Suffragists Oral History ProjectConversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights AmendmentAlice PaulAn Interview Conducted by
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Introductory Materials
Preface to Suffragists Oral History Project
The Suffragists Oral History Project was designed to tape record interviews with the leaders of the woman's suffrage movement in order to document their activities in behalf of passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and their continuing careers as leaders of movements for welfare and labor reform, world peace, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Because the existing documentation of the suffrage struggle indicates a need for additional material on the campaign of the National Woman's Party, the contribution of this small but highly active group has been the major focus of the series.
The project, underwritten by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, enabled the Regional Oral History Office to record first-hand accounts of this early period in the development of women's rights with twelve women representing both the leadership and the rank and file of the movement. Five held important positions in the National Woman's Party. They are Sara Bard Field, Burnita Shelton Matthews, Alice Paul, Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, and Mabel Vernon. Seven interviews are with women who campaigned for suffrage at state and local levels, working with other suffrage organizations. Among this group is Jeannette Rankin, who capped a successful campaign for suffrage in Montana with election to the House of Representatives, the first woman to achieve this distinction. Others are Valeska Bary, Jessie Haver Butler, Miriam Allen de Ford, Ernestine Kettler, Laura Ellsworth Seiler, and Sylvie Thygeson.
Planning for the Suffragists Project and some preliminary interviews had been undertaken prior to receipt of the grant. The age of the women—74 to 104—was a compelling motivation. A number of these interviews were conducted by Sherna Gluck, Director of the Feminist History Research Project in Los Angeles, who has been recording interviews with women active in the suffrage campaigns and the early labor movement. Jacqueline Parker, who was doing post-doctoral research on the history of the social welfare movement, taped interviews with Valeska Bary. A small grant from a local donor permitted Malca Chall to record four sessions with Jeannette Rankin. Both Valeska Bary and Jeannette Rankin died within a few months of their last interviewing session.
The grant request submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation covered funding both to complete these already-recorded interviews and to broaden the scope and enrich the value of the project by the inclusion of several women not part of the leadership. The grant, made in April, 1973, also provided for the deposit of all the completed interviews in five major manuscript repositories which collect women's history materials.
In the process of research, a conference with Anita Politzer (who served more than three decades in the highest offices of the National Woman's Party, but was not well enough to tape record that story) produced the entire series of Equal Rights and those volumes of the Suffragist missing from Alice Paul's collection; negotiations are currently underway so that these in-party organs can be available to scholars everywhere.
The Suffragists Project as conceived by the Regional Oral History Office is to be the first unit in a series on women in politics. Unit two will focus on interviews with politically active and successful women who are incumbents in elective office today.
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons prominent in the history of the West and the nation. The Office is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, Director of The Bancroft Library.
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California at Berkeley
Suffragists Oral History Project
BARY, Helen Valeska. Labor Administration and Social Security: A Woman's Life . 1974
MATTHEWS, Burnita Shelton. Pathfinder in the Legal Aspects of Women . 1975
PAUL, Alice. Conversations with Alice Paul: An Autobiography. 1975
RANKIN, Jeannette. Activist for World Peace, Women's Rights, and Democratic Government . 1974
REYHER, Rebecca Hourwich. Search and Struggle for Equality and Independence . 1977
The Suffragists: From Tea-Parties to Prison. 1975 Thygeson, Sylvie, "In the Parlor" Butler, Jessie Haver, "On the Platform" deFord, Miriam Allen, "In the Streets" Seiler, Laura Ellsworth, "On the Soapbox" Kettler, Ernestine, "Behind Bars"
VERNON, Mabel. The Suffrage Campaign, Peace and International Relations . 1975
FIELD, Sara Bard. Poet and Suffragist . 1979
Interview History
Alice Paul was the leader of the more militant suffrage and equal rights organization called the National Woman's Party. After campaigning in England with Mrs. Pankhurst, the young Quaker returned to this country, finished a Ph.D., and in 1912 became the head of the congressional committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her group soon spun off from the mother organization, rejecting the state-by- state referenda as a method of achieving equal suffrage and evolving into the National Woman's Party, which worked for suffrage by constitutional amendment. The energetic militants soon became known for their central political strategies: make suffrage a mainstream issue through public demonstrations and protests, and increase political clout by holding the party in power responsible in elections in western states where women already had the vote.
The actual tape recording of Alice Paul's memoir was preceded by a half dozen years of intermittent and fruitless negotiations between this indomitable leader and myself. I first met her when I came to research the archives of the National Woman's Party headquarters at the Alva-Belmont House in Washington and to read the party's papers in the Library of Congress.
Each trip east thereafter I stayed at the Alva-Belmont House, where Alice lived and where women writers, doctors, lawyers, and long-time Woman's Party members frequently sojourned. There Alice and I had long conversations at night about the past. While these increased our friendship, they did little to got Alice's own story preserved for posterity: she objected to tape or notebook, and explained more than once that it was unthinkable to embark on a taping project when the ERA still needed everyone's assistance in Congress. It was not long before I was sporadically lobbying House Judiciary Subcommittee members for passage of the ERA whenever I was in Washington, or when Alice called me and I could arrange my work to go.
I had jokingly struck a bargain with Alice: I would lobby if she would agree to tape record after ERA passed Congress. While my lobbying held undetermined value for the ERA, it was an indispensable apprenticeship for historical inquiry into political processes. I am indebted to Alice and to the National Woman's Party for making this experience possible.
It was Alice's departure from Washington after the passage of the ERA in Congress in 1972 that set the stage for our interviews. Although she continued to nurse ratification through state after state from her telephone in her lakeside cottage in Ridgefield, Connecticut, she has never returned to headquarters. The abrupt change in leadership in the National Woman's Party which occurred at that time is a fertile subject for theses of the future.
Regardless of her continuing work on ratification, Alice recognized that she could make time to tape her memoirs, and she invited me to come to Ridgefield.
Our first interview sessions were held November 24 to 26, 1972, with neither of us knowing whether there would ever be adequate funding for transcribing, correcting, and retyping. The following spring Rockefeller Foundation made possible the processing of that session's tapes and a much-needed second session, which we held May 10 to 12, 1973. Both were three-day marathons.
1. See the more detailed account, "Interviewer's impressions," dictated December 30, 1972, which follows.
Among sources which proved most helpful were the National Woman's Party's the Suffragist, a weekly publication which became Equal Rights in 1923, Inez Haynes Irwin's Story of the Woman's Party ( Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1921 ), and Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom ( New York, 1920). Many papers relating to the Woman's Party and Alice Paul were found in several cross-referenced collections in Radcliffe College's Schlesinger Library and in the Anne Martin-Mable Vernon papers in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Because at the time of the interview the National Woman's Party was denying most people, including myself, access to Paul's papers and other materials in the headquarter's library, the ample footnotes in the thesis of Loretta Ellen Zimmerman, who earlier had had access to the Paul correspondence, were of unique value. (See Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1912-1920; Ph.D. diss., Tulane University 1964.)
Among difficult-to-locate books that Alice made available at her cottage was one whose careful documentation made it especially helpful: Carolyn Katzenstein's Lifting the Curtain, written from her notes at the time of the campaigns; although
Alice was still working on ratification of the ERA in Connecticut and other states when I sent her the rough-edited version of the first two chapters of our transcript. As could be predicted, they lay on her desk while she organized supporters via her telephone, and while her next door neighbor and close friend, "Scotty" Reynolds, and I carried on a lively correspondence about how to get Alice to check through it. Among other obstacles, Alice was plagued by poor vision and would not take the time to get new glasses.
Then, one day in March, 1974, Alice fell. Ultimately she was taken to a New York hospital, then transferred shortly to a nursing home in Ridgefield. Diagnoses had progressed from "just bruises" to a concussion to a mild stroke. Her period of residence at the nursing home drew more protracted, and in November I was granted the rare privilege of visiting her. She was eager to know how the ERA campaign was progressing and anxious to get to Washington so she could properly organize her papers for deposit in an archive. Although our discussion was as lucid as old times, an anxiety to return to her cottage underlay her customary serenity, probably because she still was denied newspapers, TV news, letters, phone calls and visitors. We agreed that her transcript should be issued as soon as possible, that this office would finish it in its verbatim form and edit any ambiguities in the text with notations in footnotes and brackets.
Her nephew, Donald Paul, proofread the manuscript and added notations about the family, which are in brackets and footnotes and attributed to him.
At this writing, the current legal efforts on Alice's behalf have removed some of the restrictions on her, two years after she was placed in the convalescent home. Hopes are high that she may indeed move back into her cottage. It
Interviewer/Editor 5 January 1976
Regional Oral History Office
History office 486 The Bancroft
Library University of California, Berkeley
The Interviewer's Impressions of Alice Paul
Dictated on December 30, 1972 after the interview sessions of November 24-26, 1972; edited, December 23, 1975.
Alice Paul and I met about six years before the interview, when I had gone to Washington searching for material about Sara Bard Field's 1915 automobile campaign for suffrage. National Woman's Party headquarters, in the elegant and ancient Alva-Belmont mansion, housed a veritable goldmine of suffrage material in its library. When I met Alice Paul to get her permission to use it, she wondered aloud how anyone in good conscience could spend research time on the long-gone suffrage campaign when so much effort was currently needed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. I pondered silently how anyone could continue to make history and remain insensitive to the historical imperative.
After that first stalemate, I usually took one of the rooms at the elegant Alva-Belmont House whenever I was in Washington. There, after dinner in the garden in the warmer months, or with trays in the living room if it was winter, Alice would tell me some of the history of the Equal Rights Amendment. When our talks stretched into the evening hours, she would even go into her recollections of the suffrage struggle, and often our sessions would not break up until the early hours of morning. But she would never let me turn on a tape recorder, and if I pulled out a pencil to take notes she would say, "Oh, don't take notes on this. This isn't really worthwhile," or "Everything we have is either in the Library of Congress or right here."
In 1972 the Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress. It was yet to be ratified, but she had moved to Connecticut because there were some drastic changes taking place at the Alva-Belmont House. At the same time an article had appeared on her in a popular history magazine which she felt was unsatisfactory. These two factors created hope that she might finally respond to the constant overtures to tape record her life history. Perhaps Alice realized that because she had never produced a memoir she was going to have more inaccurate articles appearing about her, but that if she could record a fairly complete oral history, writers would have access to her account of her life which they could use without bothering her.
It was November and I was in Washington when I called Alice in Connecticut to make arrangements to begin an interview. We decided that she would see me the Monday before Thanksgiving. However, there were difficulties in my getting access to the
I was to meet her in her cottage in Ridgefield, Connecticut. She was fretting and apologetic over the fact that she could not provide her usual level of hospitality because she had just moved in. One hostessing problem was that she had not found anyone to cook for us. I remembered that at Belmont House, she always had a cook come in to prepare breakfast and dinner. I assured her that I was happy and able to do the cooking or anything else domestic; but she wouldn't hear of that. Further evidence of her hospitality was her insistence on having me met at the train some fifteen miles away at the Stamford station. Lacking a driver and a car, she arranged for a taxi driver to watch for me at the train and take me to Ridgefield.
Inadvertently, I was delivered to Alice's little white frame cottage about thirty minutes earlier than expected. I knocked. A dismayed Alice Paul opened the door; she had not yet dressed for the day, and her handyman's wife was still running the vacuum cleaner. (She introduced her not as her handyman's wife but as "a friend and neighbor.") For Alice's peace of mind, I wanted to back out the door and re-enter in twenty minutes. But she soon reappeared in a dress of brilliant turquoise sparkling with bead trim. A long string of pearls was further accented with a star- shaped pin of gold netting with a pearl at its center, which I suddenly realized had almost become a symbol of Alice Paul to me. She had worn it frequently in Washington, and, regrettably, I never asked her where it came from.
The little white cottage had been owned jointly by her and her late brother since the middle thirties, and although she had lived here in the forties while she worked with the United Nations at Lake Success, she was now converting it for permanent living. It was rustic, built by some early day Thoreau and his daughter on the edge of a small, wooded lake which Alice Paul also owned. The house itself still had the wide, wide planks that the early builders had hewn by hand. Ax marks still lined the rough logs that formed the ceiling beams. A great fireplace dominated the main room, which was a rather modest-sized living room with a windowed bay which, lined with blooming plants, served as a dining area. The other rooms had been added long before. There are now two bedrooms, a bath, and a study off the living room. In the study was a beautifully preserved rosewood desk that had belonged to Susan B. Anthony. Beyond is another addition, an airy sunroom windowed on three sides over the lake. There is a small kitchen,
The period furniture was comfortable overstuffed, carved, and dark-stained. There were no graphics, paintings (except family portraits ), objets d'art, or sound systems for music, unless one counts the small radio on the kitchen table—used mainly for news while I was there.
Throughout the house, particularly in the bedroom I was assigned, were portraits of members of her family, all of whom were Quakers, going back to the time the first Quakers arrived on the American continent. Alice carefully identified each one as she showed me around. Over the fireplace was a beautiful portrait in oil of a woman whom I think she said was two generations ahead of her, a close relative of William Penn. (I think she had Penn in her name.) Alice's family had been in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for many, many generations and had been Quaker even before the first one came to America. Her grandfather had helped establish Swarthmore College, where her mother attended. This strong Quaker tradition comes out in the interview.
Alice's relatively simple housekeeping needs were met by neighbors who were also close friends. "Scotty"(A.S.) Reynolds, who lived next door in a house also owned by Alice, was a competent, witty woman retired from Life magazine (she had been a photography editor) and a dear friend of Alice's. It was she who cooked and brought over Thanksgiving dinner for us.
The day I arrived was crisp and cold. Ice edged the lake, and Alice had given a local carpenter the task of fitting storm windows. After her handyman laid a fire in the fireplace, Alice said to me, "Now I will make you Captain of the Fireplace." The title was never fully earned, but I shoveled and poked assiduously, and Alice assured me that I was a marvelous firebuilder.
She's very good at thanking people—a trait I noticed with some surprise when lobbying for her. Inez Haynes Irwin had written in 1921,
"...it never occurred to [Alice Paul] to thank anybody... "
2. Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying, reprinted 1964, Traversity Press, Penobscot, Maine, p. 25 . Formerly The Story of the Woman's Party, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1921.
The same concern for people close to her showed in her attitude toward the young woman who had taken the apartment downstairs. The tenant frequently complained that she was cold, and she probably was. Alice would then request that I turn up the thermostat, thus making it too hot upstairs so that the basement would be habitable. To put an end to this untenable situation Alice had ordered a new furnace installed in the small apartment. In the meantime she frequently asked the handyman or the carpenter (they were always coming in and out) to check to see if the tenant was comfortable. When she invariably said that she was still cold, Alice, very concerned, would say, "She always says it's cold." Although a little annoyed, she was going to great expense to make the apartment comfortable.
To prepare for our interview sessions, Alice had assembled in the study her complete set of the Suffragist (the weekly National Woman's Party magazine for the suffrage movement) and other papers. By this time, I had drafted three different interview outlines—one in Berkeley, one in Washington, and now a third was developing from the additional records; I was frantically trying to get these combined before she was ready to record. After our Thanksgiving dinner we talked at length about the scope of the history and what it should include. As we talked, her sense of scholarship expanded her role from respondant to co-worker.
A few days before, contrary to her life-long policy, she had agreed to a long journalism interview. The lucky writer was Robert S. Gallagher from American Heritage magazine.
3. Gallagher, Robert S., “I Was Arrested, Of Course,” an interview, American Heritage, February, 1974, pp. 17-24, 92-94 .
At that point, we agreed that in our interview I would ask questions, that we would cover the subject year by year chronologically, and that she would tell everything of relevance that she could think of, whether I asked her or not; whenever I felt she was leaving out something, I would ask. This is pretty much the way the interview developed, although
Alice was eighty-seven at this time and she was in fragile physical condition. Trying to keep a balance between her strong mental and intellectual health and her precarious physical health presented a challenge for which, as an interviewer, I was scarcely prepared. About six months before, in May, one of Alice's friends in Washington sensing some deterioration in her general health had whisked her to a New York hospital. Although they both told me what happened, it still is not clear to me. It seems that after the amendment passed Congress, Alice had what she called a "tired heart." In the hospital her pulse rate was very low, she was given digitalis, and after a few days she returned to Connecticut.
She discussed this in quite cavalier fashion, partly because she has only airy disdain for any physical discomfort and thus refuses to dignify ill health by catering to it, or even admitting it exists. Alice told me of the Christian Science influence on her by her brother, who after his marriage had become a Christian Scientist, and of his widow who was still living in Connecticut.
During the intervening six months since her hospitalization, Alice saw no doctor, but a local "visiting nurse" regularly came to see her. That was her only contact with the medical world. Since her own doctor in New York was too far away to be of assistance even should Alice have needed her, it was necessary to maintain a careful and continual check on Alice's health, in order to be aware of significant changes that might require immediate attention. Scotty, having had some first aid training, came over daily, and listened to Alice's heartbeats with a stethoscope, kept a daily log of her heart rate, and checked to see whether her ankles were swollen. That was the extent of Alice's medical care.
Planning to start the interview the following day, we stayed up rather late that first night. I worked even later in my own room in order to complete my research. Alice awoke very early the next morning and, noticing that the furnace was off, hauled the logs from the back kitchen into the living room and built a fire. By the time I finally got up, probably two hours later, the house was still very, very cold.
As I began to make breakfast for us, I noticed that Alice looked rather gray; she obviously was not well. My first impulse was to dash to the phone and call Scotty, but I didn't know either her phone number or her whole name. I wrestled with
Scotty was due to come by some time that morning. In the meantime the handyman came and, as the only person who knew the cottage's electrical system, was able to hook up the heating pad. We piled blankets and hot water bottles on her. I was feeling somewhat panicked. Here was Alice needing medical attention and there was none at close hand. Because it was the Thanksgiving weekend, I knew that even a call to a New York hospital would not produce a doctor. Although we were close to the biggest concentration of medical facilities in the world, we might as well have been in the Australian' bush. The irony could be tragic.
Scotty appeared in a few minutes. We had a hurried conference. Alice protested. She would not hear of our even calling the visiting nurse. She said she would be quite fine, we were not to worry, nor, clearly, were we to worry her. She got so anxious about our calling in some medical help on a Thanksgiving weekend that we felt we were making matters worse by discussing it. She asked to be left alone.
I took some of the suffrage literature from her library and sat by her bedroom doorway where I could ostensibly study, but where I really could watch her closely by looking in at her sideways. I knew she would object if she caught me watching. Scotty gave me her phone number so I could call if Alice's condition seriously changed.
So the day passed with me sitting at her doorway, doing whatever research I could, and surreptitiously watching her. The carpenter was in and out building stormwindows, and Alice actually roused enough to give him directions, then went back to sleep.
Alice got up about seven or eight o'clock that evening, astonished at the incredible fact that she had slept all day. I tried to take her pulse; I tried to hear her heart. Again I could not find her heart with the stethoscope, and our efforts dissolved into giggles that mercifully released the tension of the day. When I counted three widely varying rates for her pulse, we concluded that all we had to go on was the way she felt. Her color was much better, she was warm, and much of her energy had returned, but the prognosis was still quite obscure.
Then she called her Christian Scientist sister-in-law. I remember Alice saying, "No, I don't really need you to come over; I just wanted you to know that—that I feel this way, that this is going on—because I thought that would help." She said this very matter of factly, and, after a little conversation, she hung up. She retired for the night confident that she was going to be all right, and the next morning she was.
I was careful to leave my door open in order to get up when she did, and thereby prevent her from hauling wood, or in any other way exerting herself, although the problems of the day before had been resolved at least temporarily. The oil company, which had inadvertently let Alice run out of oil, finally filled the tank and the furnace was started again. Coal and a large bag of wood had been hauled in by the fireplace. Scotty came over, took her pulse, and found it had much improved. After breakfast we began the taping, but we agreed that, having lost a day, we would only have time to talk about Alice's life up through the suffrage period.
The world outside now was a deep freeze with the lake a solid crystal plain. During a break, Alice stood at the window and showed me where she and her brother had sold a number of lots around the shore. Some beautiful homes are tucked back in the woods. A large piece of land was saved around her cottage. She told me that the lake had become quite a worry to her because one million dollars a year in insurance was required to cover liability for almost anything that could happen on the lakeshore. She was beginning to think of selling the lake to the city of Ridgefield, which wanted to buy it.
While I prepared a lunch for us that day, Alice was looking pink and bright-eyed. I mentioned this to her, and she said, "I thought I would, after I called my sister-in-law." (In fact, she looked stronger than I felt after the perils of the day before.)
Her diet was meatless. "Alice, when did you become vegetarian?", I asked. I think she said it was just after the suffrage campaign. She laughed and said, "I didn't have much time to think about such things until then. It occurred to me that I just didn't see how I could go ahead and continue to eat meat. It just seemed so— cannibalistic to me. And so," she said, "I'm a vegetarian, and I have been ever since." Perhaps Alice's experiences of hunger strikes in the prisons, both in England and in this country, may have had an effect on her attitude about food in general. Two or three times she has said to me, "Food simply isn't important to me; they're always bringing in these things," referring to her refrigerator which was stacked wall-to-wall and shelf-to-shelf with all kinds
A corollary to this was Alice's sincere inability to recall past physical discomfort. Our interview starts out with a discussion of whether she really did spend some time in a rain storm on the roof of a building in England during a suffrage protest. To the American Heritage writer, she had denied this had ever hapened. I was puzzled by her denial, and the interview opens by my showing her both the Pankhurst and the Inez Haynes Irwin accounts of this.
4. Pankhurst, Estelle Sylvia, The Suffragette; the history of the women's militant suffrage movement, 1905-1910 . New York, Sturgis & Walton Company, 1911.
She also insisted that the account of that first parade of the Woman's Party, in March, 1912, during which the U.S. Cavalry and police were called in, was not a "riot," nor that anyone got roughed up; the reports she claimed have been exaggerated. I'm inclined to accept this because reports of mass actions inevitably tend to become exaggerated.
This lack of concern about her physical condition probably accounts for the fact that she simply cannot recall hunger strikes in prison (or even being hungry). Nor can she remember what must have been extreme physical discomfort, or much of anything concerning her treatment there. Thus the interview is lacking some of the more brutal details about the prison experiences, but, that would hardly be the major value of an interview with Alice Paul.
Her ability to set strategy rapidly and unerringly is one of the most astounding things about her. About two years before the interview Alice had asked me to come to Washington to do a week of lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. I happily agreed. First of all, I believed in the cause. I also wanted to see what it was like to work under Alice Paul.
Alice, then age eighty-five, had a running record in her head of every congressman. She knew almost anything that she needed to know about his past actions on the ERA and his operations with other congressmen. She usually knew the attitudes of wives, secretaries, and administrative assistants. She knew that Mrs. Alan Cranston had her hair coiffed in a particular place where Alice sometimes went. (Belmont House was across the parking lot from the Senate Office Building.) Thus had she become acquainted with Mrs. Cranston, and it was through Mrs. Cranston that she had been working to get Senator Cranston's approval of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Her knowledge of the connections in Washington as well as out in the states was amazing. It was clear that in the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, as it wore on through the decades, she had utilized a small nucleus of women, maybe only one or two women per state, who in turn knew how to contact those persons most influential with the key senators and with certain congressmen. In more recent years she had been concerned with the members of the judiciary committees, since the struggle came to focus there. The result was a very compact campaign. There was only a little of the big, scattergun grass roots approach to create support which in turn would bring pressure on the Congress in general. Before I went back to California, I found myself appointed Northern California chairman for the ERA (much as I was appointed Captain of the Fireplace) and I understood why I had few troops to command.
In lobbying, I learned to apply caution after talking to Alice. When she would tell me what a congressman had once done for the ERA, it could have been several congresses ago. I had to check before I went to talk to him to be certain that the last time he had helped on the Equal Rights Amendment was indeed recent enough to form a basis for current action. This same trait enabled Alice Paul to put two and two together to make a vote. Finding the two and two often required complete recall, and she carried the chess board of maybe thirty Congresses and political manueverings thereof in her head, and from that formulated her own successful strategy.
Alice Paul's executive ability included an uncanny way to utilize whatever manpower was within her range. Irwin has written about this at length, and in the seventies it was still true. I witnessed one coup about 1970 that she brought off when a young woman from Los Angeles came with her sociologist husband to do some research on the woman's movement. They asked to use the library in Belmont House, one of the best women's political history libraries at that time. They needed access to some as- yet-uncatalogued, unorganized papers that were sitting in boxes in the old, old, rambling two-story carriage house, one of two buildings behind Belmont House.
Later that day Alice mentioned to me, "You know, Chita, he's from Los Angeles. I wonder if he knows Congressman Danielson? He probably could go speak to him as a constituent." Doubting that the scholar would submit to a lobbying assignment, I murmured that it was unlikely he would be from Danielson's district. Danielson was the lone urban Democrat in the subcommittee who had voted against the ERA, causing a tie vote. Neither Don Edwards, the subcommittee chairman, nor anyone else, could figure out why. I had talked to the solon twice and had received only a "Well, maybe I'll vote to bring it up again," but that had been as far as I could got with him.
Alice found that although the sociologist himself did not come from the congressman's district, he volunteered to Alice that his students had done some research in that district and had found that the young Mexican-Americans were very much for equal rights for women, whereas the older Mexican-American women couldn't have cared less. Alice said matter-of-factly to him, "I want you to go to Congressman Danielson and tell him that his district is changing, and that he'll be put out of office because of these changes of the young Mexican-Americans that are now of voting age in his district." The professor, disgruntled at the prospect of spending his limited research time lobbying, protested that he didn't have the money or the time to go over and try to see Danielson. Sometimes hours, even days were required to get in to talk with a congressman not from one's own district.
Shortly Alice told me that he did talk to Danielson. And Danielson, as a matter of fact, did request that the ERA be voted on again in the subcommittee, at which point it was voted out for a full committee vote.
At the end of my first week's lobbying, my notes of June 29, 1971, read, "...I marvel at her [Alice's] obsession. By the third day, I was delirious to have a break from the continuous pressure of advocacy. It was like living with a single beam of strong light piercing my world constantly. I accepted a lunch appointment with a single-tax expert—mainly to have an hour's reprieve. It was almost a holy moment, like stepping off a race track for a time. And I knew that a mile away was
Alice's campaign, in fact her whole life, was a one-issue affair: women's rights. Moving to the drum beat of her commitment, she is a person whose tremendous intellectual energy is put behind that commitment, with no tangents allowed.
But there were times when other issues almost intervened. It required fortitude, but Alice would not let the Viet Nam war issue in the late sixties interfere with or become related to the Equal Rights Amendment issue, just as she had refused to allow World War I to slow the suffrage campaign. One weekend when I was in Washington, women were gathering for a women's peace march on Washington that was led by Alice's old friend, Jeannette Rankin. Jeannette Rankin was staying at the Alva-Belmont House, as were some of the other so-called "Rankin File" marchers. Alice was anxious that their presence at the National Woman's Party headquarters have no relationship to the events of that weekend. She mentioned to me that evening how NBC and CBS network men and reporters from Life and Time had been trying to get interviews with the leaders of the march there at the house, but how she feared a background of the National Woman's Party headquarters would connect the ERA with the anti-Viet Nam marchers. She singlehandedly held off what sounded like the entire national news media—and quite successfully too.
There is another aspect to Alice's personality that one has to keep in mind: her background of aristocracy. Her family was cultured and well-to-do. They were also highly respected leaders in the Quaker community. These two worlds—her family and the Society of Friends—were the only worlds she knew until after she was graduated from Swarthmore. Her contact with other socio- economic classes was limited to the maids who worked for them, and the fact that the maids went dancing and behaved differently was excused because they were "that class" of people. Her class consciousness is still something that one from a different generation senses now and then. While she always denied that the women's movement she has led has been made up primarily of the higher socio-economic classes, the actual proportion of upper middle class educated women who participated in successive phases of the campaign might be the subject of further research.
The attention to class carries over into her campaign. For instance, when I was working for her in the ERA campaign, I would come in to report after lobbying on the Hill. Regarding a certain congressman, "What is he?" she would ask. Her question always baffled me. She meant, was his name Irish, Italian, or what? Alice was well aware of the strength of political ties
The Alva-Belmont House in Washington now is in a highcrime neighborhood—with the Senate Office Building adjacent, however, and the U.S. Supreme Court on an adjoining block. It was such a dangerous neighborhood when I was there that we could never carry our purses with us when we went out at night because of the probability of provoking attack. Most of the women there had been mugged at least once. Alva-Belmont House itself had been broken into two or three times. This was all laid at the door of the blacks. It is true that the neighborhood was nearly all black, but whether the crime had a racial cause or something else (drugs, for instance) was a question in my mind.
This attitude of Alice's however, seemed to be less a classical color prejudice than a consciousness of class that is almost benevolent with her, coupled with generalizing about people who, as she grew up, had been outside of her experience. Her close work with women from ethnic minorities is a matter of record.
Alice held other attitudes which colored her political outlook; at least they were her attitudes by the time I came to know her. She was non-partisan; personally, however, she seemed to trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats. This probably began or was reinforced in the suffrage struggle when Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic and recalcitrant president, became the object of her attack in "holding the party in power responsible" for defeats of the suffrage amendment. She also had a great fear of the machinations of communism and how it might manipulate her cause. She felt further that government was doing too much to help people who did not work; she deplored the welfare system—a view which is shared by many people of both parties, of course. Her views of these and many other social issues, however, seemed not to concern her unless they were related to the issue of the Equal Rights Amendment. While she had opinions about them, they held a low priority with her, and she did not spend time analyzing their causes and effects as broad societal manifestations. For instance, when we watched the television news in the living room at Belmont House, with our dinner trays brought in by the cook, Alice rarely commented on any news item unless it was of a senator or a congressman who had recently done something concerning the ERA. (or more likely who had not so recently done something.)
Alice talks rather fast and her voice is very even in tone, thus feeling and emotion come through muted. Her mannerisms in talking show an efficient energy at work at all times. There are no "uhs" or "ahs" in her speech. While she gropes for a word, she's absolutely silent. When a problem is presented to
Then she will lay out maybe eight or ten relevant points and conclude with a statement on the major focus.("She has the quiet of a spinning top," wrote[Inez Hayes] Irwin.)
Yet I have seen her upset about the twists and turns of the Equal Rights Amendment. She has a short laugh which seems on occasion to cover up despair. It might be considered a "bitter little laugh," except that Alice Paul doesn't sound bitter. She will laugh about things as though she sees the irony in a sudden twist of fate that has led to the wrong congressman getting on a committee, or a public issue like abortion suddenly coupled with the ERA in the press. A set-back in support brings from her a pause, then, "Well, then, here is what we must do." Frustrations seemed to lead to increased persistence and determination.
In Ridgefield, once we began recording, Alice had the same commitment to getting this story on tape that she had to the suffrage and ERA campaigns. She worked and worked and worked . Usually several attempts would be made before I could get her to take a break for lunch. By the second day, I had added two extension cords to the tape recorder to that her words could be captured at the dining table as well as in the study.
Finally, I stayed an additional day in order to finish—but Alice felt another was needed. Since another change in my schedule was impossible, we continued to work so that by nightfall we had wrapped up what we expected to be our last session. The recorder was turned off. Conversation came around to her genealogy. She mused on my maiden name, Roberts, and was certain that this signified a relation between herself and myself because she had a Roberts on her Quaker family tree. I was touched that she wanted to send me back to California with information on her forebears so that I could check records to confirm her conviction. But little did I suspect what this meant. The next morning Alice mentioned (in an off-hand way) that she had finally found the genealogy chart she was looking for, even though she had to hunt for it until four o'clock in the morning. This was alarming news in view of the health crisis of three days before. As I prepared to leave, the phone rang. A reporter wanted an interview on the ERA. Alice agreed. I knew she was going to go strong all day. As Scotty drove me to the airport, I extracted a promise. "For heaven's sake, Scotty, please let me know if Alice doesn't make it through the day." But we both knew she would.
Striking Pen-Picutre of Alice Paul ( Equal Rights, August 18, 1923
1. I. Family and Education
Forebears: Quaker
Prelude: Memory Discrepancy About the Rooftop Episode
PaulYou ask questions. I'll answer, you see. Just the way the Heritage man did [last week].
5. Gallagher, Robert S., “I Was Arrested, Of Course,” an interview, American Heritage, February, 1974, pp. 17-24, 92-94 .
Fry
I just want you to be Alice Paul, like we've always talked, that's all. But this time I want to get it down for the record.
Paul
No but I mean you'll want to guide the questions.
Fry
Yes.
Paul
So you guide the questions that would be useful to you. I will try to just answer those. If you want me to elaborate, you can say so. I didn't dare elaborate with [the man from American Heritage ]. I was so—my first interview—I was so humble [laughter], so I think he would have had a better interview if I had elaborated, but I didn't.
Fry
It's different, too, when you are being interviewed for publication, compared to this kind of interview, which isn't necessarily going to be published. If it's published, it'll be just as one part of someone else's research, so that ours can be a lot looser.
Paul
I'd like to know, before we begin, just what did Sylvia Pankhurst say on this episode on the [roof]top. Because
Fry
Well, according to the outline that's in my head, we'll probably get to that in about twenty minutes.
