American Experience (1988) s33e02 Episode Script

1
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the fall of 1915,
there could scarcely have been
an adult in the United States
unaware of the controversy
over votes for women.
It had been circulating
on the periphery
of the national conversation
for six decades,
and during the previous
five years,
had moved decisively
to the center
A crusade of the few
blooming into a mass movement,
their demand for the ballot
growing ever more insistent.
Hotly debated in town halls,
on street corners,
and around dinner tables
the country over,
woman suffrage had divided
husbands and wives,
siblings,
women, one from another,
and had aroused
vociferous opposition
from every quarter
of American society:
industrial interests,
politicians,
and not least, the states
of the former Confederacy,
where the franchise was
a jealously guarded instrument
of white supremacy.
With defeats far more numerous
than victories,
new voices had risen to champion
new, more aggressive tactics,
and the suffrage movement
had splintered over strategy,
Highlighting the fundamental
question of what it would take
for American women
to finally win the ballot.
What no one anticipated in 1915
was the lengths to which they
would actually have to go.
MARTHA JONES:
This is a real struggle.
It is a struggle over ideas.
Who are women, what can they be?
What can they do,
who should they be?
It is a struggle over power.
Who gets to say
what this nation is
and how it does what it does?
ALEXANDER KEYSSAR:
The fact that there is
resistance
to the expansion
of democratic rights
is not uniquely American.
When people have some rights
that other people don't have,
you have to convince them
to share.
Not everybody's
going to want to.
♪♪
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On September 16, 1915,
at the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition
in San Francisco,
four women virtual strangers
Climbed into a waiting car,
drove through the fairground
gates,
and headed east
to launch a new phase
in the very long struggle
for woman suffrage,
now in its 67th year
and counting.
It was close to midnight
when they set out.
Their final destination:
Washington, DC.
(fireworks exploding)
MARY WALTON:
The car takes off,
very, very dramatic.
Lights and fireworks,
and it's on its way.
NARRATOR:
With few personal possessions,
the travelers' cargo consisted
primarily of an enormous scroll
which had been gathering
signatures
at the Expo for months:
a petition
demanding an amendment
to the U.S. Constitution
that would enfranchise all of
the nation's women at once.
Bearing it across the continent
was Frances Jolliffe,
42 and a drama critic
from Washington state;
poet Sara Bard Field,
33 and a native of Oregon;
and two Swedes
who had volunteered
their brand-new Willys-Overland
for the trip.
(engine running)
The "envoys,"
as they were called,
would be taking
a circuitous route,
stopping for pre-arranged
rallies, receptions,
and press interviews
in 48 different cities.
Not counting unplanned detours,
the itinerary
was nearly 5,000 miles.
On a good road, with the top up,
they'd be lucky to log
20 miles per hour.
WALTON:
You have to imagine roads
at that time.
Roads are like tracks across
the prairies left by wagons.
They had to cross the desert.
There are no maps.
TINA CASSIDY:
There was no interstate
highway system.
There weren't streetlights.
There weren't pay phones.
There was really
no infrastructure
to support a crazy trip
like this.
NARRATOR:
Already by Sacramento,
Frances Jolliffe had had enough,
leaving Sara Bard Field alone
with the Swedes,
one of whom talked incessantly.
"Like Odysseus, I have many
experiences to relate,"
Field telegrammed a friend
from the road:
12 miles through alkali salt pan
in Nevada's Great Basin,
an experience Field described
as "plowing through dust";
snow drifts so high in Wyoming
that everyone had to get out
and push;
a mud hole in Kansas
that swallowed the Overland
as if it were a shoe.
CASSIDY:
Newspaper outlets would call in
with scenes from the road.
The whole adventure of it
was really captivating
for the nation.
Women were quite literally
crossing
a new divide in America,
and being much more vocal
and aggressive
Demanding the vote,
not asking politely.
NARRATOR:
The stunt was the handiwork
of Alice Paul,
a 30-year-old Quaker with a PhD
from the
University of Pennsylvania
and a playbook inspired
by her apprenticeship
with Britain's notoriously
militant suffragettes.
Having been recently ousted
from the movement's
pre-eminent organization,
the more moderate
National American
Woman Suffrage Association,
Paul now led the upstart
Congressional Union,
a small cadre
of committed activists
who shared her impatience
for the ballot
and her willingness to employ
unladylike tactics to win it.
CASSIDY:
Women had been at this
for decades,
and the movement
was going nowhere.
And Alice Paul really believed
that the answer
was in needing a new approach.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
While her one-time allies
from the National Association
continued to wage the battle
state-by-state,
re-enacting the by-now
tired ritual
of pleading with male voters
on street corners,
Paul had set her sights
on the federal amendment,
and had appealed instead
to female voters
from the 11 so-called
free states of the West,
where women already were
fully enfranchised.
As the popular humor magazine
Puck acknowledged
with a two-page spread in its
special 1915 Suffrage Issue,
the four million women
of the free states
were poised to liberate
their sisters elsewhere.
All they had to do was vote
in solidarity with the cause.
Alice Paul's envoys would
deliver that message
to Capitol Hill
and make it known
to the Democrats
Who held the presidency
and controlled
both houses of Congress
That thousands of Western women
were prepared
to hold them responsible
for the federal
suffrage amendment.
J.D. ZAHNISER:
The idea was to get
the attention of the party
and convince them
that women's votes
can alter the balance of power,
and persuade them
to push through
the constitutional amendment.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the time the envoys' Overland
reached Washington, DC,
on the morning of December 6,
four states in the East
had voted to keep women
from the ballot box.
And even those suffragists who
dismissed Paul as a "militant"
had begun to see the wisdom
in her demand
for the federal amendment.
President Wilson received
the envoys graciously.
"Nothing could be more
impressive," he said,
surveying the petition.
"This visit of yours
undoubtedly will make it
"necessary for all of us
to consider very carefully
what it is right for us to do."
What the president did not say
was that he had already decided
what was right to do.
As he'd put it to a friend
just the night before,
"Woman suffrage will make
"absolutely no change
in politics.
"It is the home that will be
disastrously affected.
Who is going to make the home,
if the women don't?"
♪♪
KEYSSAR:
It's hard to get inside the
heads of men who were thinking,
"We don't want to enfranchise
our wives or our daughters."
I think that we have
to recognize that there are
fairly rigid notions of what is
appropriate to, to gender,
what is the domain.
What was expected of women
was that they might want
to get an education,
but that then they would marry.
They would have children.
They would take care
of their husbands.
They would raise the children.
That was their ambit,
that was their sphere.
MARCIA CHATELAIN:
Women who had either
been among the first,
or among the few,
who had completed
legal education, medical school,
are realizing
that there's no place for them
and there's nothing
for them to do.
And I think the most educated
women really became restless.
SUSAN WARE:
It wasn't just about
casting a ballot.
It really was about
women's roles in society.
And the suffragists in some ways
are in the forefront,
and saying,
"We want to do more."
(thunder rumbling)
NARRATOR:
By the late spring of 1916,
the call for a federal
suffrage amendment
had become a clamor.
And in June,
despite a torrential downpour,
5,500 suffragists turned out
to press the point
at the Republican National
Convention in Chicago.
♪♪
Accompanied by a pair of mascots
borrowed from the local zoo,
the column of women stretched
for two miles.
"A vast sea of umbrellas,"
the Chicago Herald observed,
"in unbroken formation.
"Never before in the history of
Chicago, probably of the world,
"has there been so impressive
a demonstration of idealism,
of consecration to a cause."
It was precisely
the sort of coverage
the newly elected president
of the National Association
had been hoping for.
Carrie Chapman Catt was 57,
and the crusade
for woman suffrage
had been the one constant
in her life,
a thread that stretched
backwards through two marriages
and the deaths of both husbands,
through the teaching career
that had financed
her college education,
all the way back
to her adolescence
in Charles City, Iowa,
and the election of 1872.
ELAINE WEISS:
Carrie Catt is in
her family farmhouse.
It was a very political family.
Her mother was a big supporter
of Horace Greeley,
who's running.
Carrie Catt names her cats
after,
after the presidential
candidates.
It's a big deal in the house.
And so her father
and her older brothers
and the hired hands
get dressed to go vote.
But her mother just is still
in her housecoat
and isn't getting dressed,
and she says,
"Why aren't you going?
Aren't you going to town
to vote?"
And, you know, the men laugh,
and her father, who she adores,
says, "Well, don't you know,
voting is too important
to allow women to do this."
And she's just stunned.
♪♪
At that moment, she realizes
she had to work towards this.
WARE:
Carrie Chapman Catt has been
part of the movement
since the 1880s,
and was actually president
of the national organization
for four years right at the turn
of the century.
So she goes way, way back.
And I think, by 1916, she was
just getting impatient, too.
WEISS:
The movement seems to be listing
and there's a great sense
of frustration,
and the National Association
drafts Carrie Catt
to come back and lead them
into what they know is going
to be a critical stage.
NARRATOR:
After the crushing defeats
in the East,
Catt later recalled,
"Suffragists were in no mood
to go to the states again
and beg the vote."
