0.3 Great war (part ii)  (Page 12/16)

Paul would be arrested in October and sentenced to seven months in jail. She would even be sent to a psychiatric hospital to determine if her actions were the result of some mental or organic disorder. Although she would be found sane, in November another group of NWP protestors joined Paul in prison. The sadistic superintendent, Alexander Whitaker, had the women thrown down stairs, threatened with sexual abuse, and had the women moved from cell to cell by being dragged by their hair. Dorothy Day was beaten by a group of guards. Alice Consu, who suffered a concussion by the hands of the guards, spent her first night in prison vomiting. The next Paul et al began a hunger strike. The superintendent responded by having the women tied down and forced fed by inserting tubes down their throats. Paul referred to these tactics as “administrative terrorism.” Letters and telegrams poured into the offices of Congressmen, Senators, and of course the Oval Office. Newspapers carried daily stories and Alice Paul’s sister, Helen, freely gave interviews in which she questions Wilson’s patriotism and humanity. After weeks of constant pressure, Wilson pardoned all the women and ordered their immediate release. Wilson was still unprepared to support suffrage however. His December message to Congress omitted any reference to the issue, later claiming that his messages to Congress were focused on war matters, not social matters. Yet shortly after the state of New York voted in support of suffrage, Wilson began pressuring members of Congress to vote in support of the federal amendment. The vote could not have been any closer: 274 to 136, the precise number of votes required to continue the process. Wilson, meanwhile, refused to publicly support the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment until the fall of 1918 when he connected suffrage at home with his desire to make the world safe for democracy as evidenced in his Fourteen Points Address of January 1918. “If we reject measures like this,” Wilson said of woman suffrage, the world will no longer believe in the civilizing mission of the United States. However, Wilson ultimately couched his support for granting women equal political status as a reward for their war work.

Wrath of God – Black Scare, Red Scare, Influenza

With the fighting in Europe and over the League of Nations behind them, Americans went back to old fashion fighting: against other races and against foreign ideas. As the African-Americans who served this nation during the Great War returned home, some believed that they would be treated as equal members of American society now that they finally proved their worth on the battle field. Others returned home and demanded that the US treat them as equal citizens after experiencing no racism from their French hosts. Simultaneously, white troops returning home noticed the increase in blacks among what were predominately white northern cities such as New York, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago. The unemployment rate rose, many black factory workers did not want to give up their new jobs and many white military veterans demanded that blacks be fired in order to give the whites their jobs back.