Paul
Well, couldn't you just tell me about that now? Where was the place?
Fry
I think what I'll do is read it to you.
Paul
He read it in Mrs. [Inez Haynes] Irwin's book
6. Irwin, Inez Haynes, Up Hill With Banners Flying, pp. 11-12 .
Fry
Sylvia Pankhurst
7. Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910 ., pp. 416-17 .
Paul
I know, but I want to know where the roof was. Sylvia spoke also at the meeting. She was the principal speaker at this meeting in Glasgow. There were all of us at this meeting and so she knows whether I was on a roof in Glasgow.
Fry
[thumbing through the Pankhurst book] All right, here we are. It says:
"On August 20th, when Lord Crewe spoke at the great Saint Andrew's Hall, Glasgow, Miss Alice Paul succeeded in climbing to the roof, and, in the hope of being able to speak to the Cabinet Minister from this point, she lay there concealed for many hours in spite of a downpour of rain. When she was discovered and forced to descend she was heartily cheered for her pluck by a crowd of workmen, one of whom came forward and apologised for having told a policeman of her presence..."Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, pp. 416-17
Paul
[Laughter.]
Fry
" ...saying that he had thought that she was in
― 3 ―need of help."Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, , pp. 416-17
Paul
Well, then, that was really bad. I don't remember one thing about it.
Fry
Well, then "later"—I guess it means later in the day—
"when the women attempted to force their way into the building, the people needed no urging to lend their aid, and the police who were guarding the entrance were obliged to use their truncheons to beat them back. When the officers of the law attempted to make arrests, women were rescued from their clutches again and again. Eventually Adela Pankhurst, Lucy Burns, Alice Paul and Margaret Smith were taken into custody..."Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, pp. 416-17
Paul
Who was the first one?
Fry
[mispronouncing] Adela Pankhurst
Paul
Adela, we call her. She was Mrs. Pankhurst's youngest daughter.
Fry
And Lucy Burns, and you, and Margaret Smith.
Paul
And Margaret Smith was the niece of the Lord Mayor of Glasgow. I remember that.
Fry
Oh she was?
Paul
Yes. Which gave us a little standing. [Laughter.]
Then I guess it's true about the roof, but isn't it strange that I can't remember one single thing about that!
Fry
You don't remember the rain on the roof? Well,
"...even when the gates of the police station were closed upon them, the authorities feared that they would not be able to hold their prisoners for the crowd shouted vociferously for their release and twisted the strong iron gates. It was only when the women themselves appealed to them that they consented to refrain from further violence."Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, pp. 416-17
Paul
Well does she say what happened?
I will read you one more paragraph.
"When Lord Crewe had safely left the town, friends of the women were allowed to bail them out on the understanding that they would appear at the police court at nine o'clock the following morning. Nevertheless though they arrived before the appointed time, there was no one to show them the Court room, and whilst they wandered about in the passages, trying to find their way, the case was disposed of behind locked doors and with the public excluded. The bail was escheated and a warrant was issued for their arrest before five minutes past nine. At this Mr. Thomas Kerr—Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, pp. 416-17
Paul
Oh it was another arrest all over again?
Fry
You were bailed out and now you are coming back for your court appearance.
Paul
But then when we came back they dismissed the case. And what was it, we were arrested again?
Fry
Yes, a warrant was issued for your arrest, but at this point Mr. Thomas Kerr, one of the bailies,
"rose to protest and asked two minutes' leave to find the defaulting prisoners, saying he was sure they were already in the building, but he was abruptly told that the court was closed. So he went outside and immediately met the ladies and brought them in before Bailie Hunter, who presided, had left the bench, but though the Bailie saw them, he hurried away whilst the Fiscal tried to put all the blame upon him." (The Fiscal is the officer who prosecutes.) "The bail was never refunded, and the women never answered to the warrants, so the matter was dropped."Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, pp. 416-17
Paul
I knew it was dropped, but I didn't remember all these things. Isn't memory a strange thing. You know that it's so many years since I would ever even turn my thoughts to England and so on. But you wouldn't think you would ever forget [laughing] spending a night on the roof!
Fry
Well, this was 1909, on August 20th—
That's right.
Fry
—so that's a long time ago.
Paul
That's the last summer I was in England, you see.
Fry
And you had gone through so many episodes. I can see why you wouldn't remember just one.
Paul
Well, anyway, now I can tell him what really happened.
Fry
Okay. You think you must have spent a night on the roof then if—
Paul
But I denied it! I didn't want to deny something I had really done, but I didn't think [laughing] I ever had been on a roof. Now let's begin with you.
Fry
I thought that we might spend the first few minutes talking about your own biography.
Paul
All right. You ask the questions and I'll answer. I want you to get everything you need before you leave [on Sunday]. Now you tell me what you want to know.
Fry
I will. What I need to know is some of your genealogy, particularly going back to the Penns. If you have this written down somewhere, I could just use that.
Father and Mother
PaulYes, I will go and get my chart, so let's skip that for the minute.
Fry
Okay, fine. Where were you born?
Paul
I was born in Moorestown, New Jersey. That's a little Quaker village in Burlington County, and it's about nine miles out of Philadelphia.
Fry
And let's see, your birthday is in January?
Paul
January 11, 1885.
Fry
I saw the pictures in the guest room of your mother's family. They were Quakers. Was your family Quaker on both your mother's and your father's side?
From the beginning of the Quaker movement, yes. In England. They all came [to this country]. My first Paul ancestor was imprisoned in England as a Quaker and came to this country for that reason, I mean not to escape prison but because he was such a strong opponent of the government in every possible way. You know I told you, this little village was named after him, the town of Paulsboro in New Jersey which is now quite a big place. His original home is there, and I think I have a photograph of it which I could show you.
Fry
Okay.
Paul
And on my mother's side they were all Quakers. I have practically no ancestor who wasn't a Quaker. I don't know whether I had any who wasn't a Quaker. My father and mother were, and their fathers and mothers were.
Fry
Why don't you give me a picture of your immediate family, then? What did your father do?
Paul
He was a banker. And he was president [one of the founders.- Donald Paul] of the Burlington County Trust Company, which was the principal bank in Burlington County. And he was a director of other companies and so on.
Fry
[calling out] Come in.
Paul
Who's that?
Fry
Your carpenter.
We had gotten to your father being president of Burlington County Trust Company and on other boards. Could you give me some idea of your mother's education?
Paul
Well, I told you, she was one of the first girls who ever went to Swarthmore (I think I told you that) because her father collected the money with this little committee and founded Swarthmore. And he sent his daughter there and other women members of the family. My mother's first cousins went there and they were there with her. Anyway, she had an education the same as I did in a little Friends school, Quaker school, in a town called Cinnaminson, New Jersey, where she lived and was brought up.
Fry
Called what?
Paul
[spelling] Cinnaminson, I guess they still call it that.
Fry
But she almost finished?
Paul
Well, I don't know if she almost did or not. I don't know how long before she graduated she married, but I know she married the year she could have graduated. I believe it was the year.
Fry
Where did your father go to school?
Paul
He went to—I guess probably but I don't know—probably to the same Friends school because my father's father died before he was born, and so I never saw him and my father never saw him. And so he was brought up in the home of a, I presume a relative, another Quaker family. (We always called them "uncle" and so on because my father was brought up [by them], and I suppose they were, but I don't know how close a relative.) It was in the same section where my mother was born, very close to it, so he probably went to the same school, but I never asked him where he went. He died in my life before I was interested in where people went to school. I was just a freshman at Swarthmore. I was sixteen when he died. So I didn't know very much about—I never cared to ask him where he went to school. I just never thought of it.
Fry
Did he die very suddenly? Unexpectedly?
Paul
No, he went to Florida with my mother, to get away from the cold I suppose, and I don't know, stayed maybe two weeks. He was extremely busy, terribly busy, so he came back pretty soon and seems to have caught a terrible cold
Fry
Oh, for goodness sakes.
Paul
So.
Fry
That must have been a blow to you, just at that age.
Paul
Well, I was too young for it to be much of a blow to me. Life went on just the same. Of course it was a great blow, I presume, to my mother, who was left with four young children and all of this responsibility.
Fry
Who took over all of his banking interests and financial things? Your mother?
Paul
Well, he was the president. I suppose the vice-president became the president. I don't remember.
Fry
I meant, did your mother then supervise the investments and so forth?
Paul
No she didn't, and she wouldn't have known enough. [She had had no experience. - Donald Paul] But her brother was one of the board of directors of the same bank. I remember vividly, oh, I remember so vividly, every week when there was a meeting of the board of directors of the bank, my uncle came up and had dinner with us in the middle of the day (or lunch, or whatever it was). He would come out after their bank meeting, and then went back to the bank meeting. So he more or less took charge of all the investing in things. And then the man who was elected to succeed—I presume the vice-president—took over; I don't know [for sure] about that. But soon they had an election of the board of trustees, and they elected a president who was a cousin of ours and who lived very, very close to us and he—
My father also had a very big farm, not as big as [in] the West, though, but about three hundred acres, and my mother hadn't the faintest idea I'm sure how to run the farm. My father did it with no difficulty at all. He had a superintendent and he gave him orders in the morning and off he went. Certainly my mother had no idea how to run a farm or anything else [She was a very wise woman who turned to experts for advice on many matters and prospered. - Donald Paul] This cousin, who was made president of the bank, whom we saw every day, I should say, he came in every day and rode
None of this is of any importance, but I only tell you because you asked me.
Fry
I am interested in it.
Sister
FryAlice, I am still confused, though, on your brothers and sisters. I know you had one sister who, much later, would come and live with you here in the cottage in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Paul
I had one sister [Helen] who graduated at Wellesley, and while at Wellesley she became what they call a "student volunteer," if you know what that is.
Fry
No.
Paul
It's an organization that had students volunteer to go to the foreign mission fields. [to carpenter] Charlie, may I speak to you a minute?
Charlie
I will be right there.
Paul
And she was very prominent in that movement at Wellesley, and when she graduated and wanted to go with the missionaries to China, they said she was too young; they had an age limit. She wasn't old enough. So she went to the University of Pennsylvania, after she graduated from Wellesley, for graduate studies in Chinese, thinking she would prepare herself to know the language and so on. And while there she became suddenly interested in Christian Science, and deeply interested. So interested that —
Charlie, I wanted to ask, how you are getting on [with the storm windows]?
Charlie
Oh, I'm doing good. I'm working out on the back door.
Paul
Can you put them up again, or do you want Mrs._________ to put them in?
Oh no, I put them in. I take them out and paint them and then I put them right back.
Paul
You can do it?
Charlie
Oh sure.
Paul
Good. Good for you.
[to Fry] So she then founded a Christian Science Church in our little village of Moorestown, and they built a little Christian Science church building, and she was sort of the soul [an active member. - Donald Paul] of this little church, though she was very young.
That made her stop wanting to go to China because the Christian Scientists don't send missionaries. So she changed her whole life from that moment on and devoted practically her whole life to Christian Science. And then she studied in what they call "the classes," which they give to all the people who want to be students and then, through her teacher (who was named Mr. Johns and lived in New York; she came up and studied in New York) he told her of this little cottage which he owned out here, this very little cottage. (This is of no importance to your study but I will just tell you.) He owned other territory [property - Donald Paul] out here, and in this little cottage was one of his assistants. He had, I guess, rented it to him and he was living here. This porch wasn't on and this [sun] room wasn't on. It was just a very little house. So she had become so deeply interested in Christian Science that he told her the great need of having camps for Christian Science children, so she opened a little Christian Science camp right here in this little cottage. And that was her purpose in taking the cottage.
Fry
And that's when the lake and everything around here was bought, is that right?
Paul
Yes, we bought the whole territory. She bought it; I didn't buy it. I was over in Europe at this time and I remember writing to her and saying, "Now please don't undertake anything that is going to involve you in too much expense," and so on, and she wrote back and said she would certainly be careful not to. But this little camp turned out to be a great expense. People wouldn't pay enough and didn't want to pay enough.
So finally she felt it was costing her more than she
Fry
Was that at your old family home in New Jersey?
Paul
No. We had divided up our family homes. One brother took one and one brother took the other. And then my sister took our home in the town; they had three houses there. I took one that was the least desirable because I thought I would be the least able to look after these places. I didn't want to live in this little place and I didn't want to pay the taxes which were so enormous. So I thought, "I'll find a little home for myself, and I'd like to go far away from everybody and go up into the most remote place I can get, where we'll have some American people left, and so on." And so I went up to Vermont.
Fry
And this was for summertime living?
Paul
There's a painting of it.
Fry
Oh, the watercolor?
Paul
Yes. One of my cousins who came up to visit me painted that while she was there.
Fry
That's a lovely house.
Paul
It's called Echo Lake and the reason that I got to know about it was through the [Porter Hineman] Dales—who gave me the dishes you had for breakfast this morning —so well because we [National Woman's Party] had bought our headquarters in Washington from Senator Dale when we moved over from the old brick Capitol. So I got to know Senator Dale and his wife pretty well in that transaction.
So Mrs. Dale invited me to come up and visit her in Vermont, and I drove up to Vermont with a friend of mine from Holland, who had come over and married an American man who was a cousin of mine. So we drove up together to visit Mrs. Dale. And while I was there she showed me this enchanting little, (I thought) this very old,
Fry
When you were at the United Nations, did you try to commute on weekends to Vermont?
Paul
Not on weekends. When I was here (up until this time, because this is the only time I haven't had Elsie Hill here with me) we always drove in together. First when it [U.N.] was out on Long Island, Hunter's College, whatever the place was called—Lake Success wasn't it called? That's very close to here. So I had my car and she had her car, so in one car or the other we drove down together every day to Lake Success the whole time that anything connected with the woman question was up. And then when they [U.N.] moved into New York, we drove into New York every morning.
Fry
Did your sister marry?
Paul
No, she never married.
Brothers
FryAnd what about your two brothers: where did they go to school and what were they interested in?
Paul
Well this brother whose photograph I showed you over there (in fact this little painting here in the living room is when he was a child; it's right over the desk) his name was Parry Haines Paul. Parry after my mother's family and Haines after one of our families. He went to the same little Quaker school and graduated, and then he went to the University of Wisconsin and graduated in engineering, and he then joined the Friends Service Committee to teach the use of tractors and so on to the Russians.
I remember he told me many times how he would get up before dawn and go out, because they had such
Then he came home and married this Jean Dagget, who is my sister-in-law now.
8. She was from a suburb of Chicago—and was supervisor of music in the Moorestown schools and high school at this time. - Donald Paul.
9. The White Motors Company, Autocar Division. (They had one son, Donald Daggett Paul, and when Donald was very small they moved from Moorestown, N.J. to Haverford, Pennsylvania when Parry joined the Autocar Division of White Motors.) So he was there until he died a few years ago. - Donald Paul.
Now my older brother went to the same Friends high school, and then he went up to Rutgers College because he wanted to become a farmer. Did you ever hear of Rutgers?
Fry
Oh yes, I have heard of Rutgers, but I didn't know that it was an agricultural school.
Paul
Well it is mainly that. At least it was mainly that. I always thought it was mainly that. (My mother's father) I think my grandfather was chairman of the board of trustees, or at least he was on the board of trustees of Rutgers, so my brother went there. I presume he graduated. I don't remember whether he did or not, but I imagine. And then he went on to Cornell and studied in the Cornell School of Agriculture.
He inherited this family farm of my father's you see. So he was trying to equip himself to take care of
Fry
So he didn't turn Christian Scientist like the others did. Where do you fit in this line-up of children?
Paul
I was the first. Then came my brother William, the one that became the agricultural one. Then came my sister.
Fry
What's her name?
Paul
Helen. And then came my younger brother. My first brother was named William Mickle Paul. Mickle is one of our family names. Parry was my mother's name. [spelling] Mickle I guess. I could look it up in the family Bible and make sure, but I think that's what it is.
Fry
Is Perry's name spelled Perry?
Paul
[spelling] P a rry. That was my mother's name. And her mother was Alice Stokes, the one I was named after.
Fry
And you went to this private Friends school in Cinnaminson?
Paul
No, no, no. In Moorestown. That's the one we all went to. My mother went to—
Fry
Your mother went to Cinnaminson?
Paul
I think she must have. I don't know that she did, but I know that she went to a Friends school, and that's the only one that I can conceive of that was near her home. Her mother and her father were almost, I would say, the heads of the Friends Meeting there, so I'm sure she would have gone to a Quaker school. She never told me anything about it. She told me a good deal about going to Swarthmore, but she never told me about the school. But I'm sure she had to go to that school.
Childhood
FryWhat sort of Quaker life did you practice in your home? Some of the Friends I know don't have a lot of formalized practice in their homes and others do, and I wonder what kind yours was.
Paul
Well, of course, I never met anybody who wasn't a Quaker, and I never heard of anybody who wasn't a Quaker except that the maids we had were always Irish Catholics, always; we never had anybody but Irish Catholics. But I never met anybody who wasn't a Quaker, and I don't know, I suppose it was like all Quaker homes.
Fry
Did you have a lot of prohibitions?
Paul
Prohibitions of what?
Fry
Prohibitions of anything, that sprung from Quaker beliefs.
Paul
What kind of things?
Fry
Let's see. Some Quakers would prohibit music.
Paul
Oh yes, we never had any music at all. I never heard anything musical in the beginning of my childhood. Later on when I went to Swarthmore was the first time I ever heard, I guess, a hymn or anything like that, any music. But gradually after my father's death my mother—of course that was so early in my life—I remember my mother buying a piano and engaging a teacher for my sister. I was off [at school] and I didn't have any time to be taught, I guess, or to practice or to do anything, but my sister was. So finally we had music introduced.
Fry
I see. Did Quakers have any dancing in social events?
Paul
Quakers change quite a good deal. At Swarthmore for instance we did have musical instruments and we had, although it was purely Quaker when I went there, we had hymns every Sunday night. We had hymns in some kind of a general assembly of all the students. But I never heard a hymn until I went to Swarthmore; [laughter] I never knew there was such a thing as a hymn.
Fry
You'd never sung any songs?
I guess not. I don't believe so. Maybe we had, maybe we tried to; [laughing] I don't remember. You didn't regard it as oppressive, you know, you didn't know there was such a thing. You just knew all these gay maids we had were going off to dances and had a different life than we did. We just felt that was a sort of common people who did these things.
Fry
The lower classes.
Paul
Yes, the lower classes did these things [laughing].
Fry
What did you do for recreation, then, when you were at home?
Paul
Well, we played tennis. I showed you this photograph of our house, this little painting of our house. Well, the whole grounds in front, where you look, that was a great porch around the whole building and in front was a lawn, a very great lawn, so we had a tennis court there, and that is the only game I think that we played at home. And we played all the little things that people play, checkers and such things; I don't remember what we did.
And I read just endlessly, ceaselessly, almost every book it seems! We had a Friends library there in the meeting house, and I took out every book in the library. Also a great part of these books here [indicating several bookcases] were those that I had in my home, that I grew up with, any number of them. There is a whole set of Dickens right in there I have to put away. I remember reading every single line of Dickens as a child over and over and over and over again. So we just read whatever books there were, and there was pretty nearly everything I can remember. It's a wonder.
College and Social Work
To Swarthmore in 1901
FryYou must have been a pretty well-educated little girl by the time you entered Swarthmore.
Paul
Well I knew that when I went there you had to decide what to be your major, you know. You had to decide. You did there anyway. And I thought well, most of the girls were taking English and Latin and things like that.
So I thought, "I already know these things pretty well." I said, "I don't think there would be much use in my doing this because whether I studied or not I will always read,"" So I said, "The one thing I don't know anything about and I never would read and I can't understand it or comprehend it or have any interest in it are all the things in the field of science."
So I decided to make biology, which I knew nothing about, my major. I thought, "This is the only way I will ever learn about biology." And then I had chemistry and physics and higher mathematics and all these things that normally [laughing] I would never have known anything about. I don't think I did too well in them because it was not very native to my disposition, but anyway these classes were almost all the young men students because they were all studying to be engineers and took it very seriously.
Fry
And doctors—
Paul
No, not doctors. I can't remember if we had anything like premedical there. But in this biology course we even had dissection of human beings you see. [This is doubtful. It may have been animals. - Donald Paul]
Fry
Did you intend to do anything with your biology training?
Paul
Well, I never thought then about doing anything.
Fry
You didn't foresee a career for yourself then?
Paul
If I did I don't remember. But I did think by the time I got to graduate that I'd like to become a teacher. When I was in the senior year—not by any effort on my part—but I was awarded by the college, a fellowship, or scholarship, if that's what you would call it, by the College Settlement Association of America. It was a time when the college settlements and all the settlements started by Miss Jane Addams were becoming rather common through the country, and so they had formed an association and they gave these scholarships or fellowships (I don't remember what they called them) every year to certain colleges. One was Smith, one was Swarthmore, one was Vassar. I don't know whether there were any others, but I remember these colleges. One was Wellesley. And it was awarded by the college to the person that was most probably interested in that field of thought.
I had a Professor Robert Brooks, who came I think the last year I was there. He became a quite famous professor at Swarthmore and he started courses in political science and economics, which I had never studied, and immediately I seemed to have a great joy in them. He evidently thought I was very good, so he had this fellowship given to me. (I don't think it was called a fellowship but this grant; scholarship may be the word.) That was to [allow me to] go into some settlement for one year and help. This was to pay all my expenses you see, or part of my expenses.
To New York School of Philanthropy
PaulI went up to College Settlement in New York. I could go to any one I wanted to.
Where was that?
Paul
95 Rivington Street.
Fry
In the city?
Paul
Yes. It is in the Jewish section, next door to the synagogue. We were in the Jewish and the Italian section. So I spent that year there, and the same time I went to the School of Philanthropy. I graduated in 1905 from Swarthmore, then I graduated from the School of Philanthropy in New York in 1906; that's now called the School of Social Work under Columbia University. It's been incorporated into Columbia. And so I am an alumna member of Columbia; I get their bulletins—I think I got one today—asking for money and so on, or giving reports about what they are doing in the School of Social Work, while I never went to it: I went to it under its previous name.
Fry
What sort of training did they give then?
Paul
I guess they give the same as they do now. They just had lectures, authorities in one field after another field, in what you call social work, and then they took you of course to visit all kinds of institutions. I remember the head of Bedford Reformatory for Women coming in and lecturing us, and Miss Lillian [pause] what is her name, let's see—the nurse's settlement, Lillian Wald, but I don't think that she—
Dr. Edward Devine was the president of it when I was there. It was an extremely good school and had a very good reputation, and most of the people who went there wanted to become professional social workers because that's what they were being trained for, you see.
Fry
And is that what you had decided on for a career at this time?
Paul
No, I had never decided to be a [social worker]. By the time I had been there a while, I knew I didn't want to be a social worker, whatever else I was. Are you taking this down now?
Fry
Yes, I am.
Paul
I will have to be more careful what I say!
Fry
Well, Alice, we will type it up for you and send it back
Paul
I can put in what I really felt. I can cut it out then.
I knew in a very short time I was never going to be a social worker, because I could see that social workers were not doing much good in the world. That's what I thought anyway. I still think so. So to spend all your life doing something that—you knew you couldn't change the situation by social work.
Fry
Yes. There wasn't any real reform taking place to prevent these unfortunate situations from occurring.
Paul
No, I didn't think so. I thought the work we'd be asked to do—
Charity Organization Society, Summer of 1906
Paul
Now the next summer, after I graduated, I was asked by, I suppose, somebody in the School of Social Work—I'm not quite sure who asked me—to join the force of the Charity Organization Society. Did you ever hear of that? The Charity Organization Society, COS, they called it. And at that time I think in every city in the United States there was a COS. One of the lectures we had had—probably somebody in the lecture course that asked me to come. Somebody did.
So I spent all that summer working in New York for the Charity Organization Society. We were paid the tiniest little sum of money, perhaps enough just to pay your lodging, hardly anything at all. I worked in the office in my own section when I was living in the College Settlement. I kept on living at the College Settlement all summer although my scholarship was up, and I had this little salary from the Charity Organization Society. It was just a marvelous experience. I was assistant to an exceedingly experienced social worker, and I was just sent to this family and that family and the other family to see what their troubles were.
You see, then they couldn't get welfare [payments]; they couldn't get anything . The only thing anybody could get would maybe to get a church to help her or
To the University of Pennsylvania, Fall of 1906
PaulThen I decided that I didn't know very much. I was thoroughly convinced of that [laughter]. I had learned enough to know that I didn't know anything about this field, the political and economic field which, if I had known it existed in the beginning, I think I would have majored in always because that just was what I really was interested in. So I went to the University of Pennsylvania and enrolled as a graduate student.
Fry
That must have been the fall of 1906. Is that right?
Paul
Yes, because I graduated the School of Social Work in 1906 in the spring. And I'd had a certificate from it and all the things you get, you know. So I could have become a social worker, but I am certainly glad I never did that.
Then at the school of economics I took as my major, sociology and as my minor, political science and economics. And I kept on with those minors and majors until I finally took my doctorate degree, but I didn't start to take any degree excepting a master's degree, which I got the following spring, which was 1907.
Fry
Did you have to write a thesis?
Paul
Yes.
Fry
What did you write it on?
Paul
It was called "Toward Equality" and it was on the subject
Fry
Was that the first time you had picked up this subject?
Paul
[pause] I was wondering. I'm not quite sure whether I took my master's degree. I could look it up in one of the old Who's Who . It has to be an old one because I suddenly began to get questionnaires from Who's Who and I filled them out for quite a number of years and then I decided that I didn't think much of this idea of Who's Who so I stopped sending any replies.
Fry
That's why I can't find you in any recent Who's Who.
Paul
Well, I didn't send anymore. I just didn't see why it was anybody's business, all these questions they ask you; there wasn't any conceivable reason for it. So I just didn't fill them out anymore. But I do have some old ones probably, and then I would remember what year I took my master's degree.
Fry
Well, I can check that out. Let me just make a note here to myself to see an old Who's Who .
10. The 1922-23 Edition of Who's Who shows that the M.A. was awarded from the University of Pennsylvania, 1907.
Paul
You asked me if I had written a thesis. I don't think I wrote a thesis that first year, is what made me suddenly pause. But of course I wouldn't remember very well about my thesis. Anyway, whether I took a degree or not, I took the courses anyway and passed all the examinations and everything, and felt just great joy in it. Especially this Professor Patton I felt was a great, great, great teacher. Simon Patton made a profound impression upon me.
Fry
Was he in economics?
Paul
Economics, yes.
Anyway at the end of the year I was given a scholarship—I suppose you call them, I really don't know what they call these things, or a fellowship—to someplace called Woodbrook in England. Now this College
I was very happy to go. [I left] the day, I think, of commencement or right immediately afterwards. Now at that time there were almost no women students at the University of Pennsylvania except in graduate school, and there were very few graduate students.
Fry
So you were kind of a rarity there?
Paul
Well, I was in the graduate school, and you weren't conscious of it there because the few girls that were there were in those classes and we got to know each other very well. It was a splendid, splendid group of young women whom I have kept in touch with nearly all my life.
More About Friends and Activities at Swarthmore
FryThat is one of the things that I wanted to ask you: Who were the friendships that you formed at Swarthmore and at the University of Pennsylvania who meant the most to you, that you kept up with later in your life? I know Mabel Vernon was at Swarthmore. Were there any others who later on were active in the women's equality work with you?
Paul
Amelia Walker was. Her name was Amelia Himes when I knew her, a Swarthmore girl. She married a Robert Walker. She was a Quaker of course. She was a senior when I was a freshman and the loveliest person. I remember being in a Shakespearean play—by that time we were having these things at Swarthmore—and she was Ophelia, and I still can remember her being so beautiful
I think those were the two who I continued to know the most just because they went into our own campaign.
Fry
Anyone at the University of Pennsylvania?
Paul
At the University of Pennsylvania? I just kept up with them [Mabel Vernon and Amelia Himes] more or less because that time I was so absorbed I couldn't take the time to really keep in touch with any more people, which I would have liked to have done. I was always so awfully busy after I got in the suffrage movement. I remember one person I knew the best was named Clara Louise Thompson, from St. Louis, and I roomed with her for a time in the graduate school. You see we had no graduate building or anything like that and we had to live in little pensiones around the University. She became a great Latin authority in the field of Latin and Sanskrit and went down to teach in a college in Georgia. I think she has been teaching there ever since and I have occasionally crossed her path. For a few months she came to Washington and helped us in our campaign and stayed there helping the first year I was in Washington.
Fry
I have two other little things to pick up at Swarthmore: One is Mabel told me that she met you when you and she were on a debating team, so I figured from that you must have done some debating at Swarthmore.
Paul
I'm sure if I did I was the worst possible debater. I guess they were teaching us how to debate probably. But I remember Mabel being probably the most eloquent and best public speaker in Swarthmore. She was a year older than I was but for some reason or other (I don't know why; she was later in getting to Swarthmore) she graduated the year after I did. I remember we were in a Latin class together—it is the only class I can remember being in, studying the poems of Horace—I can remember that very well. I was named what they called the Ivy Poet at Swarthmore. Every year they had what they called the Ivy Stone; another stone was put by a class into the building. And they had an outdoor ceremony at commencement with all the alumni present and all the college present and they had somebody—a boy always—who made the speech and presented the stone,
Fry
What did you have to do?
Paul
I had to write the poem.
Fry
Oh, write it; not just select one and say it.
Paul
No, you had to write it. You had to compose, and a boy had to compose a proper speech connected with the placing of the stone, and the Ivy Poet had to sort of set the atmosphere.
It was a great tragedy when this happened to me. I had once written a little sort of jingle which was published in the college paper and I guess that gave me the reputation of being a poet, probably [inaudible]. I remember I struggled away and I struggled away and I wrote a little poem and took it to our English professor and asked him if it would pass as a poem. He thought it was a very good little poem.
So then I thought, "Well, I've done all I can on composing, and now the awful problem, with my complete lack of oratorical knowledge or any oratorical power, how will I deliver it outdoors to all these people?" So then I went to Mabel Vernon. [Laughter.] maybe she told you this.
Fry
No, she didn't.
Paul
And I said, "Now will you train me so I can deliver my poem?" So she undertook very religiously to have me practice and practice and practice my poem. So when the day came—I think she had gotten me up to a point where probably people could hear me—and this great audience [was there, and] I gave my little Ivy Poem. I wish I could remember a word or two of it. I'd have to think about it to see if I could. [pause] Oh well, it doesn't matter. Since it was my first poem, I think about it once in a while.
Fry
Had you written much poetry or been encouraged in that in your Quaker household?
Paul
No, I never thought of writing anything. Anything of any type. Hardly such an idea!
After you had this initiation into the world of being a poet, did you ever write any more?
Paul
No, never wrote one more. I'll see if I can think of it. But anyway, I remember my aunt, my father's sister, who was, well, her whole mind more or less was devoted to the world of books and such. I remember telling my mother that she thought it was a very good poem, so I got some little support for it. [laughter] I'll see if I can think of it. I hope I can.
Fry
I hope you can. You think of it and write it down.
The other thing was, Mabel said you were in sports at Swarthmore.
Paul
Oh yes, I was.
Fry
Did you follow up on your tennis?
Paul
Everything that happened I took part in, or tried to at Swarthmore. And I naturally was, I don't think I was very good but I think that I had the championship in tennis. (I am not quite sure. I believe I did among the women tennis players.) And then I played basketball; everybody had to play basketball, so I played. I played with great happiness. I was very happy in playing it. And I played hockey. All the things that the girls played there.
Fry
Was there a lot of difference then between what girls played and what boys played? For instance, was baseball on the campus?
Paul
I don't know; the boys may have played baseball, but I don't remember ever hearing of it. I remember that they played football and lacrosse. And the girls had an instructor, a person we all liked very much, in athletics, and so it was just every afternoon, it was part of the regular routine you see.
You had breakfast at a certain hour and all the students were together you know. At the long table at the head of the room sat the dean of the college, the woman dean. She presided just as though it were her own private dining room. It was great decorum and at each table was a certain number of girls, a certain number of boys and one professor. Maybe there were not enough professors to go around. but generally there was
The professor at the head of that little table, she just saw that everything was done with the greatest attention to proper form. Some of the people came from homes, you know, which they hadn't perhaps known very much about how to serve food and so on, so she was there to see that her table was perfect. Then the boys came in and sat down, and we all had breakfast or lunch or dinner. Three times a day we had this. Probably Mabel has told you all this so—
Fry
No, she hasn't told me any of it.
Paul
So then the boys cleared the table, took everything off, and came down and sat down, and then the dean arose and with great ceremony walked away from the table and out, and all the students arose and with great ceremony walked out behind her. It was a very dignified and a very lovely regime that she—it was her own, of course, ideas and thought; she was from, oh, just a very distinguished family, a Quaker family, and was a very distinguished person herself. She had an enormous influence, I think, on the whole sort of good breeding, of this college.
Fry
What was her name?
Paul
Elizabeth Powell Barnes [Bond?].
Fry
Did she teach classes?
Paul
No, she did nothing but be dean.
Fry
Did you personally get to know her?
Paul
Oh, of course. You know there were only four hundred students altogether. I can't say exactly four hundred, but it was about four hundred. They weren't allowed to have any more. There must have been about two hundred girls. Well naturally, she knew every girl. She made it her business to know every girl personally, and I guess she made it her business to know every boy personally.
