0.3 Great war (part ii)  (Page 11/16)

Alice Paul’s ideas on how to achieve the right to vote diverged from national leaders of the NAWSA such as Catt and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw or regional leaders such as Emma Smith Devoe. Catt, Shaw, DeVoe, and others asked for the right to vote. They were non-partisan. They used “womanly” tactics such as deferring, being demure, and dressing in the latest fashions. The womanly tactics served DeVoe well when she successfully facilitated full suffrage for women of Washington. Paul, on the other hand, demanded the right to vote, blamed those in power (the Democrats during the war) for preventing women to realize the right to vote, and embraced what were considered “militant” tactics. Paul’s militancy included loud protests, interrupting speeches of politicians, unfurling banners questioning political leaders’ judgments, chaining her to fences, allowing her to be arrested, and going on a hunger strike.

Paul even created and co-led (with Lucy Burns) her own suffrage organization called the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Her target was Wilson and to a lesser extent Catt. “We want to convict Wilson of evading us,” Paul wrote to Burns and Paul questioned Catt’s nonpartisanship. Paul also laid the blame of a lack of equal political rights at the feet of the Democrats in general and thus against Wilson in particular. Paul’s first attempt to win the right to vote was under the banner of the Congressional Union (CU). The CU believed the best way to obtain the right to vote was through a Constitutional Amendment. Three years later, Catt announced her “Winning Strategy” which included support of a Constitutional amendment.

The suffrage bill was not moving through the Legislative Branch as quickly as Paul had wished and thus to bring attention to this fact she led a small march/protest of a few dozen members of the NWP. The event took place at Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House on August 13, 1918. This was not the first time that the NWP marched in front of the White House nor was it the first time that the women were attacked by police. Earlier, plainclothes policemen (reportedly members of the Secret Service) broke up a NWP demonstration in front of the Russian embassy and tore up their banners and posters, some of which called into question Wilson’s support for democracy by referring to him as “Kaiser Wilson.” Paul and many others will be arrested.

Paul and other NWP members will be repeatedly arrested as the war waged on, and at the August 1918 protest, police were so violent that they broke fingers and wrists on some of the women. Thirty-eight were arrested. They were booked and released, then they went back to Lafayette Square and resumed their protest, thus they were arrested again. “We will continue to protest as long as our disenfranchisement exists,” proclaimed Paul. “Oppression and abuse at the hands of the law merely emphasized the great need of women for political power.” Refusing to eat, forced to sleep on concrete floors, urinate and defecate in communal pots, housed along side black women, and jailed along side prostitutes carrying syphilis, many of these middle class white reformers were shocked, as too as the American public who were served story after story in New York and Washington area newspapers.