when I opened the door. The outer office was crowded with them; filecases holding, as I learned later, 531 portfolios - 96 for the Senate and 435 for the House - every portfolio marked with the name of the member of the Congress whose record was inside. The system, developed by Miss Ruth White, the able secretary of our Committee, provided for the keeping of all known data about a senator or representative. There were printed sketches of his life; there were facts supplied by our members in the State about his personal, political, business and religious affiliations; there were reports of interviews with him by our friends in Washington or elsewhere; there was everything that could be found out learned about his stand on woman suffrage and more or less about his views on other public questions.

In the inner office I found eight or ten members of the Congressional Committee, most of whom I had met at suffrage conventions in earlier years. The previous chairman of the Committee, Mrs. Frank Roessing, who 023was giving a fortnight to help her successor, Mrs. Walter McNab Mel ton ler , get under way, opened the meeting with an explanation of the two pieces of work to be undertaken at that time.

In the House of Representatives our task was persuading the Judiciary Committee, to which the Woman Suffrage Amendment had been referred, to make a report even if it were unfavorable. During the previous session of the 64th Congress, Chairman Webb, one of our most vehement opponents, had kept the committee from taking any action on the Amendment. In the coming session we had to break that deadlock.

On the Senate side, a report - a favorable one - from the Committee on Woman Suffrage was assured has been presented; but there we needed help to bring the Amendment to vote. Mrs. Roessing explained that even senators who were known to be opposed to woman suffrage might be appealed to, on the ground of fair play , for assistance in getting a vote on the question.

She also had much to say about the importance of showing respect to members of the Congress and to senators, in particular; inasmuch as a senator is one of only two men chosen by his State to represent it in the highest legislative body of the land. Though the three senators whom I knew slightly at the time had never seemed to me like anything superhuman, I was much impressed by the explanation. I was awed, too, by the stress put upon routine matters, such as learning immediately the whereabouts of public telephones at the Capitol in order that we might call up our headquarters at stated intervals, on the chance that there might be of a new assignment for us for our work or additional information about an old one.

To all of us, senators and representatives from our own part of the country were assigned for interviews and specific 024directions were given for our calls at their offices. We were told to go in twos, partly to take away any possible suspicion of our being the old “siren” type of persuaders and partly because a commitment to two persons is less easily repudiated than is a commitment to one. In each case we had to decide beforehand which of us should take the initiative and do most of the talking in an interview. Then if the other merely backed her up by an occasional word, cross currents of argument might be avoided. In advance of every call, we were to read carefully all our records about the member to be seen and to learn the name of his secretary, because in Washington secretaries can help or hinder any cause. We were advised to knock at a closed office door; the knock to warn any man inside who might possibly have his feet on a desk; the immediate entrance to keep anyone from leaving work in order to open the door for us. To this day I do not know whether that is the preferred procedure; but it became my custom, though I never observed its use by other callers, nor did I discover that it removed any embarrassments.

Our chairman also told us that after the interviews we ought to retreat to the nearest dressing room for women to make notes of what the member had said and of our own replies, while the details were fresh in our minds. But she cautioned us not to let any strange woman notice what we were doing, lest she might be an anti-suffragist or the secretary of a member. We were also warned never to talk with one another about our work when we were in elevators, street car or corridors. That last admonition was the most of all, for we were often tempted to compare impressions if, after we had closed the door of an office, we saw no one in the hall outside. Not until; I had sat in Congressional offices long enough to realize that an open transom can make every word spoken by passers-by audible to those 025within the room, did I understand the reason for being silent in those interminable corridors.

By the time the chairman had finished her directions, I was so scared by the number of mistakes which it was possible to make that I wondered whether I should ever have courage to open my lips in an interview. The occasional legislative work that I had done in Massachusetts had never been conducted by rule. I remembered that I had pursued a member of the State legislature, registered from a cheap lodging house in which he spent only one night of the year, through half a dozen barrooms in the North End and had captured his vote when I took him by surprise. But, clearly, that was no precedent for Washington.

After the meeting, as I stood waiting for a street car, I was joined by a little woman with gray hair, who had sat throughout the evening without question or remark. She told me that she was Helen Gardener and that she had been a member of the Congressional Committee for some time. That is my first recollection of a woman of genius, who was to teach me almost everything of value that I came to know during those years in Washington.

The short session of the 64th Congress began the following Monday. I was too inexperienced to realize that application had to be made long in advance for a ticket to the galleries of the House when the Congress met in joint session. I therefore missed hearing the President read his message. I also missed the first demonstration by a few members of the Woman's Party, the so-called militant group of suffragists, who hung a votes-for-women banner over the railing of a gallery in the House while the President was speaking. When I met the members of our Committee who had been present, I was surprised to see how disastrous they considered that small happening. 026Later I found that most of the newspapers and many members of the Congress expressed the opinion that it had brought serious reproach on the cause. That idea was due, I believe, to the Washington habit of setting much store on precedents and official courtesy and to the fear that the much condemned English militant tactics were being started in the United States. At that particular time the usual difficulties of a “lame duck” session - the bad temper of defeated men sitting for the last three months of an expiring Congress and the temptation for those re-elected to be complacent and lazy - were enhanced by the narrow margin of electoral votes by which the President had won his re-election. The Democrats were inclined to be resentful, rather than jubilant , over the result and many Republicans thought it a special grievance that their party had been defeated when victory was so near. Thus the prevailing mood of the first week of the session gave the members a reason for discussing that mild incident of the until they had magnified it into a mountain of reprehensible behavior.

We, who had nothing to do with the demonstration, were so constantly blamed for it that our chairman directed us to make clear in the first words of every interview that we represented the great mass of suffragists, organized in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, who did not approve of the methods used by the small group of militants. That kind of explanation we were destined to make so long as we worked for the Amendment. Though men whom we saw frequently differentiated between the two brands of suffragists, there were always new members or indifferent old ones who did not make the distinction. Nothing about our work was more unpleasant than the need of explaining that we did not agree as to methods with other women working for the same end. And nothing was more exasperating than the queries that became frequent after later 027demonstrations: “How can you expect us to vote for you so long as those women go on breaking the law in order to prove that they ought to be allowed to vote for the lawmakers?” or, “Why don't you stop them?” or, “Why don't you women get together? You can't expect us to vote for you if you can't agree among yourselves.” We used to point out, as mildly as we could, that men, even within the same party, were not without their differences. But sauce for the goose was rarely accepted as sauce for the gander.

Mrs. Roessing having introduced me to Congressional work by taking me with her when she went to call on the senators from Colorado, who were among our strongest friends.

Senator Thomas, who was then chairman of the Woman Suffrage Committee, a tall, thin man, with a meticulously curled white toupee, was thoroughly embittered by the attempt of the militants in the previous election to defeat Democratic candidates in his State, even though the campaign had been unsuccessful. Their policy is going out against Democrats, friends of woman suffrage as well as foes, on the theory, copied from English tactics, of holding the party in power responsible for failure to pass the amendment stirred his deepest ire. With the caustic wit for which he was famous, he refuted the fallacy of expecting any one party to deliver the two-thirds majority for a constitutional amendment and ridiculed the absurdity of trying to make friends for the cause by endeavoring to defeat men who had given it loyal support. He held out no encouragement about a vote in the Congress during the short session. Although he understood clearly the different between our organization and the militants, he took us to task as if we were responsible for their misdeeds and assured us that until we could control our “unruly limb” he saw no chance of successful action on the 028Amendment.

We got much the same opinion from Senator Shafroth, a large, loose-jointed man, with sandy hair and mustache and a kindly , weather-beaten face. “Those methods,” he said, “have stirred up so much resentment that a vote now would probably show a falling off of suffrage support.”

I did not know him well enough then to realize how unusual the pessimistic attitude was with him; but I came to understand that he was as much concerned about our success as if it had been his own. He told me once that he had been in favor of woman suffrage ever since his college days in Missouri, when he took the affirmative in a debate on the subject. He said that as soon as he came to think about it, he was indignant that his older sister, who was helping to pay for his education, should be deprived of a right given to any drunkard or nincompoop who happened to be a man. Senator Shafroth had held many public officers, including the governorship of Colorado. He was known as “honest John Shafroth” because once, when he was elected to the House of Representatives in Washington, he resigned his seat after he became convinced that there had been fraud in his election, although he was in no way responsible for the wrong doing. He was indeed a public servant without fear and without reproach.

An interview with Senator Henry Cebot Lodge was my first regular assignment. My companion was a Massachusetts women, a conservative by birth and a radical by inclination. In preparation for the event we read all the reports about Senator Lodge in the exhaustive files of our Committee.

He received us in the corridor outside his tiny office in the Capitol, for, like many other senators, he preferred to be near 029the Senate Chamber and left his large rooms in the Senate Office Building to his secretaries. The friend with me Mrs. said that he was very indignant because he had been given such cramped quarters in the Capitol after the change of Administration had forced him to leave the spacious offices of the Foreign Relations Committee, of which he had previously been chairman. Certainly when we saw him his disposition appeared to be permanently soured.

As directed by our chairman, we asked only for his help in getting a vote on the Amendment and we prefaced our request by the explanation that we knew he was not in favor of woman suffrage, but that we hoped his sense of justice would lead him to aid us in getting action on the question in the Senate. I think that he never really replied to our request. Instead he scolded us for trying to promote what he called a dead issue.

“I know why you want a federal amendment,” he snarled. “It's because you realize that you'll never get another State by popular vote.”

I spunked up enough to tell him that “never” was a long time to pronounce about.

But he reiterated, in shrill tones, “You'll never get another State. Look at your defects in Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania last year. I tell you, you're done. Illinois is the only place east of the Mississippi where there will ever be women voting.”

When New York State was carried for woman suffrage in 1918, I was tempted to go and taunt him with that “never” of his. But by that time Mrs. Gardener had taught me that crowing in political circles is always unwise.

After we left Senator Lodge, my friend Mrs. took me to call on 030Senator La Follette. He, too, had a Capitol office, down one of the obscure little staircases that start near the old Supreme Courtroom. The Senator was not there at the moment, but I met his chief secretary, a broad, genial man, whose fund of political anecdotes was to prove one of my chief pleasures during the months ahead. When Senator La Follette came in, his cordial interest in us and our cause was like a tonic after our depressing experience with Senator Lodge. As I came to know La Follette better, I found that no man was more generous with time and thought when I needed advice. His short, energetic body and leonine head, with its mass of shaggy hair, often seemed to me like a rock in a weary land during my long hours in the Senate gallery. From his aisle seat in the second row on the Republican side, his rich voice rang out frequently, far too frequently, his enemies were in the habit of saying. Though I wholly disagreed with his stand about the war, I never doubted the sincerity of his convictions.

My second assignment was given suddenly. A Massachusetts member of the House, named Walsh, had been appointed to fill a vacancy on the Judiciary Committee, much to the disappointment of our chairman. When I received the assignment by telephone at the Capitol, I had no time to go back to the office to look up Representative Walsh's record and I mistakenly took for granted that his name indicated a Democrat. But after I started my argument on that assumption, I detected his failure to respond and drew in my line with as much finesse as I could command. I must have succeeded fairly well, for my companion, one of the southern members of our Committee, was impressed only by my ready answers to his objections, answers with which anyone who had been trained under Alice Stone Blackwell was bound to be familiar.

Although we were asking only that, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, he would support a motion to make a report on the Amendment, his contention ran the whole gamut of the confirmed Massachusetts anti's protects. I was so unwise as to counter with the usual suffrage statements. But in thinking afterwards about our discussion, I came to the useful conclusion that a lobbyist should not indulge in debate and thus give a man inclined to opposition the opportunity of bolstering up his stand by arguments that he might not have thought of before. I also began to see that every time a man said or wrote “no” to a request of ours, he enlisted his pride of opinion on that side and made it harder for us to change his point of view, particularly if publicity were given to his opposition. For that reason I tried later on to do everything I could to keep a man from committing himself against the Amendment when he was evidently not in favor of it.

The next day my southern associate asked to have me as her companion in her interviews with the members who were her special responsibility. I protested that a Yankee ought not to call on Southerners. But she replied that, as she was to take the initiative during those calls, I could be introduced as a resident of the District of Columbia and need not betray my northern training by much talking. In the end she had her way, and I learned a great deal from those interviews.

To begin with, she was an exquisite creature, with the creamy beauty of the traditional old South. But the thing about her that took my breath away was her complimentary attitude with the southern members. It was so extreme that I feared the men to whom it was addressed would think we had deliberately sent a honey-tongued charmer—“a slick proposition”, Northerners would have 032said—to cajole them into voting for the Amendment. Something of this doubt I felt constrained to hint to our chairman, who replied , with excellent insight, that southern me were so accustomed to that sort of persiflage they would think a woman unfeminine if she failed to use it. My other fear, that I would be recognized as a Yankee, proved equally groundless. The senators and representatives on whom we called were so absorbed in my companion that they were hardly aware of my silent presence, after their almost invariable question as to whether I was “kin to” the Parks of Georgia or Tennessee or Alabama, as the case might be; for Park, as I then discovered, is a frequent name in the South.

Among those men one sticks out in my memory, a senator whom I privately re-named Bill Sykes because of the brutality in his heavily-lined red face. Several of our efforts to get an appointment with him failed, but on an afternoon when a bill of which he was in charge passed the Senate, we saw him disappearing into his committee room and followed so quickly that he could not refuse to see us. He was excited by the success of his bill and he had been drinking. Otherwise he might not have told us the ghastly story of how, as a young men, he discovered the body of his cousin's wife after she had been killed by a “nigger”. The supposed criminal had escaped temporarily, dressed in the follows of a negro woman. To the Senator, that circumstances seemed to prove that the woman was more guilty that the man, for he reiterated that “nigger wenches” were worse than their men and would never get a chance to vote as so long as he lived to prevent it. After we left his office, my companion begged me not to let the other members of our committee know how shockingly unlike a southern gentleman the senator had proved himself to be.

Until the Christmas recess most of my mornings were given to her, because she did not expect to be in Washington again for several months and was anxious to complete her assignments before the holidays. Afternoons I spent in the gallery of House or Senate, trying to get some understanding of legislative procedure.

On the House side it seemed to me at first as if there were no such thing as a regular order of business, for the confusion of 435 members drifting in and out, talking in aisles or seats, made the hearing of speeches almost impossible. But after I learned to take a seat in the front row of the gallery at the Speaker's right,—a gallery that had the advantage of being near an elevator, my ears began to distinguish between the undercurrent of unimportant noise and the words spoken in debate. I found it hard to recognize men on the floor, because, aside from the floor leaders, members of the House had no regular seats, beyond the general grouping into Republicans on the right of the centre aisle and Democrats on the left. And it was rarely possible for me to catch names from the Speaker's announcement of them. I therefore made myself check up in the “Congressional Record” the next day the names of those whose remarks I could remember. I longed to make notes about their appearance while I was listening, but writing or reading in the galleries was forbidden and the doorkeepers were always on the watch. For that reason I fell into the habit of labelling the man in my own memory by picking out traits which might recall them when I found their names in the “Record”.

Part of my trouble in hearing was undoubtedly due to the broad southern accent of the Speaker, Champ Clark, the Democratic Floor Leader, Claude Kitchin, and the Chairman of nearly all the important committee. The South was at the front then and for a 034good many months I sympathized with the argument of a member from Pennsylvania who was said to have sought his re-election on the ground that it had taken him a year to learn the language spoken in the Congress and that public money would be wasted by the election of a now man who would have to go through a similar period of education before he could be a useful member.

In the Senate, with only 96 members, each of whom had his regular chair and desk, I found it much easier to understand what was going on and to identify individual senators when they were there. But the astonishing thing was that they were rarely present in considerable numbers. Even if they came in for a minute to answer a quorum call or to record a vote, most of them departed as soon as it was over, particularly if a senator started in on anything that promised to be a regular speech.

I did not realize then how much of the real work of the Congress is done in committee meetings and conferences. Nor did I understand that speeches are made chiefly for printing in the “Record”, where they can be read by constituents, and not for the purpose of convincing other members. Some months later I heard a senator say, “I've been here fourteen years and I never knew of a vote that was changed by a speech on the floor of either House.”

Another Senatorial custom that astounded me was the way in which senators, after they were recognized by the presiding officer, often talked, not on the measure before the Senate at the time, but on a different and wholly unconnected subject. Sometimes, too, a senator would ask and receive leave to have the Clerk “read into the Record” quotations from newspapers or speeches or even books, quotations that might take literally hours of the Senate's time.

Before long I acquired the useful Senatorial habit of not 035listening to much that was said and yet of catching promptly an interesting or important turn of debate. In some cases I came to recognize voices in the Senate before I knew the men to whom they belonged.. Senator Ollie James, for example, who had his desk at the farther end of the Democratic front row, I could never see from my favorite seat in the reserved gallery facing the Republican side of the Senate—another gallery that was near an elevator. For that reason I did not know for weeks what he looked like, though I never failed to recognize the great voice booming out from his corner, a voice so like the tones of an organ that I used to think my interest in his speeches was comparable to the desire of the old lady who begged her minister to use the word Mesopotamia more frequently in his sermons, because she got so much pleasure from hearing him say it.

The second week in December our headquarters were moved to Suffrage House, the magnificent and uncomfortable mansion on Rhode Island Avenue, which served from that time as combined office and living quarters for our Congressional Committee. It was designed for entertaining on a large scale and among the previous tenants had been a Secretary of State and a n European embassy.

As in most Washington houses of that type, the entrance floor was inconspicuous. In addition to kitchen and storerooms, ours had a large room which was our telephone and mimeograph office ordinarily and the coatroom when we gave parties: also a nonsensical little “powder room”, furnished in Louis Quinze style, with brocaded satin and much gilt.

An imposing staircase led to the hall on the second floor. This hall was hung with pictures and connected with the large and small drawing-rooms at one end and with the state dining-room at 036the other. The large drawing-room had a hooded stone fireplace, holding enormous logs—a wonderful place to gather round for our lobby meetings on winter evenings. In the small drawing-room hung a portrait of Susan B. Anthony above a table which she had once possessed and a cabinet of mementoes, lent us by some of her relatives. From that room we could look down the long vista of the hall to the state dining-room and at rows of carved, high-backed chairs upholstered in red velvet, with a coronet on each. Against the farther end, a music gallery and its tiny staircase had been built. Beneath the gallery stood a dais holding a velvet seat under a gold-fringed canopy. Where the owner of the house had acquired that treasure I never knew; but it might well have come from the throne-room of a palace in an Italian principality. In any case it was so little / in keeping with a democratic cause like ours that I was often cheered by its absurdity when I caught a glimpse of it on my return from a hard day on Capitol Hill. As the throne-room was for too large , and , in winter too cold, for us to eat in, our meals were served in an alcove opening off it and quite spacious enough to accommodate the resident family, though we were rarely fewer than twelve.

The upper floors of the house held eight huge rooms and an equal number of small ones, along with several bathrooms. Two of the large rooms were used as the offices of the Committee, another was Mrs. Catt's bedroom when she was with us and rented during her absences. The rest were occupied by our house manager and members of the Committee, or, when few of them were in residence, let to other tenants. Except for a night watchman, the household staff, like the office force, went home at night.

As one ? of the original group in the house I had some leeway 037in the choice of my own room and decided on a small one which had belonged to the lady's maid in previous regimes. I came to be thankful for the wisdom of that modest selection in later months, when the house was so crowded that to be at the end of a corridor and free from casual calls was a never-ending relief and the fact that the room was too small to accommodate even a cot for someone unexpectedly spending the night at the house was a still greater blessing. Then, too, my tiny quarters were comfortable in the record-breaking cold of 1918, when it was impossible to heat the large rooms in spite of our two furnaces.

A house warming was planned for an evening shortly after we moved to Suffrage House and invitations were sent to all members of the House and Senate, including, of course, the ladies of their families, and to many others in official life. Several members of our Committee bought new evening dresses for what we thought was to be a grand occasion, but it proved only a fiasco. In place of the hundreds of guests whom we expected, came a handful of senators and representatives and two friendly members of the Cabinet, who dropped in with their wives on the way back from another party.

One of the House members who did come was a man whom I had called on with my Southern associate. He was an early arrival and as she had taken a long rest after dinner. I found him on my hands. He was shy and I was tired and though we both struggled for common ground in conversation, there seemed to be none. Rarely have I been so relieved to be rid of a man as I was when my friend appeared, looking in her white and silver dress, as slender and appealing as the crescent moon. If I had given more thought to the deep eyes and overhanging forehead of the guest, I might have had an inkling that some day he would be the eloquent and 038greatly respected Speaker of the House, Joseph W. Byrns. As it was, I feared that my dullness had confirmed his previous opposition to the Amendment, I was therefore much relieved when a report from his State later on changed him from the “opposed” to the “non-commital” column on our poll, a status from which he was graduated, months afterwards to the “probable yes” list and then to our roll of honor of those who voted “yes”.

The question most frequently asked about the Congressional work has been was , “Where do you get the money to pay all those lobbyists?” The answer was simple, “We don't.” Not a penny of salary was paid to the members of the Congressional Committee or to the women who came to Washington to help us in the lobby. On the contrary, with only a few exceptions, they not only gave their time, but they paid their own expenses. The exceptions included the Congressional Chairman, who was reimbursed for her living expenses in Washington and when she travelled on business of the Committee, and a few women who were summoned from considerable distance for special tasks and whose travelling and hotel expenses were paid in those instances by the Association.

Everyone who stayed at Suffrage House for a night or for six month, Mrs. Catt included, paid for her board and lodging at about the same rate that she would have had to pay in one of the smaller hotels in Washington. This income did not begin to meet the running expenses of a house as so large as ours and the deficit was made up in two ways. The Leslie Commission, which administered a fund left by Mrs. Frank Leslie for suffrage work, paid the rent of Suffrage House after the first month that we were there. The balance of house expenses was met by the National Association, as were the salaries of the clerical and publicity staff and the other 039about the Capitol and the office buildings, with their apparently endless marble corridors and their lack of cross connections, even though I did not realize then how important the ability to get about quickly might prove in emergencies. The small cable cars running underground between the Senate side of the Capitol and the Senate Office Building struck me at first as humorous, particularly when they were laden with senators; but I came to wish many a time that the House had a similar system when I was obliged to hurry on foot through an equally long tunnel at the House end of the Capitol, for which no cars were provided.

For the rest, I was able to recognize most of the Rebuplivan senators whom I had faced in the gallery and a few of those on the Democratic side, also a small number of the House member, most of them Democrats; I had ceased to be frightened by the technique of interviewing; I had a slight grasp of legislative procedure; I had formed a few mild opinions as to what ought or ought not to be done by our committee; and I had come to the conclusion that Congressional work was distinctly interesting.

In addition to the records of a considerable number of interviews during those weeks, our committee had one definite gain to rejoice over. On December 15th the Judiciary Committee of the House reported the woman suffrage resolution without recommendation as to whether it should pass or not. Our Amendment was then on the Calendar in both branches of the Congress.

No one could have gasped more than I when, at the beginning of the New Year, I was appointed by the National Board to direct the lobby. A reorganization of the Congressional Committee, intended to free our chairman for special activities, thrust that responsibility and the title of vice-chairman upon me, chiefly, I suspect, because I was to be in Washington throughout the winter and spring.

Up to that time I had had no one except myself to look after. My new office meant that I had to decide who among our workers was best fitted to interview a particular member of the Congress, to choose a companion for her, to go over their reporter, to advise, to caution, to encourage—above all, to keep vigilant watch over the changes that every day brought in our poll of the Congress.

My task was lightened by the fact that a good many of our members lived at Suffrage House. When we were under one roof I could shift assignments more readily if the breakfast hour revealed that some one had a sore throat and a substitute must be found in time for a Congressional interview scheduled for ten o'clock. Then, too, the evening meetings of the lobby, for an oral report of the day's adventures were much more convenient and agreeable when they could be held in our drawing-room immediately after dinner.

For my own clarity of mind, I started to keep brief notes of our general situation from week to week. The first of these I quote:

“A - Situation on Jan. 1, 1917

I am glad that I had the sense to realize thus early that “home pressure” was the most valuable part of Congressional work, for our committee in Washington was not an isolated group. It was linked up with Congressional workers all over the country, for whom it served as an outpost of information and advice. Its fourteen members, appointed by the National Board of the Association, were expected to spend a large part of their time in Washington, if they did not actually live there. They formed the nucleus of our lobby. But this was only a small central force. The rest of the lobby was made up of suffragists called in from the States for varying periods of time. Most of them came, worked a while, went back to their homes and came again for a week or a month as they were needed.

Then there were the State Congressional chairman in the forty-four State branches of the Association, many of which also 04231had a District chairman in every one of their Congressional Districts. We tried to get those State chairman, who, to my mind, were the most useful part of the Congressional force, to come to Washington for at least a brief trial of lobbying. We knew that after they had been there they would be able to keep tab much more effectively on their senators and representatives. Years afterward I heard from one or another of them that the experience of the lobby had given her a much more vivid understanding of politics than she had ever gained in any other way. When they were not with us, they were kept in close touch with the Washington situation by means of bulletins, letters, and, in times of emergency, telegrams, and long distance telephone. Although we in Washington consulted with Mrs. Catt constantly about the places in which pressure was needed at a particular time, most of the actual directions were sent out in her stirring words from the New York office and brought a response which would have been given to no one else.

Our ninety-five Congressional Aides, women chosen for their wide influence, made up another group of workers. They were not a structural part of the organization, but when we needed to have “backfire s “ built in the case of a wobbly member of the Congress, we called on our Aides in his State to stir up the newspapers and to see that he heard from large numbers of his constituents.

A great supplementary force working for the Amendment was the Association's continuous educational campaign. No matter how urgent organization or legislative work might be, Mrs. Catt never forgot that the education of public opinion must go on with equal vigor. Besides “The Woman Citizen”, the official organ of the Association, numberless publications were prepared and sent out from the New York office: arguments, answers to objections, summaries 04332of progress, speeches, foreign language fliers, everything for which readers could be found. To all the usual kinds of press work, the Association added a special service to arrange and sent out material about the Amendment for use in the editorial columns of newspapers. This undertaking was in charge of Mrs. Ida Husted Haroer, a well-known journalist, who spent much of her time at the Washington headquarters in order to keep in touch with day by day developments.

Perhaps the greatest educational influence of all was the moving eloquence of Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, for eleven years president of the Association, who was, in the opinion of many critics, the foremost orator of her generation. Along with a golden voice, never raucous though easily heard in the largest halls, she had the gifts of glowing and dramatic phrase, wit, humors and an exaltation of appeal that swept her audiences off their fee—the power to win hearts and sway opinions by the spoken word. And that power was constantly used in our behalf from one end of the country to the other.

During the ? month of January, 1917, our lobby consisted of 29 women, including members of the Congressional Committee, from 16 different States, who stayed in Washington, at their own expense, for periods ranging from six days to four weeks. For their use we had our lobby rules drawn up in the following form: “DIRECTIONS FOR LOBBYISTS

I. PREPARATION:

When I was sufficiently familiar with the work to have a little sense of humor about it, I condensed those rules into a series of Don'ts: Don't nag. Don't boast. Don't threaten Don't lose your temper. Don't stay too long. Don't talk about your work where you can be overhead. Don't give the member interviewed an opportunity to declare himself against the Amendment. Don't do anything to close the door to the next advocate of suffrage.

The last don't was the one I dwelt on most in my talks with our workers, partly because it was the most difficult to follow. Knowing that the effect of our work in the case of doubtful members was cumulative, I used to say over and over again, “If we can't do any good, at least we must be sure that we don't do any harm.”

Many of our lobby meetings were as entertaining as a good comedy. One of the women had the gift ironic wit. Another was a capital mimic and gave us side-splitting imitations of some of the men whom she had interviewed. She was wise, too, for she cautioned us never to tell outside that any of our number had ventured to take off members of the Congress. I sometimes found it hard to stop my own laughter long enough to give out the next 04635assignments.

Some of the written reports were funny, too. For example, this was turned in by one of our southern lobbyists after she had interviewed a Texas member: “Polite but positive. Against woman suffrage - any phase of it. Declares that man represented women. When I suggested my being a widow and not having representation, he gallantly offered to represent me. The fact of he living in Texas and my residence being in Kentucky did not dismay him at all, but the proposition was most unsatisfactory to me. Against prohibition and against child labor bill. Has not seen any light at any in progressive legislation.”

Another southern interview went into our record in these words: “Invited us in - polite manner. Believes that woman dwells apart from man - in her nature. ‘She is different—Nature made it so—all history, science and biology prove it!” Look at the barnyard, the ‘cockerel’ protects the hen, etc. Woman is meant for the home, the hearth and to be sheltered by man.” He acknowledged that there were some woman outside the home, but men could protect them. The dirty mine of politics for women could not be thought of. He deplored the lack of woman's trust in men, and did not think women wanted to be called ‘suffragands’ (the correlation of the word ‘brigand’). He is beyond the pale. We parted in a friendly way.”

The shortest and most satisfactory report that I remember was of an interview with Mr. Fiorella La Guardia, now Mayor of New York: “He said, “I'm with you; I'm for it; I'm going to vote for it. Now don't bother me.’ all in one breath.”

All of us suffered from the hours spent in walking up and down those marble corridors. One lobbyist said that she never wanted to hear again “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls”. And several declared that the first thing they would work for after woman got the vote was to have thick carpets laid on the corridors of the Office Building s

One evening a woman from one of the western States gave 04736an account of an interview that found an echo in all our hearts, even though I had to point out that her part in the incident was not exactly that of the patient listener, such as we were all expected to be. It seemed that the member whom she had to see was grouchy. “I don't see why you women come round here bothering us about that Amendment. It hasn't got a chance of passing,” he complained. “You're only wasting our time.”

“Well,” said the interviewer, “if you will just look back to the days when your mother had to take you over her knee, I'm sure you will recall that what she said was, ‘Son, it hurts me a great deal worse then it hurts you.’ And that's exactly how we women feel when we have to come up here and plead for our rights.”

But the marvel was that we met so few cases of actual rudeness. That fact seemed to me highly creditable to the membership as a whole, in view of the numberless unwelcome visitors who have to be received in Congressional offices. On the House side, in particular, where in those years a member had only one room for his office, he was at the mercy of anyone who called because he could not conceal his presence, as senators, with two rooms, were able to do. Although many House members divided their offices by arranging bookshelves or cabinets crosswise to give an alcove in which they might be screened from the sight of anyone coming through the door, they had no way of getting rid of a visitor who chose to sit down and wait, except by flat refusal to see him or her. And members soon learn that flat refusals are dangerous. I came to feel real sympathy for busy men who had to keep away from the Office Building in order to work on a report or a speech.

The question of whether it was better to telephone in 04837advance for an appointment or to drop into an office on the chance of finding the member there was one that I never settled to my complete satisfaction. The more courteous way of telephoning in advance made refusal or postponement easier. The other method wasted a great deal of our time. Usually I advise telephoning in the case of members who came from the State of the lobbyist, because they and their secretaries would be loath do side-step a constituent. With men from other States I thought it better to go to the office the first time without previous arrangement. If the member was there , it was the duty of the lobbyists to explain that if he preferred to see them at some other time they would be glad to return then. Usually the poor man realized that he might as well have the interview over with then and there. And our women were cautioned to be brief.

If the member was not in his office, they had to enlist the good will of his secretary in order to find out the best time to make their next call. The possible hours were very limited. Comparatively few members were in their offices before ten o'clock and they were likely to have meetings of committees two or three mornings a week , from ten-thirty until the House convened, usually at noon. By leaving Suffrage House at nine, we could occasionally get in an early interview. Sometimes a friendly secretary would drop in hint that a member would be back to sign letters between one and two or at the close of the session in the afternoon. When we noticed from the gallery that few members were on the floor, we were often able to find one or more of those whom we wanted to see by going to their offices. We were careful never to be in the Office Building later than six, no matter how great the temptation to stay on in the hope of finding a few more man. We had heard 04938rumors that in the evening offices were not always devoted to public business.

Unless we were requested to do so , we did not send in our visiting, cards to House members who were on the floor , in the hope that they would come out to see us. The improvised House Reception Room, in a niche of the rotunda, was too open and too crowded for as satisfactory interview, and the alternative, hanging around the door from which the member would emerge if he left the floor and then retreating with him to one of the window recesses in the corridor, was too unpleasant for anything except emergency use. We tried in every possible way to be inconspicuous. Doorkeepers and elevator men, after they came to know us, often gave useful tips about the whereabouts of members and , in a way , our task was like a game of hide and seek, though we were too firmly impressed with the seriousness of it to get the full benefit of the absurd side.

In making the assignments for interviews, I tried to provide, so far as possible, that members should be called on by women from their own State or their own section of the country. Then I had to consider the political affiliations of our lobbyists or the affiliations likely to be imputed to them. A woman from a State known to be solidly Republican was not the best person to interview Mr. Crisp of Georgia, nor was a woman from the deep South a good choice for Mr. Hersey of Maine, even though she herself was not a member of any political party.

As the work went on, I became more and more interested to find out what qualities in our lobbyists enabled them to make a favorable impression upon the members whom they interviewed. Among the twenty-nine women, we had, naturally, a large variety of types.

The Southerners easily led in charm. In fact, they were invited so often to lunch in the Senate restaurant with their senators that I had to suggest the wisdom of declining courtesies of than kind. Although my companion in December was not in Washington after the holidays, there were four or five others from the South, different in many respects and yet alike in their power to draw interest, if not agreement, from the men with whom they talked. Two of them were quickly recognized as belonging to families famous in Southern annals. One had been a belle in her youth and still retained much of her delicate beauty and distinction of carriage and manner. To her and to one other I credited two important converts to our cause, a real achievement; for outright conversions, without the impetus of political gains in the member's home State, were few and far between.

By contrast, we Northerners from the Atlantic seaboard, though we were much better up on the points of our case, must have seemed blunt and uninteresting. The one who was socially the most important made the least impression , for the reason that the few men who knew her family connections belonged to the group of unchangeable eastern anti-suffragists and the other members whom she saw were unfamiliar with the traditions represented in her appearance and speech. Again and again I was confronted with the difference between the North and the South in the matter of knowing who was who.

The women who scored most politically were from the Middle-West. Some of them were middle-aged and rather too “dressy”, but they were possessed of much common sense and understanding of politics in generaly as well as of the men form their districts. They impressed members as leaders in small communities, part of the “substantial citizens” group, whose men have always had great weight with office holders.

To watch the changes in our poll of the house was my most exciting duty. We kept the list at that time on nine-column sheets, so that by following a line across the page we could get all the important information about a member's stand on the Amendment. For example, the first name form Alabama, the State which was alphabetically first, was listed:

The notation meant that Representative Grey, a Democrat from the State of Alabama, was not in the Congress when the Amendment was voted on in 1915; that he did not reply to our questionnaire; that our Congressional chairman in Alabama reported on November 25, 1916, that he was opposed to the Amendment; that the lobbyists who interviewed him in Washington on January 10, 1917, reported him as noncommittal; and that he was estimated as a “probably no” vote.

Our standard of comparison for totals was the vote in the House on Jan. 12, 1915, when the result was:

yeas nays

On January 1, 1917, our poll, based on the previous vote of those members still in the Congress who had voted on the Amendment in 1915 and on the most recent reports from our State Congressional Chairmen, stood:

On Jan. 29, 1917, thee poll showed

In our totals the figure under “doubtful” always included, not only the number about whom we were uncertain, but also the 05241number of temporary vacancies due to resignation or death.

The gain of eleven favorable votes seemed a small result after four weeks of work by a lobby so large as ours, for during that time 326 members had been interviewed and 20 of them seen twice or oftener. The record helped to convince me that comparatively little can be done in Washington to change votes.

Yet I realized that the lobby was necessary in order to verify our State reports, if for no other reason. Although the majority of those reports were accurate, we learned that inexperienced workers, as some of our State chairman were bound to be, were likely to take a pleasant, non-committal reply as meaning that the member would vote for the Amendment. And the men themselves were more tempted to stretch a point in regard to their support when interviewed in their home towns than they were in Washington, where their attitude was likely to be known to their fellow ? members. When the lobby confirmed the State reports, we had no further doubts. When the two disagreed, we asked the State workers to try to get a favorable statement in writing: and, if that was not forthcoming , to have more appeals sent from the District.

Another reason for the lobby that I did not sufficiently appreciate at first was the effect of widespread interest in woman suffrage that it gave, an effect that was indirectly of much value.

But the greatest impetus the cause received that month was a direct one, the first fruits of Mrs. Catt's plan in the granting of presidential suffrage to the women of North Dakota. We went gaily to our interviews after we had that news to spread. And we found that it did a good deal to offset the depressing remembrance 05342of the failures in the four eastern States in 1915. We grew hoarse explaining that with North Dakota's five presidential electors the total number for whom women might vote had risen to 96.

At Suffrage House that month we took steps to organize our social activities, for the failure of house-warming had taught us the futility of merely sending out invitations. At a meeting of the Congressional Committee two members who lived in Washington, though not at Suffrage House, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, a Democrat, and Miss Heloise Meyer, a Republican, were appointed to take charge of social affairs at headquarters; and a third member, Mrs. Medill McCormick, a former chairman of our Committee, was asked to act as its representative at the Congressional Club, an organization made up of the women of Congressional families. Another member, Miss Mabel Willard, was chosen to promote the use of Suffrage House as a meeting-place for the District of Columbia suffrage associations and for suffragists from other places. Her work included helping with a bazaar , which the local women sponsored , and which netted about a thousand dollars for the National Association; and also the finding and supervision of a house hostess committee to provide someone for every weekday who would ? take stray visitors over the house and thus relieve our office of innumerable friendly but pointless calls from out-of-town members of the Association. Miss Willard developed shrewd discernment about the visitors who might safely be used while they were in Washington for interviews with their senators and representatives or as companions for the more experienced lobbyists. She never forgot that the real purpose of everything we did was to get votes enough to carry the Amendment through 05443the Congress.

In addition to seeing New England members of the House whom I assigned to myself, I took on a special piece of work at the Capitol during January and a part of February. That was an attempt to get men from the woman suffrage States, along with a few strong friends from other places, to push for a House vote on the Amendment.

By that time I had learned that the only practicable way of getting a vote was by means of a so-called rule for the Rules Committee, which served as a sort of program committee for the House. Aside from a few “privileged” measures, like revenue bills, and from infrequent possibilities of bringing a bill forward on special calendar days or under suspension of the rules, measures could come usually came to the floor of the House for debate and vote only with the aid of the Rules Committee. Like all other committees, this important one was sure to have in its membership a majority who belonged to the party in power - at the time the Democrats - and to be in close touch with the House leaders of that party. If they were in favor of having a bill or resolution come up at a particular time, a rule, or resolution, to that effect would be proposed at a meeting of the Rules Committee, where it was sure of being passed by the majority party members , unless it concerned a non-party issue and they were divided about it. In that case minority party members in favor might make up enough votes to carry the motion in the committee. Then the rules was reported to the House and if it was accepted there the bill itself came up for debate and vote under conditions laid down by the rule.

One of the great distinctions between Senate and House procedure was that in the Senate getting a measure on to the floor for 05544debate was easy; but , in disputed questions , getting it off by a vote was extremely hard; whereas in the House the difficulty came in getting a bill up on the floor; but once there it was almost certain to be voted on. The reason was that the House procedure left few loopholes for delaying a measure during the debate by long or frequent speeches or by an organized filibuster.

My work to enlist the help of friendly House members began on January 2nd, when I asked Representative Raker of California to call a conference of one member from each of the suffrage States and a few others, to make plans for getting a vote on the Amendment before the Congress ended. He agreed to have the meeting on January 6th and together we made up a list of fifteen men for me to speak to and five for him to see. On January 6th, when i went to his office again, he said that he had been too busy to do anything about the conference and suggested that I add four of his names to my list. By the morning of the 5th I had made the nineteen calls with the result that ten men promised definitely to be present, four promised conditionally, four said they had engagements that would keep them away and one proved too doubtful to be invited. Except in the last instance , I left at each office a note giving the time and place of the meeting and Mr. Raker promised to have his secretary telephone a reminder on the morning of the 6th.

Promptly at 10 that day, Mrs. Catt, Mrs. Miller, our Congressional Chairman, Miss Meyer and I were at the Public Lands Committee room, where the meeting was to be held. I tried hard not to let the others know how excited I was over what I regarded as my first piece of constructive work, for the attempt to get House members to help us in a concerted way had been my suggestion.

The bald record of what happened to that effort illustrates so well the disappointments of a lobbyist that I quote part of my notes inside at the time: “Six men came. Two others arrived after the meeting ended. Mr. Catt told the conference that we wished to have the Amendment brought up in the House, for the felt sure of a much better vote than before, although we had not two-thirds pledged. She hoped for a full debate with the idea that more votes might thus be won. The men present differed from her on that point, all agreeing that no votes were likely to be changed by a debate. It was therefore decided that only a two hours’ debate, with provision for five-minute speeches, should be asked for and that Mr. Raker should organized a deputation to the Rules Committee to make this request, with the understanding that the Representatives from suffrage States should themselves take entire charge of the work with the Rules Committee. Four men promised to talk with individual members of the committee. The conference, which had lasted about fifteen minutes, then closed.”

I waited five days in the ? hope of hearing that the work planned by the conference was being carried on by the man who had undertaken to attend to it. Then I telephoned Mr. Raker, only to find again that he had been too busy to do anything. However, he promised to start out immediately and asked me to drop in a day or two later. When I went to his office he told me that the Woman's Party was opposed to bringing the Amendment up at the time, although their members had started picketing the White House in protest against what they considered the President's failure to act in the matter. I had already had work of that opposition, but I did not think it necessary to tell Mr. Raker. The outcome of our talk was that he said he would prepare a petition to the Rules Committee, to be signed by Representatives from suffrage States, if we would take it about for the signatures.

Three days later the petition with Mr. Raker's signature on 05746the first line, was ready and I started out. As Raker was a Democrat, I wanted to have an influential Republican the second signer. Again I quote from my notes, omitting only the names from reports of a few typical interviews.

“I went first to see Mr. A, Republican, but though I made several attempts, I did not find him that day. I therefore left the second line of the petition for his signature and went on with other calls.

” Mr. B, Republican, was gruff, almost rude. Said that he understood there was opposition from part of the suffrage forces and that it was our business to reconcile our differences before we asked anything of the men in Congress. I tried to explain that the National is the oldest and by far the strongest suffrage association and he finally withdrew his positive refusal to sign and said that I might come again after he had had a chance to talk it over with the other men.

“C, Democrat, was entirely cordial about signing, although he said he believe we were not likely to get a good vote this year, owing to the activities of the Woman's Party.

” Mr. D, Republican, we had to call out of the House. He signed the petition at once, assuring us of his support.

“E, Democrat, hesitated a little without giving any reason, but finally signed, with only casual interest in the matter.

“F, Republican, we called out of the House, at the suggestion of his secretary. He said that he had been talked to by the Woman's Party women and urged not to sign the petition on the ground that a vote at this time would harm the Amendment. He hoped that the vote would not be taken unless we were sure of a large increased: still he felt that he was bound by the decision of the conference, at which he had been present, to sign the petition and he did so in a spirit of real friendliness. His attitude seemed to me completely straightforward and his feeling of loyalty to the decision of the conference both manly and helpful.

“G, Democrat, had been approached by the Woman's Party. Told them he had stated in his campaign speeches that if elected he would do whatever the National Association wanted and would refuse to do what the Woman's Party wanted. He therefore signed gleefully.

“A, Republican, was very ill at ease when I at last found him and presented the petition. He hesitated, doubled the vision of taking a vote at this time, asked 05847if I thought it wise, etc., etc. Then I reminded him that he had been present at the conference at which it was decided to press for a vote and I showed him the blank second line of the petition which I had saved for his signature. He was evidently disconcerted, but, after reading the petition, signed. He urged me strongly not to let the petition go in before February and seemed pleased that the dates given were fairly late in the session.

“Mr. Raker, to whom I returned to report progress, was much pleased to see Mr. A's name on the petition. With Mrs. Catt's consent, I explained that our poll showed we were beginning to lose votes on account of the picketing ad I asked him whether, if the Rules Committee made a favorable report, it could be held up in case our vote seemed likely to be poor. He said that it could be kept from vote Mr. even with a favorable report from the Rules Committee.

“H, Democrat, was very cordial, glad to help in any way possible , and of course signed the petition. I asked whether he had been visited by the Woman's Party. He said that he had not, probably because some time ago he had requested them never to come to his office again.

“I, Democrat, signed without comment. Two days later he telephoned to Suffrage House, in my absence, and left a message that he wished his name taken off.

“B, Republican, on our second visit, said he did not think he would sign. Did not want to mix up in our quarrels. I suggested that he read the petition and when he did so and saw the names he asked when A had signed. I said that Mr. A signed the first time I had opportunity to see him and present the petition. After that B himself signed, with distinctly bad grace.

“J, Republican, said that he feared it would be a bad thing for the Amendment to have it voted on at this session and that he understood that many of its best friends were opposed to bringing it up. After we had talked with him at some length, he admitted that he was too new in the Congress to have a real opinion and said that he would be glad to talk the matter over with Mr. Raker. He seemed to us really sincere in his desire to find out what was best for the masure.

“L, Democrat, was in a great hurry and signed almost without looking at the paper. Seemed to have little interest.

“M, Republican, seen for the third time, proved to be still on the fence and too timid to come down.

“N, Republican, I tried several times to see, but for a fortnight his duties in connection with the Rivers and 05948Harbors bill afforded a pretext for his refusal to talk with me. As soon as the bill was out of the House, I tried again, only to find that he was away on sick leave.

“O, Democrat, said the Woman's Party people had not come to him about the petition, he supposed because he had previously assured them of his hostility to their methods. He felt that their opposition had helped him in his campaign and seemed glad to sign the petition.”

The total number of those whom I saw was 38, of whom 28 signed, though one of them later had his name withdrawn. Of the rest, 4 refused to sign and 6 were so doubtful that I concluded not to press them further.

Then, before the work was completed, all plans were shattered by the President's announcement, on February 4th, of the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Germany. and The next day Mrs. Catt decided that we ought not to do anything more about a vote in that session.

I felt constrained to make an explanation to the signers of the petition and , with Miss Willard, I saw as many of them as possible. In every instance except one , we were thanked for our courtesy and commended for the decision. ¶ My initial undertaking had amounted to nothing and at the time I did not have the satisfaction of knowing that the less i ons we had learned and the friends we had made among the members would help us later on. But my disappointment seemed of little consequence in the stress of the crisis that the nation was facing.

Overnight, it seemed, the shadow of the Great War fell upon Washington.

There, as elsewhere, the importance of the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” in the reelection of President Wilson the previous November had led to the belief that the United States would never be involved in the conflict. During the first two months that I listened to Congressional debate there was scarcely a mention of the European situation and its possible effect upon us--a striking omission to look back on. The bill to regulate railroads, discussed in the Senate in early December, carried a provision to give the President power “to control and operate the railways when necessary in time of war or other like public necessity”; but none of the speeches voiced the ideas that a time of war might be at hand. Even the President's “Peace Overture,” suggesting that “an early occasion be sought to collect from all the nations now at war an avowal of their respective views as to the terms upon which war might be concluded,” stirred up little comment when it was reported to the Senate shortly before the holiday recess. On the House side appropriation bills and, in the Senate, the District dry bill, a measure for prohibition in the District of Columbia by means of which the prohibitionists were testing their strength in the Congress, were the centres of interest during December, 1916, and January, 1917.

Then, on January 31st, came the lightning flash of Germany's avowal of her intention to wage unrestricted submarine warfare, during which the United States would be permitted to send only one passenger vessel weekly to England , and that under humiliating restrictions. Washington could think and talk of nothing except what the President was likely to do about the 061insulting announcement. The answer was given on February 3rd, when he told the Congress that he had severed diplomatic relations between the United States and the German Empire.

For the remainder of the session our Congressional Committee did little more than mark time by occasional conference s with our friends at the Capitol. The freedom from active lobbying gave me opportunity to spend most of my time afternoon in the reserved gallery of the Senate, for which I had a session ticket. The chief doorkeeper there, an elderly man, precise in manner and rambling in speech, soon came to know me and did all that he could, consistently with his reverence for gallery rules, to promote my convenience and comfort. Another useful friend whom I made at that time was the matron in the near-by rest-room for women, intended primarily for the ladies of senators’ families— whose gallery adjoined the one in which I usually set—but open also to women with tickets for the other reserved galleries. The matron rightly regarded herself as a person of importance and looked the part, with her elaborately dressed white hair and her fine, erect carriage. I was always careful to treat her with the respect she deserved and later on, when she found that I did not abuse the privilege, she permitted me to use in emergencies the telephone supposed to be reserved for senators’ wives. If one of them happened to be in the rest-room when I went there, the matron would raise her eyebrows as a warning that I was not to ask for the telephone. Occasionally I was caught in the act of telephoning and then I would wind up quickly and slip away. The opportunity to reach telephone without having to go to the pay station, which was two floors down and generally in use, was extremely valuable in the rush moments of our work, as was the possibility of getting an urgent message from our office when the matron sent word through the friendly doorkeeper that one had come. Small things like that and like a pleasant acquaintance with the doorkeepers in charge of sending cards to members on the floor 062of Senate or House, were to prove invaluable in the years ahead.