Then they had a director of athletics who was another big figure in the college, a man who was very
The president lived in the president's house with his wife and he presided at important gatherings. I think he presided every morning in the college collection.
Fry
That was a chapel service, wasn't it?
Paul
Yes, but it was also what they called "collection." Every student had to go there. You had to attend this collection unless you were ill or something like that. And you were seated alphabetically, I guess by class, but anyway alphabetically. Every person had his own seat, always, from the first year to the last that I was there at Swarthmore. So the president I think presided there.
Every Sunday we went to the Quaker meeting which was on the grounds. I think the president and the dean and everybody else, I guess all the professors, always went there and stood up in the benches facing you know to the students.
Fry
What other social life did you have besides that?
Paul
Well, every night after the dinner (or supper is what we called it; I don't know what we called it but everything was very simple) everybody was invited always (but not a formal invitation, just in the beginning you were invited ) to go into the social hour. You went or not, as you wanted; most of the students went. This was held in quite a large room on the main floor presided over by the dean. And there was a piano, and some people would go to the piano and sit down and play, and some people would sing, and some people would sit down and talk to each other. It was just a [inaudible] of students, I guess, everybody always went. It was a way to get to know each other.
Fry
Did you have the temptations that your mother had before you, of getting married at the end of your college year?
Paul
No, no such temptations at all, no such at all. And I don't think many of the students did there then. Of course she [Mother] married somebody from the outside;
Fry
You mean students in your generation were getting married later in life?
Paul
Well, they might have, but I never heard of any student being engaged at Swarthmore.
Fry
That surprises me.
Paul
You see they were quite young. I went there when I was sixteen and I was out at twenty. Some of them were maybe out at twenty-one or twenty-two, but certainly nobody older than that.
Let's see, Amelia Walker for instance married Robert Walker who was in her class at Swarthmore. You know you didn't get to know the older people, the older class people very well. I knew Amelia mainly by sight, seeing her as Ophelia and things like that. She married some years later. I don't think anybody at Swarthmore ever dreamed that they would get married.
It was sort of a generation—I think maybe people are marrying in colleges now much more than they were then. I never heard of a person being married or being engaged at Swarthmore.
Fry
This kind of goes up and down in the generations, it seems. There for a while in the '50s, there were a lot of marriages at the ages of nineteen and twenty, and college marriages the then.
Paul
See, now, I don't know at Swarthmore, but up here in Ridgefield, I heard them over the television (I'm not sure if it's reporting Ridgefield, maybe it's reporting all of Connecticut or maybe it's reporting New York state) where they are considering at their boards of education what to do about the large portion of the senior class and junior class girls who are pregnant. You see, you never heard of these things at Swarthmore. And the boys had one dormitory and the girls another dormitory. The only time that you ever were totally together would be at the meals, and that's only at your own table. And the one little social hour which was probably an hour long.
Fry
Could you go out somewhere together after the social hour with a boy you liked?
Oh, no, no. You couldn't. You couldn't do anything. You went then to—then everybody dispersed to their dormitory. Girls went to the girls' dormitory, boys to the boys' dormitory. I never saw or heard of anybody— of course I suppose you could have surreptitiously, but nobody ever seemed to do anything that was against the rules.
Fry
It's that Quaker conscience, I guess.
Paul
Well, it was just the rule of the college. I never heard of— So I think people got to be good friends, just as Amelia Walker got to be a good friend of Robert Walker, sitting at the table with him for maybe four years, and then they probably continued to see each other afterwards, and I remember when she was married everybody was very much surprised. We hadn't any idea [laughter] that she was thinking of being married. I have continued to know her a little bit. I don't remember anybody else at Swarthmore with me that married a Swarthmore person; there must have been some others.
Fry
I wonder, in the Friends' education of devoting yourself to a cause, would this have made a number of girls feel that they really don't want to tie themselves up with a marriage because they have more important and higher things to do? Was this a part of the feeling at all, that you know of, at Swarthmore?
Paul
No, I don't think so.
Fry
It wasn't seen as one or the other? Was it mutually exclusive, marriage or work?
Paul
Oh, no, no. As far as I can recall, the general impression that I had among the men students was that they were all preparing to sort of succeed their fathers in taking care of their families, and having a family, and most of them that I can remember were specializing in engineering. It was not any cause ; it was just what they were preparing to do.
The girls were—I remember in my class, there was one young man who came from the same school that I did in Moorestown, the same Friends meeting, and his father was president of some very large dairy firm in Philadelphia. And as a young boy I remember, while there was no college in the summer, he would go in early morning, five o'clock or something, under the
All the girls planned to start in and support themselves—and you know it wasn't so general then for girls to support themselves. If their families were able to, they didn't give it a thought. They just supposed they'd go home, live at home and maybe they would marry; they didn't think much about anything but finishing college, I guess. But the girls who did think that they were going to begin to earn some money to help support their families, were all, every one (I never heard of one who wasn't; I heard of one only, in the years I was there) all were going to be teachers, they hoped. And in the last years they were all taking courses in the things they would teach, and writing to different schools, mainly Friends schools, asking if there would be any vacancy.
Mabel Vernon, for instance, was preparing to be a teacher, and she became a teacher of German, I think. Her father was an editor and I presume that she was really trying to help meet the expenses of her own college work and so on.
Then one girl I remember wanted to be a physician, and I think after maybe two years she left and went into a women's medical college to prepare herself. But I don't remember anybody else ever going into a profession of any kind.
Fry
Was there a lot of social work type of things gone into by the young women who did not have to support themselves?
Paul
No, nobody. Nobody went into it, did anything at college. You see I told you how this professor came, Professor Brooks, the last year I was there and started this interest in social work. We never heard of it; we never knew there was such a thing as social work.
The University of Birmingham and Woodbrook, England, 1907
FryWell, Alice, how did you get interested in the idea of political reform? Was it that year after college?
In suffrage, you mean?
Fry
Yes. How did you come around to it? Was it through your work in England?
Paul
Well, you see the year that I went to—First of all, I never heard of the idea of anybody being opposed to the idea of [suffrage or equality]; I just knew women didn't vote. I know my father believed and my mother believed in and supported the suffrage movement, and I remember my mother taking me to suffrage meetings held in the home of a Quaker family that lived not far from us. It was just—I just never thought about there being any problem about it. It was one thing that had to be done , [laughing] I guess that's how I thought.
So then when I went to England, this Quaker school, this place at Woodbrook, I remember one day when I was one of the students there, I went into the University of Birmingham as soon as I went there because I wanted to go on with what I had started at the University of Pennsylvania, in the same field. So I enrolled in a few courses there, maybe three times a week or something like that. I rode in on a bicycle, I remember, through the deep fog; the main thing I can always remember is riding through this terrible fog in England on a bicycle into Birmingham and going up to the University of Birmingham. And there I went, I studied more or less the same fields I'd had been studying at the University of Pennsylvania and went on with it.
Fry
Did you do that while you were at Woodbrook?
Paul
Yes, I was living in Woodbrook and I was taking the courses they had, and then they were very glad to have students go into the University of Birmingham and take special courses on any field that they wanted to. So I studied economics there in that department, mainly economics.
Then I went in, I don't know how many times a week, to the settlement house because I had lived in a settlement in
I know when the head of the settlement came out to give a lecture at Woodbrook. They were always having people come and lecture on all the things that they thought the students ought to know about. An absolutely wonderful, wonderful place this Woodbrook; I couldn't possibly say enough in admiration of it. Later on my sister went there, and one of my first cousins went there. And gradually from all over the world young Quakers came. When I was there there were for instance two from Holland, who still have been lifelong friends of mine. And there were [some] from Ireland, I remember. Of course from England. And from Norway. And from India. I've forgotten these places.
It was a small little settlement. You couldn't have very many people. They had one little house just for the women students. There weren't so very many, but the teachers were superb, I thought.
And this one night, or one afternoon I guess it was, there was a meeting at the University of Birmingham to which all students were invited to all these public meetings. Sir Oliver Lodge was then the head of it, if you have ever heard of him. He is a great scientist and a great name in English history. He was the president, I guess you'd call it, the head, of the University of Birmingham.
Under his auspices they would have these distinguished or undistinguished people coming on all sorts of subjects. So one day they were having one on votes for women. You didn't go unless you wanted to. I wanted very much to go to this one, so I went to his public meeting—after school hours you see. It was Christabel Pankhurst. I don't know that I'd ever heard of her name before. [She] was the principal speaker, and she had a little group of two or three women with her. She was Mrs. Pankhurst's daughter. (You know who Christabel Pankhurst was probably, because she ended her life in California.)
Fry
I didn't know—
Paul
All the last years of her life she spent down there. I am so sorry I didn't take advantage— So many regrets
Fry
Where was she in California?
Paul
She was down near Santa Monica, somewhere down there. And she died about a year ago, I guess.
Anyway she was a very young girl and a young lawyer, one of the few women that had ever studied law I guess in England at that time. Quite entrancing and delightful person, really very beautiful I thought. So she started to speak. And the students started to yell and shout, and I don't believe anybody heard one single word that Christabel said. So she kept on anyway for her whole speech. She was completely shouted down.
So I just became from that moment very anxious to help in this movement. You know if you feel some group that's your group is the underdog you want to try to help; it's natural I guess for everybody. When I had gone to the suffrage meetings in this country there was no oppositions at the meetings, everybody was in accord, all the Quakers were in accord. This had been one of their principles since Quakerism was started, you know: equality of the sexes. This is the only group I ever heard of that had it in their first principles , first enunciated back in 1684. It wasn't a subject for discussion. You just knew that there were many things in which the world hadn't come along and this was one that had to come along sometime. But here, when I saw this outbreak of hostility, I thought, "That's one group now I want to throw in all the strength I can give to help."
I went back to Woodbrook, and then I learned that Sir Oliver Lodge, who hadn't been at this meeting, was very aroused when he heard of this rowdyism in his college. (You see they had a totally different attitude than they have in this college here of giving way to all the rowdyism, which I think is a great mistake.) Anyway over there Sir Oliver Lodge didn't have any patience with it. He wasn't going to say, "Well, we want to give the students all the right to express themselves." [Laughter.] Not at all. He said, "This is a great disgrace to the University of Birmingham. I call a meeting and all students—" I guess they were all required to attend this meeting, which would be conducted
Well, then I understood everything about what the English militants were trying to do. She and the other young women who spoke with her—they were all three young girls—they had anyway one heart and soul convert—I don't know how many others they had. That was myself. The meeting was over, very decorous indeed, and that was all there was to it.
Social Work in the Dalston District, 1908
PaulSo then when I finished at Woodbrook, my one year, which is what you all went for—[pause]
While I was at Woodbrook one of the leaders of the charity organizations in London came to speak and visit Woodbrook. Quakers came from everywhere, you see, if they were authorities in any field. It seems that this Quaker head of the settlement in Birmingham felt that I had been doing quite good work, I guess, because she was invited to make a speech too, and people began to ask questions. She said, "Well I am going to ask"—she referred to me; she wanted me to answer the questions. She said to the group, "I think Miss Paul" (I don't suppose they called you Miss in those days) "I think this young girl Alice Paul knows more about these points than I do." So I got to have quite a good feeling it seemed to me toward my own little efforts in social work. So this lady who came down from London began to talk to me, and she said, "I need an assistant in the charity organization work. I am in charge of a certain district, the Dalston, northeast district of London."
Fry
The what?
Paul
It's just a district of London up in the northeast, and a very poor section. So she said, "I want to invite you to come up and be my assistant. We will pay
Cycling in France
PaulThen I went over first to visit France for a little while and I took my bicycle along with one of these Dutch girls whom I came to know exceedingly well. (We became friends for all our lives, and she married ultimately one of the boys from Woodbrook who happened to be a distant cousin of mine.) Anyway we went together all through the north of France, Normandy and—
Fry
This was that summer I guess.
Paul
Yes, summer.
Fry
What fun. And you just bicycled?
Paul
I did. She didn't. She went by train or something. We would always meet and then spend the night in some little pension and then we would go and see everything together. Then I would go on my bicycle to the next place and she would get there whatever way she wanted to use.
Fry
What did you do when you had flats on your bike and things like that?
Paul
Well, I can't remember that detail.
Fry
Wasn't it unusual for a girl to tour France on her bicycle in that period? This was 1908.
Paul
I don't know. If it was it didn't seem to me unusual. Seemed to me a very normal thing. You see, everybody in England always went everywhere on their bicycles, you know—any place you could go. I remember many bicycle trips that we took there from Woodbrook, with some of the boy students and girl students, maybe five or six, to this famous castle and this famous place in history and so on. All nearby England we went to this way. That's when I bought my bicycle over there, because I saw I couldn't go around and do much without a bicycle.
So then I think she had another term at Woodbrook because there were two terms and I think I came at the beginning of one and she came at the beginning of the next one. I think so. And I believe she went back to Woodbrook [to finish]. I went on to Paris.
And I remember arriving in Paris on my bicycle. The great city of Paris [laughing]. And I had the address of some students' house conducted by English and Americans for students with an enormous wall around the garden. I remember not knowing very much French—very very little. although I had studied it all through Swarthmore but still I didn't know very much about speaking it. Still I managed somehow finally, because very many people spoke English, to find out where the house was. And I landed there and saw this great wall, and went in. Everything was so lovely from then on. So I stayed in Paris quite a little while at this very lovely students' place. I suppose it was for American and English students. It was a student's hostel anyway, conducted by English and American people who wanted to have assurance their daughters were in a safe place in Paris. And certainly it couldn't have been a lovelier place.
Then I went back by myself to London and went up to this place up in Dalston, this very poor spot. This lady had arranged for me to live in the little house that she lived in which was the headquarters for the whole charity organization movement there. So it was very nice. She had a housekeeper and you got all your meals there. You were right in the office. Then my bicycle became precious to me because I had to ride all over. Everybody else was doing it; it was nothing unusual certainly in London to be riding on a bicyle. I rode all over my district.
This was [still] in the summer. I stayed there maybe a year; I'm not sure how long. While I was there, when I first began, Miss Lucy Gardner was the person I went to assist; she was a high-up person in the charity organization work. She needed an assistant very much because she didn't have anybody excepting this one man. She couldn't possibly cope with it.
She couldn't possibly have been a nicer person to work with and be under. So she wanted me to be trained
Well, so she asked the head of the neighboring district if she would let me go there and work maybe a month, without any pay at all, to be trained. And this was an equally splendid person, I thought, that I worked under. But in addition, she was a fervent member of the Woman's Social and Political Union.
Suffrage Work in Great Britain
The First Suffrage Procession
PaulI won't say it was the Woman's Social and Political Union; that was Mrs. Pankhurst's. But she was a fervent member of some suffrage society. They were having a great procession through the streets of London, otherwise I might never have known about it. So I signed up to walk in this big procession, as it turned out. From all over England people came for this procession, and probably you will find a lot about it in Sylvia Pankhurst's book. Enormous procession. I guess I would never have gone if this hadn't happened, to suddenly meet this lady who knew all about it and made the arrangements so I could go.
Well, I was put in a section anyway, and marched in that section—and we marched down to Hyde Park where it was to end. And my particular section was the section that was led by Lady Pethick-Lawrence; she was then Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence.
Fry
Oh, that's where you met her?
Paul
Well, I didn't meet her. I was just one of many marchers, and she was the very great figure. And when we got there, here were these great—platforms (I don't know what they were [called]; I don't know how they put them up, the great platforms from which they were speaking. She was the principal speaker at this place. I was standing there right at her feet. Just by chance. I didn't know where I was going. I just walked where I was sent. And it was right down to this platform—we were all sent down to this platform, surrounding this particular platform. The other people were surrounding another platform, just by chance I had her platform. And I was thrilled beyond words by this marvelous speech.
Do you want me to tell you all these things?
Fry
This is just what I want. Perfect.
Paul
You see, when I had this man [here from the magazine last week] he was so different. He just would say—and I didn't put any of this in because none of his questions could possibly have related to it. The only question was whether I spent the night on the roof; that's all he wanted to know about England!
So all this time then that I continued working for the charity organization (to finish that part) I took this period of training and then I went back to the original place I was to go, Mrs. Gardner's. I did I guess just about everything there was to be done there, everything that you could do. I learned again a great deal about a very poor working class section of London and what their lives were. I was again more and more and more convinced that I didn't want to be a social worker, but that I wanted to learn what life was like, as many aspects as I could. At the same time the Quakers had a headquarters in London for their own social work at a place called Clerkenwell.
Fry
How do you spell that?
Paul
I guess it was Clerkenwell . It was one of the very poorest sections of London. There was a little Quaker meeting there.
Anyway, after a time of working here at this Charity Organization Society, this chairman decided to resign. I don't know what she was going to do, I've forgotten. To travel or something.
Fry
Oh, that's Lucy Gardner.
Paul
Yes, the head of my place. And so she proposed to the board, her board of directors (whatever they had) that I be engaged in her place. She said that I knew now all about the work and all about the district and all about how to raise money for it, and there was nobody else she wanted to propose.
So then they considered and they said would I agree to stay on. I said no, I was going back to America probably next year. So then they said, "Well, we can't have a person take this excepting undertaking it for some period of time." I said well then I would stay and help the new person they got, help her get started all right because this other lady, whatever it was that she had to do, she had to go to pretty soon. So I did.
They finally found someone whom I liked very much, who came down from somewhere up in the Midlands. I thought she was a splendid person. So we worked together for maybe a month or two, until she got on to the ropes. She was the daughter of a clergyman and such a spiritual type of a person and so consecrated really in her work.
Then I thought that I didn't want to keep on, I couldn't keep on as head of it because of the fact that I wouldn't stay [more than] a little while. She took it over and I know everything was all right.
Then I thought I'd go up to the School of Economics in London and learn a little more; I still knew I didn't know very much. I went up and stayed at the Friends' Quaker hostel that they had in London. That's one wonderful thing that Quakers have done; they've had these places for students. Every place I went I found some hostel, not always for Quakers but some hostel for students. And this one in London was run by Miss Anna Littleboy, I remember.
Fry
Littleboy?
Paul
Littleboy. That was one of the most outstanding Quaker families in England. One word. Happened to be her name. Her brother had been the head of Woodbrook before I went
Anyway, this Mr. Littleboy's sister was in charge of this hostel which took in students. So I became one of her students, one of her group anyway, and went up to the School of Economics in London.
London School of Economics and the Pankhurst Movement
PaulI went there for two years. That's part of the University of London, you know. I didn't try to take any degree. I wanted to go back and take it at the University of Pennsylvania; I thought it would be more useful in my own country. But I took all the courses as though I were studying for a degree.
I remember taking a course in the history of human marriage by a professor named Westermark, from Denmark, and he was at that time, I suppose, the greatest authority— certainly in England, maybe in the world—on the question of forms of human marriage. I remember while I was there he would depart for, say, half a year and go down to some new tribe that he had never visited in some very remote place (we'll say Africa, I don't know where these places were) and sink himself into the community and learn the marriage systems. Then he would come back and teach us, and then he would go back to another place. It was a perfectly wonderful course, I must say. You got familiar with every possible variety of human marriage [laughing] that there was. It makes you have a very good idea too, and you don't get too excited when people want to have some other form of marriage.
Fry
You at least know that—
Paul
You know that it exists there, and exists there and exists there; whatever they think of, it is always something that you had known about.
So I took courses like that that I couldn't get anywhere else, perhaps in the world.
What was the School of Economics like then? Was this a fairly "radical" school?
Paul
No, it has become very much so, but it wasn't then. It was neither radical nor non-radical. The head of it was a Mr. Pember Reeves [sp?] from New Zealand, and I would say it was a very scholarly school. Just like this Westermark. He wasn't advocating any extreme form of marriage you see, but he was making you really know all the forms that mankind had been able to think of. And doing it in a very scholarly way. And he's written a book, The History of Human Marriage which we all studied, and I think I still have it here.
Then there was Sydney Webb, did you ever hear of him?
Fry
What was he?
Paul
He was a great—and Mrs. Sydney Webb—they were great authorities in the field of economics, but really more in its practical application to the life of England For instance there was a great study being made while I was there, a study of unemployment. Mrs. Sydney Webb and I guess Sydney Webb too, were people who were very prominent in making that study. They were known to every person in England, the Sydney Webbs. Well, he was one of the professors there.
You had people, these outranking, just marvelous, marvelous professors. I never heard of anybody advocating anything either radical or not radical, it was so purely scholarly.
Fry
It was an inquiry without any advocacy—
Paul
Well, they were teaching people whatever subject you were taking, the basic agreed-upon facts in that field, I thought. I know now whenever I say to people I have been to the School of Economics they look with somewhat suspicion.
Fry
I have in my notes that you were there at the School of Economics for 1908 and '09.
Paul
I guess So. I graduated, let me see, the School of Social Work in New York in 1906. Then I finished my first degree at the University of Pennsylvania, whether I took my master's now, I can't remember, in 1907. Then I went in the spring of 1907, about June, to
Fry
Oh, in 1907.
Paul
Yes. When I went over I went first to Germany because I had this scholarship for Woodbrook but I didn't wait till Woodbrook opened in the autumn. I went the first boat I could get and landed at Antwerp. Then went down through Germany to Berlin, and spent the summer in Berlin. I studied German all summer.
Fry
In Berlin, that was primarily for language?
Paul
Primarily to see something of the world, I guess. Being there I wanted of course to try to learn as much as I could. So from the day I started almost I got somebody to teach me German by talking to me. I went to a hostel there, students' hostel. I learned about that on the boat over. Somebody told me how she had spent so many months or so at this students' hostel. So I went to it. It was again a place I never shall forget. It was so excellent, oh delightful in every way, delightful. And I learned really quite a little German. I remember every morning we had a sort of church service and we had the Lord's Prayer and everything was in German. I think I can still say the Lord's Prayer in German, because by saying them every day you learned a good deal.
I was given a roommate. She was a teacher of German, so I let her teach me German. Then after a little while I met, I guess an American who had been to Swarthmore with me, I'm not sure. I met somebody. Maybe it was somebody crossing in the boat with me. Somebody over there. She told me she was staying in a German family and she thought I would perhaps learn more there. So I went the rest of the summer and lived in this German family.
Fry
Did you like that?
Paul
Yes. Very much. Liked them all. Very, very much.
Fry
Alice, what sort of things did you visit and seek out when you were in France and in Germany. For instance, architectural examples, or did you go a lot to art museums?
Paul
No, I don't think I ever went to one. I went to the opera with this second place—
The German family?
Paul
Yes, the German family place because they had young men in their—little what you called there a pension, you know. The loveliest woman was the head of it. Her business in life was to conduct this little pension. I remember so well one long dining table and some of these young men and girls—women—girls, I guess they were, were going to operas. And so the first time in my life I had ever been to an opera I guess. I went to these operas and we always stood up in the gallery, because they didn't have any money and I didn't have any money. We always stood up in the back at these operas. These young men were all preparing for the army, all not knowing how many more years they had in life. They had to be in the army. Well, I spent that summer there. And then went over to Woodbrook in the autumn, and I've told you the Woodbrook experience.
Fry
So that would be 1907, autumn, and—
Paul
Then I went to Woodbrook. And I finished in the spring of 1908. And then I went first over to Paris to have some more knowledge of something in Europe, and in 1908 went up to this Miss Lucy Gardner's charity organization work. That's when I began really to take part in the Suffrage movement.
Maybe that winter I started at the School of Economics. I guess I did.
Fry
I have here 1908 and '09 you were in the School of Economics; that comes out right.
Paul
You see I went from this charity organization. Say that we stopped our work in May at the Woodbrook and I went over—maybe as little as two weeks, I don't know how long—in France; and then came up and spent I suppose all the first half of that year with this Miss Gardner. Then I must have left and gone up to London to this student hostel, to begin work at the School of Economics.
First Suffrage Tasks and the Clerkenwell Settlement
Paul
While I was at the School of Economics, I met one girl especially, her name was Rachel Barrett, I remember, who was a very ardent worker in the Women's
Fry
Did you get some hostile responses?
Paul
Well, I don't remember anything about that. [Laughter] I don't know whether I did or not. I didn't think I was much of a success, but anyway I tried.
Then they began to ask me to speak outdoors at the street corners. Naturally they asked anybody, as I have always tried to do in our movement—to ask anybody to do anything that I could get them to do. So all we had to do was to tell what the movement was doing that week, what they were trying to do. I did speak, I guess, in a great many parts of London at little outdoor meetings, and indoor meetings when there was an election going on and they would meet in a schoolhouse perhaps and try to get all the people in that neighborhood to come in. The way you started, of course—they always started [new workers] by [having you] just introduce someone, someone who was an experienced speaker and would give you a little confidence so that you'd know you didn't have to go on; you could stop in a minute and now introduce the speaker. So that's the way I started, by introducing people. Then after a little while they would promote you to speaking yourself and having somebody introduce you —another new beginner.
We would go to the railroad stations in London and what they call the "tubes" (the subway) and in little parks. I don't know what we had for things to stand on, but they always had something we could stand on to
So then in a little while I decided I wouldn't stay any longer in this Friends' pension, but I would like to try to see a little more of the life of London. So I went down to this Clerkenwell headquarters of the Quakers and rented a little tiny apartment, or room, I guess it was an apartment in Clerkenwell, in the very poorest section of London you can imagine. And I became one of their assistants in their Clerkenwell settlement. It was very easy, you know, having been in settlement; they would take you in and were glad to have you. They would give you classes of people you were to instruct.
Do you want to go and get some lunch?
Fry
I'm out of ink in my pem.
Paul
Don't you think you'd better get some orange juice or something?
Fry
Why don't we do that. We are just now getting into your suffrage work and this might be a good place to stop for a minute.
Paul
All right. I'll come out [to the kitchen]. We'll just get a glass of orange juice.
Fry
Well, let me bring it in here to you.
Paul
I really don't want to stop. If you're going to do it, I must make sure that you get everything that you want [before you have to leave].
[break; tape recorder off]
Now if I am going too much into detail, you will stop me, will yo
Fry
You're not. It's the detail that I need, because we have the outlines and the general stuff.
Okay. So you are at Clerkenwell.
Personal Risk: Arrest in the Pankhurst Movement
PaulClerkenwell. This is where the Quakers had this little
Fry
Was there a long handle that you had to pump?
Paul
No, there wasn't any handle, but you had to go down , with a bucket, to fill it for whatever you wanted to take up to your room. It was the only water we had. I can't remember about the toilet, what we had. This was just—you felt that you were living the life and that you could see what the life of the ordinary person and all the handicaps and troubles and so on that they had.
I stayed there. I still kept on going up to the School of Economics and doing this work with the Quakers in this little settlement and going to all the meetings that I could of the WSPU. That was sort of my life. I
I guess all that winter that was what I did because it was in the spring [of 1909] when I was still at the School of Economics I remember that I got a letter from the Women's Social and Political Union asking me if I would go on a deputation to, I suppose, the prime minister [Asquith] (whoever was the head of the—a person that they were going on deputations to in Parliament). It was to be on a certain day, to be led by Mrs. Pankhurst and it would probably mean that you would be under some danger of being arrested and imprisoned, so you must not accept this invitation unless you were willing to do this. I remember hesitating the longest time and writing the letter and not being able to get enough courage to post it [laughter] and going up and walking around the post office, wondering whether I dare put this in.
Fry
Saying yes?
Paul
To say yes. (That's all you could say. If you didn't want to go, you didn't write; if you would go, why then
And I did go to the meeting in Caxton Hall in London, which you will probably come across in Sylvia [Pankhurst]"s book because all the meetings were held in Caxton Hall, very close to Parliament. I must read her book again to see what she says of all these affairs.
11. Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette, The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, New York, Sturgis and Walton Company, 1911.
Fry
Yes. [Later a close associate of Paul's in the suffrage movement in the United States.]
Paul
She was a student in Baden University in Germany and I guess she had gone over on her vacation to England. I imagine it was. Anyway, she heard of this deputation and she was always much more valiant than I. About a thousand times more valiant than I, by nature, I think. So she wanted to go right away on this deputation. She had a little United States flag of some type on her suit, and so I went up to her to introduce myself—we were the only two Americans there. So we became very good friends and continued to be all our lives until she sort of melted away in the last part of our [Equal Rights
Well, bail was given to everybody on [the deputation] by Mr. Pethick Lawrence, who was a very wealthy man. So he put up the bail for everybody. Now I remember he was talking to me here in the police station, and he said now would we be sure to be there when the time was appointed for us to come to be sentenced. We were just released on bail.
I remember so well. (Funny how you remember some things and others you don't, though I have never thought of it from that day to this. I guess I've never thought of it since.) He sat down beside each person and said, "Now I am leaving this money, and you be there at such-and-such a date."
And I said, "You know I have a return ticket for America on the boat going such a date, which is before the time that I have to be there."
He said, "The only thing you can do I guess is to cancel your return ticket because by order of the court you have to appear at this time." So I did. I cancelled my return ticket to America. Then somehow or other this group never was called for sentence. Of course they [the court officials] were very arbitrary. They did what they wanted. Maybe it was such a large group that they didn't want to put all these people in prison. Whatever the reason was, they finally announced that the case was dismissed.
I was at the School of Economics when this letter arrived but it was just about the end of the term, and that's the reason that I had gotten my ticket to go home.
Since I had sent in my name for this deputation, they supposed, of course, that I might be willing to help in any of their militant efforts. Immediately, it never failed, [laughter] everything that they got up from that time after that was of a militant nature they always sent me a note, saying would I take part.
First Imprisonment
PaulAlmost immediately they were going to have a meeting in Bermondsey to protest against one of the members, Chancellor of the Exchequer] Lloyd George it was, Lloyd George's speech which he was making as a member of the cabinet; he was participating in the general opposition to the suffrage measure. They all were. The cabinet was united against us; as far as you could tell, they were united.
So I went down, being asked to go, to speak. Imagine I, knowing hardly anything about speaking at all! And a group of people were asked to speak. That's all we did: go outside the meeting and have a protest meeting. But I learned then that you didn't have to be an eloquent speaker as I thought you might have to be and I knew I would never be. So anyway I agreed to go, to make one more.
And the person who got up to speak first was instantly arrested. And then the next one that she would introduce was instantly arrested. So when it came my time to get up and make a speech, my heart was calm [laughing] because I knew I wouldn't have to make the terrible speech [laughter] which was the thing that worried me more than anything else. So I was immediately arrested. And that's the first time I was in prison.
Fry
What was the name of the town?
Paul
It was part of London—Bermondsey, one of the industrial, poor sections of London. I may have some of these things wrong, you see; I would have to refresh my memory, but I think it was in Bermondsey.
So then we all were taken to the police station and were not let out on bail at all and were convicted and sentenced to prison, we'll say, for two weeks or something, maybe a month. It wasn't any very long period. [pause]
So from that time on, I really did participate I guess, almost entirely—I guess about everything I did was from that time on in the suffrage movement.
To Scotland with Mrs. Pankhurst
PaulI remember that Mrs. Pankhurst was going up to Scotland to get up what they hoped would be a very large procession through the streets of Edinburgh on October 9, 1909 to start the movement there. And she invited Lucy Burns and myself, two Americans, the only two Americans perhaps that ever had taken part in the movement, to drive up with her, which we were both of us very happy that she asked us to do it.
Fry
Was it because she wanted Americans or was it just because you and Lucy had been doing so well?
Paul
I don't know. I suppose she was going on this tour and wanted to take some people along; maybe we had just come to her attention in some way or other. I don't know why she asked us to go, but we both were overjoyed to be asked.
I remember she had a woman chauffeur, and this was something absolutely unheard of. Nobody had ever seen a woman chauffeur. It was unusual for a woman to drive a car but to have a woman chauffeur—! So she was quite a picture on her expedition. Only Mrs. Pankhurst, Lucy Burns and myself, and this woman chauffeur. Then we would stop at meetings along the way; great meetings had been arranged for Mrs. Pankhurst, and she would make one of her great speeches to enormous crowds; and then we would go on to the next stopping place where she would make another speech.
What they wanted to do was to organize this procession, and I think that Mrs. Pankhurst thought that maybe we could help her organize it. We both were going back to America and we had no particular ties in England, and so when we got up to Edinburgh—have you ever been to Edinburgh?
Fry
No.
Paul
One of the most beautiful streets that you can think of—Princes Street—goes from I think what they call the castle, an old, old, old castle, down to an equally historic place. It is between two very historic places. They opened headquarters there under Mrs. Pankhurst. And she had an assistant called Flora Drummond (they always called her General Drummond) who managed everything. So sad, you know, not to keep
So she asked me, and I think maybe Lucy Burns but anyway she asked me, to go down to a meeting at Berwickon-Tweed (and by the way, that's another thing that Mr. Gallagher asked me all about, so [that story] must be in one of these books).
Interrupting Sir Edward Grey, Winston Churchill, and Lord Crewe
PaulA meeting by [Minister of Foreign Affairs] Sir Edward Grey; he was a member of the cabinet. We were not supposed to go outside and make a meeting, but to go inside and ask a question of him as to why the government was obstructing the enfranchisement of women, or something like that.
