No sooner were they incarcerated than the President summoned the District Commissioner in charge of the police. “Mr. Wilson was highly indignant,” recalled Commissioner Louis Brownlow. “He told me that we had made a fearful blunder, that we never ought to have indulged these women in their desire for arrest and martyrdom, and that he had pardoned them and wanted that to end it.” Brownlow then had the painful duty of informing the President that the women had refused his pardon. In the meantime, the incident provoked exactly what Wilson had feared—unwanted publicity. Newspapers ran accounts of the daughter of a former Secretary of State and the sister-in-law of a former Secretary of War being required to rise at 6:30, wear loose gray dresses, and eat hominy, cabbage, and vegetable soup. Most “unnecessarily humiliating” of all, reported The New York Times¸ was that the suffragists had been quartered with Negro women.
Wilson was further humiliated when Dudley Field Malone, the Collector of the Port of New York, decided to represent the women. The President met with his old friend for more than half an hour. Malone insisted that Wilson could enact national suffrage almost immediately if he sincerely believed in it. At that point, with the nation mounting its war effort, Wilson said he did not feel he could go to Congress with such a demand. Malone asked why Wilson considered it right to demand of Congress all the important legislation he had pushed through and not this measure.
“I know of nothing that has gone more to the quick with me or that has seemed to me more tragical than Dudley’s conduct,” Wilson wrote Colonel House, “—which came upon me like a bolt out of the blue. I was stricken by it as I have been by few things in my life.” Rather than accept that he had inadequately justified his position, he dismissed Malone’s new role in the women’s rights movement as an overreaction. “Here is one more item of tragedy added to this time of madness. We must not let the madness touch us,” he wrote House, replaying in his mind what Kipling had said about keeping his head when all about were losing theirs.
During the 1916 election, Malone had campaigned hard for Wilson, notably in the woman suffrage states; California, of course, had delivered the President his cliffhanging victory. Malone had promised the women there that if they reelected Wilson, he would devote himself to the passage of the federal suffrage amendment. Now Malone felt hypocritical working for an administration that would not allow him to honor that commitment. As England and Russia in the midst of the Great War had promised women national enfranchisement, he could not reconcile the President’s position. Unless the government took a step in that direction, Malone asked, how could it “ask millions of American women in our homes, or toiling for economic independence in every line of industry, to give up by conscription their men and happiness to a war for Democracy in Europe, while these women citizens are denied the right to vote on the policies of the Government which demands of them such sacrifice?” He told the President, “It is high time that men in this generation . . . stood up to battle for the national enfranchisement of American women.” On September 7, 1917, he tendered his resignation, which the President reluctantly accepted.
Wilson steadily continued his work on behalf of the movement at the state level. In the November 1917 elections, another five states embraced woman suffrage—most notably New York. Wilson had advanced the cause there by addressing a large delegation of its Woman Suffrage Party at the White House shortly before the election and then releasing his remarks to the press. Women had played a significant role in the war effort—not least of all the women of NAWSA, who sold a million dollars’ worth of bonds. Praising their “ardor and efficiency,” Wilson had insisted then that “this is the time for the states of this Union to take this action.” In a post-election White House meeting, the woman leaders praised the President for his support; but even Mrs. Catt said “the time had come to grant the Federal amendment.” This time, Wilson agreed.
Until she saw some actions to back the President’s words, Alice Paul and her followers escalated their war for equality. They continued to write quotations on their banners that they thought would embarrass the President, such as the one that read “WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WHICH WE HAVE ALWAYS HELD NEAREST OUR HEARTS—FOR DEMOCRACY, FOR THE RIGHT OF THOSE WHO SUBMIT TO AUTHORITY TO HAVE A VOICE IN THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS.” They were, of course, quoting Wilson himself and were consequently immune from charges of sedition. When Alice Paul was hauled into court for obstructing traffic, she claimed she was exempt from the court’s jurisdiction on the grounds that she and her sisterhood had no part in making the laws that brought her there. Paul was released, only to find herself back in court a few weeks later, at which time she was sentenced to Occoquan. There she demanded to be considered a “political prisoner” and began a hunger strike.