Going forward, the National
Association would fight
for the constitutional
amendment.
But unlike the militant
Miss Paul
leveling threats
at the Democrats,
Carrie Catt meant
to beat the politicians
at their own game.
WEISS:
Amending the Constitution
seems really very enticing.
But it's not easy.
ELLEN DUBOIS:
You have to get two-thirds
of the Congress.
That's hard enough.
And then you have to get
three-quarters of the states.
Ratification is by design
a very high bar.
NARRATOR:
Catt's opening move
was to convince
both major political parties
to endorse votes for women
and thereby clear the way
for the federal amendment.
MICHAEL WALDMAN:
Political parties
mattered a lot,
and their platforms
mattered a lot
What they said
were the commitments
that they were going to make.
Carrie Catt is trying
to convince the parties
not just that this is
the right thing to do,
but that it'll help them
politically.
She's in there whispering
to the men in power,
"This is in your interest."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
But at the convention
in Chicago,
Catt's play was blocked
by anti-suffrage senators
from Massachusetts and New York.
WARE:
In the Northeast,
in the industrial states,
there's strong, entrenched
political machines
who were not keen
on women voting.
KEYSSAR:
The political machines want
a predictable electorate.
And they want to be able
to win elections
with the electorate
that they know.
Double the size
of the electorate,
and who knows what's going
to happen?
So let's just keep things
as they are,
where we know how to manage.
NARRATOR:
Thanks to pressure
from pro-suffrage Republicans,
a compromise eventually
was struck:
a plank that endorsed
votes for women,
so long as they were secured
by action of the states.
To Catt's dismay,
the scene repeated itself
the following week,
at the Democratic
National Convention
in St. Louis,
only this time, the opposition
came from the South.
CHATELAIN:
With the majority
of African Americans
concentrated in the South,
the issue of voting becomes
the central preoccupation
of white Southern Democrats,
as well as anyone interested
in the machinery
of white supremacy.
BETH BEHN:
Southern states had gone
to great lengths
to disenfranchise
African American men,
who'd been enfranchised
with the 15th Amendment.
So, any discussion of an
amendment that would include
a provision
for federal enforcement
is, is crazy talk in the South.
WALDMAN:
Federal action on voting
had created a situation
where the former slaves
were voting in huge numbers.
That was Reconstruction.
The Southern Democrats regarded
that as a grave mistake.
The last thing they wanted
was national constitutional
action on voting rights.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
For Southern Democrats,
the stakes were amply
demonstrated by Illinois,
where, in 1913, women had won
partial suffrage,
and now could vote
for both presidential electors
and in municipal elections.
Over the previous year,
renowned anti-lynching crusader
Ida B. Wells
and her Alpha Suffrage Club
had successfully mobilized
Chicago's African American
women,
and had helped to elect
Republican Oscar DePriest,
the city's first black alderman.
JONES:
Black women are going to vote
for president in Illinois
in 1916.
They are organizing themselves
and their community
around the polls.
So if I'm an astute student
of politics in the South,
I understand what black women
will do
if given the opening
and the possibility
of coming to the polls,
that they will work
to really upend
a political order that is bound
by white supremacy.
That's clear.
NARRATOR:
The plank that finally wound up
in the Democrats' platform
was nearly identical
to the Republicans'.
Catt declared it
"an insult to womanhood."
But as she told members
of the National Association
at an emergency meeting,
now that both major parties
had drawn a line
at the federal amendment,
she was more determined
than ever
to get it across.
CATT (dramatized):
Remember that the federal
government
enfranchised the Indians,
assuming its authority
upon the ground
that they are wards
of the nation.
That the Negroes
were enfranchised
by the 15th amendment.
That the vote is the free-will
offering of our 48 states
to any man who chooses
to make this land his home.
Why, then, should American women
be content
to beg the vote on bended knee
from man to man,
when no male voter has been
compelled to pay this price?
BEHN:
Carrie Chapman Catt says this
is the beginning of victory.
And she launches what she calls
the Winning Plan.
DUBOIS:
Catt's idea is, you support the
state campaigns like New York,
where they might win.
But the goal is going to be
the federal amendment.
BEHN:
She does the math and says,
"Okay, clearly,
"the more representatives
there are from suffrage states,
the better the chances
for the federal amendment."
WEISS:
And that is true.
As more and more states were
enfranchising their women,
that meant there was
more pressure on Congress.
WARE:
Carrie Chapman Catt had
a political vision
that was just as accurate
and practical as Alice Paul's,
but Catt is someone
who works within the system.
That's the way she is.
Alice Paul says, "No, I'm going
to try different things,
and we're going to blow this
wide open."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Beyond America's borders
in the summer of 1916
was a world fraught with danger.
(engines running)
(planes flying,
explosions echoing)
The nations of Europe
were waging
a brutal,
seemingly senseless war
that in just two years
had claimed the lives
of nearly a million men.
And Americans were looking
to elect a president
who would keep them
out of the fray.
(crowds cheering)
It was shaping up to be
a tight race.
Woodrow Wilson, who'd been
nominated by his party
on the first ballot,
had the advantage of incumbency.
But the last Democrat elected
to a consecutive second term
had been Andrew Jackson,
in 1832.
Already, the slogans were
flying, newspapers were opining,
and the Republican nominee,
New York Governor
Charles Evans Hughes,
was barnstorming the country,
trying to distinguish himself
from the competition.
WALTON:
They're both sons of ministers.
They're both lawyers.
Teddy Roosevelt called Hughes
the bearded Woodrow Wilson,
they were so much alike.
And Alice Paul sees
an opening here.
She thinks she has a real chance
to defeat Wilson.
NARRATOR:
After personally paying a call
to Hughes in July,
Paul managed to extract from him
a tight-lipped endorsement
of the federal
suffrage amendment,
though he was careful
to qualify it to the press
as "purely a personal opinion."
The Southern-born president,
by contrast, stubbornly clung
to the states' rights position
favored by his party.
BEHN:
Wilson knows he's in a battle
heading into the 1916 election.
He's deeply concerned
with any discussion
of a federal amendment
on suffrage
because he's got a base
of support in the South.
And the whole question
of who's voting in the South,
for Southern Democrats,
must remain a state matter.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Alice Paul intended to make
the Democrats' party line
a liability at the polls.
She'd already taken
the audacious step
of forming
a new political party
The National Woman's Party
Which at first was comprised
only of fully enfranchised women
and featured in its platform
a single plank:
immediate passage of
the federal suffrage amendment.
(train whistle blows)
Now she sent organizers west
to rally women voters
to her party's ranks,
and, as she told a supporter,
to convince them
to cast their ballots
against Wilson
and the Democrats.
PAUL (dramatized):
We have been saying
that the women would rise
in revolt
at the polls this November
against the Democrats
if they did not
pass the amendment.
We are now face-to-face
with the test
of whether they will do so.
Whether we succeed
in defeating Mr. Wilson
is of secondary importance.
What we must do is to show him
and every other national leader
that women are ready to revolt
against hostility.
DUBOIS:
The growing number of women
who had full voting rights
in the West
were now an actual tool
A force, a political force
to be reckoned with.
Everybody recognized this.
But Paul took a step forward.
BEHN:
Paul says
to the Democratic Party,
"If you do not get on board
"with supporting a federal
suffrage amendment,
"we will swing the votes
"of 500,000 women
in the Western states
"against you.
"Whether your candidates
in those states
"are pro-suffrage
or anti-suffrage,
"we're going to vote
against them,
"we are going to vote
against Wilson,
"and we are going to hold
the Democrats responsible
for passage
of a federal amendment."
NARRATOR:
By the end of August, Paul had
installed opposition campaigners
in all 11
of the free Western states.
37-year-old Lucy Burns,
Paul's second-in-command,
was stationed in Montana.
Doris Stevens, 27 and a teacher
from Omaha, took on California,
while trade union organizer
Rose Winslow, 26,
split her time
between Arizona and Wyoming.
Harriot Stanton Blatch,
who'd been assigned to Colorado,
was sure that together,
they could annihilate Wilson
at the polls.
Blatch was 60 and a veteran
of the suffrage wars.
She'd spent the better part
of the last decade
organizing in New York,
the very state where her mother,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
first had launched the movement.
But the 1915 defeat there
had soured her on the work.
Newly widowed, she'd established
legal residency in Kansas
in order to be able
to cast a ballot,
and, as she told Alice Paul,
had turned her head and heart
to her enfranchised sisters.
"I believe in women,"
Blatch explained.
"The East calls to the West
for succor."
♪♪
WALTON:
They're equipped with banners
and leaflets
and copies of The Suffragist.
In many places,
this is still the frontier,
and it's very difficult terrain.
They know no one,
and no one knows them.
They find
that in a number of states
where women have the vote,
they're just
not all that interested
in this federal amendment
and this cause of Eastern women.
♪♪
DUBOIS:
It's 1916.
Nobody really cares about this.
They're concerned
about the war in Europe,
and Wilson is announcing
he won't take the United States
into it.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
What in August had seemed
a promising venture
by September
had become a punishing grind,
as the campaigners shuttled
over hill and dale
to canvass far-flung voters.