I remember the person that I was [assigned to]. I was always sent along you know as a little girl assistant to somebody important. This person that was put in charge of this, I hope I can think of her name; her husband was one of the foremost journalists in Great Britain. (Previously at a meeting in London, where various women had gotten up and asked questions and had been thrown out of the meeting, there was a man named Henry Nevinson. Did you ever hear of him? He has written a book not exactly on this topic but on a related one; he was one of the foremost newspapermen in England. He got up in great indignation when all these women were being thrown out and made a public protest. Then there was another newspaperman who followed him and got up and did the same. Probably I will think of his name.
12. H. N. Brailsford
So for one week we stayed there, and every night we went out and spoke on the street corners of Berwick-on-Tweed, in the marketplace or someplace where people assembled. This was to acquaint the people of the town with why we were protesting against Sir Edward Grey.
When the meeting came I think she went back to London and I stayed on. Whether Lucy Burns was there
They conducted me all up through the streets of Berwick-on-Tweed to the police station holding my hands behind me. I don't know whether with handcuffs or with what, so I was, I remember, so blazingly angry and—
Fry
They made you walk through the streets?
Paul
Yes, to take me to be arrested to the police station, or be booked, or whatever you did. So then I was arrested and I was charged with whatever I was supposed to be charged with and the meeting was over, and I guess Sir Edward Grey must have told them not to go forward with any prosecution of anybody or something like that. Because I was released.
So having done this little chore, Mrs. Drummond asked Lucy Burns and me to go together up to East Fife to arouse East Fife on this subject. Let's see, what was the name of that town—Dundee. We were sent to Dundee. We went out from Dundee into all the neighboring little towns. It was so interesting, the experiences; and we usually spoke on the street corners. They hardly ever had indoor meetings; it was in the summer.
Then there was to be a meeting by Winston Churchill, a great meeting, I think it was in a great hall in Dundee. And so we were asked to get up a meeting outside, a protest, which we undertook to do. And we did. We got up the meeting and we were both arrested and we were both imprisoned. I don't know for how long, but both of us were put in Dundee prison.
13. See Irwin, Inez Haynes, Up Hill with Banners Flying, Traversity Press, Penobscot, Maine, 1964, p. 10 , for fuller account. This is the 1964 edition of Irwin's Story of the Woman's Party .
I remember when we got there, we were far out in the country, and Lucy Burns and I thought we would go out for a walk, and Miss MacGregor was very much embarrassed. She said, "You know, no lady goes out without having a hat and a coat and gloves and so on. I wouldn't want anybody to go out from my house without being properly gowned." So we gradually learned all the right customs [laughing] and conformed to them, I guess all right. And this was at Invorkeelor.
Fry
How would you spell that?
Paul
I'll have to look these things up. I may find them in Sylvia's book. I think it was [spelling] Invorkeelor or something like that. That was the name of her town. And the name of her house was [spelling] Abbeythune. Maybe that was the little village she lived in. But anyway we spent maybe two or three weeks there as her guests.
Then we went back to Edinburgh, where the procession was being gotten up. And that's the time they sent us over to Glasgow, which you read to me.
Fry
And that's where you were arrested again? On the rooftop episode in the rain.
Paul
Yes, we were arrested there, but they didn't prosecute the case. I remember they didn't. The only time I went to prison in Scotland was in Dundee.
Fry
One question: When you were going into the Sir Edward Grey meeting, how did you get inside the hall for that?
Paul
Berwick-on-Tweed? Well, they were public meetings; people could always go in.
Then the procession came off. Both Lucy Burns and I spent our time helping in every way we could in getting it up. Doing all the things you had to do to get up a big procession. It was a great success. The procession was very beautiful.
Then when it was over we went back to London.
Fry
Any arrests on the procession?
Paul
No, no, no. There were no arrests at all. It was just a beautiful procession through the streets. There was no opposition: I suppose they had a permit. The only time we were ever arrested was when it was some protest against some members of the cabinet.
London, the Annual Meeting of the Lord Mayor, November 9, 1909: Alice as a Charwoman
PaulThen when we went back to London in the autumn, (as I recall it, though I might find more in Sylvia's book) the first thing we were asked to do—Lucy Burns and I—was, as I can recall, to go to the meeting of the Lord Mayor of London [Nov. 9 1909] which was held every year for some celebrity and to ask (probably the prime minister, but whoever was speaking) again about why they were holding up the suffrage movement.
14. Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910 . p. 459-60 . See Appendix for text.
I was asked to go in as a charwoman in the morning when all these charwomen were going in, and go up where the gallery was and call down to make sure that if Lucy down on the floor didn't get her words heard, at least they would hear this from above.
I was with another woman. Maybe her name was Brown, I mean Nurse Brown, I always called her. Maybe it was Amelia. But the two of us were sent together to do this upstairs business. She was a nurse and I was a student. So we went there and spent the whole day.
Fry
As charwomen?
Paul
No, we just concealed ourselves. We got in as charwomen, and then we had to conceal ourselves upstairs somewhere in the loft. The police searched the whole building. I remember they came in and searched just where we were crouching down, and they even touched my hair, but they didn't—I guess they thought it was something else, so they didn't discover us. So we stayed there all through this day.
Fry
Were you in a closet or something?
Paul
No, we were just—we'll say some loft, over the—
Fry
Up over a ceiling.
Paul
Over the building. And it was not adjoining the place where the Lord Mayor's meeting was, but it was right next to it. So we were supposed to break a window and call down [into the meeting] because the place that was right above—it was too thoroughly guarded, I guess, probably, they thought.
So we stayed there all day. And then I suppose Nurse Brown called down too—I don't remember a single thing except of myself. So I called down what I was supposed to call down and the police came rushing up and arrested us. She probably did the same. And whether Lucy Burns ever made her speech and so on on the floor I don't know. I suppose she did, but I don't remember because I don't think she was in prison with me.
Forced Feeding in Prison
PaulAnyway, Nurse Brown and I were in prison, I think for about a month. And that is the time I think they started forcible feeding, I'm not quite sure. But anyway, we served out our sentence.
Fry
Pankhurst says in here that you had to undergo forced feeding.
It was started at a certain time, and I think it was then. I don't think it ever was in a previous one that I can recall.
So then when I came out I was invited by a very nice Jewish family who belonged to this movement to come to their house and recuperate. I was supposed to be very ill [laughter] apparently, because I was a very frail and fragile person anyway. I suppose I looked more ill than I was. So I went to this home. It was lovely, oh very cordial and warm and generous people. And I stayed there maybe two weeks. I remember Mrs. Pankhurst came to see me there and various people connected with the movement came to see me. And then I got finally my passage home and returned.
I don't know whether I told you all the episodes or whether there were some others that I have forgotten.
Fry
Well, the one that you just told me, according to Sylvia Pankhurst, took place in November of 1909.
Paul
And I came home in January, 1910.
Fry
What was your treatment like in the jails and prisons that you were in?
Paul
Oh, they just paid no attention to us. You were just locked up and you were in solitary confinement. You never saw anybody. You were not given anything to read. You were just left alone. Nobody paid any attention to you whatsoever.
Fry
Did you get plenty to eat?
Paul
Well, we were forcibly fed you see. We didn't eat anything.
Fry
What about in the other English jails you had been in? You had this other sentence that you had to serve, and you said you were sentenced for a short while after your protest against Lloyd George.
Paul
About two weeks, I think. Maybe a month, but not very long.
Fry
I just wondered if there was any—
Paul
I don't remember a thing. You know I still today don't know much about food, or think much about it or care
Fry
Apparently the hunger strike was one of the coordinated strategies of the Women's Social and Political Union.
Paul
Well, the hunger strike was the reason we were forcibly fed. Wouldn't have been otherwise. And I don't recall whether we went on a hunger strike before. I know we did the last time, but whether we ever did before or not, I don't know. Whenever they adopted finally as a policy, which they did, of asking all the prisoners—the Women's Social and Political Union would say, "Now if you want to go, we want you to hunger strike or not go." And so you went in with that understanding. When they adopted that policy—and I think the policy was probably after we were imprisoned in Dundee because I don't recall that we hunger struck in Dundee. We might have, but I could look it up and see. Whenever it was, we did.
15. Pankhurst relates the first hunger strike taking place in Holloway gaol, London, July 5, 1909. The Suffragette; The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910, p. 391 .
So that's the end of England. I think I have told you most of the things that happened.
Fry
I think you have.
There's a note I picked up somewhere that in the summer before, (1908) you were a resident worker for Christian Social Union Settlement of Hoxton, London. Did we cover that?
Paul
Well, when I was staying with this Miss Lucy Gardner in the Charity Organization work I told you the first month [of the summer] I didn't stay with her because I went up to have this training, we'll say a month. I don't know whether I got there about July or June or when. Then after staying with her a little while and I learned all about the Dalston region because I went over always with my bicycle.
I must tell you one other thing. While I was going all over the place with my bicycle, going everywhere, full of confidence and everything, which I still retain—I don't seem to learn much through ages going by—I came out from visiting one family, and here my bicycle
Fry
Did you walk everywhere after that, or how did you get around?
Paul
I walked every place. Maybe they had some little buses, I don't remember. Of course it was only one little section you know, not an enormous section you covered.
When I was about to come home, Christabel Pankhurst asked me if I would stay on as an organizer and be paid a little salary, (they paid very tiny salaries, but they paid a little salary) and give all my time to being one of their organizers. And she made the same offer to Lucy Burns. Same time. And Lucy Burns decided she would and she did. And I decided I would still go home and try to finish up my academic work and take a degree. I thought it was perhaps the best thing to do. So I came home. By myself.
2. II The USA Suffrage Campaign
Return To The USA
From Suffragette to Suffragist
PaulWhen I got home the suffragists in this country asked me of course—naturally they would—to go to their meetings. So I joined the one in [Philadelphia). I went right back to the University of Pennsylvania and took a room in Philadelphia so I could go to classes all the time; they still didn't have any place for the graduate students and there were no other women there. They put me on the board of their Philadelphia committee.
Fry
This happened right away?
Paul
Yes. After I came back, I remember when I made a speech, they asked me to come in and speak to them and tell them about the English campaign. I remember the head of it, Miss Jane Campbell, who was the president, said, "You know, when we asked you, we didn't know who you were or what sort of person you were or whether you were wild and fanatical or what you might be, but we thought we'd ask you just because you are a figure now in the minds of people. Now we see what sort of a person you are and we'd like you to go on our committee." So they were very welcoming from the very beginning. Even though I think they may have thought we had done rather [laughing] extraordinary things.
Then they formed a committee for the first time on having street meetings in Philadelphia and trying to make this movement better known. So I was made chairman of the street meeting committee.
Fry
That sounds logically like it might have been your idea—bringing over the street meeting technique from England.
No, they were beginning to start them in Boston and other places in this country, before we got back. Just the natural thing that comes in all political campaigns when you desperately want to get before the people; it is about all you can do.
So I took the chairmanship of this, and in Miss Katzenstein's book,
16. Katzenstein, Carolyn, Lifting the Curtain, the State and National Women's Suffrage Campaign in Pennsylvania as I Saw Them . Dorrance & Co, 1955.
I was, let me see, I think I didn't start into the University of Pennsylvania until the fall, but all this time I sort of got into the woman's movement. And I was invited down to the national convention of the National American Women's Suffrage Association in Washington. I guess it must have been in the spring of 1912.
Fry
That was fall of 1910 when you started back at the University, according to my notes. Is that right?
Paul
I think so. I got back here in January I think. And I didn't enroll in the University right away but went to these different meetings, and, among others to one that was held in Washington (the first time I had ever gone to Washington in my life) at one of the hotels, their convention. Could it have been 1912?
Fry
Let's see. You got your Ph.D. in 1912.
Paul
No, this must have been earlier then. It was probably the spring of 1910, the year I came back. It would have been 1910 because Taft was the president of the United States and I presume he was president in 1910. We can look that up. Taft was a speaker at this convention, and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, I think, was the presiding officer, and they invited me just because I had taken part in the English movement and I guess they invited
Then when it came time for Taft to speak (before or after—I don't know where I came in the program) Taft made clear that he didn't think much of this voting for women. All over the room people began to hiss, and he was unperturbed, but they did. [pause]
Nothing happened through the meeting excepting I got to know some of the different leaders of the movement and continued to know them always because of that first meeting. That was just one little—perhaps one week it took me down in Washington.
Fry
Any certain leaders that you want to mention?
Paul
I remember the women, but I won't say at this meeting because maybe I didn't meet them at this meeting. But I can tell you later who the women were I can remember.
A Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania
PaulThen we went on—beginning I guess in the summer—to hold these street meetings and, let's see, this would have been 1910. I went back to the University evidently in the autumn of 1910 and stayed through 1911 and 1912. In 1912 I think I took my degree in June, my doctor's degree. Previously to that I had taken a master's degree. Whether it was the first year that I was back or whether it was the last year before I went, I am not quite sure. Anyway, I know what my thesis was for my doctor's degree. It was called "Toward Equality" and the same title I think I had for my master's. It was toward equality in the United States for women. And the previous one, I think my master's, was toward equality for women in Pennsylvania.
So on the basis of the Pennsylvania one, I just enlarged it to take in the country.
Fry
In this thesis—
Paul
One of the biggest things we did in our street meeting affair [?] —we had no opposition, but we didn't get much—I don't know, I wouldn't say very much assistance. There were just a few of us who did all the meetings.
Fry
It will be probably in Katzenstein's book.
Paul
It might have been September of that year I came down to Washington. Perhaps it was because that year [1912] they had the National [American Woman] Suffragist Convention in Philadelphia and the person in charge of getting that up was Mrs. Lawrence Lewis.
Appointment as Congressional Chairman, National American Woman Suffragist Convention
PaulShe asked me to help her, which I did, perhaps because of this big meeting that we'd gotten up in Independence Square—but anyway she asked me to help her. So at that meeting I went—I suppose as a delegate; I don't know about that—but anyway I went to the meeting and as a sort of assistant to Mrs. Lewis, helping her any way I could. That's when I was appointed to be the Congressional Chairman for the coming year, November, 1912. The national Congressional Chairman had to go to Washington, you know. Lucy Burns and I were appointed and the resolution was offered by Miss Jane Addams at the national board meeting, that we be appointed and that we be given free reign and free hand in anything we wanted to do, excepting we were not to be allowed to send in a bill for anything that we spent and not to charge anything to the national treasury and not to spend even one dollar that we didn't ourselves raise or give. That's the only condition they made. That was the treasurer I suppose who made all those conditions.
Fry
Now on my notes I have that you visited Lucy Burns at
Paul
Well, I don't know whether it was that summer, I thought it was later, but maybe it was that summer—she came down and visited me at my little home in Moorestown. It must have been in the summer of 1912 I guess, because we were considering what to do about whether we would undertake this work in Washington. She came down and stayed with me a little while, and we discussed it and felt that we would offer to come down and do this in Washington; maybe they wouldn't accept it, but we would make an offer. Then I went up to visit her to talk about it further. I don't know which came first, whether she came to me first, or I went there first, but anyway we had conferences, at least those two.
Then at the time of the convention—I don't know whether she went to the convention or not—but I know I did. And we went— I went at least, maybe she went too—to Miss Jane Addams to say we would like to offer to help in any way we could in the federal amendment campaign in Washington. And she said Mrs. William Kent, who was then acting as congressional chairman, didn't want to continue or couldn't continue for some reason, and they wanted someone to be on the congressional committee, and that she would offer our names, propose a resolution, which she did, and it was adopted with that one restriction.
Fry
I want to be sure I have this right. Did you and Lucy prefer to work on the congressional committee?
Paul
[Inaudible] a committee. This was [inaudible] open door [?],there was only one committee for the open door [?] meeting, only one committee for the congressional work. We didn't, I suppose, even know anything about it when we offered to go down and try to see if we could push it. Then we learned that there was Mrs. William Kent, wife of the congressman from California, who had been and who didn't feel able to continue, and wanted someone to take her place. I guess we were told that by Miss Addams; I can't be sure.
Then anyway she said that she thought it would be a splendid thing for us to do, and she would be delighted to back it and would offer the resolution, which she did.
Fry
That's what I have in my notes—that Jane Addams brought it before the board and it was approved. The names I
Paul
Well, as far as I know only—that may be if there is some record that Crystal Eastman was on—I don't remember that. Crystal Eastman was a personal friend of Lucy Burns and I didn't know her. They had been at Vassar together, and it was my impression that after we got down there and began to see all the work that was needed and felt that we had to have more people, that she asked—we asked her together—Crystal Eastman to come down and join us, which she did. Or maybe she was already appointed, I didn't remember.
Fry
Well, my notes may be wrong because I think I got a lot of these notes from the History of the Woman's Party by Inez Irwin, so you see this might be wrong [in a secondary source].
Paul
Well, it might be true. Anyway she from the very beginning worked with us. I didn't think she did in the very beginning. I thought she came later.
Getting Set Up in Washington, D.C.
PaulI went down alone on December 7, 1912, after I was appointed. I spent that Christmas in Washington getting ready for the opening of our little headquarters. Mrs. William Kent asked me to have Christmas dinner with them, I remember so well. She was the most stalwart and wonderful aide anybody could ever want, my predecessor. Extra, extra, extra, extra wonderful.
Lucy Burns came down, I imagine about the middle of January, but anyway she didn't come down for quite a little while. I went into a little friendly boarding house on I Street in Washington right next to the Quaker meeting house and everybody there, I guess, was a Quaker or in some way connected with them. And I remember I had one little third floor room. And no headquarters of course, no office, nothing. And I told you that's when we got the Susan B. Anthony desk—I think I told you about that.
Fry
Oh. you told me, yes—but now you have to tell it again [to record it on tape].
How did you get the headquarters?
Paul
Well, they gave me a list of women's names in New York before I went—the New York people did in their headquarters before I went down. These were all Washington members and officers and supporters. And so I started out.
First thing I went to this little Friends boarding house which I think was the place that I went when I first went down to this convention that I had gone to when Taft was speaker. I learned about it anyway. It was in the Friend's Intelligence here (that's the Quaker paper), always advertised, so I knew about it and I went there. So then I started from there, with no headquarters, to go through the whole long list that they had given me of maybe forty or fifty names to ask each person if she would join in with this effort we were going to make to take up again Susan B. Anthony's work in a rigorous form to really get the Amendment through Congress. Because Mrs. Kent, and I don't know who was there before, but ever since the death of Miss Anthony the national board had put all its efforts in state referendum campaigns and had regarded the Washington work as something that had to be continued to the extent of having a speech made in Congress or something like that and having the Congressional Record containing the speech sent all over the country; but it was all secondary to the state campaign.
So when I went to these women I didn't go to Mrs. Kent right away, but I began on the list, maybe alphabetically as they gave it to me, I don't remember. But I found one person after another after another had died, and then I found one after another after another after another had moved away and nobody knew their present address. So it narrowed down to not having so many left to see.
Fry
My goodness, it must have been an old list.
Paul
It showed how feeble was the movement there, anyway.
And then I, among others, went to Miss Emma Gillette, who was the dean and one of the founders of the Washington College of Law which had been started as a college to enable women to study law, because at that time there was almost no place in the country you could be admitted as a student. Miss Gillette came from Pennsylvania and when she wanted to study law she came to Washington
Then when she graduated she joined forces with Ellen Spencer Mussey, who was the wife of a Washington lawyer and who had studied law herself in her husband's law office and passed the bar examination to become a lawyer. So there were two women lawyers in Washington, as far as' I know. One was Miss Gillette and one was Mrs. Mussey. And they had set up this little Washington College of Law, in order that the women would have a chance.
[Neighbor, Mrs. Scotty Reynolds, enters.]
Fry
Oh! Hi!
S.R.
Am I too early?
Paul
Oh, no.
S.R.
I'll put your groceries away, in here.
Paul
Lovely. [To Fry] Do you want to go and help her a minute? I'll remember where we left off.
[Recorder off]
Paul
—Forty or fifty people and almost everybody on the list had died or moved away.
Fry
And you were telling about Ellen Spencer Mussey—
Paul
Miss Gillette, who was the first person I met who was friendly and interested and still living. She was, my goodness, such a wonderful woman. So she had been with Mrs. Ellen Mussey. She had founded this Washington College of Law where I took my first law degree, founded in order that women might have a place to study law.
Fry
Did you say where you had taken your "first law degree"?
Paul
Yes, I took it there, after I got to know her long years after. I didn't dream of taking a law degree then, in 1912.
I met Miss Gillette and she had a little law office and real estate office in the basement of an office
Fry
Yes.
Paul
So I went to see her in this little basement office, and she was enthusiastic about helping, so I told her we probably would get up a procession in Washington, that we would try to, the day before president-elect Wilson came, that this was our big plan, and that if we did, would she be our treasurer? And she said she would be very happy to do so.
She then said, "Now why don't you go next door and there's an office in the basement just like mine, one long room, very simple, unpretentious, and I know it's for rent; the people have moved out."
And I said, "Oh, no, we couldn't think of it, I know we could never afford a great big place like this."
She said, "Well just go in and try, and I think they will be glad to have you and will put [on] a price you can pay."
So I did go in and they said they would rent it to us for $60 a month. So I said, "Well then we will see if we can raise $60 a month, and if we can, we will take it."
So we got our office next door to her. And this Mrs. William Kent, whom at that time I hadn't met but I went to see later, she gave the first $5 and said, "I will give $5 every month." So then we thought, "Well, with $5 guaranteed, maybe we could raise the $55" because it had been so impressed upon us by the national headquarters that we couldn't let any unpaid bill ever go to them. So we didn't take [the office space] then, but we thought we probably would.
Then I went to see Mrs. Helen Gardner, who was on their list, and she was very cooperative. I think she was a writer of some type. I think she was very displeased that a young whippersnapper such as myself should be the chairman, because she talked about "Well they don't have much sense about who they put in charge" [laughter] and "all these undertakings which need great experience" and so on. I think she probably thought she should have been made the chairman, but nobody had
So we sat in this room and finally I said, "If we do start up this procession, since you are in the field of journalism, would you be willing to be our press chairman?"
And she said yes, she certainly would.
The Committee's Inauguration Parade, March 3, 1913
NAWSA Congressional Committee's Inauguration Parade, Washington, D.C., March 3, 1913
So we gradually got, this way, some people. Then I went to see the president of the little group in Washington, which was very tiny. Her name was Florence Etheridge. She was employed at the Indian Bureau in Washington, and I had met her at the national convention in Philadelphia because she had come down to represent her little D.C. group at that convention. She had known that up there we had talked about the possibility of having a procession the day before Wilson came in, and she wanted very much to do it.
But she said, "It is just impossible. We couldn't vote to do it at the convention because we had nobody to get it up and no money with which to get it up." So she said, "Well, I think it would be a good idea. I don't know whether it is possible."
So then she took me to see Mrs. William Kent, my predecessor. I had put her off because I wanted to get a little foothold before I went to her because she would be the most important. And there I found such a wonderful welcome and such a marvelous woman. Roger Kent's mother, you know. Beyond words, a wonderful person.
So she invited me immediately to come and have Christmas dinner with them and, knowing our possibility of getting a little headquarters, she said she would give $5 every month, and she was from that time on a steadfast supporter until she died. She was still a member of our board when she died, not so long ago.
Fry
That $5 a month started a tradition with her, didn't it, because I noticed—
Paul
She kept on and on, giving and giving.
Later she would have a "committee of a hundred" and a "committee of two hundred," always to pay your rent, as your houses got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Paul
Oh. it was wonderful what she did. Then we decided to have a meeting and launch it, the whole program. So we held a meeting on the second of January [1913], which is the first meeting we ever held in Washington. I suppose it was held in this new little headquarters, though I am not quite sure.
[Telephone rings.]
[Tape off]
Paul
All right. Now at this first meeting I presided and introduced the whole idea of a procession and so on, and I remember everybody there supported the idea and said they would turn in and help. And I remember among the people who were there was Miss Belva Lockwood, did you ever hear of her? I think she is the first woman in the country who ever ran seriously for the presidency. She was the woman who single-handed opened the Supreme Court to women. [Spelling] Belva Lockwood. She was one of the pioneers and she died of course a good many years ago. She was very nice. She came and she sort of gave us her blessing. And of course Mrs. William Kent came and Helen Gardner and all these few people we had gotten in touch with.
Among other people that I haven't told you about that I went to see, one after another, the one that I suppose was the most important that I went to see, but I didn't know them, was Elsie Hill. She was the daughter, as I told you, of Congressman Hill. She was on my list.
Fry
And he was Congressman Hill from what state?
Paul
From Connecticut and from the district we are sitting in now. Our district. He was nineteen years in Congress and on very important committees.
His daughter, who had graduated Vassar, had gone over and spent some time in France and knew evidently a little about French. So she wanted to stay on in Washington after she finished college to be with her family. She got a position to teach French in a high school in Washington, and when I got to her she was
As I said, then she came in and stayed with me after my sister died up here. And all that china that you were asking about in the kitchen that's in the left hand side (we call it our [laughing] "common" cupboard),
17. Alice is referring to the cupboard of dishware for everyday use, as opposed to more elegant china.
And she got that little radio. A man stopped at the door, and I said, "I just think I can't afford another radio, I have this enormous one that's in here. Now it's not much good, sort of worn out."
She said, "I want one in my room that I can hear the news every morning when I waken up."
So I said, "All right, we'll buy that." And I remember so vividly—it was only I think $17, but we've had it every day, every day since she bought it. We've had it there in our little kitchen.
This was this first meeting. Then we had to get a permit and I told you this before [off tape]. We applied for a permit to have a procession, and the national headquarters had been kept informed up in New York about everything and they were very anxious for us to have it. They thought it was a very good thing to have this procession; it would have a good effect on the suffrage movement all over the country. But they were always harping on the fact that they couldn't afford to pay anything toward it. So then we were told by the chief of police, as I
So we said, "We just must have Pennsylvania Avenue," and they said,
"Well that's fine, but we certainly won't let you have it. It's totally unsuitable for women to be marching down Pennsylvania Avenue."
And so then Elsie Hill asked her mother—since her father was in Congress and the Congress supports and gives the money for the District [of Columbia] police and everything else—she felt her mother maybe could do something. So her mother said she would go down and talk to this—what is the name of that man, was it Sylvester?
Fry
His name was not given in any of the references I read, but you mean whoever the contemporary police chief was at that time.
Paul
Whoever he was; I don't remember. But I remember so well Major Sylvester it is my impression that he was the one at that time. Anyway Mrs. Hill took Elsie Hill with her, and they came out of the interview with the permit for the Avenue.
So then we had something to work on, and we got up a committee which divided up into all the different groups. One was to get the nurses, one the doctors, one the lawyers, one the college graduates, and so on. I found here my photograph just from going through these things; I will show it to you. And I was in that procession.
Fry
Oh, you did? Good!
Paul
Just by chance I found it.
Is that somebody downstairs?
Yes, your tenants came in.
Paul
You will excuse me one minute. I'll ask her if she's the one that's so chilly.
[Interruption.]
[Tape off.]
Well, I was saying that we had these committees for every department, and we succeeded apparently, [to judge] from the results, in getting very good leaders for each one, because you see between the second of January and the third of March wasn't very long to get up a procession in a city where you weren't known and where you had no workers and where you had about every obstacle that you could have.
Fry
And you had just moved into your headquarters, I guess?
Paul
Well we hadn't, I guess, moved in. Well maybe we had just moved in. But anyway we had nothing , and we had to raise all the money and we had to get all the women to march and so we put somebody in charge of the costumes. This was Hazel McKaye; I don't know whether you ever heard of her.
Fry
Oh, yes, Benton McKaye's—
Paul
Benton McKaye is her brother but the other famous one was Percy McKaye, the poet. She was considered the foremost woman pageant producer, pageant worker in America. I remember that one day somebody who was working with us said "There is coming to Washington tomorrow the best woman in the field of pageantry in the country, and it would be a good thing to get her, if we can, to help."
So we went to her right away when she came. And then we became lifelong friends. Until her death she was always one of our supporters. And so she took over all the pageantry. She put on something on the treasury steps so that when the procession would go by, they would all see this beautiful pageant on the treasury steps being repeated and repeated. Elsie Hill was one of the dancers, I remember, in this pageant on the treasury steps. It seems to have been very beautiful.
And the whole procession was so colorful. We had one section followed by another section in another color
Fry
Who led the parade?
Paul
The national board of the National American [Woman's] Suffrage Association because it was under their auspices, you see. We were their committee. It started out that way.
Dr. [Anna Howard] Shaw I guess was the leading person on their board who walked at the head. I think that Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett and a few of the other people on the board—I don't remember who—were there. I remember the national treasurer was there, the one who [laughing] was always afraid of our sending the bills in. Her name was Mrs. Stanley McCormick. All these people walked at the head.
Well, we went out bright and early—I guess I told you this too before, how we made an arrangement with the people who were selling the tickets. I told you that, didn't I? Do you want me to tell you over again or no?
Fry
Yes, please tell me about that. We didn't have the recorder on before.
Paul
Some group had gotten a contract to put up the grandstands and sell all the tickets for [seats in] the grandstand. I don't know what their contract was like.
Fry
For Wilson's inaugural—
Paul
For the inaugural procession. And so then they came to us and asked, since they thought we were going to have a pretty interesting procession the preceding day, if they could make their ticket selling cover our day too, and they would give us a percentage of all the tickets they sold.
So we gave them a little tiny space in our little tiny office, and there they had somebody selling tickets all day long and all evening long until the day of the procession. And they took in a great deal of money, and
There had never been a procession of women for any corner of the world or in Washington, probably; at least nobody had ever seen it. [Faint noise and music in background begins.] Nobody ever dreamt that women—you were always seeing these Elks and people going around in processions—but they never thought of women doing such a thing. And so there really was a great interest in it. A great many tickets were being sold, to our astonishment. So we had a pretty good idea that there would be a great many people there, apart from the people who had written to us that they would come and be in the march. And we had floats, a great series of floats. Different towns and different sections of the suffrage movement over the country that we would write to would say that they would come and they would bring a float or pay for their own float. The floats were a very decorative part mixed in with this very great pageantry that Hazel McKay had produced.
So when the day came, almost time for the procession, we found that apparently the police were taking the matter very casually. They said, "Well maybe a handful of police could tend to it on the day before the inaugural." And that then they would concentrate all their force on taking care of the people at the inaugural.
We tried with not much success to get them to think we might have a big procession and that they had better be prepared. So then the night before, as I told you, Mrs. Stimson's sister, Mrs. John Rogers (Mrs. Rogers was the sister of Mrs. Stimson)—Mrs. Rogers said she would take me down—she was on our committee—and talk to her brother-in- law [Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson] and see if he couldn't be aroused into the fact that we really were in some doubt as to whether the police could handle the crowds. So we went to see him.
At the same time they were having a big mass meeting in I think Constitution Hall (you know, that's a D.A.R. [hall])—I'm not sure—but in one of the big theaters, big place in Washington. And Mrs. Catt, Carrie Chapman Catt [was there]. [Tape runs out.]
So we asked her to come down and to speak at this mass meeting. It was the first time that we had any real contact with her. And she came and made a very powerful speech, people told me. I didn't go because I was out seeing Mr. Stimson at the moment.
Fry
[checks movement of tape.]
Paul
Do you want me to go on or is it stopping?
Fry
Yes, the recorder's doing fine.
Paul
So then Mr. Stimson said, "Why of course, if the police can't handle it, you can just count on me. I will send over our artillery" (from this place right outside of Washington where he was in charge of all the —) cavalry , I mean. He said, "I'll send over the cavalry. They will handle everything you need. Just call me up if you do have any difficulty." So that relieved our minds very much.
The next morning we went out early, very early, to try to begin to line the people up in all the different sections. We had a grand marshall who rode on horseback with several assistant marshalls on horseback, but they were more for publicity. The grand marshall was a Mrs. Burleson; you know at that time there was a Burleson in, I think, the cabinet of Mr. Wilson [Albert S. Burleson, Postmaster General]. Anyway she was a very prominent Texan family, Democratic family. I'm not absolutely sure what her relationship was to [Secretary] Burleson; her husband was an officer at Fort Meyer. So she came in and practiced and rehearsed and everything else and was an extremely decorative person on her horse.
But you couldn't do much because when we started out to form our people up, we had no place to form because the whole street was just—from one side to the other — was just filled with people. They were tourists, I
So when we started out we had this mass of people and we didn't know how to get through; we tried to get through and we just saw it couldn't be done. We could never have this procession of maybe one thousand women or five thousand or ten thousand (whatever we had); we'd never get them through.
So we went to the phone to call Mr. [Secretary of War] Stimson, and he said—I don't know who went, probably I went but I don't remember—he said all right, he would do just as he had agreed the night before, and he'd have the cavalry there as fast as they could get there.
So they came all on their horses, prancing around, and of course they could easily open the way, which they did, so we could go a block maybe; and then the way was all closed again and they'd have to open the next block. So that, as I told you the other night, the march which was supposed to end at Constitution Hall at a certain hour, it was hours later before we even came in sight of Constitution Hall.
We had the meeting there all right but on the way, for instance, there was this pageant of Hazel McKay's, which we had spent a great deal of effort on and it was apparently going to be extremely beautiful. So these poor people [waiting to see] the pageant—they had a separate grandstand built [for that], the sellers of this whole thing. Normally processions would go around in front of the White House, but this time they went in back of it so as to be opposite the Treasury and enable all the people who paid extra to have extra good seats [laughing] to see the pageant [laughter], so all these people thought they were paying extra to be in this place of advantage to see the pageant on the Treasury steps.
