WOODROW WILSON AND “VOTES FOR WOMEN” 277

Brave women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been the early pioneers, facing abuse and ridicule, violence and even arrests for attempting to vote. Later, women like Dr. Anna Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt headed the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, which struggled against “the lethargy of women and the opposition of men.” But by 1916 a younger, bolder and more militant group emerged, which was dissatisfied with the slower process •of winning suffrage, state by state, and fought for a constitutional amendment. They organized the Women’s Party in 1916, which planned to mobilize the women’s vote in all suffrage states only for parties and candidates who would support national suffrage. That year a group of wealthy suffragists financed and toured in a Suffrage Special. They did not campaign directly for the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, but their slogan was anti-Wilson: “Vote against Wilson! He Kept Us Out of Suffrage!” Many voted for Eugene V. Debs, then in prison.

Wilson came to office indifferent to suffrage. On his first Inauguration Day, he was greeted by a suffrage parade of 10,000 women. His first address to Congress set off another women’s demonstration. On that day, April 7, 1913, the 19th Amendment, known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, was introduced in both the House and Senate. It took seven years of organized struggle by the women before it was adopted and ratified. The women felt correctly that Wilson could have speeded it up.

The tactics of the Women’s Party caused sharp differences in the suffrage ranks. The Golden Special, as the suffrage train was dubbed, caused rifts. Dr. Marie Equi, my Portland friend, and others there who helped win suffrage in Oregon, opposed such a display of wealth in the name of suffrage. She carried a banner when they arrived there, naming several wealthy sponsors and asking: “Which Goose Laid the Golden Egg?” They tried unsuccessfully to have her arrested. Wilson was extremely bitter against the women who campaigned against him. Yet he did not remember Dr. Equi’s stand when appeals for executive clemency came to him on her behalf, and allowed her to go to San Quentin prison.

Large numbers of women, old and young, were arrested, refused to pay fines and were sent to an unspeakably vile workhouse, “Occo- quan.” Some were wives of government officials. Their husbands went to Wilson and raised hell. They had been dinner guests at the White House! Released, they returned to picket. Their banners were destroyed and they were beaten by hoodlums, including soldiers and sailors, while the police looked on. They fought for the status of political prisoners and resorted to a hunger strike as a protest against horrible conditions. Forcible feedings were attempted and they were threatened with insane asylums. Women were arrested on Boston Common as they burned Wilson’s speeches there, and outside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, where he spoke. They all boarded a “Prison Special” on their release and toured the country. Public sympathy and support for the women grew.

It was some ordeal these plucky women endured. On May 19, 1919, President Wilson called a special session of Congress and the Amendment was carried by both houses and sent to the states for ratification, with the two long-needed votes finally mobilized by the reluctant President whose reputation as a statesman was tarnished by this long delay. Both parties now worked hard for ratification so the women could vote in the November 1920 elections. Our country trailed behind over 20 others in granting the right to vote to women. Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Russia, England and Sweden were among the first.

The suffrage forces did not unite after victory. About 51 per cent of the eligible women voters came to the polls in 1920. This went up to 61 per cent in the next election. Many of the suffragists joined the National League of Women Voters, founded by Mrs. Catt in 1919, an excellent organization which has since campaigned to educate women

Our office was an interesting place. Many visitors dropped in. I recall a famous “infant prodigy,” named Sidius, a mathematical genius but a lonely and rather forlorn and helpless human being. He had been arrested on Boston Common during a May Day demonstration in 1919, and his professor parents had disowned him. He found warmth and comradeship in our office and was pathetically grateful. He used to help my son Fred do his algebra and geometry at our work table. Another visitor was a gray-haired prosperous-looking, rotund, middle- aged man, later mayor of Massillion, Ohio, as I recall. He was General Jacob S. Coxey, leader of the famous Coxey’s Army of 1894, who had assembled the unemployed of the Western states and marched them to Washington to bring their grievances before Congress. Attempting to demonstrate near the Capitol on May 1 he was arrested. While he was in jail he was nominated for Congress in Ohio.

Another visitor who dropped in occasionally was an IWW seaman friend of mine, “Jimmy.” When he was in Russia, he told me, Jack Reed had taken him to see Lenin, who asked him how soon there would be a revolution in the United States. Jimmy said, “Not very soon,” and Lenin eagerly questioned him about the reasons for his answer. He said to Jack, “I’m so glad to meet a real American worker.” Jimmy said, “He’s a smart man. He wants to know the truth—no nonsense for him.”