"I am absolutely worn out,"
Harriot Stanton Blatch grumbled,
"by routing out at midnight
and 4:00 in the morning."
Even women half her age
had begun to flag.
By October, no fewer
than eight were down,
from nervous exhaustion,
bronchitis, food poisoning.
Then, late in the month,
the campaign's star speaker,
30-year-old Inez Milholland,
who'd led the 1913 suffrage
parade in the capital,
collapsed mid-speech on a stage
in Los Angeles,
her last words directed
to Wilson:
"Mr. President,
how long must women go on
fighting for liberty?"
Diagnosed with pernicious anemia
and a rampant infection,
Milholland languished
in the hospital
while Blatch finished
out her tour.
BLATCH (dramatized):
Women voters!
Remember, Wilson kept us
out of suffrage.
Be loyal to women.
Do not return to power
a president and a Congress
hostile to political freedom
for women.
Vote against Wilson
and the Democratic candidates
for Congress.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
When voters went to the polls
on November 7,
they delivered
one of the closest elections
in American history.
Based on incomplete returns,
some early editions on the 8th
declared for Hughes.
By the 9th, those papers were
publishing retractions.
Wilson had eked out a victory
after all.
Of the 12 states
where the National Woman's Party
had campaigned against him,
the president had carried ten.
BEHN:
The premise of Paul's strategy
was that women would be
single-issue voters,
that they would privilege
suffrage above all else,
and that strategy turns out
to just be incorrect.
Compared to the issue of
America's entry into the war,
suffrage was way down
on the list.
CASSIDY:
The Western campaign didn't have
a huge impact,
but it really opened
people's eyes
to the lengths to which
Alice Paul was willing to go
to keep the momentum going.
NARRATOR:
Two-and-a-half weeks
after the election,
Inez Milholland
died in California,
and Alice Paul immediately
resurrected her
as a martyr for the cause,
emblazoning the cover
of The Suffragist
with Milholland's likeness
and a verse from "The Battle
Hymn of the Republic":
"As He died to make men holy,
let us die to make men free."
♪♪
When Maud Wood Park,
a newly appointed lobbyist
for the National Association,
arrived in Washington, DC,
in late 1916,
it was with some reluctance.
"I am afraid I am
too much a reformer
and too little an opportunist,"
she'd told Carrie Chapman Catt,
"to be of use in Washington."
But as Park recalled,
the lobby was a key component
of Mrs. Catt's Winning Plan,
and she'd refused to take no
for an answer.
WEISS:
The suffragists
have knocked on doors.
They've had rallies,
they've had marches.
But they also
have to convince legislators,
political men
who have their own agendas,
who have
their own constituencies,
to meet their needs.
That federal amendment's
been kicking around Congress
for 40 years
They got to get it out of there.
NARRATOR:
Park had been selling woman
suffrage to skeptics
for her entire adult life.
One of only two women in her
1898 Radcliffe graduating class
to support votes for women
And appalled
by her generation's apathy
She'd gone on to found the
College Equal Suffrage League,
which by 1908 boasted chapters
in 30 states.
She was no less tenacious
when it came to politicians.
Back home in Massachusetts,
she'd once trailed a state
legislator into a saloon
to secure his pledge
for woman suffrage.
But Capitol Hill
was alien terrain.
The briefing she received
on the task ahead
left her, she later said,
"So scared by the number
of mistakes
"which it was possible to make,
"I wondered whether
I should ever have the courage
to open my lips to speak."
WARE:
Maud Wood Park
really hadn't spent any time
in the nation's capital
until that point.
She had to teach herself
how Congress worked,
and I think she was at first
a little surprised
at how dysfunctional it was,
how
How things didn't get done
and how people seemed to be
spending an awful lot of time
not doing anything at all.
But she's the kind of
no-nonsense person
that would just think, "Okay,
what are we going to do
about this?"
NARRATOR:
From the National Association's
new headquarters
on Rhode Island Avenue,
Park now would oversee
more than two dozen volunteers
from 16 different states,
and guide their efforts to push
the federal amendment
through Congress
one legislator at a time
All of them men.
Washington insiders called it
the "Front Door Lobby."
DUBOIS:
The word "lobby" already had
a negative association.
Lobbyists were corrupt people
who bribed politicians
in back rooms.
WARE:
What was so unusual
about the suffrage lobbyists
is that that was not
the way they operated.
They were going to go in
through the front door
and they were just going
to sit down and make the case.
DUBOIS:
Maud Wood Park trained
a whole corps of lobbyists.
She taught them
how to approach congressmen.
One of the things
you always did is,
before you went
into a congressman's office,
you knocked, lest he be
in a compromising position.
Keep the door open, make friends
with his secretary,
and when you're done,
go into the ladies' room
and write down all your notes.
WEISS:
They keep very detailed records
on every legislator in Congress,
and they know
who his enemies are,
they know who his friends are,
they know who his donors are.
They know the skeletons
in his closet,
and they'll use it if necessary.
Just sweetly, just mention
that they know it.
WARE:
And then just keep at it.
Keep coming back,
not get discouraged.
Don't nag them,
but just don't go away.
NARRATOR:
During the month
of January 1917,
Park's lobbyists met
with 326 members of the House,
20 of them
on more than one occasion.
The reports on the interviews,
read in bulk,
could be dispiriting.
"Polite but positive."
"Against woman suffrage."
"Believes that woman dwells
apart from man in her nature."
"Maintains that Illinois
is the only place
"east of the Mississippi
where there will ever
be women voting."
Still, by the end of the month,
the lobbyists had gained a total
of 11 new supporters,
"Small result after four weeks
of work," Park acknowledged,
but nevertheless progress.
DUBOIS:
Becoming active in the suffrage
movement changed women.
It taught them capacities.
It taught them
how to run organizations,
how to run political campaigns,
what it was like to collaborate
with other women.
It got women to do things
they didn't think
they could possibly do.
(trolley bell rings)
NARRATOR:
The nation's capital had barely
begun to rouse itself
on the morning
of January 10, 1917,
when Alice Paul turned her back
on decades of polite patience
and politics-as-usual,
and threw down the gauntlet
at the very gates
of the White House.
A dozen suffragists assembled
there just before 10:00,
shouldering the colors
of the National Woman's Party
and banners addressed
to the president.
They stood in silence
until midday,
when they were relieved
by another group,
who stayed until 5:30.
"Squads will be stationed
about the White House daily
until the presidential inaugural
on March 4,"
the Washington Herald reported.
"This is generally regarded as
the most militant move ever made
by the suffragists
of this country."
No one had ever picketed
outside the White House
like this before.
BEHN:
For women to stand at the gates
of the White House
and demand attention
from the president,
to demand rights,
is stepping far outside
of social norms for that time.
WARE:
There had been picket lines
in the labor movement for years.
It's not a tactic
that they invented.
But applying it to suffrage
and using the White House
And specifically its occupant,
Woodrow Wilson
As the target
was something entirely new.
It was a brilliant way
of upping the ante.
NARRATOR:
The demonstration had been
hatched in tandem
with Harriot Stanton Blatch,
who'd led a deputation
of 300 women to the president
just days before,
to secure his pledge
for the federal amendment
as a memorial
to Inez Milholland.
Wilson had refused.
"Until the orders of my party
are changed,"
the president had told them,
"it is impossible for me
to do anything other
than I am doing"
♪♪
For Blatch, the only rational
response was radical action.
BLATCH (dramatized):
We have got to take
a new departure.
We have got to bring
to the president, individually,
day-by-day,
week in and week out,
the idea that great numbers
of women
want to be free, will be free,
and want to know
what he is going to do about it.
WALTON:
It's now 1917.
They have not made
any real progress
toward a federal amendment.
They can't point
to any real success.
Something new was needed.
The whole idea was to put
pressure on the decision makers
and to get under the skin
of Wilson.
"You are not going to ignore
this movement."
NARRATOR:
At first, the protests seemed
a source of amusement to Wilson,
who tipped his hat to the women
as he passed
through the White House gates.
On the second day,
when the temperature hovered
at 35 degrees
and the pickets were reduced
to perching on hot bricks
and taking turns
with a donated muskrat coat,
he sent a messenger
to ask them in for coffee,
a kindness they refused.
By the fourth day,
everyone involved
had come to regard
the demonstration
as a trial to be endured.
"We are all worn out
by the picketing,"
Alice Paul confessed
to a friend,
"and how we shall keep it up
until March 4
is a problem we cannot face
with equanimity."
ZAHNISER:
Alice Paul and her staff do
an incredible amount
of outreach.
They are reaching out
to nearby states,
to colleges,
to small suffrage groups
Anybody they can think of
who would be interested
in coming to demonstrate
at the White House
for the suffrage amendment.
NARRATOR:
So desperate was Paul
for fresh recruits
that she even issued invitations
to local
African American activists,
setting aside her deep
conviction that their presence
risked turning a woman's protest
into a racial one.