My interrupted hours in the Senate gallery at that time gave me real knowledge of the views and the personalities of many of the leading senators. When the speeches were long and dull—and the longer they were the duller they usually proved—I amused myself by making up descriptive names for the men on the floor.

The most striking figure in those days was Senator Verdaman of Mississippi, who had habit of standing at the centre door of the Chamber in his broad-brimmed black felt hat and voluminous cape with velvet collar—like the Colonel in his opera cloak—and clapping for a page to come and take his hat and cape to the coatroom. His tall figure, sallow complexion, the dark hair which he wore long about his ears end his old-fashioned black goatee led me to call him Simon Legris. His colleague, Senator Williams, to whom he was anathema, was said to have spoken to him on only one occasion. That was when Vardaman was to take the oath of office and in accordance with the usual procedure, Senator Williams was expected to escort him to th place in front of the platform where oaths were are administered. Williams let it be known that he intend to he intended to leave town in order to escape his distasteful duty. Then his friends persuaded him that he ought not to flout Senatorial custom in that way , and he finally consented to act as escort on condition that Senator Vardaman would agree not to speak to him during the ceremony. But when the line of incoming senators with their sponsors was formed in an aisle of the Senate, Vardaman, noticing that he had placed himself at the left of his colleague, changed over, with a whispered apology for being on the wrong side.

“That's where you always are, damn you,” said Williams, addressing him for the first and only time during his term in the Senate.

For another senator, whose large supply of whiskers and heir led to his being called in the press-gallery “the animated feather duster,” I found 063a more satisfactory name after I saw him come into the Senate on noon and walk slowly to his front seat, drawing off his gloves as he came forward and extending one, held by its finger tip, almost at arm's length. That pose, his foppish clothes and something feline about his bewhiskered face made him so like a picture in the Mother Goose book of my childhood that I never thought of him afterwards except as Puss-in-Boots.

Two other names that I picked out during those weeks were so obvious that I found them later in newspaper accounts of the Senate. One of these was the Undertaker, applied to a sour-visaged man possessed of a funereal voice and habitually dressed in black clothes. The other, the Floor-Walker, I gave to a tall Senator with manners of studied affability, who always stalked about the floor in a frock coat.

Senator Penrose, rarely in his seat in the Republican front row except during th critical debates on prohibition or revenue bills. I used to watch with fascinated interest when he was sure to be there. At first the huge bulk of his unwieldy body, always in dark clothes, his small, half-shut eye and the keen mind under his apparent indifference made me think of him as a rogue elephant, waiting his opportunity to stampede the herd. Then one day I saw beside him in that front two other senators who, in over-fed appearance, were smeller editions of Penrose himself; so I grouped the three as the World,the Flesh and the Devil. That classification satisfied me until th following summer, when Penrose came back from a week-end cruise with his red face burned to a deep mahogany. As he sat in his place, with bent head and hands folded on his vast belly, he reminded me so vehemently of something I had seen but couldn't remember that I was unhappy until a recollection of the great Buddha at Kamakura flashed into my mind. From that time on he was for me “the great god, Budd.”

More legends were recited about him about anyone else in the Congress, with the possible exception of Champ Clark. Two persons who had 064known Penrose in his youth told me that he had been strikingly handsome and a student of great promise. Like Alcibiedes with all the gifts, he must have had the world pretty much at his feet when he was young. But when I first saw him, his girth and his Gargantuan meals, for which he was said to order double portions of such hearty food as steak, broiled lobster or duck, were a part of current gossip. Much was said also about the curious friendship that seemed to exist between him and Senator La Folletts. I found it explicable only on the ground that each of them recognized in the order the absence of any pretence of being something that he was not. Each of them was thorough-going in his way, not wishy-washy, not divided against himself.

On the few occasions when I heard Penrose speak in the Senate he was brief, casual and witty. And, in spite of the sinister aspects of the kind of boss-rule which he exemplified, he had the reputation of being dependable, once his word was given.

He proved so in the interviews which I had with him. One of these was when I happened to meet him lumbering along the hall just before our last vote in the Senate. With sudden courage I stopped and asked, “Are you going to fight the Suffrage Amendment this time, Senator?”

“Vote against it. Won't fight it,” he drawled, without looking at me or halting his slow pace. And he was better than his word, for he paired against the Amendment and stayed away from the Senate

As the time for final adjournment of the Congress drew near, evening sessions of the Senate became frequent. I noticed then that something about the lighting of the Senate Chamber seemed to melt away the sharp distinction of the daytime between floor and galleries, as if the lookers-on in the tiers of seats above had suddenly become a part of the Senate itself. In the early hours of the evening I always found that sensation exciting; but if the session was a late one and the gallery crowd went away, I used to envy senators on the floor—often no more then two or 065three besides the men speaking—because they were able to make themselves comfortable by sprawling on two chairs spiece trusting to the cessation of the speaker's voice to waken them if by chance they dozed off. And the presiding officer, too, often drooped suspiciously in his chair on the platform. Only the clerks, the hard worked stenographers and the men who was speaking were obliged to keep awake. But in the galleries sleep was forbidden on penalty of expulsion. Once when I had been having a desperate time to keep my own eyes open, I saw th elderly doorkeeper napping, with his head propped against the jamb of the door. I concluded that, with my coat arranged as a pillow, I might venture on forty winks myself. It seemed as if I had no more than five when a hand shook me and I heard the old man's voice whispering, “If you go to sleep I shall have to put you out of the gallery.”

On another evening I hit upon a device for keeping awake that served for the remainder of that session an well into the next. In my own mind I group the members of the Senate into the cast of a comic opera with several choruses, including the Bald Brigade, led by a senator who always reminded me of a Mexican hairless, and the Mustache Contingent, headed by two members with walrus mustaches. One senator was the Farmer Boy; another who had wavy hair and a Byronic tie, th Poet; and a third, Senator Harding, the Heavy Leed. All those for whom I could find no special designation I put into a group of Just Folks. Most of the members of th Senate at that time were well into middle age or beyond it; but there were four whom by contrast, seemed extremely young. These I styled the Young Things and I made them into the principals of my opera. Two, who were tell and romantic looking when from the gallery, were cast as the dark hero and the blonde heroine; and two others shorter and stouter , but though but also of contrasted coloring, were the gay juveniles.

But my nonsense gave way to absorbed interest on February 26th, when 06655the President requested from the Congress authority to supply the country's merchant ships with defensive arms for the protection of lives and property at sea. Even then he explained that he was not “contemplating war or any steps that may lead to war.” A bill was introduced immediately granting the authority which he sought, but opposition to the measure quickly made itself felt in the Congress. Then the President let it be known that the British secret service had got hold of a message from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the German minister to Mexico, directing him to propose an alliance with Mexico if the United States declared war and offering, in that case, to support Mexico in the recovery of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona from the United States. Aroused by that information, the House passed the armed merchantmen bill, with only a few dissenting votes. But in the Senate there was organized opposition from “the little band of wilful men,” led by Senator La Follette.

The Constitutional end of the Congress, at noon on March 4th, was so close at hand that opponents of the bill, by arranging to spell one another in speeches that lasted for hours, were able to prevent a vote before final adjournment. I particularly remember one of those speeches, made by old Senator Stone, who managed to consume more than four consecutive hours by incredibly slow delivery and by pauses whenever his breath began to fail pauses during which he paced from one side of the Chamber to the other, stopping from time to time to time to pound on a desk before uttering a fex words. Usually when such speeches were made, most of the senators were off the floor and in this case he spoke to chairs that were nearly all empty. As Senate rules had no check on the length of time or the number of times that a senator might speak and no provision for taking a vote on a measure when any member wished to talk, one senator could prevent a vote so long as he was able to stand on his feet and keep talking. In the organized filibusters there was always a second senator present to help the first by asking questions or to take his place when his strength was exhausted. To 06756his opponents, who also kept a man or two in the Chamber in the hope of getting the floor, the speaker could refuse to “yield” or could yield for questions and still hold his right to the floor. From the point of the opposition, questions were undesirable because they gave the filibusterer opportunity to pause and, though he could not take his seat without losing the floor, he could relax and rest his throat while the questioner was speaking.

The filibuster on the armed mechantmen bill revived stories of some of the famous filibusters in the past. One of the favorite anecdotes was about Senator Smoot, who rarely made long speeches and on the occasion in question had difficulty in filling the time allotted to him in a filibuster. While he was addressing an almost almost empty Chamber, Senator Williams strayed in from the Democratic coatroom. Smoot, observing with the tail of his eye that Williams was behind him, cannily twisted his speech into an attack on the Democrats, in the course of which he deliberately mistated an historical fact.

As he anticipated, Senator Williams, the most erudite member of the Senate, was instantly on his feet, asking, “Will the Senator yield for a question?” And the Senator obligingly yielded. Whereupon Williams not only questioned the mistatement but started in to refute it.

Meanwhile Smoot, looking like the eat who had swallowed a canary, leaned back against the desk behind him and sent one of the Senate pages to bring him a glass of milk. When the milk came , he sipped it and rested while Williams, warming with own eloquence, went on and on.

After he had talked for fully half an hour, the Democratic floor leader, who had been watching the course of events through a glass pane in the coatroom door, slipped into the Chamber and, pulling Senator Williams’ coat, whispered a plea that he would bring his remarks to an end. But Williams paid no attention and the leader went back to the coatroom. Twenty 06857minutes later he sent in one of Williams’ closest friends to head him off. “John,” the friend begged in an audible whisper, “don't you realize you're helping the filibuster?”

Williams broke off his remarks long enough to reply, with no lowering of his voice, “See here, Joe, if you don't stop pertering me I'll make a speech.” And he continued to elucidate his point for the better part of an hour. Then Smooth, thoroughly refreshed, went on with the filibuster.

The task of filibustering was made easier by the fact I have already spoken of that Senate rules do not require a member to speak on the measure before the Senate. If a man has the floor he may talk about any subject that he chooses. Once I heard Senator La Follette, who was said to have made an eleven-hour speech in one filibuster, the longest speech on record, thank an opponent who had mistakenly risen to ask him a question. “Well now,” said he, “I am much obliged to the Senator for that question. Time does hang rather heavily on my hands this evening and he has given me a new start. I hadn't thought of speaking on that point, but I think I can spend fully an hour on it.” And he did.

As March 4th crept closer, excitement about the fate of the armed merchantmen bill became intense. The galleries were packed throughout the afternoon and late into the evening. Again and again Senator Hitchcock, who was in charge of the bill, getting the floor under pretext of asking a question, besought a chance to bring the measure to vote. But invariably one of the eleven “wilful men” was on hand to prolong the debate.

On the morning of Saturday, March 3rd, Mabel Willard and I were in the reserved gallery two hours before the session, which began at eleven, in order to be sure of seats. And there we sat through the apparently interminable speeches that filled the afternoon. We had learned that the crowd thinned out a little about five-thirty, so we chose that time to slip down into the restaurant for supper. But when we returned at six, 06958there was a long queue of visitors waiting before every gallery door. As the rule was that after a gallery was filled no one else could go in until someone came out, we had to wait more than two hours before enough visitors emerged to provide those ahead of us in the line with the opportunity to enter. When our turn came, there was only standing-room at the rear of the gallery and there we stood for nearly two hours longer before withdrawals made it possible for us to get seats. Towards midnight the crowd began to melt away and by two o'clock in the moring we were the only occupants of our gallery. Senator Gronna, an admirable man but a full speaker at best, was doing his turn then and droning along as if he had been wound up to last for a slow eternity. About three I suggested that we try to get a little reat in a dressing-room on the House side, where I remembered seeing two couches. We made our way down stairs and through dimly lighted, errie corridors to that dressing-rrom, which happily was unlocked. There we lay down and Mable slept, but, just as I was dozing off, an unmistakable bite drove me from my sofa. After a dejected interval in a rocking-chair, I washed my face and smoothed my hair, hoping that label would wake up. Then she stirred a little I told her that I was going to get a cup of coffee in the Senate restaurant, which was always open when the Senate was in session. She declined to go with me and, after we had had a little food, we sent back to the empty gallery, only to find Senator Gronna still on his feet and talking, though he sounded as if he were doing it in his sleep.

At seven o'clock the doorkeeper told me that our regular cards of admission were not sufficient for the coming hours and that we needed to cut special tickets for that morning. He let me wait until I saw one of our friends on the floor. Then I went down to the reception room and sent it my visiting card to the senator, who came out promptly and secured for me the necessary admission tickets.

About eight Senator La Follette, who had organized the filibuster and 07059had reserved the closing hours for himself, came in. He had been sleeping and looked surprisingly fresh and cheerful. But in planning to make the last speech he had not reckoned with the bitterness of resentment that other senators felt toward him personally, a bitterness which was palpable from the moment he entered the Chamber. Whenever he tried to get the floor he was prevented, either by some parliamentary trick that I did not understand or by the refusal of the Vice-President, who was when in the chair, to recognize him , in spite of his loud and persistent cry of “Mr. President, Mr. President, I rise to a point of order”.

His allies were, therefore, obliged to keep the floor, with no opportunity to yield to him as it had been planned that they would do. Moments came when his voice rang out so stridently and the attitude of his opponents was so hostile that I thought that they were going to resort to blows. Indeed the Sergeant-at-Arms came forward and stood in the aisle as if he feared that an attack was about to be made on one side or the other.

As the minutes went by, Senator Hitchcook, getting recognition several times for a question, implored the filibusterers not to let the Congress come to an end without a vote on such an urgent matter as the protection of our merchant marine. But the filibuster went on.

Hitchcook's last plea was made at a few seconds before twelve. There had been talk of setting the clock back, as had been done in other years in order to give time for unfinished business; but when it became evident that an hour or two would make no difference, the Vice-President rapped for order and, in a silence tense with the determination of the “little band” and with the wrath of the President's supporters, he announced the final adjournment of the Senate of the 64th Congress.

As far back as the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Germany, while others were content with mere wondering, Mrs. Catt had set herself to find an answer to the all-effacing question, “What shall we do if the United States enters the war?” When her own mind was made up, she called a meeting of the Executive Council, the same body which had heard her campaign plan in Atlantic City.

Interest was bubbling at Suffrage House before the meeting, in late February, when the question came to a head. The different currents of opinion which were sweeping over America were represented in the Council itself. We had militaristic members who insisted that war work was all that the Association ought to undertake in case of war. Then there were the pacifists among us who argued that our sole purpose as an organization was to get votes for women and that all our efforts should be directed toward that end. But again it was Mrs. Catt who carried the day with her conviction that the success of woman suffrage, as well as natural considerations of patriotism, would necessitate double duty. Through her initiative, a resolution pledging to the Government, if war should be declared, the loyal and active service of the Association was voted by a large majority of the Council members. Once more, confronted with a choice between two tremendous pieces of work, Mrs. Catt decided, “We must do both.”

Following that action, we had a mass meeting in the National Theatre in Washington the next Sunday afternoon. All the members of the Congress and the high-ups in the Executive Branch of the Government 07261were invited and many of them occupied seats on the stage. Thanks to the hard work of Mabel Willard, the general audience was so great that an overflow ? meeting on the street had to be hastily arranged. Inside the theatre, where Mrs. Catt presided, the tender of the Association's services was acknowledged with appreciation by the Secretary of War, representing the Administration; and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw made one of her most impassioned speeches. Unfortunately, it happened that scenery for the play of the coming week arrived during her address and the sounds of moving were audible on the stage. To keep the workmen quiet, I left my seat and went back. So I lost Dr. Shaw's words, but I could hear the rise and fall of her wonderful voice and before I knew it I was sobbing at its cadences just as I had sobbed the first time I heard her speak, at the celebration of Miss Anthony's eightieth birthday in 1900.

Within a few days of the close of the 64th Congress, the President called an extraordinary session of the new Congress. The date, first set as April 16th, was changed to April 2nd in consequence of the sinking of American ships by German U-boats. After the earlier date was announced, few doubted that the President had made up his mind to ask for a declaration of war. In Suffrage House, as outside, little else was talked of. Everybody was proclaiming himself or herself as one of the vast number who thought we ought to go into the war or as belonging to the small group of active and, for the most part, conscientious objectors. Rumors were heard everywhere about papers found in the German Embassy and said to reveal plots against the United States, even while we were completely neutral. The stand of senators and representatives, which was pretty well known, seemed to assure the 07362declaration of war if the President asked for it.

I myself had not been in sympathy with the previous quiescent attitude of the United States. From the moment that Belgium was entered by the German forces, I believed, with the English, that if any nation were permitted to regard its pledged word as something that could be tossed aside at convenience, then civilization might as well throw up its hands. It seemed to me that the Allies were fighting our battle as well as their own and I thought we were cowardly to let them do it without our help. But when the sinking of the Lusitania went unpunished and the accidental discovery of German data about expenditures for propaganda in the United States, the forging of passports , and alleged sabotage in this country brought only a request for the recall of the Austrian ambassador and two German attaches, I came to the conclusion that we were weakly and wickedly leaving the standards of international decency to be destroyed by savages. Thereafter I tried not to read more than headlines about the progress of the war, for the apparent success of the Germans seemed too dreadful to be borne. To me, therefore, the probable change in the President's stand was of passionate concern.

Then, just when it was hardest for me to give thought to anything else, the chairman of our Congressional Committee was obliged by family duties to resign and I was appointed by the National Board to take her place. I dreaded the responsibility too much to accept it readily. First I tried to persuade Helen Gardener, whose extraordinary gifts I was beginning to appreciate, to be chairman. She refused because of her husband's failing health, though she promised to be vice-chairman. Then I told the Board I was not sufficiently familiar with Congressional procedure 07463to direct the work. But that objection was removed by the Board's agreement to engage, as temporary adviser, Dr. McKelway, who had been the legislative representative of the Child Labor Committee when the first child labor bill passed the Congress. With the further assurance that Miss Ruth White, of Missouri, the able secretary of our committee since June 1916, would continue in that office, I reluctantly accepted the appointment.

In addition to Mrs. Gardener and Miss White, the members of the Committee at that time were:

Miss Heloise Meyer, Massachusetts;

In spite of our absorption in the possibility of war, we knew that we had to prepare for our campaign for the Amendment in the 65th Congress. So Ruth White and I wrote our letter of directions to State Congressional chairmen, a letter which I quote in full because it is explicit in regard to the help counted on and, in most cases, received from our State workers.

March 21, 1917

“Dear Congressional Chairman:-

The 65th Congress has been called together on April 2nd. Although we cannot tell what the extra session may bring forth, we hope that the need of political justice for women will be more apparent than ever before and that openings may arise which we had not foreseen. It is imperative that we should take advantage of every possibility in our favor. For that reason, there is urgent need for 07564activity in the home districts of Members of Congress. Will you therefore please give immediate attention to the following requests.

“I. REPORTS.

There are several new members with regard to whom we have had no word from their own state. Please send us immediately a statement, as full as you are able to make it, about the men whose names are enclosed.

“CAUTION. Although we are most anxious to know how the Members of Congress stand with regard to the Federal Amendment, we beg you to take the utmost care that no Member is allowed to commit himself against the Amendment when he can be prevented from doing so. If you think he is inclined to be opposed, let us know your opinion; but in your letters to him and in your interviews, frame your appeals in such a way that they will not offer opportunity for a negative answer.

“II. DELEGATIONS

If time allows and unless you have already done this work, delegations should visit your new members before they leave for Washington. Delegations should be sent also to the old Members who are reported as “non committal” or ‘opposed’. Old Members who are in favor should be scan less formally, thanked for their position in the past, and given to understand, in a friendly and cordial way, that we are confident of their continued support.

“In this connection, we ought all to remind ourselves constantly that Members expect to be treated as individuals. Do not permit circular letters to be sent them; but in writing or visiting them, be sure to make clear that you differentiate the individual from the group. In the case of friendly men, great harm has been done by writing or speaking as if their previous records were unknown and their support unappreciated.

“Care should be taken in forming delegations to choose, if possible, women whose families have political influence in the man's own party and who are representative of the different sections of his district. It is well to have a small group of persons of real importance in the district rather than a large group of less prominent people. Effective use should be made of our recent remarkable gains in Ohio, North Dakota, Indiana and Canada. For example, copies 07665of the maps giving the increase of suffrage territory might be shown and a statement made of our gain in electoral votes.

“Please let us know what you are able to do in this matter.

III. WORK BY MEN.

INDIVIDUAL CALLS. The best advice that we have been able to get with regard to our work in the coming session bids us lay much more emphasis on work by men in the home districts. We therefore urge you to try to get men of political prominence to call, apparently casually, on your Congressmen before they return to Washington to express to them the hope that they may support the Federal Amendment. The more men you can get to make these calls the better, for they will be enormously effective. They should be quite apart from the delegations.

“COMMITTEES OF MEN. While you are seeking men to make these personal calls, it would be well also to start in each Congressional District a committee or group of men prominent in politics or in other ways who will agree to help as the need may arise by sending letters and telegrams to the Congressmen. When such a committee or group has been formed, a list of its members with addresses should be sent to our office with the name of the District Congressional Chairman through whom they can be reached. Mrs. Catt in her letter of March 12th wrote you in this connection. We are merely reminding you and urging you to make every effort to secure as many influential men as possible for these committees.

“IV. COMPLETION OF STATE CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEES

Mrs. Catt urged you also to complete your list of District Congressional Chairmen, if such list is not already filled. The Chairman of each district should make herself responsible for the accumulation of all information with regard to her Congressman which could possibly be of use to the workers in Washington. She should know about his political, social and personal standing, what influences affected his election, what pressure he would most quickly feel, his previous record in Congress and any earlier political record he may have. If he is a former member of the State Legislature, she should know what kind of bills he sponsored in the legislature and whether he is progressive or reactionary with regard to social and humanitarian measures. In short, she should know all about him, and most important of all, she should pass that information on to us in Washington 07766in order that we may make the best possible use of it.

“SPECIAL. In addition to your chairman for each Congressional District, you should appoint two members ‘at large’ each of whom should hold herself responsible for one of your Senators in the same manner in which the Congressional District Chairman is responsible for the Representative from her district. Will you kindly send us the names of these two members at large as soon as possible?

“V. STATE ORGANIZATION WORK

When your State is planning its organization work, can you not arrange with the State Organization Committee to put its full force into the districts whose representatives in Congress are on your ‘doubtful’ list? It is possible that the reason why that representative is ‘doubtful’ is that the suffrage organization in his district is weak. If you could send an organizer into that district to stir up new suffrage sentiment or to make articulate and effective the feeling that is already there, the man might be swung into our ranks for the coming session. If you can accomplish this with even one of your ‘doubtful’ men, you will have done much toward the end which we are all hoping to attain in this coming Congress. We look to the State Congressional Chairmen and their lieutenants in the Congressional districts to make this hope an accomplished fact.

“SUMMARY.

We shall then expect from you:

I. An immediate report on the new members whose names are inclosed.

Your National Committee hopes to hear from you more frequently during the coming year. We are convinced that our fighting strength must lie chiefly in a connection with our state organizations represented by the State Congressional Chairmen. We urge, you, therefore, to share with us freely all the wisdom which you may have. Your 07867suggestions and criticism at any time, as well as your active co-operation, will be heartily appreciated.

Very cordially yours, Maud Wood Park, (Chairman) Ruth White (Secretary) National Congressional Committee”

In Washington during March, we made calls on friends in the Senate and House who were not to be in the next Congress, to thank them for their support in the past. We found furniture on the move and the corridors of the office buildings filled with the cedar chests which were given to members for the filling of valuable papers and which they usually took with them when they left Washington. It was my first experience of the moving out and about which follows the close of every Congress, though there were not so many changes that year as there are when a different party comes into power, with a consequent reassignment of Committee chairmanship and the large offices which go with them. Still, a good many members who had had poor offices were provided with better ones and, in spite of committees in House and Senate to make assignment of quarters, with due regard for the wishes of members of the majority party, occasionally a man who just grabbed a desirable vacant office was able, by moving in, to keep it, on the principle that possession is nine points of the law.

Before the new Congress convened we had to make arrangements for having the suffrage resolution introduced by a Democrat and a Republican in each house. As the Democrats were the majority party, we knew that it was advisable to approach one of them first. We found that it was not easy to make a choice on the House side, but after considerable discussion we decided on Representative Raker of California. We asked him to try to have his resolution 07968numbered one among the joint resolutions, though the number was of no real importance except as it was supposed to give a little extra prestige and publicity to the resolution. In the House the only way to be sure of that number was for the representative introducing the resolution to arrange beforehand with the Clerk, so that it would be the first taken out of the basket in which the hundreds of bills and resolutions, sure to be introduced on the opening day, would be placed. Mr. Raker saw to that at once. Though I had thought him a little dilatory at the start of our work for the petition to the Rules Committee in the previous Congress, I never found again that he failed to give prompt and careful attention to anything that he undertook to do for us. He was a staunch suffragist and, like Senator Shafroth, attributed his interest to one of the women of his family, in his case an aunt who had brought him up from childhood. Unfortunately he was not a good speaker, but he was a man of tireless energy and of distinguished appearance. Among the Republicans we chose Miss Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to be elected to the Congress, to present the resolution. Several other members, including Representatives Mondell of Wyoming, Keating and Taylor of Colorado, and Hayden of Arizona, introduced similar resolutions of their own initiatives. That fact we regarded as encouraging because it indicated their interest and their belief that it was well to be active for suffrage.

We knew that in the Senate the chairman of the Woman Suffrage Committees ought to be the chief sponsor of the amendment and, as Senator Thomas had made up his mind not to serve again as chairman, we were naturally much concerned about his successor. Our anxiety was not lessened when we learned that a new senator, Hon. 08069Andrieus Aristicus Jones, of New Mexico, was not to be mentioned for the position by the Democrats and would undoubtedly be confirmed by the Senate. Though he had been in Washington before as Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury, he had never served in the Senate and we were fearful that our resolution would be handicapped in the hands of an inexperienced member. Then, too, as far as we could find out, he had not taken any stand on the suffrage question.

As soon as we heard the news of his appointment, Ruth White and I went to see Senator Thomas, who took us over to Senator Jone's office and introduced us as “sane suffragists”. We found our new chairman to be a slow-spoken man of middle age, with astonishingly blue eyes in a brown face. He was decidedly non-committal, but we gathered that he was in favor of woman suffrage and our impression was soon confirmed by a report from his State. As I faintly foresaw that first day, a large part of our work from that time on was to be done with and through him. Before we left him, he promised that the Woman Suffrage Committee would give us an early hearing on the Amendment and he agreed to do his best to have the suffrage resolution numbered one. On the latter point I felt considerable doubt of his success. However, before the Congress convened, he assured us that he had the Vice-President's promise to recognize him first when the time for presentation of resolutions came; for in the Senate they were not put into basket, but each was presented separately, with a few spoken words from the sponsor.

Whenever we had information that any other new members of the incoming Congress had reached Washington, we tired to see them in order to establish friendly relations and to check up on our reports from their States. Occasionally Mrs. Catt went with me to 08170those interviews, but in most cases it was Ruth White and I who made the initial calls.

By that time we had a lot of good news to talk about. In February the legislature of Ohio and Indiana had given presidential suffrage to the women of their States and in March the governor of Arkansas, at a jubilee meeting in Little Rock, signed the bill, just passed by the legislature , to grant the right to vote in primary elections to the women of Arkansas. We rejoiced particularly over that victory because it was not only the first instance of primary suffrage for women, but also the first break on the suffrage question in the solid South. Then, before the close of the legislative sessions, three other States, Nebraska, Michigan and Rhode Island, gave their women the right to vote presidential electors, ↑ the first state to make a rift in the glacial record of the Atlantic Seaboard.

In three of the State opponents tried to hold up our grains, in Ohio and Nebraska by referenda to the voters and in Indiana by raising the question of constitutionality: but in all three cases our victories were confirmed by later events.

Mrs. Catt's plan had brought great results in the legislatures of 1917, though at the moment, when everybody's chief concern was the action likely to be taken about war, we found it hard to get as much attention for our successes as they deserved. Still, no one trained in politics could wholly overlook the significance of the striking increase in electoral votes dependent, in part, upon women. In less than five months our total had jumped from 91 to 172.

April 2nd, 1917, opened for us with festivities in honor of Jeannette Rankin, who took her seat in the Congress that noon. Though we did not know ? it in the morning, the evening of the same day was to bring the President's address to a joint session of the two Houses, the address in which he asked for a declaration of war.

Before going to the Capitol, Miss Rankin, who had been president of the Montana Branch of our Association, made a speech from the balcony of Suffrage House. Then she took her place in a decorated open car, the first in a cavalcade of honor which we had ready, and, with Mrs. Catt, Miss Mary Garrett Hay and me, drove to the House of Representatives. On the long flight of steps under the Dome, her picture was taken by dozens of cameras, then we escorted her to the House door and scurried to our own places in the gallery. ¶ Mrs. Champ Clark had invited Mrs. Catt, Miss Hay and Mrs. Gardener to sit with her on the Speaker's Bench. Ruth White and I, who had the special tickets of admission required for the day, managed to get into our favorite front row of the gallery at the Speaker's right. From there we watched the formalities of the swearing-in of members, the election of the Speaker and the Clerk of the House and all the rest of the customary procedure at the opening of a new Congress. But our closest attention was given to Jeannette Rankin.

When she went up to take the oath, she was escorted by her colleague, Representative Evans, who, although he was a Democrat, sat with her on the Republican side that day. Her place, which 08372came to be her usual seat, was on the centre aisle, in the second row from the back. There she held an informal reception for hours, with a long string of representatives constantly in line to be introduced by Mr. Evans. I was much amused to observe among the first of them the shining bald head of one of the Massachusetts members, a strenuous opponent of woman suffrage. Apparently he was not satisfied with one introduction, for he joined the line a second time, more than an hour later. During the afternoon Senator Walsh of Montana came over from the Senate to sit for a while with the new representative from his State.

By that time we began to hear whispers in the gallery that, instead of addressing a joint session the next day, as had been expected, the President would appear before the two Houses that evening.

“Do you suppose that can be true?” I asked Ruth White.

“It may be,” she replied. “The unexpected frequently happens in the Congress, you know.”

“I think I'll scout around and try to find out,” I said. “I'll leave my coat and then perhaps you can hold on to my seat.”

Downstairs I sent in my card to two members whom I felt free to call off the floor. They both confirmed the rumor and one of them undertook to get for Miss White and me the new tickets of admission that were being issued for the evening. Then I had coffee in the House restaurant and bought a supply of sandwiches and fruit to send in to Mrs. Catt, with the warning that she and the others would better not give up their places for fear of not being able to get back. As I went back to my own seat, I saw that all the galleries were filling rapidly, for it had become known in the city that the President was to make his address that evening. 08473Long before he spoke, the entrances to the Capitol were closed and even then the corridors were crowded with visitors unable to get into the galleries.

Then came the always dramatic ceremonies connected with the entrance of dignitaries entitled to a seat on the floor: the Justices of the Supreme Court, the members of the Cabinet and of the Senate, the latter preceded by their own Sergeant-at-Arms and led by the Vice-President and the Clerk of the Senate, after loud announcement of their arrival by the House Sergeant-at-Arms. Last, through another door, the President himself entered, with the delegation of senators and representatives who had been appointed to escort him to his place at the Clerk's desk. In spite of the vast crowd, the silence was breathless as he started to speak.

It seemed to me that he read that momentous and eloquent address much as he might have read aloud an essay of Charles Lamb's. To my mind there was no animation or appeal in the cool voice that went on slowly, clearly, collectedly. Perhaps I was too tired to be appreciative; but that is how I felt, in spite of the crashes of applause from the floor. Whether my impression was shared by others I never knew. Certainly none of our little party was inclined to talk as we drove back to Suffrage House. Not until the next day, when I saw the speech in print, was I conscious of its power.

Resolutions declaring war were introduced that night in both Senate and House. Senator A. A. Jones tactfully yielded the place promised him for the Suffrage Resolution in order that the War Resolution might be the first to be offered. In presenting the suffrage resolution later, he explained, “Mrs. President, I 08574introduce a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States conferring upon women the right of suffrage. This joint resolution is identical with one introduced in several previous Congresses and generally known as the Susan B. Anthony amendment. I have been requested by the National American Woman Suffrage Association and others to introduce this resolution in such order as would cause it to bear number ‘1’ as in previous Congresses. I had planned this course, but the exigencies of this extraordinary session of Congress have not made this purpose practicable or advisable, owing to the tremendous importance of the joint resolution introduced on Monday night. I know that the supporters of this joint resolution are quite willing that it shall bear a subsequent number. I therefore introduce the joint resolution and ask that it be referred to the Committee on Women Suffrage.” 1

Senator Jone's resolution was numbered two. Similar resolutions were introduced independently by Senators Shafroth of Colorado, Owen of Oklahoma, Poindexter of Washington, and Thompson of Kansas, and referred to the Woman Suffrage Committee.

On the House side, Representative Raker's resolution received its number 1; the prohibition resolution was number 2 and the war resolution number 24; Jeannette Rankin's suffrage resolution number 3. All the woman suffrage resolutions on the House list were referred to the Judiciary Committee.

The war resolution was adopted by the Senate late in the evening of April 4th. I lost my seat when I went down to the restaurant about five o'clock that day, and I had to wait nearly three hours in line before I could get into the gallery again. 08675Even then I could only stand wedged into the crowd at the back, and when someone tried to push his way to the door I was shoved against one of the seats so hard I feared—happily without cause—that my leg was broken. Yet in the Senate a favorable vote on the war resolution was a foregone conclusion, and the actual count was 82 yeas to 6 nays.

In the House there was more doubt of the result. I stayed in the gallery there listening to the speeches for the against the resolution throughout the day of the 5th and most of the next day, which was Maundy Thursday. Late in the afternoon the House went on to the five-minute rule, limiting all speeches thereafter to not more than five minutes. Nearly a hundred speeches were made in all, largely by men who expected to vote no and who wanted their constituents to understand their reasons for doing so. As the evening wore on, many of the Members became almost hysterical with the long strain. Booing, catcalls and shouts of “Vote! Vote!” greeted each speaker who took the floor.

When Champ Clark was in the Chair, he banged with his gravel until I wondered why it didn't split. Once he said, “If you gentlemen want to keep us all here till sunup, I'm willin’ to stay.” More than once he thundered forth rebukes for disorderly conduct on an occasion of such grave import.

I could understand the disturbances for, even with no responsibility on my shoulders, I wanted to scream from the fatigue of a cramped position and of nervous exhaustion. I kept saying to myself, “This is one of the great moments of history. The whole future of the world my turn on this vote.” Yet for the life of me I could not feel anything except irritation over the long drawneut 08776I wanted to join in the cat-calls as new speakers got to their feet. I thought it would be a joke for someone to present a huge motto, “Speech is silver. Silence is golden” to hang back of th Speaker's chair. I must have repeated that sentence to myself a thousand times.

About eleven o'clock a murmur crept through the gallery that there was to be an adjournment so that the vote might not have to be taken on Good Friday. But midnight came and still the debate continued. It was after two on Friday morning when the speeches stopped and the roll-call began. According to custom the roll was gone over twice to give members who did not answer to their names the first time a further opportunity to be recorded. A time-consuming method.

Within a short time we knew that the ayes were in large majority. Miss Rankin, although she was in her place, did not vote on the first call of her name.

“What do you think Joannette Rankin will do?” I asked of Ruth White, before the Clerk came to the R's.

A dubious shrug was her reply.

We realized that she was in an a gonizing position because, as a thorough-going pacifist, she was opposed to the resolution; yet she knew that if she voted no her political future would be in jeopardy. Many of her strongest supporters in Montana had bombarded her with telegrams of threat or entreaty. Her brother, who had been acted as her campaign manager and to whom she was devoted, had been at her day and night to support the resolution. A woman who had backed her candidacy financially and who was a strong personal friend had come to Washington to prevail upon her to vote “yes.” Between 08877the first and second roll-calls these two sent for Miss Rankin to come out to the door of the House, in order that they might make one last plea; the woman on the score of the harm that a vote against the resolution would do to the suffrage cause and Mr. Rankin on the ground of what his sister owned to her future. Nevertheless, Jeannette Rankin went back to her seat and voted no. When her name was reached the second time, she made the mistake of trying to explain her vote, for she had not spoken previously. As speaking during a roll-call is not permitted, she was told that she was out of order. Though that error, natural enough in a new member, was the only evidence of upset nerves that could be brought against her, many of the newspapers described her breaking down and sobbing, as if she had made a scene that forever disproved woman's unfitness for public office. She may have shed a few tears before or after she voted; but, if so, they were not evident in the gallery: whereas the Democratic floor leader, Claude Kitchin, the nth degree of the he-man type, broke down and wept both audibly and visibly during his speech against the resolution.

I was entirely out of sympathy with Miss Rankin's point of view and I feared that she was lessening the chances of the Suffrage Amendment; but I knew that her vote was heroic. The next time I saw her she told me that the thought uppermost in her decision had been her conviction that she, a woman without children, ought not to cast a vote that might send the sons of other women to their death. When she asked whether I thought her vote had done harm to our cause, I replied that I feared it had, temporarily, but that I was glad she had voted against the resolution, for, with her convictions, she could not honorably have done otherwise.

Within a few days the long series of war measures was 08978started in the Congress and a so-called gentlemen's agreement that until they were out of the way no general legislation should be undertaken was made between the leaders of the two parties.

That agreement plunged our Congressional Committee into another serious dilemma. If no general legislation was to be taken up while was measures were pending, should we or could we go on with our work for the Amendment at that time? The question was debated first in the Congressional Committee itself, then by the National Board members , among whom there was a difference of opinion about the right of the Board to override the decision of the Convention at Atlantic City, that an active campaign for the Amendment must be carried on. The conclusion finally reached was that the work already planned for the State associations should be continued and that we in Washington should proceed with the arrangement for the early hearing before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage, which Chairman Jones had promised before the Congress convened; but that we should postpone the regular work of the lobby until there was a prospect of getting a vote on the Amendment.

If Mrs. Catt had not had two new responsibilities thrust upon her, I doubt that she would have consented to a postponement of our drive. But she was immediately appointed by the Secretary of War a member of the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense, of which Dr. Shaw was chairman and Mrs. Stanley McCormick, second vice-president of the Association, another member. Three of our National officers were thus drafted for war service shortly after the declaration of war and hundreds of our States and local officers and members were appointed to leading positions in the State committees that were promptly organized, positions that demanded 09079much, if not all, of their time and thought.

In addition to the losses sustained in this way by our working force, we had to allow for the war work undertaken by the Association itself. The starting of that work was Mrs. Catt's second new responsibility, which she took up as energetically as if she were not already doing once woman's full job for the Council of National Defense and another for regular suffrage activities. Under her direction a War Service Department of the Association was organized with six sections: Food Conservation, Child Welfare, Protection of Women in Industry, Land Army, Americanization and Oversea Hospital, each in charge of one of our best workers. It was soon evident that some of those sections could be most advantageously carried on in cooperation with other groups of women, but the rest remained primary responsibilities of the suffrage organizations throughout the period of the way. The Oversea Hospital alone had 74 women, most of them physicians or trained nurses, in its units in France, for the maintenance of which our Association raised over $133,000. , and that in the same year when we were striving to get a million dollar fund for local, State and national suffrage work.

When the Women's Division of the Liberty Loan Committee was formed, Mrs. Catt and Mrs. Guilford Dudley of the Congressional Committee were both commandeered for that group also. Another member of the Congressional Committee, Miss Meyer, went to France. On every hand our women were devoting themselves to one war service after another. How the suffrage work was kept going I have never understood; but it went on unceasingly.

Our hearing before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage came on April 20th. As I had had no experience with hearings in 09180Washington, Mrs. Roessing kindly came down from Pennsylvania to take charge of the preparations.

The plan was to have eight senators from suffrage States, plus Miss Rankin, as speakers, with Mrs. Catt to introduce them and to make the concluding address. When she came down from New York the day before the hearing, she brought a circular stand holding tiny silk flags to represent the countries in which women were then enfranchised. We teased her a good deal about her toys; but she was convinced that her object lesson would prove the fact—to her mind, inexcusable—that other parts of the world were getting far ahead of the United States in the application of the democratic principle to women. On the way to the Capitol she insisted on holding the flag-stand herself for fear, as she said, that the rest of us would not treat it with sufficient respect. And when we reached the committee room, she put the stand down in a conspicuous place on the big table, at one end of which Chairman Jones and the clerk of the Woman Suffrage Committee took their places.

The eight other members of the Committee were supposed to be seated along the sides of that table; yet at ten o'clock, the hour announced for the hearing, there was no sign of them and only Senator Shafroth and Miss Rankin from the list of our promised speakers, were present. Mrs. Roossing hurriedly dispatched some of us to round up the absentees and fifteen minutes later, when Chairman Jones rapped for order, we had succeeded in getting in four more members of the committee, enough to make a quorum, and all of the speakers except Senator Johnson of California and Senator Chamberlain of Oregon, who we were not able to find. By that time the room, which seated about fifty, was filled to suffocation 09281with our women, who listened respectfully to Chairman Jones's brief account of his presentation of the suffrage resolution and then applauded madly when Mrs. Catt, introduced by him, reminded her audience that the Woman Suffrage Committee had been established in 1883 and then added: “Thirty-four years have passed since then and 17 Congresses. We confidently believe that we are appearing before the last of these Committees. We believe, Mr. Chairman, that it will be your immortal fame to bring in the last report for Woman Suffrage in the United States Senate.”

Senator Shafroth, the first of our Congressional speakers, replied , on the basis of experience in Colorado, to the current objections that woman suffrage would double the vote of the undesirable element and increase the cost of elections, without changing the result.

After him came Senator Kendrick of Wyoming with explanation of why his State had been the first to give votes to women: “——In my judgment the life the Wyoming settlers led on the ranches - for it was largely a ranch country - and the share that their wives had in making life worth while for them brought about their entire willingness to grant woman's suffrage or any other real right the women claimed or had. Our women shared not only the hardship and the privations but the dangers of ranch life as well. They were an integral part of the life of the State - there is scarcely a woman on the ranches to-day who has not her own cattle, sometimes in her own right and sometimes in equal partnership with her husband or some other relative, as the case may be. That, in my judgement, was the occasion, the great primary reason, for the establishment of woman suffrage in that State.”

Senator Thompson followed with a florid account of the history of woman suffrage in Kansas. Then Mrs. Catt said: “It is my great pleasure to present to you our 09382first Congresswoman, but even in this particular I regret to say that the United States of America has not led the innovation. There have been women in the Parliament of Finland for a great many years. One of them is a very dear friend of mine. A woman has been in the Norwegian Parliament, and, strangest of all, a woman is at this moment sitting in the Mexican Congress. It is my pleasure, nevertheless, and my pride to present to you Representative Rankin of Montana.”

Miss Rankin's speech about the difficulty of getting amendments to State constitutions was brief and to the point. After her came Senator Walsh of Montana, who refuted, in his judicial way, the fallacies of the State rights objections to a Federal amendment for woman suffrage. Senator Thomas of Colorado and Senator Smoot of Utah were next. Then Mrs. Catt made what we laughingly called her flag speech. As she told about the gains in other parts of the world, beginning with the colonies of Great Britain, she held up the appropriate flags and explained: “That these remarkable facts may be visualized before your eyes, I present the flags of the British colonies where women have more suffrage than in the United States, except in the great West—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, Burma, and Honduras. “Four of the five Scandinavian countries have given women universal suffrage, namely: Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland; and the fifth, Sweden, has granted every right except the vote for Parliament. “Little did American suffragists think that any woman of darkest Russia would be promoted to political freedom before those of the United States of America. Little did they think that women to the north and to the south would be liberated from political thralldom before the women of the Great Republic. Little did we think that the columns of our press would be called upon to announce on the same day, as was done on April 18, that Russia had confirmed the right of women to vote for the coming constituent assembly and that the legislature of a State wherein women have no scrap of suffrage had refused to even submit the question to the voters. That State was Pennsylvania. —— 09483 “In the light of these facts, the ‘mumbo jumbo’ of sectionalism, States rights, political party balance, and other forms of mental anesthesia, used to quiet the consciences of otherwise progressive men, are become mere junk to be cast upon the scrap-heap of outworn opinions. These are not principles, they are excuses. Posterity will not respect them as suitable causes for delay; posterity will take note of the date when the American Republic did its duty by its women—a duty that had always been inevitable. ‘We asked you, gentlemen, to wait no longer; let women fell that the flag to which they pledge their loyalty waves over a land which gives them as much political freedom as any under the sun.”

In spite of the applause when Mrs. Catt ended, I had a let-down feeling that somehow our hearing had not amounted to much. But I comforted myself with the reflection that, as all the members of the committee except one were definitely on our side, the report was bound to be favorable anyway. A few days later one of the men who had been present said something that explained my vague notion that the hearing had failed to register.

“Senators hear more than enough from one another on the floor of the Senate,” said he,” and therefore it would have been better if you had not had so many of them as speakers.”

The Woman's Party was given a hearing about a week after ours and on May 3rd the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage had its innings, with Mrs. James A. Wadsworth, wife of Senator Wadsworth of New York, in charge. From a woman of wealth and social position, her flippant introduction of the first speaker seemed to me unpardonable.

“Mr. Chairman, one of the frequent criticism of our organization is that most of its members belong to the leisure class and therefore have no understanding of or sympathy with the needs and problems of the working women.

“Mr. observation has led me to the conclusion that the chief difference between the leisure and the working 09584classes was this: That the latter worked from 8 to 10 hours a day, with pretty fair wages to show for its efforts, while the forme, especially in these days of patriotic and charitable activities, worked about 16 hours and pays everyone in sight for the privilege of doing so. However, our first speaker this morning is a living refutation of the claim that ‘every woman who works wants the vote.’ She has always worked and worked had and well, both for herself, her Government, and I am thankful to say, for our national organization. I take pleasure in introducing our secretary general, Miss Minnie Bronson, from Iowa.”

Miss Bronson's speech was the best I ever heard on that side. Her presentation of two of the most plausible objections was particularly effective with men.

——“The first mistake, it seems to me, that has been made by the suffragists and by many others who have given this question only a surface study, is that the woman suffrage movement is the woman's movement. The suffragists say that the women of this country, who number nearly one-half of the population, have been coming to you year after year and asking for this Federal amendment. As a matter of fact, the movement cannot be the woman's movement unless it represents the activities and the desires of the majority of the women of this country. No one, I suppose, assumes that it does. We know that it does not; I know, and you know, and everyone here knows that if the majority of the women of the United States desired the ballot they could get it without any pressure on Congress or the State legislatures, but by the very simple device of each woman who desired it saying to her husband, ‘I want to vote,’ and the various husbands of this country would get together and put in motion some wheels that would bring about their desires, for the American man is ready to give the American woman everything she wants, whether it is for her good or not.

“It is not the desire of the majority of the women of this country. And the chief reason why it has been defeated so many times and so overwhelmingly at the polls is because the women do not want it.———

“The suffragists are asking you to put through a Federal amendment and not submit the question to the people, because it has been tried time and time again before the people of this country and it has been turned down. Woman suffrage is not desired, either by the men or by the women of this country. As the suffrage press agent said the other day, ‘If we leave it to the votes of the people it is put off until doomsday.’

“Another thing I want to call to your at tention is that never in the history of this country has it been proposed to amend the Constitution when the sole purpose is to defeat the will of the people, and I do not believe that the men who framed the Constitution, and who provided this way of amending it, ever dreamed that it was going to be used to defeat the expressed will of the people, expressed at the polls. Within the last five years one-half of the population of the United States has voted on this suffrage question and defeated it. I do not believe that it was ever intended by the framers of that Constitution, or that it is a fair proposition to amend the Constitution merely to overcome the expressed desire of the people.”

After Miss Bronson came Miss Lucy Price of Ohio, another well known anti lecture, and then Mr. Oscar Leser, a lawyer from Baltimore. Mrs. A. J. George of the Massachusetts Association opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Woman—a name more cumbersome than that of our own national organization—wound up for the opposition. I had listened dozens of times before to her subtle appeal to masculine vanity through the implication that the women opposed to suffrage were content to trust the men, whereas the suffragists were trying to stir up sex antagonism, an appeal that always struck me as contemptible, but this time that part of her speech was briefer than usual: ——“the women of Massachusetts know that in a well-ordered state of society there is not antagonism between men and woman, and they know that the whole suffrage movement is founded upon the fallacy that the interests of men and women are dissimilar.—— “We antisuffragists know that it is woman's right to ask for the protection of the men and that it is not a question of equality in doing precisely the same thing that men are doing, but is a question of our showing through the performance of the work which rests upon us, equality by working along the line of God-given functions, and we do not believe this is along the line of government or of governmental direction.”

On May 14th a fourth group, made up of Progressives, Socialists and Prohibitionists if favor of woman suffrage, were 09786heard by the Woman Suffrage Committee. Chairman Jones certainly did his duty in the matter of hearings that spring.