Wilson called for both a physician and a Commissioner of the District of Columbia to examine the prisoner’s conditions. On November 9, 1917, Commissioner W. Gwynn Gardiner filed a detailed report, with the surprising observation that Miss Paul had volunteered that “she recognized the fact that President Wilson was a friend to the suffragists, but that they had determined upon picketing as a means of bringing the cause before the people of the country and keeping it before them.” She stated further that she had decided upon this hunger strike as a means of “compelling those in authority to accede to her demands.” Because she was physically frail and refused to eat, the workhouse insisted on force-feeding her through a tube that would be inserted down her throat. Gardiner consulted with Dr. William Alanson White, a renowned psychiatrist and superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the government hospital for the insane. White explained that this was “an every-day occurrence” at his institution, that for twenty years he had been feeding patients in this manner with no ill effect, and he recommended it for Miss Paul. Her room, Gardiner reported, was “well-lighted, well-ventilated, and perfectly clean.” On the night of November 14, however, Occoquan became Bedlam. After Paul had undergone her forced feeding, many of her fellow soldiers protested what they considered inappropriate indignities—including the wearing of prison stripes. Their obstinacy ignited what became known as the “Night of Terror,” complete with threats and physical abuse.
By the first week of 1918, another vote on the women’s suffrage amendment was advancing in the House of Representatives. Elizabeth Bass, who headed the Women’s Bureau of the Democratic National Committee, sent the President a short letter wondering “if you know how a word or two from you today . . . would enthrone you forever in the hearts of the women of the United States as the second Great Emancipator.” Of greater significance was Bass’s observation that they were living in fast-changing times—“when all foundations are shifting,” and even the most extreme advocates of states’ rights had just abandoned their position and passed a Prohibition amendment, of which Wilson did not approve. On January 9, Wilson advised the Democratic members of the House Suffrage Committee to vote for the federal amendment “as an act of right and justice to the women of the country and of the world.” The next day the House voted 274 to 136 in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, without a single vote to spare in attaining the requisite two-thirds majority. Republicans supported the measure four to one, while Democrats, mostly from the South, split down the middle. A far more difficult fight lay ahead in the upper house.
All that year Wilson and the suffragist leaders lobbied Senators. The vote was set for September 30, and according to every straw poll, the amendment would be two votes shy of passage. On the twenty-eighth, women from NAWSA called on Secretary McAdoo to discuss eleventh-hour strategy. They handed him a list of Senators they believed might still be talked into voting for their cause. McAdoo looked it over and said he had already talked himself hoarse pleading the case. But the next morning, Sunday, he had an idea. The only possible means of winning was to have the President address the Senate. There were, unfortunately, two significant obstacles: Wilson did not discuss public questions on the Sabbath; and there
was no precedent for a Chief Executive to address a chamber of Congress in order to influence a vote on pending legislation.
McAdoo called his father-in-law at ten o’clock that morning and stated his case. He said he did not believe anything at this point would change two votes; but, knowing how to appeal to the President’s penchant for lost causes, he said, “I felt that since no President of the United States had ever spoken in favor of woman’s suffrage, and that since we were fighting a war for democracy, it seemed to me that we could not consistently persist in refusing to admit women to the benefits of democracy on an equality with men.” McAdoo argued that even if the speech fell on deaf ears within the legislature, the public, just weeks away from electing a new Congress, would hear his message. Wilson said that not only was there no precedent for such a speech but it would provoke resentment. At five o’clock that afternoon, Edith called McAdoo on the telephone to say that her husband was writing his speech.
At one o’clock the next day, Wilson appeared at the Capitol. The chamber quickly filled with Senators, their umbrage apparent. Through the “frigid atmosphere,” he spoke for fifteen minutes, hoping that the “unusual circumstances of a world war in which we stand” justified his presence. He said, “I regard the concurrence of the Senate in the constitutional amendment proposing the extension of the suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged.”
Wilson reminded his audience that the entire world was looking “to the great, powerful, famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day . . . 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.” In the past, some anti-suffragists had maintained that men’s defense of the nation with bullets entitled them to ballots; for the first time, a Commander in Chief argued that the nation had made partners of the women in this war: “Shall we admit them only to partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil,” he asked, “and not to a partnership of privilege and right? This war could not have been fought, either by the other nations engaged or by America, if it had not been for the services of the women.” He went further, saying, “This measure which I urged upon you is vital to the winning of the war.” Just as women had helped in the war effort, so too would they help in drafting the peace: “We shall need their moral sense to preserve what is right and fine and worthy in our system of life as well as to discover just what it is that ought to be purified and reformed. Without their counsellings we shall be only half wise.” The President asked the Senate to lighten his task by placing in his hands the “spiritual instruments” he needed to close the war.