53-year-old Mary Church Terrell,
a charter member of the NAACP
and a longtime suffragist,
answered the call
more than once,
though she'd long ago resigned
herself to the fact
that white suffragists typically
found it more expedient
to exclude her.
JONES:
If you're a black woman,
white women's racism
is not news.
Racism is the order of the day.
You know what that is.
But that's not exactly a reason
to stay home.
CHATELAIN:
African American women
understood
that the right to vote
was yet another tool
to try to dismantle
the structures
that were still in place,
even after the end of slavery,
and to ensure
African American safety
and, perhaps, prosperity.
So Mary Church Terrell
was willing
to join white women's protests
to the extent
that she believed
it would ultimately
deliver the vote
for black women.
NARRATOR:
For every show of solidarity,
however, there was a defection.
Paul was bombarded with letters
protesting the picket,
resignations, cancellations
of The Suffragist,
even a plea from her mother
to call off what she described
as the "undignified
annoying of the president."
Instead, the vigil continued,
day in and day out,
usually six days a week.
By way of explanation,
Paul offered an analogy:
"If a creditor stands before
a man's house all day long
"demanding payment of his bill,
the man must either remove
the creditor or pay the bill."
WALTON:
Alice has never lost her focus
on Woodrow Wilson.
And all of these years,
it's always been
about Woodrow Wilson,
and it's still
about Woodrow Wilson,
the man in the White House.
(trolley bell rings)
(children calling)
♪♪
NARRATOR:
For nearly three years,
while the countries of Europe
had been consumed
by battle and bloodshed,
the rhythms of America's
day-to-day had continued
with little variation
or interruption.
It therefore came
as something of a shock
when, in early February 1917,
Wilson answered Germany's
ongoing aggression at sea
by severing
diplomatic relations.
As lobbyist Maud Wood Park
remembered,
"The importance of the slogan
'he kept us out of war'
"and the re-election
of President Wilson
"had led to the belief
that the United States
"would never be involved
in the conflict.
"Overnight, it seemed,
the shadow of the Great War fell
upon Washington."
ZAHNISER:
The probability of war
gave suffragists
some difficult choices.
Were they going to put the idea
of gaining suffrage aside
for the duration of the war?
Or were they going to persist
in the suffrage struggle?
Or were they going to try
to juggle both things?
♪♪
NARRATOR:
For Carrie Chapman Catt,
the choice was a bitter one.
Like many suffragists,
she was a lifelong pacifist,
and believed that women,
once they voted,
would put an end to war.
Just two years earlier,
she'd helped to found
the Women's Peace Party,
and had been advocating
ever since
for disarmament and mediation
in Europe.
But if American women refused
to back their country now,
she reasoned,
they could hardly expect
the country to back them.
BEHN:
Carrie Chapman Catt
is a pragmatic politician.
If she has to make a choice,
suffrage is going to be
the priority for her,
and she's willing to sacrifice
principle in other areas
to move forward that agenda.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On February 5,
as the nation grappled
with the implications of war,
Catt arrived in the capital
to have dinner
at the White House.
Officially, she was the guest
of the secretary of the Navy,
but the evening's host
was President Wilson.
BEHN:
This dinner comes at a really
important time for Wilson.
He's facing the prospect
of having to say
to many of those
who voted for him,
"I am no longer able
to keep us out of war."
For Catt, it's also
a really important time.
There are major states
New York being
the most significant
That are having a referenda
in the fall of '17,
and she needs
President Wilson's support.
So we don't know for sure
what happens at that dinner.
There's no transcript
of what they discussed.
But what we do know
is what happens afterwards.
NARRATOR:
Less than three weeks later,
in a hand-delivered letter
to President Wilson,
the National Association
offered its services
to the government
of the United States.
Although it was made clear
that work on behalf of suffrage
would not be set aside,
the commitment to Wilson
was unequivocal:
"In the event
they should be needed,
"and insofar
as we are authorized,
"we pledge the loyal support
of our more than
two million members."
WEISS:
Carrie Catt takes the approach
that, "If we can prove to Wilson
"that American women
can be trusted,
"are citizens, are patriots,
"are willing to step up,
are willing to support him,
then maybe we can
slowly, slowly turn him around."
She also makes one of the great
compromises of her life.
And she's kicked out
of the Women's Peace Party.
She is snubbed
by her fellow pacifists.
And she does this
because she feels
this will help gain support
for the federal amendment.
NARRATOR:
Alice Paul, for her part,
expressed no support
for the war,
and the daily protest at the
White House gates went on,
to the mounting consternation
of not only President Wilson
and the men of Congress,
but also Harriot Stanton Blatch,
who believed that in a time
of national crisis,
picketing ought not
to be pursued.
Even Paul's mentor,
the implacable British
suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst,
had set her demand
for the vote aside
when England went to war.
But Paul refused to back down.
PAUL (dramatized):
When the Civil War began,
Susan B. Anthony
was told the same things
we are being told today:
If she'd only drop
her suffrage work
and become an abolitionist,
women would be given the vote
as a reward
as soon as the war was over.
She did drop her work,
and as a result,
all legislation
in which women were interested
was promptly dropped.
WALTON:
Alice said, "I'm not going
to make that mistake again.
"We are going to continue
the battle
"for the federal amendment.
We are going to continue
picketing."
And they did.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The pickets remained
at the White House gates
all through February.
They were still there on the eve
of Wilson's second inaugural
on March 3
A contingent of hundreds,
who marched the half-mile
around the White House
four times in a drenching rain,
chanting "votes for women."
And when President Wilson
asked Congress
for a declaration of war
on April 2,
the pickets took up their vigil
once more.
♪♪
By then, the battle lines
within the suffrage movement
had been clearly drawn
Paul on one side,
Catt on the other,
and between them, a president
who, by his own account,
was willing to go to war
to make the world safe
for democracy.
BEHN:
Catt and Paul are very similar
in many ways.
Both have these incredibly
persuasive personalities,
and they are decisive
and focused
once they've made decisions.
So it's interesting
that two women,
both totally devoted
to the same ultimate goal,
take such different and
antagonistic paths to get there.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The joint session of Congress
that President Wilson called
in April 1917
was historic, not simply
for the declaration of war
it was asked to consider,
but because for the first time,
a woman participated
in the deliberations:
34-year-old Jeannette Rankin,
a longtime suffragist,
now the newly elected
Republican representative
from the free state of Montana.
When Rankin arrived in
the House chamber that morning
as the first woman
ever to hold federal office,
she was greeted
with cordial applause.
After taking the oath of office,
she reintroduced
the woman suffrage amendment
and made history again,
as the first of her sex
to sponsor a bill in Congress.
And in the hours before dawn
on April 6,
Rankin held fast
to her pacifist convictions
and voted against sending
American sons and husbands
to the killing fields of Europe.
Although 50 others
voted with her,
Rankin's dissent
made no difference,
and the nation woke that morning
to the prospect
of imminent war
A prospect many suffragists
regarded as an opportunity.
♪♪
Over the months to come,
as the draft plucked
tens of thousands,
then millions of young men
out of the workforce,
women would slip in
to replace them.
(machinery rumbling)
They took jobs in foundries,
oil refineries,
blast furnaces.
They manufactured
explosives and armaments,
tools and airplane parts,
uniforms for the armed forces.
(machinery clicking)
As Harriot Stanton Blatch
put it:
"When men go awarring,
women go to work.
"War compels women to work.
That is one of its merits."
DUBOIS:
Blatch said one
of the dirty secrets of war
is that it's good for women.
She thought it would help women
enter into industry.
And it did.
JAD ADAMS:
It was a massive modern war.
And there was a vast hinterland
of people
who needed to be involved
to get those armies out there
and to get them active.
And so women could justify
by their war effort
the fact that they
were patriots, too.
NARRATOR:
In Washington,
the Wilson administration
moved to avail itself
of the support
Carrie Chapman Catt and others
had pledged,
and created
the Women's Committee
of the Council
for National Defense,
the first governmental entity
entirely comprised of
and focused on women.
With Anna Howard Shaw,
Catt's predecessor
at the National Association,
as chairwoman,
and Catt one of the committee
of ten,
the council marshaled
the resources
of scores
of women's organizations
and put them in service
to their nation's defense:
coordinating the cultivation
and distribution of food,
providing assistance
to the Red Cross,
promoting patriotism
among recent immigrants.
Caps were knitted for soldiers,
Liberty Bonds sold,
and more than $100,000 raised
to maintain a hospital
in France.
74 women of the National
Suffrage Association,
most of them
physicians or nurses,
volunteered to go abroad
to staff it.
Catt, meanwhile, saw to it
that their good turns for
democracy did not go unnoticed.
WEISS:
They run a very sophisticated
public relations outfit
out of New York,
pumping out articles
about women in the war
and all the wonderful things
they're doing.
They send these to newspapers
around the country.
This is the mass media
of the time.
There's not even radio
at this point.
This is how America is learning
what women are doing
for the war.
BEHN:
Catt talks
of women's war service
as being equivalent
to military service.
It's as if she's leading
a military organization,
an army of women.
And that's the phrase
that she uses.
The army of women organized
for suffrage
are now organized
in support of the nation
during a time of war.