Before they were ended, the preparations for war were obvious all over Washington and it seemed as if every third man on the streets was khaki-clad. Going into the gallery of the House one day, I was startled to see standing in front of the Speaker's desk, a tall figure with a preposterous something over its head and face. Only when he took off the contrivance, did I realize that Representative Tillson, of the Military Affairs Committee, had put on a gas mask to show the other members how our soldiers were to be protected against poison gas. It made the war seem more real than all she speeches about it that I had heard had over made it

Washington itself was suffering from the inevitable confusion due to the setting up of scores of war agencies and to the influx into a small city , not prepared to receive them , of thousands of workers and of other thousands of visitors who were there temporarily to transact business with one or more of the Government departments and commissions. Lodgings for the new workers were so much in demand that four of five had to be crowded into rooms that would have been small for two. Houses and apartments for rent were snatched up by the first-comers among the newly appointed executives of the various war services and by the dollar-a-year men who were called into Washington from all parts of the country. Later arrivals were often forced to buy houses in order to get living quarters. Seemingly incredible tales were told about visitors who had to travel back and forth on night trains so that they might have a place in which to lie down. At Suffrage House all our unoccupied rooms were rented to women war workers, with the proviso that they would be given up when they were needed for visiting suffragists. 098Delegations from our allies came, one after another, to confer with the President and the Cabinet and to make speeches to the Congress in half a dozen different languages. The speaker I liked best was Balfour whose brief and apparently unstudied address had the clarity and directness that are characteristic of the English speaking at its best. Round, jolly Marshal Joffre, who was in the French delegation, made what must have been the shortest speech ever heard in the Senate. “I cannot speak English. Vive les Etats-Unis!”

While the British Commission was in Washington, I had as guest at luncheon an Englishman whom I had known elsewhere. He had spent that morning with a friend who was a member of the Commission and he was so shocked over the facts he had learned about the extent to which English resources were reduced during the months he himself had been out of the country that he could not refrain from giving me some of the details. His summary, “Our people have their backs against the last wall,” haunted me for weeks, and that night I could not sleep for thinking of what might have happened if the United States had not entered the war.

It was Dr. McKelway who first pointed out a way of escape from the impasse in which we found ourselves when the “gentlemen's agreement” was made to take up no general legislation in the Congress while war measures were under consideration. “Why don't you try for a woman suffrage committee in the House?” he asked, during one of our conferences.

I answered his question with another. “What use is there in trying for a committee so long as general legislation is forbidden?”

“Creating a committee doesn't belong in the category of general legislation.” He replied. “It's a part of the organization of the House, which has to go on anyway.”

The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. If we succeeded in getting a committee, we could be sure of having the Amendment reported out without such a delay as we had had in the previous Congress, when the Judiciary Committee took no action until it was too late for a vote. Moreover, we might hope for a chairman of the Committee who would favor woman suffrage and thus give the Amendment the immense advantage of coming to the floor in the hands of a friend, rather than of an enemy as determined as Chairman Webb undoubtedly was. Still another advantage, that appealed to me particularly, lay in the fact that the committee measure could be carried by a majority vote. For that reason it would give us an opportunity, similar to the one which the prohibitionists had made use of in the District dry bill, to test our support before we ventured on a vote for the Amendment itself, for 10088which a two-thirds majority was required.

The first step was to get Mrs. Catt's consent to the undertaking. She agreed rather reluctantly, for she hated to have efforts diverted, even temporarily, from the Amendment. Next we set out to enlist the support of the two men whom Dr. McKelway considered essential to success: the Speaker of the House and Chairman Pou of the Rules Committee.

The interest of that magnificent old autocrat, Champ Clark, was secured and kept by Helen Gardener, whom both he and his wife held in high esteem. At that time he was still bitter over his defeat by Wilson in the Democratic National Convention of 1912; he was riddled with anxiety by the knowledge that his only son was likely to go oversea with our troops; he was beginning to feel his age: nevertheless he was the dominant personality of the House. In the gray broadcloth that he wore in winter and the white in which he always appeared in summer, he was one of the most dignified and imposing figures I have ever seen, well over six feet in height and with no more fat than was needed to fill out his huge frame. He had droll Southern turns of phrase, much ironic humor and a great fund of political stories. He believed that woman suffrage was is a corollary of the democratic principle and he had a shrewd notion that it was inevitable. Hence his support had the twofold motive of conviction and of practical politics.

For me Champ Clark had no use, as I soon discovered. My Boston accent was hard for him to follow; for he was a little deaf, a handicap that he did not like to admit or to be reminded of. If it had not been that Mrs. Gardener, with all her quick wit, never quite grasped the technicalities of Congressional procedure, I should have urged her to go to see the Speaker without me; but, 10189as it was, she always insisted on having me accompany her.

On one occasion, when we were seated on a sofa in the spacious and beautiful old room which is reserved for the Speaker's private office, she asked me to explain to him a difficultly that we had met. He himself was at his desk, under a great crystal chandelier at some distance from us, and looking straight ahead while I talked.

Suddenly he turned toward Mrs. Gardener and, without a word of apology, interrupted my sentence with the amazing inquiry, “Where do you get your milk?

Naturally I was flabbergasted.

Mrs. Gardener, who understood at once that his mind had drifted away and why, gave him the name and address of her milkman. Later she explained to me that the day before the Clarks had moved, from their rooms in a hotel on Capitol Hill, into the house next her own, where their daughter and her baby were to spend the summer with them. Bored with my explanation, or not hearing it, he had forgotten all about me while his thoughts drifted to preparations for the expected visit.

Having the Clarks next door was an opportunity that Mrs. Gardener never overlooked. Her cook used to make Southern delicacies that would be handled over the back fence to the Clarks’ cook.

Once he commented on this in my presence. “First time we've had anything over the fence since we came to Washington,” he said. “Seems like we got neighbors again.” ¶ When Mrs. Gardener needed to get a bit of information from him, or wanted to convey some without the formality of a call at his office, she used to wait of a morning in her own little parlor, with her hat and coat 10290on, until she heard the door of the next house slam after him. Then she would appear, as if by accident, on her steps, which only a low railing separated from his, and, during the moment of friendly chat that was sure to follow, she would adroitly drop in the question or the information. But she was far too wise to do that often. No other lesson that I learned in Washington stood me in as so good stead as my growing realization of the value of Helen Gardener's help.

Dr. McKelway was the means of our getting the support of the chairman of the Rules Committee, Representative Pou of North Carolina, a rigid, grayish man, with an immoveable countenance,—the proverbial poker face. Even at our first interview with him, I realized that he had a firm sense of justice and a completely logical mind. Although he was in favor of woman suffrage, he thought that it ought to come only by State enactment and he was, therefore, frankly against the Federal Amendment. Yet he was fair-minded enough to see that a vote on the question ought not to be prevented by opponents who happened to be in a strategic position and he immediately promised that he would not oppose the “erection” of a woman suffrage committee in the House. Actually, he gave us such strong and continued assistance later on that I came to think of him as a real friend, even though I knew that he was not going to vote for the Amendment. In fact, I respected his decision when I understood how thorough-going his convictions were. He was the only consistent advocate of State rights whom I ever came across in the Congress.

As soon as resolutions asking for the creation of the committee were introduced by several of our friends in the House 10391and referred to the Rules Committee, Mrs. Catt, to mark the official beginning of our campaign, sent his letter to the Speakers: “April 10, 1917 “Hon, Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Washington, D. C. My dear Sir: On behalf of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, I write to ask that a Committee on Woman Suffrage be appointed in the House of Representatives as in the Senate of the Congress of the United States. We make this request because the Judiciary Committee, to which constitutional amendments are referred, is and always has been so occupied with other important questions, that it has never been able to give the consideration due to this measure, supported by so large a portion of our people. May I remind you that the national governments of Great Britain, France, and Russia have promised woman suffrage in the near future; and that the greater part of Canada has already established it within a few months. The leaders of these governments have announced that the vote has been or will be given to their women in recognition of the devotion, sacrifice, skill, and endurance of women in their varied service to their country under the strain of war. Our Republic stands upon the threshold of what may prove the severest test of loyalty and endurance our country has ever had. It needs its women; and they are ready—as fearless, as willing, as able, as loyal as any women of the world. You have had a long and successful political career and that means that you know men and women. You know that both work better when their hearts bear no sense of being wronged. You will realize that our women will feel a less exalted patriotism, a less unselfish spirit of devotion, a less spontaneous desire to serve, if they are forced to carry a conviction that the monarchies of the world have been more just to their women citizens than this Republic has been to us. Mr. Speaker, the women of our country appreciate the fact that you are yourself an advocate of our cause, but we do not presume upon your interest when we ask for a House Suffrage Committee. We ask it because the world is calling to the Congress of the United States to make better time if it would hold its place as Leader in the march of world democracy. As a small concession to this world-wide movement, we beg to recommend to the House the establishment 10492of a Woman Suffrage Committee. Very truly, (Signed) CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, President.

After the Senate hearing on the Amendment was over, our efforts were all concentrated on the House. Our attempt in the previous Congress to get the backing of members from woman suffrage States in a petition to the Rules Committee for a vote on the Amendment turned out to be not so completely futile as I had thought it then; for it suggested the idea of a petition from those same members asking for the creation of a woman suffrage committee. And this time the six representatives who had introduced the Amendment agreed to act as a group to get signatures to the new petition.

Though the presumption was that any member in favor of the Amendment would support a measure intended to bring it to vote under friendly sponsorship, we did not dare to take anything for granted. Consequently, we spurred on our State Congressional chairmen to conduct a special campaign for the suffrage committee, with as many resolutions passed and letters and telegrams sent to the representatives as possible. Replies were immediately reported to us in Washington and when a member failed to reply, we urged the women in his District to keep on writing to him.

By that time I had lost my early scepticism about the effect of letters from constituents. My change of opinion was largely because of a friendly secretary who told me that her member,one of our “doubtfuls”, directed her to keep one drawer in a large cabinet for letters and telegrams in favor of suffrage and another drawer for those in opposition. Every morning he asked for the totals in each category and from time to time he opened the drawers to see which side has more bulk in this appeals. After I heard that, I was 10593much more urgent about the sending of letters.

In my first directions to State workers, I had requested that letters should be brief and, if possible, typed. But I changed my mind about those points, too, after an interview with and opposed senator, who drew out a lengthy and illegible letter just received from an anti-suffrage woman, in order to show me how much more convincing was that apparently spontaneous and certainly laborious effort in long hand than any number of typed letters or of telegrams, which might, he said, be all drafted by one person. From that time on, I was careful to explain that letters and telegrams ought not to be similar in phrasing, even though the arguments were weaker than they would have been / if a statement outlining them had been sent from a central office.

While work for the petition was going on, we learned that our chance of securing favorable action from the Rules Committee was complicated by an impression that such action might conflict with the President's legislative program. To clear up that doubt, President Wilson himself, on the request of Mrs. Catt, which Helen Gardener presented, wrote a letter to Chairman Pou, endorsing the idea of a woman suffrage committee in the House as “a wise move of public policy.”

Mrs. Gardener's success in getting the letter was only one of dozens of instances in which she was our efficient messenger to the White House. For service of that kind she was vastly better than anyone else. She was one woman to whom the President was always willing to grant an appointment and whom Mr. Tumulty and Mr. Forster, the secretaries in the Executive Offices, were always glad to assist. Every time she went there on an errand for us, 10694her tact and intelligence made an increasingly favorable impression. Invariably, before one of those important calls, she went carefully over in her own mind the points that would have to be made clear by her talk and she also prepared a typed memorandum of them to be left with the President. Whenever an event in our favor that appeared nothing short of miraculous became known, we realized that Helen Gardener's unheralded efforts had brought about the result. No wonder that we came to call her “the Diplomatic Corps” of our Congressional Committee! She was as essential to our success in Washington as Mrs. Catt was to the country-wide campaign.

Under the favorable conditions of recommendation from the President and from the Speaker, the Rules Committee granted a hearing on May 18th, at the request of Mr. Raker, in behalf of the members of the House who had secured signatures to the petition, and of our committee, in behalf of the National Association. The Woman's Party also asked to present speakers and each group was allowed twenty minutes. Nine minutes of our time I gave to the representatives from suffrage States who spoke for us: Raker of California, Rankin of Montana, Keating and Taylor of Colorado, Mondell of Wyoming, Hayden of Arizona, McArthur of Oregon and O'Shaughessy of Rhode Island. The petition, which Mr. Raker presented, had the signatures of the delegations from all of the equal and most of the presidential suffrage states, excepting those members who refrained from signing because they were on the Rules Committee or the Judiciary Committee.

I read Mrs. Catt's letter during our part of the hearing to the Speaker as the best presentation of our arguments. Then Mrs. Gardener spoke briefly and read a letter from Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. Afterwards, with a desire to enliven the proceedings and also 10795to illustrate our gratitude to the men who had been helping us, I started to tell a story about an elderly New England woman who was invited out to supper and, being asked to say grace, did so in these words: “Lord, we thank Thee that we are at last permitted to eat something we did not cook ourselves.”

When I came to the grace, I in advertenly began, “Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the Committee, we thank you,” then, seeing my blunder, I stopped short and explained, “What I meant to say was, ‘Lord, we thank Thee,’ not, ‘Mr. Chairman and gentlemen,’ but at least my mistake shows the awe with which I regard the Rules Committee.”

A howl of laughter went up from the committee members and I realized, with resentment in my heart, that I had scored more of that silly remark than I could have gained by the most eloquent of speeches.

In view of the support of the President and the Speaker and the friendly attitude of Chairman Pou, our chance with the Rules Committee seemed excellent, and Representative Cantrill of Kentucky agreed to make the motion for a favorable report from the Committee.

He was a conservative and influential member of the House, who had been at one time a vigorous opponent of woman suffrage, but had turned into one of our staunchest friends I used to tell him that he was like St. Paul, who persecuted the Christians to the best of his ability until he saw the light and then became a stalwart champion of the new faith. With Mr. Cantrill's help, a prompt report seemed likely when our hearing ended, for we had learned that, of the twelve members of the Committee, seven were 10896in favor, one doubtful and only four definitely opposed, so that we had at least a majority of one.

However, we knew that we ought to be sure of not less than 250 votes before the Committee report came to the floor of the House. Nearly a hundred of those appeared to be guaranteed by the signature to the petition and our State reports gave evidence of about two hundred more. But we realized that we ought to check the report in order to have an accurate poll on the proposal to create a woman suffrage committee. When we tried to call in some of the woman who had lobbied with us in January, we found that many of them were deep in war work and others could stay only a few days, so the major part of the lobbying fell to Ruth White and me.

That was one kind of work in which we could not count on Mrs. Gardener. She hated to be called a lobbyist and she grieved when we referred to ourselves or others referred to us by that name. The fact that we were called designated as “the front door lobby,” in compliment to our straightforward methods, did not remove her distaste for a word which, to her mind, always connoted the objectionable kind of lobbying done in earlier days by women of another sort. She herself rarely went to see any member whom she did not already know or to whom she had no means of getting a formal introduction. Her unique service came through repeated contacts, not through the covering of much ground quickly, such as we needed at that time.

Hard as the work was that month, Miss White and I concluded that it was probably well not have a large lobby, which might have brought adverse criticism just then, either on the score of the gentlemen's agreement or on the suspicion that our women were lacking 10997in patriotism. Even in our own case, we thought it best not to be seen too often in any one part of the House Office Building or of the Capitol, and so we became expert in slipping from one corridor to another and in choosing different elevators for our coming and going.

In spite of these difficulties, our poll was completed while we were still without a report from the Rules Committee. Again and again on the morning when it met, we waited in inconspicuous corner near the committee room in the hope of waylaying one of our friends and getting good news at the close of the meeting. But there was always a reason why the subject of the suffrage committee had not come up. Several times it was the absence of one of the men known to be in favor; at others, the indignation of some of the members over the picketing of the White House by the Women's Party; and, most frequently of all, the urgency of war legislation. But as week after week went by without a report, we grew increasingly uneasy.

Our worry over the delay in the Rules Committee led Mrs. Gardener and me to go to the Speaker one morning and ask what we could do to hasten action. We found him starting for the House and, when Mrs. Gardener put our question, he stopped just long enough to grunt, “Sit tight and trust in the Lord!”

“That means he doesn't want us to do anything,” said Mrs. Gardener after he left us. “Perhaps we'd better keep away from here for a few days.”

With considerable misgiving, I assented and spent the next two mornings in our own office. Thus it happened that I read more carefully than usual both the “Congressional Record” and the House Calendar. In the latter, I noticed for the first time that some of the suffrage resolutions were on a special list of measures for which discharge was requested from the committees having them under consideration. As the first of the suffrage resolutions on that list was Representative Taylor's, I hurried to his office to ask him why the change had been made.

He was amazed to see it. “Somebody's pretty cheeky to do that without consulting me,” he exclaimed indignantly.

When I questioned him further, he told me that the motion to bring up a measure listed in that way might be made in the House on a “suspension Monday”, the name given to the first and third Mondays in each month, because, on those days, the standing rules of the House could be suspended by a two-thirds majority of the members voting, provided they were enough to make up a quorum. If 11199the motion to suspend were carried, the main measure could then be brought up.

Feeling sure that we did not have at that time a two-thirds majority and that the chance of the Amendment would be much better if it came to the floor through the proposed suffrage committee, I was alarmed at the possibility of having a vote precipitated without preparation on our part.

Mr. Taylor, who was himself a Democrat, tried to reassure me by saying that there was no likelihood of such a vote so long as war measures were pending. His opinion was that Mr. Mann, the Republican floor leader, had had the new listing made merely as a gesture of interest on the part of the Republicans to offset Democratic initiative in the matter of creating a woman suffrage committee.

But in spite of all Mr. Taylor said, I was still disturbed when I left his office. So was Ruth White, who told me she had had a suspicion for several days that some project in which we were concerned was on foot on the Republican side. She suggested that we should drop into the offices of a few of our Republican friends to see what we could find out. We made the calls seem as casual as possible, but learned nothing from the first two or three. Then we struck a man who asked what we thought the outcome on Monday would be. My reply was as evasive as I could make it and before he realized that we were in the dark he let us know that the Republicans were going to try to get the Amendment up the following Monday, the first Monday in the month. We protested so vehemently that he saw we had had no previous information on the subject and then he insisted on our promising that we would not let anyone know what he 112100had told us.

When we left his office we were convinced that the Republicans, in order to get ahead of the Democrats, were willing to take the risk of a defeat for suffrage as the result of a sudden vote; yet we could not warn the Democrats because of our promise not to repeat what we had been told. With a good deal of casaist r y, we decided to call at other Republican offices in the hope of getting the same information under circumstances that would permit us to repeat it. We were fortunate in striking a communicative secretary who told us that his chief was at home preparing his suffrage speech for Monday and that a “whip” call had gone out to request all Republicans to be on the floor of the House that day.

When we had learned all that we could from that secretary, I telephoned Helen Gardener to join me at the Capitol so that we might see the Speaker as soon as possible. At first he was inclined to pooh-pooh our fears, on the ground that there was nothing the Republicans could do. But after he had looked over the Calendar and consulted his son, who was then the parliamentarian of the House, he decided that, since it was then Friday and the following Monday was suspension Monday, perhaps it would be well to take a few precautions. So he sent for Mr. kitchin, the Democratic floor leader. The result of their conference was evident in a motion made by one of the Democrats that afternoon that when the House adjourned the next day it should adjourn over Monday, because there was to be a Confederate reunion in Washington that week and members from the South wanted to be free to give time to constituents coming to the city as delegates.

Mr. Mann, too alert to let as chance be snatched from him, immediately protested that as Monday was to be “suspension day”, he 113101would object to the motion unless there was an agreement that business which ordinarily came then would be considered in order on Tuesday. Other members objected, reasonably enough, that if there were to be any adjournment over a whole day, when the House had so many important matters before it, that day ought to be Tuesday, rather than Monday, because the reunion was scheduled to begin on Tuesday. But Mr. Mann's protest had convinced the Democrats that there was good reason for being on guard; and, in spite of the urgency of war measures, the original motion was blithely amended to include both Monday and Tuesday in the adjournment.

Still Mr. Mann refused to be satisfied until the motion was further amended by the proviso that “business in order on Monday shall be in order on Wednesday.” 1 So all that the Democrats gained by their idea of adjourning over Monday to avoid suspension of the rules, was a little more time in which to circumvent Republican tactics.

The next Democratic plan was to get the Rules Committee, at its regular meeting on Wednesday morning, to make a favorable report on the resolution to create a woman suffrage committee; and than to have the Suffrage Amendment resolution held for reference to that committee. As the Republicans could no longer outvote the majority party by a surprise attack, as they might have done if the Democrats had not been warned to have all their own members present, it seems as if the Rules Committee report would supply the Democrats with an excellent excuse for voting against a motion to suspend the rules in the matter of the Suffrage Amendment. We were 1 Congressional Record, Vol. 33, Part 3, page 3207 114102glad that it last the Rules Committee was forced to act, though we wished that its meeting could be held on Monday or Tuesday, so that, if there were any slip-up, time would be left for a substitute plan.

Mrs. Gardener, Miss White and I were in the Speaker's outer office early Wednesday morning to get the first news from the Rules Committee; but not until eleven-thirty, only half an hour before the House was to convene, was there any word. Then one of our friends rushed down to tell us that, although the Rules Committee had voted by a majority of one in favor of a rule to creat e ing the suffrage committee, the last vote had been accured only on the condition that the report should not be taken into the House until more of the war measures were out of the way.

The joy that we might have felt over the Rules Committee's favorable action was completely forgotten in our consternation about the possibility that Mr. Mann might be able to carry his motion to suspend the rules in order to bring up the Amendment. In that case, as we pointed out to some of our Democratic friends who held a burried council of war in the Speaker's office, the Republicans were bound up to reap a harvest whether the Suffrage Amendment was brought up or not; for, if Mr. Mann's motion was defeated, as it could be only if most of the Democratic votes were cast against it, the Republicans would be free to say that the Democrats had turned down an opportunity to bring the Amendment before the House; and in that case Democrats from the suffrage States would be placed in the embarrassing position of having apparently voted against a suffrage measure. On the other hand, if Mr. Mann's motion were carried, the Republicans could “point with pride” to their zeal for the cause. Obviously Mr. Mann's shrewdness had placed them in a dilemma, either horn of which was bound to be unfortunate for the party.

Fifteen minutes of precious time were lost in wrangling about ways of averting the disaster. Then the Democratic leaders decided that the only thing that could be done was to take up the one bill that preceded the suffrage resolution on the special calendar, and to keep the House on that subject until a motion to adjourn could decently be made.

The bill in question was a long pending measure to erect in Washington a statue of President Buchanan, for which sufficient funds had been provided by his granddaughter. A Maryland member of the House who was in charge of the bill, was hurriedly summoned. He protested that, as it came under the ban on general business established by the gentlemen's agreement, he had been told that it could not be brought up for several months and he was therefore wholly unprepared to make a speech about it. Nevertheless, he was told that he would have to go ahead and talk, as soon as the special calendar was taken up.

When the moment came, he was recognized by the Speaker, although Mr. Mann was already standing. The debate that followed on the Buchanan statue bill was an excellent illustration of the farcical possibilities of floor procedure. The Maryland member launched immediately into an eulogy of President Duchanan, but his knowledge about that statesman ran cut after a few sentences and one of his friends dispatched a page to the Library for a biography, parts of which might be read into the Record to consume time. Meanwhile other friends tried to help the speech-maker by getting themselves recognized to ask questions. Most of them did not know enough about the subject to do more than put questions on points which the Maryland member had already touched and, after 116104several instances of that kind, someone pointed out that, if the questioners had the courtesy to listen to what their colleague had been saying, they would not have needed to make those inquiries.

Fortune was on the side of the Democrats, however; for a Republican who had received the whip call while he was at his home in Minnesota and had hurried back by the first train, supposing something or grave importance was to be taken up, arrived at the House just as the biography was brought in. He had come directly from the train and therefore had had no opportunity to find out from the other Republicans what was in the wind; and when he discovered that the erection of a statue was the subject under discussion, he was pretty mad. So, getting himself recognized by the Speaker, he broke into the debate: “Mr. Speaker, I am certainly only one of many who are very much amazed that it is proposed to pass this bill at this time, —— a measure that in so sense can be considered a war measure.” 1

Thereupon the Maryland member asked, “How about the suffrage amendment?”

“We haven't reached that yet,” replied the man from Minnesota, still ignorant of the plan of his floor leader.

“How will the gentleman vote on that?” continued the questioner, who did not realize that the Minnesota member was wholly unenlightened about Mr. Mann's little plot.

“That is a bridge we will cross when we come to it,” the “rate Republican answered. “The gentleman cannot get me away from considering the malicious features of the proposition by asking me about something else and totally different.”

“It not the reason the gentleman is opposed to this because he wants to get up the suffrage proposition?” asked a Democrat from the Middle West.

“The gentleman certainly never made a greater mistake in his life,” the Minnesota man retorted. “I am very serious about this.——It is for the Democratic members of the House now to decide whether they are going to keep the faith, the faith that we made and were glad to live up to, that the committees of the House should not report out any legislation except that which is devoted to war propositions.”

Instantly Mr. Kitchin saw / his chance and jumped to his feet, getting prompt recognition from the Speaker. “Mr. Speaker,” he shouted, “I am in sympathy with the gentleman in his statement that this session should be confined to war measures. Therefore, I move that the House do now adjourn.”

His motion was carried though most of the Republicans voted against it; and so, with a ripple of laughter, the House adjourned.

Three working days in those crowded weeks had gone over-board to save the Democrats from being outwitted.

However, I saw that afternoon why it was that Claude Kitchin was popular as floor leader; for his effrontery was so candid, his tricks were so obvious, that they put even his opponents in good humor. Up to that time I had thought of him only as a Congressional “wild bull of Bashan”. His vast girth and height, his way strutting up and down when he was making a speech, his Southern accent, the thickest I ever heard from lips white or colored, and a voice so load that I sometimes recognized it through the 118106closed doors when I was at the entrance a story below the House, —these characteristics, along with his opposition to woman suffrage, had made him, from my point of view, a detestable person. He was in the habit of describing himself as “An unreconstructed Southerner,” and the title fitted, though I came to understand that day that it included good qualities as well as bad.

Later, one of our friends told me that the funniest part of it all was the angry perplexity of the Maryland member when he came off the floor.

“Weeks ago Claude Kitchin tells me that there isn't the ghost of a chance of getting that Buchanan statue bill up this session,” he stormed in the coatroom. “Then this morning, ten minutes before the House meets, he sends for me and says it's going to come up today and I got to make a speech on it. And just when I'm getting under way, he goes and adjourns on me.”

The next morning there was a veiled account of the comedy in one of the Washington papers under the caption, “ Minnesota Member Spills the Beans.” But I could not think of the proceedings aa something to laugh over, for I realized how disastrous for the Amendment they might have been if we had had no previous inkling of the plan. While my indignation was still seething, I went to see a Republican friend, who was a member of the party steering committee, by which party strategy was supposed to be planned, and begged him to tell me whether another attempt of that kind was likely to be made. He replied that he thought not, inasmuch as the success of the Republican plot depended upon taking the Democrats by surprise and they had avodently been warned thoroughly enough to be on the watch in the future.

Then he explained how the plan came to be made. According to his account, Mr. Mann, at a meeting of the Steering Committee one day, remarked that it was the duty of the floor leader to put one over on the other side occasionally and that, as it was clear the Democrats were intending to make merit with the suffragists by letting them have the House suffrage committee, it might be well if the Republicans beat them to it by getting up the Amendment on a Suspension Monday.

Certainly if I had ever had much respect for party politics, that explanation would have gone a long toward undermining it.

“Watchful waiting,” and “Marking time” were two phrases that we learned the full meaning of in Washington. For a month after the frustrated attempt to rush us into a vote about the Amendment, we watched the calendar of the House and we waited for our report from the Rules Committee.

By way of marking time we hunted down a bill to permit woman suffrage in Hawaii. I first heard of it from a Boston woman, Mrs. Benjamin Pitman, who had family connections there. From her account it appeared that the Hawaiian legislature, in 1916, had passed and sent to the 64th Congress a resolution asking for the right to give votes to their women. But, so far as we could find out, no one in that Congress had ever heard of the resolution. In 1917 a similar one was passed by the legislature. That second resolution we found in the office of Prince Kalanianaole, Delegate from Hawaii, whom we prevailed on to introduce in the House a bill providing for a favorable reply to the Hawaiian request. No further action was taken in the House for nearly a year; but, fortunately for us, our good friend, Senator Shafroth, was then chairman of the Senate Committee on Porto Rico and the Pacific Islands. When we asked him to introduce a bill similar to the House bill, he did so at once, and had it favorably reported by his committee. In September, shortly before the close of the session, the bill came up in the Senate during a Calendar period, when measures to which no one makes objection can be taken up, and it was passed without debate or roll call. In view of the delay in votes for 121109women in the United States, that was one of the most astonishing cases of inconsistent success that I ever knew.

Mrs. Catt had her own way of marking time, if a woman who worked twelve or fourteen hours a day could ever be said to mark any. Her way was to make plans. Anyone else would probably have been content for a while with the remarkable number of victories won by her previous plan in the State legislatures of 1917: for, besides presidential suffrage for women in six States and primary suffrage in one, resolutions in support of the suffrage amendment, such as Mrs. Catt had requested from the legislatures of equal suffrage States, had been sent to the Congress by all of them, and in six other States the legislatures had voted to submit State constitutional amendments to give votes to women. The idea of a suffrage struggle carried on simultaneously all over the country had brought 23 victories - no small record for six months of effort.

Yet Mrs. Catt—amazing leader that she was—was already looking ahead to 1918, when few State legislatures would be in session and the full force of most of our State organizations could be concentrated upon the Congressional work. She therefore decided to call a conference of our State officers at Columbus, Ohio, in May; and there she presented another plan, complete in every particular, a new instance of her rare gift for combining a wide view with the most careful regard for details. More than anyone else I have ever known, she could see the large and the small at the same time.

The title of her plan was a rousing one, “HOW TO WIN AND WIN NOW,” and its points show so clearly the kind of State work back of our efforts in Washington that I give the outline in full.

PLANS FOR CONGRESSIONAL WORK TO BE UNIFORM FOR ALL STATES

1 - Hold a conference of the Board of Officers, the State Congressional Chairman, the District Congressional Chairmen, the State Chairman of Organization and all State organizers, and two or more invited delegates from each District to meet a representative of the National Board or Congressional Committee, in private session, for the purpose of planning ways and means for the execution of the following plans. The date of this conference to be fixed by joint arrangement between the state and national officers. Such conference will not be necessary where an energetic Board agrees to push the plan.

HOW TO DO IT

If your own staff is too limited to do this additional work,interest other women to make it their business. Get women especially placed for political influence. If you are short of money, beg or borrow it. You will need to follow up continually the instructions sent to Chairman. You will need to keep check upon them in order of learn whether they are doing the work. If not, 124112an officer or an organizer must go to learn why and to find a more dependable chairman. Be sure to get your organization going in every county. This plan will fuenish the motive for doing it.

When it become clear that our report from the Rules Committee would not be brought up until the and of the session, I went away from Washington for a few weeks, while Mrs. Roossing took charge of the “watchful waiting.” The only event of special concern to us during that time was a futile effort, by Senator Cummins of Iowa and Johnson of California, to have the Woman Suffrage Committee in the Senate discharged from consideration of the amendment. Their attempt, similar to Mr. Mann's on the House side, was much more easily thwarted because of Senate procedure. But it did not make us think any better of partisan politics.

Early in September I went back to Washington, for I was afraid the Congress would recess without doing anything about our committee; but we were soon notified that the Rules Committee should bring in its report on the 24th. Though our friends assured us that we did not need to worry, I set about checking up on a part of our poll, in order to find out whether the defeat of the State constitutional amendment at the election in Maine earlier that month had cost us any votes in the House. A few day's work convinced me that we were still close to the 250 that I had set my heart on as a guarantee of safety.

Then, because I had seen from the gallery a great many votes taken with only a small number of members on the floor, I hit on the device of dividing up those who were pledged to us among the seventeen members whom we counted as our most active friends. In the bosom of the suffrage family we called those men shepherds, in as much as they were supposed to see that our sheep, 125113the promised voters for the suffrage committee, were all in the House at critical moments. An Ohio Republican, for example, had charge of Republican votes for us in his own and a neighboring State; and a Colorado Democrat looked after our Democratic votes in three States.

Some of the shepherds also agreed to attend to the business of “pairing” absent friends with opponents, in accordance with the custom which provides that, when a pair has been arranged between two members, neither votes on the question, and therefore the opponents offset each other, as they would have done if each had cast a vote in accordance with his opinion. In that case the votes are not counted on the official statement of the total, but the pair is listed in the Record. When both members are to be away, the government, which is then called a “dead pair” because neither vote could be cast, has no advantage except that of permitting the two men to make their stand known. But when one member is present and might vote if he wer not paired, the other side is practically as well off as it would have been if the absent member had been there to give his support. That kind of pair, known as a “live pair”, is was therefore more to be desired, a fact that I did not fully realize at first.

As a last effort we begged Senator Jones to give us the impetus of a favorable report from his C c ommittee in the Senate and on September 23d, the day before the House vote, he presented to the Senate the first unanimously favorable report ever received by that body from a woman Suffrage Committee.

In spite of that fact and of all other preparations, I was desperately anxious lost something that ought to be done had 126114been neglected. It was to be first vote during my chairmanship of our Congressional Committee and I felt as if the fate of the universe hung on it.

Long before the session began on September 24th, Ruth White and I were in our usual places in the House gallery, equipped with roll-call slips secured from the press gallery. We had put checks at the left of the list of names to correspond with our own poll and we hoped to get a chance to check at the right of the names, the votes actually cast, though we knew that writing, like reading and sleeping, was forbidden in the gallery. I didn't hear a word of the Chaplain's prayer at the opening of the session because I was trying to count our friends on the floor. When I saw that Mr. Pou was hot there I whispered my concern to Dr. McKelway, who had joined us in the gallery. He laughed and told me that, if I would look carefully when the door of the Democratic coatroom was opened, I might catch a glimpse of Mr. Pou stretched out on a sofa there and dozing until the time for his report. And I did actually se through the opening the shoes of a recumbent figure and felt comforted by the sight.

As soon as the reading of the Journal of the previous session was over, I began to get rigid with expectation. But a “gentlemen from Illinois” asked and was granted unanimous consent “to proceed for one-half minute”. What he wanted was to have a speech made by a former member of the House printed in the Record. When his request was at tended to and some reports from the Committee on Enrolled Bills was disposed of, I was rigid again. But there was a “Message from the Senate”; delivered by one of its clerks, whose funny, ducking bow from the back of the centre aisle would have delighted 127115me on an ordinary occasion. As soon as he made ? his report of Senate agreements and disagreements with House action on bills or resolutions, he ducked again and departed.

Then a storm cloud broke over the House in the person of Representative Norton of North Dakota. Raising to “ a question of the highest privilege” 1 he stated that in an interview quoted in the paper that morning, Representative Heflin had reflected on the membership of the House by stating, in connection with an alleged German plot to bribe Congress not to vote for the declaration of war, that he could name 13 or 14 members of the House and Senate “who had acted in a very suspicious way.”

Thereupon Mr. Heflin raised a point of no quorum and the long process of calling the roll was gone though. My dismay because Mr. Pou did not appear to answer to his name was not lessened by the Speaker's grim remark,”Now, this is likely to be a rather exciting day for more reasons than one, and the Chair announces that he is going to keep order here today, and if any gentleman disturbs the proceedings he will harness him up by the Sergeant-at-Arms.”

After that, Mr. Norton went on, “Gentlemen, if that charge is true - and I don't believe there is a scintilla of truth in it - there is no punishment severe enough to deal out to such a man or such men if they can be found.

“On the other hand, gentlemen, if it is false, apologies on the part of the member—will not undo this evil.—If he knelt down on his marrowbones in humblest apology he could not undo the evil he had done.”

Then Mr. Heflin rose to a question of “personal privilege:” “Now, Mr. Speaker, I have not said that any member has been influenced by German money. I have made no such charge. But I did say that I could mention some members whose conduct, according to my judgment, has been suspicious.”

Pressed to name them, he refused. Several other speeches, condemning or ridiculing him, he answered by puerile attempts to explain the inexplicable; and the outcome was a resolution calling for a committee of investigation, which was followed by a parliamentary dispute as to whether the resolution had to be referred to the Rules Committee or not.

By that time I was so interested in the debate that I had almost forgotten my own problem. But jut as the Speaker ruled that the resolution would have to go to the Rules Committee, I saw Mr. Pou leisurely proceeding down the centre aisle. Whether he had a page trained to warn him of the exact second to enter, I never knew; but anyhow, there he was addressing the Chair: “Mr. Speaker, I offer a privileged report from the Committee on Rules.” “The Chair knows,” said the Speaker,” but wait until we get through with this.” “I thought the Chair had ruled. I may b mistaken,” Mr. Pou replied, with laconic emphasis on “may”. The Speaker designed to explained, “The Chair desired to hear these gentlemen if they had any argument to make one way or the other.” Then he ruled again, “The Chair refers the resolution to the Committee on Rules.”

For a second time Mr. Pou went through the customary formula, “I offer a privileged resolution from the Committee on Rules.”

“The Clerk will report it,” said the speaker and the Clerk read: amendments to the Rules of the House, intended to provide for a Committee on Woman Suffrage 129117with 13 members, to which “all proposed acts touching the subject of woman suffrage should be referred.”

When the Clerk ended, Mr. Pou spoke again.

“Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that debate on this resolution be limited to two hours, one hour to be controlled by those who favor the resolution and that hour to be equally divided between myself and the gentleman from Kansas, (Mr. Campbell) he to control a half hour, and the other hour to be controlled by the gentleman from Tennessee, (Mr. Garrett) who opposes the resolution. At the end of that hour the previous question to be considered as ordered.”

Mr. Campbell asked to have a proviso included that debate be confined to the resolution, probably with the futile wish to keep the discussion off the general issue of woman suffrage; and Mr. Pou agreed to the proviso. Then a Republican opponent complained that all the time in opposition had been left in the control of a Democrat and Mr. Garrett promised to divide the time fairly.

After that a member rose to request time for a brief presentation of a minority report on motor truck delivery and that request was granted when the Speaker had agreed not to take the time out of the two hours allotted to Mr. Pou.

“Will they never get down to our report!” I thought with agonized exasperation, as another message from the Senate was delivered by another ducking messenger. But there were still two more minor matters to be adjusted before Mr. Pou was able to begin his calm and well-ordered speech. 2

“Mr. Speaker, the question before the House should not be confused with the larger question of national woman suffrage. The proposition before the House is simply the creation of a committee. In times past various new committees have been created by the House. Within the last few years the Committee on Good Roads has been created and also the Committee on Flood Control. 130118The Committee on Rules decided that the question of Woman Suffrage was of such importance as to justify the creation of a committee charged with the duty of considering that particular question.

“In my own mind, there is but one argument that can be advanced against the creation of this committee and that is the trifling expense involved. It is very true that at this time the Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction of this question.— —If that point is to be fatal to the resolution offered by the Committee on Rules, then no new committee could ever be created, now or hereafter. And it is no reflection upon any committee of the House, above all the Committee on the Judiciary.

“Now, Mr. Speaker, this request is nation-wide. I have here a petition signed by more than 80 members and it seems to me it would be a gracious thing to do in this hour when the life of the Republic is at stake and when American women are responding to the call to duty equally with the men to say to the women of America, ‘You are at least of importance enough to entitle you to have a committee created in the House of Representatives to consider your claims.’

“We have here as a member of this body the first woman Representative in the American Congress.” At this point there was a prolonged applause. Then Mr. Pou went on, “There will be others—and it seems to me the time has come—to give to these women the committee to which they appear to be entitled. And I say this as one who has never voted for a suffrage amendment to the Constitution.”

Mr. Pou was followed by an irate opponent, Mr. Blackmon of Alabama: ——“The chairman of the Rules Committee says that we now have a Congresswoman and are going to have more. I do not feel disposed to take issue with him upon this subject. It may be that this will happen.——It may be that there will be many women in the next Congress, and unless the present House settles down to business—it might not be surprising if we had a lot of children elected to the next Congress.—— “This resolution is brought forward notwithstanding the fact that when the Congress was called into extraordinary session——it was agreed in caucus that there should be no legislation on any subject other than war measures.—— “What is the necessity of this committee? Are we prepared to say that the great Judiciary Committee of the House is unable to deal with this question?—What member of the House is there who can not draw a resolution proposing a constitutional amendment?” 131119 “Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?” asked Mr. Pou. “Yes,” said Mr. Blackmon. “As I said before,” Mr. Pou explained, “this is simply a change in the rules of the House. The Democratic caucus did not pass a resolution providing that the rules of the House should not be changed.”

With the wind rather taken out of his sails, Mr. Blackmon wound up. Then another opponent, Mr. Meeker of Missouri, undertook to champion the women opposed to Woman Suffrage: “I want to say that the opposition is as wide as the desire to have this rule adopted. Women in all parts of the nation—and they are probably as intelligent as some who are insisting on this rule—are opposed to it, although they do not make the same kind of noise.——There is absolutely no safeguard for a free people except to preserve for them those matters for local decision to which they are entitled.”

Miss Rankin spoke next, making the points that the Judiciary Committee “has all it can do in attending to the regular business that comes before the Committee,” and that the amending process was so difficult in some of the States as to make State constitutional amendments practically impossible.

Then came our new friend, Mr. Cantrill of Kentucky: ——“I cannot understand why even the most active opponents of woman suffrage should oppose the establishment of a standing committee to consider the question.——I have heard some Members of the House say they did not favor the establishment of a committee on woman suffrage because of pickets at the White House gates. I do not favor picketing, either, but I would not insult my intelligence by voting against the resolution because some few women hold banners on the streets of Washington.” ——“Today 20 States of the Union have presidential suffrage for women.——It is high time we should give consideration to the rights and liberties of half our people. “I will note with much interest the votes of some of the Members of the House, who have always been so insistent on prohibition legislation.——It is generally believed that woman suffrage means prohibition legislation. In my opinion, no real and earnest advocate of prohibition could vote against such a simple 132120proposition as having committee in the House to study the problem of suffrage.”

The last shaft, which was directed against Chairman Webb of the Judiciary Committee, whose zeal for prohibition was equalled only by his inconsistent enmity towards woman suffrage, struck home; and Mr. Webb reacted promptly: ——“I am one prohibitionist who does not favor woman suffrage.——I do not have ti defend the Judiciary Committee——It cannot be asserted that that Committee has not carefully considered the woman-suffrage proposition, not only last year, but every year. No one can say that we have been unfair to them. And, as I say, we are ready to report in December.—— “You want to pack the new committee; that is your object. This whole movement is an effort to get a committee which will make a report contrary to the wishes of the majority of this House, and it ought no to be allowed.”

Another Southern member, Mr. Adamson, arose: “Mr. Speaker, will the gentlemen yield?” “Not now,” Mr. Webb replied.

“But I want to ask the gentlemen a good question,” said Mr. Adamson, ingratiatingly, whereat there was a shout of laughter from both sides of the House, and Mr. Webb agreed to yield for a question.

“There is no committee in the House on male suffrage?” Mr. Adamson asked.

Mr. Webb made the obvious answer, “No,” paving the way for Mr. Adamson's, “Why should there be one on female suffrage?”

“There should not,” Mr. Webb announced, and then went on with his speech: “When this war Congress began, we held a Democratic caucus and passed a resolution which by common consent up Republican side has agreed to—that we would take up nothing except war emergency measures during this session.——I obeyed your orders and did my best to carry out what you wanted done—to report and pass 133121nothing in the House except war emergency measures. I say it is unfair to the members of the House who have acted in good faith on the understanding of the House so long—at the end of the session now to practically deify the woman-suffrage proposition, put it on a pedestal, and shove it through the House to the exclusion of the all other important matters.” ——“I say again that we are going to give these suffragette ladies a vote on their resolution in December, and we have printed all the literature that they have been able to scrape together. We will not give them a favorable report, but we will report out the Susan Anthony resolution and give them a vote; but they do not ask for a vote in December. They want a committee and if you do not pack the committee they will abuse you and criticize you all over the country. “In the last twenty year a big majority of the population of the country have voted (on woman suffrage) in the States and have overwhelmingly defeated it.”

Then he went on to give the discouraging record of all the votes that had been cast against us in the dark period before our recent victories began, a form of argument which led Mr. Mondell of Wyoming to comment, “It will be noticed that while gentlemen opposing the creation of the committee may begin their remarks by arguing against the creation of the committee—they always close by strongly presenting their arguments against suffrage.”

He continued: “Now, the only question before the House is—should there be a committee on woman suffrage? Is the question important enough to justify the formation of a committee to consider the subject? Well, we have a Committee on the Disposition of Useless Papers, created possibly in a prophetic hour by some one who wanted to get a place to put the printed arguments of those who are against woman suffrage. We have committees on some fifty-odd different subjects, no one of which can, in the nature of things, be more important than this subject of whether or not one-half of the human race—and the better half—are to have anything to do with the affairs of the government.”

Mr. Small of North Caroline, the next speaker, waved at the southern members the red flag of state rights, without which no woman suffrage debate ever on long: 134122 ——“This resolution purports to consider a committee to consider an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.——What does such an amendment imply? It implies taking away from the States the right of local self-government.”

To my mind, the most sensible speech was the ? one made by Representative London of New York, who said: “Mr. Speaker, I would like to get rid of this woman suffrage business if for no other reason than to get rid of the silly arguments that are used on both sides of the questions. “The proposition is elementary: A woman is a human being or she is not. She is either a member of the community or she is not. If she is a member of the community, she has a right t vote, as to vote means to participate in the making of those rules which are binding upon the community. “As to the suggestion of a committee, I am going to vote for it, but not with any particular enthusiasm, because it looks to me like a miserable sop which politicians give to would-be politicians. “What I dislike is the avoidance of the big issue, the question of an amendment to the National Constitution. Nothing seems to me more absurd, more grotesque, more indefinite than the appeal by Democrats to the State's rights idea to-day,——They would allow people in one end of the country to regulate the personal habits of people in the other end of the country; they see no objection to the that, but when it comes to a question involving an extension of human liberty they raise the question of State rights.”

At the end of two hours the roll call began. It was the first of many times that I was to sit in a Congressional gallery, with my heart in my throat, checking up on our poll as the votes were recorded. Then, as always later, the doorkeeper, who knew how keen our interest was, made on humane exceptions to the rules; for they never seemed to notice that we were marking the roll-call slips which we held.

Before the vote, 181 yeas to 104 nays, was announced, we knew from our own list that we had won by a comfortable majority 135and were able to draw a deep breath of rejoicing. As soon as the House adjourned, Mrs. Gardener and I hurried down the long flight of marble stairs to thank the men who had helped us most as they came out.

When we saw Champ Clark, she said gaily, “Well, Mr. Speaker, we trusted in the Lord and He stood by us.”

“Hmph!” grunted the Speaker, forgetting all about the advice he had given us earlier, “The Lord didn't have anything to do with it. Tended to it myself.”

Naturally, Mrs. Gardener explained that she was merely quoting his own remark and then he moved on, appeased.

Back at Suffrage House when I went carefully over our vote I realized that our majority was a long way from two-thirds, even on a minor issue on which we might reasonably expect to have few votes, like M. Pou's, that we could not count on for the amendment itself.

Still more discouraging was the fact that our total of 181 ran considerably below number of members who had promised to vote for us. Only of these had actually voted no; and 21 were paired in our favor. But even will the allowance for our pairs, there were still about twenty men supposed to favor the committee resolution who had been unaccountably absent and I was fearful that the defeat of our State constitutional amendment in Maine had scared them off.

Of our favorable votes, we found that 82 were from Democrats and 96 from Republican. Of the opposed votes, 74 were cast by Democratic members and 32 by Republicans: while among those not voting, 59 were Democrats and 81 Republicans. When we worked out 136123the last figures I began to wonder whether the excess of Republican absentees was because the resolution to create the committee was sponsored by Democrats.

Another uncomfortable conclusion at which I arrived was that some of our “shepherds” had not bothered themselves to look after the sheep assigned to them. To be sure, many of the shepherds had done a thorough job; but others had been of no help[ at all. Little by little, I was coming to distinguished men whom we could depend on from those who merely made promises.

Yet, in spite of al my misgivings, I was very happy over that first victory. I saw that in addition to the advantage of having the Amendment considered by a committee the majority of which was likely to be favorable to suffrage, a feeling of success for the cause as a whole had been stirred up. Then, too, the effort had given me much needed experience and some confidence in my own legislative judgment, upon which I should have to depend in the future; for the business arrangement with Dr. McKelway had been terminated by our National Board at the end of two months and, though he generously continued to give me advice and occasional help, I knew that I had no right to trespass upon his time. So it meant much to my future work that I came to have considerable knowledge of the House through that successful preliminary skirmish.