We had gotten very good publicity all the time we were getting up this procession because this Mrs. Helen Gardner I had gone to see turned out to be a super-whiz at this. She would arrive in the early morning and stay all day long and never budge and certainly she was 100%
Fry
Both Washington papers were faced, I guess, with prospects of filling their space between the time of the election and the inauguration—
Paul
Maybe.
Fry
—So you had some good—
Paul
Luck [laughing].
Fry
Also you were given newspaper space.
Paul
You see, Mr. McLane [?], the owner of the Washington Post, gave us one million dollars and—
18. The gift from the editor of the Washington Post was $1,000. (Note by Ruth F. Claus)
Fry
Then?
Paul
I don't know whether he did it for that procession or just after the procession, but he gave it to us, so we had the good will of the Post . [pause.] That's the first big gift, I think, we got.
Well anyway we had the cavalry working as hard as they could and very faithfully. People have written it up and I would like to read again that [congressional] hearing [that took place later] because Mr. Gallagher tells me it is written up there that we were mobbed and people were very antagonistic and so on. But I didn't get that impression myself. My impression is of the police doing the best they could, having their leaders not providing enough policemen, and that they could not possibly, in any possible way, manage it.
Fry
Well, I have the reference on that Congressional hearing which followed.
Paul
Have you a copy of it?
Fry
I don't have a copy but Mabel Vernon has a copy.
19. Mabel Vernon's copy could not be located for the final printing of this transcript, nor could the exact reference of the Congressional hearing. See Sun article.
Paul
Has she? Well, I hope she will let me have it because
Fry
Well Doris Stevens' account intimates some sort of—
Paul
Well, she wasn't here though.
Fry
—harassment and so does the Irwin account.
Paul
I know they do, but Mrs. Irwin wasn't even a member of ours at that time, nor was Doris Stevens. I don't think—
Fry
And of course the Suffragist wasn't being printed at that time, so we don't have that for a record.
Paul
The only place where I could see [a record is] what we testified, because I testified [in the Congressional hearing] and I'd like to see what we said in the testimony. Because as I look back on it now , my impression is that the police were valiant in their effort to try to keep order and just about as completely at a loss for what to do as we were. And nothing saved that procession but Secretary Stimson sending the cavalry. I'm sure of that.
I remember there were some protests from people thinking that the crowd had made remarks and so on they didn't like, but I don't know that there was anything worse than that. I remember Mr. Kent was one of those who wanted this investigation because his daughter, Elizabeth, a beautiful, lovely girl was on the float, (his and Mrs. Kent's daughter) and it seems that somebody had pulled her foot or done something like that from the crowd, something he thought was very insulting. So there were some people who seemed to think that the crowd had not behaved as they ought to behave, but I wasn't really conscious of it myself. I suppose I was so terribly busy trying to keep the people in line [laughing] and get them not to go home disheartened. and keep our own little army together. But anyway we finally emerged at Constitution Hall at the end and had this meeting.
Then immediately these Congressmen that somehow or other had been brought in touch with it—the one I remember the most was Mr. Kent—got this investigation started. And the chairman of it was the senator from Washington state. I guess his women had asked him to do it, because Washington had already become enfranchised,
Fry
(I think dinner is burning in the oven; let me go look.)
[Pause]
Paul
And he was really enthusiastic, I imagine, because of the women back home. So I went to see whom we should ask to be speakers and testify as witnesses and so on and what they should do and everything—the procedure. And then I remember saying, "Well, I'll have to come in and see you probably a good many times about this, and what time would you like me to come?"
I remember him saying, "Oh, I'm always beginning my work at seven in the morning; that's the time to come." [ Laughing] I got a very wonderful impression of Senators. I thought, "Here they are, all at work at seven in the morning. I have a hard time to get my eyes open at seven in the morning!" [Laughter.]
20. For conclusions on the March 3rd 1913 procession, see page 79.
Initial Organizing
The Press Department and Florence Brewer Boeckel
PaulWell, we had this hearing. Then Mrs. Gardner, who had done such good press work, said to me that she wanted to withdraw from our campaign. She said, "You know, I did this press work on the impression that this was just to make good propaganda for the campaigns in the states . I don't believe in getting this federal amendment that Miss Anthony was working for and never have believed in it and don't want to have any connection with it. I see from the way you are acting—you have these banners saying 'We demand an amendment to the United States Constitution'— that you are actually talking about putting this amendment through. If I had known this I certainly wouldn't have had anything to do with it. So I want now to withdraw from all connection with it." So we said, well if that's the way she believes, we'd have to accept it. So we did. So we never heard anything more about her until the day of the ratification of the amendment, when it was given—what do you do?— proclaimed by the Secretary of State, I think it is.
Fry
Yes, a proclamation.
Paul
President Wilson gave the time of the proclamation. (I suppose it was issued in the White House, but I don't know where they give the proclamations from). Anyway, President Wilson invited a group of women to be there for this ceremony of the proclamation, and among others was this Mrs. Helen Gardner, whom we hadn't seen all these intervening years.
And then he promptly appointed her to the first position I guess he gave to any women, to be head (I don't know whether it was head, but a member) of the
So then we started to build up a little press department and—you may know all this. For about a year Elsie Hill and I, I guess, did all the publicity. I would write a little bulletin and Elsie Hill would come home from her school, and she would come in and take it around to the newspapers. She was full of enthusiasm and could get people all stirred up. So we continued to get, we thought, pretty good publicity, but it took a lot of our time and we wanted to get some one person to do it.
So then Elsie told me of somebody who had graduated from Vassar that she knew, and she said she had been on a paper for a little bit of work up in Poughkeepsie when she was in college, and then she had now come down to Baltimore to be on Vogue, the paper, Vogue . So then she said, "I think maybe we could persuade her to come over." So we both went over to see her in Baltimore, and from the first moment we were so congenial; we all were. She was so—just delighted to be invited to come and do our press work, and she had a little money so she said she could pay all her expenses—and she came. And her name was Florence [Brewer] Boeckel. (She died, last year I think; I went to the memorial service for her.) So for maybe a year or two years she did this just as a gift. She came down to our headquarters in the morning and worked all day, as though she had been a regularly paid person. Then she married this Mr. Boeckel—do you know who he was?
Fry
No.
He had for years—and I think it still continues probably under his name, but I don't believe he does the work any more—I think it was something like the editorial research service, or something like that. But they didn't send out news articles like newspapers and news bureaus; they sent out only editorials, and he would write editorials. He was apparently very gifted in that field. He would write editorials giving the situation of different bills before Congress that the whole country might be interested in, and this service was bought all over the country. So it was the way that Mr. and Mrs. Boeckel lived, supported themselves.
So then she had a little son born, so she said that she thought she couldn't any longer do it as a free gift, so we paid her from then on a small salary, and she built up a splendid press department. We gave her one room in the headquarters. (By this time we had a building and not just one room.) She got two assistants, whom we paid, whom she chose. One was good at writing and one was good at interviewing. Then she got several stenographers and typists and mimeograph workers and people who clipped everything for her and kept clipping books—she never had undertaken to do a news service; she just built it up without any experience. I would have thought she built up probably the best press service that I've ever known anybody to have for a volunteer organization in Washington. And she continued to our victory.
Fry
I've seen her name on the masthead of the Suffragist .
Paul
Yes, I'm sure you have. A great part of the time she didn't do the Suffragist, but toward the end she took over the Suffragist too. Well, that's just telling about the beginning. I don't know whether there is anything else to tell.
Fry
That's just the beginning.
The macaroni and cheese is done. Do you want a break and eat now?
Paul
Oh. Yes.
[Recorder off.]
[Background music ceases in subsequent taping.]
Field Organization and Mabel Vernon
Paul[I've talked about] Lucy Burns, who came in our movement in England, really, and Mrs. Boeckel, so wonderful in the press,
Fry
Yes, we just finished Boeckel.
Paul
And Miss Gillette, this woman lawyer. So I thought I might tell sometime about how Mabel Vernon came in because I would like especially to put in the [two other] Swarthmore people, Mabel Vernon and Mrs. Walker.
Fry
Mabel Vernon came in in June of the year that we are now in, I believe, so maybe you could go into that.
Paul
The second year, 1914?
Fry
She came in 1913 didn't she?
Paul
No, I think 1914.
Fry
Well, we are now in 1913, according to my notes.
Paul
Did Mabel tell you she came in in 1913?
Fry
She told me you wrote to her, where she was teaching at Radnor, in the spring of 1913, asking her to join your efforts when the school year was out, in June.
Paul
Well, supposing I tell you right now about her, is that all right?
Fry
All right.
Paul
You see, when we began to think we would have to go out over the country and that we couldn't do this after we were severed from the National American and had no members and no branches of our own, we saw that we would have to form them to ever have any hope of influencing the congressmen. So we asked Mabel to become our first, what we called, organizer to go over the country. She was the first person we had outside of the few of us who were starting in Washington.
I went up to her school where she was teaching—she was teaching German I think, maybe she has told you this— in Pennsylvania and told her what our whole purpose was, to put this amendment into the Constitution.
So she said she believed thoroughly in every bit of it and that she would like to come down and help and would like to become a national organizer for that purpose. So she was our first national organizer. She accepted right away and she stayed of course till the campaign was over. And then when it was over she became the director of the whole campaign for the new [equal rights] amendment. Then, after a time, she stopped and formed her own People's Mandate, which was for peace.
And of course you know how absolutely invaluable, without words—we could never express what we owed to her. Every place she went in the states she made friends, and she could get up meetings with the greatest ease. She had this great, great gift of speaking so she could go in an unknown place and hold a meeting and just put the place on the map, as far as our campaign was concerned.
Financial Support for Workers
FryWhen she came, was she willing to live at her own expense at first?
Paul
No, she couldn't because she was earning her living as a school teacher, and we started by paying, I think, when we began to pay anybody we started with one salary for everybody that we paid, and that was $200 a month. And at that time people could live on $200 a month.
Fry
Oh, yes. What about yourself, did you—
Paul
And then after we got a headquarters, she—I don't know whether she stayed in the headquarters or not but she probably did because almost everybody who was campaigning stayed there—and then we never charged any of the people [for board and room] who were doing this campaigning.
And about myself: When I started in the beginning, the national [NAWSA] board, when they appointed Miss Burns and myself, said they would of course pay no
So that's the way we did. Both Miss Burns and I were the only two people in the beginning, you see, and we both had our families back of us. You see, we were still almost in the college age where your parents would be looking after you. I remember Miss Burns' father had been sending her the money to stay over at the University of Bonn in Germany, and then he just continued it. Every month he sent her a check down to continue the work here, because he was backing her up.
And then my mother just did the same with me. She gave us the money with which we started. If I went on trips and so on I turned in an expense account and was reimbursed; but otherwise in the beginning we practically paid all our own expenses, our families did, I mean. But don't put this in your story.
Fry
But this is something that's good to know, that you did go down on your own expense. I think it shows a dedication not only of just you, but of your parents, too.
Paul
Then later on, when Mrs. [0. H. P.] Belmont came into the movement and was so very wealthy, she announced to me that she was going to give me a salary of $1,000 a month. [This was during the Equal Rights campaign in the twenties, probably.] I told her that I didn't want to be in that position at all. I certainly didn't. So anyway she did, she gave the check. So then I turned the check over to the Woman's Party. I gave them for the one year $12,000 that she gave to me.
Fry
That was a lot of money because she came into the movement, when? About 1916?
Paul
She came in 1914. Our first year when we were put out by the old National American she joined—she left them and joined us.
Fry
So wasn't that a pretty big monthly salary in those days?
Paul
It was, but I mean she had enough money, and I was only
Fry
Well, that's important to know. Sometime somebody will be going through the party business records in the Library of Congress and they will come across an item of your big salary [laughter] and it's good to have an explanation.
Paul
At the same time they will come across my $12,000 donation in Equal Rights magazine. (I think it was after we started on the new Equal Rights campaign that she did this, because we made her president). She said, "Now I am president. I can't do the work, and you are doing the work and I think you should be vice-president and I should pay you what I would be spending on it." That's when she gave me this money which I just said I didn't in any way want to be in this position. So then I turned it in. It was reported in our weekly magazine, donation from me, $12,000.
Fry
I'm glad we got that explained.
Paul
You see, I feel I owe a great deal really to my family. I must say that. They did always stand back of me. My mother did, my father did, and it was the money that my father made and that my grandfather made, which I inherited, partly, which enabled me to do it. It is a great asset, you know, to have a little money of your own you can fall back on.
Fry
Or even like this when you want to get something started, you don't have to worry about how you are going to eat for those first months before you get the organization set up.
Paul
Yes, and you don't know [whether] an unpopular measure—and this was a very unpopular measure at the time—whether it will ever get much support. So it gave me—I feel I never could have done this, and Lucy Burns of course never could either, if we hadn't both had families that were willing to back us.
Fry
The question about that March 3 procession was whether the chief of police was removed or not, as is written up in these other books.
Paul
Well, I have told you all I know about that.
Fry
You told me that you doubted that he was removed. Then
Paul
We ought to get that report that was made—you say Mabel Vernon has a copy of it. See what their recommendation was after all this testimony was in. But that's my impression, strong impression. I know that I never opposed this man in any way because I knew better; I knew perfectly well that he was in a hopeless thing for him to try with his inadequate force. That would be perhaps lack of foresight on his part or maybe it would have been impossible for him to get the extra money [for additional men], and therefore we would have never gone in to get him removed.
Anyway, we never did go in to get anybody removed. For anything.
Presidential Delegations Begin
FryThat procession was March 3. Now on March 17 my notes say that you and three others went in to talk to President Wilson. He had called a special session of the sixty-third Congress for April 7. Do you remember anything about talking to him?
Paul
Yes, I led the delegation and I remember everything about it, I think. And one woman who went with us—does it give their names? Where did you get this from?
Fry
I think these notes came from Up the Hill, the second edition of Irwin's book.
Paul
I think if you look in this folder that you are in now for the 1914—I will tell you what I can remember and then you can look later—
Fry
It's right here. I think I've got it marked in the volume. [Names of other women are not given in Irwin's account.]
21. Irwin, Inez Haynes. Uphill with Banners Flying, Traversity Press, Penobscot, Maine, 1964 . This is a second edition of the 1922 book, History of the Woman's Party .
One woman who went with us was Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, who was the historian, you know, of the suffrage movement, if I remember rightly. And one was the wife of a congressman from Illinois, I don't remember who. She wasn't there long; her husband wasn't re-elected. And myself. I don't know who the fourth one was.
Fry
You see, this was before the Suffragist began coming out.
Paul
Oh, no, no. The Suffragist began November 15, 1913.
Fry
Yes, and you went in to see President Wilson on March 17, 1913.
[Discussion of date of first Suffragist .]
Paul
Yes, I remember it now because I know it was the end of our first year that we began the Suffragist ], and our first year was 1913. So maybe it wouldn't have given there the names of those people.
Fry
There's a report of the NAWSA congressional committee which was "Congressional Union" by the time the first issue came out—that summarizes what it had done through the year. But it does not mention who went on that delegation; it just mentions that that delegation occurred, and that's all. So we don't know who went with you.
Paul
I know two of the people who went. One was, as I say, Mrs. Harper, who was this link with the old National American Woman Suffrage Association, and one was this wife of a congressman from Illinois, whose name I could look up of course, but he wasn't re-elected and I don't remember who he was. And there was a fourth one I think.
Anyway, I introduced them and made the main presentation, and Wilson was as he always was, you know: he gave the impression of being very scholarly, very tolerant and very respectful and completely in accord with the idea that women should vote. He explained how, as governor of New Jersey, he had supported it, how they had had a referendum and he had voted for it in New Jersey himself. And as a states' righter from Virginia, believing in all the states' rights traditions, he felt that that was the way to proceed, and he did not feel inclined to press for action by Congress. So we gave our point of view to him and we didn't, I think, change him at all; but he couldn't have been more courteous
Fry
As a resident of his own state, could you talk to him at this point as someone who had supported him in his recent campaign.
Paul
No, I didn't support him. I didn't support anybody in that campaign. I didn't have anything to do with that campaign. Women were not voting. I [resided] then in New Jersey and women were not voting in New Jersey. I mean when I did get to vote, I voted in New Jersey, but at the time of this campaign, I couldn't vote. So I didn't support him, I didn't have anything to do with the campaign.
I just talked to him about the rightness of the cause, I suppose. I can only imagine that's what I would have talked about, and the importance of not wasting the lives of generations of women on these referendums—to the male voters of a state. It seemed so unfair and unjust to have to go forth and convert a majority of the male voters of a state to something, for the women who had the necessity of converting the majority of the men of a state.
Well, he said there are two ways to get this, one by a federal amendment and one by the states' amendment.
You know, I knew his daughter and I have a photograph of his daughter right here in this house, his daughter Jessie.
Fry
How did you come to know her?
Paul
I met her in one of the settlement houses in Pennsylvania, the Lighthouse Settlement. I used to go there a great deal because the head of it, Mrs. Bradford, was one of our members and she was the sister of Mrs. Lawrence, who was our national treasurer. So they gave a great deal of help. And Jessie Wilson was living for a time at that college settlement. I remember she was living there and I talked to her there when the New Jersey referendum was on, and she told me about the support from her father. She herself helped us when he became President down in Washington.
Fry
What did she do?
Paul
Well, for instance, we had a reception one night, just
I thought this first interview with Wilson was more or less the same as we had every time afterwards. One thing he was always saying, "You'll have to convert public opinion, get enough public opinion in the country back of this. At the present time there would be no use of trying to get Congress to do this," and so on. I had a great respect for Wilson, great respect for him. And he was a nice type of man to have as your adversary because you could be pretty certain of what he would do in a certain situation.
Fry
At least he was consistent and forthright, is that what you mean?
Paul
Well, I mean he had the kind of a mind that you could—you know some people you deal with you can't imagine why they do the things they do. But [with Wilson], I would feel [laughing] that we always knew beforehand. If we planned a campaign, we would be pretty sure to know what the reaction of Wilson would be to that kind of campaign. I think he was a very great man, a very, very great man. I was always so moved at the League of Nations when I would walk down the street and see this tiny little, maybe this long [measuring with her hands], inscription to Woodrow Wilson—in French it was—"To Woodrow Wilson, founder of the League of Nations." I thought he did a marvelous thing in that.
Fry
Well, the next thing in my notes was that there was another deputation to see him, that I think was led by Elsie Hill, just a couple of weeks later.
Paul
There was a long series of them. It went on and on and on through that whole year. Let's see that was 1913. They went on through 1913, [pause] and 1914 and 1915, and 1916 I guess we kept up these delegations. I'm not sure when we stopped. Finally the President—it is my recollection, vague recollection—he was getting mixed up with the international situation, and the war seemed to be in the offing, and he said he could not take the time to see [the women] anymore, that they all said the
Fry
Yes, that was right after he was re-elected. Well, we will get to that.
Paul
Let me see when that was. That was 1917. January 10, I think we started them.
Fry
[Laughing] That's just the date that I have, January 10, 1917, and then the war broke out in April.
Paul
And we picketed with no interference from anybody January, February, March and April. [The picketing] was led by Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, who had been on our own national board because after the victory of the New York campaign and referendum, her New York Women's Political Union (I think it was called, whatever it was in New York) voted to amalgamate with the Woman's Party. And when they voted to amalgamate with the Woman's Party, we asked Mrs. Blatch to go on our national board. She was one of the people, when we started on this picketing campaign, who was most ardent for us to do it.
Then to our great astonishment, we got a roundrobin led by and initiated apparently and mainly due to Mrs. Blatch, urging in the name of all American women and so on, that we stop our picketing because of the war. She had married a British man, Englishman, and she was very pro-English. They got an enormous roundrobin that they sent to us, and a great many people felt the same way and fell away from us, you know.
The old National American—you probably know all this—officers, the leading ones, took positions in the defense department of the government and moved down to Washington, not to work on the suffrage amendment, but to work in the defense movement, under whoever was Secretary of War. Dr. Shaw took such a position and I think practically everyone did.
Fry
Well, wasn't Harriot Stanton Blatch one of the leading officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association?
Paul
No, she wasn't in it at all.
Fry
She had never been in that?
Never. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been one of the founders of it, but [Harriot] founded one of her own and it was modeled very much after the British one. I think she called it the Women's Political Union.
And all their membership was handed over to us. They just formally amalgamated. It was a help to us, of course. The reason they did it I think was that so many of their board members [advocated it]. This Mrs. Rogers, who, I told you, took me to see Secretary Stimson, was on her board, and Mrs. Rogers had always stayed with us, although she was always on the board of Mrs. Blatch's, too. And there were a lot of their women the same way, their leading women, who were also supporters of us. So when they won the referendum, they said, "There's nothing more we can do up in New York; we'd better turn in and help the National."
The Changing Relations with the National American Woman Suffrage Association
The Congressional Union Evolves
FryDuring this period, in 1913, were you aware that the National American officers, like Dr. Shaw and so forth, did not want all this effort put out for a national amendment, that they wanted more state-by-state campaigns?
Paul
Well, I don't think that they did. I think that they were in back of us.
Fry
Well, they were back of you up to a point, and I was just trying to fix in time where that point was.
Paul
For instance, we had first of all, in [March, in] our first big procession, they headed it. Then our subsequent processions they—I don't know whether they came down physically or not—but I think that as far as I know we had their backing. Then that first year we had a meeting, I remember, in a theater in Washington, and Dr. Shaw came down and was the principal speaker at that meeting; it was in the summer.
Fry
Oh, in the summer? There was a—
Paul
The Columbia Theater, I think we had—
Fry
National Council of Women Voters on August 13 in the District of Columbia.
Paul
No, that was not it, that was totally different. That's something we formed on our own.
Fry
Well, they had a meeting in the Columbia Theater in December.
No, but that's their convention.
We got up that convention and we paid $1,000—I never shall forget—ourselves; we had to raise the money for the hall in which it was held. I [had been] invited out to Dr. Shaw's home in Pennsylvania when they were planning the convention, and I said that I thought it would be helpful to have the national convention in Washington because we wanted to direct as much attention as we could to the federal amendment. The convention could go to see the President and it would be helpful to us, I thought. And—they were always this way—they said if we would get up the convention and would pay all the bills for the convention, they would come to Washington. So Dr. Shaw was heartily in favor of what we were doing up to that point.
Fry
Why wouldn't they share some of the responsibility for financing it with you?
Paul
Well, it's common in most women's organizations that the local place that has the convention—I suppose all groups, the American Legion, everybody else, do it that way—that the local people entertain and they bear the expense. Since their local [in Washington] was such a tiny little group that couldn't do anything, I suppose that it was natural [that] they wanted us to do [it], which we did.
The first whisper of protest that I ever heard—there may have been whispers going on that I didn't hear about; I do think we made one mistake, which was that we didn't keep in constant—say almost every other day—connection, correspondence, by telephone or by letter or by going up personally—to make reports to the national leaders who were up there in the New York headquarters. I think if we had done so, we would have perhaps never had to have the two groups, because—[But] we were working so hard and had so little money and so little thought of anything but what to do the next morning, how we were to get through with the things we [laughing] had undertaken, that we just proceeded as though we were doing it—which we were—and that we would have the backing of everybody. But by the time of the convention, the national treasurer—her name was Mrs. Stanley McCormick—and Mrs. [Carrie Chapman] Catt made a protest at the convention against what we were doing, which is the first time that I realized it. Perhaps it was dumb not to realize it before, but I didn't.
That was the convention in Washington in December, 1913.
Paul
The one that we had gotten up. I remember our desire to save money, so we asked Mrs. Kent if she would entertain all the National board. She had a big house and was the wife of a congressman and was very, very, very, very wealthy. So she said she would.
Fry
Well, she had been a member for a long time, hadn't she, of NAWSA? She was on their congressional committee before you were.
Paul
Well, there was no division then. Anyway this convention was coming, and I asked her, since we had the responsibility of financing it, including the entertaining of all members of the National board, would she entertain them at her home? So that we wouldn't have to pay an immense hotel bill. She said she would, gladly. And then I remember they sent us word that they couldn't go to a private home, that they had to meet constantly, every moment almost, [and they could not be in any situation where their time might be required for social niceties].
Are you taking this down?
Fry
Yes
Paul
I figured it worked out all right, but we had to pay [even] another bill, you see. So I had been thinking we were on very good terms with the National; I didn't realize that any rifts had occurred.
But at the convention Mrs. Catt (who had made one big speech for us, as I told you, in the theater the night before our first procession in Washington), she got up on the floor, and of course she was a very influential person, a hundred times more influential than any of us were, and she—
I think I'd had to make the report [to the convention] for the congressional committee, and so I made the report saying we had this big procession and we had had so many smaller processions, and we'd had so many deputations to the President, and we raised so much money, which I think was $27,000 if I remember rightly, not very much but still a lot for us, and we had started a weekly
So Mrs. Catt said, "I want to inquire what has happened to the National American Woman Suffrage Association. It seems to me that there is something called the Congressional Union which is running the whole campaign on Congress," [tape volume decreases but words remain clear] and that we were—what did they say—that they were the dogs and we were the little tail that was being wagged, or something like that. [Slight laughter] I remember it very vividly.
Fry
The tail is wagging the dog?
Paul
Yes, the tail is wagging the dog. We were the tail and we were wagging the dog. Is that the way it goes? Well, anyway, that was the simile she used. [Laughter.]
And she said, "Here they are even getting out a paper ! Imagine such a thing!" And we thought oh we would get so much more support from our paper. We were very much astonished at this speech.
And then Mrs. Stanley McCormick, this very, very, very wealthy woman, I was told she was, from Boston, the treasurer, got up and said that not one penny of all this money, the $27,000 or whatever it was we raised, had come into her national treasury, and she thought that this was a situation that could not be tolerated that a committee—just a committee—should raise the money and keep the money.
So we saw something was not right. But I didn't suspect it before. And I don't think anybody else in our group suspected it.
Then Miss Jane Addams got up and she said, "I want to say that I do not agree with Mrs. Stanley McCormick" (you know these are not exactly their words of course, but this was their idea) "I don't agree with Mrs. Stanley McCormick at all. I made the resolution asking Miss Paul and Miss Burns to go down to Washington and start this work, and we made this condition, that they should raise all the money [standard volume returns on tape] in any way connected with the campaign and pay
And then Miss Gillette [got up], this lawyer whom we had gotten to help us in the very beginning, who became the treasurer of our first committee. It may be we raised $27,000 for that procession and more later. I remember $27,000 was raised for something.
Fry
There was a $27,000 total figure of funds raised up through November of that year that I saw in a treasurer's report. I think you had given that figure because you had eleven months of the year totalled for the published report in the Suffragist .
Paul
Whatever it was, it was the $27,000 that the treasurer was having all this dispute about. So whatever the sum was.
So then Miss Gillette got up and she said, "I was treasurer for the movement here in Washington from the beginning, from the first penny that was raised until this procession was finished, then another treasurer succeeded me. And I want to say from my experience that phenomenal frugality was displayed, it seemed to me, by the people who were running this campaign." She spoke in general approval, and she was an important woman, a very important woman because [she was] the dean of the only woman's law school in the country. So she spoke for us.
And then we saw there was a ripple of—some people weren't our friends, we could see that. So then when the convention was over they asked me, this board, if I would continue for another year, but sever my relations with the Congressional Union, which they thought was the one that was wagging the dog or wagging the tail or whatever the thing is. [Laughter.] The group that was wagging them anyway had gotten out the paper, the Congressional Union's paper, and by this time we were using the name Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.
I remember Miss Gillette coming to me and saying, really in terror, "I just can't stand for these bills that you are bringing in to me every single day. We never, never, never can pay them." And then in a little while she came and said,
"Well, I see. I don't understand how it is done, but you are getting in a sufficient amount of money always to cover your bills. And so I withdraw my objection. You evidently know what you are about." And so she supported us very loyally at the convention.
Well, when we discovered that if we wrote to somebody in a state, the state treasurer [for National American] would write back and say, "You have taken away one of my chief financial supporters and I have to do my best to win the referendum and I need every penny I can get," when we got protests from any place [where] we tried to get any money, we thought, "Well, we will form a little group who won't be involved in a state referendum campaign and who can do everything they can to help us by supplying members for our lobbying work, and for our deputations and for our fundraising and so on.
Well now the National American had a series of branches you could belong to. I remember that one of them [requirements] required you to have three hundred members before you could be a branch, in that category. and you [the branch] had to pay so much—whatever the sum was, I don't remember the sum—to the National every year. So we applied to be affiliated with them National American in this class, and we were accepted [as a branch]. This was when we first began, probably April or May of the first year, 1913.
Then it became a question of what we would—we thought maybe we would get three hundred people and ask them each one to give a part of whatever the sum was we had to give, we'll say $10 each or something like that. We called people on the phone and we got enough to satisfy this requirement and the money requirement and then applied to be an affiliated branch. At the very beginning, when we were first formed, this was.
So then we didn't know what to call ourselves, and I remember that Mrs. Dennett, who was national secretar, proposed this name—Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. I didn't think and I still don't think it was very much of a name, but still, since she had proposed it and was the national secretary, we thought it would be a good thing to take it, so we did. We called ourselves Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.
And I remember we discussed it so much. We said, "We don't know whether we have the right to say congressional union; we are not connected in any way with Congress." And I remember Mrs. Kent saying, "Oh, that will be all right, we have a congressional boot"—what do you say, the person who shines your boots?
Fry
Bootblack.
Paul
Bootblack is it? [Laughter.] "We have a congressional bootblack and we have a congressional this, that and the other. Why can't we have a congressional union for woman suffrage?"
So we said, "All right. If you think the congressmen won't object, we will call it that." So we did.
Well then it had raised—at least through the efforts of this group—we had raised the money we had gotten in; and we had gotten the people through the efforts of this group who had gone on all our delegations and all our processions and they were sort of our backbone. They were almost all D.C. [District of Columbia] people who had almost no connection with the old National American, never had had, so there was no defection from them. And they had no state referendum campaigns to be diverting them, so it seemed to be working all right. We didn't expand it or try to make it any bigger. We just tried to get the number we were required by their regulations to have, which was only, I think, about three hundred.
So then [when the convention was over, the board] said, "Now if you continue as chairman you have to have undivided loyalty and it must be to the National association and their national committee and not divide it with the Congressional Union."
We said, "Well, the Congressional Union's only purpose is to raise money and get members to finance the congressional committee's campaign." So we didn't
And they said, "All right, then we'd like you to go on the committee all the same, but we don't want you to be chairman."
So I said, "That's all right. I will certainly be glad to continue on the committee."
Then they said, "Now we will ask Lucy Burns [to be chairman]." Lucy Burns said about the same thing I said. I don't know whether they put her on the committee, but anyway they asked her to be chairman. She said no, she wouldn't be chairman.
So then we had a period with no chairman.
Then they announced one day that they had decided on Mrs. Medill McCormick, and she had agreed to be the chairman. We were very delighted because when we [had] started our first little effort, I remember, getting up the procession. She was one of the first people from over the country who without any solicitation sent us $100 to help with our first procession. And she had always helped, always . And at the time of this national convention in Washington—the delegation which we had organized and planned way back when I had gone up to see Dr. Shaw at her home in Pennsylvania—a delegation that had requested an interview with the President [in December of 1913]. Dr. Shaw of course led it as the president, and I stood right beside her, I presume at her request (I certainly wouldn't have done so otherwise) and listened to this wonderful speech she made to the President [Wilson]. Mrs. Medill McCormick was one of those who helped me to get up this delegation to the President. And we had gone to see various people—newspaper people, all kinds of people, when we were trying to get the appointment, which we hadn't gotten too easily.
[Discussion of which presidential delegation this was.]
Congress Faces Two Amendments: March 2, 1914
PaulSo we thought this was a very wise appointment, and we were very happy over it. Mrs. Medill McCormick immediately asked me to be a member of her committee—well, I had already been appointed by the National board—and I asked her to be a member of our Congressional Union committee and she accepted right away. So we said, now we will have complete harmony because I will be on their board and she will be on our board and there won't be any possibility of conflict. So it seemed to me very good.
By this time I decided I would take a little rest, [laughing] now that we had gotten the whole Congressional committee fixed up and the Congressional Union going forward, and although I had agreed and expected to go home at the end of the first year, I still didn't see exactly how I could go. So anyway I decided to go home, to my own home in Moorestown, New Jersey, and just rest for a time.
[Discussion of time frame of previous story.]
So then I went home and Lucy Burns took over the responsibility of the Washington work. And almost the first thing that happened was that I got a letter from her saying that the most unbelievable thing had occurred. That Mrs. Medill McCormick, without consultation with anybody as far as we knew, had introduced a new amendment to the Constitution. Senator Shafroth from Colorado was putting it in the Senate and Mitchell Palmer of Pennsylvania putting it in the House, both of whom were our very good supporters, exceptionally good supporters. And that this amendment was one that would divide the whole of Congress into two groups, those who supported the one and those that supported the other, because one was to give women the vote and the other was to give women the right to a referendum on the subject, to the male voters of the state on the collection of a sufficient number of signatures, which seemed to us almost unthinkable. Well, Mrs. Medill McCormick took the position when we got back and we [looked] into these things—you know she was the daughter of Mark Hanna. You know who he was?