WHEN AMERICANS FIRST HEARD OF LENIN

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When Americans First Heard of Lenin

When the news of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 burst upon the world, American workers learned for the first time of a man named Lenin—through this great event in human history, the beginning of socialism. We also learned some new words, which became part of the language in no time, “Bolshevik” and “Soviet,” among them. Even those of us who were left-Socialists and IWWs knew practically nothing of the Russian Socialist movement, except that we had great sympathy with its long, agonizing struggle to overthrow the tsar’s cruel and bloody regime. Overnight, “Bolshevik” became a household word, even to those who did not know it merely meant “majority,” and referred to a political division in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. “I am a Bolshevik from the crown of my head to the tip of my toes!” said Debs. “Damned Bolsheviks!” employers shouted at militant workers and union organizers. All strikers were “Bolsheviks,” of course.

The Russian-speaking people in our midst knew the meaning of the word “Bolshevik,” and also of “Soviet,” which meant “council” in Russian. But it, too, was new to us, although it had originated in the unsuccessful 1905 Russian revolution. “Soviet (Councils) of Workers’ Deputies” were elected by the workers in all mills and factories. They had started in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and spread to many cities. They created a strange and novel structure, which appealed enough to workers everywhere that they were eager to know all about it.

American newspaper correspondents flocked to revolutionary Russia from all war fronts in Europe. One, Isaac McBride, went across the border under a white flag, carrying a suitcase, in his eager zeal to see what a revolution looked like. Everything that we of the left-wing movement heard from there through the press fired us with enthusiasm. In the fourth year of the bloody European war the first act of the new Congress of Soviets was a Decree of Peace, calling for a “just and democratic peace—an immediate armistice, and the abolition of all secret treaties.” Later they published all the secret treaties of the tsar’s government. The second act of the Soviet Republic was to abolish private ownership of land, mineral resources, forests and waters. It would be hard to describe today the impact of this news on the outside world —the consternation of the militarists, the imperialists, the capitalists, in short, the ruling classes of the world—and the thrill of satisfaction

Curiosity and a burning desire to know what was going on in Russia swept through the Socialist and labor movement everywhere. I recall a little pamphlet, possibly the first one published here, called The Soviets at Work, by Lenin, Premier of the Russian Soviet Republic. It was issued in 1918 by the Rand School of Social Science. In the introduction, Alexander Trachtenberg, then director of research at this school, makes this significant comment on Lenin: “The Soviet revolution makes no romantic appeal to him. It is a matter of how ready and willing the workers are to understand the building of a new order which would not prove a house of cards but a formidable structure rooted in the very foundations of sound economics.” Almost a million copies of this pamphlet were sold.

The flood of books started in 1918 with Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed, followed by Six Red Months in Red Russia by his wife, Louise Bryant. An expose of the corruption of the tsar’s court and the influence of the dissolute monk, Rasputin—called The Last of the Romanoffs—was written by Mr. Rivet, the Paris Temps correspondent. The Daily Herald (London) correspondent, Henry Brailsford, wrote Across the Blockade. Albert Rhys Williams, who was European war correspondent for the Outlook, an American magazine, went into Russia in 1917. He wrote Through the Russian Revolution, and later The Russian Land, and The Soviets, also Lenin—the Man and His Works, and 76 Questions and Answers on the Soviet system, all enthusiastic accounts of the new Russia. He lectured here all over the country on what he saw there. Richard Washburn Childs, American ambassador to Italy under President Wilson, wrote Political Russia. All these books came out under the imprint of well-known publishers.

A little later, Arthur Ransome, war correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, wrote Russia in 1919 and Crisis in Russia (1921). William Z. Foster went to Russia in 1921 and wrote a series of articles for the labor press here, subsequently published as a book, The Russian Revolution. Journalists and others wrote interviews with Lenin—including H. G. Wells of London, Colonel Raymond Robbins of the American Red Cross, Bessie Beatty of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Lincoln Steffens, who said, “I have seen the future and it works.” The trade union delegations went there from all countries and made elaborate reports. Russian-born Sidney Hillman, president of the