Our happiness over the creation of the Woman Suffrage Committee in the House was soon dampened by difficulties about the chairmanship. The Republicans wanted Miss ? Rankin to have it and some of the Democrats thought that giving her the position would be a pretty gesture to the ladies. We knew that if a few of the Democrats were willing to vote for her and the Republicans supported her unanimously, she stood a good chance of being elected; for the Democratic margin in the House was a narrow one. But much as we liked to see a woman come to the from, we were not in favor of having her for chairman, because we believed that only a person of Congressional experience should have charge of the Amendment. We realized, too, that a Democrat would have an advantage when it came to getting a satisfactory date for the vote and in many other details controlled by the majority party. On the Democratic side there were two candidates, Mr. Raker and M. Keating. Both were friends on whom we depended and we had a hard time to steer an even course between their claims. Mr. Raker was favored by the Speaker and Mr. Keating by Mr. Kitchin. Either for that reason or because of Mr. Webb's adverse influence, the session, much to our regret, was permitted to come to an and the first week in October without any appointments to membership on the suffrage Committee.

That week I went up to a meeting of our National Board In New York. Everyone there was Keenly anxious to know my opinion about the real chance of the Amendment in the next session.

“I think its chance depends on the result of the vote on the constitutional amendment in New York State,” I said. “If that amendment is carried, we shall have a chance in Washington; if it is not carried, we shall probably get a better vote in both houses of the Congress than was given before, but we can hardly scarcely hope for the necessary two-thirds.”

Miss Mary Garrett Hay, who was city chairman of the woman suffrage organization, said immediately, “Then you'll get through, for we're going to win New York.”

After the meeting I asked her what she really thought about it. “You don't have to buoy me up with false hopes,” I added.

“I mean it,” she replied. “We're going through.”

Mrs. Catt, who was listening, remarked, “I think Molly's crazy; for she really believes we'll win, though so far as I know she is the only person who does.”

But Miss Hay was right, incredibly right; for, at the election in November, thanks to her leadership, the city piled up a sufficient majority to offset the unfavorable up-state vote, which came in spite of the gallant struggle of the State suffrage association. That was a reversal of the usual fortune of State amendments to enfranchise women, on which the vote in large cities was ordinarily more opposed than the vote in towns and country districts. Mrs. Catt said afterwards that no one had ever understood what happened in New York City. Certainly one great factor in the success was Miss Hay's adroit management of Charlie Murphy, whom persuaded to instruct his henchmen that Tammany was to keep hands off the suffrage amendment. And another was her 139126genius for organization, which build up New York City Woman Suffrage Party, organized on the ward and precinct basis, into one of the strongest reform associations in the country.

Fittingly, No wonder the newspaper women called Miss Hay “The BIg Boss”. She had, to a remarkable degree, the executive ability and the knowledge of practical politics that were essential to the carrying out of Mrs. Catt's extensive plans. They were close friends and they worked together admirably. Mrs. Catt was essentially a statesman, Miss Hay, a politician, and together they were, in most cases, invincible.

The New York victory made almost as much difference in Washington as I had believes that it would. I saw the change as soon as the members of the Congress began to come back in late NOvember. New York had the largest delegation in the House, 43 members. Among them, most of those listed as “doubtful” on our poll, promptly changed to supporters, as did several of those previously opposed. The mercury in our thermometer of electoral votes had jumped from 172 to 217, and there were gains in the delegations from other States, because the carrying of New York was accepted by the politically wise as the handwriting on the wall.

None the less, we detected some disconcerting signs. First among them was the increased activity of our opponents; due, no doubt, to their recognition that at last we had a real chance of success in the Congress. Soon we began to hear astonishing rumors that the Woman Suffrage Committee was not to be permitted to have jurisdiction over the Amendment. The notion was so incredible that at first we paid little attention. Then the story was so frequent that we set ourselves to trace it to the source , which we found in claims 140127made by Chairman Webb of the Judiciary Committee that amendments to the Constitution had always been reported through that Committee and could not come before the House in any other way. He had even convinced some of our strong supporters that they had been mistaken in advocating the creation of the Woman Suffrage Committee because it could not possibly have jurisdiction over the ours Amendment.

As soon as we discovered what the difficulty was, Mrs. Gardener and I tried to rally our friends. To our consternation, the first one whom we saw, a power in the House, told us that Mr. Webb was right and that the Woman Suffrage Committee would not be permitted to bring the Amendment to the floor.

I was so indignant that I trust out with the question, “But why didn't you tell us this before?”

“You didn't ask me,” was his reply. “I promised to help you get the Committee and you've got it; but I never said it could take charge of the Amendment.”

“What sense was there in helping us get the committee if it can't do the very thing we wanted it for?” I exclaimed, determined to let him know that I thought he had double-crossed us, But Mrs. Gardener pinched my arm and managed to get me away before I made that insulting accusation. Once outside his office, I broke into denunciations of the man's treachery.

Mrs. Gardener didn't agree with my charges. “I don't believe he meant to trick us,” she said. “I think he didn't know anything about that objection until Webb dug it out. The trouble is that man is so conceited that he would rather have us think he double-crossed us than admit he didn't know an important fact about procedure.”

During a wakeful hour that night, I had the idea that it might be good thing to check up on Mr. Webb's claim. The next day I hunted through Hinds's “Precedents” to find out exactly how previous amendments had come before the House and I discovered that two had started in committees other than the Judiciary and that one, the 17th, for the direct election of United States Senators, had been handled all the way through by another committee. Then I telephoned Mrs. Gardener to suggest taking this information immediately to our friend on the hill.

But again she was too wise to follow my suggestion. “We'll need his help a great many times before we're through,” she explained, “and we'll never be able to get it again if he thinks we think we know more than he does about the way the House works.” Then she advised consulting his secretary, whom she knew. So we peeked into the House to make sure that the member was there, and then called on the secretary, who was much interested in what we had to say and promised to transmit the information for us.

Afterwards he reported that he had put a copy of Hinds, open at the right page and marked, on his chief's desk and that, when he was asked how the book came to be there, he replied, “I heard you talking with those ladies the other day and when I ran across the reference, I thought you would be interested to see it.”

From that time on we heard nothing more from that member or from any other influential friend about the exclusive right of the Judiciary Committee to have charge of the Amendment. The reference had done its work.

But Chairman Webb had another card up his sleeve. The first week of the session he called a meeting of his Committee in 142129order to get Mr. Raker's resolution reported out before the members of the Woman Suffrage Committee were appointed.

We heard about this plan only the day before the meeting, but we managed to turn loose upon him a lot of our Democratic friends. Mr. Raker himself protested as vigorously as he could; a hurried conference of House members from suffrage States appointed a committee to wait upon the Judiciary Committee and ask for a postponement of action on the Amendment until the Woman Suffrage Committee had a chance to consider it; and Mrs. Bass, Vice-Chairman of the National Democratic Committee, rushed up to talk with Mr. Webb. The net result of all these efforts was that Mr. Webb consented to postpone action by his committee for one week. ¶ A far worse difficulty loomed before us when Mr. Kitchin announced that the vote on the Amendment would be taken December 17th, the day before the Prohibition Amendment was scheduled to come up. It was not the first time that the interests of the two measures had conflicted. We suspected that the early date was chosen in order to deprive us of the advantage of having the prohibition issue settled before our Amendment was voted on. As speakers in the debate on the creation of our Committee had pointed out, there was no greater ? anomaly in the Congress than the vehemence with which some of the advocates of the Prohibition Amendment in one breath denounced the Suffrage Amendment as a usurpation of State rights and in the next denied, just as vehemently, the right of the State to decide the question of prohibition. Most of the opponents of prohibition believed that the votes of women be cast in favor of that reform and some of them, who had no other objection to woman suffrage, intended to vote against our Amendment on that ground. 143130On the other hand, some members, chiefly Southerners, were convinced that if the Suffrage Amendment could be defeated before prohibition was voted on, the expectation that women would be voters all over the country would be removed and the Prohibition Amendment stand a better chance. So we were likely to lose votes among the supporters, as well as among the opponents of prohibition, if our vote came first.

Everything that could be done to change Mr. Kitchin's decision about the date we did. Our friends in the Administration and in the National Democratic Committee, as well as in the Congress itself, together with Democratic women in the suffrage States, were all besought to see him or to telegraph their protest. But it was due to Mr. Keating, who was a close friend of Mr. Kitchin's, more than to anyone else, that Mr. Kitchin was prevailed upon to enter into an agreement with our Congressional Committee.

At first he offered us two choices: (1) that if we accepted a vote about December 17th and then Amendment resolution failed to pass, he would have the suffrage committee named immediately, jurisdiction transferred from the Judiciary Committee and another vote taken in the short session or, (2) if we insisted on postponement of the vote, the Woman Suffrage Committee would be appointed and jurisdiction transferred, but we would have to fight for a place on the Calendar and our vote would probably be delayed until summer.

As neither of these alternatives was satisfactory to us Mr. Kitchin was persuaded, chiefly by the good offices of Mr. Keating, to consider another proposal and, at a conference at which Miss White and I were present, a three-fold agreement was arranged, providing: 144131

1st - that the Woman Suffrage Committee should be named at once and should assume jurisdiction of the Amendment;

This Mr. Kitchin laughingly called “a private gentlemen's agreement”, and he signed his initials to a memorandum of its provisions.

In accordance with the first of them, nominations of the members were announced in the House on December 13th; for the Democrats, Representative Raker of California, Chairman, and Representatives Saunders of Virginia, Clark of Florida, Hilliard of Colorado, Mays of Utah, Sullivan of New York and Blanton of Texas; for the Republicans, Representative Rankin of Montana, ranking minority member, and Representatives Mondell of Wyoming, Carter of Massachusetts, Meeker of Missouri, Little of Kansas and Elliott of Indiana.

Thanks to sincere devotion to our cause of Miss Rankin and Mr. Keating, the anticipated contest over the chairmanship was averted and the nominations were confirmed without a roll-call. In talking about the situation afterwards, Mr. Keating told us that Mr. Kitchin had been greatly surprised by the eagerness of Democratic members to be put on the committee. We were much encouraged by that report, for we knew that a desire to be on the committee implied in most cases anticipation of success for the Amendment.

A little later the date of our vote was changed, with our approval, from January 8th to January 10th. We longed to have it delayed still further, for three weeks seemed a terribly short time in which to make the necessary preparations; but we accepted that danger in order to avoid a worse one, when Mr. Kitchin told us that our vote must be taken before the Revenue Bill came up or else indefinitely postponed.

The month of December was like a three-ringed circus in which our Congressional Committee had to perform hair-raising stunts in all the rings at practically the same time.

For six days the National Convention of the Association was meeting in Washington and in order to get all possible advantages from the presence of a large number of our own members, we arranged thirty State conferences to be held at the Capitol, on one of the mornings of that week. If the senior Senator from the State was favorable to suffrage, we asked him to invite the other senator and all the House members to his office to meet a delegation of our members form that State: the meeting was arranged in the office of At many of the conferences the full membership in Senate and House was present to listen to a speech from the leader of our delegation and then to break up into formal talk , in which badinage on both sides played a large part. That afternoon, at a session of the Convention, a brief report of the morning's experiences was given by each delegation, with the greatest applause going to Arkansas because its members in the Congress, who had all been recorded against woman suffrage, had that day stated, that they would be “pleased” to vote for the ¶ Amendment. Mrs. Catt's own chief speech at the Convention was made in the for m , of an address to the Congress and printed copies of it 146133were later delivered to Senators and House members by one or more women from their own State. Then, on one of the Convention evenings, the wives of Cabinet members, Mrs. McAdoo, Mrs. Baker, Mrs. Daniels, Mrs. Burleson and Mrs. Lane, gave a reception for our delegates in the ballroom of the New Willard Hotel. Their help had been enlisted by Mrs. Gardener as a means of getting publicity to indicate the importance of our cause, rather than as an agreeable social occasion; but the reception served both purposes admirably.

The Convention came just at the time when our efforts to offset the claim of the Judiciary Committee about jurisdiction over the Amendment and to persuade Mr. Kitchin to postpone our vote were at the most nerve-wracking stage. I remember that the only sessions of the Convention I had time to attend were the ones in which I had to make my report as Congressional Chairman and to conduct a conference on Congressional work in the States.

In that Convention week, too, came a meeting of the Judiciary Committee at which it was voted to report out Mr. Raker's resolution, with no recommendation for or against it, but with the addition of an Amendment limiting the time allowed for ratification by the States to seven years. Evidently Mr. Webb / was determined to hold on the Amendment, even if his argument about the impossibility of any other committee's taking charge of it had been proved a fallacy. And it looked as if he had powerful backing.

On December 15th, the newly appointed Woman Suffrage Committee met and voted to ask the House for the transfer of the various suffrage amendments from the Judiciary Committee to the Woman Suffrage Committee. That afternoon when Mr. Raker made a 147134motion for the transfer on the floor of the House, a point of order was immediately raised on the score that he had not presented his motion at the proper time, just after the reading of the Journal. Mr. Raker explained that he had had an agreement with the Speaker to recognize him at that time; but that the Speaker had recognized someone else. The Speaker acknowledged this agreement and was about to declare Mr. Raker's motion in order when he was told that the Judiciary Committee had already reported the suffrage resolution. As the Judiciary Committee's report had not been filed when the House met that noon, it was obvious that the report had been put into the basket soon after the session began, supposedly while Mr. Raker was l a ying in wait to get the promised recognition. A heated discussion was followed by the Speaker's ruling that, as the Judiciary Committee had already reported the resolution, it was on the Calendar and could not be transferred. Mr. Webb then tried to get unanimous consent to have the vote on the Amendment taken on December 18th, but in that he was unsuccessful.

We are almost in despair, for the afternoon's proceedings seemed to indicate that the Speaker was supporting Webb and that Mr. Kitchin did not intended to keep his promise about the transfer of jurisdiction. Mr. Pou, to whom we went for advice, suggested a way out. He said that if Mr. Raker would introduce another resolution, similar to his first, it would be in order to have the second one referred to the Woman Suffrage Committee. He also gave us to understand that , until that Committee had a chance to consider the second resolution , the Rules Committee would take no action on Chairman Webb's request for a rule to permit a vote on the Judiciary Committee's report of the Amendment. ¶ Mr. Raker acted upon this suggestion as soon as we told him about it and his new resolution, 148135numbered 200, was referred to the Woman Suffrage Committee, just as Mr. Pou had said that it would be. This evidence that the powerful Rules Committee was behind us in our fight against Chairman Webb's ungenerous efforts gave us courage again, even though we understood that the question could not be finally settled until the day of our vote.

One member whose advice I longed to have in that struggle was the Republican floor leader, James R. Mann. By that time I had come to see that the little game, with our cause as pawn, in which he had tried to outwit the Democrats the previous spring was no more than might be expected of the leader of either party. And I had learned, not only that Mr. Mann was the shrewdest parliamentarian in the House, but that he could and would give valuable advice, provided we were willing to bear with the gruff way in which he always started out. One of the members of his own party had told me, in an angry moment, that the only way to get anything from Mann was, figuratively speaking, to kowtow twice at the door of his outer office, three times at the threshold of the inner one, and then kneel down with forehead to the floor before venturing to address him. After I realized that his harsh manner did not indicate personal dislike, I fell into the habit of going to see him occasionally for information about a House rule which I did not understand or with a question of strategy when I was in doubt. And I never went away without help. But before that session began, he had been forced to go to a hospital in Baltimore, where he was said to be seriously ill. In his absence, Representative Gillett of Massachusetts had been chosen by the Republicans as acting floor leader. He was opposed to Woman Suffrage and, though he was always courteous, the weight of his influence was against us. With 149136the Democratic floor leader also opposed, I longed increasingly to have Mr. Mann back as our troubles piled up during that month of December, 1917.

As soon as our Convention was over, Miss White and I set about organizing our chief friends in the House into an informal steering committee for the Amendment, for we were convinced that the members themselves could do more for us than anyone else in the short time that remained before our vote. We therefore gave every moment that we could steal from other work to efforts to get men to serve on this committee. Those who were already members of the Woman Suffrage Committee were considered ineligible, according to House custom; but we found 51 others, most of them from the West, with a sprinkling of southern and eastern members, who were willing to join the steering committee. And it proved to be the one group in our Congressional experience in which members of both parties worked harmoniously for the interests of woman suffrage, and in which we never found an instance of politics played for personal or party advantage. In fact we did learn of several cases in which genuine sacrifice of personal feeling were made in order to promote the work. ¶ The most outstanding of these concerned Mr. Keating, who had previously refused to make a fight for the chairmanship of the Woman Suffrage Committee, in spite of having Mr. Kitchin's backing for the position, and who was entitled for that reason, we well as by his ability, to expect that he would be made chairman of our steering committee. Indeed, he told me frankly that he would like to have the chairmanship; nevertheless, he insisted on my consulting Mr. Cantrill, who, as a southern conservative and an old-line politician, was opposed to what he considered Keating's radical views.

“If Cantrill thinks it's safe for me to be chairman, I'll be glad to do it,” Keating said. “But if he is opposed, I'd better not; for that will mean I shall not be able to get the kind of support for you that someone else might get.”

Dutifully I went to see Mr. Cantrill and after our talk I had to go back and tell Mr. Keating that Cantrill thought he would not do as chairman. To that conclusion Keating himself cheerfully assented and his cordial interest in our work was in no wise lessened thereafter. ¶ To me he was one of the most stimulating and helpful men in the entire Congress, for he taught me something of his own philosophy of politics at a time when my early awe of men in public life had given way to undue contempt. I had often discovered , often with representatives or senators who were opposed to suffrage , that, when one alleged reason of theirs was disproved, they would cite another and another until they had traversed a complete circle of argumentation and come back to a repetition of their first statement. That kind of experience, along with the tendency to play politics with every issue, had led me to think that a large number of members were nothing more than cheap and dull politicians.

No ¶ What Keating pointed out was that the men I was condemning were not really as stupid as they seemed; because for the most part, they talked to me at random, from the circumference of their thought, as it were, without revealing the real objection to suffrage, at the centre of their minds, an objection which might be only an ancient prejudice or might involve a pledge to an important constituent or to a powerful business interest. When I inveighed against the pettiness of members and their self-seeking, he reminded me that they averaged up fairly well with any other 151138group in the community and were no more liable than other men to have their conduct influenced by a desire to hold on to their job, or their judgment warped by a fit of ill-temper or indigestion.

No ¶ In that way he led me to realize that all I had a right to expect of legislators was not that they should be , had geniuses or heroes, but only representative of the run of men outside the Congress, as he believed that most of them were. Thanks to his point of view, I found it far easier in my dealings with members later on to be tolerant of their shortcomings and not to show resentment when I felt it.

our next choice for chairman of the steering committee was Representative Hayden of Arizona, easily the most popular member of the House; a big, shy man who had been sheriff in a tough county of his State. Once at a tea at Suffrage House his wife told me that she liked to have him work with us because he was “bashful” with women and yet, as Arizona had woman suffrage, he needed to know how to talk to them. I replied truthfully that he would not need to talk if he let them see his customary boyish grin, the most irresistible grin I ever came across in a grown man. With him as chairman and with Representative French of Idaho, a hard-working and completely dependable Republican, as secretary, the Steering Committee went ahead with splendid spirit.

One of its tasks was to keep friends on the floor whenever anything connected with the suffrage cause was likely to come up and in at least one instance we profited notably by such efforts. The special occasion was on December 18th the day after the prohibition Amendment was passed, when Mr. Raker asked unanimous consent for the transfer to the Woman Suffrage Committee of two minor suffrage bills to provide for the right of women to vote 152139in the election of the President, the Vice-President and the members of the Congress. These bills had been introduced, one by himself and the other by Representative French, some months before, and had then been referred to the Committee on the Election of the President and Vice-President. When Mr. Raker asked for the transfer, an opponent objected to unanimous consent and Mr. Raker was forced to make a regular motion to have the bills transferred. A roll call was demanded on the motion, which was carried by a vote of 234 yeas to 107 nays, more than two-thirds in our favor, though a simple majority would have been sufficient. ¶ Only those who know the swiftness with which current opinion can shift in the Congress will understand how much weight that vote had. Up to that time few of our friends had believed that we could muster a two-thirds’ majority on a suffrage question; but many of them took heart at that moment and went to work with renewed zeal. Wavering members, who wanted to be on the winning side, looked more favorably on the Amendment and we soon began to hear of “doubtfuls” who had come over to us. Again our opponents had overreached themselves; for, if unanimous consent had been granted, no roll call would have been taken on the question and we should not have had the marked impetus of that large majority.

The members of our Steering Committee then agreed to make a poll of their own by State delegations and to give personal attention to any uncertain member whom they might hear of. Though they did not all do their work with equal thoroughness, their active championship went a long way toward building up the conviction that this time the suffrage Amendment has a real chance of getting through. And men who were still waiting to see which way the cat was likely to jump turned their heads a little more 153140in our direction.

Perhaps the greatest service of the Steering Committee was in saving us from the idea that in order to get all possible votes for the Amendment we should have to accept a limitation of the period for ratification by the States to seven years, a limitation similar to the one which had been added to the prohibition Amendment. I myself was about convinced that a fight on that point would be unwise; but Miss White, who fortunately disagreed with me, consulted Representative Alexander of Missouri, a member of the Steering Committee; and he undertook to talk with certain members who, we had been told, would vote for the Amendment if it carried the seven years’ provision, but who would vote against it if no limitation were put on the time allowed for ratification. He found there was no foundation of fact in the rumors about votes that we might get by means of the seven years’ clause. Not a single opponent would agree to vote for us if we accepted the limitation and, without it, no promised support was likely to be lost. His report convinced our own Congressional Committee that we would better stand by our guns and the Steering Committee agreed to back us.

With all the other excitement, our lobby had to go steadily ahead. For that purpose, after the Convention was over, we held or called in enough women to give us a total of 29 31 workers before the vote was taken. Of this number, 13 were in Washington all the time and 16 for longer or shorter periods. They represented 17 States and the District of Columbia, with 5 from New York, 3 from Illinois, 3 from Massachusetts, 2 from Kansas, 2 from Kentucky, 2 from Michigan and 1 each from Colorado, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the District.

The preceding February, when we stopped lobbying for the Amendment, our poll stood, on Feb. 5, 1917—182 yeas, 17 8 5 nays, 7 5 8 doubtful.

Our next listing, based on our previous records plus the most recent reports from the States about new members in the 65th Congress, showed, on Nov. 30, 1917,—195 yeas, 163 nays, doubtful 77

When reports from Convention delegations and the lobby began to come in, we had, on Dec. 13, 1917,—235 yeas, 155 nays, 45 doubtful; and Jan. 1, 1918,—245 yeas, 143 nays, 47 doubtful.

But even with that considerable gain, it was clear that we should need to convert some of the opponents or else bring practically all the doubtfuls to our side in order to get a two-third's majority. And less than two weeks to do it in! We had harrassed days and sleepless nights.

Some of our most strenuous efforts were made to secure the active co-operation of Republican and Democratic national leaders. Secretary Baker, Secretary McAdoo and Secretary Daniels did all that they could do for us, including the writing of open letters in favor of the Amendment; Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Chairman Willcox of the Republican National Committee, urging that the party do everything possible for the success of woman suffrage; and Mr. Willcox himself came several times to Washington to labor with Republican leaders in the House in order to secure fuller Republican support there. Mrs. George Bass, who was at the head of the Democratic women , and Mrs. Ellis Meredith, their publicity director, worked early and late with House Democrats; 155142as did Mrs. Medill McCormick and Miss Mary Garrett Hay, both active in the Republican organization, with Republicans.

One thing that Mr. Raker asked us to do was to get telegrams from southern women, as a means of offsetting the claim of many of the representatives from the South that women there did not want the vote. I therefore sent to our Congressional chairman in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oklahoma, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas this telegram: “Southern congressmen say there is no demand from southern women for federal amendment. Suffrage Committee would like to refute such statement. Please have at lease ten telegrams from women's organizations preferably, or from individual women sent to Honorable John E. Raker, Chairman Woman Suffrage Committee, House of Representatives, requesting favorable report on suffrage amendment. Arrangements should also be made for many telegrams and letters from influential men and women to all members of House from your state. Have all messages reach Washington by January ninth. Vote scheduled for tenth. (Signed) Maud Wood Park

The result was that telegrams from the South poured in by the hundreds and were displayed in the House by Mr. Raker when he made his speech on January 10th.

On January 3rd, after the Christmas recess, the Woman Suffrage Committee started a four-day series of hearings on Mr. Raker's new resolution, the one numbered 200. The first day was given to the National American Suffrage Association, with Mrs. Catt and Dr. Shaw as our chief speakers. On the other days speakers representing the National Woman's Party and the anti-suffragists were hear s d ; and, at th e r end, our Association was given an opportunity for rebuttal. It was my duty to introduce our speakers and to make such filling-in remarks as I saw need for. And on the rebuttal 156143day the speech address of former Senator Bailey of Texas, whom the anti-suffragists had secured as their chief speaker, gave me plenty of opportunity; for his speech, the old-fashioned, florid kind, brought in innumerable compliments to the ladies, but few arguments against the Amendment. He seemed to set great store by one of his metaphors which described at length the fouling effect of a drop of ink in a glass of pure water, with the conclusion that the casting of a vote would be a drop of sullying blackness in the limid purity of woman's nature. As I told the Committee, when it came my turn to speak, I was sorry to have to turn their attention from such pretty figures of speech to the plain facts about the Suffrage Amendment, but that happened to be the subject under consideration at the time. The laugh which greeted that bit of impertinence consoled me a little for the hours upon hours which I had been forced to give to the hearings at the very time when every second was needed for preparations for our vote, then only three days ahead.

A favorable report from the Committee was, of course, to be expected; for nine of the thirteen members were avowed suffragists, three avowed opponents , and one doubtful. But we had a distinct sense of triumph when the doubtful one came over to our side and left only three opponents to file a minority report.

When the hearings were over, we scarcely ate and were too tired to sleep because of the innumerable last things to be attended to. Scores of our women who were not members of the lobby came to Washington for the vote and them we used whenever possible for last minute interviews. Telegrams and long distance calls hourly went to our workers in every Congressional district in which there was the faintest chance that another appeal or more concerted 157144pressure would help to bring us another vote.

One of our “doubtfuls”, who had been spending a few days at home in Florida, came back to Washington the day before our vote and gleefully reported that our State Congressional Chairman had traveled on the same train with him to the border of the State, in order to exhort him to support the Amendment, and that groups of suffragists had been waiting to put in a last plea at every station along the way.

“But I didn't make any promise,” he boasted.

I had already had a telegram from the State Chairman that she was practically sure he would vote “yes”; and, when I saw how entertained he had been by the efforts put forth to get him, I agreed with her. The next day proved that our conclusion was right.

As I was making my last round of calls in the House Office Building on the afternoon of the 9th, I ran into Mrs. Medill McCormick, who was there to talk with some of the Republicans.

“I can't see any possibility of our getting through, can you?” she asked.

“I think there's a possibility,” I replied. But I did not feel free to tell her that, at the very moment, a delegation of Democrats was being taken by Mr. Raker to the White House to ask the President's advice about the Amendment, in accordance with a plan worked out by Mr. Tumulty and Helen Gardener, whereby the Democrats might seem to be requesting his opinion instead of having it thrust upon them, as he foared they might consider it was if he took the initiative by summoning them. I myself could not 158145see any real difference, but I was very glad to have the President come openly into the fight. Later, when I found that Mr. Raker had not been able to get any Democratic opponents to go and that the best result the delegation had to show was the strengthening of one “doubtful”, I began to have my doubts of the practical value of the President's advocacy.

That evening several of us went to the Capitol to hear the report of the visit to the White House and to make last-minute plans for the next day. As usual at night, I was tired and depressed and the conference seemed to me completely futile. I believed that we had barely enough votes to go through on if nothing slipped, and I felt as if some calamity would be sure to intervene.

Not one calamity, but half a dozen, had befallen us, I thought when I arrived at the House Office Building early on the morning of January 10th. Our “shepherdesses”, who had been making their check up of House members, had distressing absences to report.

Mr. Grace Wilbur Trout, in charge of the Illinois delegation, had received word that Representative Ireland, who had left Chicago the day before, was held up by a train wreck. She had telegraphed to have an engine sent up the track to the place of the wreck with a messenger to get Mr. Ireland's signature to a telegram authorizing a pair; but there was no assurance that the reply would come in time. She was also at her wits’ end because Mr. Mann, in hospital in Baltimore, had made no request to be paired, though his secretary had assured her that she need not worry. An Indiana woman had learned that Representative Barnhart of that State had been taken to a hospital in Washington. And a Tennessee woman reported that Representative Sims, an elderly member of the Tennessee delegation, had fallen on the ice and broken his shoulder. She said that with wonderful courage he had refused to have it set for fear the anaesthetic would keep him away from the House and he was actually there at the moment, though in such excruciating pain that no one know how long he would be able to stay. The saddest case was that of a New York member. Representative Hicks, whose wife had died during the night, but who was coming to Washington just long enough to cast his vote for the Amendment because she had been ardently in favor of woman suffrage.

When I hurried to Mr. Keating with news of the unexpected need for more pairs, even he seemed a little daunted. He promised to do his best, but he told me that the opponents were advising men on their side not to five further pairs and he doubted that he could get any more. Beset by nauseating fear, I went to my seat in the gallery , which a member of our office force had been holding for me. I had a hard time to get to it, for the halls were packed with women. To find a place in the long queue of those already there, I had to showe my way through the line and the doorkeeper, who had promised to let me in on condition that the woman who had my seat come out, opened the door for me, much to the indignation of some strangers who did not understand why I was admitted. Once inside I had a hard time to get to the front row, for the standing space at the back was suffocatingly crowded and not only the seats but the stops the tiers were filled with our women, many of whom had been there several hours.

The session began at eleven that day. Billy Sunday, who was in Washington at the time, had been invited to make the opening prayer and he took the opportunity to tell the Lord about “the great pack of hungry, wolfish Huns, whose fangs drip with blood and gore.”

After he finished his exhortation, there was a little routine business. Then Mr. Foster, who had been chosen to present the report of the Rules Committee , because Mr. Pou was against the Amendment, came forward with our rule, House Resolution 125. 1

“Resolved, That immediately upon the adoption of this resolution the House shall proceed to the consideration of the House joint resolution 200. There shall be not exceeding four hours’ general debate, to be divided between those favoring and those opposing the resolution, but such general debate shall be concluded at not later than 5 o'clock P.M. At the conclusion of 161148such general debate the resolution shall be considered for amendment under the five-minute rule. Whereupon the previous question shall be considered has ordered on the resolution and all amendments hereto to final passage, without any intervening motion, except one motion to recommit” provided that all debate shall be confined to the subject matter of the resolution.”

Mr. Foster tried to get a little time beyond the usual forty minutes allowed for discussion of a rule, but Mr. Clark of Florida objected. Although nominally the rule itself was the business before the House for the next forty minutes, all the speeches during that time were about the Amendment. They were made, according to custom, by members of the Rules Committee, with time evenly divided between the two sides.

An opponent, Mr. Parker of New Jersey, led off with the State rights objection.

——“I maintain that certain right are reserved by the Constitution to each individual State and that one of these is the right to determine what its electorate shall be.”

Mr. Cantrill of Kentucky, followed with an argument intended to appeal specially to his Democratic colleagues. In a way it was also an explanation of his own change of opinion about woman suffrage.

——“Woodrow Wilson, the President of the greatest Republic on earth, and the spokesman of the world for humanity and liberty, speaks to the nations of the earth because the women of the West by their ballots so decreed; Champ Clark, one of the greatest champions of the rights of the people, presides over this House because the voters of woman suffrage States joined hands with the Southern States in support of Democratic policies. The Democratic Party of the Nation controls the legislation of our country in the State and in the House, and upon our country depends the safety and happiness of the world. Our party has taken the position of world leadership for civilization and Christianity because the woman-suffrage States of the West by their votes made it possible. This being true, then right and justice demand that those of us on the Democratic side of the House should stand by those States which have stood by us.

Mr. Moon of Texas, who came next, dealt with the four objection most frequently brought against the Amendment at that time.

“Mr. Speaker,——a few hours or debate upon a question that will add 14,000,000 of voters to the electorate of the United States is a want of consideration of one of the most important questions ever presented to this House.——

“When you deprive a State of the right to say who its electors are or place restrictions upon the State in determining the qualification of the elector, you strike down absolutely and unconditionally the life of its sovereignty.

“We are engaged in a great foreign war. It is not the proper time to change the whole electoral system.——Patriotism in my judgment, forbids the injection of this issue into national politics at this time. This is not the time for any honest American or patriotic man to press this issue upon the people.

“It has been insisted that the real purpose of this amendment is the basis for political legislation that will ultimately deprive the Southern States or representatives in part in Congress and their power in national affairs. This may be and probably is true.—In those Southern States where the colored population outnumbers the white to double the number of ignorant voters by living the colored women the right to vote would produce a condition that would be absolutely intolerable. We owe something to the wishes and the sentiments of the people of our States struggling to maintain law and order and white supremacy.”

I choked with anger at the dastardly appeal of that last argument to the p rejudices of Southern members. Yet I was glad to have what I knew to be one of the most potent objections come out into the open. As a man had said in an unguarded moment. “The real reason we Southerners don't want woman suffrage is that we can club the nigger men away from the pools if we have to, but we couldn't do that with their women.”

Then came Mr. Campbell of Kansas, answering Mr. Moon's argument about the war.

“Mr. Speaker, the man who does not know that to-day witnesses the dawn of a new era in the progress of 163150civilization of mankind fails to comprehend what is passing in the world.——There never was a more propitious time for this Nation, that entered this war to secure for those who are governed the right to have a voice in the Governments under which they live, than at this hour for America to grant the right of Suffrage to the noble women of the Republic. If it is right for America to participate in this war in behalf of the consent of the governed in other lands, it cannot be denied that Congress should go as far as it can go to grant the right of suffrage to all the women of America.”

Mr. Green of Massachusetts went off on the subject of picketing: ——“Since the second session of the Sixty-fifth Congress opened I have met several woman suffragists from the State of Massachusetts. I have immediately propounded to them this question: ‘Do you approve or disapprove of the suffrage banners in front of the White House with the following words emblazoned thereon, namely, “Kaiser Wilson, what will you do for woman suffrage?“’ The banners with these words inscribed thereon were flaunted many days during the last session of the Sixty-Fourth Congress. The day the Russian visitors called on President Wilson they were specially offensive. The answer in nearly every case to my inquiry was, ‘I glory in that demonstration.’ President Wilson, while not my choice for President, is the Commander-in-Chief of our Army and Navy, and the action in time of war was insulting to him and to the Nation in the terrible struggle in which we are now engaged and were then endeavoring to make successful. Besides, the response to my question was very offensive, and I immediately ordered these suffrage advocates from my office.”

Mr. Lenroot of Wisconsin made his appeal to his Republican colleagues: ——“Mr. Speaker, there should be no partisanship in the consideration of this resolution; and yet I must congratulate the Republican side of the House that because of the fact that an overwhelming majority of them will vote for this resolution to-day they have compelled the President of the United States to change his mind upon this proposition.”

That remark brought forth much applause in the Republican side, as it was intended to do, despite Mr. Lenroot's disclaimer of partisanship.

While he was speaking, I was relieved to see Mrs. Catt and Dr. Shaw make their way, with Mrs. Clark, to the Speaker's Bench in the gallery at right angles to our own. With Billy Sunday, they had been guests at the Speaker's luncheon and I had worried because they were losing part of the debate.

When Mr. Lenroot ended, the rule was accepted by a voice vote and I knew that we were over our first hurdle; for, by adopting the rule, the House concurred in the provision which made the resolution reported by the Woman Suffrage Committee, and not the one which the Judiciary Committee had reported, the form in which the Amendment was to be taken up. At last the prolonged struggle over jurisdiction was technically settled and settled as we wanted it to be.

As soon as the vote on the rule was over, Mr. Raker came forward, accompanied by the pretty, blonde girl who was clerk of the Woman Suffrage Committee, and who carried a batch of papers to be put on a small table out in front of the Democratic ranks. A little gasp of surprise and some applause were heard from the floor. Afterwards I was told that it was the first time a woman had been featured in that way as clerk of a committee.

Said the Speaker, “The Clerk will report the Joint Resolution,” and the Clerk read: “Joint Resolution (H. J. Res. 200) proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States extending the right of suffrage to women. “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein). That the following article be proposed to the legislatures of the several states as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which, when ratified by three-fourths of said legislatures, shall be valid as part of said Constitution, namely: 165152‘Article— ‘Section 1. The right of citizens of this United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. ‘Section 2. Congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation to enforce the provisions of this article.’”

Then the Speaker made an inquiry: “The Chair desires to ask those in the management of this debate if the Chair understands the situation correctly. The Chair's understanding is that the four following members shall each control one-quarter of the time: The gentlemen from California (Mr. Raker), the lady from Montana (Miss Rankin), the gentlemen from Virginia (Mr. Saunders), and the gentlemen from Missouri (Mr. Mecker). Is that correct?”

Mr. Raker replied, “That is the understanding, Mr. Speaker.”

Then there were a few questions about the time for amendments to the resolution and the opportunity to be allowed for “the extension of remarks” in the Record, to permit those who had no opportunity or an insufficient one for speaking to have their written addresses printed in full. When those details were disposed of, Mr. Raker yielded for a question by Mr. Walsh of Massachusetts: “I desire to inquire if it would interfere with the gentleman's plan in any way if he permitted the lady from Montana (Miss Rankin) to open the debate on this resolution?” “Mr. Speaker,” Mr. Raker answered, “I reserve the balance of my time and will permit the lady from Montana to open the debate.”

At that there was warm applause and Miss Rankin began her speech, during which I think no woman among us who had worked for the Amendment failed to rejoice that at last a woman's voice could be raised in the Congress in behalf of her own sex. Her appeal was brief and moving: ——“Something is still lacking in the completeness of our national effort. With all our abundance of coal, 16615387with our great stretches of idle, fertile land, babies are dying from cold and hunger; soldiers have died for lack of a woolen shirt. “Might it not be that the men who have spent their lives thinking in terms of commercial profit find it hard to adjust themselves to thinking in terms of human needs? Might it not be that a great force that has always been thinking in terms of human needs, and that always will think in terms of human needs, has not been mobilized? Is it not possible that the women of this country have something of value to give the Nation at this time?—— “For seventy years the woman leaders of this country have been asking the Government to recognize this possibility.—— “To-day as never before the Nation needs its women.——Their energy must be utilized in the most effective service they can give. “The boys at the front know something of the democracy for which they are fighting. These courageous lads who are paying with their lives testified to the sincerity of their fight when they sent home their ballots in the New York election, and voted ten to one in favor of woman suffrage and democracy at home.—— “How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen; how shall we explain the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?”

Her speech brought forth the prolonged applause that it deserved. Then Mr. Raker himself disposed of the common objection on the score of enlarging the potential negro vote before he took up the important argument of the inevitab y ility of woman suffrage: ——“I want to appeal to my Democratic friends. Lying on this table here are hundreds of telegrams from the loyal women of the South.”

These were the replies to our request for telegrams from Southern women.

“From every organization and association these women are appealing to Congress that they be recognized as are the men of this country in regard to the right to vote. They say that the negro question is a camouflage, and that they can well take care of it. There are over 8,788,000 white women in the South and 1671544,000,000 colored. You will have over 4,000,000 more white women than you will have colored. The total negro population is 8,294,274 and white women outnumber both negro males and females by nearly half a million. Therefore, from every conceivable point this resolution should pass.——

“Woman suffrage is no longer a controversial question; it is an established fact in nearly half the territory of our country. Wyoming in 1869 led the way and New York in 1917 carried the question over the top. No one denies that the coming of woman suffrage over the entire country is inevitable.”

From time to time during the wearing hours that followed, one or another of our friends would walk forward to a place directly below our seats in order to cheer us up with an encouraging word. And one man sent up by a page a bag of juicy red apples, for which we nodded our thanks as we munched. Curiously, eating in the galleries was not forbidden.

Next to stupid speeches by our friends, the inaccurate and unfair statements of some of the opponents were hardest to bear in silence. How we longed to applaud whenever a member on our side answered / one of these statements effectively! But even when an objection had been well answered, it was likely to be reiterated again and again.

A favorite argument against us was the plank in the Democratic platform which recommended woman suffrage by State action and was silent about a Federal amendment. In the words of Mr. Gordon of Ohio: ——“This joint resolution is a naked and impudent repudiation of the last national platforms adopted by the two leading parties in this Nation, and every man on the floor elected as a Democrat or Republican, who did not in the last campaign openly repudiate the platform of his party on this question is guilty of an act of bad faith in voting for this resolution.”

While Mr. Gordon was speaking, a doorkeeper with a telegram in his hand wriggled his way to Mrs. Trout's place. She read the message and then glanced 168155across at me, nodding her head affirmatively. I knew that she had heard from Mr. Ireland and sympathized deeply when she rose and followed the doorkeeper out. In order to make the hope of getting sure that a pair was found for Mr. Ireland, she was sacrificing her chance of seeing the climax for which she had been working months in Washington and years in Illinois. She knew that there was no hope of getting back into the gallery that afternoon. But she went out with her head up, like the gallant soldier that she was.

Mr. Clark of Florida, who was a member of the Woman Suffrage Committee indulged allowed himself time enough for a lengthy speech, in which he ran the gamut of most of the known objections and would up with a burst of oratory about the disruption of the family if women were permitted to vote.

——“I want to say in conclusion that if I had no other objection to woman suffrage. I should oppose it because, in my humble judgment, the conferring of the franchise on women will tend to disrupt the family, which is the unit of society, and when you disrupt the family you destroy the home, which in America is the foundation stone of the Republic.——God knows that factional politics, when confined to two wings of the same political party, is bad enough, but when you get factional politics limited to husband and wife, oh what a spectacle will be presented, my countrymen.”

Behind us some women started to laugh out loud. Miss White's head and mine both twisted automatically and our hands went up in a warning gesture. As I turned, I saw that Mr. Keating was just behind my aisle seat. “I came to tell you that everything seems to be going all right,” he whispered. “We've had some trouble with Gallivan, but that's all straightened out now. I was afraid you would hear about it and be worrying.”

Afterwards I learned that Miss Rankin, in her lack of experience and her desire to be obliging, had promised about twice as much time as she controlled. Gallivan, although a Democrat, 169156had persuaded her to assign him twenty minutes because he wanted to make a speech lauding Lucy Stone, who had lived in his Congressional District. When Miss Rankin notified him that she would have to cut him down to five minutes, he lost his temper and stormed around the Democratic coatroom, declaring that if that was the way the suffragists treated him he was going to vote against the Amendment. Someone told Mr. Keating what was going on and he and Mr. Mondell, by sacrificing most of their own time and getting others to lop off a little, were able to let Gallivan have his twenty minutes. And so his vote was saved to us.

Mr. Gray of New Jersey harked back to the war which was used again and again as an argument against woman suffrage by opponents and an argument in favor of it by supporters. Said he: ——“Our country entered into this war by votes of the male members of Congress. If we win this war or do our part in winning the war, it will be done primarily by the physical force of the male men of the Nation. The majority of the women of the Nation may be for war or they may not be for war. We cannot afford to take the chance that they are not for war and give them the vote.”

As a champion of the anti-suffrage women, Mr. Stafford of Wisconsin took the ground that if the Amendment passed they would be forced to go to the polls in order to offset the evil done by the rest of us.

——“If suffrage is going to be exercised at all, it should be exercised not by a small fraction of the class but by all the class; and you should not force an unwilling fraction of American voters to have to go to the polls to counteract the action of another fraction of women voters, and possibly a very small fraction, who wish to go to the polls and register their opinions.”

So many of the opponents hashed and re-hashed the State rights argument that we found it a comfort to have their inconsistency pointed out in a common-sense answer by Mr. Mays of Utah.

——“The gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Moon) worked himself into a fever heat about State rights, saying that he would not consent that Tennessee should have forced upon it a suffrage question against its will. Yet I see by the Record that the gentleman from Tennessee himself voted to force upon my State, against its will, the seventeenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States. My State expressly objected to that amendment, expressly repudiated that amendment, and never did ratify it.——The question is, Did the gentleman from Tennessee impinge upon the rights of my State? I do not think so, because when Utah consented to join the Union it came in under the Constitution, and it admitted the right of three-fourths of the States of the Union, in a regular, orderly way, to change the fundamental law of the land.”

Mr. Meeker of Missouri raised another aspect of the war objection: ——“This Nation in the hour of trial should lay aside and repudiate every domestic question that tends to divert and distract the attention of the people here at home.”

Mr. Keating's brief speech answered that argument: “Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Meeker) has just made a fervid plea to you to defeat this amendment because its submission will interfere with the winning of the war. The President of the United States, charged with the prosecution of the war, sends you word to pass the amendment in order to aid in winning the war. It is for the membership of this House to decide now whether, on the important question of winning the war, they will follow the leadership of Mr. Meeker, of St. Louis, or Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States.”

Mr. Gallivan of Massachusetts used the full twenty minutes finally pieced together for him, but even then he did not finish the speech about Lucy Stone, prepared for him by a former publicity director of Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, though he did manage to tuck in the paraphrased conclusion, “Democracy cannot live half free and half female.”

As he ended, we noticed that men were rushing to a door on the Republican side of the House and standing bunched together there. Soon there was a crash of applause from the Democrats as well as from 171158Republicans. When it died down the Speaker said, “We are all glad to see our colleague back with us.” Mr. Mann had come over from Baltimore to vote for woman suffrage, despite his doctor's warning that he was risking his life by doing so.

When he took his place, Mr. Mondell rose to speak.

“Mr. Speaker, I shall use the 30 seconds granted to me to say, as the Representative of the original woman suffrage State, the State in which women have voted for forty-nine years, the Commonwealth of Wyoming. That this is a great and glorious day, the day that shall see the adoption of this resolution for a Federal woman suffrage amendment.”

We had been anxiously watching the clock. Five o'clock was drawing near—five o'clock and the amendments that we dreaded.

In all 40 speeches were made during the time for general debate; 23 for us and 17 against. These in addition to 8 during the forty minutes given, technically speaking, to the discussion of the rule. Though the time was equally divided between opponents and supporters there was less demand for a place on the list among our enemies that among our friends and consequently more minutes for each opponent.

Promptly at five the resolution was read for amendments. The first offered by Mr. Moores of Indiana , providing for ratification by conventions in the States instead of by the legislatures, was defeated by a vote of 274 to 131. More than two-thirds. How we rejoiced when that vote was announced!

The second, offered by Representative Gard of Ohio, was the one which our Steering Committee had decided not to accept, the one which limited the time allowed for ratification to seven years. On that the vote was 274 to 158. The opponents had gained strength. 172159If amendments had required more than a majority vote to defeat them we should have been beaten on that one, we told one another in frightened whispers.

When the triple agony of the roll call on the resolution began, I started in to check my copy of the poll. One of the early votes I listened for with particular anxiety. It was that of a member who had always been against us but who had told me, after the prohibition vote, that he thought he would vote for the Amendment just to get even with Webb, by ramming woman suffrage down his throat the way he had rammed prohibition down the throats of the “wet” contingent.

“Very well,” I had replied at the time, “I accept on those terms. And when I sit in the gallery and hear you vote ‘yes’, I shall know that it's not because you love woman suffrage more, but Webb less.”

I chuckled as he voted for the Amendment.

When Representative Hicks answered “yes” to his name, I felt as if I must rush down to thank him, but he left the floor as soon as his vote was recorded and I knew that he was hurrying back to New York to arrange for his wife's funeral.

Before the names had been read through the first time, I realized that our victory was in doubt. To get two affirmative votes for every negative one was a terrific task. When two or three no's came in succession, it was almost more than I could bear. On the floor our friends were scurrying up and down the aisles and out to the coat-rooms to get in for the second call those who were pledged, but had not answered to their names the first time. And the opponents were scurrying, too. Just below 173160our gallery one of them was arguing with a man on our doubtful list who had not voted. Representative Sims, his arm in a sling, was going to one after another on the Democtatic side, imploring support for the Amendment. Anyone less heroic would have left the floor as soon as his own vote had been recorded, but he stayed on , in spite of the agonizing pain that he suffered , and strove, as he had been striving all day, to bring over one or two of his Southern friends to our side or to prevail upon them not to vote at all.

As the Clerk started on the second call, a stretcher was brought to a place near the Speaker's desk and lying there, Mr. Barnhart voted “yes”. He was not able to walk, but he had insisted on coming.

At the end of the second call, the issue was still in doubt. I took some comfort from the remembrance that the Speaker was in reserve, but I was not sure that we were close enough to have one vote save us; for, in the confusion on the floor during the second call of the roll, neither Miss White nor I could hear all the replies. The third call , as usual , was of those standing round the Speaker's desk, who were not supposed to be counted unless they could affirm that they had been inside the door, but unable to hear or to make themselves heard, during the previous call. Our most active friends were in the thick of the confusion around the Speaker's desk and it was so hard to hear in the gallery that we were in doubt about the outcome until Mr. Cantrill, slipping out of the / excited crowd, came to a spot below our places and called up, “It's close, but we've won, I think.”