Oh, he was the big power, in Cleveland, Ohio?
Paul
Yes. I don't know if it was Cleveland, but in Ohio. He was one of the political bosses of the Republican party, national. And it was a great political power. And she was surrounded—she had married Medill McCormick up in Chicago—she was really surrounded by her father's, among other people, co-workers and they had convinced her that, as you looked over the world there was almost no place where women could vote; there were a few western states in our union at that time, but there weren't very many you know: Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, a small group. And in Russia, Finland was a province of Russia and they could vote there, and—I'm not quite clear, I don't exactly remember at this moment what the situation was in New Zealand and Australia but I think it was in some provinces. But if you looked over the whole world, these were the only places women were voting, and they convinced her it was an impossible thing to take a great nation like the United States and go out of step with the rest of the world. She was thoroughly convinced of it. If by getting the referendum on [the ballot] in each state, maybe that state could be built up and it could be done, but the main thing to do was to get the possibility of these state referendums.
Well, we told her we didn't agree with that at all.
Fry
When had you come back to Washington?
Paul
I came back right away when I got the message of this terrible thing. [Laughter.]
By this time we had our paper [the Suffragist ], and I think you will find in it, these volumes that you have, the editorials that we began to put out, week after week. Our editorials on this Shafroth-Palmer [bill]. That was a big division.
Then the little woman's Congressional Union met together, the leaders anyway, to decide what to do. A great many of them said, "Well, we think we had better disband. You can't fight this great National American." (Well it wasn't a very big one, still it was so big compared to us.) And they said, "Just the few of us, we can't go forth and try to put the [suffrage] amendment through, if they [in National American] all want this, they voted this—
So we said, "Well, we will go up and talk to the
Fry
Was Lucy Burns one who said it was too much to fight?
Paul
Oh, no, no. She was always a very belligerent person. She was always quite ready for a fight.
So we went up to the National board, made an appointment to meet with them and I think all of our leading people on our committee [went up]. I know Mrs. William Kent went up; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis went. I went.
Fry
Was Maud Wood Park—
Paul
No, she wasn't in the picture then; I had never heard of her at that time.
Then their national board met—Miss Jane Addams came from Chicago, and Dr. Shaw and Mrs. Dennett and their national treasurer. And I remember the national treasurer sat there, this Mrs. Stanley McCormick, at the meeting, and she took her chair and placed it so her back was to the group and she sat there throughout, us seeing only her back, to show her complete severing of herself from everything that was going on. She wouldn't have even had a conversation with us, I guess.
Of course Miss Addams was always very pacific, and we were very pacific, and it seemed to us—I didn't see how anybody could, it seemed to me just betray this movement that had begun so many, many, many years before [with Susan B. Anthony].
The Amendment before Congress at this time that we were working for, you know that came up when we first began [work on] our first procession: what amendment we would work for. The whole National American didn't even have any idea what they wanted to work for. So I appointed a committee and asked them to draw up the right amendment for us to work for when we were having our first procession. We demanded "an amendment to the United States Constitution enfranchising women," but we didn't know what amendment or how to draw it up or anything about it.
Mary Beard took the chairmanship and she came in a few days—do you know who she was, Mary Beard?
Fry
[Laughing.] Oh yes, the historian.
Yes, and Charlie Beard's wife. And she was on our first board when we formed our Congressional Union. So Mrs. Beard came back and she said (she got people to be on the [amendment committee] board who were competent to judge this ) what we should —You see we didn't have any idea that there could be any dispute ; we just took for granted that what Miss Anthony had put in was the thing that they had always worked for and Mrs. Kent had worked for and we would just keep on. But when this question arose, what would we work for, we then appointed this committee to see what we'd better work for. So Mrs. Beard made the report from her committee that we ought to stick to this Susan B. Anthony original amendment.
So here we were. We were the only group sticking to the one that had been introduced year after year and we didn't see how we could make it better and we didn't want to start and work for just the right to have a referendum to the men of a state. No woman would be enfranchised by that .
So we came back defeated from the National board. They didn't seem to have any good reason, but they said they'd appointed this committee and their committee [chairman Mrs. Medill McCormick had vast political experience and great political wisdom at her command through her father's affiliations, and it seemed the wise thing to do and they stuck to it—although they hadn't been consulted by Mrs. McCormick and hadn't known she was going to do it. It was a strange attitude for them to take. And maybe, again, if we had kept in more daily contact with them we could have averted it. But, that's the way it was.
The Separation from NAWSA
PaulSo we very seriously considered whether we hadn't better just give it up and disband and go home, and let them go ahead and do the best they could. But we finally, all of us, agreed that—everyone of us came to the same conclusion—that we had better turn in and try to make another organization, because then we were only an affiliate ourselves you know of the old National American. And it would be pretty hard for the National American to be trying to put one measure through Congress and have one of their affiliates trying to put another through.
So we said the only thing to do is to make ourselves a completely separate organization. And I think they came to the same conclusion, because we got a letter from them asking that—or suggesting—that since we were paying a rather high amount of money to them we could change into a category where we would pay less . You probably know all this.
Fry
No.
Paul
So they said, "You just send in your resignation as a whatever affiliate [chapter] you are, and then send at the same time an application to be in another [type of] group, and we will just transfer you." So we sent in the resignation and the request for membership in another classification where the expense wouldn't be so great, and they accepted our resignation but they didn't accept our application for the new one. So we were out, you see. We were just put out by this device.
Fry
Had you already decided that you wanted to be completely separate?
Paul
No, we had really expected to continue. We wanted to have unity in the movement, but we had expected to go our way and continue to work for our old Amendment. We decided to do it, but it was rather a hard decision to make because we didn't have any money, and our individual people didn't have any money, and we were all exhausted [laughing] by one vigorous campaign. It had gone at a terrific pace.
So anyway we voted [to be separate]. All of our old congressional committee stood with us. Mrs. Kent went with us, and everybody who had been on the old committee, every single person, stayed with us. And so we then were the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage as a new independent organization, not affiliated with anybody. That was I think in the late spring of '14.
Then we had this constant conflict because we would use the "we demand an amendment to the United States Constitution enfranchising women," and they would say, "We demand the passage of the Shafroth-Palmer giving women the right to referendum " and so on, on this subject. It was the acme of the complicated for the congressmen and for the women of the country.
So then they held what they called the Mississippi Conference, which was I guess an annual conference that
Fry
And this was NAWSA?
Paul
Yes. Well, this Mississippi Conference was under the auspices of the states in the Mississippi region belonging to the old National, because nobody belonged to anything else. There wasn't any other thing to belong to.
I went out to the conference to try to get this conference to endorse the old Susan B. Anthony Amendment. And I remember on the way out, I went with Mrs. Glendower Evan who was a very, very, very prominent woman in Boston belonging to the old National American, and she was passionate for continuing the old Amendment campaign. So she wanted very much to go to Iowa, and I went with her or she went with me, however it may be.
Fry
What was her name, Alice?
Paul
Her name? G-l-e-n-d-o-w-e-r Evans. She lived in Boston. She was a prominent member of the old National American.
Well, we stopped in Hull House [in Chicago] on the way out because Mrs. Evans was a great personal friend of Miss Jane Addams. And she was passionate about demanding the old Susan B. Anthony Amendment. So we explained it to Miss Addams that night—which is what you have to do all the time, explaining to the people who are important; that's what takes so much time, but we did do it With Miss Addams to keep her informed. We were her guests that night, and she devoted all her time to looking into it. And I don't think she took any active part; she was on the National board and so she was sort of bound to what they were doing. But we had a feeling that she was very sympathetic with what we were doing. So then we went on to the Mississippi Conference.
We met in the rooms of the different people during the conference where all the delegations from one state would meet. And I would go up and talk to a delegation, and somebody would go up and talk on the other side about the two amendments. I was trying to influence people as much as we could to stick by the old Amendment.
Well, then when it came to the floor of the conference, somebody got up and said, "We would like Miss Paul to explain to us what this"—because I wasn't on the program—" what this whole mix-up's about," and so on. And up got one of the officers of the Mississippi Conference and said, "Well, Miss Paul has been very ill and we don't want to tax her by making her make a report," or something. So I sat and listened in great astonishment at this, but I didn't say anything.
Fry
Had you been ill at all?
Paul
This time that I went up to—I think when I went up to [New Jersey] to take a rest, I think I went to the hospital, and there was some kind of an intestinal trouble I had gotten by eating some kind of apples or something. So my mother arranged for me to go into the hospital and try to get this thing cleared up, which they did, whatever it was. I wasn't very seriously sick. And I believe I did that during the time I was going to take this rest. I had sort of forgotten anything [about it] when I heard I was very ill. [Laughter.] I didn't say anything and they went on with all their reasons for the Shafroth-Palmer. And they got up a woman from Minnesota named Mrs. Alden Potter. I had gone out to Minnesota and spoken before their branch. (We had started in to go over the country and speak before every branch in the country if we could, and I had spoken there before the Minnesota one.) Mrs. Potter invited me to be her guest at her home—she was a Christian Scientist, very devout one, and gave me a Christian Science—what's the thing called, Mrs. Eddy's book whatever it is— Science and Health . We became very good friends by staying there, and so she said she would leave the old National American, that she would never work for this new thing. And a large section of their Minnesota people joined us in our campaign for the old Amendment; I guess almost everybody did.
And Mrs. Potter got up and said, "Well, Miss Paul is sitting here and she doesn't seem to me too ill to explain things to us," or something [laughter]. I wasn't a member you see; I wasn't from the Mississippi region and I don't know that I was [invited]. I rather think that I just went. I can't remember that I had an invitation to go; I don't believe I would have had.
So I did try to explain it, and I think then Mrs. Potter said, "Well, the Minnesota people, their board
But anyway I was regarded as a sort of pariah, an outcast in every possible way, at this convention. So everybody went back to Chicago, in order to get back to their respective places, and everybody stayed at the same hotel there—I mean most of the people I think—just for convenience. Whatever the hotel was, it was recommended to us. I remember going down in the morning for breakfast, and here were all these people from all the different states in the union, and I remember not one human being spoke to me. I just felt such an outcast, and for a long time we were regarded in that way. [Pause.]
Howsoever, people like this Minnesota group and like Mrs. Donald Hooker—Katherine Hepburn you know, is her niece—Mrs. Hooker was the sister of Mrs. Hepburn up here in Connecticut and was a leader of the suffrage movement up here, and Mrs. Hooker was a leader of the suffrage movement in Maryland. They all belonged to the old National American. So Mrs. Hooker's group [formally withdrew], and of course that was because of this personal contact we had; we were so close in Washington that we went over to see Mrs. Hooker many times and she invited us often to spend the weekend or spend Sunday or something over there. So finally her whole branch formally withdrew from the old National American over the question of what we would fight for, and joined us. And then this New York one, as I told you, joined us, amalgamated with us when they gave up their own, just dissolved and recommended every member to transfer membership to us.
An Organization Emerges
PaulSo we gradually got support, sometimes whole states and sometimes parts of states. But from that year we spent—I spoke in a great many places over the country just to the local boards—we'd ask them if they would let me come and explain this. I remember going to Ohio, and that very foremost woman lawyer (Do you
Fry
She meant stick to the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment.
Paul
Yes. So as we went over the country, we got to know the women. In every place we got some friends I think. So gradually, to our amazement, while we hadn't expected to get another [organization]. We thought we'd be another group that would independently work for this Amendment. We hadn't started out to build an organization, because that is a hard thing to do. And when you get it, a hard thing to manage, and we really didn't want one. We wanted to get the existing National American to stop supporting the Shafroth-Palmer.
But oddly the only result was that our own organization suddenly began to be an organization. So that was, say, up to 1915. Then in 1915 Doris Stevens went across the country speaking in place after place, and Mabel Vernon had been going and I had been going, and we had gotten branches in one state. We had been down to Texas and got this Rena Maverick Green and got this Clara Snell Wolfe, who became one of the greatest supporters we ever, have ever had. She was the wife of a professor of economics in the [University] at Austin, Texas. And it is beyond words what she did. It is just impossible to estimate the value of her work. She was a very intellectual type. So then her husband (this is just a diversion) was transferred up to the University of Ohio, as professor of economics, head of the economics department. So she went up to the University of Ohio. In the meantime, she decided that she would teach herself. She had no children and she was extremely intellectual type of a person, so she had studied I have forgotten what, something, and took her doctor's degree in it and then got a position to teach in a college in
But these groups brought in, you see, people so that gradually when the local wouldn't support the equal suffrage amendment, then we got a group of our own, until we formed branches in almost all the states.
Fry
Some of your organization started in 1913 because it is mentioned here [the Suffragist ] that you had had mailings to suffragists all over the United States about the suffrage amendment that you were going to submit, and they responded. By the time Congress opened, which was in April of 1913, you had one woman from every congressional district in the United States on hand to give a petition to her congressman.
Paul
Yes we did, I know.
Fry
Goodness, how did you do all that?
Paul
That's what I said, we were so exhausted [laughter].
Well, now you had better ask me some questions.
Fry
Let me go over this covering the years that you have just talked about and see if I have any mopping up questions.
Paul
Is this light good enough for you?
Fry
Yes, it's fine.
Now, your amendment was introduced the opening day of Congress, April, 1913, by Representative Mondell, who was a Republican of Wyoming in the House, and Senator George E. Chamberlain of Oregon in the Senate. I think he was a Democrat.
Paul
Well, that was one year.
That was that year, 1913. So that the fight between the two amendments became known as the fight between the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment and the Mondell amendment.
Paul
We always called it the Bristow -Mondell amendment. I don't remember Chamberlain.
Fry
Yes, I wonder. Of Oregon.
Paul
Bristow was from Kansas, I think.
Fry
Well, his must have been the name finally assigned it, as the prominent one.
Paul
Maybe it was afterwards. It was usually known through the years, you will find it in almost everything, as the Bristow-Mondell amendment.
You see, the confusion was so immense, confusion among the women and the confusion in Congress as to why these two [suffrage] groups coming up with two bills. (Of course it didn't last very long because, as I said, as soon as the war came on these other people [NAWSA] all deserted and went into the war effort and we had the field all to ourselves. That was '17 and '18 and maybe part of '19 that they weren't there—till the war came to an end—they weren't there.) But when this confusion was so terrific, we decided we'd have to change the name of the Bristow-Mondell and call it something that would have some propaganda value, and that's when we decided to call it the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, because she had been one of the most prominent women in having it drafted and introduced.
And then to do that, we got up a pageant in Washington which Hazel McKaye came down and did for us. I remember going up to see her in Shirley, Massachusetts, the coldest little place that you ever saw, where she was living with her mother. I asked her if she would come down and put on a pageant to make people know who Susan B. Anthony was so we could call this the Susan B. Anthony Amendment and people would know something about it.
So she did come down and we had in a very big hall in Washington a very beautiful pageant that she put on honoring Susan B. Anthony. And from that time on we did it again and again, and again, and again. And we got a Susan B. Anthony stamp, you know, and we did everything to make people know who Susan B. Anthony was.
Oh, I didn't know you got a Susan B. Anthony stamp.
Paul
So then we called it the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, as against the Shafroth-Palmer. And it was just a device to simplify this campaign and make it easier for congressmen and easier for the women to know what they were backing.
Other 1913 Activities
FryYou had problems getting it out of the House committee, in that Congress.
Paul
Well, we always had—we never in the beginning had any strength in Congress.
Fry
But you did get it reported out in the Senate. That was the first favorable report in twenty-one years, I think. It came out in June, and in June and July, CU— the Congressional Union—had petitions circulated in every state. Then on July 31, when they arrived at the Capitol, you had another great big demonstration, with a motorcade—
Paul
What year are you talking about now?
Fry
1913 still. There was a big motorcade to the Capitol that started at Hyattsville and came down to the Capitol with all of these petitions for the Amendment.
Paul
That's our first year, you mean?
Fry
Yes, this is 1913, your first full year. With a big demonstration of delegates. And you met with the members of the Senate committee, who made some speeches.
Paul
Where was this?
Fry
In Hyattsville, on the "village green."
Paul
Well, that wasn't anything very much.
Fry
But they had a big motorcade down to the Capitol.
Paul
Yes. That was gotten up; we created something, at least tried to—
It looks very big in the Suffragist .
Paul
Anyway, the thing wasn't one of ours, you know. In an effort to try to get women from the suffrage states, which we were then beginning, there was a Dr. Cora Smith King who had been a prominent member in winning the suffrage in the state of Washington. She had transferred her practice to Washington, D.C. from Washington state, and she was an officer of the Washington state branch of, I suppose, the National American. Anyway, whatever group [it was]. She organized as well as she could, getting some women from every suffrage state to come or send a representative for a delegation they were going to take down to the Congress. Well, that was this one that she organized. She lived in Hyattsville and she organized it out there and she brought it in. It was very effective because these congressmen that they were going to see were their own congressmen and they were, themselves, voters.
Fry
I was amazed that you could get everything organized all over the United State. How did you locate all these women?
Paul
Well, we turned it over to Dr. King; she said she would do it. She got in touch with women in their own state and they authorized her to represent them, and she got in touch with women in other states where women had the vote.
Fry
One thing that interested me was that Mary Ware Dennett accepted the key to the town of Hyattsville from the mayor, so she must have been in on this. Isn't she on the board of the National American?
Paul
Yes. In the beginning we worked, you see, much more closely together than we did later on. This was the first year before the separation had become quite so definite. You see there were only a few people, like Mrs. Catt, who seemed to have her heart very much in any animosity.
Fry
Then the next month, August 13 (that was just two weeks later) was this National Council of Women Voters, which was made up of women voters from the suffrage states.
That's what I am telling you about.
Fry
That's what you organized?
Paul
No, I wouldn't say we. We arranged through Mrs. King to get it organized—Dr. King.
Fry
Well, it seemed to have a president—Emma Smith Devoe.
Paul
That's right.
Fry
Jane Addams became the national vice-president?
Paul
Because they just got the presidential vote out in Illinois.
Fry
They had a mass meeting in the Belasco Theater. It was "hot and crowded." [Laughing.]
Paul
Well, we really got up all these things and did all this organization work. But we were helped by the fact that we would send out the letters in Dr. King's name and Mrs. Devoe's—Mrs. Devoe Smith I think her name was.
Fry
Then I have another note here that in November, on November 17, a delegation of seventy-three New Jersey women came in to see the President.
Paul
Yes, that was Mrs. [Pikehurt? (inaudible)]. That's one of the things that Mr. Gallagher asked me about. I wonder where they get all that?
Fry
I think it's written up in one of the early books,
22. Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying, pp. 41-42 .
Paul
I didn't go but they did. But they came down—we had asked them to come down [to Washington] because they were from the President's state. You know we kept these deputations [to President Wilson] with anybody we could think of that might be a new group. We thought well, his own state women might be good, so we asked Mrs. [Pikehurt?]. She was a member of the old National American; this was the first year when everybody was a member of the old
By the time we got through all these deputations he certainly knew that there was a widespread interest in the country. What he had asked us to do—to concert public opinion—we were trying to do . That was our point.
Fry
Another question I have is, would you want to tell anything about the problems of getting a suffrage committee in the House? The Senate had formed a suffrage committee; but the House continued to operate without one, and they made you work through the sub-committee of the Judiciary Committee.
Paul
There isn't much to say. I think that we thought it might be a good thing to have a special committee, but it of course didn't make much difference, just so we got it done. As far as I remember, we never did get a suffrage committee in the House, did we?
Fry
Well, you may have, along about 1917 or so.
Paul
I don't remember whether we ever did or not.
Fry
Seems like I remember that from my reading.
23. The House created a Suffrage Committee September 24, 1917.
Paul
You do a lot of things just in order to keep the subject going, and of course I never thought it made much difference which particular committee through all the years. But if you could make an agitation about a committee, you sometimes get to know friends and get new friends and so on. While we might not have been so anxious to get a report and have suffrage put in the Constitution, they might think, well, why shouldn't they have a committee? So we had all these little
The Suffrage School
FryAnother thing that you did later on is that you had a suffrage school; I thought that looked pretty impressive.
Paul
Yes, I remember all about it.
Fry
It's on page forty-two of December 20, 1913 Suffragist and there's a class in parliamentary law, by Mrs. Nanette Paul, L.L.D.
Paul
Yes, I remember it all very well.
Fry
Elsie Hill.
Paul
These were all devices to keep the subject before the women of the country and to get them more informed, you know.
Fry
This went on for several days.
Paul
I know it did.
Fry
It looks like an awfully good training curriculum for anybody working in political organization work. You even have parliamentary law and a class in vocal culture and public speaking and one in press work.
Paul
We didn't devote—I don't know that we ever had another session of it; we may have had. But we only did this, again, in the way of keeping this before the women because I know perfectly well you can't stop and devote yourself to the physical culture of your speakers, studying parliamentary law and so on. You just have to spend most of your time in the actual work before you. Of course each one of these schools cost us a lot of time to make it a real success. It was a good success. It was very, very successful.
Fry
Well, you must have gotten new workers out of it.
Paul
Maybe one or two. Not much.
Fry
Did you have very many of the schools?
I don't remember how big a school—it wasn't supposed to be a big school. At that minute they were having these suffrage schools all over the country. We weren't, but people were.
1914—The Formative Year
Nationwide Demonstration May 2
FryNow in 1914 the Suffragist in the April 11 issue talks about the nationwide demonstration to demand Passage by Congress of the Bristow-Mondell suffrage bill. So if you can remember anything about the planning on that and how it was pulled off, it would be interesting.
Paul
Which one was that?
Fry
This was in April of 1914, and you wanted a demonstration in every state on May 2. Did you get one?
Paul
Oh, we certainly did. Crystal Eastman, who had come on our national board, went all over the United States (not all, but a considerable section) getting people to hold processions and meetings, whatever they could, for the original Susan B. Anthony Amendment, and then to send people to Washington on May 2 to have a big demonstration there, which they did. The second one was very big and you will surely come across it here.
Fry
[Checking Suffragist .] Yes, there are quite a few pictures in the May 9, 1914 issue.
Paul
May 2 have you gotten to?
Fry
Yes, here's May 2.
"From Ocean to Ocean Suffragists Celebrate Great Day. Women from every congressional district to carry resolution to Washington on May 9. Plans for procession to the Capitol."Suffragist, May 2
Paul
Yes, that's right. That's when we had one woman, I think, from every district. That's when the police—I told you the other night—when the police had more policemen out, the paper said, than we had marchers,
Fry
It says here you sold your Suffragist in cities all over the country; sales were most gratifying. Here's a song, “March of the Women, ” that someone wrote—Ethel Smith.
Paul
You know what that is, don't you?
Fry
I've heard it.
Paul
Do you know what it is?
Fry
No.
Paul
Well, when the women were imprisoned in England, Dame Ethel Smith, who was given her title of Dame because of her reputation in the field of music, wrote this “March of the Women,” wrote the music for “March of the Women,” and wrote the words for the “March of the Women.” And from that time on it was sung in every—it was sung, I think, when I was back in England, in the suffrage days over there. It was sung always in prison by all of the suffragists and everywhere at every meeting and so on.
So then I knew about it, having been over there, so we brought it over here and had it sung at our meetings. And we still do. And the words are wonderful, you know. "Life, strife, these two are one." The words are superb in that. I think. And the music is stirring.
Fry
Yes, it is. I think Consuelo Reyes [companion of Mabel Vernon] has recorded that.
Paul
Yes, she's used it.
Fry
Here's a picture on the front of your May 16 issue of the front of the Congressional Union procession to the Capitol on May 9. So May was certainly your month. Here's this enormous, enormous crowd in front of the Capitol.
Paul
You see why we were so exhausted. You see why I have a "block" on my heart, the doctor says. [Laughter.]
Policy of Holding Party in Power Responsible
FryI can see why your heart is tired.
But 1914 seems to me to be an important year because that was when you really started working holding the party in power responsible and you began to influence the elections.
Paul
Well, it is the first election campaign that occurred after we [the Congressional Union] were created. We couldn't do it before.
Fry
Did you have any opposition to that idea?
Paul
Yes, tremendous. We had opposition to everything we did. Everything.
Fry
I meant within your own councils, when you were planning it.
Paul
No, our own people, we were the same type of people; we got on all right. We didn't ever have any opposition or anything. We adopted this program at this meeting up at Mrs. Belmont's, you know.
Fry
Oh, yes, at Marble House in Newport?
Paul
Yes. We called this meeting—it was a meeting of our, I think, of our executive board and our national advisory council, I think. And we laid before the women—I presided at the meeting—and gave the outline of what we wanted to do, and Lucy Burns, who had been doing most of the congressional work, made the splendid speech showing how the Democrats had caucused against us as a whole body, and we couldn't start and support individual Democratic candidates even though they were for us, when they belonged to a caucus that had taken the action against us, and so on. So this vote went unanimously through.
We had a great many people there who were from the old National American. For instance, Mrs. Hepburn,
24. The actress Katherine Hepburn's mother and aunt were both active in the suffrage movement.
Fry
National American had promised cooperation in this nationwide demonstration in May, 1914. Did they cooperate?
Paul
Well, I remember when we had this they had some kind of a float (maybe it shows in one of the pictures, I don't know) showing their support of the Shafroth-Palmer.
Fry
Oh. [Laughing.]
Paul
Putting it in ou r demonstration.
Fry
That wasn't quite what you had in mind, was it?
Paul
Well, most of the people that looked on had no idea what was the "Shafroth-Palmer." [Laughter.] It didn't make much difference. We didn't worry about it. It got us some more people.
Fry
At this Newport meeting at Mrs. Belmont's Marble House, my notes mention also that there was $7,000 raised.
Paul
Mrs. Belmont gave $5,000. After we had announced our program and so on, she got up and offered $5,000, which she paid.
Fry
May I ask you one more question that isn't quite clear to me?
Paul
Have you gone all through these records in the Suffragist for the things you are asking me about, have you gone through?
Fry
I have read the Suffragist .
Paul
The questions you are asking me, is that the period you have covered [in your research, so far]?
Yes. And there's one other thing that I want to ask you. The Suffragist said that on this May 9 mass meeting an so forth in Washington, 531 delegates from various states presented resolutions to the committee of senators and congressmen,
Is that the right impression, that the petitions were presented to the senators and congressmen and then immediately introduced as bills into each House? Or was it?"which then were introduced on the floor of each house." This was the first time that suffrage had been up for debate on the floor of the House, although "Congressman Henry would not let the Rules Committee meet on it at first."Suffragist
Paul
Well, I think the petitions were presented in support. Usually you get your resolution introduced at the beginning of each Congress, and I imagine we did.
Fry
The purpose of this May march—
Paul
—was to back it up.
Fry
Was to back it up and make a demonstration in support of the bill?
Paul
That's right. All of our demonstrations were for that purpose. The only thing we changed in that was that finally we gave up Bristow-Mondell's name and put in Susan B. Anthony. In our demonstrations.
Fry
I wanted to ask you about the formation of an advisory council.
Paul
What year was that?
Fry
This was 1914. Harriot Stanton Blatch joined it in September; you had a lot of famous women on it from all over the nation. So I wonder if this was an effort on your part to get a wider base of support.
Paul
Yes. Of course. Mrs. Blatch may have founded it, but the principal person—
Fry
No, I didn't say that she founded it. I just know that she joined it in September.
Paul
Oh, she joined it. Well, the person who was the chairman, [pause] and I thought she was always the chairman, (maybe she wasn't in the beginning) was a Mrs. Elizabeth Rogers, the one I told you went with me to Secretary Stimson. She worked always as the chairman
Fry
In getting an advisory council like that together it takes a great amount of contacting women, and I noticed they were from all different walks of life. Could you give us any idea of how on earth you would go about something like that?
Paul
Well we got a chairman, the one that we wanted to be a chairman (and I think it was Mrs. Rogers; I don't remember any other chairman). Then she of course would write to people she knew. She was very well known; her family, Secretary of War Stimson, was very well known. She had many connections. She got it together herself. And if anybody heard of somebody she thought would be nice to get as a member but would not be likely to do much work—say some writer, some woman physician, or something, somebody who was well known but she didn't believe she would do very much work, then we would ask her to go on the advisory council.
Fry
So how did you use this council then, just as names for—
Paul
No. I just recall—I am almost sure they were at this meeting at Newport, and I think they were at every meeting we ever had.
Fry
So that they really did participate and gave ideas.
Paul
Yes. And they were willing to do that, you see, to come to a meeting where a decision was to be made. It was a very useful organization.
Fry
Well, the other thing that I would just like to hear you talk about is how you handled the Democratic women in trying to get them to campaign against their Democratic candidates, in holding the party in power responsible.
Paul
You mean in the suffrage states?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Well, we just used the same argument that we did with all women: that women who had the vote now had the obligation we thought—anyway they had the opportunity—more than anybody else, to enfranchise the rest of the women in the country. And we would appeal to them to use their votes in a way that would help, and we'd point
You see, in each one of these election campaigns, we got women to go into every state, who believed this and who could get up and say it, and that way, I guess, we turned a great many votes. We didn't have to turn enough [votes] to defeat a man; if he just felt there was an unrest among his women on the subject, then it would be probable that when he came back he would use his influence in his party to stop this opposition, which was the case—that did happen.
Fry
Did you run into the stickly problem of having to campaign against Democrats who had worked hard for the Amendment?
Paul
Well, I don't know anybody who ever worked hard .
Fry
Or who had supported you in Congress?
Paul
But of course we did in the suffrage states because everybody was supporting us in Congress from the suffrage states.
Fry
Did you lose any friends in Congress?
Paul
I don't think we did. It made people [candidates] very angry, but I think they—of course they were angry when we diminished their support in their own states. But still they would probably always keep on being for the Amendment because the women were voting and very few men wanted to go against the votes for women in a state where women were voting. Of course in the Senate, Senator Borah [of Idaho] did vote against us. I think he was the only senator from a suffrage state that did.
Fry
Why did he? Do you know?
Paul
I don't know why he did. What he said publicly was that he was for it, and he thought people should get it the same way Idaho did, by their state referendum.
Fry
Oh, the same states' rights thing.
Paul
What he said was a defense. As to why he really was against it, I don't know. We had an organizer, Margaret Widemore [?] who went up to the state of Idaho, and I
He came to see me personally in our headquarters in Washington and said the same thing, that he was supporting us, and he wanted us to know and to not continue any opposition, which we were having in the beginning, against him. He came into our office [in 1918] and sat down, in a long talk, telling me this. And he told the senators this.
And when this measure came up for a vote in the Senate, when we were almost at the point we thought of winning (and that must have been 1918 I guess; I think it was in the winter), Maud Younger and I sat up—she was our congressional chairman you know and a wonderful chairman—we sat up together in the gallery. We thought the vote was going to be taken in the Senate. We thought we had the votes exactly, but not one over. And she knew every man so intimately, she made that her business, just to know them thoroughly and personally and socially and their wives and everything. And so, on the strength of her report and our own general information, we thought we could risk the vote. And from all over the country women came, packed and jammed with people from great distances who came for this first vote in the Senate on the equal suffrage amendment. Maybe there had been earlier ones where it wasn't really going to be passed, but this was the first one when it looked as though it would go through.
So finally when all these speeches went on and on and on and on and on, and no vote was being taken, Maud Younger went down to see what the cause of it was. And we went up to Senator Curtis, who was the Republican Whip from Kansas, (later the Vice-President under Hoover) and Senator Gallinger from New Hampshire who was a Republican leader of the Senate (this was when the Republicans were in control). We went up to them and there they were, each one standing side-by-side with a tally sheet in their hands, and we said, "Why in the world don't you vote? All these women are assembled to hear the vote and it's going on and on."
And they said, "Well, Borah has left us."
We said, "We think we have the votes." And they said, "We think you have the votes too. We thought you had the votes and we knew you had the votes. And we were planning to take the vote. But when Borah told us that he had decided to vote against it, we knew we couldn't carry it because we would be one vote short. And so," he said, "we have instructed all our leaders on the floor of the Senate to just keep on talking, get as much enthusiasm for it as they can, and then the time will be up and they will move to adjourn, because we don't want to be voted down, which would be very harmful to you and to the Republican party. We don't want that to happen." So we agreed with them that was the best thing to do and the only thing to do.
So nobody really knows what happened to Borah because we had had his pledge when he came to this office personally—he took the trouble to come to an unimportant group and sit down and tell their chairman that he was going to vote for this measure, and please not to make any more trouble in his state. And he went down and signed it, and this Miss Widemore, I am sure, was correct when she said she read it and saw his name signed to things he would support. And then he told his own Republican Whip and his own Republican leader, Gallinger, because they said he told them he would vote for it. And he didn't. So that postponed our Senate victory for maybe half a year.
I guess you haven't come to that yet in the Suffragist .
Fry
Not yet.
After you had campaigned against the Democrats in 1914, the Amendment, which had been bottled up in Congressman Henry's Rules Committee all that year, was suddenly voted out, without recommendation, to the House; he let it come to a vote in the committee.
Paul
Well, of course the purpose was to start to speed it up.
Fry
Do you see that as a direct result of your work?
Paul
Well, we knew it was, of course. Because if you get on the Rules Committee, there were a good many men—Republicans and Democrats—and if they see signs of their women wanting something and expressing it in their votes, you see some of the senators and congressmen did have
Fry
In the hearing?