KEYSSAR:
The argument going back to the
revolutionary period was,
if you carry a musket,
you should have
the right to vote.
It was there in the revolution,
it was there in the War of 1812,
it was there in the Civil War.
Women weren't carrying guns
in World War I,
but they're making the argument
that they are critical
to the war effort,
and thus the right to vote
should be extended to them.
♪♪
(ship whistle blows)
NARRATOR:
On June 20, 1917,
as the first American troops
neared France,
the National Woman's Party
pickets
launched
their sixth month of protest
with a bold provocation:
a banner, fully ten feet wide,
addressed not to the president,
but to a party
of Russian diplomats,
who motored through the
White House gate, as expected,
just moments later.
"They say we are a democracy.
Help us win a world war so that
democracies may survive,"
the banner read.
"We, the women of America,
tell you that America
is not a democracy."
Wilson unwittingly had given
the women a great gift
when he said, "This is a war
so that the world will be
made safe for democracy."
Essentially,
they're calling Wilson a liar.
How can you call America
a democracy
when 20 million American women
cannot vote?
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The visiting Russians would
later express support
for the demonstration,
but to the hundreds
of government workers
milling about
on their lunch hour,
it smacked of treason.
Within moments,
two men one wielding a knife
Set upon the pickets and tore
the banner from its frame.
Once America enters the war,
everyone was expected
to do their part.
They were supposed
to be good patriots.
They weren't supposed
to be questioning the president.
DUBOIS:
These women become traitors.
They become people
who are refusing
to stand up for their nation
during a war.
NARRATOR:
Wilson wanted the pickets gone.
"I daresay you heard
about the fracas raised
by the representatives
of the Woman's Party,"
he wrote his daughter.
"They certainly seem bent
upon making their cause
as obnoxious as possible."
CASSIDY:
I think he hated
Alice Paul with a passion.
She was a thorn in his side,
constantly.
He tried to ignore it.
He made the women think
he was ignoring them,
but you know he was peeking
through the curtains
to see what they were up to.
WALTON:
Something has to be done,
and it's very difficult,
because nothing the women
are doing has changed.
They're still standing
on this rather wide sidewalk
holding up banners.
It's the conduct of the people
watching them that has changed.
NARRATOR:
The district police
moved quickly
to shut the vigil down.
At first, pickets were arrested
when they reached their posts,
spuriously charged
with obstructing traffic,
then released to await a court
summons that never came.
But after making 27 arrests
in just five days,
the authorities began to bring
the women to trial.
Some were
paid suffrage organizers,
long active in the movement.
Some were new recruits.
They were teachers, nurses,
and munitions workers,
as well as daughters and wives
of the socially prominent.
Given a choice
between a fine and freedom
or a brief stint in jail,
most chose jail.
WARE:
The kind of women
who were on the picket lines
were generally white,
middle-class women
who never would have been
arrested.
They, it just would have been
incomprehensible.
But a lot of them, I think,
just decided
this was something they felt
they had to do.
ZAHNISER:
They were coming
from a great distance,
many of them without telling
their families
what they were going to do.
So, it galvanized the troops
around Alice Paul.
DUBOIS:
She had this single-minded
quality of commitment,
believing that anything
could be done.
There were no obstacles.
And so she called out the best
in them.
She insisted that they do what
was necessary, and they did.
WARE:
And once that decision was made,
nothing would stop them.
As soon as they're out of jail,
they're back out on
the picket line the next day.
NARRATOR:
Across America,
the outrage mounted.
Week by week, editorials
denouncing the protest
filled so many column inches
that Carrie Chapman Catt
felt compelled
to launch a campaign
of clarification,
stressing
that the National Association,
which represented the vast
majority of suffragists,
did not support the picketing.
DUBOIS:
When Paul's forces
begin to be arrested,
that's when Catt loses it.
I think she disagrees with it
personally,
she feels it's insulting
to the president,
but she also feels,
more importantly,
that it is a terrible policy
to engage in
and will hurt suffrage.
BEHN:
Catt and the National become
even more attractive to Wilson
because they've got the dramatic
foil of the Woman's Party
working for them.
And once Catt's made it clear
to Wilson
who she and the National are,
as in contrast to the
National Woman's Party,
he's sort of driven even more
into their arms.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By midsummer,
the pickets' intractability
had become so vexing
to President Wilson
that his administration
conspired with local newspapers
to minimize coverage
of the vigil,
hoping a lack of publicity
would tamp it down.
But Alice Paul
upped the ante again
and sent women out in August
with an incendiary banner
composed by Lucy Burns,
which compared Woodrow Wilson
to the leader of enemy Germany.
Several days
of near-riots followed,
as again and again,
pickets with identical banners
were attacked by furious mobs.
(people shouting)
Women were knocked down, kicked,
dragged across the pavement.
At one point,
a crowd of several thousand
Mostly government clerks,
soldiers, and sailors
Swarmed the Woman's Party
headquarters,
hurling eggs and stones.
(gun fires, glass shatters)
A bullet was even fired
through a balcony window.
♪♪
Although police did little
to the quell the violence,
the arrests continued apace.
Between mid-August
and the end of September,
29 women were put behind bars,
some at the district jail,
others at
the Occoquan Workhouse,
an open-barrack prison
on the Potomac River.
Sentences now ran
between 30 and 60 days.
ZAHNISER:
As the sentences grow longer
for simply standing in front
of the White House gates,
more people begin
to be concerned.
President Wilson begins
to get letters
from people
who are supportive of him
and saying they are not
supportive of the pickets,
and yet,
the length of time in jail,
the conditions
that are reported,
seem to be wholly
out of proportion to any crime
these women may have committed.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Rumblings of disapproval
could be heard
even within
Wilson's inner circle.
His former campaign manager,
Dudley Field Malone,
registered his protest
by abruptly resigning
his lucrative post
as collector
of the Port of New York.
Then he offered to represent
the pickets in court.
If men had been
demanding the vote
and ignored by the government
for decades,
Malone told the president,
"their inevitable impatience
and righteous indignation
would be understood."
Yet the penalties for picketing
only grew stiffer.
First-time offenders arrested in
October were given six months.
Alice Paul got more.
PAUL (dramatized):
Dear Mother, I have been
sentenced today
to seven months' imprisonment.
Dora Lewis is going on
with the work in my place
and will be at headquarters.
Please do not worry.
It will merely be
a delightful rest.
With love, Alice.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On October 27, 1917,
one week after Alice Paul was
handed down her sentence,
Carrie Chapman Catt led
a phalanx of 20,000 suffragists
down New York City's
Fifth Avenue.
Together, on their placards,
they carried the signatures
of more than a million women
to a petition demanding
the right to vote.
♪♪
The afternoon was chilly,
but spirits were high.
In ten days, New York voters
would go to the polls
to determine whether or not
the women of the state
should be permitted
to join them,
and the marchers were confident
their claim could not be denied.
WALTON:
Women have worked very hard
for the war effort.
They've repaired trains.
They've actually kept
the transportation system going.
They have raised crops.
They're feeding the troops
in Europe.
They're feeding the Allies.
How are you going to tell
these women
they're not entitled
to the vote?
NARRATOR:
It had been four decades since
the woman suffrage measure
first had been brought
to the New York legislature,
and the one and only
popular referendum
ever held in the state, in 1915,
had been bitterly defeated.
But Carrie Chapman Catt
had been working 12-to-14-hour
days all year,
with her "Winning Plan"
always in her sights.
KEYSSAR:
Carrie Chapman Catt
was looking at 36 states.
We needed ratification
by 36 states.
She was focused on lobbying
members of Congress.
She was meeting with Woodrow
Wilson to try to win him over.
BEHN:
Catt puts a lot of stock
in Wilson's support,
and she cultivates
that relationship with him.
Over the course of 1917,
Catt and Wilson
exchange 30 letters.
Almost every other week,
they're writing
back and forth to one another.
She's counting on him
to weigh in
with governors
and legislators in key states.
NARRATOR:
Though the president remained
staunch in his opposition
to a federal amendment,
he'd obligingly thrown
his weight
behind Catt's state campaigns.
Thanks to his influence,
and the tireless efforts
of thousands of unsung heroines
on the ground,
five states recently had
followed the Illinois example
and extended either presidential
suffrage or primary suffrage
to women,
dramatically enhancing
their political clout.
A victory in New York, the most
populous state in the country,
would add as many as 45
pro-suffrage votes in Congress,
and the National Association
had pulled out all the stops
to secure them.
For months on end,
suffragists had tramped over
the nearly 50,000 square miles
of the state,
collecting signatures
door-to-door.
An enormous campaign coalition
had been built,
comprised not only
of working-class
and immigrant women,
but also, crucially,
African American women,
many of whom had been
actively working
for the ballot for years,
through black women's clubs,
equal suffrage leagues,
the NAACP,
and who were able to tap
a population of male voters
too sizable to ignore.
JONES:
When we focus
on the national story,
we see the near impossibility
of black and white women working
in tight and equal coalition
with one another.
But in a place
like New York City,
things are possible
that are not possible
on a national scale.