Then, before the total was announced, an opponent, Mr. Dominick of South Carolina, came forward and demanded to be recorded 174161against the Amendment , on the ground that his name had not been called on the second roll-call; but his statement was challenged by Mr. Austin of Kentucky, who said that he had heard Mr. Dominick's name called. Mr. Cantrill hurried back to the Desk and, though we could not hear the words, we knew that a heated controversy was going on. Meanwhile the Speaker was pounding for order. Finally he thundered, “Gentlemen , will all keep still until the Speaker can rule. The gentlemen brings himself within the rule.”

Loud applause from our opponents made it clear that they believed the Speaker's ruling in favor of Mr. Dominick had given them the victory. It seemed as if we could not stand it to be so close and yet lose.

At that moment Mr. Raker came rushing down the aisle with another member, who said that he wanted to vote “yes”. That time there was silence among the men near the Desk and we are able to hear the Speaker ask, “Was the gentleman in the Hall listening?” and the man's reply, “I was. I thought I voted on the first roll-call. It may be that I am not recorded.”

When the Clerk reported that the member, Mr. Russell, was not recorded, the Speaker asked, “Does the gentleman state that he was in the Hall listening when his name was called and failed to hear it, or does he state that he voted?”

“I thought I voted on the first roll-call,” reiterated.

After what seemed an eternity of hesitation, the Speaker directly, “The Clerk will call the gentleman's name.”

The Clerk then called the name and Mr. Russell voted “aye”.

There was such prolonged applause from our side that we felt sure we were safe at last. But immediately Mr. Saunders of Virginia shouted, “Mr. Speaker, I ask for a recapitulation of the 175162vote. It is exceedingly close.” And we had to keep ourselves in hand until the recapitulation was over, without causing any change.

Then, at long last, the Clerk an nounded the vote as 274 in favor and 136 opposed. “So,” in the language of the Record, “two-thirds having voted in the affirmative, the joint resolution was passed.”

We had just one vote to spare.

On the floor our side was cheering like mad and men standing below shouted their congratulation to the group of us in the front row above. Outside the gallery door, Mrs. Glendower Evans of Boston started to sing, “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,” and hundreds of women's voices took up the refrain.

By the time we were able to get out of the gallery, the men who had done most for us were waiting in the corridor below to shake hands and exchange congratulations again. Thanks stuck in my throat. I had a hard time to keep back the tears.

The next morning when the Congressional Record came, we went to work to check up the returns. In addition to the 274 votes cast for us, 7 men were paired in favor, a real total of 281 on our side. The opponents had 4 paired, besides their 136 votes. Of the six men who neither voted nor paired, four were listed on our poll as opposed and one as doubtful. The sixth was representative Ireland, for whom, in spite of Mrs. Trout's efforts, no pair could be got, at the last moment. As there were eight vacancies in the House at that time, the members who did not go on record were astonishingly few. In that respect and in the closeness of the result it was one of the most remarkable votes ever taken in the House.

When I came to think it over, I realized what a terrifying 176163success we had had. If a single men on our side—say Mr. Gallivan—had changed over, the Speaker might have made our last vote; but if, in addition to the loss of one vote, we had been forced to give a two to one pair for Representative Johnson, in a or if any one of the members who came to the House at great risk to themselves had not been there, even the Speaker could not have saved us.

The following afternoon Mrs. Catt and I drove around with flowers and letters of thanks for the men who had left sickbeds to vote for us, including Mr. Crosser of Ohio, whom we had not known about the day before.

We also had a deputation to the White House to thank the President for his help. He received us in the Blue Room and when Mrs. Catt had expressed our appreciation, he asked whether we were sure that he had made any converts. I told him that one of the men whom he had received th afternoon before the vote had previously been listed on our poll as an opponent. I did not think it necessary to explain that his conversion was wall on the well on the way before he went to the White House. But I did add that several of the doubtfuls might not have turned to us at the end if the President had not spoken. And that was true.

Other stories about votes that we almost lost came to Suffrage House from time to time. The most absurd of them was recounted by one of our zealous suffragists. She had been in Pennsylvania during December, with the family of a brother whose wife was about to have a baby. Anxious for our success, our member persuaded her brother to talk with the Representative from that District, a personal friend, who explained that he was in doubt as to how he ought to vote because his constituents on both 177164sides were appealing to him in large numbers.

“I tell you what I'll do, “he finally said. “If your baby is a girl, I'll vote for women suffrage; but if it is a boy I'll vote against it. I might as well decide in that way as any other.”

When the baby was born, on January 9th, the father, egged on by his sister, telegraphed to the Representative in Washington that it was a girl. And that member voted for the Amendment.

But when all was said, we knew that the great cause of our success was the galna in the States during 1917. This the following table proves, for it shows the difference between the votes cast in 1915, the only previous House record on the Amendment, and in 1918, by delegations from States in which we had had recent victories.

The very morning after our vote in the House, Mrs. Catt, who was never known to waste time rejoicing over what had been accomplished, sounded the trumpet-call of the new campaign in a letter to our State presidents, in which she confidently predicted that our work in Washington would be completed by February first.

Again I quote her words in full, including a compliment to my own work which I cannot bear to omit now because it gave me such intense happiness at the moment: “NATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION 1626 Rhode Island Avenue, Washington, D.C.

January 11, 1918.

COPY to Congressional Chairmen

My dear President: The long anticipated success has come at last and our Federal Amendment, after forty-nine years of struggle, is through the House. It will go through the Senate, although there is a stretch of hard work ahead. We expect that vote soon. You will get that date in the Citizen. We expect to be ready to say our good-byes to Washington by February 1st, and to be through the New York Legislature before March 1st.

The work of the National has been splendid and has commanded the situation undeniably. The Lobby has been composed of about twenty-five women, representing some twenty states—splendid, intelligent, able women. There was a circularization of up-to-date literature and letters. There was an advertising campaign of up-to-date propaganda in the newspapers. There were four days of rather lively hearings pro and con before the Woman Suffrage Committee. Democrats and Republicans both realized that the question had become a political issue and could not be pushed aside; and as the pot boiled harder and harder, each day brought new, exciting incidents. The three leading members of the Cabinet came out for it—then a delegation of Democratic Congressmen waited upon the President and asked his views and he came out for it. The wonderful day came at last and with it the vote which put us through. It was all very thrilling and inspiring.

There are many persons to whom we owe gratitude for the work of the past few months, but I have no words to describe my appreciation fo the skill, tact, patience and intelligence, with which Mrs. Park has dealt with the many delicate and difficult problems and led the campaigh on and up to the final success. Of course, it will be claimed that the Woman's Party did it. You may assure any who make that claim that it was accomplished in spite of them.

Directly the question will be up to the States and we shall have forty-eight campaigns. The plans for them we are making already and as soon as we are through the Senate, they will be sent for your approval. I hope we may unite upon a practical, national, inspiring scheme which will be uniformly carried out and that at least the necessary thirty-six states will have ratified the amendment by the spring of 1919.

The Woman's Hour has Struck!

Please start at once a series of letters and telegrams to your Senators. If they are favorable, get a good many letters off to them from prominent people, acknowledging their friendliness, but urging that they do everything possible to get an early favorable vote. If they are doubtful, see that a big campaign of letters and telegrams pour in and keep it up. Many House Members told us that they heard nothing from their Districts. They want to hear; it justifies their vote. You may be certain the opposition will get very busy in the States of the doubtful Senators and they will hear plentifully from the enemy. You must counteract that influence. If your Senators are opposed, don't despair; many bitter opponents in the House came around to our side. Start a campaign of letters and telegrams and keep it up. We must have a little more support in the Senate and we are as likely to win over a real opponent as a doubtful Senator.

Please do not fail to do these things. We won by a single vote in the House; we may be beaten by a single vote in the Senate. Leave no stone unturned. Get people of influence to send letters to your Senators and do not content yourself with a few letters. Let them feel that there is a big, strong demand in your state and in all parts of it for the Senate vote.

I do not know how well some states did their petition work. Those who did not do it well, and you will know, should make up for the failure to bring a great pressure to bear at that time, by more strenuous work now. I enclose herewith to each state, the vote of the delegation of that state and will indicate what men, if any, spoke for or against. I will ask you to excuse Mrs. Park and Miss White from writing you at this moment for they are hard at work upon the next step forward. We are now marching on to the Senate.

Do not forget that every vote in the Senate is crucial!

It is a great thing to be in at the finish of this half-century 183170struggle. It is a new experience to feel the thrill of victory, so long have we been accustomed to the dull drudgery of propaganda, but I fancy it will make you all as happy as is the household of the Suffrage House at this moment.

Put on your armor, mobilize your army, and be ready! Yours for final victory before 1920! Carrie Chapman Catt, President.”

Our Congressional Committee, however, faced by the latest Senate poll, was more doubtful than Mrs. Catt was about our being able to leave Washington in the near future; for, although we had made notable gains during 1917, we were still far from a two-thirds majority.

Our first analysis of the Senate of the 65th Congress had shown:

33 members recorded as in favor of the Amendment at the previous vote in 1914;

In March, 1917, we were able to count in our “favorable” list all of the 33 who had previously voted for the Amendment except Senator Penrose. He had gone over to the opposition because of the defeat of the State suffrage amendment in Pennsylvania in 1915; but we had gained 3 who had been recorded against us in 1914, Senators Pittman of Nevada, Fall of New Mexico and Vardaman of Mississippi. Further, we had learned that 7 of the men who were not in the Senate in 1914, Senators Curtis of Kansas, Johnson of California, McNary of Oregon, Kendrick of Wyoming, McKellar of Tennessee, Sutherland of West Virginia, and France of Maryland would vote for the Amendment. Consequently, at the beginning of the 65th Congress, our poll showed 42 supporters in the Senate.

Between March, 1917, and January, 1918, we gained: 184171

2 more of the members who had voted or paired against the Amendment in 1914; Senators Robinson of Arkansas, and Gore of Oklahoma.

These made a total of 15 additional votes; 9 from States in which there had been suffrage gains in 1917 and 2 from older suffrage States.

With the 42 on whom we had previously counted, our total number of known supporters in January 1918, when we turned from the House to the Senate, would have been 57 if recent deaths had not left 4 vacancies, 3 of them in the places of friends. Our poll therefore showed at that time 54 favorable, along with 6 doubtful, including the vacancies, and 36 opposed.

We had to have 64 votes. Our problems was how to get 10 more.

If we had not been so worried, we might have looked on the struggle to secure those 10 votes as an exciting game of ups and downs, ins and outs, with “catch as catch can” for a motto. Or we might have thought about our efforts as a sort of political chase, like hare and hounds, if only we could have been sure which of the two we ourselves were. But we were far too anxious to see the humor of the situation until long afterward.

Less than a month after the House vote, two of the vacancies in the Senate were filled by the appointment of Senators Henderson of Nevada and Nugent of Idaho, both favorable to the Amendment, as we learned immediately. They reduced the number of additional supporters whom we needed to eight. And soon afterwards, Senators McCumber 185172of North Dakota let us know that, in spite of his personal opposition, he felt constrained to vote for the Amendment because his State had given presidential suffrage to women. We were then 7 short of our two-thirds majority.

Our friends in the Senate were all of the opinion that we ought not to try for a vote until the null number we needed was pledged. But Mrs. Catt was so hopeful of early victory that she had a new dress made to wear when she started out to organize campaigns for ratification in the various States. We teased her about that ratification dress, as month after month went by without a vote; yet she still found it hard to credit Mrs. Gardener's maxim, “You can't hustle the Senate.”

We soon learned that a large lobby was inadvisable for senators; partly because their membership was less than a fourth of the House membership and partly because they seemed to resent anything that suggested a mass approach. Most of them were not above keeping an ear to the political ground; but they could neglect that precaution longer than could House members, who, with a term of only two years, were obliged to reckon with their prospect of re-election almost as soon as they took their seats; whereas senators usually forgot the painful necessity of a future campaign for three of four years out of the six for which they were elected.

In consideration of senatorial idiosyncrasies, we not only avoided the appearance of concerted action, but we also took pains to call off the floor senators who preferred to talk with us at the Capitol, rather than in their offices. I used to think that they were glad of anything that rescued them from the pretense of listening to the lengthy speeches of their fellow senators and that we were much more likely to get information when we were regarded as a pleasant 186173interruption of the tedium of the Senate Chamber.

That was why we fell into the habit of going first to the gallery each day to see who was on the floor and what was happening. As soon as a “set speech” was well under way and we noticed that any Senator whom we wanted to see was not listening hard, we would go down and send in our cards, with a polite message to the effect that if the senator did not wish to leave the floor we would take some other opportunity of seeing him. That method meant that we had to be in the Marble Room frequently under circumstances that would have made a large lobby extremely noticeable. And so, although we had a number of our best lobbyists come to Washington when we thought they could be of use, we did not have many working at one time. More and more as the views on suffrage of every one of the 96 senators became definitely known, our work in the Senate narrowed down to consultations with our friends about floor tactics or about some new effort of theirs or ours to bring over to our side men who were listed as opponents.

One of our first thoughts had been to form a steering committee in the Senate similar to the one which had been so helpful in the House. But we discovered that, although the House had taught us a good deal about party rivalry, there was vastly more to be learned in the Senate, where party feeling ran so high that Democrats and Republicans were actually unwilling to work together for the Amendment, which was, of course, unpartisan. We therefore tried having two groups; one of Democratic friends and one of Republican.

As a result of this policy, we succeeded in getting an early conference of our Democratic group in the office of Senator A.A. Jones, where Mrs. Catt, Mrs. Gardener, Miss White I have were also present. The men who were there promised to do everything in their power to 187174make Democratic Senator who were doubtful or opposed see the importance to the party of having the Amendment go through during a period of Democratic control.

The Republicans we had more difficulty with, for there was none of them in a position of official leadership, such as Senator Jones held, who could be asked to call a conference of Republican friends. As a matter of fact, we stumbled on so much jealousy within the small group that we concluded to have the first meeting at Suffrage House, rather than in a senatorial office. Five Republican Senators came and spent most of the evening denouncing the President for not forcing the Democrats in the Senate to give us as many votes as the Republicans were ready to deliver. A few more attempts at conference convinced us that we got much better results on the Republican side when we talked with the senators individually. And, little by little, we adopted that method with the Democrats, too; though they themselves arranged an occasional conference.

One of the outcomes of Democratic efforts was telegraphic poll of the Democratic National Committee, taken by its Executive Committee, with the result, as we were informed, of a two to one vote in favor of the Amendment. The Executive Committee then ventured to make public on February 11, a resolution stating that after a referendum vote of the members of the Democratic National Committee representing the 48 states, the Executive Committee endorsed the Suffrage Amendment and urged favorable action on it by the United States Senate.

The next day the Republicans went the Democrats one better, for the Republican National Committee itself, then in session in St. Louis, passed a resolution which said, “Five-sixth of the Republican members of the House of Representative have voted for the submission 188175to the States of the national suffrage amendment, know as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. We, the Republican National Committee, endorse the course of these Republicans as a true interpretation of the thought of the Republican Party.”

With the two party committees vying with each other to assure us of their support, it seemed as if our seven additional votes ought to be forthcoming immediately.

Meanwhile prominent members of both parties who were not in the Senate were coming out with letters expressing the hope that the Amendment would be passed speedily. Among them, on the Democratic side, were several members of the Cabinet side and the Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt and Will Hays, newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee.

None of those endorsements or the hundreds of others secured during the following months just happened. Everyone of them was the result of planning by our committee and conferences with our friends in official circles. One of the most helpful of these was Louis Brownlow, Chairman of the Board of Commissioners for the District of Columbia. To his advice I always listened, for, as a Southerner by birth and a newspaper man by training, he had a wide acquaintance outside Washington as well as among the men in public life there. When I considered how friends like were working for us and how the country was being scoured for men and women who might have weight with any one of the opposed senators, I could not see that a single avenue of approach was being neglected.

Yet the number of votes that we needed was to be increased and by the saddest of all reasons, the death of friendly senators. During the 65th Congress there were ten vacancies in the Senate due to death, an appalling percentage of the total membership. Seven of 189176those losses were of friends, three of opponents. Again and again when we seemed on the high road to success we had to stop and wait in anxious suspense for the vacancies to be filled. But we did not wait idly. We called upon every available agency, personal and party, organized and individual, to see that the interest of woman suffrage was not overlooked in the filling of the vacancies.

As our losses mounted, Dr. Shaw remarked that if she were the wife of a suffrage senator and wanted to preserve his life, she would try to have him change over to the opposition. We had to make jokes to keep up our courage. Indeed, I came to fear that when funeral arrangements were so frequent in the Congress the use which was sometimes made of them led us to be more callous than we should have permitted ourselves to be.

After a death in the Congress, there was a routine of procedure, beginning with adjournment, moved usually by someone from the same State as the deceased member. Then would come the appointment of a funeral delegation to accompany the body back to the home District. That delegation was supposed to be made up of members who had been personal or political friends of the dead man, with a minority representation of members from the opposing party and from the other branch of the Congress. Practically, there was a good deal of trading to secure places on the delegation for men who, for one reason or another, wanted to go back to their District at public expense or who felt themselves in need of a little rest—and perhaps recreation, too. On the other hand, men actively interested in some measure not easily postponed their absence would try to be excused from going, provided they were not afraid, in cases where the deceased member was from their own State, that if they did not attend the funeral an unfavorable impression would be made upon their 190177constituents. The memorial service in the House or Senate was usually not held until some months after the death. The tendency was to let those services drift along until the approaching close of a Congress warned that something must be done about them. By that time the floor program was likely to be crowded with measures needing action before final adjournment, so that some of the pending memorial services would have to be combined and held on a Sunday, with the probability of a scandalous small attendance.

Once when I was in the office of a senator, a House member came in to make arrangements about the service for a colleague who had died some time before. “Can't you run so and so's memorial service in along with the two senators you're having next Sunday?” Asked the caller. “There have been so many deaths in the House that we've got to have two services and even then there won't be room for him.” Though such a combination was unusual, it was arranged by the senator, who was from the same State and a person of importance.

The final stage of memorial was the printing, on thick paper, with a handsome black leather cover, lettered in gold, of all the eulogies that had been delivered at the Congressional service, together with a biographical sketch of the deceased. Such books were much in demand as gifts to be franked out to constituents by the men whose speeches were included; so members from other States would trade the copies to which they were entitled for some document of more use to them, possibly for a memorial book about someone from their own section.

The first memorial service that I attended was the one held for Senator Gallinger, on a Sunday morning a number of months after his death. Unfortunately, our party from Suffrage House was delayed, first by the tardiness of our chauffeur and then by his effort to 191178make up for lost time by exceeding the speed limit in Washington, an effort which led to our being held up by a policeman, taken to the station and cited for appearance in court the next morning, before we were allowed to proceed. In consequence we did not reach the Senate until some time after the service had begun and we felt very conspicuous as we tiptoed to seats in the gallery, where there were only four other persons. Senator Smoot was speaking and the other senators on the floor, about ten in all, cast furtive glances at the gallery to see who was arriving so late. Being arrested for speeding to a funeral service was bad enough - particularly as I was fearful that our names would get into the papers and the cause be brought into reproach thereby - but the attention due to our belated entrance was even worse. It took me some time to calm down enough to realize that Senator Smoot, whose rare speeches on week days were usually tiresome, was making a really moving eulogy of Senator Gallinger. When I told him the next day what I thought of it, his face lighted up. “I have been asked to make a good many memorial addresses since I have been in the Senate,” he said modestly. But he was so evidently gratified by my appreciation that I knew he was conscious of having a gift for that kind of speaking.

In one instance the Amendment profited by a funeral delegation for which some of our most active friends had themselves named because in the State of the deceased senator, the governor by whom the interim appointment of a new senator would be made, was not in favor of votes for women and it was believed that he might be won over if the importance to his party of another suffrage supporter in the Senate could be made clear to him. All of our friends in the delegation talked to the Governor about it; but only one of them felt hopeful when he returned. He told me that he and the governor, who 192179was an old friend of his, “cussed each other out for three hours on the way back from the funeral,” before the appointment of a suffrage senator from that State was assured.

How our natural grief at the death of a friend was increased by its effect on our vote was made plain when Senator Baird took the place of Senator Hughes of New Jersey, in the spring of 1918. To oblige the governor who appointed him to the vacancy, Senator Baird promised Senator Curtis that he would support the Amendment, provided no advance publicity was given to his stand; for he feared a deluge of anti-suffrage protests if it were known beforehand that he intended to vote in favor. This , Senator Curtis explained in confidence to Miss Hay and me , and we were careful not to repeat it, even to the other members of our Congressional Committee. But about a week later we were horrified to read in the morning paper that Senator Baird had agreed to vote for the Amendment.

“We must go straight up and see Senator Curtis,” Miss Hay explained exclaimed , “for he said he hadn't told anyone except us and he'll think that we gave out the information.”

We hurried to his office and were relieved on one score, when he told us that he did not hold us responsible for the leak. Then he explained that he believed it had come through two women for whom the party leader had requested a report on Baird.

“I didn't want to tell them,”said Curtis, “but of course I couldn't refuse to give information when the party leader asked for it. I cautioned them, just as I did you, not to let it get out: and now they've cost us Baird's vote. He ‘s mad through and through about that article in the paper and he swears that he'll vote against the Amendment.”

Nothing that we or our friends could do was able to offset 193180the disastrous effect of that publicity and Baird remained firm in his determination to vote “no”.

Happily for us, Senators Stone of Missouri and Gerry of Rhode Island, the first listed as “doubtful” and the second as “opposed”, came over to our aids about that time, reducing our needed number to 5. One more vote, Senator Culberson's, previously held to be opposed, was assured when Texas gave primary suffrage to women on March 21st; and another, when a long delayed appointment to the Wisconsin vacancy brought Mr. Lenroot, who had voted for the Amendment in the House, into the Senate. That meant that we needed only 3 more votes. We set out get them with renewed energy, for it seemed as if we could not fail when we were within 3 of our two-thirds majority.

My own greatest hope was Senator Page of Vermont, who had voted “no” in 1914. He was fond of teasing and after I told him that my father was born in his State, he amused himself by dangling before me the possibility of getting his vote. From the time that the Vermont legislature granted municipal suffrage to women, he was really on our side; but he enjoyed keeping me in suspense for months and at the end said only that if I had no one except him to worry about I ought to be quite happy. I knew he meant me to understand that we could count on his vote. Then I reckoned that we were only 2 short.

I was pleased to have Senator Page come over to our side, just as I had been in the case of Senator Colt of Rhode Island, for they both belonged to the group of elderly New England conservatives, who were supposed to be completely under the influence of Senator Lodge. Senator Colt was also a tease and loved to draw me into economic arguments in order to make believe that if my views were

(Insertion p. 181)

If Mrs. Colt was in Washington when a new Senator was in, we always to have her take the lead in the interview with him. Senator Hale of Maine has one with whom I made an appointment for her shortly often his arrival. But the day before she has to talk with him, she asked me to point him out from the gallery; and, after she had taken a good look, she whispered, “You'll have to cancel that appointment, for his I hope and I know it would be a waste of time to see him.”

characteristic of women as a whole it would be unsafe to let them have suffrage. But I did not mind teasing so long as it helped to get votes.

However, I did wish that Senator Page would give us a definite pledge in favor of the Amendment. There were two or three others who were like him about refusing to let their stand be generally known, and although we had their private assurance of support, there was bound to be a shadow of doubt in our minds up to the very moment that they voted.

In those weeks my hopes went up and down so often that I was one day amused to discover how largely my feelings were dependent on the point at which I started to make calculations. If I began with the 54 votes, which were all we had in January, I could be quite jubilant over the increase of that number to 62 in May; but if I started with the 64 that we needed, there seemed to be a limitless chasm between 64 and 62.

When I could think of nothing else to do, I called upon our friends in the Senate, one after another, in the hope that some one of them might have heard coat-room rumors about the possible weakening of another opponent.

The nucleus of our Democratic group there was made up of Chairman Jones and two other Democrats on the Woman Suffrage Committee, Senator Ransdell of Louisiana, and Senator Hollis of New Hampshire. Three others, Senator Shafroth, who was always ready to attend conferences and to do any suffrage errand assigned to him, Senator Walsh of Montana, and Senator Pittman, of Nevada, were active members of the group from the start and Senator Sheppard of Texas and Senator Robinson of Arkansas a little later.

At first Senator Jones seemed slow and over cautious in what he said to us. Mrs. Catt was so suspicious of him and he was 196182so inclined to dislike her, that I wondered how we were ever going to work together; but, as the weeks went on, I came to see that he was genuinely anxious for the success of the Amendment and that his guarded speech hid a lot of shrewd political judgment.

Senator Ransdell Mrs. Catt used to call the bravest man in the Senate because he dared to be a suffragist in spite of the tremendous opposition in Louisiana. His support of our cause was all the more to his credit because he had converted himself by reading arguments on both sides. In appearance he was old-fashioned, with greying hair and a little goatee. His speech was slow and formal and his manner marked by a charming, deliberate courtesy. His young secretaries were trained to similar politeness and it was surprising to see how quickly they learned to appear as if a woman who came into the office was conferring a favor by the mere fact of her presence. Senator Ransdell never kept a secretary more than two years, for he had a system whereby he took young men from one district in the State after another, gave them the opportunities that Washington offered and when the period expired, as he had warned them in advance that it would, did his best to see that they were established in a more permanent position. Both he and his motherly wife kept an eye on the young fellows and had them often as guests. Altogether it was a kindly and useful plan and excellent politics besides; for, quiet as he was, Senator Ransdell was an astute politician. In Louisiana, he was known as “Gumshoe Joe” and I daresay he had won the little by the care with which he kept his political fences mended and the other fellow's under inspection.

Senator Hollis, another of our most active friends, had a detached, philosophical point of view about men and issues; for that reason I found it easy to discuss my impressions of Washington 197183with him. As the first Democratic senator from New Hampshire in many years, he had much prestige; but he used to say that, inasmuch as he won his election by the tiniest of majorities, he realized how easily that narrow margin might have been on the other side and he himself classed with the failures. His candid, impersonal attitude helped me to get an understanding of the Senate, much as Mr. Keating's sane views had helped me in the House. Mrs. Catt liked Senator Hollis because, as she said, he looked young and healthy. Indeed, seen from the gallery, he did appear to be a full generation younger than most of the other senators. He was too intelligent not to understand that woman suffrage was a corollary of the democratic principle of government, and he was so helpful to us that we soon called him our Democratic whip. His secretary, a youngish woman with two small sons to support, came to be one of our chief standbys when we needed a bit of information or a document which a senator's office could obtain quickly. Like Hollis, she was inclined to be cynical and she had an uncanny gift for picking up stray bits of Congressional gossip that often proved valuable. In that office and in Senator Shafroth's, where both secretaries were as much devoted to the cause of suffrage as their chiefs was were we were always, be welcome. When we needed a place to wait for an appointment or to send a telephone call, we felt free to go to the one of those two offices which was the nearest at the moment, for we knew that we should find a cordial welcome reception in either of them.

The man of most ability in the Senate at that time was Walsh of Montana, who had the gift of separating wheat from chaff in a subject under discussion with almost superhuman speed and surety. He was not always easy to talk with because he had morose moods and even at his friendliest, a sort of disillusions pessimism that brought 198184out the worst side of a situation. Yet when I succeeded in getting him to turn his mind to the problem I needed advice about, I was always entranced to see how crystal clear his ideas were. No matter how new the material might be, if he once gave his attention to it, essential facts were winnowed from unimportant details so unmistakeably that I felt as if I could see his mind working like a clean, sharp knife. He actually suffered from the muddiness of thought of some of his fellow senators. I have often seen him sitting dejectedly in his place in the Senate, with head down and eyes averted while some asinine statement was being made. Then, when he could no longer dear the speaker's lack of logic or of information, he could rise and get himself recognized by the Chair for a question, or a series of questions, that elucidated the subjects as completely as a lightning flash illumines a dark night. He was the ablest Constitutional lawyer in the Senate, a fervent Catholic and, for the most part, a liberal. But he was not affable or a good mixer and his party was always putting him aside for men or much smaller calibre, a fact of which he was conscious and which he resented. It was a tragedy for himself and for the Nation that he died before he had an opportunity to prove his ability as Attorney-General.

Senator Pittman of Nevada, tall, thin, with blazing dark eyes and a quiet manner, was at that time the most dramatic figure on the Senate floor. He had spent several years in Alaska and was said to be the original of the young attorney in “The Spoilers,” Mrs. Catt had taken a great fancy to him at the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis, when he thundered at the audience which had applauded Governor Ferguson's jokes about women, “Are you men who applaud the belittling of women?” In later months, when Senator 199185Hollis was sent by the State Department on an official errand to Spain, she asked me to request Senator Pittman to act as our Democratic whip during Senator Hollis's absence.

For Senator Shepperd of Texas, my nickname was the “little minister” because he was small and young looking and ministerial in manner and appearance. He was the chief proponent of all prohibition measures and indefatigable in their behalf. A wary floor manager, he was always on hand to take advantage of any opportunity afforded by the parliamentary situation. No one had to worry about his being late or absent when he was needed for prohibition or for woman suffrage. He was the only Democrat who could be compared with several Republicans for diligence in committee duties and for prompt attention to innumerable demands from a huge State. In spite of the amount of work that he did, he never refused to see callers when he was in his office.

Senator Robinson of Arkansas, now later the Democratic floor leader in the Senate, combined the qualities of the South and the West and was liked by his colleagues from both sections, who often differed among themselves. In our conferences he was emphatic in his opinions, but he used few words in expressing them. I used to think that the emphasis showed the West in him and his laconic way of speaking, the conservative South.

On the Republican side, our most active friends included Senator Curtis, of Kansas, then Republican whip, Senator Smoot, of Utah, Senator Wesley Jones of Washington, a member of the Woman Suffrage Committee, Senator Kenyon, of Iowa, Senator Norris, of Nebraska, and Senator McNary of Oregon. Senator La Follette was at that time in California for several months, in consequence of the desperate illness of his oldest son. Including him, our friends 200186represented three divisions in their own party: the “old guard”, to which Curtis and Smoot belonged; the radicals, like Norris; and the intermediates, such as Kenyon and McNary. We found such hostility between the different factions that it was hopeless to try to talk with them together and even at the beginning of our work in the Senate the infrequent Republican conferences were held in two groups.

Of them all Curtis was our most useful ally. His partly Indian ancestry showed itself in his eyes, a lustreless black unless he was angry, when they narrowed into a terrifying intensity. Early an orphan, he had been taken by his Indian grandmother into the tents of her kinamen and while he was still a tiny boy saved the entire tribe from annihilation by slipping through lines of hostile Indians, who had made a sudden attack, and running several miles to summon a detachment of United States cavalry. Later the Indian grandmother sent him to his white grandmother, because, as she told him, only among the white s could he hop to get an education and a start in life. But even his white relatives were unable to help him much and he began to pick up odd jobs when he was less than ten. For a while he was a successful jockey. When he became too heavy to ride in races, he drove a hack , and studied law while he was waiting for customers. After he was admitted to the bar, he went into politics. He was a politician from start to finish, but never a grafter. His square dealing made him well liked by his own party and by a good many of the Democratic senators, who knew that if he pledged his word they could rely on it.

In affable moods he used to give me a good deal of “inside” information about politics in general. It was his business as whip 201187to make sure that all the Republicans were present or paired on party issues and they were supposed to notify him when they were not to be present at a session. I have seen hem beside himself with wrath because “one of my fellers” had stayed away longer than was expected or had slipped off to play golf when he was needed on the Senate floor. Nothing except illness ever kept Curtis away from the Capitol. He served on many important committees and never shirked their meetings, yet he was one of the easiest men to see in official life. Early at his office, he would talk with every comer in the order of arrival up to the that he had to go to a committee or to the opening of a session. If there was early adjournment and to conference on, he would stay in his office until the last caller had been seen. I was frequently amazed at the frankness with which he discussed his fellow Republicans and at his shrewdness. In appraising their weaknesses, he had only contempt for mere speech makers, and his own rare remarks on the floor were brief and nearly always concerned with procedure. He often said that Miss Hay and I were women who could be trusted not to betray one side to the other; and the respected my reticences about the betray Democrats, realizing that when I was with them protected the Republicans in the same way.

A unique figure in the Senate was Reed Smoot, the first Mormon to become one of its members. During his first term he had to sit through a long controversy as to whether he should be permitted to retain his seat or not. Apparently there was no evidence that he had ever been a polygamist, so he was allowed to stay, years later, to achieve his heart's desire to be chairman of the Finance Committee. In appearance, he was tall and spare, with thinning grayish hair. He wore spectacles and had a perference for black alpaca coats that made him look like a country schoolmaster. He rarely spoke at length and 202188when he was questioned or opposed his voice became high-pitched and querulous. Like Curtis, he was always scrupulous in attendance, one of the few men sure to be on hand for the opening prayer. He was an unremitting worker and so thoroughly equipped with the details of financial measures that it was said his opponents, even when they knew he was misstating facts, were rarely willing to do the amount or research necessary for a successful attack on his figures. Conservative of the conservatives as he was, woman suffrage was the only forward looking movement that he was known to support.

He was then a Mormon elder and later became one of the twelve Mormon apostles. He felt keenly the insults heaped on his church and was correspondingly grateful for anything that indicated interest and tolerance. Once when I took occasion to say that I had heard and enjoyed a recital on the great organ in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, his face actually glowed with enthusiasm as he talked about the musical cultivation of the Mormons. He liked it, too, that I had met and spoke appreciatively of some of the leading Mormon women. I used to wonder which was the stronger in him, his devotion to his church or his worship of the Republican party. I decided in favor of the latter when I got his reaction after Senator Sutherland, a Republican Gentile, was defeated by Senator King, a Democratic Mormon. When I asked Senator Smoot what position his new colleague was likely to take on the Amendment, he replied that his colleague would do the thing that advertised him best, if he could do it safety.

“If he thinks it will be good publicity, coming from a Suffrage State, to oppose the Amendment and believes that he can explain his action satisfactorily to the people at home, he will vote against the Amendment. But, “Senator Smoot added,” he will never be able to explain such a vote in Utah.”

Senator Smoot was thoroughly contemptuous of the Woman's Party methods in Washington. Once when they had been picketing the Senate Office Building, he fairly choked with indignation as he described their tactics.

“Do they think United States senators are going to change their opinions and their votes because a parcel of women stand round the doors, holding banners?” he demanded. “Who are they, anyway? Little young things, just out of school or old ladies who ought to be at home enjoying their grandchildren.”

Nevertheless, I had a suspicion that he co-operated with the Woman's Party a good many times because he regarded them as opponents of President Wilson, whom he detested, and of the despised Democratic Party as a whole.

Senator Jones of Washington, a large man with heavy step, who gave the impression of being serious and straightforward, was, like Senator Sheppard, more active in behalf of prohibition than for woman suffrage; but he was always dependable, with no nonsense about him. Later he was Republican whip land attended to his duties with steady devotion. His chief committee interest was interstate and foreign commerce and although it was thought by the radicals that he used his position to further the interests of certain shipping firms on the West Coast, he seemed to me honest and wholesome, in spite of being much more conservative than most of the men from the far West.

Another Pacific Slope Senator among our active friends was McNary of Oregon, the present Republican floor leader. He was then in his first term in the Senate, a tall, slender man with ash blond hair and a boyish face that looked, at a distance, as if he might still be in his teens, though a nearer sight it proved to be lined 204190with tiny wrinkles. He had known Senator Borah well in connection with some western trial in which they were both counsel and he used to say that in the end Borah was sure to vote for us. “If he doesn't,” McNary assured me, “I'll go back to Oregon on foot.” I reminded him of that remark after Borah voted against us.

McNary, who was filling an unexpired term, was shortly coming us for re-election and he or his secretary had the idea, then a new one, that it would be a good thing for his campaign to have some movie pictures of the senator helping suffragists in Washington. So Dr. Shaw and I were asked to pose as if in conference with him in his office, then to be pictured as we talked with him on the steps of the Capitol, and as we were helped out by him when we stepped from his motor car in front of Suffrage House. It was my first experience with that kind of publicity.

Of our less active friends in the Senate, two of the older men on the Republican side interested me particularly, Senator Gallinger of New Hampshire, and Senator Nelson of Minnesota. Both of them must have been suffragists by conviction, for they had voted for the Amendment in 1914.

In the case of Senator Gallinger, I came to the conclusion that he had been converted in his youth by one of the famous speakers for our cause; Lucy Stone, perhaps, or George William Curtis; and that he had stuck to his early conviction. At any rate, he was our firm friend, though I did not consult him so often during those months as I should have done if he had not been so far from well that he had to leave the conduct of party affairs largely in the hands of Senator Curtis. I did go to say good-bye the day before he left Washington in the early summer and he talked with me cheerfully, but when I spoke about our work the next autumn, he replied, with a kind of 205191sad conviction that troubled me at the moment, “I doubt that I shall be here to help you then.” And he was right, for he died at his home in New Hampshire within the month.

With Senator Nelson, his Swedish birth and the early start of women suffrage sentiment in Scandinavian countries seemed to me to account for his championship of our cause. Perhaps, too, he had seen and appreciated the courage with which women met the hardships of life in the pioneering days in Minnesota. He had been so long our friend that he was always greatly vexed when anyone spoke or wrote to him as if he needed to be converted or stirred up to activity. He was one Senator to whom I asked our State workers never to send letters or telegrams, except of thanks after a vote. But I could not keep other women quiet, and once, when some of them had been specially annoying, he got into such a peppery temper that he threatened to line up with our opponents if he weren't let alone.

I felt particularly warm appreciation of the help of senators from non-suffrage States after I had a chance to get the viewpoint of one man from a suffrage State who supported us only because he wanted to be re-elected. He was Senator Mark Smith of Arizona, whose full name was Marcus Aurelius Smith—in credible as it seemed that such a combination should be in the same list with Andrie n us Aristicus Jones. Often, when I was in the gallery, I had been entertained by Senator Mark Smith's resemblance to a retired sea-captain; for he had a rolling gait, a fog-horn voice and an evidently choleric disposition. As he was a Southerner by birth and a strong personal friend of Senator Ollie James, an opponent whom we did not think quite hopeless, I had what I thought was a bright idea of enlisting Senator Smith's help with Senator James.

In my effort to talk with Senator Smith about it, I went 206192to his office so many times without finding him there that his secretary took pity on me and agreed to “dig him out” for an interview if I would be in the Marble Room at one o'clock the next day. When I entered the room, I found that every chair and all the window niches were filled and that several anti-suffrage women, some of them from Massachusetts, were standing in the middle of the floor, waiting for a senator. To my horror, Senator Smith chose a place not far from them while I was trying to explain my errand. At first I spoke so low that he, being extremely deaf, put his hand back of his ear to catch what I was saying and then made me repeat my words in a louder tone. When he grasped my meaning, he shook his head and bellowed, “No, no! Can't do it. Nothing I can say. Born in the South and feel just the way the people there do about this Amendment. But keep it dark, keep it dark; for of course I have to vote for the resolution, now that we've got woman suffrage in Arizona.”

As there seemed to be nothing more for me to say, I retreated hastily, devoutly hoping that the anti ladies had not heard all.

Among the Democrats, none of the “elder statesmen” from non-suffrage states had voted for us in 1914 except Senator Ransdell. Most of the other Southerners let the bugaboo of the negro vote close their eyes to the justice of our cause. They never seemed able to escape from the fear that the second section of the 15th Amendment, which provides for the reduction of the basis of representation of a State denying the right of suffrage to male citizens for any cause except rebellion or crime, might be enforced if women had the vote. For that reason they dreaded anything that called attention to the right of suffrage. If I had needed a lesson 207193about the tendency of acquiescence in one injustice to breed tolerance of another, I should have learned it from the way so many of the men from the South saw other questions only in the light of their determination to keep the negro from the ballot-box.

Many Republicans from the Northeast were equally blinded by fear of the foreign-born voters or of those without property. Senator Weeks, for example, admitted in a frank moment that he would favor woman suffrage if it could be limited to tax-paying women or to those with a high educational qualification.

“What needs to be done,” he went on, “is to take away the vote from a large part of the men who now have it; but of course that is impossible.”

Senator Wadsworth was another of the opponents who, it seemed to me, were not really in favor of our form of government. They believed in an oligarchy on the well-to-do, and they were fearful that tariff schedules might be reduced or railroad regulations extended of women had a chance to vote. What they considered woman's quixotic tendency to place the interests of persons above the interests of property was, in their eyes, a sufficient reason for opposition to the Amendment. Like some of the business groups in the North, which had managed to arrive at satisfactory terms with existing political machinery, they were terrified at the possibility of any considerable change in the voting body. Perhaps it would not upset their agreeable arrangements, they reasoned; on the other hand, it might. Best to take no chances.

South and North, the anti-democratic race or economic reasons were often tangled up with old-fashioned ideas about “Woman's sphere”. But that kind of objection was much less frequent in the second decade of the century than it had been twenty, or even ten, 208194years earlier; and comparatively few Congressional speeches voiced it.

I used to think that the difference between the conservative Democrats and the conservative Republicans was mostly superficial. When Senator Lodge became Republican floor leader, I was often amused by the resemblances in point of view and method between him and the elderly Senator Martin of Virginia, who was Democratic floor leader at that time. Both were autocratic and easily angered by opposition. Senator Martin's wrath made him sputter when he talked to the Senate and Senator Lodge's led him to sizzle, like fat dropping on a hot stove. Temperamentally, they belonged together, even though they were of opposite parties.

At Suffrage House during the early months of 1918, we made a determined effort to use our headquarters as a gathering place for women of the official group. With the help of Mrs. Louis Brownlow, wife of the Chairman of the District Commissioners and daughter of Judge Sims, that heroic member of the House who had refused to have his broken shoulder set until after the suffrage vote was taken, Mabel Willard carried on a series of weekly teas at which the hostesses, the guests of honor and those serving at the tea-table were among the most prominent women in Washington. To wives of some of the opposed Senators were frequent callers and their daughters often handed about our cakes and sandwiches. Those teas were remarkably well attended and much as I hated to have to tear myself away from the urgent work at the Capitol, I used to hurry back once a week to change my dress and stand at the head of our receiving line. But how painfully little I found to say to the important ladies who dropped in on us only they and I knew.

For a while we tried the experiment of Sunday afternoon 209195parties, too,in the hope that the men as well as the women in Congressional families would come to Suffrage House. But that plan did not work, partly because the men did not want to give up their one free afternoon and partly because many of the Southerners and Mid-Westeners disapproved of even the simplest festivity on Sunday.

One interesting group that met at our House for monthly luncheons was made up of the women executives in the war services. They were the heads of the various nursing corps and the leading women in the Food Administration, the Department of Labor, the Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, and the War Department. I was the only person not in war service who was invited to be present and that was one kind of social gathering that I liked to attend, for at each luncheon some of the women would tell about their work and the difficulties that they had to contend with. I was much struck by the invariable protect against the habit that men executives were reported to have of talking over problems and arriving at decisions in men's clubs or smoking rooms, quite forgetful that women of equal authority could not go to those places. The luncheon group was agreed in the opinion that the men did not deliberately overlook the women, but that they were so unaccustomed to take women's views about work into the reckoning they just naturally forgot all about them.

As women became more and more absorbed in war activities that spring, our social affairs were gradually given up, though the following autumn we had occasional suppers or receptions for new members of the Senate and House, or perhaps a more formal political inner-party, when I thought that we needed to give one in order to make a new tie or to honor an old friend. Once a week, however, our spacious second floor was given over to a folk-dancing class for 210196war workers, with a teacher and music provided by Mrs. Laura Williams, a suffragist then living in Washington, who made the possibility of that weekly recreation for the young men and women crowded into lodging-houses a part of her war contribution. On the whole I felt as if the social side of our life consumed far too much time and energy. Yet little as I liked it, I knew it was helpful, because it gave us an opportunity to know the waives of men whom we were seeing constantly and to remove any possible prejudices against us.

As our knowledge of the partisan attitude of Senators increased, we concluded that it would be wise to make more use of the official party women among our own members; but we found that, although they were all strong suffragists, they had, of necessity, a divided allegiance. Some things they could do much more effectively than could women with no party connections and others they could not do so well, because they were bound to be less single-minded. Moreover, they were inclined to be suspicious of the women most strongly allied with the other party and conferences at which both parties were represented were no longer frank exchanges of opinion. The sense of being on guard was so obvious that I called fewer and fewer meetings of the full membership of the Congressional Committee and relied with our party women, as I had learned to do with senators, on individual conferences. The truth was that after the Amendment passed the House both parties began to jockey for the expected advantage of women's support in case the Amendment went through and was ratified before the election of 1920. Much as I was saddened by the subtle division among us, I understood that our party women could not be expected to free themselves completely from the prevailing currents of thought.

For an intermediate group between the women who held office in party organizations and those of us who could not legitimately represent a party point of view, we hit upon the plan of having a steering committee of our own, in which Miss Hay, an avowed Republican, though not at that time in party office, was our Republican “steer” and Mrs. Guilford Dudley, well known as a Democrat, our Democratic “steer”. When it seemed wise to have a strictly party approach to a man in public life, one of them did the interviewing. What they learned in this way was reported to me, with the understanding that the information would not be given to the representative of the other party. My job of go-between was a ticklish one, but I tackled it conscientiously and in the end I think that I had the confidence of both sides. At any rate, I got excellent training for my interviews with our friends in both parties in the Senate.

Later on, one Senator irreverently remarked that perhaps God knew which party Mrs. Park favored; but if so, He hadn't told anybody in Washington.” If I had felt free to say what I thought, it would certainly have been, “A plague on both” your parties!

Among the newspaper cartoons, after our victory in the House on January 10th, was one of “Miss Woman Suffrage”, carrying a large bouquet and accompanied by a dashing gentleman labelled “Mr. House of Representatives”. In the middle of the picture was a narrow stream with stepping-stones; and, on the farther side of the stream, stood “Mr. Senate”, a surly, fat old man, to whom Mr. House was calling. “Give the lady a hand, Old-Timer!” We hoped then that hand would be extended soon, but we were destined to wait a long while for it.

On April 12th, when we were 2 votes short, Senator Broussard of Louisiana, an opponent, died and two days later Senator stone, who had been on our “favorable” list only a few weeks was stricken. I remember that when Ruth White joined me in the Senate gallery at noon that day, she said she had stepped into Senator Stone's office on the way over to make sure that he was not backsliding and she had found everything in confusion on there because the senator had just had a stroke. I had a sickening premonition that he was to be another of our losses and so it proved; though in the end our total was changed, because his successor, Senator Wilfley, who took his seat the oath of office early in may, was a suffragist.

That week the Woman Suffrage Committee, under the impression that the 2 votes we needed would be forthcoming through the President's efforts, voted to bring up the Amendment for debate on May 10th. When Senator Jones made the formal announcement of that date in the Senate, he had been given to understand that Senator Martin, the Democratic Floor Leader, would not actively oppose the 213199Amendment, even though he intended to vote against it. But on May 9th Senator Jones learned that martin had telegraphed all the opponents who were not in Washington to return immediately and had also advised those who were there to give no pairs to absent suffragists. In view of view of this evidence of a rancorous fight, it was important for us to get al our ow absentees back and we moved heaven and earth to do so, sending telegrams ourselves and getting many others sent by friendly senators and representatives. Among those who came were Senator Pags and Senator Goff of West Virginia, also elderly, who were both at home because they had not been well, but who made a hurried journey to Washington in response to our urging.

Then, before the session began on the 10th, out of a clear sky came world a conference of Democratic suffrage senators, at which Mr. Vance McCormick, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Mrs. Bass were present, had decided not to bring up the Amendment, in spite of Senator Jones's notice, because the votes to carry it had not been assured.

I felt humiliated through and through when I went to the galley at noon to listen to the withdrawal of the previous announcement. I think Senator Jones must have been almost as unhappy as I was, but he took his medicine like a man; though the complains of supporter who had come back to vote and the taunts of opponents, to whom the situation was delightful, must have been hard to bear.

The protests were begun by Democratic Senator Smith of Arizona, (Marcus Aurelius Smith); with whom I should have had more sympathy it I had not remembered how he bellowed about is dislike of woman suffrage, when I had my interview with him in the Marble Room: 214200 “Mr. President, I beg the indulgence of the Senate for just a minute, as I am compelled to return to Kentucky at 2 0'clock. I came from there last night for the purpose of casting a vote in favor of the proposed Amendment giving suffrage to the women of the country. I left the sick-bed of the person nearest t me now living. As I said. I shall return at 2 o'clock.——

“I received a half dozen telegrams telling me that the vote should be taken on to-day. I responded for the purpose of wasting my vote and I am disappointed in not being able to do so.

“I hope the next time Senators who are absent on matters of necessity are notified about the vote there will be some dependence in the reports. I received from Senators and Members of the House message that the vote would be taken today.

“As I said before, I have returned here in response to the call and I shall leave at 2 o'clock, and if the joint resolution comes up within the next ten days, I shall not be here. The long trip and the necessity of my immediate return will be somewhat trying on me at this time, but I can never feel regret at having tried to help the great cause, but only regret being disappointed at the end of my efforts.

Later I was that he had gone down for the Kentucky Derby and that his indignation was really due to his fear of having to miss the race for the first time in many years.