Paul
On the result of the election, Mr. Taggart made these furious statements against us and oh, violent statements against us, that we had gone in and poisoned the minds of the women in his state and so on and so on. (He was from Kansas.) But then as far as I know—
Fry
He raked you over the coals pretty hard in a hearing; I don't know whether you remember it or not. And the transcript of the hearing was reprinted in the Suffragist . It was after the 1914 elections.
25. Partial transcript is also in Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying, pp. 119-124 . The hearing was in December, 1915.
Paul
Yes, because we felt—
Fry
He was really upset about it.
Paul
—it was good evidence (we put it in to encourage the women) it was good evidence to show that when they defected on this subject, it was making a congressman give real serious attention to the subject.
[Discussion of date of hearing.]
Paul
We kept up the policy till the end, you see. And I am sure it was a very effective policy because it was an appeal to the solidarity of women, through all the highest motives they could have in voting, and it lifted the whole thing up to where they were standing for a great principle; we thought anyway, and they thought so too, evidently, so that they would put this principle above their party and everything else.
Opposition
PaulIt was inevitable that it would have an effect on the congressmen. We didn't care very much whether we defeated them or didn't defeat them. We knew anyway, whichever we did, they would still probably vote as the women of the state wanted, which would be for it. I don't remember any man from the suffrage states who voted against it excepting Borah. And he made it clear that he wasn't voting against us, he was only voting for state referendum [slight laughter], to get it the same way Idaho had gotten it. But I think he must have had some other motive.
Fry
There must be a story there that we don't know.
I thought that I detected, as I read through The Suffragist, every time a southern chapter was formed or something good would happen in the southern states, a little note of "Look, the South is coming around," if I read between the lines correctly. I wanted to check with you on this. Was the South a bit more difficult than other areas to get woman suffrage established, because of the race question?
Paul
Well, I don't think the race question would have come into it. Maybe the general conservatism of the South.
Fry
Well, there was an editorial in the Suffragist about how national suffrage would not affect white supremacy in the political world in the South, and I thought maybe that editorial wouldn't have been necessary if this hadn't been a problem.
Paul
Maybe, but it wasn't anything that was very serious. We just knew we had to go everywhere, and if we went to one state there would be some difficulties, and in another state another difficulty.
Now, I went down myself and formed a branch in Florida. We got one of the best members we ever had in the whole Woman's Party history, and that was Helen West, who later became the editor of our Equal Rights magazine. (We got an Equal Rights magazine after the Suffragist .) And at that same meeting we got somebody [from Florida] to come up [to Washington]; she was the oldest picket, and she was arrested and imprisoned.
Fry
Oh, yes.
Paul
And I remember when I went myself to Texas and formed that branch, and we got one of the strongest branches in the country through this Mrs. Clara Snell Wolfe, and she brought all these Maverick people in, Lola Maverick Lloyd and all these people whose children are still helping us. And South Carolina, we—by correspondence, not even going there—we got Anita Pollitzer, who just became the backbone almost of our movement. She came, you know, from Charleston.
“Anita Pollitzer, Suffragist, Dies, ” ( New York Times, 5 July 1975)
Fry
Well, it seemed that there might be too—
Paul
And from Tennessee, for instance, (excuse me one word, one minute) we got Sue White. One of our members went, I think Maud Younger went down there and had a meeting and got Sue White to come up and stay at the headquarters and give up all her work. She had been a court stenographer and she came up and she just devoted herself to the campaign. She was one of those who burned the President's words in front of the White House, which was one of the hardest things anybody could have done. And she was from Tennessee, another southern state, you see. So I could go through all those southern states and tell of the very strong supporters we had.
Fry
Well, I thought that there might have been two other issues that kept impinging on the suffrage issue. One of them was the southern issues of states' rights and race relations, and the other one was the prohibition issue—liquor.
Paul
Well, the liquor interests were always considered, and many people still believe it is the main source of opposition. I don't know very much about the liquor interests, but they always had a formal representative, publicly representing them, speaking against the Amendment in every hearing as far as I can recall. And of course many people thought it was a very powerful opposition. I don't know that it was so much. They thought women
And then this other one, about states' rights, there was no question that the states' rights movement—of course it was embodied in the old National American woman suffrage position. The women themselves were divided. I told you about how Mrs. Helen Gardner withdrew publicly from us and personally from us on the grounds that she discovered that we were really in earnest about putting the Amendment in the Constitution. And didn't appear again until the vote was won, when she appeared at the meeting giving them the pens I believe, for the proclamation. I told you all that.
There is no question about that opposition; it was the voice of the President himself.
Fry
What do you mean, "giving them the pens"?
Paul
I told you how President Wilson assembled a group of people the night before the proclamation was issued and you know, they always sign it and then they give the pens, one pen to one person, one to another, then everybody goes away with a pen signed to some important document. So the people he assembled there were states' rights women who had opposed us. I don't know whether all of them were states' rights people, but probably they all were. Those I knew about were.
And the other thing you said about the racial [issue]—. I want to tell you there was formed, and you probably know this, sometime while we were having the suffrage campaign I guess, a—let's see—National Association of Colored Women was its name (I guess you know all this) by Mary Church Terrell, who was the first Negro woman ever to graduate from a college, and she graduated from Oberlin. She married a judge in Washington, appointed by one of the presidents, a Negro judge. She got together a group of women that is still the largest and most important group of colored women in the country, called the National Association of Colored Women. Well, they supported us always.
In our first procession we had a group from Howard University which Elsie Hill organized. She went over there and spoke to them and got these colored women to come. At that first—I guess I've told you this—it was the only thing that brought dissension in our first procession. Have I told you about it?
No.
Paul
Well, she went there and organized these women and got them to come and—not this National Association of Colored Women, but just the women in Howard. She was having this [parade] section herself of college women, so she did that in connection with this, invited the college women in Howard to come, all of whom were Negroes.
So they accepted and became one of the groups getting this up, and when this became public I began to receive letters from many, many, many, many splendid supporters we had, saying, "This is unheard of. We are certainly not going to come up and march in a procession where you have colored women marching." It reached the newspapers and they played it up to the utmost, to get dissension sowed in our ranks. It was quite a problem. It was extremely difficult because we had so many women saying, "There will be nobody from our town, there will be nobody from our state to do this," then lots coming forth in the newspapers inflaming everybody about the subject. [Laughs.] It was a very difficult situation.
And so I remember how we finally solved it. We had—as I recall rightly, and I would have to check this—I think we had a men's section in this first procession, and I think these men were gathered together by a Quaker man whom I knew, whom I think was a distant relative of mine, named Mr.—I won't put his name, because I might be mistaken. This man said, "Well now, our group could be placed right next to the colored women because we have no objection whatsoever. We don't think anything at all about this fuss over this colored women's delegation."
So it is my dim recollection—if only Elsie Hill were living I could ask her all these thing that I don't remember. I think in her college section—which is my section as I told you, walking—that we had this colored group, and it is possible that they had a whole separate section of colored women. But I think they were in the college section. I'm not sure about that, but there was a colored section anyway, a section of colored women. And so we put this men's group next to them, and the men's group were perfectly polite. Finally everybody calmed down and accepted it, so it was this men's group that really saved the day for us.
And I want to tell you, this National Association
Fry
I saw your problem not as being one of lack of support by the blacks but as one of—
Paul
Oh, it wasn't that. It was lack of support by the white women.
Fry
Yes, because they didn't want any more blacks voting in the South.
Paul
No, it wasn't ever that. I never heard of that before. First time I have ever heard anybody say that . There were not so many black people voting anyway because they had this grandfather's clause and various things, you know. They didn't worry about that at all. What they were worried about was being personally associated in any way with these colored women. On that ground they left us— they never finally left but they threatened to leave.
Fry
You mean in the organization?
Paul
Well, it came up about our first procession—they weren't parts of our organization.
Fry
But after that—
Paul
The white women were parts of our organization but the colored women who were coming in were not a part.
Fry
Judging from the Suffragist, apparently your workers in the South were finding that the opposition there was saying that if the woman suffrage amendment passed, it might increase the number of Negro voters in the South. The editorial that I read in the The Suffragist, which is in the November 14, 1914 issue, page three, pointed out that the white women voters in Dixie will outnumber Negro women two-to-one; and besides that, the property and literacy tests rule out Negro voters anyway, usually; and in states where there are more Negroes than whites,
Therefore the Amendment would not alter the proportions of the black-white vote."white supremacy could be continued to be maintained by the same means as now prevails in these states."Suffragist, November 14, 1914, p. 3
I think I probably wrote that editorial because I wrote almost all the editorials in the first few years of our magazine.
Fry
And it has a little chart to illustrate these points.
Paul
But I don't think I ever personally thought that this was a serious matter. Somebody was always thinking up some dread thing you had to answer.
Fry
I have some notes here on the opposition and I thought maybe you could fill out the picture. There was an opposition paper called the “Woman Patriot, ” which was financed by a rich man named Wadsworth, and somewhere I picked up a note that this was a part of the Alice Longworth crowd.
Paul
[James Wolcott] Wadsworth [Jr.], you know, was the state senator [assemblyman] from New York, and then later defeated the congressman from New York [and became U.S. Senator], one of the most powerful men in Congress. And his wife, Mrs. James Wadsworth was the president of the association against votes for women. They appeared at every hearing, they were powerful women, wealthy women, and a powerful organization, and all over the country they had these branches. You know it was a very big force we were up against. And this was the leading, the crystallization, of the opposition by the leaders of this group all over the country.
Fry
Did this hit its peak in 1914, '15 and '16?
Paul
I should say it had its peak when the vote was taken in the House of Representatives [in 1919].
It was always apparently well-financed and extremely active and led by very prominent women who sincerely believed it was for the benefit of the country not to have the vote for women. Now what happened was they withdrew from the campaign, and I hope you read this when you get to the—it will be in the 1919 issues—have you read that yet?
Fry
I did, but it has been years ago, Alice.
Paul
You haven't read it right now, since you have been here.
I have read a few pages in it; but go ahead, what were you going to say?
Paul
Well, when the vote was taken in the House of Representatives the first time, it was taken twice. The first time was I think in the spring of 1919, but you can find it there in the Suffragist .
26. The Amendment first passed in the House January 10, 1918, by a vote of 274 to 136—one vote to spare.
And all over the hall cries came up of "Shame." They knew what he was doing, trying to defeat us by this. And so this amendment of Mr. Gard's was voted on and turned down, defeated. So then they had the original amendment, "The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex," with no limitation on it in any way.
And then (I think I told you all this before) then Mrs. Wadsworth—and you will find this in the Suffragist because I looked it up in our recent fight to keep the seven years out [of the Equal Rights Amendment].
27. The ERA was up for ratification at the time of the interview. A seven-year clause was added to it before passage by Congress.
And so it was very wonderful for us because throughout this whole ratification campaign we never had a whisper from any of these powerful women and the well- financed, organization of the league against votes for women, because of Mrs. Wadsworth's withdrawal of the whole organization from any further opposition. She said, "It's useless, essentially useless. They have won by defeating that seven-year [clause]."
I couldn't seem to get that over to any of our women [last year]—that by putting the seven-year [clause on the Equal Rights Amendment], they were doing exactly what our opponents were trying to do in vain back in the suffrage campaign, and the leader of the campaign against votes for women was much more powerful than any leader we have now, but she withdrew and said, "We will give up the battle now. We won't go into any campaign." And we went through all these states and we never had anybody opposing. Other people opposed as individuals, but we never had a group of women opposing, which was our most formidable opposition.
Fry
And that seven-year clause now just gives hope to the opponents of the ERA?
Paul
Well, it would give hope to anybody that has to try to put something over that is difficult to put over. If you limit the time in which you can oppose you limit yourself, you see.
Fry
Did you ever have any indications that some of the money for these antis [anti-suffragists] came from liquor interests? Maybe some of the money in the Wadsworth crowd, do you think?
Paul
We don't know where they got it from. They were all wealthy women, that type of women.
Fry
They had money anyway?
Paul
I don't know. We had no idea. But the liquor interests were totally different. They had a personal motive: they thought that women would be so given to temperance that their own business interests would be destroyed.
Fry
There is one more opposition factor. That's some of the
Paul
Who was he supposed to be?
Fry
Apparently he was a writer or an editor on the The New York Times and was bitterly opposed to suffrage.
Paul
Yes, I think the The New York Times was opposed. I don't recall it was ever for us.
Fry
And there was a newspaper in Louisville that was opposed.
Paul
I think a great many papers—I don't think we had very much support from the press.
Fry
Oh, you didn't?
Paul
No.
Fry
Well, what I have been reading in the Suffragist are the quotes from newspapers that did support you, so I think that might give a kind of a skewed impression of the support you got from the press.
Paul
When you say the [The New York Evening] Post, do you mean the The New York Evening Post ? Did you say the [The New York Evening] Post
Fry
No. I said the Louisville paper, and I don't know which one.
Paul
Oh, Louisville paper.
Fry
It's referred to as "Waterson's paper," and I don't know which one Waterson had. We'd have to look that up. But I wondered if you remembered.
Paul
Well, as a whole, we had this wonderful person who did all the press work for us and kept all the press work for us, kept all the clippings and so on. We have the clippings down there, a great many of them, in Washington; you could go through and see. But my impression was that we weren't getting much support from the press. I know that we got support from a few, and we always recognized it and knew who they were. One of them was a paper up in Boston which was edited by Mr. Greuning; you know, Senator Greuning. You know who he is.
Fry
Yes.
Did he die, by any chance? Do you know whether he died?
Fry
It seems to me he did.
Paul
Because in the middle of this election campaign, you know, he was the chief speaker for McGovern [in the campaign this year] , his number one speaker. And his wife is a member of our national board, Dorothy Greuning. He went all over the United States speaking for McGovern, and then I heard over the television one day during the midst of the campaign that he was very, very, very ill and [it was] not known whether he would recover, and I never heard a thing about his death. so I didn't know whether he survived or not.
Anyway [I was at his house and he] told me the other day himself that in looking through the papers for his memoirs which he was writing then, that he had found a letter from me, as national chairman of the Woman's Party, to him thanking him for the great help he had given in winning the vote for women, and he said he had kept it all these years and was putting it in his memoirs. Well, there were individual cases where people did go all out and help us. When we were picketing up in Boston, when the women were arrested on Boston Common all these times, he came to our aid.
Discussion: Sources for History of the National Woman's Party
FryDo you have the newspaper clippings in scrapbooks?
Paul
We have volumes of them.
Fry
Where?
Paul
In the National Woman's Party headquarters.
Fry
Oh. But not in the Library of Congress?
Paul
No, I hope they are not. Mrs. Belmont, before she became interested in our [campaign] and joined us, when she first became interested in suffrage in general and was financial contributor to the old National American Suffrage Association, she bought a house on the corner of, in New York City. I don't know which exact corner but just right there, that neighborhood, a whole building. She established a society called—I think she called it—the Political Equality Association, and she made herself the president, and she started in to try to work any way she could.
Then when the National American practically threw us out, you know when they told us to resign and try for a membership in another form, she was their principal financial backer then. So she withdrew from them completely in indignation and joined us.
Fry
Oh, so that's why she entered the scene right then. I wondered what prompted her to do that.
Paul
We had gone to see her and gotten her interested a little bit, and she approved of everything we were doing. Then she was outraged when the National American acted this way toward us. It was in the spring of 1914,
So in her office she employed a girl, a Jewish girl, to search all the newspapers in the country that she could search, and find any article about votes for women and paste in her scrapbooks. They were about this thick, and I don't know how many volumes of them, several shelves of them. So I imagine that all these people writing books come down there; they always go through these press clippings.
Fry
Are those at Belmont House in Washington?
Paul
Yes, they are there. And I hope when you go down you will go and see all these things.
[ Closed to research until 1 January 1978]
Paul
I am pretty much worried, I am very worried, because we have a new chairman, and I think she is well-meaning but I don't think she knows very much about the campaign, or is at all the type of the women who built the organization up. She was in the Bureau of Internal Revenue for years, she had some subordinate position there:
28. She had been with Bache & Company in New York—before the Internal Revenue. - Donald Paul.
And I said, "But you haven't any right to do that. A great part of those letters are my personal letters that I have written over the country hither and yon, and Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller has written a great many of these letters, and "—you know who she was, don't you?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
"Mrs. Florence Bayard Hilles has written a great many of them; there are volumes and volumes and volumes of letters in these filing cases, and without the consent of these women, you haven't any right to do this." And I said, "All kinds of personal letters are mixed in there, and it would be a great violation of the understanding on which these people came and wrote their letters here for us."
But I don't know that I stopped her; I am not sure. And I am so terribly afraid that I am going to learn that [she has done it]; she makes everything seem very plausible—so.
Mrs. Butler Franklin, do you know her?
Fry
No.
Paul
Well, she is our first vice-chairman, and she is an extremely fine woman, very fine woman. She is a second cousin of Mrs. Belmont, lives out in Virginia close to Washington and comes in quite often. Well, she called me up and she said, "We are going to have a board meeting and the subject is what to do with all the Woman's Party documents."
I said to her just what I am saying to you. "These must not be given away, and I think it would be absolutely dishonest to do such a thing, and when the whole campaign is over, we ought to do as we did when the whole suffrage campaign was over: put some very responsible person in charge of sorting the papers and discarding what should be discarded and classifying them and cataloguing them and then giving what we want to give to the congressional library. But not just turn over to these dozen young colored girls (what they have now, almost nothing else in the congressional library) to come in harum-scarum. No telling what we'd find left in the papers in the congressional library. It would be a terrible, terrible thing."
So I was going to say, if you get a chance to impress upon this Mrs. Chittick—in case any papers are left—the sacred duty that we have to preserve them and not give them out to the world to people who know nothing about their value, or what should be said or not said.
Fry
Well, something like that needs to be gone over by someone familiar with the Party first, I guess.
Paul
Yes, but if they get over to the congressional library and these colored girls start—they will send everything down and it's going to be in the manuscript department. I remember when a man—maybe I told you this—came in to see me who was writing the life of Jeannette Rankin, did I tell you about that? And he came across a letter from Mrs. Catt.
Fry
Oh, yes.
Paul
Well, we don't want that sort of thing to happen. If Mrs. Miller has written a letter to somebody saying, "Well, I think Miss Vernon is a not a very competent
Fry
Well, my experience at Belmont House last week was that nothing is available to anybody, at least right now. I couldn't even look at a copy of Irwin's book.
Paul
Well, maybe she didn't have one to show you.
Fry
Yes, she said she had several.
Paul
Well, why wouldn't she let you look at it?
Fry
She said she had no facilities to handle people like me who come in wanting to see a copy of the Suffragist or a book. I explained to her that I couldn't carry all these things from Berkeley with me out here.
Paul
Did you tell her that you were coming up here?
Fry
No, I was trying to tape record Mabel Vernon in Washington, which is what I told her I was about to do at that time.
Paul
Well, that is absolutely outrageous!
Fry
There was just no way that I could come in and use anything. So I don't think any materials are available, right now at least.
Paul
Well, I am so afraid it is all going to go to the congressional library; I am so terribly afraid of it.
Fry
Does she want to move that entire library over to the Library of Congress?
Paul
No, she wants to take all these filing cases [of papers] like my filing cases up here. I brought a few up [to Connecticut] with me, which are my own letters. If I had known what sort of person she was, I would have brought them all up, while I had a chance. I had a mover bring them up. It was very expensive, but when I got this idea that she was going to put them over in the congressional library and have them start to sort and analyze and see what they'd keep and what not, I was horrified. All my expressions of anxiety didn't seem to have the slightest effect on her.
And then I thought it had; for a while I didn't think she would do it. Then I got this telephone call up here from Mrs. Butler Franklin, first vice-chairman, and she said the subject was coming up and will you tell me what you think we ought to do about it, and I told her.
And so then she called me after the meeting and she said, "Well, we voted to have a committee, and the chairman of the committee is somebody who has never been in our movement."
Fry
Oh, Chittick said to me that there was some professor, a woman, who was going to take over the handling of writing the history and get a grant to catalogue everything in the library. Maybe that's this person who's head of the committee, do you think?
Paul
I don't know, but this was a woman, and Mrs. Franklin said Mrs. Chittick seemed to have everything in hand and know just what ought to be done. And she said this was a wonderful arrangement she had made with the Congressional library, and "I am sure you will think so too." Well, [laughing] I couldn't have thought so less , but I didn't know what I could do way up here. The meeting was over and they had voted it. They put it in the hands of this unknown woman, totally unknown, I don't know anything about her. She is chairman of the committee to dispose of all our records, all our tremendous effort through all these years is to be—
Fry
Well, I hope she doesn't dispose of anything that is valuable.
Paul
Well she will dispose of all the records. Records are very valuable. Everything, she says, is now in the hands of this woman. I hesitate to go down there. I don't want to have a blow-up over it.
Fry
What had you given to to the Library of Congress before? I remember going through quite a few boxes there.
Paul
I told you what we had given. At the end of the suffrage campaign I told you this Miss Mary Fillbrook [sp?], a lawyer and a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and very used to doing research, and one of our own members. She was the one who opened the bar to women in New Jersey. She was a young girl about nineteen when she studied law in her father's office and then wanted to practice and discovered that no woman could
Fry
Before World War II while you were in Europe.
Paul
Whenever it was, she told me that she couldn't really continue to practice in New Jersey because the Italians had taken over all northern New Jersey, and they had Italian judges, Italian court officials, and she said that first of all there is a prejudice against a woman, and then there is a prejudice against an American, and she said, "I can't get any case because the people trust me, but they know that when I go into court, I will have the court against me, against them." So she said, "I just can't get any cases." And so she said she was going to apply, if we approved, for a grant from this WPA, I think the thing was called, to catalogue all the records of the suffrage campaign.
Well, we were very happy because I knew she would be the absolutely perfect person. Reliable and conscientious, thorough and knowing everything about it, as much as I knew about the campaign; she would know everything . She would know what to be preserved and what to be discarded and how to classify it and so on.
So she got the grant herself. She went forth and did it. The grant was for two years, if I remember rightly— this might not be correct, but it is my impression—and she was to employ as big a staff as she could on this amount of money they gave her. And I think—again I may be mistaken in the number but I think she employed twelve women, and she took the whole responsibility. We took one room in our headquarters and Mrs. Fillbrook had it wired all over with chicken wire so that nobody could possibly get in there to run off with any papers or anything. And there for about two years she worked. She had this staff, she directed the whole thing, and she saw exactly what they did, and then when it was finished we had an exhibit over in that great big lobby, you know in the front of the congressional library when you go up the steps, in that great big one. We had an exhibit of photographs from the beginning to the end of the suffrage campaign and of everything that made a good showing in the exhibit. Everything was
So they said all right, they would take it as a loan. And every year they sent us a letter saying would we like to convert it into a gift, and we would always say no, we think we ought to keep title to these possessions. (And we do.) And that we hope someday that we could have a headquarters in which they could be taken care of with a professional staff and so on. We have had very good relationships with the Library.
Well now, building on that good relationship, she is apparently trying to dispose of all the rest that we have, just turn it over to them, not turn it over to somebody who would do it for us.
And I wish very much, but I can't do anything with her, that Mabel Vernon could be gotten to take a little responsibility. We put her on this national board, and while I am up here she could do everything that I could do [there in Washington, things] I know she knows and could do so well. But is she too old to do anything?
Fry
Well, it is hard for Mabel to get around.
Paul
I know, but when she does get around, can't she—I can't see how she can let Mrs. Chittick do these terrible things.
Fry
Mabel could do a lot by telephone, I think.
Paul
Or she could go up in a taxi. Consuelo always takes her everywhere and helps her downstairs into a taxi, helps her get over to our headquarters. And when I came up here for the summer, that's the way it was always, she came up quite often. But she couldn't have come without Consuelo.
But I never could get Mabel to—I don't know why, whether she has gotten too fatigued, or too bored by it, or—I say, "Won't you do this, this is such a crisis,"
Fry
Well, she sees it as a very big problem. That's all I know. Maybe if you called her—
Paul
She sees what as a problem?
Fry
Well, Miss Chittick.
Paul
I thought she was supporting Mrs. Chittick in every way. She certainly was when I was down there. Of course she doesn't like to—nobody else does either—to get in any fight with anybody, but she is in a position really to save our records.
Fry
Maybe if you call Mabel, it would help.
Paul
I had planned, you know, to go down to Philadelphia and then I planned to go on to Washington. And then when I discovered that I would have to pay $20 a day to go into a hotel (I was afraid Mrs. Chittick wouldn't allow me to [stay at] the headquarters), I thought well, I will spend a lot of money and in that short time I can't help Consuelo [with her audio-visual history], which was my main purpose in going—I would need more time, I was afraid. But I think maybe this [recording we are doing] will do what she wants.
Fry
I hope so, yes, I think so.
Paul
I don't know what to make of Mrs. Chittick, really I don't know what to make of her.
[Tape off.]
1915 A Year of Field Work
FryIn 1915, you were organizing a lot in the individual states, right?
Paul
Yes. And then we were making it all point up to the meeting in California, where we were going to concentrate on organizing as much support as we could from the women voters.
Fry
My notes here say, "On March 31 at an advisory council meeting Alice Paul announced plans to hold a convention in each state, and to elect a state chairman," and to make an organization in each state, and then send a delegate to San Francisco during the Panama-Pacific Exposition.
Paul
And that's what we did. You mean each suffrage state, it was.
Fry
Maybe so. Is that what it was, only each suffrage state?
Paul
Yes, I think so. Because we were concentrating on trying to get the women voters together, you see. Was this 1915? Yes, I am sure that is what it was.
Fry
Yes. Then in September you had the women voters' convention, in San Francisco. That must have been the suffrage states only.
Paul
Yes, that's what we were doing.
Fry
In the meantime you had had a couple more suffrage states come in in 1914, Nevada and Montana was it?
Paul
Yes, they both came in. They came in by state referendum. I don't really remember which year it was.
It was 1914.
Paul
In San Francisco—you know all about it from Sara Bard Field of course—we had this booth and so on, got up the big petition.
Fry
With Sara and—
Paul
She and Miss Joliffe were to carry it across the country [ to Washington]. And Sara carried it [by car] with these two Swedish women; then Miss Joliffe came by train, I think. I think you ought to do this part extremely well because of the fact that you have done so much recording with Sara. She was such a big part of it.
Fry
I think it will be helpful to have Sara's manuscript deposited there with yours, so that both of them can be used together.
I guess the only thing I wanted to ask you about 1915, to complement what Sara has told, is how the idea ever came up of having women make a coast-to-coast automobile campaign in 1915?
Paul
Well, when we got this enormous petition, we wanted to get it to Washington and—I don't know much about an "idea"; it seems to me it would be a normal thing to think of.
Fry
You had had petitions brought to Washington before with—
Paul
This was the biggest one we'd ever had, and we wanted to get all the drama out of it we could.
Fry
And Mabel Vernon went ahead of them by train and—
Paul
She went ahead and arranged everything.
Fry
Each city.
Paul
Yes. Mabel has given you so much. Are we duplicating what she gave you?
Fry
No, not at all.
There's one little note here. When Sara arrived in Washington there was a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, with Congressman Taggert chastising you for your Democratic party opposition. Sara was
Paul
I think you are doing this very thoroughly and very well, and I can't tell you how I rejoice over it.
Fry
Well, I am glad you are able to tie it all together like this. You can see how distorted it can be when we just take little bits and try to put them together. We still don't know what the full story is.
Paul
And how anybody at our national headquarters could refuse to cooperate with you is incredible!
Fry
Maybe I wasn't very good at explaining to her what I wanted, who I was, and what I was doing.
I want to ask you some California questions. You had some problems along here with William Jennings Bryan.
Paul
When was that?
Fry
Well, in July, 1915 in California, William Jennings Bryan was there, and Sara had a conversation with him. He was just furious over the opposition from the Woman's Party.
Paul
Is that so?
Fry
Yes. And this is a marvelous conversation that is reported on page five of the July 17, 1915 Suffragist .
Then there was another one. Sara was a leader of a four-hundred-woman deputation to Senator Phelan in California.
Paul
Senator who?
Fry
Senator James D. Phelan, a Democrat. I am kind of interested in whatever you can tell me of his attitude in this particular deputation. The Suffragist reports that he said that you shouldn't have campaigned against him just because he was on the Democratic side, and that you shouldn't go into other states to try to
Paul
No, I don't remember anything. Of course he wasn't ever any conspicuous person in our campaign.
Fry
I noticed that Joe Knowland, who is another Californian, made a marvelous speech on your behalf a couple of years before this, when he was in Congress.
Paul
That was later on, of course.
Fry
No, that was before , when he was in Congress, I think.
Paul
Yes. Senator Knowland I don't think was there in the suffrage days, was he?
Fry
This wasn't Senator Bill Knowland; I meant Congressman Knowland, Joe, the father. He was in one of his last terms in the House when he made this statement. He was a Republican, incidentally.
Paul
I think this will be so valuable too for things like this that you bring in. All the people who were associated in any way with these individual congressmen will be so interested in this.
Fry
We are always interested in California's congressmen and any new information we can get on them to round out their papers. [Pause.] Well, we will go breezing on into 1916 then. In April—
Paul
Of course, that was one of the very big things that we did, this women voters [convention] and having that booth and getting that petition presented with such an enormous number of people.
Fry
How do you rate what that accomplished?
Paul
Well, I think it accomplished everything we wanted. It was one of the big outstanding things I think that we did. The first convention ever held by women voters, you see. And getting them as far as we could get them lined up for this policy opposing the party in power as long as it continued to oppose us. And then getting it dramatized by going across the country so the whole world—the whole country would know about it. I think it was very effective and very useful.
1916: The National Woman's Party is Formed
Working for the Endorsement from the Democrats, Republicans, and Progressives
FryWell, you followed that up in April of 1916 with that big meeting—
Paul
That's the one in Chicago.
Fry
Not yet, I don't believe [Reading.] This was the conference on April 8 and 9 in Washington that included members of an advisory committee representing thirty-six unenfranchised states. And the Congressional Union was "ready to undertake its most pretentious election campaign" and Alice Paul called for "an independent political party." There was a big procession connected with all of this gathering of women too. (I'm sure you never missed a chance to have a procession.)
Paul
That's when we decided to have what we called a National Woman's Party. Is that it?
Fry
Yes, I think so. And then you held your big gathering of the women—just before the other parties' conventions.
Paul
In Chicago [June 5-6-7, 1916]. But you see, it was made up only of women who could vote, and we elected Mrs. Anne Martin president in Chicago.
Fry
And you had a train that went from the East to the West to invite everybody, around the end of April. It went all around the suffrage states.
Paul
Well, we had three special trains. One was the Suffrage Special, we called it, and it went all around the country. Then we followed it later by one called the Prison Special, where all the people who went were
Fry
That was not in this campaign though; that was later.
Paul
Later yes, that's right.
But you see at that meeting at Chicago we voted to carry this campaign in the coming election into all the states where women were voting. Just concentrate on that.
Fry
As you had done in 1914?
Paul
Only we did it on a much bigger scale.
Fry
Bigger because you had more states , or because you used more women?
Paul
No, bigger because we had just grown stronger. We had more women we could send out to campaigns, we had—we started off with this big convention in Chicago. Mrs. Belmont, I remember, got up and pledged, I think it was $50,000—the Suffragist will tell what it was—to defeat every Democrat. She didn't actually give the money later on. I don't know what happened to her. But she often—We got to know her through the years. She was very often full of enthusiasm and said, "I'll pay for this"—you know there are lots of people like that—and then when the time comes they think, well, they guess they'd rather not. [Laughter.] So she didn't give us anything like $50,000 but I think anyway she got up and announced it at this great big meeting, do you have a Blackstone Theater, or something like that in Chicago?
Fry
Yes. That's right.
Paul
In Chicago. And that's where we had all these men come from the different parties and say what they would do.
Fry
Oh, yes. Now tell about that.
Paul
It's all there in the Suffragist . You can look through it.
Fry
You had the candidates coming to you. All the Suffragist says is that representatives from each party did come and did try to woo you to their cause and their party.
Paul
And I remember particularly well Dudley Field Malone,
I think we had everybody come, every party.
Theodore Roosevelt
PaulAnd at that time I think the Roosevelt party, which had dwindled to a very little one, gave us an endorsement, and the Prohibition party, and the Socialist party.
Fry
Yes, I have here that even before this happened, I think about in May, Teddy Roosevelt announced in favor of the suffrage movement.
Paul
Yes, but then at this time, his party did.
Fry
I thought maybe you would know what brought Roosevelt around or who brought him around.
Paul
What date are you on now?
Fry
Well, this was in May just before you met in Chicago in June for your first national convention.
Paul
There was a suffrage meeting held in New York—not by us, I don't know who, but probably by Mrs. Blatch's society, but some suffrage meeting—and I went up to it just to be present, and Mr. Roosevelt was supposed to be the principal speaker. I remember going with Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, our national treasurer, after the meeting was over, around up to the platform to thank Mr. Roosevelt for the wonderful speech he'd made for suffrage. Now perhaps that's the time that you have that he came out.
Fry
Oh, may be.