And when African American women
see an opening,
they are prepared to mobilize
their clubs
into real political power.
NARRATOR:
Most promising to Catt
was the continued return
on her investment
with President Wilson,
who publicly expressed his hope
"that the people of New York
"will realize the great occasion
that faces them on election day
and respond to it
in a noble fashion."
Tammany Hall, the powerful
Democratic machine
that dominated
New York City politics,
was quick to follow
Wilson's lead,
and, on the eve of the election,
reversed its longtime opposition
to woman suffrage.
KEYSSAR:
If you are a politician,
you don't want to stake out
a strong position
on a losing side
where you're
in opposition to people
who might become
enfranchised anyway,
especially a lot of people
Like half the population.
So that what happens
at that point,
when they're looking
at the endgame,
they say,
"Let's get on the bandwagon."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On election night,
as newsboys roamed
the streets below,
hawking late editions,
Carrie Chapman Catt
stood in a window
of the National Association's
headquarters on Fifth Avenue
and watched as the building
that housed
the anti-suffrage Times
flashed its rooftop spotlight,
a signal that the women
of New York
at last had won
the right to vote.
At a victory celebration
the next day,
before an auditorium packed
to the rafters,
Catt opened her remarks with
the words "fellow citizens."
(people cheering and applauding)
What came next was drowned out
by cheers.
(applause continues)
But Catt had no time
for jubilation.
She'd already turned her mind
to what lay ahead.
"The victory is not New York's
alone," she declared.
"It's the nation's.
The 65th Congress will now pass
the federal amendment."
DUBOIS:
Catt called the New York victory
the Gettysburg of suffrage.
Meaning it was the battle
that turned the tide.
But it wasn't the battle
that ended the war.
(people shouting in background)
NARRATOR:
Word of the triumph in New York
likely did not reach Alice Paul,
who'd been behind bars for more
than two weeks at that point.
(glass shatters,
shouting continues)
On her second day in,
she'd incited her fellow
suffrage prisoners to rebellion,
encouraging them to fling shoes,
tin drinking cups
Whatever they could
lay their hands on
Through the high windows,
just as she'd done
eight years earlier
in a London jail.
For that, she was placed
in solitary confinement,
cell door bolted round the
clock, no mail, no visitors.
♪♪
PAUL (dramatized):
However gaily you start out
in prison
to keep up a rebellious protest,
it is nevertheless a terribly
difficult thing to do
in the face of the constant cold
and hunger of undernourishment.
NARRATOR:
By the end of the second week,
the daily ration
of worm-riddled pork
and dry bread
had left Paul so feeble
she had to be transferred
to the jail's hospital.
There, she decided
the time had come
to declare a hunger strike,
another tactic she'd mastered
during her time
in the British suffragette army.
♪♪
DUBOIS:
Hunger strikes are now
an understood way
of drawing publicity
to a movement that's otherwise
up against a political power
that they can't stop.
CASSIDY:
They were being arrested
repetitively,
and she needed to do something
to break the cycle.
And a hunger strike
was yet again
taking it to the next level.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Paul refused nourishment
for three days.
On the fourth,
she was carted by stretcher
to the psychopathic ward,
tied down,
and force-fed a mixture
of milk and eggs
through a tube
shoved down her throat.
This she would endure
twice daily
so long as she remained in jail.
BEHN:
Alice Paul is
singularly focused,
almost to the point
where you could characterize her
as a zealot for suffrage.
She is by all accounts
an absolute force of nature.
Once she's made a decision
on a strategy,
she believes in her heart
and in all of her actions
that she's doing
the right thing.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The news of Paul's ordeal, which
played all across the country,
was followed
by yet more pickets,
more arrests, more suffragists
standing trial.
WALDMAN:
This was an
extraordinary innovation
in the tactics of protests
People deliberately getting
arrested, hunger strikes,
doing it for the media.
And it was the first time
you had
this kind of non-violent,
ongoing civil disobedience
on a great public issue
in the nation's capital.
It had never been done before
in the United States.
CHATELAIN:
The fact that a woman will put
her body on the line
for her right to be a citizen
is considered shocking.
But women are realizing
that if they don't act in these
ways, nothing will change.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In mid-November,
no fewer than 34 women
appeared
before the district judge.
Only one paid the fine
And then only because her
husband, a former congressman,
insisted upon it.
The rest were sent to Occoquan,
with sentences
of varying lengths.
In recognition
of her advanced age,
73-year-old Mary Nolan received
the lightest of six days.
Lucy Burns,
who'd only just been released
from her first stint
at Occoquan,
got seven months.
When they demanded to be treated
as political prisoners,
the pickets were met
with flagrant brutality.
Seized upon by guards,
they were beaten,
dragged through the corridors,
and thrown into cells.
Burns, labeled the ringleader,
was handcuffed
and left overnight
with her arms chained to the top
of her cell door.
The women would later refer
to the experience
as the "Night of Terror."
By morning,
more than half of them,
including ringleader Burns,
had joined
Alice Paul's hunger strike.
SMEAL:
The harsh treatment
begot sympathy,
and people thought
it had to stop.
This is outrageous, why are
you doing this to these women?
NARRATOR:
On November 23,
lawyers for the pickets
successfully persuaded the court
to transfer the Occoquan
prisoners to the district jail.
Struck by the appearance
of the women,
some of whom were plainly
on the verge of collapse,
the presiding judge followed up
three days later
with an inquiry
to the jail's superintendent.
Are there prisoners in your
custody, he asked,
whose health might be endangered
by serving further time?
The superintendent's reply
was unambiguous:
"All of the suffragists."
CASSIDY:
They were incredibly weak
and beaten up.
Well, they hadn't eaten in days,
and nobody wanted to have
a dead suffragist
on their hands.
NARRATOR:
Alice Paul and the others
on hunger strike
were the first to be released.
They passed through the gates
of the district jail
just hours later,
some too frail to walk
without aid,
and were met
by a clutch of reporters
seeking comment from Miss Paul.
♪♪
PAUL (dramatized):
We were put out of jail
as we were put in,
at the whim of the government.
They tried to terrorize
and suppress us.
They could not,
so they freed us.
We hope that no more
demonstrations
will be necessary.
But what we do depends entirely
on what the administration does.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The news broke six weeks later,
in headlines
from coast to coast.
With the House of
Representatives finally set
to vote on the federal
suffrage amendment,
Wilson had met privately
with a dozen key Democrats
and had urged
the amendment's passage,
calling it "an act of right
and justice."
BEHN:
Early on, if you were going
to put money down
on whether or not Wilson would
become a fierce advocate
going to personally plea
with Congress
on behalf of the federal
woman suffrage amendment,
that would not have been
a good bet.
But things changed
pretty significantly
by the middle
of his second term.
NARRATOR:
Just days before, in what would
come to be called
his "Fourteen Points" speech,
Wilson had outlined his plan
for the end of the Great War
and his grand vision
for a lasting peace.
But if he were to have any hope
of achieving it,
he'd need to keep control
of Congress.
BEHN:
Wilson is doing
whatever he possibly can
to try to help Democrats win
in the 1918 midterm elections,
and one thing that is going
to be used against them
in state after state
is their opposition to suffrage.
ZAHNISER:
I don't think he at heart
changed his mind
about where women's place was.
But over time,
between Carrie Chapman Catt
and Alice Paul,
he became convinced of the
political expediency for himself
and, more importantly,
for his party
of putting through
the constitutional amendment.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By late morning
on January 10, 1918,
it was standing-room-only
in the House,
with nervous suffragists
counting and recounting
their too-close-to-call tallies.
When at last the clerk announced
the final vote
274 in favor, 136 opposed
A mad cheer went up
from the galleries.
The amendment had passed
the required two-thirds majority
by a single vote.
As exultant suffragists
made their way
through the Capitol corridors
and out into the streets,
crying and singing hymns,
few could doubt that Wilson's
last-minute support
had made a difference.
What accounted
for his conversion
was less clear.
WEISS:
Carrie Catt believed that
it was her slow cultivation,
her slow political seduction
of him,
proving American women
deserved the vote,
proving their patriotism
through wartime,
proving their citizenship.
And Alice Paul claims credit
because she embarrassed him
in the eyes of the world
by calling him a hypocrite.
They were both right.
BEHN:
You could make the argument
that Catt and Paul
were almost working in tandem,
and that if you didn't know
better
and if you didn't know the level
of animosity that existed,
you might think that this was
actually a strategy.
KEYSSAR:
This is not unusual
in social political movements.
What happens is
that there is a split-off
of a more militant wing.
And there are
severe disagreements
about tactics and strategy.
But the upshot of it is
that the two efforts work
very well together,
where the more militant wing
is really pushing things forward
and shifting the agenda,
and calling a lot of attention.
But it makes the mainstream
seem much more acceptable.
SMEAL:
The reality is, the moderate
looks moderate
only because somebody out there
is making a fool of themselves
or pushing in the line
a little further.
If not, they're the radical!
NARRATOR:
When Alice Paul's
boisterous troops returned
to the Woman's Party
headquarters,
flush from the House victory,
they found Miss Paul was already
there, bent over her desk.