The Smiths were on the war-path, I though, for Senator Smith of Michigan, a Republican, was the next speaker. Said he: 1 “—I obtained a formal leave of absence from the senator in order to visit my son who was on sick leave from the Army in southern California, and my aged mother, who was about to have her fourthy third birthday in that State. Advised that a vote would be taken today upon the constitutional amendment referred to by the Senator from Arizona, I am here and in my seat ready to vote. In fact, I am anxious to vote.——I shall regard it as a very unfortunate event in the history of the Senate if it failed to take up the important question now and settle it, and settle it rightly.”

With dejected manner and voice, Senator Jones Y tackled his 215201depressing task of explanation: “Mr. President, I have listened to the expressions of the Senator from Arizona and the Senator from Michigan respecting the vote upon the woman suffrage amendment. This occasion is not only disappointing to them, but it is one of keen disappointment to me. It is also an occasion of keen disappointment to millions of men and women in the United States. On Monday last, by direction of the Committee on Woman Suffrage,——I gave notice that on to-day——I would move to take up the amendment for consideration. At that time the Committee felt that it had reasonable ground to believe that, if brought to a vote, the amendment would receive the affirmative vote of at least two-thirds of this body. Since that time information has been received that cause the committee to doubt that fact. It is not believed now that one-third of the Members of this body are irrevocably committed to defeat of this Amendment, if brought to a vote——but it is so important that the Amendment be not brought to a vote until there is a reasonable assurance of its passage that the committee has decided not to ask immediate action by the Senate.”

The he went on to show the growth of the woman suffrage movement by means of a list giving the gains, not only in the United States, but all over the world.

When he concluded, Senator Thomas lightened the situation a little with a joke about Senator Overman, of North Carolina, one of the opponents.

“Mr. President, in view of the fact that explanations some in order this morning, I desire to say that I notice the return to the Senate of my very great friend and distinguished colleague, the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Overman), and I feel sure that he also has returned for the purpose of casting his vote for the amendment, and I think the Senate will so deduce unless he assumes a contrary attitude (laughter).”

But Senator Overman, who never had anything to say, for once had the wisdom to say nothing. But Senator Reed, of Missouri, one of our most obnoxious enemies, snatched the opportunity to belabor Senator Jones.

“When the next notice is given that we will vote on 216202a given day, will it be understood then that the notice is upon condition that we will vote provided the Senator has enough votes to win; and if he has not, we will not vote, as appears to be the case to-day? (laughter).”

“The remark of the Senator from Missouri is very amusing, as usual,” replied Senator Jones. “Answering it seriously, however, I desire to say that notice will not be given unless we feel reasonably assured that we have votes enough to carry the joint resolution, and that when notice is given the motion will be made, unless something occurs in the interim, such as has occurred since the last notice, which would warrant the committee in deferring action.”

But Reed was not appeased; “I want to ask the Senator from New Mexico,” he went on, “If he can give the Senate any assurance as to whether the corridors of the Senate will be flooded with attractive lobbyists until he is ready to call up the joint resolution? (laughter).”

“Mr. President,” Senator Jones retorted, “I sincerely hope that they will, and I not only hope that, but I hope that the citizens of the States represented by Senators who are disposed to vote against this motion will make it so warm for such Senators that they will not dare to vote against the constitutional amendment when it comes up for consideration and action.”

Whereupon Senator Borah rose in wreth: “I want to say to the Senator from New Mexico in regard to the question of ‘making it warm’ that there are some Senators on this floor who have been advocates of woman suffrage for the last 25 years, long before the late New York election. Those senators have some convictions of their own. They believe that every Senator should settle the matter for himself. I say, therefore, in answer to the Senator's suggestion, that no amount of telegrams that can be poured in here will have any effect upon the Senator from Idaho. Upon this subject he has views which are not subject to change.”

Altogether it was a most disheartening episode.

The next morning Mrs. Catt, who was almost as angry as Senator Smith was over the fiasco of the day before, went with me to see Senator Jones and spoke her mind so completely that he was offended. I knew that it would never do to have him aggrieved against us, so 217203later on I went back alone to try to lessen his vexation. When he complained about some of Mrs. Catt's remarks, I started to explain that she had been too upset to realize the implication of what she said; but I myself was so disturbed underneath and making such an effort to conceal my feelings, that before I knew it my emotional struggle registered itself in a violent outburst of sobbing and I had to put my head down on the table and cry like a baby. It was the only time that I ever did such a thing in a Congressional office and I was terribly mortified. However, the Senator patted my shoulder in a fatherly way and when I started to apologize he said, “Why now, it just shows that you're nothing but a woman after all.” As soon as I was able to control my sobs, I fled to a dressing room, where I sopped cold water on my eyes until I thought I should not be too conspicuous in an elevator. Then I went home, feeling that I was complete failure. But what I had done was probably the most effective apology that I could have made, for from that time on the Senator was staunchly and consistently our friend.

For my part, I came to see that what he had done in withdrawing the notice must have taken a lot of courage and have been inspired by a genuine interest in furthering the Amendment. I realized, too, that in spite of blunders in floor tactics due to his inexperience, he had the respect of his fellow senators because of his sense of fair play and his bull-dog tenacity.

Mrs. Catt's indignation found a further outlet in a campaign of protest over the failure of the Senate to act. She called for mass meetings throughout the country and for resolutions to be presented to the Senate in such numbers that the demand for a favorable vote on the Amendment could not be disregarded. And the resolutions 218204did literally pour in, though the affect of them was weakened by the revival of a ruling in the Senate prohibiting the printing of resolutions and petitions in the Congressional Record.

More important were the new political endorsements which we put forth every possible effort to secure. Among them were resolutions from the Democratic Congressional Committee and planks in the State platforms of both parties in several States. These all involved innumerable conferences with persons of weight in party councils and the kind of follow-up work which could easily be interpreted as nagging if we were not tactful in the way we went about it. In order to maintain our non-partisan stand, we were obliged to balance support by one party with some corresponding testimonial from the other; and it often happened, as had been the case with the national party committees, that a rumor of proposed favorable action on one side led to a corresponding endorsement on the other; for neither party wanted its rival to have a monopoly of women's gratitude if and when the Amendment went through.

In addition to the political organizations, several great non-political associations, such as the American Federation of Labor and the General Federation of Women's Clubs were persuaded to come out with resolution requesting the Senate to pass the Amendment.

Every one of these endorsements, political or non-political, gave us a pretext for calling upon our friends in the Senate and begging them to draw the attention of doubtful or opposed Senators to the accumulating evidence that opposition to the Amendment was politically stupid. Then, in a few days, we would make a second round of calls to get reports on the way in which the information had been received by the particular man or men whom we had asked 219205each of our friends to see.

Our backers in the House did not forget us or the cause during our long wait in the Senate. Again and again they took a hand in our efforts to get political party endorsements or persuaded someone whose opinion was likely to have weight to talk or write to an obdurate senator.

On Mr. Raker's initiative, the Woman Suffrage Committee in the House took up the Hawaiian bill ? and had a hearing on it on April 29th. Mrs. Pitman, whose interest in Hawaii had set the ball rolling, came on from Boston to speak; a letter from Prince Kalanianaole was read; and Dr. Shaw, Mrs. Cunningham and I were also heard. A favorable report was made on May 18th. All three of the anti-suffragists on the committee concurred in it and one of them, Mr. Meeker of Missouri, actually made the motion to report in favor, though how he reconciled his zeal in permitting the Legislature of Hawaii to give votes to the women of the Islands with his relentless opposition to having State legislatures in the United States act on the Amendment I was never able to make out. But, as I have said before, consistency was plainly not a jewel to the average advocate of State rights. The Hawaiian bill was brought up in the House on June 3d, on the unanimous consent calendar, was passed without a roll-call by a two-thirds vote under suspension of the rules, and was immediately signed by the President. It gave us a striking opportunity to contrast our own difficulty in getting action from the Senate with the ease of enfranchisement in the case of the Hawaiian women.

Later in June, a petition sent to the President by the woman suffrage association of France - L'Union Francaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes - on behalf of the women of the allied countries 220206created the opportunity that we desired for a further statement from him. His original reply, sent to Mrs. Catt in advance of any publicity, disappointed her deeply because it carried no mention of the Senate. But Helen Gardner said, “Write it exactly the way you would like to have it and I will see if I can't get the President to make the change.”

it was Ruth White who hit upon a satisfactory sentence to be added at the end of what the President had written. Then Mrs. Gardner, with a typed copy of the sentence and a memorandum of the reasons why we wanted it included, went, saw the President, and conquered. One of the White House secretaries told her afterwards that, so far as he knew, she was the only person who ever persuaded Woodrow Wilson to make a change in a document after he had written it to his own satisfaction. The statement, as it was given to the papers, with Ruth White's sentence at the end, read:

“The White HouseWashington13 June, 1918

My dear Mrs. Catt:–May I not thank you for transmitting to me the very interesting memorial addressed to me by the French Union for Woman Suffrage under date of February first, last.

Since you have been kind enough to transmit this interesting and impressive message, will you not be good enough to convey to the subscribers this answer:

‘I have read your message with deepest interest and I welcome the opportunity to say that I agree without reservation that the full and sincere democratic reconstruction of the world for which we are striving, and which we are determined to bring about at any cost, will not have been completely or adequately attained until women are admitted to the suffrage, and tht only by that action can the nations of the world realize for the benefit of future generations the full ideal force of opinion, or the full humane force of action.

‘The services of women during this supreme crisis of the world's history have been of the most signal usefulness and distinction. The war could not have been fought without them, or its sacrifices endured. It is221207 high time that some part of our debt of gratitude to them should be acknowledged and paid, and the only acknowledgment they ask is their admission to the suffrage. Can we justly refuse it? As for America, it is my earnest hope that the Senate of the United States will give an unmistakable answer to this question by passing the suffrage amendment to our federal constitution before the end of this session .’

Cordially and sincerely yours, (Signed) Woodrow Wilson Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, President International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1626 Rhode Island Avenue.”

Mrs. Catt, Dr. Shaw, Mrs. Gardener, Miss Rose Young, editor of the “Women Citizen”, Miss White and I went in a delegation to the White House to thank the President for his letter and Mrs. Bass, representing the Democratic women, was also present. The President discussed the Senate situation in some detail and when Mrs. Catt expressed the opinion that his coming out with a statement addressed to the Senate would bring about the passage of the Amendment, he replied that he had great doubt of that and thought he had already “gone the limit” in attempting to influence the senators. He reminded us that he had interviewed a number of them and had written to others without result, but he said that he would continue to do all that he could.

Watching him that day, I was amazed to see how little he showed the burden of the War. I had been present not long before at a hearing at which Secretary Baker explained to the House Committee on Military Affairs the colossal extent of the provisions for our Army oversea, and I felt, as I think I said to the President, that he was a modern Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders. Yet, up to that point, those shoulders were unbent.

About ten days later a delegation of Democratic Senators, including Senators Shafroth, Ransdell, Hollis and Robinson, went 222208to the White House in behalf of the Amendment. Afterward Senator Shafroth reported publicly: “The President is enthusiastic for the passage of the Amendment and regards it as very important in view of the international situation. He says the confidence which exists among our allies is based upon the impression that he represents thoroughly the American sentiment. He fears that if the Senate turns down the woman suffrage amendment which he has so many times endorsed, it might be taken by the people of the allied countries that he does not represent the true sentiment of the American people relative to democracy, of which the woman suffrage / measure is an important part, and he has authorized us to say that he would like to have the indorsement of the Senate in order that the allies may know that we are thoroughly in favor of the principles of democracy.”

All this was in preparation for a second attempt to get action in the Senate, where the Amendment was actually brought up by Senator Jones on June 27th. He had been promised a one-to-one pair, which was equivalent to an added vote on our side, and he expected to offset the other vote by the willingness of Senator James, who was in hospital, to go without being paired in opposition. Speeches were made early in the afternoon by Senators Poindexter of Washington and Thompson of Kansas in favor of the Amendment and by Senator Brandegee of Connecticut against it. Then Senator Underwood of Alabama demanded a pair for Senator James, on the ground that a telegram from him of much earlier date, which requested a pair, had been confirmed by telephone that morning. Senator Jones tried to give a tactful refusal; but his explanation, that, as he himself 223209was unwilling to pair on that subject, he could not ask any of his colleagues to do so, sounded decidedly weak and he could not bolster it up by stating his real reason, which was that the White House had assured him Senator James did not want to be paired. Senator Underwood then declared that, unless a pair was given, the opposition would make it impossible to get a vote; and Senator Reed of Missouri proceeded to make a filibuster speech lasting over an hour.

At its conclusion, Senator Jones, seeing that there was no chance of getting a successful vote then, withdrew his motion on the ground that he was unwilling to delay the consideration of the Army Supply Bill. He said, however, that after the supply bills were out of the way the Amendment would be brought up again and kept before the Senate in face of any attempt to recess for the summer. So ended our second fiasco in the Senate.

Within a few days it became clear that Senator Jones's threat to keep the Senate from recessing for the summer would not be carried out for the simple reason that we were still two votes short and the favorable pair situation by which that deficiency might have been made up on June 27th no longer existed. Moreover, the death of Senator Tillman of South Carolina, an opponent, opened the possibility that his successor, Senator Benet, might be more favorable.

On July 13th the Senate agreed to transact no business until August 24 except the reading of the Journal on Mondays and Thursdays, in order to conform to the provision which forbids complete adjournment of one House while the other is in session. Six months had gone by since our vote in the House, six months of continuous disappointment. broken only by the two abortive attempts to get a vote, and we were still 2 votes short.

By the time the Senate ended its three-day recesses in August, our list of favorable senators was cut out to 61 by the death of Senator Gallinger. The loss was made even more disastrous for us by the election of Senator Lodge to the position of Republican floor leader. We were then faced with a situation in which both party leaders in the Senate were hostile to the Amendment.

Earlier in the summer the death of Senator Tillman of South Carolina an opponent had created one vacancy and in late August the death of Senator James of Kentucky, also listed as an opponent, though not a hopeless one, left a third seat to be filled. Again we were forced to wait anxiously for new members. When a young man named Martin was appointed from Kentucky, we had reason to believe that he would be favorable; but the views of Senator Drew, who took Senator Gallinger's place, were in doubt, as were those of Senator Benet, who was Senator Tillman's successor. Our poll stood: Favorable, 62; (30 Democrats and 32 Republicans)

Opposed, 32; (21 Democrats and 11 Republicans)

Doubtful, 2; (1 Democrat and 1 Republican)

If we could win over the two “doubtfuls”, we were safe. And it looked then as if we were going to get them. Our Republican friends were extremely hopeful that Senator Drew, out of request for Senator Gallinger's great interest in woman suffrage, would feel under obligations not to defeat the Amendment by one of his first votes in the Senate. And our Democratic supporters were counting on Senator Benet, as a young man who was said to hold liberal views on many subject.

We wanted to wait until we were sure of those two votes; 225211on the other hand we knew that it was important for political reasons to have action taken at least a few weeks in advance of the November elections. We had several meetings with groups of Republican and Democratic friends and on September 16th a delegation of Democratic women, headed by Mrs. Minnie Fisher Cunningham of Texas, had a conference with the President to ask his further help in securing an early and successful vote.

Then some of our Republican friends told Miss Hay that we might count on 33 Republican votes. Although Senator Drew was not named as the 33rd, the inference what it was he was obvious. Having permission to report this information to Senator A. A. Jones, we did so at once and he immediately called a conference of Democrats, who thought the chance of having Senator Benet on our side was so good that we ought to press for a vote at once. That decision was confirmed at a meeting of the Woman Suffrage Committee the next day and Senator Jones then gave notice in the Senate that he would move to take up the Amendment on September 26th.

Two days after that notice, Miss Hay was informed that only 32 Republican votes could be counted on, presumably because Senator Drew had decided to oppose the Amendment. That was a serious blow to our hopes but; but we agreed with Senator Jones and other members of the Woman Suffrage Committee that we ought not to withdraw with the possibility of still securing the needed votes by means of the pre-election sentiment. Senator Jones explained that if we lost he would change his vote from “yes” to “no”, in order to be entitled to ask for reconsideration. In that way we would be assured of another chance in the 65th Congress without the need of going back through the House.

As soon as the date for taking up the Amendment was settled, 226212our women flocked to Washington. Although I did my best to make them realize that we were still two votes short, they would not believe that we could fail to win that small number. How high their hopes ran was shown in Rose Young's day-by-day account, later published in “The Woman Citizen”.

“Suffrage House, Washington, D. C., Sept. 24. It is bromidic to say that the clans are gathering, but when you feel that you are saying it for positively the last time, the bromide takes on a certain historic dignity. And, positively, we feel that it is the last time. For the last time the old bodyguard is here. For the last time the trains are hourly bringing in women from all parts of the country-women who are leaving war work just long enough to rush in here for the final round-up, for suffrage, which is also war work.

“Mrs. Catt has been here for weeks. Mrs. Park is always here. So is Mrs. Gardener. Miss Hay is here, proud of the Republicans. Mrs. Dudley of Tennessee is here, confident of the Democrats. Mrs. Travis H. Whitney is here. Mrs. Cunningham and Mrs. Potter and Miss Gearing are here to represent Texas. Mrs. Trout of Illinois is here. Mrs. Ralph Smith of Nebraska is here. Miss Mabel Willard of Massachusetts is here. Indiana is represented by Mrs. Stilwell, Mrs. Edwards and Miss Adah Bush, the latter en route to France in the service of the Y.W.C.A. Both Mrs. Edwards and Miss Bush have given valiant service in the handling of the publicity of the occasion. Miss Ludington of Connecticut is here. Mrs. Yost of West Virginia and Mrs. Cowles of Virginia are here. Miss Ruth White is here. Mrs. Ess of Missouri is here. Miss Friest of Nevada is here. Mrs. Frank Roessing and Miss Hannah Patterson of Pennsylvania are here. Mrs. Harriman of New York is here—indeed there are not many States in the Union unrepresented by some one or more prominent women. By Friday Dr. Shaw of the United States will be here.

“Suffrage House is crowded from roof to cellar. Coming into the office on the second floor this morning, I surprised some comfortable looking bedding on the point of departing from the two long lounges in one of the private offices.

“All the talk is of victory.

“Sept. 25: This morning some thirty-five of us went to the Hill in the capacity of message-bearers to the United States Senators; a demonstration arranged for by Mrs. Edwards. We assembled in the Caucus Room on the third floor of the Senate Office Building and then 227213went to the office of Vice-President Marshall. Mrs. Catt was at our head and went as far as the Vice-President's office as a message-bearer on her own account. It was her assignment to present to him personally some data that had been assembled to show the great popular and political demand for the passage of the Amendment. Tired as we are of having to ‘set forth’ things to prove justice and expediency that should be self-evident, we are rather proud of this summary. In it some of the resolutions passed by political parties are given in detail, notably those calling for the passage of the Amendment by both the Democratic and Republican National Committees. The summary shows also that already the legislatures of fourteen States have demanded the Amendment's passage; that its passage is called for by planks in the platforms of twenty-six State conventions, Republican and Democratic; in the two States having the largest and third largest electoral vote, New York and Illinois, both party platforms adopted unanimously planks urging immediate and favorable Senate action. In Indiana, always a pivotal State, the planks of both Democratic and Republican conventions demand passage and promise State ratification, etc., to follow at once.

——“Mrs. Charles L. Tiffany of New York has arrived. Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, head of the Collegiate Division of the Food Administration and Acting Chairman of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party is due tomorrow. Mrs. F. Louis Slade, also of New York, head of the Women's Division of the Y.M.C.A.’s war work and Vice-Chairman of the New York City Woman Suffrage Party is due.

“Sept. 26: The Northeast gallery (Mrs. Park's favorite gallery) has been assigned to the National Association and one hundred tickets issued for the one hundred seats in it. This arrangement does away with the need of getting up before dawn to rush to the Senate, as was literally the case when the House vote came off. We are taking our lunch with us, however, as we shall undoubtedly have to be in our places from ten o'clock or thereabouts until four P.M. Victory is still in the air.”

The five-day debate started shortly after noon on the 26th with a long speech in support of the Amendment by Senator Vardaman, of Mississippi. Why he was in favor was almost as much as mystery when he concluded as when he began, for his address was about equally divided between extravagant praise of women and violent attacks upon the negro. Among his pronouncements were these: 228214 “Congressional Record, Vol. 56, Part 2, p. 10700 & ff.

—“I would rather rely upon the intuitions of women to lead me in the right path, I would rather trust the promptings of her unselfish heart, than the boasted ratiocinations of the painful, logical processes of man.——To say that woman is the mental inferior of man is only to proclaim the ignorance of the person making the statement.

—“The (Spartan) women were so wise that no Spartan warrior ever thought of taking any action without consulting his wife.——Spartan women are greater, more learned, beautiful or refined than are the women of America.

—“Mr. President, I should be uncandid if I failed to state in his presence that I realize also when I cast my vote for this amendment, the power of the objection urged by some of my colleagues from the South, that it is going to bring to the ballot-box, along with the negro men, a few negro women. I also understand that the negro women will be more offensive, more difficult to handle at the polls than the negro men, for ‘verilty the female of the species is more deadly than the male’. But when I realize that five white women will be added to the electorate when only two or three negro women can possibly be brought to the ballot box, the difficulties are minimized.——

—“The military negro is a menace to the peace and prosperity of every country governed by the white man.—The arrogance and impudence of the ex-negro soldier will greatly enhance the white man's burden.——

—“Every thoughtful white man living beneath the folds of the stars and stripes, whether his place of residence be north, east, west, or south, knows that the white man and the negro cannot live peaceably together in the same country on terms of political and social equality, and they also know that political equality when the races are nearly equally divided in the State means, ultimately, social equality; and social equality means race amalgamation; and race amalgamation means race deterioration, which is followed in turn by the disintegration and death of the white man's civilization.——

—“As woman always instinctively looks out for the best interests of the home, the preservation, the education and the development of the child, we can rely upon her to take the proper interest in the question of paramount importance when it becomes a political issue; and I think we can rely upon woman to do this without regard to the geography of her residence.

—“My estimate of woman is well expressed in the words employed by a distinguished author who dedicated his book to 229215a “Little mountain, a great meadow, and a woman.’ ‘To the mountain for the sense of time, to the meadow for the sense of space, and to the woman for the sense of everything.’”

So he went on for the better part of an hour, balancing, as it were, between the emotions of admiration and hatred. In 1914, he had voted against the Amendment. Coming from Mississippi as he did, his new attitude was courageous and the more surprising because even southern senators spoke of him as a “negro baiter”. What brought about his change of heart in regard to woman suffrage I never knew. It was not tactful to ask men who came over to our side why they did so and the only explanation that I got from other senators was the unkind one that his support must have been called out by Senator Williams’ opposition , for they had a long standing feud in the State from which they both came. That explanation I never credited. My opinion was that between 1914 and 1918 some event that touched him personally changed his mind and, though he could not escape from his old objection on the score of the negro vote, he was brave enough to stand up for his new conviction.

The next speech, by Senator McCumber, of North Dakota, was an amazing apologia and thoroughly illustrative of the way in which our vote was increased in consequence of State gains brought about under Mrs. Catt's plan. Said he: “Mr. President, the question of how I should record my vote on this joint resolution has given me great concern. I am compelled to admit an unrelenting conflict between my own conviction as to the merits of extended suffrage and what I regard as my duty ssa a representative of a State. My own judgment is against the resolution.——The Legislature of the State of North Dakota, beginning in 1917, passed, and, as I am informed, by a large majority, and act which extended the right of suffrage to women to include the election of presidential electors and county, city and township officers.—

“This is the record of the State as it stands today, and while the question of public sentiment is not free from doubt, I can not remove from my mind the conviction 230216that the people of State to-day are, as a whole, in accord with their legislators.——

“And, Mr. President, I feel that as a representative of the State, I should vote their views rather than my own upon this subject.

“To my mind, this is not a political but a sex question pure and simple. It is not a question involving a superior or inferior mental endowment, but rather a question of the division of labor, duties and responsibilities between the two sexes.

“My own observation has taught me that common vocations converging and loading the masculine and feminine into and along channels of common thought and sentiment, and even common earning capacity, relieving the one from any dependence and the other from the consequential duty which such dependence imposes, the disarrangement of the old plan of provider on the one hand and home maker on the other,——weakens that magnetic attraction which is the soul of home.——Her (woman's) work and her duties, which are none the less important, are and must forever be of a different character.”

His position was similar to that of Senator King, of Utah, who had let it be known that he had to vote for the Amendment because his State demanded it, but that he himself was dead against Federal action on that subject. He, however, was far more cantankerous than Senator McCumber was and often managed to put a spoke in our wheel by an Adroit question or by adverse parliamentary tactics. As a chronic objector, Senator King was held by many other senators to be thorough-going pest. And we certainly found him one.

Senator Ransdell, who followed Senator McCumber, faced the opposite dilemma.

——“It is a source of deep regret that my views on suffrage differ from those of many friends in Louisiana and elsewhere, for whose opinions I have the highest respect. In particular do I regret that the Legislature of Louisiana recently memorialized Congress in opposition to this measure.——I have no criticism of their action. They performed their duty a s they saw it, and I shall do mine as I see it.

—“My own views on the subject were formed several years ago, and have been matured and strengthened by the most 231217careful study and deliberation.

—“In my judgment the situation as to negro women can be handled as has been done with negro men for the past 25 years. Negroes in the South—are acquiring homes, are rapidly becoming educated, are mastering all of the trades and some of the professions, are good, law-abiding citizens, and are working out the salvation of their race in peace and amity with their white neighbors and friends.

——“males and females are equal before the law in their responsibility for crime, payment of taxes, and most of the obligations of citizenship, and they should be equal in law-making.——To refuse suffrage to women because of their sex, while giving it to men is legislative unfairness.”

Those were both candid statements and they raised the large question of whether it is the duty of a representative to represent the opinion of his constituents or to act upon his own initiative. Though our admiration went, naturally to Senator Ransdell, who followed his sense of justice rather than the wishes of his State, perhaps we should have appreciated more warmly than we did the position of Senator McCumber, who frankly admitted that his vote for us would be against his own convictions.

Next came Senator Fletcher who summarized most of the current Southern objections in a conveniently numbered series.

“First. If and when it is desired, woman suffrage should be obtained through the States.

Senator Hardwick of Georgia, the next speaker, said that he was against the Amendment as a Democrat, as a Senator from the South, and as an American citizen, and proceeded to enlarge upon those points.

By that time some of the women in the gallery had become restive. Two long anti speeches in succession were more than they could bear quietly and there was a rustling and murmuring that I knew must be stopped. So I shook my head and put my finger on my lips whenever I could catch the eye of an offender, with Miss Hay to second my efforts. Meanwhile, Mrs. Catt found listening to the opponents, with no chance to reply, so trying that when it became clear there would be no vote that afternoon she went back to Suffrage House.

As the hours wore on and nerves grew more taut, I decided to take a few minutes and walk around to Senator Pittman's Capitol office, which was on the gallery floor, on the chance of finding 233219him there and getting the latest reports from the Democratic coat-room. Miss Hay, to whom I whispered my intention, promised to keep order in the gallery while I was gone; for Miss White, on whom I had depended in the past, had resigned from the Congressional Committee a short time before and her successor had not then been appointed. In the corridor I met Mrs. Trout, returning from a talk in the marble Room with one of the Republican senators. I listened to her discouraging report and tried to cheer her up by explaining that I was on the way to Senator Pittman's office, in the hope of getting a little better news there.

When his door was opened, in response to my knock, I discovered that a conference of five of our Democratic friends was going on in the office. There was a burst of laughter as I entered and one of the men said, “It's no use trying to keep anything from her. You may as well tell her, Pittman.”

To my amazement, I then learned that the gathering was discussing an idea of Senator Pittman's, who thought there ought to be an audacious challenge of the Republicans the following day, calling upon them to produce the vote they had promised and then withdrawn. He was convinced that their original assurance was a trick to get the Democrats to set a date for taking up the Amendment, in order that when it was defeated, with more Democratic votes than Republican against it, the responsibility for failure could be thrown upon the Administration. And he believed that if he were to accuse the m republican senator publicly they might be stung into producing that extra vote at the last moment , or some of the Democratic opponents might be made indignant enough to give us two additional votes from that side. The other senators agreed that the strategem might as well be tried in default of any other chance. When they 234220asked my opinion, I said that I preferred not to give it without consulting Mrs. Catt. So we all sat there while Senator Pittman telephoned her and outlined his plan. He conclude by telling her that we could be no worse off if it failed, for, as matters then stood, the Amendment was bound to be defeated. Without hesitation she told him to go ahead.

Very dubious about the result, I went back to the gallery and found that Senator Frelinghuysen of New Jersey was delivering a speech intended to be in favor of woman suffrage but much more urgent about the need of his amendment to the joint resolution, an amendment which provided that women of alien birth must be naturalized in their own right, and not simply by marriage to a citizen, before they were allowed to vote.

When Senator Guion, Senator Broussard's successor, followed with a speech on State rights, my hopes fell still lower, for I knew that the Democrats had thought of him as one of the men who might be persuaded to change over to our side the next day, a possibility that his statement completely removed.

Before adjournment that afternoon there were speeches in favor, by Senator Thompson of Kansas, who told how well woman suffrage had worked in that State; by Senator McKellar, of Tennessee, who made a new point, that it was unfair to have women voting in some States and not in others; and by Senator Owen of Oklahoma, who maintained that the suffrage plank in the Democratic national platform did not exclude the Federal method of granting votes to women.

Speeches in opposition were made by Senator Pomerene of Ohio, who opposed on the ground of State rights and also because of the adverse majority in the referendum in Ohio; and by Senator Williams, who spoke in favor of his own amendments to the joint 235221resolution, limiting suffrage to white women.

Altogether there were thirteen speeches that afternoon, seven for the Amendment, if McCumber could be counted on the side of his announced vote, and six opposed; in addition to a little floor skirmishing in which Senators Walsh and Shafroth took part on our side and Senator Wadsworth in opposition.

At Suffrage House that night there was less talk about victory.

Early the next morning packages of sandwiches, nuts and apples were again ready for all of us; for by that time our house manager had become expert in choosing the kind of food that could be eaten quietly and putting it up in paper that would not rattle in the gallery.

Miss Hay and I went up before the others in order to find out whether any possible changes had been reported by either party.

We shook our heads disconsolately when we met again after our interviews.

At the close of the morning business Senator Pittman started his attack by accusing the Woman's Party of being a Republican “adjunct”. Thereupon Senator Wolcott, of Delaware, asked, “Is the Woman's Party the party that has been picketing here in Washington?” 1

“That is the party,” Senator Pittman replied.

Then Senator Smoot was on his feet. “I wish to say to the Senator,” he protested, “that the Republican Party is not responsible in any way for the picketing, and members of the Republican Party upon the floor of the Senate have condemned it just as strongly as any Senator on the other side of the Chamber.”

Senator Pittman's next move, in order to prove his claim 236222that there was an anti-Democratic alliance between the Woman's Party and the Republicans, was to read a resolution adopted by a caucus of Republican Senators and published by the Woman's Party in its bulletin. The resolution stated that the Republicans would insist upon a vote on the Amendment at the earliest possible moment, but carried a provision to the effect that the resolution should not be construed as binding the action or vote of any senator on the Amendment.

The Senator Pittman went on to read from an account in the “Washington Post” of September 17th; showing the hostility of the Woman's Party to the President: “As a climax of their demonstration yesterday the National Woman's Party——burned President Wilson's words on suffrage at the base of the statue of Lafayette, opposite the White House. With a blazing torch in her hand. Miss Lucy Branham set fire to a scrap of paper containing words the President is reported to have said to a delegation of women earlier in the afternoon. The statement read: ‘I am, as I think you know, heartily in sympathy with you. I have endeavored to assist you in every way in my power, and I shall continue to do so. I shall do all that I can to urge the passage of the amendment by an early vote.’”

The reading led to a remark by Republican Senator Poindexter of Washington.

“I should like the Senator, so long as he is discussing the action of the pickets, to explain to the Senate whether or not it is the action of the pickets and the militant branch of the woman's party that caused the President to change his attitude on the subject.”

Senator Pittman replied with a question: “Does the Senator think there is any effectiveness in picketing?——I should like the Senator to answer that question so that I can go on with my speech.”

“I will answer that question,” said Senator Poindexter. “I can only speak for myself. So far as the effect upon me is concerned, it would tend to antagonize me.”

“I asked the question of the Senator,” Pittman continued, “knowing him to be a fearless man, knowing him to be an 237223intelligent man. His answer is that it would antagonize him and have no effect upon him unless it would be a contrary effect.

“I leave it to him that very probably the President of the United States is just as intelligent and fearless as is the Senator from Washington.”

After that Pittman turned to the main point of his attack. Conceding that we were two votes short, he explained how the ladies of the National American Woman Suffrage Association had asked a group of Democratic senators in favor of the Amendment “If we can assure you 33 Republican votes, will you bring the joint resolution up?’ We replied, ‘yes.’ Why? Because although we had not enough with the 33, we believed that we might get two more votes. They said then. ‘We feel at liberty to say to you that Senator Smoot, on behalf of the Republican Senators, has come to our committee through Miss Hay and assured us that the Republicans are ready to deliver 33 votes.’——

“Then, after we had been deceived into bringing it before this body, after we had been led into the trap, the distinguished Senator from Utah goes to the same people to whom he promised 33 votes and says. “We can get only 32.’ Why did he do that? Why did he promise 33? Because the 33 votes, with the votes the Democrats then had, would still defeat the Amendment. Why did he come down to 32 votes? Because we gained enough with the 33 to pass the Amendment. What other conclusion is there to be drawn?”

Senator Smoot was on his feet ready to ask for recognition as soon as Senator Pittman paused for breath. When opportunity came, Senator Smoot began, in a voice that was shrill with wrath, “Mr. President, the Senator is stating supposed facts that I have never heard before.——I want to say to the Senator now that, as far as the 33 votes are concerned, there was always a question of doubt as to one vote. If the Senator wants to know the doubtful vote. I do not think the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Drew) will object to my stating that”

“Undoubtedly, however,” Senator Pittman broke in, “the women who induced us to bring this matter to a vote did not have any doubt about the doubt of the Senator from Utah.——”

By that time Senator Pittman had worked himself into a tense fury that made his eyes blaze and his voice sting like a 238224whiplash. And beside me in the gallery sat Miss Hay with flushed cheeks and eyes that burned as angrily as the Senator's. All around us there was the rustle of excitement, while I held my breath in fear that my own name would be the next to be seared with the humiliation that I know Miss Hay was feeling.

“What you have accomplished is this:” continued Pittman, “You have got this joint resolution before the Senate through a deception and you have got the Democratic Party in an embarrassing position, no matter how it goes; but I, for one, am not willing to give up.”

Then Senator Reed of Missouri saw an opportunity to score against us: “The burden of the charge just made by the Senator from Nevada,” Reed thundered, “is that the leader of the Suffrage Senators on each side took a poll of his votes and dutifully carried the result to the chief female lobbyists, at the same time promising these lobbyists the delivery of the votes as disclosed by the poll; that therefore the chief lobbyist or lobbyists concluded the time had arrived for the Senate to vote, and accordingly gave orders for the resolution to be reported for action. If that was not a disgraceful proceeding, so far as it affected the Senate of the United States, then. I have no knowledge of what could bring disgrace upon this body.

“If it be true that the Senate has sunk to such a level that the leaders upon either side of this movement——can be ordered to bring forward a bill or to withhold a bill and those orders come from a lobby outside——the Senate of the United States is in disgrace.——Now we find a petticoat brigade awaits outside and Senate leaders, like little boys, like pages, trek back and forth for orders. If you accept that office, Senators, then put on cap and bells and paint your cheeks like clowns and do your truckling in proper garb.”

Our defence was taken up by Senator Lewis of Illinois.

“Has it come that a distinguished Senator can on the floor indict these women for coming about and seeking to protect their rights, when every railroad lobbyist in America could with freedom haunt the Capitol?——Can it be possible, Mr. President, that certain heads of the great telegraph companies and the telephone companies can be found in every corner of the Capitol at a time when we seek to convert these agencies to the welfare of the Republic——and that there should be no voice that condemns? Can it be said that if these are 239225protecting their rights they are all of a virtue and the women who merely seek to obtain a thing they think is their liberty are all of a vice?”

After Senator Lewis had finished there was a long speech by Senator Reed, followed by a debate about the time of taking the vote, a debate in which Senator Martin of Virginia lost his temper completely. Finally a short speech by Senator Thomas led up to adjournment.

I rushed down to see some of our friends because I was afraid that Senator Reed's attack might have done harm to the cause. But they laughed my fears aside. “Everyone knows that Reed loves to shoot off his mouth,” one of them assured me, “and nobody pays any attention to him.”

At Suffrage House that night we had a more devided group of women that I had ever seen there before. Several of them who were Democrats thought that Senator Pittman had been wonderful and that the Republicans would be shamed into giving us that extra vote. But Miss Hay and some of the other Republicans insisted that his attack had been a shameful proceeding. I judged that Mrs. Trout had told how she met me on the way to Senator Pittman's office and, for the first time, I felt that some of my fellow-workers were suspicious of me, though I was sure that Miss Hay would pooh-pooh any such doubt, as I found later that she had done. Still, I was glad when a guarded question, asked by a member of our Congressional Committee, gave me opportunity to explain exactly how I came to hear of Senator Pittman's plan.

The next morning Miss Hay and I went to see Senator Curtis and then Senator Smoot. To my great relief, neither of them held us responsible for Senator Pittman's onslaught. Senator Curtis said it was just an attempt on the part of the Democrats to lay the 240226defeat of the Amendment at the door of the Republican and Senator Smoot dismissed the matter with a contemptuous, “That's Pittman all over.”

On the third day, which was Saturday, debate on the Amendment was preceded and frequently interrupted by discussion of other subjects, including the coal situation in New York, agricultural appropriations and the prevention of Spanish influenza. My last hope vanished when Senator Benet of South Carolina made a speech in which he said that he found it hard to oppose the President's wishes, but that he did not consider woman suffrage a war measure. He wound up with the stereotyped State rights objection, which was amplified by Senator Hardwick in another speech.

During the afternoon, Senator Smoot made a reply to what Senator Pittman had said at the preceding session and later Senator Pittman replied to Smoot's reply; but neither of them spoke with the fire of the day before. Then Senator Shafroth gave a long speech on the result of woman suffrage in Colorado, a speech much interrupted by taunting question from Senator Wadsworth; and Senator Henderson talked about the blot that would rest on the South if the Amendment were defeated by southern votes.

Everyone seemed let down after Senator Benet's speech and adjournment came earlier than on either of the preceding days.

The remainder of that afternoon and a good part of the night we spent in appeals to our friends of both parties, in the Senate and outside. Telegrams and long distance messages, interviews and conferences-every minute was filled with them.

Finally, Mrs. Catt decide to turn once more to the President and Sunday morning she sent by messenger a moving appeal to beg him to address the Senate in behalf of the Amendment. In the 241227afternoon, Senator Shafroth and Senator Pittman went to the White House for a conference and we waited in keenest suspense until word came from them that the President would take the almost unprecedented step of going to speak to the Senate upon a measure which required action by both Houses.

Mrs. Catt, who thought that a direct request from the President could not fail to bring the additional votes, was very happy over the news. We all rejoiced with her, but when I came to think over the situation in bed that night, I was by no means certain of victory.

The next morning, as we were driving up to the Capitol, Mrs. Catt took me to task for not looking jubilant. When I hold her that I was not so confident as she was, I did not shake her faith at all, nor did Miss Hay, who said, “I think Maud's right. He may not be able to change any votes.”

As the session was about to begin, Senator LaFollette appeared on the floor for the first time in many months. He had hurried back from California to vote for us because feeling against him ran so high that several senators had refused to join in a pair to which he was to be a party. Ordinarily a senator who had been absent a long while was greeted warmly by all the senators on his own side of the aisle and by many of those on the other. In this case no one except Senator Gronna seemed to make any acknowledgment of Senator LaFollette's presence until Senator Hollis, deliberately crossed over in front of the Desk and shook hands warmly with LaFollette. I had long been grateful to Senator Hollis, but never more so than when he made that friendly gesture. To my deep regret, I had been persuaded by some of our own women, together with several supporters in the Senate, to send a request to Senator 242228LaFollette not to speak on the Amendment for fear that his advocacy might arouse enmity from others. And I have rarely done anything that made me feel more contemptible in my own eyes; but he was too magnanimous to hold it against me.

After the business of appointing a committee to receive the President was attended to, Senator Benet made a second speech in order to explain that his stand on the Amendment had not been known and that no one had had any right to count on his vote.

Senator Wesley Jone's only speech followed, a speech in which he answered several of the current objections and appealed to his Democratic colleagues to support the President.

“The time is here,” he said in conclusion, “the hour has struck for us to allow our people, in the way provided by the Constitution, to enfranchise that great body of our citizens who are better fitted by intelligence, education, capacity, lofty motives, high aspirations, and native ability to discharge the duties of citizenship in this great Nation than any other class upon whom this right has ever been bestowed. The women of the country demand the right and honor of the ballot. They are entitled to it, not as a special privilege but as well earned and well deserved function of citizenship.” 1

Next came Senator Walsh of Montana, who built his argument on the fundamental principle that “Government derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” and on the immediate needs of the war period.

At one o'clock proceedings were suspended while the President was escorted to a seat at the right of Vice-President Marshall, who was then in the Chair, and the members of the Cabinet were given places on the floor. The excitement that we, in the gallery, felt so keenly was plainly evident below, where all the senators except Reed of Missouri were standing to show their respect for the Nation's 243229chief, if not for Woodrow Wilson himself. I should have given more thought to Reed's surprising lack of courtesy if my mind had not been so intent on the President and what he way about to say.

“Mr. Vice-President and gentlemen of the Senate,” he began, “the unusual circumstances of a world war in which we stand and are judged in the view, not only of our own people and of our own consciences, but also in the view of all nations and peoples will, I hope, justify in your thought, as it does in mine, the message I have come to bring you. I regard the concurrence of the Senate in the constitutional amendment proposing the extension of the suffrage to women as vitally essential to the prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged.

“I had assumed that the Senate would concur in the Amendment because no disputable principle is involved, but only a question of the method by which the suffrage is to be extended to women. There is and can be no party issue involved on it.——

“If we be indeed democrats and wish to lead the world the democracy, we can ask other peoples to accept in proof of our sincerity and our ability to lead them whither they wish to be led nothing less persuasive and and convincing than our actions. Our professions will not suffice.——Through many, many channels I have been made aware what the plain, struggling, workaday folk are thinking upon whom the chief terror and suffering of this tragic war falls. They are looking to the great, powerful, famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for which they have so long waited; and they think, in their logical simplicity, that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them. If we reject measures like this, in ignorance or defiance of what a new age has brought forth, of what they have seen but we have not, they will cease to follow us or to trust us.——

“We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toil, and not a partnership of privilege and right?——

“I tell you plainly, as commander-in-chief of our armies of the gallant men in our fleets, as the present spokesman of this people in our dealings with the men and women throughout the world who are now our partners, as their responsible head of a great government which stands and is questioned day by day as to its purposes, its principles, its hopes, whether they be serviceable to men everywhere or only to itself, and who must himself answer these questioning or be ashamed, as the guide and director of forces caught in the grip of war and by the same token in need of every material and 244230and spiritual resource this great nation possesses-I tell you plainly that the measure which I urge upon you is vital to the winning of the war and to the energies alike of preparation and of battle.——

“That is my case. This is my appeal. Many may deny its validity if they choose, but no one can brush aside or answer the arguments upon which it is based. The executive tasks of this war rest upon me. I ask that you lighten them and place in my hands instruments, spiritual instruments which I do not now possess, which I sorely need, and which I have daily to apologize for not being able to employ.” 1

To me those words were the most impassioned that I had ever heard the President utter and it seemed impossible that they could be spoken in vain.

Perhaps if the vote had been taken immediately, the result might have been different. But as soon as the President left the Chamber, Senator Underwood of Alabama, easily the ablest of our opponents, started on a long speech to refute the war argument and to rattle once more the dry bones of the State rights and negro objections. Senator Smith of South Carolina followed with a re-statement of those same objections. Then Senator Knox, of Pennsylvania, and Senator Borah, of Idaho, seized the opportunity of a large audience in the gallery to enter into an extended discussion of the proper sources of revenue. Meanwhile the leaders of the opposition moved about on the floor, finding our whether their forces were still unbroken. Once we noticed the two floor leaders, Lodge, of Massachusetts, and Martin, of Virginia, standing arm in arm at the back of the Chamber and comparing notes. After that view, Mrs. Catt habitually spoke of them as “the unholy alliance.”

When Borah sat down, a speech in favor of the Amendment was made by Senator Kendrick of Wyoming and one against it by 245231Senator Bankhead of Alabama. Then Senator Frelinghuysen spoke again about his amendment to our resolution. So the afternoon dragged on. I felt as if I were at a funeral service, waiting for the arrival of the officiating clergyman.

After adjournment I went down to see as many of our friends as possible and to ask whether they knew of any votes that had been changed by the President's speech. They feared that none had been.

For the next day, October 1st, there was little left but the interment, for the time being, of our joint resolution. But first, Senator Williams’ amendment to limit suffrage to white women was defeated by a vote of 61 to 22; and Senator Frelinghuysen's, providing that only native born or naturalized citizens should vote in national elections, by 53 to 33. Then Senator Fletcher of Florida presented a new amendment so absurd in its effort to emasculate our provisions that it was laid on the table by a vote of 63 to 17.

Finally came the vote on the joint resolution itself, 54 in favor to 30 against, or, including pairs, 62 in favor to 34 against. Every senator was either or paired. Not a shred of doubt was left about the stand of any of them, and we had lost by two. The President's noble appeal had not changed a single vote.

Analyzed by parties and including pairs, the vote was:

At the previous vote in 1914, the total by actual vote was: Yes, 35; no, 34; not voting 27 But with pairs and announcements of stand included, they were Yes, 46; no, 47; not voting 3

At least we had gained 16 en that vote. And 7 of the favorable votes in 1918 were cast by men who had voted or paired against the Amendment in 1914. Moreover, 10 of our additional votes came from the senators of 7 states in which there had been suffrage victories in 1917; 2 from Arkansas, 2 from Indiana, 2 from Rode Island, and one each from North Dakota, New York, Oklahoma and Texas.

Without the State campaigns which Mrs. Catt had urged, our gain in the four years would have been only a third of what it actually was.

The moment the session was over, Mrs. Gardener, Miss Hay and I, with heads held as high as we could get them, went down to thank our friends as they came out of the Senate Chamber. And the next morning, though Mrs. Catt was more disappointed and upset than I ever knew her to be about anything else, I persuaded her to go up to the Senate and consult our supporters about the next move, just as if nothing untoward had happened.

As we waited for the elevator in the Office Building she looked so downcast that I made an effort to cheer her up. “We've got to act like merry sunshine, no matter what we think,” I said, “for we can't afford to have anybody know that we feel beaten.” Her response was such a dejected effort to look gay that I have often laughed at the remembrance of it. And never again could we persuade her to come down to Washington when a vote was to be taken, not even when we felt sure of victory. What she always replied was that since she could do nothing, it was a useless torment to sit in the gallery, listening to anti speeches and trying to follow roll calls.

Dr. Shaw took her revenge in a famous bon mot about the 247233Senate, which she introduced into her speeches for months after our unsuccessful vote. “When I sit in the gallery of the Senate and look down on the senators,” she would remark, with a twinkle in her eye, “ I know And I don't have to sit in the gallery to look down on them.”

We went in a delegation to thank the President for his help and were received in the Blue Room. In replying to Mrs. Catt's words of appreciation he dwelt on his regret that his efforts had not brought victory. “I am convinced,” he went on, “that future generations will condemn the thirty-four men who voted against the Amendment yesterday.” Suddenly I realized that he was seeing himself, as well as the obdurate Senators, in history.

Our next battle ground was chosen the day after our defeat. Since we knew that everything possible had been done to win over each and all of the 34 opposed senators, it was obvious that we should be forced to get our additional votes from new members of the Senate. That meant that we should have to plan and carry on campaigns to defeat at least two of the men who had voted against us and who were coming up for re-election on November 5th. Only five weeks were left before that date. We had to act quickly.

As a non-partisan organization, we knew that we must oppose men of both major parties. The choice fell on Republican Senators Weeks, of Massachusetts, and Democratic Senator Saulsbury, of Delaware, each of them from a State in which two senators of the same party had voted against the Amendment.

But, as success was by no means sure in either of these cases, two other men were opposed by our National Board, Senator Baird of New Jersey and the Republican nominee in New Hampshire George W. Moses, who, although he had not been in the Senate to vote against us in October, was known to be unfavorable to the Amendment. Against these last two opponents, the Women's Party also launched an attack.

In Massachusetts, Senator Weeks, held by the Republicans to be impregnable, was opposed by Governor David I. Walsh, who had declared himself in favor of the Suffrage Amendment. The campaign, which was organized, not in support of Walsh, but against Weeks, was carried on, with some financial assistance from the 249235National Suffrage Association, by a remarkable group of Massachusetts women, who called themselves the Non-Partisan Suffrage Committee. Their Chairman was Mrs. Oakes Ames, granddaughter of one Republican governor of Massachusetts and daughter-in-law of another. The committee also included Miss Alice Stone Blackwell and seven other women who were representative of all political faiths and of wide and varying interests.