He swung no votes that day. With victory still out of reach, the two factions of the suffrage movement joined forces, each side having learned from the other. Alice Paul softened her approach to President Wilson while Carrie Chapman Catt got tougher. Moving their armies to the Capitol, the two suffrage leaders privately assured Southern legislators that giving women the vote was not meant to diminish states’ rights or augment Negroes’ powers; it was simply about lifting the “sex restriction.” Publicly, they targeted anti-suffrage legislators from both houses in the upcoming elections. A number of longtime Senators saw reason to worry. “The women have earned it,” Wilson told Stockton Axson. “I am sorry it had to come in this way”—through the agitations of war—“but they must have what they have justly won.”
With the young men of the American Expeditionary Force at last in the line of fire, Wilson considered virtually every act of Congress a measure of patriotism. That meant not only giving full voting rights to women but also seizing certain rights from other Americans. To ensure that the soldiers had the complete support of the Americans at home, Congress passed the Sedition Act on May 16, 1918. With the strong encouragement of Attorney General Gregory, this amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917 conferred certain policing powers upon the Postmaster General and further curbed citizens in expressing political opinions. Protest against this new law was vehement, but it found little backing in any branch of government.
When still teaching at Princeton, Wilson had written that the Sedition Act of 1798 had “cut perilously near the root of freedom of speech and of the press. There was no telling where such exercises of power would stop. Their only limitations and safeguards lay in the temper and good sense of the President and the Attorney General.” Now as President, with Americans dying for their country, Wilson would brook no speech that even suggested sedition. He left the actual pursuit of violations to his hard-line Postmaster General and Attorney General. Both men were leery of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World because both organizations had opposed American entry into the war, which they considered a capitalist struggle at the expense of the workers. Questions arose as to whether vocal opposition to the war qualified as seditious.
Paranoia permeated the nation. Local watchdog organizations formed to ferret out enemies within America’s borders. The largest and best-organized group of this nature banded under the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. Calling itself the American Protective League, by 1918 it claimed over six hundred branches with 250,000 card-carrying members whose only real power was intimidation. Gregory boasted to McAdoo that after almost a year of operation, there had been only three instances of “objectionable” APL conduct.
The American Union Against Militarism—which became the American Civil Liberties Union—begged to differ. In August 1917, this left-leaning pacifist organization sent the President a list of recent cases they thought would convince him that civil liberty in America was being “seriously threatened under pressure of the war.” The authors of the letter—including Lillian D. Wald and Roger Baldwin—provided evidence that constitutional rights were being overlooked. They cited unlawful arrests of people exercising their rights of free speech and peaceable assembly—meetings and parades that had been disrupted by the military, orders from overzealous District Attorneys, and arbitrary actions by Post Office officials who declared certain publications “unnmailable” because of their content. Wilson assigned the Attorney General to investigate the charges because he personally esteemed the people who had signed the letter. When the Postmaster General clamped down on eighteen periodicals, the President immediately received a letter from Max Eastman, Amos Pinchot, and John Reed, who asked, “Can it be necessary, even in war time, for the majority of a republic to throttle the voice of a sincere minority?” Again, Wilson intervened, writing Albert Burleson, “These are very sincere men and I should like to please them.” The Postmaster General insisted that their opposition to the war, especially the conscription law, went so far as to “obstruct the Government in its conduct of the war.” The matter quickly moved through the courts, until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government.
On June 16, 1918, Eugene Debs campaigned for the Socialist Party in Canton, Ohio, where he had just visited three comrades who were serving time in a workhouse for having encouraged young men to refuse induction into the Army. Debs kidded with his audience about the care he had to take in selecting his words, and then he proceeded to inform his 1,200 listeners that the government had been trying to suppress the Socialist message, that the master class had always taught and trained the workers “to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war to have yourselves slaughtered at their command.” He urged his listeners “to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder,” and he harangued the government for prosecuting those who resisted what the ruling class called “patriotic duty.” Two weeks later, Debs was arrested and charged with ten counts of sedition.
At his trial in September, Debs’s attorneys presented no witnesses, only the defendant himself, who spoke for two hours. The court found him guilty. Upon receiving a ten-year prison sentence, he spoke once more, telling the judge: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all li
ving beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” The words would echo for decades; but Woodrow Wilson still considered Debs a traitor.
Within months his case came before the Supreme Court. The Espionage Act of 1917 criminalized the conveyance of “information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies”; and, for all of Debs’s elocutionary caution, the Justices considered his Canton speech an obstruction of military recruitment. In considering whether the defendant’s conviction violated his First Amendment right to the freedom of speech, the Justices referred to a nearly identical case decided the preceding week, Schenck v. United States. The Court had ruled that an individual distributing leaflets urging opposition to the draft was not safeguarded. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had written the unanimous opinion for the Court, which famously asserted that “the character of every act” depended upon its context.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. . . . The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. . . . When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.
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