"11 votes to win
before we can pass the Senate,"
was all she said.
♪♪
CATT (dramatized):
The long-anticipated success
has come at last,
and our federal amendment,
after 49 years of struggle,
is through the House.
The woman's hour has struck!
Please start at once a series
of letters and telegrams
to your senators.
We won by a single vote
in the House;
we may be beaten by a single
vote in the Senate.
Leave no stone unturned.
Put on your armor,
mobilize your army,
and be ready!
Yours for final victory
before 1920!
NARRATOR:
When she wrote
to her lieutenants
in early January 1918,
Carrie Chapman Catt
was confident
they'd make short work
of the Senate.
So much so that she had
a new dress sewn
for the ratification campaign,
in her favorite shade of blue.
But week after week,
the dress went unworn.
Prohibition, the 18th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution,
had sailed
through both houses of Congress
just before the new year.
But on the suffrage amendment,
the Senate refused to budge.
A vote scheduled for March
was blocked by opponents
and delayed until May,
then delayed once more.
It wasn't until September
that the bill finally came
to the floor for debate,
and by then, no one was more
anxious for it to pass
than the president.
The end of the Great War
was finally in sight
The German army
all but defeated
And Wilson, intent on dictating
the terms of the peace,
was looking to boost
his credibility abroad.
ADAMS:
America, having built itself up
as a power,
was now assuming a role
as a world leader.
But America was no longer
a world leader
in terms of democracy.
The U.S. was actually falling
behind other comparable
countries
like Russia and Germany
and the United Kingdom,
who had all enfranchised women
before America did.
BEHN:
There's this perception
that Wilson is working against
as he prepares
to negotiate the peace
as the beacon of democracy,
that he lacks
some moral foundation.
And so he's working to get
that liability off of his sheet.
NARRATOR:
"We have made partners
of the women in this war,"
Wilson insisted to the Senate
on September 30.
"Shall we admit them only
to a partnership of suffering
"and sacrifice and toil,
and not to a partnership
of privilege and right?"
The president's appeal changed
not a single vote.
The next day,
the suffrage measure failed,
with more than half of the nays
coming from Southern Democrats.
The federal
woman suffrage amendment,
Senator Underwood of Alabama
argued,
would be "the final overthrow
"of the very life and integrity
of these state governments."
Southerners were very frightened
of black women
getting enfranchised.
You know, the senator
from Mississippi said,
"That will be the end
of white supremacy
if black women get the vote."
Tillman of South Carolina says,
"Black women are more aggressive
"than even men at the polls.
We can't allow them
to be enfranchised."
BEHN:
Wilson cannot convince
Southern senators
to change their position.
The calculus for them is
different than it is for him.
They can be outflanked
on the right
in their home states
if they appear
the least bit soft
on the issue of white supremacy.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Echoing a widely held view,
one columnist pronounced
the amendment dead
in the 65th Congress.
Nevertheless,
the suffragists persisted.
(crowd yelling)
Even as the war came to an end
in November 1918,
and Wilson departed soon after
for Paris
to negotiate the peace,
they continued protesting.
Only now,
instead of merely throwing the
president's words back at him,
the women set them ablaze
across from the White House,
in Lafayette Square.
They kept on organizing
and educating,
lobbying and canvassing,
until, as Carrie Chapman Catt
said later,
the struggle filled their days
and rode their nights.
The ongoing work in the states
carried out by women
of diverse ages, backgrounds,
and ethnicities,
had expanded the suffrage column
by three in 1918,
bringing the total number
of states
in which women could vote
in national elections
to 21.
Still, the amendment idled
in the Senate,
while Southern opponents put
forward various modifications
designed to limit the franchise
to white women.
By early 1919,
after more than a year
of inaction,
suffrage leaders were prepared
to compromise.
As she dispatched 26 members
of the Woman's Party
on a national speaking tour,
with the slogan
"From Prison to People,"
Alice Paul clarified
her objectives
to the press.
"Negro men cannot vote
in South Carolina,"
she told the New York World,
by way of example,
"and therefore Negro women
could not
"if women were to vote
in the nation.
We are organizing white women
in the South."
GIDDINGS:
Alice Paul was one of those
people who believed
that anything
other than suffrage
would dilute and diminish
the issue.
And so,
in some of these meetings
where there were black women,
they would talk about
that they wanted to deal
also with race
as a part of this.
And she said absolutely not.
JONES:
This struggle is going on
at the same time that the nation
is resolving, still,
the Civil War.
How?
By jettisoning black Americans
from the story and from the
actual political culture.
So maybe we shouldn't be
so surprised
that some American women
come to that same notion
of a compromise.
Which is that African Americans
might be dispensable
for other kinds of goals.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
But African American suffragists
refused to be sidelined,
and, spurred by a complaint
from Mary Church Terrell,
the NAACP issued
a formal resolution
condemning Alice Paul's remarks.
The 6,000 members
of the Northeastern Federation
of Colored Women's Clubs,
meanwhile,
applied for membership
in the National Association,
fully expecting to be told
that the timing
was not advantageous.
When Carrie Chapman Catt,
through the National's
secretary,
begged them to withdraw
the application
for the sake
of the amendment's passage,
the federation's president,
Elizabeth Carter,
readily agreed, on the condition
that the National pledge
to stand for the amendment
as originally drawn,
without modification.
CHATELAIN:
The Northeast Federation
of Colored Women's Clubs
realizes that they need to keep
the issue of race
within this conversation
of women's suffrage.
And so they are forcing women
at the front
of the suffrage issue
to really kind of
confess their sins.
And it's strategic and it's
an act of disruption,
as well as a challenge
to organizations
that had been poised
to ignore black women.
NARRATOR:
In the end, only the Democrats'
loss in the midterm elections
broke the political stalemate,
and it was a new
Republican-controlled Congress
that finally passed the federal
woman suffrage amendment,
exactly as written
more than 40 years before.
♪♪
The measure squeaked
through the Senate at last
on June 4, 1919,
with a scant two votes more
than the required
two-thirds majority.
WALDMAN:
It wasn't like the men
of the political process
woke up one day
and said, "You know what?
This is the right thing to do."
It was won by inches.
KEYSSAR:
Perhaps the most important thing
that that says to us
is that democratic advances
have not been achieved
in this country
by everybody standing up
and shouting and agreeing.
There has always been
a strong opposition
to the enlargement
of democratic rights.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
When the legislation
had been first introduced
in the Senate in 1878,
it was meant to be
the 16th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution.
More than four decades on,
it was leaving Capitol Hill
as the 19th.
Given what still lay ahead,
few suffragists paused
to mark the accomplishment.
As one remembered it, they
"simply made a beeline for home
to start the campaign
for ratification."
DUBOIS:
The endurance, the incredible
endurance, of these women
to keep fighting.
There actually is
no single reform movement
that focused
on one single goal
Nothing like it exists
in American history.
To fight and fight and fight
and fight and fight
for the same thing
for so many years.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
After years of militant protest,
the image was at least
improbable:
Alice Paul, needle and thread
in hand,
patiently stitching satin stars
to a flag,
a gambit for publicity
she dubbed
"the Betsy Ross of Suffrage."
When a similar photograph,
featuring another Woman's Party
member in the role of Ross,
appeared on the cover of The
Suffragist in mid-July 1919,
the flag bore 11 stars,
one for each of the states
that had already ratified
the 19th Amendment.
Subsequent editions would track
its progress
through the state houses
of America.
WEISS:
Three-quarters of the states
have to ratify
any federal amendment.
There are 48 states in 1920.
That means 36 states
have to ratify.
There were not 36 states
at that point
that already allowed women
to vote.
Nowhere near that close.
And so, each state
to add to that
was a real battle.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In capitals
both north and south,
from Boston, Massachusetts,
to Austin, Texas,
the decades-long struggle
was re-enacted once more.
Governors, asked to call special
sessions, dug in their heels.
Legislators debated and wavered.
And organized anti-suffrage
women,
who for years had been
distracted by the war in Europe,
surfaced once again to plead
that their sex be left out
of the electorate.
It took the suffragists
a full year,
but as of mid-June 1920,
35 states had ratified
the amendment.
Eight more seven of them
in the Solid South
Had rejected it.
Three others refused
even to consider it.
That left as a possible 36th
only North Carolina,
where defeat
was all but certain,
and Tennessee,
which just the previous year
had extended presidential
voting rights to women
in a bitterly contested battle
that split the dominant
Democratic Party.
Tennessee's governor,
Albert Roberts,
at first refused to call
a special session.
Then, in late June, came a wire
from President Wilson,
who pressed the governor
to deliver the final state
so that the Democrats could
take credit for it.
Roberts who liked to say
that Wilson was his Moses
Compliantly set the date
for Monday, August 9.
WEISS:
The suffragists do not want
to stage this in Tennessee.
Tennessee is a border state.
Part of it had actually
supported the Union
during the Confederacy.
But it's still a Southern state,
and it's still a terrible place
to have to put all your marbles
for the last possible
ratification.