This committee made extensive use of a flier which was prepared by two of its members, Mrs. Teresa A. Crowley, a Boston lawyer, and Mrs. Lewis Johnson, Officers of the Democratic National Committee told me it was the best campaign document they had ever seen for it gave Senator Weeks's reactionary vote in the Congress on thirteen measures, including the Suffrage Amendment, with page references to the Congressional Record to prove the statements. This flier was posted to all the registered Republican and Progressive voters in the State and sent out to a picked list of thirty-five thousand suffrage women, with a special letter appealing to each of them “as a woman denied political self-expression by the ballot, to get at least one vote, through a voter in your family or among your friends, against Senator Weeks in the forthcoming election.”

Special campaigns among the suffragists of their own faith were organized by the Catholic and Jewish women on the Committee and a flier giving Week's record on labor legislation was distributed by trade union women who toured the State in three groups, speaking from automobiles in all the large cities and industrial centres.

In anticipation that the Senator might attempt to deny some of the statements in the flier s , a signed guarantee of their 250236accuracy was secured from the editor of “The Searchlight on Congress” and, when the denial came, that guarantee was printed along with the facts given in the flier, in sixteen of the largest newspapers in the State just before the election.

It was a colossal undertaking in view of the short time and small funds which the Non-Partisan Committee had for the work; but it was carried through with perfection of detail for which the genius for organization of Mrs. Wenona Osborne Pinkham was largely responsible.

In Delaware a still shorter time was available because Dr. Ball, who was opposing Senator Saulsbury, could not be induced to give a definite pledge to vote for the Amendment until about a fortnight before the election; and we were unwilling to start in on the campaign without that assurance. But on the afternoon of the day that Senator Curtis told me he had the pledge locked in his safe, two members of our committee in Washington, Miss Mabel Willard and Mrs. Horace Stilwell, went to Delaware to set the suffragists there at work against Saulsbury. Miss Willard, who had given the two hottest months of the preceding summer to getting a Delaware petition, with II, III signatures, asking the senators to vote for the Amendment, was familiar with the State and quickly organized a series of meetings at factory gates, with Miss Hannah Black, an eloquent young munitions worker, as chief speaker. At the same time Mrs. Stilwell started a campaign against Saulsbury among the women of Delaware. If he had had no other opposition, we should have felt that such last minute efforts were bound to be wasted; but, in view of strong State interests that were against him, there seemed to us to be a chance that our workers might contirbute enough to make an adverse majority, even if only a tiny one.

In New Hampshire and New Jersey the campaigns were carried on under the direction of our New York headquarters and largely by means of meetings. Meanwhile, we at Suffrage House had constant requests for bits of information or help to be asked of Washington officials, not only in the four States in which our Association was trying to defeat candidates for the Senate, but also in four other States, South Dakota, Michigan, Louisiana and Oklahoma , in which State constitutional amendments for woman suffrage were to be voted on , November 5th. Up to the night before election we were kept busy trying to meet those requests effectively and, for Oklahoma, we succeeded in getting a much desired letter from the President, which proved to be of real assistance there.

In addition to this work, we had to keep after our workers in every State to make sure that the business of interviewing candidates for election to the Congress, House as well as Senate, was carefully attended to. Directions for the interviews were given in a bulletin sent out by Mrs. Catt at the time when work of any kind was extraordinarily difficult because of the wide spread epidemic of influenza.

October 18, 1918

“SUBJECT: CONGRESSIONAL INTERVIEWS

These are sad times for the whole world, grown unexpectedly sadder by the sudden and sweeping epidemic of Influenza. This new affliction is bringing sorrow into many suffrage homes and is presenting a serious new obstacle in our Referendum campaigns and in the Congressional and Senatorial campaigns, carefully planned and under way in several states.

We must therefore be prepared for failure to secure the needed Senatorial votes, for only through careful preparation can quick and successful action in the next Congress be possible. Therefore we implore you (if you have not already done so) to interview, in person if possible, all candidates for the House of Representatives and for the Senate, unless their sentiments are unalterably for the Federal Suffrage Amendment and well known. (Of course only one-third of the states have 252238Senatorial elections.)

Democrats and Republicans are striving hard to secure control of Congress, and both are expecting surprising results. As either may be right it is important to know the sentiment of the candidate opposing the one you feel certain is to win.

The question to be asked is this: Will you vote for the Federal Suffrage Amendment, if elected, provided that Amendment has not already been submitted to the Legislatures of the several states?

It is necessary that a very definite reply be obtained if favorable, and that it be in writing if possible. Such a statement may be withheld from publicity until after election if the candidate prefers. If the candidate is doubtful, do not drive him to positive opposition. In the event an opposed candidate is elected begin at once a campaign for his conversion.

Send an immediate and a duplicate report to the New York and Washington offices of Congressmen and Senators ELECTED together with their records on suffrage. If we are able to show conclusively that the Sixty-sixth Congress will surely submit the amendment, the Sixty-fifth Senate will more readily find the single vote which we believe is now needed.

Please understand that we are not discouraged over the possibility of getting the amendment through before Christmas, but we must provide for every emergency.

Our great cause has reached its zenith but clouds rest on the heights and we are passing through them now. The sunshine is just ahead. Let us make haste to reach it.

It is may earnest prayer that you and yours may be spared the sorrow now visiting many homes. God grant us all courage and strength.”

As fast as reports of the interviews called for in that bulletin came to our Washington office, they were tabulated for the records of the 66th Congress, which we already had under way.

Fortunately, though most of us at Suffrage House were stricken by influenza, no one was seriously ill. But we were constantly saddened by reports from the city where lodgings of many of the new government workers, with sometimes three or four ill in one room, furthered the spread of the epidemic and taxed every 253239resource of overworked doctors. The numbers of nurses was so inadequate to the need that volunteers were called for and of the residents at Suffrage House, Miss Alice Priest , courageously offered her services, though wholly untrained in nursing. She was sent to a family in Georgetown where she performed all the duties of a night nurse for several persons and, happily, was not infected herself, in spite of having only the usual gauze mask as protection against germs. I used to marvel at her endurance as I saw her starting off, evening after evening.

Mrs. Catt, on one of her visits to Washington, had to take to her bed. By the time that she recovered enough to sit up in her room, she was so anxious for a conference with Senator Walsh , of Montana , that I asked him to come to the house. When he arrived and found that he would have to climb two flights of stairs to see her, he said that it was impossible for him to do so, because he was still weak himself after severe illness.

I had to leave him in our little Pompadourish “powder-room” on the first floor—his ascetic, melancholy face, with its drooping moustache , an incongruous sight against the gilding and brocade there—while I ran up and down stairs, like a wingless and tired messenger of the gods, bearing Mrs. Catt's questions and his replies.

The unprecedented cold of that winter, which began early, added to our discomforts. Our stenographers shivered in the offices and our household in bedrooms which could not be made comfortable in spite of seventy-six tons of coal consumed by our furnaces in a few months. Evenings our family huddled about a register in the small dining-room, with the icy temperature of the larger rooms cut of as much as possible by portieres. After the defeat of October 254240first, we could hardly have felt cheerful under the best of circumstances and with the discomforts indoors and tragedies outside, our gloom was inescapable.

On the morning of election day I went up to New York, where we began to get election returns in the early evening. At first the news that a considerable majority was piling up against Weeks in Massachusetts seemed too good to be true; but the report continued until the morning papers went to press and we read the confirmation in the first edition. Senator Saulsbury's defeat was also announced and by a margin so sorrow that we felt confident the efforts of our own workers had made the difference.

From New Hampshire and New Jersey the reports were disheartening, for Moses and Baird had been elected, though by a majority less than normal in both cases. But, happily for us, Baird was chosen only for the balance of the term of Senator Hughes, which would end with the close of the short session, and the successful candidate for the 66th Congress, Walter Edge, was, as we know, pledged to the Amendment. So, although we had gained nothing from New Jersey for the immediate future, we were able to count on another vote from there in the new Congress. And we needed that vote to offset the loss of Senator Vardaman, who was to be replaced in the 66th Congress by Representative Pat Harrison, one of our opponents on the House Rules Committee and in the House vote. In every other case in which we had lost a friend, the place was to be filled by someone known to be in favor of the Amendment. In short, our Senate poll for the 66th Congress showed that, with the defeat of Weeks and Saulsbury, we had 64 votes pledges. Unless death or the breaking of promises intervened, we were assured of victory in the next Senate.

But there was also the next House to be thought of, and I hurriedly compared such returns as the morning papers gave with the tabulation of candidates which I had brought from Washington. Even with incomplete reports, I found enough to make me certain of a large increase in the number of our supporters in the House of the new Congress. Not since our House vote ten months before had I been so happy.

However, those fine prospects concerned the new Congress and there was still a session of the old one before us. For that, too, we had one piece of good news. It came, strangely enough, from South Carolina, where the election illustrated the possible threefold change in Senate membership when a senator dies in office , as Senator Tillman had done. His immediate successor, Senator Benet, the young men who had disappointed us in October, had been named by the governor to sit only until the election, when two terms were to be provided for; the unexpired balance of Senator Tillman's term and the regular new term. For the former period, the duration of the short session, the senator-elect was William P. Pollock, and he was reported from the State as being warmly in favor of the Amendment, though the man elected to the Senate of the 66th Congress, Cole Blease, was a virulent opponent. Pollock's vote could therefore help us only in the remainder of the 65th Congress; but it would give us one of the two votes needed in the short session.

There was still another reason for rejoicing after that November election, for in three States, Michigan, South Dakota and Oklahoma, the State suffrage amendments had been carried. Mrs. Catt's plan had brought success again, and our mercury of electoral votes, which had risen from 217 to 237 with the Texas victory, made 256242a new jump to 267.

By the time my breakfast was eaten that morning, I had made up my mind that instead of going on to Boston for a few days of rest, as I had planned to do, I would return immediately to Washington in the hope of making Democratic leaders realize how idiotic it would be, in view of the fact that the Republicans had won a majority of seats in both Houses of the next Congress, to let the Amendment be defeated for lack of one vote in the last session of Democratic control. I had seen so much of party rivalry that, with the assurance of enough votes to pass the Amendment in the new Congress, I could not believe the Democrats would let their last chance of getting credit for the enfranchisement of women go by the board.

The conference of Democratic Senators with whom I met the following day agreed with me as soon as they saw my poll of the 66th Congress, and they promised to set to work immediately to get one more vote on the Democratic side of the Senate. For weeks I was jubilant in the thought that our task would certainly be completed before March 4th.

Then, with the coming of the Armistice the whole world seemed full of sunshine. I was in New York for a Board Meeting on the day the city went mad over the false first report and, like everyone else I expended my utmost enthusiasm then, so that I found it hard to be equally excited when the authentic news arrived, though I caught myself again and again humming, “Mine eyes have seen the glor ing y of the coming of the Lord.”

For weeks the only clouds on our horizon were due to our sorrow over the defeat in the election of two of our best friends, Senator Shafroth and Representative Keating. They had both been 257243prevented from making an active campaign by the official ban on all public gatherings in Colorado because of the prevalence of influenza there. Senator Shafroth, who had refused to leave Washington so long as the Congress was in session, had been counting on a whirlwind tour of the State to present his case in the kind of informal speeches at which he was adopt: and meanwhile his opponent, a man of great wealth, had been steadily on the job, winning friends by large gifts to war work and other charities. “It had to come some day,” said Senator Shafroth cheerfully, when he returned to Washington. “I've had a good many years of public service and I ought not to complain if my State wants a change.” But we knew that he was more deeply hurt than he would admit.

Mr. Keating had been attacked by the other side as lacking in patriotism because of his vote against the declaration of war. And though Mrs. Gardener succeeded in getting a statement of confidence in him from the President, to be used in the press, it did not overcome the prejudice that the charges of his opponents had aroused.

I had learned by that time that the men who worked for our cause because they understood its essential justice were few, and I wanted every one of them to be in the Congress when we won.

Our preparation for the short session called for a chain of mass meetings of war workers all over the country, from which appeals for the Amendment might be sent to the Senate. The first of these meetings was held in a theatre in Washington with Mrs. Catt in the chair and for speakers;

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Chairman Woman's Committee, National Council of Defense,

Long before the hour to begin, hundreds were turned away from the theatre for lack of room and an overflow meeting was therefore arranged in the street in front of the building. At both the indoor and outdoor meetings a strong resolution calling for the submission of the Amendment was enthusiastically adopted, and a copy of which was later sent with a letter to each Senator.

Another thing that we did in preparation for the short session was to start a new kind of letter-writing campaign. As I explained in my directions to our State Congressional chairmen, “During the past year our plan has been for the women of each State to write only to the Representatives and Senators from that State. Now we wish to make a change, because at the time of the vote in October, antis made a great impression upon some senators by sending them letters from all over the country. Will you help with such a bombardment?——The letter should begin to come in on December 2nd and should continue until a vote is taken on the Amendment. Letters from organizations may be written on official paper, but a great number, typed or written in longhand, should be sent by individual men and women.” I added the names of Senators to whom the letters should be addressed.

By the first week in December, when the old Congress convened, it seemed to me that everyone in the United States knew that we were just one vote short. But no one except ourselves appeared to realize how hard it was to get that one.

I remember an instance that particularly exasperated me because it happened on a day when I had received a series of unfavorable reports from men who were trying to help us. When I went back to Suffrage House that afternoon, I found a young woman waiting for me with a letter of Introduction from someone in New York.

“I came,” she blithely explained, “because they say you are a successful lobbyist and I thought I'd like to be with you when you crack some tough old nut of a senator to get that last vote.”

I was too annoyed to be polite. “Young lady,” I said, “63 senators, both national party committees, Cabinet members and the President of the United States have thus far been unable to get that one vote. If I knew how to do it, do you suppose I would have waited for you to go with me?”

Another and more preposterous incident was due to a woman who sometimes came to our meetings at Suffrage House, wearing a military cap and cape, both gold-braided. When I has inquired who she was and why she wore that costume I was told that she was a dressmaker in Washington and that she claimed to be president of an organization called the Daughters of Democracy, but, so far as my informant knew, the woman herself was the only member.

It was that erratic person who called me by telephone one evening to explain that she had a plan which would undoubtedly bring us the one vote needed and probably a good many more. She prefaced her account with the statement that we had made a great mistake in not appealing more to the emotions of the senators, particularly to their love of beauty. Then she went at great length into the details of her plan.

Her idea was to have 96 wreaths, one for each senator, 260246made of green leaves, with long streamers of purple ribbon. On those for the 63 favorable senators, the ribbons were to be lettered in gold with the words. “Son of Democracy.” On Saturday of the following week a wreath was to be placed on every senatorial desk and with it a bouquet of roses. In the bouquets for the opposed senators, one rose was to be covered with a cap of black paper. When the Saturday session began, so the woman said, she intended to have one of the friendly senators, probably Senator Sheppard, escort her to the floor of the Senate. There she meant to make an address, after Senator Smoot had led in the singing of two songs, the words of which she had written and which she would have typed for distribution.

She wished our Congressional Committee to share in this great plan to the extent of sitting in the gallery, dressed in our prettiest clothes, and with flowers in our arms. She was certain that, after the music and her speech, the hearts of the obdurate senators would be so deeply moved that when she asked them to put the wreaths on their heads and stand, with the bouquets in their hands, one of them—she thought Senator Brandegee—would be sure to rise and say that he wanted to take the cap off his rose, because he intended to vote for the Amendment. She was also sure that some other opponent would then ask, “Why not make it unanimous?” Thereupon, she believed, all the senators would rise and unanimously pass the Amendment.

When I was able to get my breath and a sufficient let-up of here to make a remark, I ventured to say that the Senate rules would not permit her to appear on the floor during a session. But that objection did not seem to her a serious one, for she was convinced that she could persuade the senators to adjourn to the great 261247portico, where the ceremonies might easily be carried out.

I made as many other reasonable replies as my patience allowed, only to be told that the trouble with me was that I had no instinct for beauty and no understanding of publicity. While I was gasping over the truth of the second accusation, she went on to say that the Woman's Party, whose members did have a publicity sense, would jump with delight if she were to make them the same request that she had made to me; but that she hesitated to do so because they would be sure to like the idea so much that they would claim it as their own.

When I refused, as flatly as possible, to have anything to do with the plan, she was so determined to win me over that finally I had to hand up the receiver while she was still talking. As it was, we had conversed for fifty minutes.

During the next week she was frequently at the Senate Office Building, trying to make her arrangements. To my horror. I was asked again and again by senators or their secretaries whether she was connected with our organization. One noon when Mrs. Cunningham joined me for luncheon in the Senate restaurant, she was choking with laughter over the apprehensions of Senator Sheppard, who had consulted her about the best way to make the woman let him alone. Someone told us afterwards that when he was telling his fears to a group in the Senate coat-room, one of the men asked, “What on earth are you afraid of?”

To which Sheppard replied, “Why she might get me into a corner!”

“Well,” said the other Senator, “you could scream, you know.”

On the day before the fateful Saturday, in spite of important 262248business, the Senate adjourned until Monday, and several of the press gallery men told us that the woman who wanted the senators to wear wreaths was the real cause of the adjournment over Saturday.

Even that unexpected disaster did not wholly discourage the poor creature. When I went to Senator Smoot's office early Saturday morning, I found that blonde boy who was one of his secretaries busily at work on some crazy verses which she had left to be typed and which she intended to have sung by the Senate, with Senator Smoot leading, to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.”

Later that morning I saw her in one of the corridors and tried to avoid a meeting; but she spied me and hurried up to ask whether Senator Chamberlain was a suffragist or an anti, because she wanted to leave a wreath in his office and she was not sure whether it ought to be one of those with the inscription “Son of Democracy” or not. She was carrying a huge package of wreaths beautifully made of glossy, dark green leaves with streamers of expensive purple satin ribbon. Altogether they must have cost a pretty penny. So far as I heard she did nothing that day except to leave the wreaths in the various offices. She must have become convinced at last that her plan was not workable, for she made no further attempt to carry it out.

The following week, when I noticed one of the wreaths hanging over a picture in the office of a friendly Senator, he obligingly tried it on to show me that it was far too small for a senatorial head. Then he told me what had happened in his case the previous Saturday morning.

It seemed that one of his close friends, who had entered 263249through the outer office, broke into his private office and exclaime d ing , “Say, did you know there's a dame with a wreath waiting for you out there?”

The senator was so appalled at the announcement that, with a warning finger on his lips, he tiptoed out of the other door of the private office and fled to the capitol, whence he telephoned to his secretary to bring over his coat and hat. As soon as they came, he hurried to his motor car and drove out to his country place in Maryland for the rest of the day.

After that recital, I concluded that if the Senate could not be converted by the love of beauty it could certainly be terrified into inaction by the fear of being made ridiculous.

But we still needed one more vote in the short session.

On the eve of sailing for the Peace Conference at Versailles, President Wilson, in his address to a joint session of the Congress, made another spirited appeal for the passage of the Suffrage Amendment. With that encouragement, it seemed to us that the Democrats would certainly find some way of getting one more vote.

The political advisability of their doing so while they were still in control of the Congress was put up to them by Democratic women in a resume of the situation which pointed out:

“1. The present status of woman suffrage. 15 full suffrage states and 6 states which have presidential or primary suffrage. In Arkansas and Texas primary suffrage is equivalent to full suffrage, that is the primary really decides the subsequent election. There are 213 267 votes in the Electoral College from these states. Large numbers of women will vote for president in these states in 1920.

Meanwhile Mrs. Catt and the New York office went to work on what appeared to be a Republican possibility. Soon after election Senator Moses, who, like Senator Pollock, was chosen to will a vacancy and therefore took his seat in the short session, have one of our Republican women to understand that he would support Amendment if a resolution in favor of it were passed by the New Hampshire legislature. As the legislature did not convene until January, our Association sent three organizers to join with the New Hampshire women in a canvas of the 426 members-elect at their homes. In that way the signatures of two-thirds of the total number were secured to a petition asking Senator Moses to vote for the Amendment. The petition was then taken to him in Washington 266252by a deputation of New Hampshire women, who reminded him that a resolution from the legislature could be passed by a bare majority, whereas they were presenting a request from two-thirds of the membership. In spite of that argument, Senator Moses replied that the petition did not take the place of a resolution and that he would not vote for the Amendment unless action in favor of it were taken by the legislature itself. By that time December was nearly over and there was nothing to do in his case except to wait for the legislature to convene. When it met, the first week in January, a public hearing before both Houses was granted to the suffragists, and the House of Representative promptly passed the resolution. During the week-end adjournment, State Senators were seen again by the suffragists and a majority for the resolution was promised. But when it came up in the Senate, it was defeated by the vote of several senators who broke their agreement to support it , after Senator Moses had made a hasty trip to New Hampshire. Presumably, when the House passed the resolution, he decided to have it blocked in the Senate, despite what he had said to our women.

Our hopes were vitalized again by the granting early in 919 of presidential suffrage for women in Wisconsin and Vermont, and for the second time in Indiana, where a question of constitutionality in the previous law made another necessary. Though the Governor of Vermont vetoed the act in that State, we had the prestige of favorable action by the legislative branch of the State government. And twenty-three State legislatures encouraged us during January by the adoption of resolutions asking the Congress to submit the Amendment.

All this time the Democratic Senators most active in our 267253behalf were doing their best for us. The man they had most hope of was Senator Trammell , of Florida. The likelihood of his coming over to our side was tied up, after a fashion, with the question of Democratic leadership in the Senate. The western Democrats wanted to have Senator Robinson, of Arkansas, for floor leader, in place of the elderly and conservative Senator Martin, of Virginia. If they succeeded in making the change they would be in a position to give Senator Trammell a place on a committee of which he was anxious to be a member for reasons of business advantage to some of his constituents. Once, after midnight, a Democratic Senator telephoned me to say that he thought I would not mind being called so late when he told me the good news that Senator Trammell had attended the conference of our friend that evening and they thought they could count on his support. But when a vote against Senator Martin, that they had expected, was withdrawn, and he was re-nominated floor leader, Senator Trammell told them that the other side had promised him the committee place if the stayed with them. Still Senator Pollock, whose enthusiasm for our cause, particularly in a man from South Carolina, cheered us amazingly, felt sure that he would be able to persuade Trammell to take the progressive rather than the conservative side.

Two women who had not been in Washington long were sure that they had prevailed upon another Democrat, Senator Overman of North Carolina, to change over to side. For those of us who had worked steadily on the lobby, a similar conviction on the part of every woman who talked with him for the first time had come to be a joke. He was one of those old bucks with ruddy cheeks, white hair and a conspicuous paunch , who think themselves lady-killers and he could not resist the temptation to appear gallant, if only 268254with suffragists. Even the astute Mrs. Trout was once misled by his florid generalities. His political opinions were all formed for him by his colleague, a far abler man and a strong opponent of ours; but up to the last minute of every vote on the Amendment, some one of our group always expected to hear an “ay” from her recent convert, the senior S s enator from north Carolina.

Mrs. Gardener it was who put her finger on the real reason why argument about party welfare moved some of the senators from one-party States. “The trouble is,” she told me, “those men have no opposition at home from other party, but they have plenty of trouble getting jobs enough for their supporters and when their party is not in power in Washington they can say that the Republicans control all the appointments.”

Incidentally, that was a first-rate argument against the spoils system in public office; but for the politicians, to whom personal advantage loomed larger than party principles and national well-being, it offered a convenient alibi.

Early in january we had a scare on the Republican side. The Senators from a northwestern State, one of them a long time in the Senate, the other, new, and both counted on to vote for the Amendment, were reported to be wobbling because of unwise pressure from a group of women in their State. The older man, who had voted for the Amendment in 1914, was said to be particularly indignant that his stand was not understood or appreciated. I did not dare to ask either of them what he meat to do for fear that such an inquiry would only add fuel to the flame. So I hit upon the device of going to each of them to ask for help with the other.

“I have heard a rumor,” I explained to the senior Senator, “that Senator B is not so favorable to the Amendment as he has 269256been in the last. Of course I don't give much credence to it, but I should feel a little easier if you would talk with when you have an opportunity, For I am sure opinion will have great weight with him.”

“Probably those damned women got after him the way they did after me. They make me so mad that if I didn't believe in the justice of woman suffrage, I'd vote against the Amendment myself, just to spite them. But I'll talk to Senator B when I get a chance,” was the reply.

I went away reassured about him, for I knew that he was a square-dealing old gentleman who would not let me think he was helping us if he intended to vote “no”. But I was by no means sure of his colleague, with whom, a few days later, I found a pretext for my call in our possible need of a favorable senator to complete a pair.

“I should like to have your opinion about the advisability of asking Senator A to pair for the Amendment,” I said to Senator B. “I know that some of the senators don't like to give a pair for fear that it may not be understood by their constituents.”

“Perhaps you'd better not ask him,” Senator B advised. “We had a talk about the Amendment only a day on two ago and he's a little touchy about the way people don't seem to knew that he has always been in favor. If you can't get anyone else, you might let me know and perhaps I will do it myself.”

When he made that offer I knew that we had no need to worry about him. Next to the joy of winning a vote, was the satisfaction of finding that we had not lost one.

Even at the Peace Conference, the President was not unmindful 270257mindful of the Amendment. We knew that he called more than once to senators whom he considered strong friends in all other matters to urge them to give us the vote necessary. Copies of his messages were supplied to Mrs. Gardener by one of the White House secretaries, so that our Congressional Committee might be kept in touch with the efforts that were being made. One new vote was assured in this way, that of Senator-elect Harris of Georgia. But he was not to take his seat until the 66th Congress met and was therefore of no help to us in the last session of the 65th.

When January had gone by without the longed for promise of another supporter, our friends came to the conclusion that further delay might jeopardize our chance of action by the Senate before final adjournment. So, at a meeting of the Woman Suffrage Committee on February 3rd, the members voted unanimously to bring up the Amendment a week later.

Then, on petition of 22 Democratic senators who hoped to get a party endorsement, a Democratic caucus about woman suffrage was held on February 5th. On a resolution recommending Democratic senators to support the Amendment, 22 voted in the affirmative and ten in the negative. But, instead of declaring the resolution adopted, Senator Martin of Virginia, who was in the chair, permitted the ten opponents to withdraw their votes so that he would be able to claim that, since a quorum of party members had not voted, the resolution was lost. Against that unfair decision our friends protested without avail.

On Sunday, February 9th, the day before the Amendment was to be brought up in the Senate, The Woman's Party held a demonstration in one of the public squares in Washington. They had intended to burn the President effigy, but the police got wind of the 271258plan and stopped them. However, they had sent but an advance notice to the press and the story of what they had planned to do was in the morning papers on February 10th. That such an insult to the official head of our government should have been contemplated, particularly while he was representing the United States in a foreign land, was shocking to all friends of the President and to many of his political opponents as well. When I went to the Capitol that morning Senator Jones told me that he considered our last chance had gone, for Senator Williams, to whom the President had appealed several times by cable, was telling everyone that not even the President himself could persuade him to support a cause advocated by such outrageous methods.

Nevertheless, the usual last minute errands had to be attended to; checking the poll with Senator Sheppard, who was looking after the pairs for us in Senator Hollis's absence, and making sure that Senator Ashurst would be in his place to answer “ay” on the first roll-call. The precaution I had learned to take because his name was followed by the names of five opponents in the B's; Bankhead, Baird, Beckham, Borah and Brandegee; and so many noes in succession might have a discouraging effect upon possibly doubtful members who did not want to vote for a lost cause. Mrs. Gardener, too, had a special duty which I never entrusted to anyone else. It was to see that Senator Owen, who was the hardest man in the entire Senate to find, was on hand at the roll-call. Even Helen Gardener never succeeded in discovering the whereabouts of his Capitol office, but she did get the private telephone number that belonged to it and by that means managed to reach him sometimes when he was not on the floor; though she nearly had heart-failure once when there was no reply to the telephone and the senator did 272259not appear until the tail end of the last call.

The session began that morning at eleven and as soon as the morning business was completed Senator Jones brought up our resolution. The first to speak was Senator Pollock and his interpretation of the State rights argument was so new and his courage so great they almost reconciled me to our disappointment.

1 “Mr. President, and gentlemen of the Senate,” he began, when the representatives of the people are called upon to decide a momentous issue upon which their constituents are greatly divided, and to grant or refuse a right to which it is claimed the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind requires that they should declare the cause which impels them to their course. Let this be my excuse and apology for consuming a little of the time of this greatest of all deliberative bodies.

——“The members of this body have been referred to as Senators of certain states, but no student of our Constitution could for a moment claim that any Senator is a Senator of a particular State. On the contrary, he is a Senator from a certain State to the United States of America. As a Senator coming from South Carolina, one of the original thirteen colonies,——I want to say that we of South Carolina are happy and rejoiced that we were not permitted to remain out of the Union——We have long since ceased to regret that in the Providence of God we were not permitted to set up a separate government of our own. My father, my kindred and my countrymen forgot for that two years, but the Constitution of the United States was amended at Appomattox when Lee tendered his sword to Grant,——

“From that day the greatest of all State rights was destroyed, the States in their separate sovereignty ceased to exist; and now we have a nation—instead of forty-eight independent and separate states.——

“In approaching a discussion of this resolution, it seems to me that two considerations must of necessity enter—the one of principle and the other of expediency. Principles are eternal, expedients are temporary.

“I hold with Thomas Jefferson, that all men are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights”. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the 273260governed.——I hold, sir, that our present form of government has denied to woman the liberty to which she is entitled, the right to have a voice in her government.

“What could give to any citizen of a country a right to vote except a stake in that country? Who could have a greater stake in a country than a wife, a mother, a mistress of a home?——

“For more than 140 years in America we have had freedom and liberty for half our people, and we have had patient and uncomplaining slavery for the other half. For nearly a century and a half we have had democracy for one-half our people, tyranny for the other, and I say, sir, today that this nation cannot and will not endorse forever one-half free and the other serf.——

“When a respectable portion of the American people ask that the question of amending the Constitution of the United States be submitted to the States for their approval or disapproval, it is a denial of State rights to refuse to let the States, through their legislatures, act.——And surely no one will say that the right of any one State should be greater than the right expressly conferred upon them further by the States acting jointly.——

“Sir, I come from the South. I come from a state that has a majority of negro population. Some men have said that they do not want to anything in the South. I tell you, speaking for the New South, speaking for the real South, speaking for the American South, we want this prestige. We feel that the women are entitled to it, and we know that we can handle any race question that comes up in this enlightened age.

“Mr. President, when the resolution was last before the Senate of the United States, it needed but two votes to pass it. Since then it has been my fortune to come here. It is now my privilege, my pleasure, to present to the womanhood of America one-half of all the votes that were needed when the joint resolution was here before. I do not know what changes there may have been, but I do know that if all those who voted for the joint resolution when it was here before shall vote for it again today, when that vote is supplemented by my vote the women of America can need but one vote today. So the responsibility is placed squarely up to every Senator in this body who may vote ‘nay’. Each man has this whole responsibility resting upon him.——

“Let me call this further to the attention of the Senate. The Republicans are converted to the principle. The Democrats are committed. The two great National Conventions have put it in their platforms. It is just a question now of the method by which you will get it.

“Let me tell you that no man will be nominated for the Presidency who is not an advocate of Woman Suffrage. Let me tell you that neither Convention of either party would dare fail to place in its platform when it meets in convention next year a plank calling for the passage of the joint resolution. Everybody will be for it when the next conventions meet. You will be bound to vote for it then whether you will or not.

“Let me tell you, you may defeat it today, but you only postpone it. You may postpone it for a few months, it may be possibly for a year, but this Congress, as it is gradually dying, has the opportunity to make itself immortal.I f you do not pass the joint resolution, this incoming Congress will pass it.

“I beg, Senators, when only one vote is needed, not to turn deaf ears to 50,000,000 of people. It is too late for any man belonging to either party to doubt the wisdom of women voting. We are all committed to it. It is coming; it is here. I believe, Mr. President that the joint resolution is going to pass today, and this Senate will go down to history forever, more on account of that than on account of any other thing that if may have done during its time.”

The Senate had heard a great speech. We knew that we had another heroic friend. But not a single opponent wavered.

A brief address from Senator Calder, a longer one from Senator Frelinghuysen, and then a short statement from Senator Gay, who had succeeded Senator Guion, the interim appointee from Louisiana, and who wanted to explain that he was a strong advocate of woman suffrage by the State method, though he opposed Federal action,—these made up the total of the other speeches.

The taking of the vote seemed almost perfunctory. When Senator Sherman's name was called, he unfortunately voted “no” when he meant to say “yes” and he had no opportunity to change until the Clerk had gone through the entire roll. If Senator Trammell had any intention of voting for us, I knew that mistake would deter him, for it looked as if one additional vote would not be enough. And when I saw Senator Williams leave his seat and go 275262to stand behind Trammel's chair just before the T's were reached, I did not need to hear Trammell's clear “no” to realize that we had lost by one vote in order that his committee appointment might be secure.

Again every senator was on record by vote or pair. Of the 3 new members, only Senator Pollock had voted differently from his predecessor, so that, with the exception of South Carolina, the line-up by States and by political parties was exactly as it had been on October 10th.

The Democratic opponents had cost their party its last chance to sponsor political justice for women. But, since only one more vote would have saved the Amendment, every one of the 33 senators who had voted “no”, as Senator Pollock had pointed out, took upon himself the responsibility of our defeat. Among those who did so, only 2, Borah and Hitchcock, came from States west of the Mississippi. Of the others 7 were from New England; Hale of Maine, Dillingham of Vermont, Moses of New Hampshire, Lodge and Weeks of Massachusetts, McLean and Brandegee of Connecticut: 7 were from the Middle Atlantic States: Wadsworth of New York, Baird of New Jersey, Penrose and Knox of Pennsylvania, Saulsbury and Wolcott of Delaware, and Smith of Maryland. 15 were from the South: Martin and Swanson of Virginia, Overman and Simmons of North Carolina, Smith of South Carolina, Hardwick and Smith of Georgia, Fletcher and Trammell of Florida, Bankhead and Underwood of Alabama, Williams of Mississippi, Gay of Louisiana, Shields of Tennessee, and Beckham of Kentucky. From the Middle West there were only 2: Pomerene of Ohio and Reed of Missouri.

Once more, as soon as adjournment came, Miss Hay and I went down to thank our friends, with words of special appreciation 276263for Senator Pollock. Them, while Miss Hay went off to the telephone booth to get a message through to Mrs. Catt in New York, I asked Mabel Willard, who had been waiting for me, to let me walk home alone. I needed that good long walk in frosty air to keep me going.

Between February 10th and the end of the Congress on March 4th, several abortive attempts to get favorable action by one device or another were started by Democratic senators. One of them was a new form of the Amendment which Senator Gay introduced after several consultations with one of our women from Louisiana. It gave the states the right to enforce the Amendment, but with the further provision that if they failed to do so, the Congress should have power to enact enforcement legislation. This was a beating of the State rights argument around the bush and had the further merit in the eyes of some Southerners of changing the similarity of form which our Amendment bore to the Fifteenth Amendment, detested by the South. Mr. Raker, on the House side, called a meeting of his committee which reported out this new resolution on March 1st. The Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage took similar action, and the fact that this slightly changed form had a chance of going through was attested by the constant presence, during the closing days, of Senator Weeks or Senator Wadsworth, who spelled each other in order to prevent action in case Senator Gay's resolution reached the floor.

Like the 64th Congress, the 65th ended in a filibuster, carried on, in this instance, by a few Republican Senators who wanted to prevent the passage of necessary appropriation bills in order to force the President to call an early special session of the new Congress.

When the hour for final adjouenment came, at noon on March 4th, Vice-President Marshall made a slight, but significant, change in the announcement used for the concluding session of a Congress. Up to the last two words of the sentence he followed the customary formula, “The hour of twelve noon having arrived, under the Constitution of the United States, I now declare the Senate of the United States adjourned.” But instead of the usual “sine die”, literally, without day s , he wound up with “sine Deo,” without God, a statement which probably described the situation as th is e Administration saw it, and certainly expressed my own feelings.

With the beginning of a new Congress we had to start all over again. Three days after our defeat on February 10th, I sent out a letter to our State Congressional chairmen with an admonition to bury the past decently by thanking the senators from their States who had supported us and by sending special letters from all the States to Senators Shafroth and Pollock, of whom I wrote, “One is an old friend, the other a new one.

“Senator Shafroth has helped us early and late. In the Senate and before that, as a House member, he aided Miss Anthony in the days when he was almost our only friend in the Congress. He has been defeated for the next Senate and his chief regret is that he will not be there to vote for the amendment when it goes through. No word of appreciation can be too strong for his devoted and unselfish service to our cause.

“The new friend is Senator Pollock of South Carolina, who broke away from the accepted custom that a new senator should follow the policy of his colleague during his first year and who fought, not only the senior senator from his own State, but every southern opponent in his own party!”

Then I went on to give directions for the new campaign: “THE NEXT CONGRESS - Our faces must be turned to our new campaign. A special session of the next congress is probable. The general expectation is that one will be called in May. According to State reports we have sufficient votes promised in both Houses to secure the amendment. It is of the utmost importance to confirm the reports immediately. The enemy will leave no stone unturned to pledge men against us.

“WHAT YOU ARE TO DO—It is urgently necessary to get all the members who have not yet given written pledges to vote for us to do so at once. Of course this must be done with tact, but it should be done without delay and without publicity.

“In thanking senators who voted for the amendment and who will return to the 66th Congress, please word you letter so that it will show that you expect their continued support and so that their replies will pledge them to it. The same course should be pursued with re-elected House 279266members who voted for us in January, 1918.

“Enclosed you will find a list of your House members as they appear on our records. Please let us know if you have any different or further information. Please be sure to fill in all blanks with regard to the source of YOUR information about these men.

“Our success in the 66th Congress depends upon the speed and accuracy with which we confirm our pledges. Our enfranchisement has been withheld, but no one can keep from us our courage to fight. It is our inheritance as suffragists. And victory will be ours!

Faithfully yours, Maud Wood Park, Congressional Chairman.”

A special session of the new Congress was called by the President for May 19th. The fact that the Republicans were to be in majority in both Houses made it necessary for us to watch the party elections of floor leaders, and whips and the nominations for membership on the Rules Committee of thee House and the Woman Suffrage Committees there and in the Senate. On the Democratic side few changes were made. Those who had been majority leaders and committee chairmen became, in most cases, the minority party leaders and the ranking minority members on committees. But among the Republicans there were some contests, notably for the Republican nomination, virtually the election, for the important office of Speaker of the House. Mr. Mann, as floor leader in the previous Congress, was the natural choice; but strong opposition to him developed within the party and Mr. Gillette of Massachusetts was finally chosen. We were much concerned about this nomination, for it meant to us the election of a member who had voted against the Amendment in the place of Champ Clark, who had been friendly to it. However, some of our Republican women, anticipating that Mr. Gillette might be nominated, took the precaution of having him seen in advance by a number of prominent Republicans, to whom he 280267gave the assurance that he would put no obstacles in the way of the speedy passage of the Amendment by the House. Mr. Mann declined to be a candidate again for the position of Republican floor leader and he was succeeded by our strong friend, Mr. Mondell of Wyoming.

Sorry as we were that Mr. Mann was not to bee Speaker, we profited in the end by his defeat , for it led him to accept the chairmanship of the Woman Suffrage Committee. We ourselves would not never have dared to suggest his taking on a committee that, in spite of its importance in our eyes, was regarded as one of the minor committees in the organization of the House.

The idea came from Representative Wason of New Hampshire, an old line Republican, who was member of the Republican Committee of Committees, the group that made the Republican nominations for all committee memberships. Years before Mr. Wason had heard Mrs. Catt make in an address before the State Constitutional Convention in New Hampshire and was had been converted by her words. The next year, when I helped to arrange some meetings for Dr. Shaw during the New Hampshire campaign for a State woman suffrage amendment, his name was given me on a list of possible helpers in his home city. I went to see him in his office and found his advice extremely useful. About a fortnight before our vote was to be taken, he told me that I might as well go home and stay there, for we were going to be showed under by the opposition of the Boston and Maine henchmen, who had been notified the day before to send word down the line that the woman suffrage amendment must be defeated. At the moment I did not credit his statement about the political power of the railroad, but when the election came I found that he was right: we were snowed under.

Years later, when I went to see him in Washington, I had forgotten about that experience and, though he seemed somehow familiar, I did not remember for months that I had ever met him before. Then one morning, as I sat facing him in his office, he turned his head in a quick gesture. Suddenly there came to me the look of another office a wooden building in Nashua New Hampshire, and a man who had turned his head in just that way while he was telling me that we were completely licked. As soon as I had the connection, I asked if he had was not been , our helper in the New Hampshire campaign.

“I been waitin’ to see how long it would take you to remember that,” he chuckled. But he bore no grudge on account of my bad memory, though he prided himself on never forgetting a name or a face. In spite of belonging to the Moses faction in State politics, he was a of great assistance to us in Washington. He took Miss Hay and me to see Senator Drew and was deeply disappointed when nothing that we said or that he himself could do prevailed upon the senator to vote for the Amendment.

When the chairmanship of the Woman Suffrage Committee was in doubt, it was Wason to whom I turned for help. If Miss Rankin had still been in the House, she would undoubtedly have been made chairman, for she was the ranking Republican member of the Committee in the previous Congress; but at the November election, she had run, not for the House, but for the Senate, in opposition to Senator Walsh, and had been defeated. We were deeply sorry that she was no longer in the Congress, though we could not regret that Senator Walsh was re-elected: Mr. Mondell, who, as floor leader, did not want the chairmanship, became the ranking Republican on the Committee. The next in order seemed to us undesirable as a 282269chairman, but the only way of getting around the custom which would have given him the position was to have someone who had not been a member of the committee before, but whose standing in the House was sufficiently authoritative to justify a breaking of seniority precedence.

“I'll see what I can do for you,” Mr. Wason replied when I first laid our difficulty before him. The next day, when I went to see him again, he startled me by saying, “What would you say if I was to get Jim Mann to take the chairmanship of the Woman Suffrage Committee?”

“But he'd never do it!” I exclaimed, remembering what a great Mogul Mr. Mann was in the House. “He'd never take the chairmanship of a minor committee like that.”

“I'm not so sure,” Wason said, “He's pretty sore about Gillette's getting the nomination as Speaker and he says he won't take any chairmanship, but I think if I put it up to him that this Suffrage Amendment can be run through right away and the women all over the country will know he did it, I can get him for you.” And Wason did exactly that.

Before I went to see Mr. Mann, I took pains to learn from his woman secretary every possible detail of the hours and ways in which he could best be approached in that basement office of his in the Capitol. Like the House members, I was terribly scared of him and that fact probably gave me a becoming modesty: for, though he invariably began then - and in later years when I used to consult him about the work of the League of Women Voters, - by growling at me and telling me all the things I did not know, he soon quieted down and gave me the advice I wanted. And extremely valuable advice it always was.

When I first asked him, a few days before the Congress convened, about the probable date of our vote, remarked that he expected to have the amendment through the House in the first week of the session. I could not believe my ears remembering the days of hearings before the Woman Suffrage Committee, in the previous Congress, the intricate of “getting a rule” to bring the joint resolution to vote and the anxiety about pairs. I ventured to say that although our poll showed a large majority I should feel safer If we checked up on it.

“Let me have your poll,” demanded.

I gave it to him and he went through the pages with care.

“I'll keep this,” he said when he had completed his survey. “I can get you some votes that you haven't got there.”

afterwards he allowed that my poll was a unusually accurate one. But he was right when he said that he could get some votes that we had not counted on.

Mr. Mann's own resolution for the amendment was promised the desired number one , and the Republican nominations for the Woman Suffrage Committee were all ready to be voted on at the opening of the congress, on Monday, May 19th; but the Democratic nominations were delayed. Nevertheless, Mr. Mann notified the Republican members and enough of the old Democratic members to fill the smaller number of places allotted to the minority party that a meeting of the committee would be held Tuesday morning. I tried to dissuade him from having the meeting so early , for fear that the Democrats might claim irregularity on the ground that their member were not elected. But he brusquely replied that what they might do made no difference.

The next morning I waited in a convenient corner near his office to find out as soon as possible after the meeting ended what 284271action had been taken. To my horror I learned that Mr. Mann intended to waive hearings and to bring in the next day the favorable report which he had extracted from the Committee that morning. Cold with fear, I went in to see / him and protected that several of our friends were not back then and could not be paired because they had not taken the oath of office.

He demanded to know how many were still away I gave him their names with an exactitude that won his rare commendation. “But I don't need ‘em,” he concluded.

Though I was still chill with apprehension, I could find nothing more to say and took my reluctant departure, in time to hear the President's message, cabled from France, read in the House. It contained the last public plea that he to make for the Amendment.

“Will you not permit me, turning from these matters, to speak once more and very earnestly of the proposed amendment to the Constitution which would extend the suffrage to women and which passed the House of Representatives at the last session of the Congress? It seems to me that every consideration of justice and of public advantage calls for the immediate adoption of that amendment and its submission forthwith to the legislatures of the several State. Throughout all the world this long delayed extension of the suffrage is looked for, in the United States, I believe, longer than anywhere else, the necessity for it and the immense advantage of it to the national life, have been urged and debated by women and men who say the need for it and urged policy of it when it required steadfast courage to be so much before-hand with the common conviction; and I, for one, cover for our country the distinction of being among the first to act in a great reform.”

Wednesday morning, feeling exactly as if I had committed myself and all that was dear to me into the keeping of wild horses, I went with Mrs. Gardener and Miss Hay to the gallery, this time on the Republican side. The whole thing was so sudden that the women from a distance who usually came when a vote was to be taken 285272were not there; but members of our local suffrage association filled the gallery.

As soon as the prayer and the morning business were over, the Speaker (Mr. Gillette) said, “This is Calendar Wednesday and the Clerk will call the committees in their order.” Later in the session, many committees alphabetically preceding the Woman Suffrage Committee would have had bills to report, but on the third day of a new Congress only Mr. Mann was ready. When the name of the Woman Suffrage Committee was called, he was on his feet: “Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Woman Suffrage I call up House joint resolution No. 1, proposing an amendment to the Constitution extending the right of suffrage to women, and ask that the resolution be reported.”

When the resolution had been read by the Clerk, Mr. Mann took up the question of procedure, about which he was easily the best informed member of the House “Mr. Speaker,” he explained, the rules provide that on Calendar Wednesday general debate shall be confined to two hours. I am not entirely sure whether that rule applies to a debate on a House Calendar bill, although I think that it had been so construed in the past. It had been my intention to ask the House to proceed with the debate to-day and for a time to-morrow, before asking for a final vote on the resolution, but as there is a committee appointed to attend the funeral of our late colleague, Mr. Van Dyke, and the Nebraska delegation has an appointment to meet the Nebraska soldiers returning to New York to-morrow, I desire to have the house complete consideration of the resolution to-day, and I would like, especially in order to accommodate the proponents and opponents of the resolution, to give a longer time for debate than two hours. I ask unanimous consent that the rule, so far as it limits debate, may be abrogated for the consideration of this resolution, and that at 5 o'clock the previous question shall be considered as ordered on the resolution and any pending amendments, and that the time between now and then shall be equally divided, one-half to be controlled by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Clark) and the other half of myself.”

As soon as the Speaker asked whether there was unanimous consent, by which alone the time for debate could be lengthened beyond two hours, the opponents began the attack that I had feared on 286273Mr. Mann's high-handed methods.

Mr. Moore of Pennsylvania was the first to protest: “I do not expect to debate this question or ask for time, but I would like to ask the gentlemen from Illinois—whether hearings have been had in the bill, since there are two sides to the questions.”

Mr. Mann's quick answer brought out a round of applause: “Mr. Speaker, hearings have been had on this resolution for more than 50 years.——There has been no hearing had on joint resolution No. 1 in this Congress, nor is there anything new to be said in a hearing.”

Mr. Moore had a second question: ——in view of the fact that women opposed to woman suffrage have indicated yesterday and to-day, that they are surprised by this action - and I give full credit to the gentlemen from Illinois for his parliamentary cleverness in bringing it up at this time - whether her thinks it would be fair to let this matter stand over for a few days, until those opposed to the resolution may be heard upon it?”

But Mr. Mann quickly disposed of that query.

“I do not think it would be fair to the rest of us,” he stated.

The next questioner was Mr. Garner of Texas, now Vice-President.

“——I want to ask the gentlemen form Illinois a question about the parliamentary status. If unanimous consent is agreed to and the previous question shall be considered ordered, will that give an opportunity of reading the resolution under the five-minute rule?”

Mr. Mann laid down the law on that point.

“There is no opportunity for reading a House Calendar resolution or bill under the five-minute rule.”

“Would there be any opportunity to offer an amendment unless the one offering the amendment should get recognition for that purpose?” Mr. Garner asked.

Again Mr. Mann was definite: “There would not be unless the Member offering the amendment should get recognition for that purpose.”

“I wanted Members of the House to understand the situation,” Mr. Garner warned.