There is a presidential election
looming in the fall,
the first election since the end
of World War I,
and a time when the whole world
is realigning
and America's going to have
to make big decisions
about its role in the world.
The suffragists want to be part
of this,
and they've come
to the very threshold.
So, Tennessee becomes
the last hope.
For both the suffragists
and the anti-suffragists,
it's the last stand.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
They began to converge
on Nashville
during the first,
abysmally hot week
in August 1920.
Suffragists
and anti-suffragists,
legislators, lobbyists,
reporters
All of them primed
for the final showdown.
Carrie Chapman Catt had been
in town for a month already,
preparing the legislative ground
from her third-floor suite
at the Hermitage Hotel.
WEISS:
Carrie Catt has been leading the
fieldwork for the suffragists.
They want legislators to commit
in advance,
to sign a paper saying,
"Yes, I'm going to vote
for the federal amendment."
They send Tennessee women
out to every town and hamlet
and say,
"We are your constituents.
You have to sign this."
And, so, by their count,
they have the votes.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
But now, as new arrivals crowded
into town,
Catt had a dark sense
of foreboding.
WEISS:
The anti-suffragists also
have their headquarters
in the Hermitage Hotel.
And you have the corporate
lobbyists and the politicians
who have come in
from all over the country,
and they're also staying
in the hotel.
Even though Prohibition
is already in effect,
they open what they call
the Jack Daniels suite
on the eighth floor,
a 24/7 speakeasy
where liquor is dispensed
morning, noon, and night
to any legislator
who will come up and listen
to the arguments why they should
vote against suffrage.
And there's money being passed,
there's threats being made,
to get them
to change their vote.
NARRATOR:
Alice Paul,
stuck in Washington, DC,
raising funds
for the ratification campaign,
got word of the shady dealings
from Sue White,
a veteran picketer
and native Tennessean
whom Paul had put in charge
of the Woman's Party efforts
on the ground.
"Nobody will say how bulk
of Republicans will vote,"
White wrote Paul.
"Some reports antis using money.
Wish greatly you were here."
♪♪
At noon on Monday, August 9,
the pounding of gavels
brought both the Tennessee
Senate and House to order
And set in motion
one of the most contentious
and chaotic legislative sessions
in the history of the republic.
Employing a series
of procedural high jinks
Purposeful clerical errors,
resolutions to delay,
maddening adjournments
Opponents of the amendment
first managed
to stall the Senate vote
until Friday,
leaving legislators
with little to do all week
but mingle at the Hermitage.
WEISS:
Carrie Catt convenes
her suffragists and says,
"Okay, how many
of these legislators
"are susceptible to bribes?
Yes, we have his pledge,
but is it reliable?"
And what they find is, those
pledges begin to get reneged.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the time the Senate passed
the amendment 25 to four,
the vote in the House
had been postponed.
Worse still,
Speaker Seth Walker,
who had originally pledged aye,
had double-crossed
the suffragists,
and vowed to bring with him
as many House members
as he could muster.
Tallies made Friday night
indicated
ratification would fail
by two votes.
It was a trying weekend,
with drunken legislators
wandering the halls
of the Hermitage
and weary suffragists
keeping watch
over their pledged delegates,
lest any one of them slip away.
WEISS:
The suffragists see the erosion
of their support,
and they know
that it's other influences
that are coming to bear.
They realize
they don't have the votes.
They're probably going to lose.
And Carrie Catt realizes
that she's been working
for this cause for 30 years
and this may be it,
this may be the end.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On Wednesday, August 18,
after nine days of delays
and three-and-a-half hours
of debate,
the suffrage measure
finally moved
to a vote on the House floor.
In the galleries, anxious women
reviewed their tallies
Two votes shy
of the required majority.
The chief clerk began to call
the roll:
Anderson.
Bell.
Burn.
Harry Burn was 24 years old,
the youngest member
of the legislature
and a representative
of a strenuously anti-suffrage
rural district.
But that morning, a page
had handed him a letter
from his mother,
which spoke more loudly to Burn
than did his constituents.
WEISS:
It's a mother's letter.
She's asking him to go shopping
for her in the big city
and buy some sheet music.
But she also says she's been
reading the papers
and noticing he's not been
supporting the suffragists,
and she admonishes him and says,
"Be a good boy
and help Mrs. Catt."
NARRATOR:
To the astonishment of all,
Harry Burn voted aye,
bringing the tally dead even.
And there it remained through
the rest of the roll call.
Suffragists were already
weeping softly,
when,
at the last possible moment,
Banks Turner suddenly stood
to address the speaker.
The 30-year-old farmer had been
counted as an opponent,
but he'd kept silent
when the roll was called.
Now he announced he wished
to be recorded
as having voted aye.
Catt, who'd elected to wait out
the vote at the Hermitage,
could hear the roar
in the galleries
clear across the street.
WEISS:
Carrie Catt's window faces
the State House,
and she hears shouting,
and she realizes this is it.
The dream of her life
was coming true.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Outside the State House,
Harry Burn paused
to exchange congratulations
with Banks, Turner,
and the suffragists,
but only briefly,
having fled the torrent
of insults in the House chamber
through a window
in the clerk's room.
SMEAL:
The closeness of the vote
shows you how important
the struggle is,
and shows you you weren't
just fighting windmills.
There is always an opponent,
and that opponent has power,
and they are yielding only
because they have to.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The rush wire from Nashville
soon reached
a waiting Alice Paul,
who hastily stitched
to her ratification banner
the long-awaited 36th star.
Eight days later,
on August 26, 1920,
72 years after the movement
for woman suffrage
first stirred into being,
Secretary of State
Bainbridge Colby
certified the 19th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution,
and with his seal,
enfranchised 26 million women
of voting age.
WEISS:
The phrase you hear is,
"In 1920, American women
were given the vote."
It drives me crazy.
The struggle
for women's suffrage
takes over seven decades.
The women who began the movement
didn't live to see it
come to fruition.
And the women who took it
over the finish line
weren't born when it began.
And so, you have these three
generations of American women
who all come together
in this extraordinary movement
for equality.
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WARE:
To reduce that to women
being given the vote
or granted the vote,
it just does a disservice
to what is clearly
one of the most sustained
and successful moments
of political mobilization
in all of American history.
It wasn't just given to them.
Women fought for the right
to vote,
and they won the right to vote.
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NARRATOR:
When Americans went to the polls
in November 1920,
an estimated nine million women
were among them,
only a third of the eligible
female electorate,
but roughly three times
the number who'd been active
in the suffrage movement's
final phase.
Many were African Americans,
who had eagerly registered
to vote
wherever they were able
From Massachusetts and Maryland
to Ohio.
But elsewhere,
as one journalist observed,
black women had the right
to vote
"in name only."
Denied access to the polls
by individual states,
as black men throughout
the South had been
On grounds
not specifically prohibited
by the U.S. Constitution
Many thousands
of African American women
and other women of color
would remain disenfranchised
for decades yet to come.
GIDDINGS:
If we're talking about fairness
and equality and democracy,
the whole idea of reform
is to do away
with as much discrimination
as one can.
You might not be able to do it
all at the same time,
but you got to go for it
And you have to envision it.
NARRATOR:
Votes for women,
as everyone who'd agitated
for them well knew,
had merely forced open a door.
"It is incredible to me,"
Alice Paul remarked in 1921,
"that any woman should consider
the fight for full equality
won."
But thanks
to the 19th Amendment
And the decades-long struggle
that had secured it
That fight had at least
finally begun.
ZAHNISER:
What the 19th Amendment meant
for American democracy
is hard to overstate.
Half the population winning
the vote is a tremendous step
towards this young country,
America,
finally achieving the equality
that Thomas Jefferson
wrote about
in the Declaration
of Independence,
a huge step towards America
achieving its potential.
CHATELAIN:
Any time you bring more people
into full citizenship,
you create new standards
and new expectations
for what a nation can do,
and so the 19th Amendment meant
that the concerns of women
were important.
KEYSSAR:
When you enfranchise
half the population,
you're stripping away
the argument
that this is a privilege,
this should be exercised
by only certain kinds of people.
The 19th Amendment
is absolutely critical
to the affirmation
of voting as a right.
WALDMAN:
The fight over the right to vote
has never just been
about ideals.
It's always been about power,
and who has it,
and who doesn't want
to give it up.
We're still fighting
over who has that power.
And that fight to vote
is the central story
of American democracy.
It's about who we are
as a country
and who gets to decide
what the policies
of the government are.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Like all those who had spent
their lives
in pursuit of the ballot,
Carrie Chapman Catt was deeply
conscious of its value,
and she'd closed out her career
as a suffragist with a plea
that the newly enfranchised
not lose sight
of what it was they had won.
CATT (dramatized):
The vote is the emblem
of your equality,
women of America,
the guaranty of your liberty.
Women have suffered
agony of soul
which you never can comprehend
that you and your daughters
might inherit political freedom.
That vote has been costly.
Prize it!
The vote is a power,
a weapon of offense and defense,
a prayer.
Use it intelligently,
conscientiously, prayerfully.
Progress is calling to you
to make no pause.
Act!
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