But Mr. Mann was not perturbed. “That is the rule with reference to a House Calendar proposition,” he announced,

The next member to tackle him was Mr. Raker, chairman of the Woman Suffrage Committee in the previous Congress, who as the ranking Democratic member of the new committee and as a friend of the Amendment, thought, with some justice, that he had a grievance because all the favorable time was controlled by a Republican.

“——The gentleman's proposals as to time gives one-half to the gentleman from Illinois, (Mr. Mann) and one-half to the gentleman from Florida, (Mr. Clark) who is opposed to the resolution. The gentleman from Florida is the one member on the committee who is opposed to the resolution——Of course, the Democrats upon this side of the House desire to be heard.——I take it the gentleman from Illinois will yield me time, so that time can be divided among the Members of the Democratic side who desire to speak for the resolution.”

Mr. Mann's reply was sharp: “I shall not make any agreement with gentleman upon the floor about it and I told him so yesterday. The gentleman can take time delay the consideration of the resolution if he desires, but I am in a position where I can not be held up, because if the extension of time is not agreed to, there will be but two hours of general debate. I have always dealt fairly with every Member of the House about debate.”

But Mr. Raker still protested: “That is not the question. Just one moment further. It ought not to appear that Members on this side are opposed to the resolution, for that is not the fact, they favor it; and I know the gentleman from Illinois does not want it to appear that a large majority here are not in favor of the resolution; but by fixing the time and giving one member who happens to oppose it on the Democratic side half of the time for debate in opposition, the impression might be conveyed that we are opposed to the resolution.”

Mr. Mann had an excellent alibi: Mr. Speaker, after all, the record will show who votes for it and who votes against the resolution, and it will not be determined by those who talk who is for it or against it.”

Mr. Raker's persistence was never more evident than when he bobbed up with another point: 288275 “May I state this? Now, in fairness to the gentlemen on the other side and this side, when the resolution was up last year, the gentleman from Florida made a minority report. The ranking Member on the other side, Miss Rankin, was given half the time.”

If Mr. Raker's pertinacity was not worn out, Mr. Mann's patience was: “I have nothing to do with what was up last year. I am proceeding under the rules of the House.”

Another Democratic supporter of the amendment, Mr. Ferrie of Oklahoma, took up the controversy: “Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, the gentleman from Illinois has at all times in the past been fair, and he knows the rules better than anyone else. Why did not the gentleman make the request, allowing the ranking Democratic Member on our side to control the time, which is the usual method?”

“Oh no,” said Mr. Mann, “the gentleman is mistaken.”

Then Mr. Ferris lost his temper: “Mr. Speaker, under the circumstances, the minority members of the Committee on Woman Suffrage not having had a chance to be appointed or to participate in the matter, I object.”

Mr. Mann condescended to explain, “Well, I will say the gentleman that the democratic members of the committee participated. They were at the meeting and made the agreement which I have asked to have carried out.”

“But the announcement was made—Mr. Ferris broke in.

Mr. Man did not wait to hear him through: “Very well; there is to be only two hours’ debate on the bill then,” he said with finality.

And that was probably what he wanted from the start.

By that time I was sure we should lose votes from angry Democrats and I whispered my fears to Mrs. Gardener. “Nobody is going to jump off the band-wagon,” was her consoling reply.

Mr. Mann yielded fifteen minutes to Mr. Little of Kansas, 289276a Republican member of the Woman Suffrage Committee, who explained that no one was more surprised than he was, because he had had only 30 minutes’ notice that he was expected to speak, “from the chairman of the committee and author of the resolution at issue, whose rare parliamentary sagacity and unrivalled parliamentary leadership made this day's work possible.” Nevertheless he consumed all his time with a speech which was mostly about the courage of the women who bear soldiers, even if they do not bear arms.

The first speaker in opposition to the resolution was Mr. Kitchin of North Caroline, the Democratic floor leader, who bantered Mr. Mann and jeered at the Republican with irresistible humor. Said he, “Mr. Speaker and gentlemen of the House, I shall vote against the resolution. I do not rise, however, to make an argument against it, but rather for the purpose of an explanation and some congratulations. It appeared in the Record yesterday that the Democratic organization of the House had been a little amiss about nominating the membership of the Woman Suffrage Committee. I want to say that that is simply apparent. This morning was the first opportunity which the Democrats had to present the names of the Democratic membership of the Woman Suffrage Committee, though the identical members that were this morning elected as minority members of that committee were notified and invited by Mr. Mann, the chairman of the Woman Suffrage Committee, to meet in his committee room yesterday, along with the majority members elected on Monday. They did meet and considered the resolution, and they did vote, with the exception, I believe of one, for the favorable report.

“I wish now to express congratulations—sincere congratulations—to the Republicans on their quick response to the President's message on yesterday.”

This sally brought laughter and applause from the Democratic side. Mr. Kitchin went on: “The President yesterday in his message, read from the desk, requested the Congress—and he knew the Republicans were in the majority and were in control of the organization—to immediately pass the woman suffrage amendment. ‘Immediate adoption’ was his language, and within 24 hours in come the Republicans, patriotically and loyally, presenting this joint resolution, in compliance with the President's Suggestion, and it will be carried.”

Mr. Mann jumped to his feet. “Mr. Speaker, will the gentlemen yield?”

But Claude Kitchin was too wary to yield to such a skilled opponent.

“No.” he replied, “I am sorry I have not the time, as I have only seven minutes.”

For once Mr. Mann disregarded the rules of the House.

“I wanted to add that we reported it before the President's message was received,” he put in, out of order.

That time the laughter and applause came from the Republicans.

Mr. Kitchin continued: “I want also, Mr. Speaker, to congratulate nor only the leaders of the Republican Party on that side, but the entire membership on the Republican side on the ease and celerity with which, within 18 months they have been able to jump on the band-wagon. Let it be known that for 14 years, from 1897 to 1911, the Republican Party had control of every branch of this Government. The Susan B. Anthony Amendment—this amendment—had been before the American people for half a century. And yet, during every one of those 14 years, session after session, its advocates came and appealed to the Republican Party in the House and the Senate to have the amendment considered by the Congress, but a deaf ear was turned to them.——For 14 years with absolute control of every branch of the Government, the Republicans in the House not only refused to allow them to have the suffrage amendment considered in this House—to have a vote on it—but refused even to allow a woman suffrage committee to be created in the House before which they could go and put their case. But it was reserved for a Democratic Rules Committee and a Democratic House to give the suffragists of this country a Woman Suffrage Committee before which they could go and put their case. (applause on the Democratic side). They did go before this Woman Suffrage Committee, composed of a majority of Democrats, who gladly heard them day after day and week after week and month after month plead their cause. Be it known that it was a Democratic Woman Suffrage Committee that for the first time favorably reported this very resolution to the House and gave the advocates of woman suffrage a chance to have to cause considered and voted on in the House. (again applause on the Democratic side).

“And gentlemen, I want to congratulate the gentlemen from Illinois. (Mr. Mann) chairman of the Woman Suffrage Committee in this Congress, for promptly reporting out of 291278that committee the same resolution which the Democratic chairman of the Woman Suffrage Committee in the last Congress reported out. His committee has adopted the same amendment resolution that the Democratic Woman Suffrage Committee, headed by the gentleman from California, (Mr. Raker) adopted last Congress, and they ask the Members of this House to pass to-day the same resolution that the Democratic House passed last Congress, and which a Democratic President approved and now insists on ‘immediate adoption’.”

The Democratic side of the House shouted with laughter over this witty and brazen attempt of an opponent of the Amendment to make merit for his party. One Democrat, however, Mr. Hardy of Texas, prefaced his speech against the resolution with the remark, “Mr. Speaker, this is a curious exhibition to me. I have watched the chasing of the band-wagon on many occasions during all my life, but I never saw such a band-wagon chasing as went on yesterday and is to-day.”

Mr. Mann yielded the next portion of his time to Mr. Raker, who said in part, “——This is one of the great fundamental questions confronting the American people to-day. We have settled many of the other questions ahead of the civilized world, but we have been behindhand when it comes to half of our population and giving them the same right the other half has had with respect to participation in the Government.——

“I want to congratulate the gentleman from Illinois, as I think I am entitled to, upon his insisting that this resolution be brought up the first thing when this Congress met in extraordinary session.——We are going to pass this resolution to-day and instead of having just enough to make the necessary two-thirds, I hope that we will have 50 votes to spare. Some of the States, since the last Congress adjourned, even in the very heart of the sunny South, the very center of where some say there is the greatest opposition is have given women the right to vote. We find that the great State of Tennessee has extended to women the right to vote for the President of the United States. What little objection there might have been is being eliminated. Even out good Republican friends who voted against it in the last Congress will vote for it this time, and, so far as politics are concerned, there should be no attempt to take advantage by either the Republican or Democratic Party.——There may be a few Democrats and a few Republicans, who in the past have voted against this, who will vote against it to-day, but they are going to be so scarce you will hardly be able to count them.”

Two more friends, Mr. Nelson of Wisconsin and Mr. McCrate, a 292279new member from New York, followed Mr. Raker.

Then came Mr. Focht of Pennsylvania, who declared:“— “——Another reason why / women in their good sense are not here appealing for the vote and sphere of political activity may be that they have a better conception of the biological and physiological laws than some gentlemen who will vote in the affirmative on account of being from States where women now vote—laws ordained by God, and which the vote of Congress nor an amendment to the Constitution can not change or set aside.”

After that dictum, he read a letter from Mrs. Horace Brock, President of the Pennsylvania Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, one of the last communications from anti-suffrage women to be read in the halls of the congress . It told of the adverse vote on the State constitutional amendment and went on: “A Federal amendment to the Constitution is a serious matter, because it is irrevocable. The voters of New York State, men and women, finding that double suffrage increases the taxes and the Socialist vote, are planning a re-submission of the question to the voters before long. If this Federal amendment is not passed, this will certainly be done.

“A noisy minority are demanding votes for women as a reward for their war work, but the majority of women war workers, who have been largely anti-suffragists, desiring no reward, object to being penalized and given this additional burden because of their work. Moreover, because a woman is efficient in Red Cross and industrial work, it does not follow that she would be efficient in Congress. Also, it is not advisable to legislate for normal times extraordinary measures that may be useful and necessary in abnormal times.

“I therefore ask you in justice to your State and its electorate to vote against the Federal woman suffrage amendment.”

And that letter was applauded!

Mr. Blanton of Texas, speaking in favor, preceded Mr. Clark of Missouri (Champ Clark) whose talk made me realize that some of the strangeness I had felt in the House that day was due to the disappearance of the “Southern language” from the Speaker’ place.

“Mr. Speaker,” he began, “I have never set up as a 293280prophet and I am not the son of a prophet, but on the 4th day of July, 29 years ago, I made a speech in which I indulged in two prophecies. One of them was that the justice of the American people would give the right of suffrage to women. The other one was that we would live to travel in flying machines. One of the prophecies has been realized and the other will be realized in a very few days. When I cam here the suffragist was like John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. It was more a joke than anything else, but time and the extension of suffrage, in pieces, have converted a majority of the House and perhaps a majority of the Senate to this doctrine. In the last Congress, by a curious accident, they got just exactly enough votes to pass the amendment through the House. I did not vote; I rarely ever did. I did not think it was ever intended the Speaker should vote very much, but one gentleman was going to change his vote to the negative, and I sent word that if he did I would vote and that would tie it. So I came that near voting.

“I do not think that woman suffrage is going to precipitate the millenium. I do not believe it is going to cause the damage to American institutions that some very good men think.——Now another argument in favor of it, and I think it is founded on justice, is I think my wife and daughter are as capable of voting as most men in this country are.”

“More,” called our Mr. Mann.

“And I would be ashamed to raise a daughter who was not,” Mr. Clark continued, to the accompaniment of applause from both sides of the House. “Well, now, there has been a good deal of talk first and last about the opinion of the President, and some people have intimated I was not up to the mark in that respect. From across the sea comes the voice of the leader of the Democratic Party and the leader of the American people, who was made that way by two elections in this country, and it ought to be a matter of pride to every American citizen that Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, is universally acclaimed the foremost man of all the world.”

A great burst of applause interrupted the speech, for it was well known that Champ Clark's feeling toward his successful rival for the presidential nomination had not been cordial and members appreciated that generous tribute. Clark went on: “He has arrived at that opinion by gradations, like a good many of the rest of us have. It is the progress of the human race going on all over the world.”

Mr. Mann's own brief speech was next.

“Mr. Speaker, two years ago, when a similar resolution was pending in this body, I took my life in my hands and came over here to vote, and for a week thereafter I did not know whether it would kill me or not. But to-day, strong and healthy” (applause came from both sides for him, too) “I appear in the advocacy of a great cause, with the time ripe, with the people ready, with the beneficiaries eager, intelligent and willing to perform their share in the functioning of good government.

“The distinguished speaker who has just preceded me referred as had a Democrat formerly, to the message of the President: I had hoped that the discussion might proceed without any partisan bias. It is true, my friends on this side of the House, that the President and Democratic leaders have frequently talked in favor of woman suffrage, but a majority of them have never voted for it, (applause on the Republican side). They have been long on promises, like they are on everything else, but very short on fulfillment. I heard the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Kitchin) speak for seven minutes in favor of the amendment, which he proposes to vote against.

“Now this is not a partisan question on either side of the House. If it were it would not have any chance. Let both sides, Republican and Democratic, feel their responsibility to civilization, to enlightenment, to progress, to the movement ahead.——

“I hope that the Republican side of the house may vote almost as a unit, if not as a unit, and I pray that the majority of the Democratic side of the House will see the light and vote accordingly.”

Mr. Clark of Florida, the only member of the Woman Suffrage Committee opposed to the amendment, left himself a good slice of time in which to voice, for the last time, his antedeluvian objection. But first he gave Mr. Mann a little slam.

“They say there is no zeal like that of a new convert. The distinguished gentleman from Illinois, who has just taken his seat, has not always been so zealous in support of this proposition.——

“I may be old-fashioned and out of date, but I believe in the home woman. I believe in the American mother, who presides in queenly dignity over an American home.

“She needs no ballot for her protection. God bless her, she is and always will be protected by the deep and undying love of the American man. I want her to forever occupy the commanding place which she fills in our economic affairs, respected, honored and revered. I could not drag her from the lofty pedestal on which she has been placed by the 295282undying love of the American man - the pedestal of sisterhood, wifehood and motherhood - to the low level of ward politics, God forbid!

The nimblest turncoat of the day was Nicholas Longworth, of Ohio. Ingratiatingly he began: “Mr. Speaker, some surprise and, I might add, great gratification was expressed by my distinguished friend, the author of this resolution, when this morning I asked him for a few minutes’ time in which to speak in favor of it. Some surprise has also been manifested by others of my friends when I told them that I intended to support it. If I am about to execute a volte-face, at least it will not be comparable to that executed by a most distinguished American now residing abroad; who sent us a cable on this subject yesterday. It is true that upon the occasion when this resolution was last before the House I voted against it, but my vote was predicated upon a doubt as to the opportuneness of the time, rather than upon the essential justice of the question. I have for a long time believed that suffrage was inevitable, that it would come soon, and that it ought to come. I am now convinced that the time has arrived when we ought to give suffrage to the women of the country.

“Heretofore I have felt it my duty to follow the vote last cast by the citizens of my constituency. I believe, however, that since then the situation has changed. Certainly it has changed to the extent that in my State my party has gone on record in its platform in favor of suffrage. It is beyond question that my party as a national party is in favor of suffrage, that it is now one of its main tenets. This is no longer a local question. It is a national question. I think the gentleman from Illinois was right when he said that it ought not to be a political question, but the fact remains that our action to-day, to be followed, I am certain, very shortly by another body, will make it indisputably evident to the country that suffrage has been granted to women, and could only have been granted, through the medium of the Republican Party.”

And with that declaration in the very same sentence in which he stated that suffrage ought not to be a political question, he concluded his speech in the midst of enthusiastic applause from the Republican side.

Mr. Mondell of Wyoming had the last five minutes, as befitted the representative of the oldest woman suffrage State.

“I bring the balm of consolation to the agonized soul of the gentlemen from Florida, “he said. “I have been 296283voting, lo, these many years, and I have never voted except where women voted.”

So, with praise of Wyoming, congratulations for the suffrage workers and a prediction of success, he brought the debate to a close.

For the last time, as the roll was called, I checked up on the House poll. But the ayes came tumbling in so fast and so close together that I could hardly set them down. The tense feeling that had marked our previous vote in the House was all gone. There was no anxiety, no suspense, no scurrying for one more vote, no sick men coming in to record their support. From time to time gusts of laughter and applause saluted the “yes” of a man who had answered “no” only sixteen months before. Everybody was jovial. I hardly recognized our cause in its new setting of gaiety.

Then the vote was announced, 304 in favor to 89 against. It seemed incredible. Such good fortune could not be true, I thought at first. Even without the friendly members who had not taken the oath of office, we had 42 votes to spare. All my fears about Democratic resentment of Mr. Mann's methods had been needless. His idea of shoving the joint resolution through on the third day of the new Congress had been a brilliant one. Nobody else could have carried it out. For a few moments I was too stunned to realize how happy I was. Then Miss Hay dragged me away from the women who were crowding around us. Our leaders in the fight on the floor had to be seen and thanked.

The next day, thinking that I could steal a little time for some long neglected shopping, I put on a shabby old dress and spent the morning downtown. When I returned late for luncheon. I found the household distracted because an urgent message had come from Mr. Mann's office that I was needed at the Capitol. Fearing some disaster, I did not stop to eat or to change my dress, but left our 297284secretary to telephone that I was on the way while I rushed to the corner for a cab.

When I arrived at the Capitol, Mr. Mann was standing on the steps at the entrance. He explained that a moving picture concern wanted to take a picture of him receiving the thanks of a representative of the suffragists and that he had sent for me. Hastily the movie man explained that I was to start from a given point, walk towards Mr. Mann and, when I reached him, I was to shake his hand and thank him as enthusiastically as I could.

To the best of my ability I followed the directions and when the time for hand shaking arrived I shook so long and so hard that the camera man yelled, “Let go of his hand, lady! Let go of his hand!”

And I let go, quickly and thoroughly.

A few days later I went to see the film in one of the moving picture theatres. When the grotesque figure that was I came walking on, laughter all over the house and rose to a grand climax at the way in which I dropped Mr. Mann's hand, after shaking it as if it had been a pump-handle.

The press reproductions—there were hundreds of them—were almost as funny as the movie. One editor had labelled the picture, “This is what Mr. Mann gets for passing the Woman Suffrage Amendment!”

In spite of our amazing victory in the House on May 10th, in spite of six more presidential suffrage States in 1919, I was uneasy about the outlook in the Senate all through the three weeks before our vote there. My anxiety surprising even to myself, for I knew that, in addition to Senators Walsh of Massachusetts, and Ball, of Delaware, who had replaced our defeated opponents, Weeks and Saulsbury, we were assured of two more new supporters. The first of these was from the South, Senator Harris, of Georgia, whose cabled message to the President, promising that he would vote for the Amendment, had been copied for Mrs. Gardener by one of the White House secretaries. The other was Senator Hale, of Maine. He had voted against us the preceding October and again in February; but, after the Maine legislature gave presidential suffrage to women, he left us know that he would support the Amendment in the future. So far as the Congress was concerned, he was the last fruit of Mrs. Catt's plan.

In the Senate, as in the House, the chairmanship of the Woman Suffrage Committee was given to a prominent Republican not previously a member of it, Senator Watson, of Indiana; and that fact alone should have allayed my fears, for I knew that he was a Shrewd politician. Our former chairman, Senator Jones, of New Mexico, became the ranking minority member of the Committee; and, though he had fought gallantly for the Amendment in its days of unsuccessful struggle, he dropped modestly into the background during the new Congress, helping when he could, but never obtruding upon his successor his ideas or his record of previous service.

Indeed, it was a disheartening experience to find out how many of the senators who given us constant help in the previous Congress were shoved aside in consequence to their party's loss of power. And to have Senator Shafroth out of the Senate when our victory was in sight seemed unforgivably cruel. I remember that when he came back to Washington after his defeat, he said, “I think what I mind most is not being in the Senate to vote for the Amendment when it goes through.”

The preliminaries of getting the resolution up in the senate were almost as perfunctory as the preliminaries in the House had been. The unanimously report of the Woman Suffrage Committee was brought in without hearings; and Senator Watson gave immediate notice that he could call up the Amendment on June 3d.

By that time I was so accustomed to worry and hard work that I could not get to a situation in which neither was needed. up to the last minute, I felt as if something would go wrong. I dreaded to look at the morning paper for fear one of our friends in the Senate had died during the night. Momentarily I expected to hear that the two floor leaders, Lodge and Martin, had succeeded in forming an affective coalition against us. I reminded myself that the Amendment had passed the House once before, only to meet defeat in the Senate. Even the astounding growth of support shown by the second vote in the House had not taught me how swiftly a band-wagon can move. The short space between May 10th and June 3d seemed to me like years.

But June 3d came at last. One more I prepared the roll-call slips ready for checking during the vote. Once our house manager laid out packages of nuts and sandwiches for us to take to 300287the Capitol. Once more, before the session, all our friends in the Senate were looked up and the list of pairs gone over. Once more we took our places in the gallery reserved for us, the same gallery in which we had sat through two defeats.

My last and most reasonable worry was the fear that some harmful, but seemingly innocuous, amendment might be tacked on to our resolution by the opponents. Senator Underwood's amendment, to require ratification by State conventions, rather than by State legislatures, was the one that I was most afraid of. And when I learned that Senator Phelan, of California, proposed to amend that amendment by another, to settle the size and method of election of the conventions, I was quite beside myself and sent message after message begging our Democratic friends to do something to stop Phelan.

The debate dragged for two days, during which most of the speeches were mad by the opposition; for our side, assured of enough votes, was desirous only of an opportunity to have them recorded, knowing well how many kinds of disaster might upset calculations over a protracted period.

The tactics to be followed by our friends were indicated by Senator Watson when he explained, in calling up the resolution: 1 “Mr. President, it is not my purpose to enter upon any extended discussion of this proposition. It has been discussed as have but few other questions that have ever engaged the thought and the attention of the American people. Hearings have been repeatedly held by committees of both House and Senate on this question in the past. It has been debated on the floor of both bodies and has been discussed throughout the country in every forum where the people are wont to go to listen to public discussion. What is needed now is action and not speech. Therefore, so far as I am concerned, I shall enter upon no debate touching the merits of this proposition which are well understood throughout the country.”

On this occasion, curiously enough, the perennial State rights argument found its chief exponents in three Northerners, Senators Borah, of Idaho, Wadsworth, of New York, and Brandegee, of Connecticut.

——“To impose upon the Southern States a rule for local affairs for which they are not prepared and which they do not want, simply because we have the voting power to do so, is Prussianism,” Borah declared. 1

Then, as if the figure of our recent enemy were not a sufficient scarecrow, he dragged out the skeleton of ancient Rome.

——“Do we propose to break down the laws which separate the States and compound the American people into one mass, all to be directed and governed from Washington? Do we intend to enact again upon the western continent the tragedy of Rome——the fearful, destructive, consuming tragedy of centralization which destroyed that nation?”

To this tirade, Senator Lenroot, of Wisconsin, undertook to reply.

——“Mr. President, the Senator from Idaho takes the position, carried to its logical extent, that if there be 33 United States senators who believe that a proposed amendment to the Constitution is not for the best interests of the people of the United States, notwithstanding all the other people of the United States may be in favor of it, it is the duty of those 33 senators to prevent the people of this Republic from securing such alteration of the Government as they desire. Mr. President, I am conscious of no more dangerous attack upon popular government than such theory as that.

“Because I believe in popular government, because I believe in the right of the people to rule, because I believe in their right to secure any amendment to the Constitution that they desire if they go about it in an orderly way by using the methods provided by the Constitution, I can not subscribe for a moment to the theories or the arguments advanced by the Senator from Idaho.——

“I believe that when the people of the United 302290States form deliberately a judgment as to an amendment or a change in the Constitutional it is our duty to permit them, in the form provided by the Constitution, to act upon it.——

“The Senator from Idaho talks about Prussianism, about three-fourths of the States being able to enforce their will upon one-fourth of the States that may be unwilling——Prussianism? There can be no Prussianism in according to the people of the United States the right to secure such alteration in their government as they desire to secure.”

Then Senator Smith, of South Carolina, again tried to frighten the Southerners who were on our side by flaunting the red rag of the fifteenth amendment.

“——the southern man who votes for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment votes to ratify the fifteenth amendment.——

“I should not do my duty if I did not warn southern Democrats - southern white men - that this day they solemnly ratify what they have for the last fifty years denounced as the crime of this century. We protested against the act that incorporated into our organic law the right of an alien and ignorant race to be turned loose upon us, and it numerically in the majority. When you vote for this amendment today, you vote to ratify it, and say to those who enacted that amendment that they did not make a mistake but that you are now ratifying it.—

——“If it was a crime to enfranchise the male half of that race why is it not a crime to enfranchise the other half? You have put yourselves in the category of standing for both amendments, and, when the time comes, as it will come, when you are to meet the result of this act, you can not charge that it was a crime to pass the fifteenth amendment.”

When I remembered the speech for woman suffrage made by another senator from South Carolina, Senator Pollock, during the debate in February, I realized more clearly than ever how courageous his words had been in the face of such blind and furious prejudice as the senior senator represented, and I found it hard to sit quietly. Indeed, throughout those two days, when victory was within our grasp, I completely lost the self control with which I had sat through 303291the previous debates, anticipating defeat. I, who had sternly checked any of our women making the slightest sign of disapproval, could not restrain my own murmurs of angry impatience during the last anti speeches. For that reason I was inordinately grateful to one of our friends on the floor, who, on the second day, seeing me in the gallery and perhaps noticing my uneasiness, ordered a luncheon of chicken and coffee to be brought from the Senate restaurant and served for me on a little table just outside the gallery door, so that I could hear everything that was going on while I ate. That unexpected kindness did lessen the tension and make it easier for me to wait for our vote.

Meanwhile, Senator Jones, of New Mexico, who must have been almost as angry as I was over Senator Smith's speech, broke his usual silence to answer it.

“——I have been listening to the very positive statement made by the Senator from South Carolina, and I have felt like not making any interruption, even for the purpose of asking a question. However, I have finally concluded that unless something be said at this juncture it will go to the people of South Carolina and other southern States that the remarks just made by the Senator from South Carolina have been universally accepted here in the Senate.

“I do not want to provoke any discussion of this subject, but I do not want at this time to protest most earnestly against the construction which the Senator from South Carolina has placed upon this proposed constitutional amendment. If I am able to read the English language, this amendment does absolutely nothing more than to prevent discrimination in the franchise on account of sex. I think it requires an extreme imagination for anyone to draw any inference or to fabricate any argument to the effect that the passage of this amendment is a reaffirmation or readoption of the fifteenth amendment.”

On June 4th the first speech was made by Senator Wadsworth, of New York, whose very clever attack upon suffragist tactics was followed by an appeal to the economic fears and prejudices of his 304292own prosperous class.

“——the advocates of this movement - and I do not criticize them for exercising whatever power of influence they may bring to bear or for resorting to whatever devices they may find ready at their hand to bring about their purpose - the advocates of this proposition——believe that this is the easiest way to achieve their purpose. To them it has become a purely practical question. Regard for the spirit of our institutions does not enter into their discussions. The Constitution of the United States means nothing more to them than that it should be used as a vehicle to achieve a set purpose; and, being intent upon that purpose, they pick up the instrument and use it. They do not want referendums. They have said so in many of their public utterances.——

“Mr. President,——I do not blind myself to the fact that slowly, but surely,——we are whittling away the sense of responsibility of the individual citizen. We are teaching more people every year that the Government owes them a living; we are teaching more people every year that the Government should and can do things which they as individual citizens can do for themselves. We are urging ‘the easiest way.’ Scarcely a year goes by but what that tendency becomes more marked, and when we whittle away that sense of responsibility which should live in the breast of every individual citizen and teach him that the Government at Washington, remote as it is and rapidly becoming top-heavy with a bureaucracy, the intricacies of which I challenge any Senator to understand to-day, when we teach him that the Government at Washington, with its so-called bottomless Treasury, can take over, and should take over, all of these functions and duties and that the people of the communities of this country need not be expected to do those things for themselves——then I say that step by step we are building in this country a paternalistic system such as was the curse of Germany.”

A speech that gave me a lot of satisfaction was made by Senator King, of Utah, who, although he had done everything in his power to delay and discredit the Amendment, was forced to admit that he had to vote for it because he came from a suffrage Senate. His position was much the same as that of Senator McCumber; but his opposition had been so much more persistent and cantankerous than McCumber's that I was delighted to listen to his statement.

“——I am in the unfortunate position of being unable to vote in harmony with my convictions. I represent, in part, a sovereign State; and the mandates of my party and the people of my State require that I vote for the submission of an amendment to the Constitution providing for woman suffrage. It is a matter of sincere regret to me that I am compelled to support a proposition by my vote which is so repugnant to my conceptions of the rights of the States, and, indeed, the rights of the people themselves, and which will prove to be a dangerous precedent and a continuing menace to the peace and welfare of the Nation.”

As the debate went on, it narrowed down more and more to a discussion of the Underwood resolution to amend our Amendment, about which I was extremely fearful because the argument for it was the plausible one or giving voters a more direct voice in the decision. Under wood himself and several other of our ablest opponents evidently realized that our success in the Senate was inevitable, but they hoped to induce some of our friends, particularly those from the South, to support a modification permitting the question to be decided in the States by the previously untried, though Constitutional, method of referring the Amendment to conventions, rather than to State legislatures for ratification or rejection. In that way the process of ratification would be made harder and the opponents probably believed that they could keep enough States from ratifying to kill the Amendment.

Senator Reed, of Missouri, who had made one long and several short speeches during the course of the debate, launched out into another, a highly objectionable attempt to arouse race prejudice in support of the Underwood proposal: “——We might just as well look this question in the face. When politics run high, as they will again, and when the clamors go up from the dark sisters of the South that they are not being permitted to vote and when sisters of the North who belong to the political party that feels that it is losing votes down South get aroused, I want to 306294say to you Senators that you are very likely to get some legislation compared with which the force bill will be a gentle and merely persuasive measure. So I say that the men of the South might at least give their people a chance to vote on this question.”

To him and to all other advocates of the Underwood amendment, Senator Walsh, of Montana, replied in a way which showed that he thoroughly understood their tactics to make ratification as difficult as possible: “——Is it not a fact that it (the Underwood amendment) would result, first, in a contest before the legislatures on the question of whether a convention should be called, then a contest would occur before the people over the election of delegates to the conventions, and, finally, a contest would ensue before the convention as to whether it (the Suffrage amendment) should be adopted or not: and does it not mean that there would be three fights over this matter, and that is the reason why the Senator desires to pursue that method?”

Nevertheless, after Senator Phelan's amendment to the Underwood amendment had been defeated without a roll-call, 28 senators voted in favor of the Underwood amendment and only 55 against it. As an amendment to our Amendment, Underwood's could be defeated by a majority of the votes cast; but I was terror-stricken when I learned that we had less than two-thirds on our side because of two of our pledged supporters had voted with the enemy on that question.

Senator Harrison's amendment to limit the extension of suffrage to white women had been defeated earlier and that left only one more to be disposed of, Senator Gay's, to permit enforcement by the Federal Government only when a State failed / to enforce the provisions for woman suffrage. And that amendment was rejected by a vote of 62 to 19.

Then I braced myself for a final vote on the Amendment itself.

Ashurst's “ay” was followed by 4 noes in succession from Bankhead, Beckham, Borah and Brandegee. Then came five C's in favor; Capper, Chamberlain, Culberson, Cummins and Curtis. I had no need to check the list that time, for I knew the expected votes by heart and my ear would have caught instantly any deviation from our poll. Through the F's and K's, which, with the exception of Knox, belonged to us, everything held firm; through the M's and N's, P's and S's, where our largest number of votes was to be found; and, up to the last favorable vote, which was Watson's, nothing slipped. Then the 5 pairs, including 10 supporters and 5 opponents were read. Every senator was on record. Not one of the 66 men whom we counted on had failed us.

I was glad that Vice-President Marshall, who was himself an opponent, had the good sense to let Senator Cummins, the President pro-tempore of the Senate, occupy the chair and announce the result. His voice trembled as he began: “The ays are 56 and the nays are 25. A quorum being present and the joint resolution having received the affirmative vote of more than two-thirds of the Senators present and voting is declared to have passed the Senate in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.”

The end of the fight in the Congress had come. I sat still trying to realize it.

Then I remembered that we had to hurry over to the House side, where Helen Gardener had arranged to have the Amendment signed by the Speaker in the presence of a specially selected group of friends, with movie camera installed to record the scene.

On our way out, Mrs. LaFollette, who was in the gallery reserved for senators’ families, saw Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton and, leaning on the railing between that gallery and ours, called happily 308296“Well, Harriet, it's all over.”

At that Mrs. Upton's face began to twitch and the next moment she was sobbing, exactly as she might have been expected to do, but probably would not have done, if we had lost.

The Speaker, after signing the Amendment in the presence of the House, as the rules required, retired to his office, where the movie scene was set. There he pretended to be signing, with a group around him which included Champ Clark, Representatives Raker and Mondell, Mr. Tyler Page, Clerk of the House, and six of us.

Mrs. Gardener had planned to have another picture made that afternoon, on the Senate side; but it took so long to get the members of the party together in the Speaker's office that the Senate had adjourned by the time that we were back there. So the movie reproduction of the signing by the Vice-President had to go over until the next morning, when it came off in the Vice-President's office with Senators Walsh, of Montana, Watson, Ransdell and Smoot, present, along with our group of women.

It was a curious fact that the two men who had to sign the Amendment were both anti-suffragists and that President Wilson, who had done his best in our behalf, had no opportunity to sign because a Constitutional amendment does not require the President's signature.

To me, the absence of Mrs. Catt and Dr. Shaw when our final vote was taken was a great pity. But Dr. Shaw was off on a speaking trip and Mrs. Catt was firm in her determination, made after our defeat the previous November, never again to sit in the gallery and listen to a legislative debate on woman suffrage. Besides, she wanted to give all her time to preparation for the campaign for ratification. However, the pen with which the Vice-President signed was sent 309297to her. And I saw to it that the one used by the Speaker went to Helen Gardener.

A week later we had a “thank you and good-by” party at Suffrage House for our Congressional friends. Then our files were packed for removal to the New York headquarters and Suffrage House was closed.

Again and again I have asked myself or been asked by others why our victory was so long delayed and what new factors brought it about when it did come. Nearly a century of struggle seems an excessive price for the simple justice of votes for women in a nation which started out by declaring that “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But governments and the people who constitute them have a habit of overlooking the corollaries of a principle and, after one of these has been pointed out, a singular facility in finding excuses for the exception. Slavery and the legal and political subjection of women were generally accepted because they had existed for a long time; and the groups who suffered from the oppression were either ignorant of the remedy or unable to apply it to our Constitution.

Then, too, the Woman Suffrage Amendment granted the largest single extension of suffrage ever made by a government not in the throes of a revolution. Under that Amendment, which enfranchised approximately 20,000,000 women, 1 the men voters of the nation ceded away, in effect, nearly a half of their political power. Personal selfishness, entrenched interests, the machinery of small politics were naturally on the side of the opposition. In the beginning, the women who wanted the change were outsiders, trying to storm the political fortress with no weapons except the appeal of justice to 1 The total number of women of voting age in the United States in 1920 was approximately 27,000,000 of whom between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 were fully enfranchised by State action before 1916 and about 310298the men inside. Not until individual States gave votes to women was there any chance for them to work from within the stronghold to open the gates to sister women, still outside.

To my mind, therefore, the long campaign of education, organization and legislative effort in the States, the campaign carried on by two generations of suffrage workers, was the fundamental cause of the final success.

Often the immediate cause has been said to be the World War. But, as I have tried to point out, the war argument was used in both ways; against, as well as for us. And, so far as I could see, it was merely a talking point in both cases. Not a single vote, to my knowledge, was won or lost in the Congress because of the War. However, it is true that indirectly the war helped us in Washington because it did influence State action in some instances. In New York and Oklahoma the soldier vote helped to carry the State constitutional amendments for woman suffrage and that fact created favorable public opinion elsewhere. Then, too, the work of women in the various war services led many men to think that women's toil and sacrifice should be rewarded by enfranchisement: and again that belief affected not only States in which woman suffrage measures were pending, but, through them, the opinions of legislators in Washington.

The importance of President Wilson's support of the Amendment in its final success is another question that has been frequently discussed. My own opinion about it is that the good effect of the President's efforts was general, rather than definite. Anything that helped us to build up the impression of inevitability among those whose chief desire was to be found on the winning side was valuable in the Congressional work. And the President of the United 311299States could give that impression better than anyone else. When it came to individual votes, I could not put my finger on a single one in the House for which I felt sure that the President alone was responsible; but, in the Senate there were two on June 4th which I think we could not have won without his help.

Another mistaken impression which I have come across occasionally is that the Front Door Lobby itself was the immediate cause of victory. Much as I like to think that we had our part in the successful outcome, I am sure that no member of the lobby failed to recognize that, without the backing of the women at work in the States, our best efforts would have been futile.

The function of a lobby such as ours is many-sided. It must translate public opinion to legislators in terms that they will understand. Then it must report back to workers in the legislative District the advisable next steps to get or to hold a favorable vote. Most important of all, the lobby must discover friends in public office who will work actively for the success of the cause and must keep those friends on the job without annoying them by too much prodding. That our lobby was able to do those last two things with fair success we owed, in large measure, to Helen Gardener's gift for making and holding friends for the cause and to the influence of her advice and example upon the rest of us. Our maximum of accomplishment was summed up in a letter sent to one of our number by a Senator who was not in Washington when the last vote was taken.

“The narrow margin of two votes gives you a right to feel that you personally are a tremendous factor in the final result. If the margin had been large, no one person could have claimed much credit. But those two votes certainly represent the result of your individual efforts.

“I have said many times that you have handled the suffrage campaign in Washington with most remarkable tact, 312300intelligence and perseverance. I am glad to have this chance to repeat it in writing. I do not recall a single mistake that you have made, and numerous instances come to my mind where you secured the vote of a doubtful Senator and clinched the allegiance of a wavering one.

“Moreover, you were always so considerate and deferential that no one could take the least umbrage at your persistence. It was always a great pleasure to confer with you and follow your suggestions, and you enlisted the cordial support and sympathy of my office force.”

It is pleasant to know that anyone thought so well as that of our work. Nevertheless one fact is clear, that the marginal two votes in the Senate for which one of us might have been responsible would have meant little if they had not been added to the eighteen which came to us in other ways between 1914 and 1919. And what is true of the Senate is even truer of the House, where there was a jump of 130 in the affirmative vote between 1915 and 1919.

As I have already pointed out, the great majority of those gains was due to the extraordinary leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt; and to the carrying out of her plans by our State Suffrage organizations. Without the continuous boosting given by the successive State victories, the Amendment would not have gone through the Congress in 1919.

Before our last vote was taken in Washington the fourfold program of action laid before that Atlantic City meeting in 1916 had brought these results: 14 State legislatures in 1917 and 26 in 1919 passed resolutions asking the Congress to submit a Federal Amendment for woman suffrage;

4 States, New York, Michigan, South Dakota and Oklahoma adopted State constitutional amendments for woman suffrage;

11 State legislatures granted presidential suffrage to women, not including Kentucky, which made the grant after the Amendment had passed the Congress, 313301but before ratification was completed;

2 States gave women the right to vote in primary elections; and the total number of presidential electors for whom women were eligible to vote rose from 91 to 305.

Those victories were the decisive factor in our success in the Congress in 1919. All honor to Mrs. Catt, to whom honor for that record of achievement is due!

Ratification by at least 36 States—that was the mountainous load that Mrs. Catt took upon her own shoulders as soon as the Amendment was through Congress. In fact she assumed that burden long before the work in Washington was completed. Her plans were therefore all ready; plans that, like her ratification dress, had been made, out-dated, and remade more than once.

In her own words: “Every Legislature had been polled, Governors had been interviewed, the press kept informed of the necessary procedure of the campaign, and an expectant, eager army, thoroughly well-equipped and trained, was waiting for the next move. Before the sun set on June 4, telegrams had been sent to all Governors where special legislative sessions would be necessary, urging that such sessions be called. Instructions for still more intensive campaigns with Governors, legislators and the press were wired to State auxiliaries to the National Suffrage Association, and when the sun rose on June 5 the campaign was already under full speed.—

“The Legislatures of Illinois and Wisconsin being on the eve of adjournment, the Suffrage Amendment was wire to both from Washington for ratification. Thereupon started a lively contest between the two states for first place. Illinois newspapers helped by calling loudly upon the Legislature to be ‘First’, her Governor, Frank O. Lowden, helped by sending a spirited message to the Legislature; and her Assembly helped by introducing into the Senate a resolution for ratification twenty-four hours after the passage of the Amendment and before the receipt of the official notification. Action was taken on June 10.

“Two letters in the alphabet came near losing Illinois her first place. A sentence in the joint resolution transmitted from the federal Secretary of State's office to the Illinois Governor read ‘which shall be valid for all events and purposes as part of the constitution.’ ‘Events’ should have been ‘intents’. Legal authorities said that ratification was not invalidated, but to be safe the Illinois Legislature re-ratified June 17.

“Wisconsin ratified on the same day—and Wisconsin had the distinction of filing her certificate first.” 1

Followed in rapid succession ratification in Michigan, Kansas, Ohio and New York; “Six ratifications in as many days.”

Then three States, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Texas, in which the anti-suffragists had been hopeful of defeat, disappointed them by ratifying; and special sessions in Iowa and Missouri brought the number of ratification with in a month up to eleven. But the total of thirty-six was still a long way off.

Surprisingly, the far western States, which had been counted on to ratify at once, were dilatory; and some of their political leaders took the selfish ground that, inasmuch as their women were already enfranchised by State action, they had nothing to gain by the Federal Amendment.

In July, in order to get definite pledges of Special Sessions from Governors, Mrs. Catt sent four women as “envoys”; two of them, who were Republicans, to Minnesota, North Dakota, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming; and the other two, who were Democrats, to Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Oklahoma.

That month Arkansas, Nebraska and Montana all ratified by means of special sessions, and in September, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Utah, making seventeen in all.

Then came a pause, inexplicable in view of the continued delay of most of the early suffrage states, a delay which led Mrs. Catt to “put on her bonnet” and set forth to hold conferences in twelve states, with “Wake up, America!” as the slogan of her efforts. The trip brought calls for special sessions in California, North Dakota, Colorado, Oregon and Nevada, though in one of those States the suffragists had to get the legislators to agree to pay their own expenses before the governor would consent to call the session. By the end of the year, Maine, California, North Dakota, South 316304Dakota, and Colorado brought the total number of ratifications up to twenty-two.

By that time opponents had begun a series of systematic attempts to find legal flaws in the ratifications or to have them held up by a referendum to the voters. The problem of the anti-suffragists, who had only to keep thirteen states from ratifying, was far simpler than that of the suffragists, who had to get favorable action from thirty-six.

But in spite of the difficulties that the opposition put in the way, five States ratified in January, 1920; Rhode Island, Kentucky, Oregon, Indiana and New Jersey; and five others in February; New Jersey, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Mrs. Catt knew that the opposition had grown exceedingly bitter with every one of the later States and in West Virginia, the thirty-fourth, the outcome was so close that a State senator, who was in California when the special session was called and to whom the opponents refused a pair, was obliged to hurry back across the continent in order to cast the deciding vote in favor of ratification. Then, in March, 1920, Washington, the last of the far-western States, by action of a special session, brought the total number of ratifications up to thirty-five. The fight then narrowed down to the crucial thirty-sixth State.

At first Vermont seemed the most promising field and, to overcome the objection of cost of a special session, the suffragists secured the pledges of a majority of the legislators to pay their own expenses; but even then Governor Clement, who was a confirmed opponent, refused to call the session. Governor Holcomb, of Connecticut, also an opponent, took a similar course. Efforts were then concentrated upon Delaware, where, after terrific work by both 317305sides, ratification was defeated in the lower House, making Delaware the tenth State and the only one north of the Mason and Dixon line to take adverse action.

Happily for the Suffrage forces, their grievous disappointment about Delaware was offset, that same week, by a decision of the United States Supreme Court that a referendum on a Federal Amendment, such as the anti-suffragists were seeking in several States, would be illegal.

The last hope of getting a thirty-sixth State in time for women to vote in the presidential election of 1920 rested then in Tennessee; but there the Governor had refused to call a special session because he believed that a provision of the State constitution required action in regard to ratification to be taken at a regular session. In this emergency the suffragists appealed to President Wilson and, through the instrumentality of Helen Gardener, the President asked the Department of Justice to render an opinion about the applicability of the Supreme Court's recent decision to the situation in Tennessee. When the Department rendered an opinion to the effect that the State constitution could not put an obstacle in the way of a method of ratification permitted by the Federal Constitution, the President sent a telegram to the Governor urging a special session of the Tennessee Legislature. After considerable delay, the session was called for August 9th.

Mrs. Catt, who had gone to Tennessee on June 15th, with the idea of expediting the preparations, stayed on through devastating heat of the intervening weeks because she realized how relentless the opposition had become and how unscrupulous its tactics were likely to be. And her insight proved prophetic, for every known or imaginable device for preventing or delaying a favorable vote was tried during 318306the twelve days of the special session.

In spite of the excitement, Mrs. Catt held resolutely to her conviction that her presence during the legislative sessions debates would be an almost unbearable strain with no corresponding advantage for the cause: but through the open windows of her room in a nearby hotel she could often hear cheers and applause, without knowing, until some of the suffrage workers came to report, which side was ahead.

Although the resolution for ratification passed the Senate with comparatively little difficulty, the struggle in the House was marked by a long series of dramatic surprises in which first one side and then the other appeared to have the upper hand. Even when a vote of 49 in favor to 47 against was taken on August 18th, a motion to reconsider held up the decision for three days longer, during which 38 opposed legislators tried the trick, at that time a novel one, of fleeing to a neighboring State in the hope of preventing a quorum. When that device failed and reconsideration was voted down on August 21, the Speaker of the House, who was the floor leader of the opposition, announced that an injunction against forwarding the certificate of ratification to Washington had been issued by one of the judges of the State Supreme Court. Two days were spent by the suffragists in getting the injunctions dissolved and on the 24th the certificate was signed by the Governor and started on it way to Washington.

Meanwhile Helen Gardener had arranged with the Department of State to have the certificate examined as soon as it came, so that the Secretary of State would be able to take the final step of announcing that the Amendment had been adopted, for we were fearful that any delay would give opportunity for further injunctions to be 319307brought by the anti-suffragists, who were leaving no stone unturned in their efforts to hold up the announcement of ratification.

At four o'clock on the morning of August twenty-sixth, the certificate from Tennessee reached Washington, when where the Solicitor-General, who had sat up all night waiting for it, made the examination needed before the signature of the Secretary of State could be affixed

Shortly after eight, that same morning, Mrs. Catt, on her way back from Tennessee, arrive in Washington, and the first thing she did was to telephone to the office of the Secretary of State. Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton and I were in the room with her and heard her ask him whether the Tennessee certificate had been received.

In a moment she put down the telephone, turned to us, and said, “The Secretary has signed the Amendment and he wants us to go over to his office and see the Proclamation before he sends it out.”

So quietly as that we learned that the last step in the enfranchisement of women in the United States had been taken and the struggle of more than seventy years brought to a successful end.

We were all too stunned to make any comment until we were in the cab, on our way to the Department of State, when where we almost had to stick pins into ourselves to realize that the simple document at which we were looking was, in reality, the long sought charter of liberty for the women of this country.

Then Mrs. Catt had a conference with the Solicitor-General about the legal aspects of the fight in Tennessee, for she anticipated that the anti-suffragists would bring suit on that score as later they did without success.

That evening we had a jubilee meeting at Poli's Theatre, when every seat was taken and standing space crowded to the last limit permitted by the fire regulations. The greetings, and congratulations 320308of the President were presented by the Secretary of State, Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton and Miss Charl Williams, who had had important roles in the campaign in Tennessee, told about the “ways that were dark and the tricks that were vain” on the part of the opponents there, and then Mrs. Catt made one of her greatest speeches.

Her journey to New York the next day was a truly a triumphal procession as anything I ever expect to see. At every station at which the train stopped, deputations of women, many of them smiling through tears, were waiting with their arms full of flowers for her. When the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York was reached, Senator Calder, a Republican, was standing at the door of her car and upstairs, Governor Smith was ready on hand to voice the official congratulations of the State of New York on the outstanding achievement of its “distinguished citizen, Carrie Chapman Catt.”

The Woman Suffrage Party of New York City presented her with a huge sheaf of her favorite blue delphinium and then formed a procession, led by mounted police and a fine band, with the other officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association marching, like a guard of honor, beside her motor car on its way to the celebration at Hotel Astor.

There is a beautiful picture of her taken just before the procession started, when she stood in the car, the flowers in her arms and her face alight with the joy of triumphant home-coming. No one of us who saw her then will even cease to be thankful for that perfect moment when she must have felt to the full the happiness of a great task completed.