Paul
But he did. Then I remember that we always regarded him as an ally, always. And I think that this meeting out in Chicago when his party—no, he had two conventions, the first one in 1912 when they formed this Bull Moose Party, and I think that was the one when he
Fry
Taft.
Paul
I guess so. So then, he wasn't deeply interested but we regarded him as a friend. And when Hughes was finally nominated for the Republicans at that convention you know in Chicago [in 1916], we tried of course to get every candidate to come out—just as we tried this year to get McGovern—we're [laughing] still doing the same old thing.
Well, we couldn't get Hughes. Miss Alice Carpenter was one of the leading Republican women in New York and a personal friend of Roosevelt, and whom I had asked to try to get Roosevelt to use his influence with Hughes. We were getting everybody to go to Hughes to say, "Don't be such a fool. Do come out for this measure," and so on. So Miss Carpenter said, "I think that we had better go out and see Mr. Roosevelt," and she said, "I know him and I know he will make an appointment to see me, and if you will come along with me, because you perhaps know more about what's going on." So I said I would.
So we went out together to Oyster Bay and made an appointment to see him. I remember this so vividly. So when we went in he was all alone waiting for us, in a sort of library, I guess it was.
He said, "Well now, the great trouble is, in politics, that people don't seem ever to quite master this thought, that you not only have to be right, but you have to be right in time ." And he said, "Hughes is undoubtedly some day going to come out for this measure. I don't think I can get him to come out now; he has to consider so much and take so long. He just hasn't mastered the idea if he should be president—he thinks this is right, apparently—that he must be right in time and let the world know." So he said, "I don't know whether I can do one single thing with him, but of course I think you are on the right track," and so on.
So then Mr. Hughes started on his campaign across the country. We had sent quite a good many delegations to Hughes himself and he was always saying this would require quite a lot of thought, and the idea of the state referendums and everything had to be carefully weighed and so on. So nobody had ever been able to get
And then he went on through the suffrage states, down through California and so on, never committing himself at all on the suffrage amendment in spite of constant requests sent to him.
When he got back to New York, where they did not have the vote, then , in a great speech that he made, his final speech, he came out for the suffrage amendment. It was just a perfect example of doing what Roosevelt had said he would do. If he had timed himself to be for it in all those suffrage states, he would have won so much more support, and if he had kept silent, if he had to keep silent, in New York—it was not a popular measure there at that time—he would have been much wiser.
So he finally did come out.
Fry
The Woman's Party had a hearing also before the resolutions committee of each national party, to try to get the Amendment in the party platforms.
Paul
Yes, we did.
Fry
For the first time, suffrage was put in party platforms although not the constitutional amendment. Can you tell anything about what went on in those hearings?
Paul
Yes, I have already, I think, told you about that.
This was 1916, and when you were telling me that the National American had rescinded its support of the [rival] Shafroth-Palmer [bill], and I said it is hard for me to believe that they did that in 1915 because I can remember the tremendous opposition to us when we asked for the federal suffrage amendment at this hearing in Chicago.
I told you all that before.
Fry
Would you mind repeating it now?
Paul
Do you remember anything about what I told you?
Fry
Mmm—
Don't you remember what I told you?
Fry
[Laughing.] I remember. But I want you to tell it to me as though I don't so I can get it all down on tape.
Paul
All right. As I said, I would have to look this up and see about that rescinding of the support of the Shafroth-Palmer bill, because when we went in 1916 to Chicago there seemed to be the greatest schism in there between the people who were working for the Shafroth-Palmer and the people who were working for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Then to show you how it was, I said that we wanted to get first of all a headquarters to work from, and I appointed a Miss Sarah Chapman—
I had asked Miss Chapman to go out and find a headquarters for us. At that time the different stores were giving their show windows to different groups of women, I suppose helping them in advertising, they thought. So Miss Chapman secured a shop in a very good location, with big show windows, and we were to have that for our headquarters throughout this campaign with the Republican and Democratic and all the other candidates.
Fry
[Labelling tape.]
Paul
Are you listening to me?
Fry
Yes! I am.
Paul
So then in a short time we received word from the owners of this business house that had the show windows that they had learned that we were not a group in good standing and so on, and that they were withdrawing their offer of the headquarters. So then we had to go forth and get another, which we did.
The chairman of the whole group out there that were getting up a parade through the streets of Chicago asked us to come in and join with them. They said they would like very much to have us do so because we had been getting up a lot of things with lots of people, and they thought we could help them. So we said we would be delighted to, and I went over to see her and
She said, "Oh well then, we won't allow you to come in our procession because we couldn't possibly, possibly put such a banner as that up. We are just saying that we believe in suffrage and we are asking the party to come out for suffrage for women."
So then we didn't go, and they went alone. A day of terrible storms.
Then they went in and we went in, separately, to the platform committee: two different groups with two different amendments. I am not sure exactly what they did get. They may have gotten an expression of approval of suffrage, I guess—maybe they did by that time. They did not get anything about, and we did not get anything for the suffrage amendment. So we were two groups. They were refusing to let us walk with them if we mentioned this enfranchisement of women by a federal suffrage amendment.
So it seems to me it is very hard to understand how they could nationally be taking this stand against any mention of this subject [the federal amendment]. And they didn't mention it at all in their presentation to the committees. But we did. I think we got only the Socialist, Prohibition, and the third party, Roosevelt's party—
Fry
Progressive.
Paul
But I remember later on in Congress, before Mrs. St. George became our leader for the Equal Rights Amendment, the congressman who had been leading the fight for [our Equal Rights Amendment] died or was defeated—was no longer there. So we had to get a new leader. I remember going to see Congressman [John Marshall] Robsion of Kentucky, a Republican, and asking him if he would become our chief sponsor. I remember his saying to me, "Well, you perhaps don't remember me but I remember you very well. I was on that platform committee in Chicago in 1916, and I remember you all coming in bedraggled, wanting to have the suffrage amendment before Congress approved by our platform committee. And we didn't approve it." But he said, "It made a very deep impression on me, and I am personally supporting it and I will
So I remember these very, very well—that hearing that we had there. Again it was the two groups of women, [and one] still asking for the Shafroth-Palmer as far as could see, and [one] asking for the full amendment.
Fry
Well, at least suffrage did become a part of the platform in each of the major parties.
Paul
Just general suffrage, but not the federal suffrage amendment.
Fry
I think that was the first time that any kind of suffrage had been mentioned, but I wondered if it was more the National American's idea. I copied down what the Resolutions Committee of the Democrats said. Let's see, the Democrats recommended "the extension of the franchise to the women of the country by the states upon the same terms as men."
Paul
Yes, that's the state referendum.
Fry
And the Republicans said "Each state is to settle this question for itself."
Paul
You see, that was the position that the National American was taking.
So after all those years of Miss Anthony going to these conventions and so on, and working all by herself— you see, it made me feel very sad to think that the women themselves would consent to work against themselves, but they did.
Now, what's the next question?
Fry
Well, I have that Wilson is still standing on states' rights and—
Paul
Yes, he was.
Fry
—he spoke to the Atlantic City convention of NAWSA. I think that was some time in the summer, when he spoke to them. And I wondered if this made hearts sink in the National Woman's Party?
Paul
Well, that was his position. There was not anything unusual about that. It wasn't very much of an event.
Fry
Then on August 10, 11, and 12—
Paul
You see, the thing that was bad about it all was that a suffrage organization that had had the tradition of working for many many years, before we were even born, for this federal suffrage amendment, that they would have at their national convention an address by a person who said he was against it! It gave support to our not getting it.
Fry
And just further divided everyone, I guess.
The Campaign, 1916
FryIt looks like you had a planning conference at Colorado Springs. This was August 10, 11, 12, and again—
Paul
What year was that?
Fry
That's in the same campaign, 1916. You had representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties come to plead with you there. That's where you planned your big campaign and the organizers' work and so forth.
Paul
No, no, no. It wasn't. We planned all that up in Chicago.
Fry
Oh. Well, it says that there you were going to plan the protest campaign against the Democrats.
Paul
Well, maybe the protest campaign for Colorado. We had planned the protest campaign against the Democrats up in Chicago, when we elected Anne Martin to be the president of the National Woman's Party, made up only of women from the suffrage states.
Fry
Except that was before you definitely had word that the Democrats were not going to include it in their platform that year. You didn't know that until after you had your convention.
Paul
Well, I wouldn't say that. We knew when we went out there. The person who came to speak for the Democrats—I told you how Dudley Field Malone who afterwards married Doris Stevens, stood there and argued on that
Fry
Maybe it was just for Colorado then.
Paul
That was the meeting. I was there at that meeting. What date was it again?
Fry
August 10 to 12.
Paul
I remember that Hazel Hunkins—and I have told you about her over in Europe, I think, and how I went up with her to see Jeannette Rankin—this girl from Montana—to try to get Jeannette Rankin to vote against war, just unofficially, from ourselves. We had never seen her, but she came down from Montana. In fact you can probably find all this out in the Katzenstein book because Miss Katzenstein had gone out as our organizer to Montana in that campaign, and she had gotten this Hazel Hunkins interested. When we had our meeting down in Colorado Springs, Hazel came down. First time we ever met her.
She wanted to throw in her life work with us, which she did. She went on with us down to Washington and remained one of our workers until suffrage was won, and went to prison with us. We have some pictures of her heading the suffrage procession; she was going out to. the White House to picket. She was a very lovely girl.
I don't remember it as being anything but just one of the organizing meetings that we had there. It certainly wasn't going to plan our policy because our policy had been planned and we had elected a committee headed by Miss Martin to carry it out.
Fry
So, in the big 1916 campaign, everybody went out and pitched in in the suffrage states, but we need a picture of how this was organized and how you—
Yes, it was all organized from Chicago,
29. See Appendix
We did just the ordinary things you always do. For instance in Chicago I remember that the person named Matilda Hall Gardner, who came from Chicago, came out to help us. Her husband was the NEA representative in—you know what the NEA is? National Enterprise—a great newspaper [association].
Fry
Oh, yes. The newspaper association.
Paul
Well, her husband was the head of the NEA bureau in Washington. She came to Chicago to help because she had grown up in Chicago and knew a great many people there. She took over, I remember, the question of getting up parlor meetings, and she had little parlor meetings every day practically to which we would send somebody to speak trying to turn votes in that little district. We just did the way anybody conducts a campaign. The way the Republicans did and the Democrats did—only they did it on a bigger and vaster scale than we were able to do.
Then we took deputations.
Fry
To candidates?
Paul
[Pause.] I don't know whether any candidates came or not, but if they did we would take deputations to them. We had a great many street meetings in Chicago. We just tried to put the question on the map and turn as many women as we could. I remember one woman—you perhaps know who she is and know her. She died two or three years ago, Mrs. Avery Coonley; Did you ever know her?
Fry
No.
Paul
She and her sister were very wealthy women who had
Fry
Yes.
Paul
She went on our board out there. And I remember that simplified everything for us because anything that we would want, almost, by using Mrs. Rosenwald's name, it made it much easier for us to get. For instance, we didn't have to establish a big bank account or anything, because they knew Mrs. Rosenwald was on our board. It helped us a great deal. So we got very influential women out there in Chicago, I think, to help.
But, among others, Elsie Hill got to know Mrs. Avery Coonley, who was interested in progressive education and had started a kind of a school out there which she financed. Elsie, I guess, was interested in that and got to know her that way. Probably she got to know her through Vassar because they were both Vassar graduates.
She took me one day out to see Mrs. Coonley. We thought she would have a big circle, and if we would get these prominent women, each one would have a big circle, and it might be an easier way to get votes for what we wanted. I remember asking her if she wouldn't just not vote for Wilson, and not vote for any Democrats. She said she would have to think about this and so on. Anyway from that interview she became a warm friend and continued until her death.
I went out after the campaign was over (and Wilson had been reelected, of course; that's when we had all this campaign to get Hughes and didn't succeed) I went to see her to ask her for money then. I remember she gave about $750 or something. She said, "Now I want you to go to my sister, Mrs. Hooker, because we try to
So I said, "How did you vote?" She said, "I voted just as you asked me to vote. I voted for the prohibition ticket, all the way down the line." So we knew we were turning a great many votes. I don't—I suppose you were too young to know anything about the campaign when it came to California.
Fry
I have read about it.
Paul
Well, I think that's all I know about it.
Fry
Something kind of intrigued me, and I don't know whether you can throw any light on this or not, but according to the Suffragist, you had a very good kind of reporting system set up so that you were able to warn certain Republicans when you felt they were going to lose in certain districts in the West. The Suffragist intimates that you kind of established a reputation for knowing what the political winds were in each district around the West.
Paul
Well of course we did. We had to.
Fry
—That you had a better system operating than either major political party did.
Paul
Well, I don't know about that, but we always had in every state a group of women who kept us informed of what the situation was. You see, most of these men in the suffrage states all—in fact it was unanimous among them to support the federal suffrage amendment. So we were not out [to elect Republicans]. We were out to defeat all Democrats because they had caucused and were in power and could do it and wouldn't do it. But we were not out of course to elect Republicans. We didn't go out to do that, go out to do any party. We didn't care whether they voted like Mrs. Coonley, whether they voted Prohibition, Socialist, or Republican, whatever they wanted, [as long as it wasn't Democratic].
I have always thought it was one of the most powerful instruments that we could find and that we did use to change the Democratic party and change President Wilson, because of course, you know, it wasn't so long after that that he did change.
Yes, and Vance McCormick was the man who was chairman of the Democratic party for that campaign. I believe that after the campaign was over, he made a public statement that by the next election, in 1918, the weak places in the Democratic party must be patched up. One of the weak places, he said, was suffrage, and the Democrats should be doing something about suffrage before then. Do you remember that?
Paul
No, but I am glad to know it. [Laughter.]
Fry
In your own evaluation do you feel you were more successful in your 1919 efforts than you had been in your 1914 efforts?
Paul
Well, of course; we did it on a much bigger scale. We had ourselves become much larger, stronger. We had more women to go out to the different states. We tried to send somebody, and I guess we did send somebody, from Washington to every state. Those people who went in with nothing to do but defeat the Democrats, could accomplish more than getting some local committee [made up of local people] that were doing like myself [now]—having storm windows put on [laughing] and being diverted by everything else.
Fry
Oh, I see. It really worked better if you sent someone out into the state.
Paul
That's the reason we always did.
Fry
I should think that you also stood the chance of a local person getting diverted into another campaign that was going on there.
Paul
By sending somebody out, she had the one task of—if there wasn't a good local committee—building it up and guiding them. The whole thing, I think, worked very well.
1917: The Final Phase Begins
Suffrage Banner Sneaked into Congress
FryThen the Presidenttook office. Did you have any doubt that he was going to omit the Amendment again from his address to Congress—as he did?
Paul
That would be 1916. We took it for granted he would. He had never changed his position that we knew of, at that time.
Fry
That was when Mabelunfurled her banner from the congressional gallery. In the middle of his address.
Paul
No. She unfurled that banner, as I remember, on a speech that he was making for the, I think it was the Puerto Ricans or some group.
Fry
You are right in that it was his message to Congress on what he wanted to do with legislation for that year, in January of 1917. Wilsonhad gone on eloquently about the suffrage that had been granted and the freedom given to the Philippines—meaning Filippino men.
Paul
Seemed to me—was this Filippinos? I thought it was Puerto Ricans or somebody.
Fry
Filippinos. And that was the moment that Mabelchose to unfurl her large banner from the balcony, which she has told me about in her interview.
Paul
Yes. There were others there, you know. It wasn't just Mabel.
Fry
Yes, there were five.
Paul
The way we got it done was through Mrs. Elizabeth Rogers,
Fry
How did she help with this?
Paul
When she was a young and very beautiful girl apparently, the daughter, I think, of a judge, anyway an eminent, distinguished lawyer up in New Haven, and Dr. Rogerswas a medical student there, they became engaged to be married. Suddenly she developed a goiter, and so he said that he was going to devote all his time [to this] because she would no longer marry him. She said, "A goiter is incurable and I am not going to be your wife and have this disfigurement," and also it had other effects I guess on your body. So she said she wouldn't marry him. And he said, "Well then, I am going to drop everything else and find out how to cure goiters."
So he concentrated as a young medical student, and he did discover a cure for goiters, which was the first time it ever happened. So he cured Mrs. Rogers, and she became his bride after that and married him. He therefore, having for his own interest in curing Mrs. Rogers, become an authority in this field of not only goiters but everything connected with the thyroid and so on, and so people came from all over the country.
I nearly always stayed with Mrs. Rogerswhen I went up to New Yorkinstead of going to a hotel. She always invited me to come, and to save expense I always went. And also because I wanted to always be with her as much as possible. And I remember when I would go in the front door—it was one of the houses in New Yorkwhere you have on the ground floor your dining room, then a steep stairway and then upstairs, sort of living quarters. Well, I would walk up the stairs and it was almost impossible to walk up because every single step was covered by women seated there or men seated there waiting to see Dr. Rogersbecause of their thyroid or glands or something.
And finally, it got to be so that he would never make an appointment. He took anybody who came and he charged them all the same—I think $2 a visit. It was almost a miracle the way they were cured. I remember so vividly when I would go up. Mrs. Rogers, I would find had [finally] been driven up to the top floor of
Then he would never send a bill. But he had a secretary. Mrs. Rogersand the secretary together would contrive to send out the $2 bills to people. He was just a marvelous man in being unselfish—completely unselfish type, I thought.
So one day I happened to be there when this occurred: He came in and he told us—at the dining room table, all of us—that one of his Yaleclassmates had brought his wife to see him that day, and this Yaleclassmate had a wife who had shingles. Do you know what shingles are?
Fry
It's a rash, isn't it?
Paul
Something that goes all around your waist, I think. And [his classmate] was a member of Congress, and he was a very wealthy man, so he had taken his wife to Austriaand all places in the world where they were supposed to be great experts on health measures to try to have the shingles cured. (It goes all the way around and I don't know what consequences it has.) He never could get any relief for his wife. [The congressman] said that people had been saying to him, "Why don't you take your wife to Dr. Rogers, why do you go all over the world?" And he said, " Dr. Rogers? I never would go to him; I was on the crew with him in Yale. He doesn't know one single thing about it. This man, all he could do was to be a good person in our Yaleraces," and so on. Finally, when he grew so desperate (and his wife was always getting worse and he was definitely very devoted to her) he said all right, he would swallow his prejudice against his fellow crewmate and go and see him. So Dr. Rogerstold me that this day he has come with this wife.
And he said, "I saw in a minute what was the matter with her. It was very simple. I knew exactly what to do. I gave her some pills to take," and he said, "The whole thing disappeared; she is completely cured. There was no reason at all for all these years of hesitation. Very simple to anybody who is familiar now with all these glands."
So then this man talked to Mrs. Rogersand said, "You know, Dr. Rogerswon't allow me to pay him anything,
So [later], when we decided we would have a banner put out, when we knew this—you say Filippinos, whoever it was—was going to come up, we could point out that he was so solicitous for equality for other people and not for people at home—just the same way we did when we were burning his words, you know, later on. So Mrs. Rogerssaid, "Now I think I have never asked Mr. So-and-so for anything," this congressman, and she said it was an impossible time to get a ticket to the gallery; it always was these times the Presidentspoke. There were only a few tickets and they were given out to the wives and so on and the diplomats. You couldn't. I've never gotten a ticket; I've never asked for one because I didn't like to be under obligation to anybody; but I have never gotten a ticket to anything since I first went up to Congress; to this day I have never gotten a ticket. And we knew it was almost impossible. Mrs. Rogersknew it was almost impossible.
So when we planned this idea of dropping the banner on this subject, she said, "Now I will see if I can get the tickets." So she wrote to this [congressman] and asked him, since he told her always to ask for anything that she wanted. She said, "One thing I would like to do would be to have a ticket for myself and some of my friends to go in for this opening speech of the President," on—you say Philippines—whatever it was [laughing]. So she got the tickets and she came down to Washingtonwith the tickets, and so she gave one ticket to Miss Vernon, apparently. I didn't remember whom she did give them to. But she kept one ticket for herself. A little group of four or five I think went in with their banners concealed somewhere about their person. And then when this moment came, I think they all put out their banners. Or one long banner.
Fry
It was one big banner which Mabellaid down at their feet once they got in, Mabelsaid.
Paul
Yes, I think they all put down the same banner.
And they all had a string then that they held it by.
Paul
So anyway Mrs. Rogers—it's not that I don't think Mabeldid everything, because she undoubtedly did—but I just remember Mrs. Rogersthen because that was the end that I was familiar with, of getting them in. And so they did. And then they were all asked to leave, as you know.
But it was very effective, very effective, written up in the papers, and I thought it was a very effective thing to do. But it was all due to this curing [laughing]. It couldn't have been done if we couldn't have gotten the banner in, and couldn't have gotten in—I don't know that we could have gotten in if it hadn't have been for this man's feeling of obligation to Dr. Rogers.
Fry
And that was just a little while before your picketing began.
The Death and Memorial of Inez Milholland
FryNow in the meantime you had the Inez Milhollandmemorial service.
Paul
Yes, and you know all about that I am sure.
Fry
You brought Sara Bard Fieldout from the West Coastto give a speech there.
Paul
No, we brought Sarafor the presentation of the statues at the end of the campaign. I told you about the statues, do you remember, this morning.
Fry
Yes, she came out for that too. Okay, maybe she didn't come out for the Inez Milhollandmemorial service.
30. Field's speech was the presentation of the memorial resolution to President Wilson following the service for Inez Milholland .
Paul
No, she didn't. Because the principal speech was made by Maud Younger. I remember this Mr. Gallagher(who interviewed me last week) said, "Well, I read that you told somebody that the way to speak was to read Lincoln'sGettysburg Address and then make the same kind of a
Fry
We haven't mentioned Inez Milhollandand her work on that 1916campaign, or any of her other work.
Paul
Yes, do you want me to? I think I told you about it the other night. [Tape recorder not turned on then.]
Fry
Yes, you did. Of course there is quite a lot written about her as a result of her death. So you don't have to say very much now.
Paul
I will tell it if you want me to.
She had graduated, you know, from Vassar, and she'd become well-known because she was the person who organized this meeting in the [adjoining] graveyard at Vassar when the [college] president forbade—called her before him and told her that the board of trustees were not willing to have the college have this suffrage meeting. So then she got the same group she had gathered for the meeting (and who had arranged to have three speakers come) and took them out to the wall outside the college which separated the college from the graveyard. They all hopped over this wall, you may remember, and I don't know how she got her speakers in, but she got her speakers there too, somehow or other. So they held this meeting. It was such good publicity that people sort of remembered Inez Milholland as a result.
She then—I suppose she was about twenty-eight or something like that and she was already married and she had already studied law. She tried to study law at Yale and various good places, but they wouldn't take her because she was a woman. So she went to New York University, which then didn't have much of a reputation, and got a law degree there. Then she offered to come into our campaign, and she rode at the head of some of our processions, one at least. We have this photograph on many of our letterheads, you know, of her in that procession.
Fry
On the horse?
Paul
Yes.
She offered to go over the country and try to arouse women to vote against the Democrats, and her father, Don Milholland, didn't want her to go alone, so he said, "Well, I will pay all the expenses of my other daughter, Vida, and have her accompany Inez." Vida had a very beautiful voice, so it was arranged that she would sing suffrage songs or things related to it at every meeting and then Inez would appeal to people not to vote for the Democrats.
I remember that she said to me, "I want to make one condition: at every meeting, I am the only speaker. The reason is that I am very timid and have no self-confidence and I think maybe I could appeal to women and get them to change their votes. But if there were another speaker there, I know myself that I won't be able to open my mouth. I will think she is so much better a speaker so I will say to her, "You go ahead and speak." I know that I can't do it unless I am left alone and I will have to do it."
So she started out and, I think, was very effective. The meetings, it seemed to me, were very effective as far as we could hear. She was an extra beautiful girl and extra, sort of, well [pause] she just was so beaming with her belief in what she was doing. So extremely sincere. And she was doing it against quite a great deal of personal diffidence, as she said. So as the meetings went on, one by one by one, they seemed to me to be bringing in very good results. And then when she got to this meeting in Los Angeles and was speaking, she just fell to the floor and collapsed and she never regained consciousness. You know all that.
Fry
I didn't know that she never regained consciousness.
Paul
Nobody ever spoke to her or heard anything from her since.
Fry
Was it a stroke?
Paul
Well, I don't know whether you can have a stroke when you are twenty-eight, can you?
Fry
I don't know.
Paul
What the doctors out there said was that she had pernicious anemia and that she had not known she had it, and she had worked so extremely hard and just worn herself out and—it wasn't a stroke; it might have been
And then immediately, in a very short time, in about a week—we got up this memorial meeting in the capitol and sent a message from the memorial meeting to President Wilson urging that no more sacrifices like this be made necessary in the effort to get the enfranchisement of women. And Mrs. William Kent offered the resolution, which was good because she was a congressman's wife. We had the ceremony up in the Statuary Hall, and then she took it down with a delegation to the President.
31. Sara Bard Field's address to the President is on p. 192, Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying .
Fry
It seems that Wilson's response was another one of "I can't as the leader of my party do anything that my party doesn't want me to do or take any stand that my party doesn't want me to take." The accounts I read emphasize the extreme disappointment of the women after this meeting as they filed back across the street to suffrage headquarters. They were gloomy and rather silent. Do you remember?
Paul
The only thing that I remember was that somewhere along there, I don't know which day, but somewhere along in this time—he said that he had received so many delegations and they said the same thing and he said the same thing and he now had the great world responsibilities because of the threat of war and he couldn't see any more delegations. That's my recollection. And so we then said, "All right, we will send this perpetual delegation. And you won't have to see it; we will just hold up banners reminding you."
The Decision to Picket the White House
FryAt the meeting that was scheduled to be held at your headquarters right after their deputation to Wilson, was it a new decision then to start the picketing, the direct result of Wilson's response to your delegation? [January 9, 1917.]
Paul
No, I think it was the general situation of not being able to go with any more delegations to him. That he had announced. I don't know when he announced it but somewhere around that period. I always supposed it was because he was getting so involved. There was a very great threat of war, you know, and we might get in it, and it seemed very natural.
We had quite a long discussion—I guess many days and weeks, maybe—before we decided to start any pickets. When you start you have to be prepared to come through for a long time or it is ineffective. So we finally decided to do it. Then we started it, whatever day we did start it, in January—[January 10, 1917.]
Fry
Do you remember anything about the pros and cons of picketing that were discussed at the time?
Paul
No, I don't. I think that just as if you and I should decide whether we should go out and picket somebody today, it would be about the same thing. Would it be useful? Would it be possible to carry it out? Could we get enough people to carry it out—because you can't possibly do anything effectively unless you have it over a long stretch; we knew that. I don't know. Women volunteered to go right away. You see it is like everything when you mull over what will you do. I think it is always the same. There are lots of pros and cons on any step that you take.
Jeannette Rankin Votes Against War
FryThen in April, war was declared.
Paul
Yes, April 7.
Fry
Could you relate to me again—for the tape recorder—the incident of Jeannette Rankin?
Oh yes. I can.
We had known Jeannette Rankin, not intimately, but known her because the first year we went down in 1913, when we were a committee of the old National American, the National American had sent Jeannette Rankin down to be what they called an organizer to work with us. So we had gotten to know her. She was mainly on the legislative work, going up and seeing congressmen, but we didn't get to know her too well. Then she disappeared, and I don't know exactly what she was doing all that time.
Then she suddenly appeared [as a congresswoman] in this victorious campaign in Montana, the time that Hazel Hunkins came down; she had worked for her, you see, up in Montana. We got up a meeting in conjunction with the National American to welcome the first woman member to Congress and held it in one of the hotels in Washington. Jeannette Rankin spoke and I spoke and I don't know who spoke for the other group.
So then we didn't see her again until this vote on war was to come pretty soon. Hazel Hunkins by that time, as I said, had come down, and was working in our Washington headquarters, and was our only real Montana connection with Jeannette Rankin, so she and I went up together that night when she was to vote. We said, "The Woman's Party welcomes all women who work for equality for women, whatever they think about war. And we have in our picket line women who are strong supporters of the war and people who are strong opponents of the war. We don't take any stand on this as an organization.
But both of us take a stand as individual women, and we wanted to tell you how we feel, just so we could feel that we had said this to you, whether it meant anything to you or not." And so we told her we thought it would be a tragedy for the first woman ever in Congress to vote for war, that the one thing that seemed to us so clear was that the women were the peace-loving half of the world and that by giving power to women we would diminish the possibilities of war—
[Sounds begin from a radio in background, dimly.]
—the only place we would go I presume that night. She came upstairs to see us and talk to us up in the gallery.
Then she went down, you know, and the first time around that her name was called, she didn't answer. And the second time when they went around to all the people who didn't answer, you remember, she said—I think these were her words, I remember it very, very clearly—she said,
"I want to stand by my country but I cannot vote for war."
And now this man from this University of Georgia is writing her life. I told you he has been up [to Washington] quite a number of times and stayed at our headquarters. (I don't know, if Miss Chittick won't let people in the library, what anybody will do [now], because he has come in there and gotten so much material for her life.) And had so many talks with me about her [Jeannette Rankin], telling him all these things that he doesn't know. He always comes and stays with us, and pays for his room upstairs so he can work there.
So I was talking about him to Jeannette, the last time she was there at our headquarters (she almost always stays with us when she goes to Washington) I told her that I had told him about this time we went up to see her, and I said, "I don't know whether you remember it but I remember it very well." And she said,
"Oh, I do remember it very well, because it was about the only support I received from women in my vote." And she said, "The most enormous pressure that you possibly can conceive was brought to bear upon me by the suffrage leaders on the ground that I would put back the suffrage cause if I voted opposing the war." So she said, "I was invited up to the home of Mrs. James Lee Laidlaw"—you probably don't know her but she was a very well-known woman then in the suffrage movement in New York, and a lovely woman, a wealthy woman and very, very lovely woman. And she said, "I wouldn't have believed Mrs. Laidlaw would have done this thing, but," she said, "Well, Mrs. Laidlaw invited me up, she had people came to see me, she entertained me, there was no kind of pressure that she didn't bring to bear, as did the other suffrage leaders, to get me to vote for the war."
And then you know I told you that this man who is writing her biography came in and told me that he found this letter from Mrs. [Carrie Chapman] Catt, written to a personal friend. (And probably Mrs. Catt doesn't know it is in the congressional library—and that's the harm of getting these letters put in without people classifying them and going through them.) Mrs. Catt just let herself loose against Jeannette Rankin in this letter, and said, "It is impossible to say how much I detest"—and so on—"Miss Jeannette Rankin"—I am not saying the words, of course I don't know the words because I didn't see the letter—"how terrible had been the action of Miss Rankin, in casting that vote against war. It has put the suffrage amendment maybe back years and years and years and years, what she has done." So this man who was writing her biography [laughing] came across it and then told me about what it said.
I knew that's what was happening, that that was their attitude. So I was very proud of her [Jeannette]. I think she was superb.
So when Congress came along to our measure, of course she was extremely helpful. She spoke for it, helped in every way because she was on the inside and could do what we couldn't do. And in all the speeches, she tells me, she always said, "I am the only woman in the country who ever voted or who ever will vote or who ever can vote for the enfranchisement of American women," because the day that she voted it went through, of course it was no longer to be voted on. They got it.
Details and Descriptions of the Woman's Party and its Operations
Working on the Suffragist
FryThe only other questions, before we get into the new section on the suffrage campaign picketing, have to do with the administration of the National Woman's Party, just little things, I might just run through them to see if you can tell anything.
Paul
Do, please.
Fry
Did you write a lot of the articles in the Suffragist ?
Paul
I wrote a lot of the editorials. I didn't write anything else excepting whenever we didn't have an editor. For instance during the period that we were having our 1916 election campaign, we had nobody at that moment who was editing the paper. I remember that I did it from Chicago, and I had to not only write the editorials but I had to assemble and so on all the material. I remember I just didn't see how I could do it. I decided that I would stay up all night every other night; one night I would go to sleep, and the next night—because all through the day you were having telephone [calls], you were having people, and you couldn't do anything—so at night when everybody had gone and the charwomen came in to clean the building and so on [I would work on the Suffragist ]. We had this big room down on the street, as I told you, with big show windows, and it was very safe because you were exposed through every window. Nothing really could happen I think in the light. You just would seem to be one of the late workers in the office. So every other night I took up the Suffragist problem, and we got it out all through the election campaign. That's the only time that I took the whole responsibility of the paper.
How long did that keep up? I don't see how your health held up, missing your sleep every other night.
Paul
Well, as I tell you, that's what this doctor says, I have a heart block. [Laughing.] I don't know whether I have or not.
Fry
You are still one of the most active and brightest people I know your age.
Classes of Woman's Party Members
FryI thought you might like to give a few statements on the types of women that were in this campaign. For instance, it wasn't a lower class working women's campaign, was it? It was primarily handled by women who had independent means or who had time to do this and who were in a position of influence and power. These were the women who really seemed to do the work. Is this impression right?
Paul
Well, see, when we went to prison, the woman who was in the same room with me in the psychopathic ward was Rose Winslow and she was, as far as I know, I think she was a Polish immigrant. Completely what you would call the working class.
Fry
I know that you did have some labor womm.
Paul
Then we had Nina Saboroden who was the one who gave us our suffrage song because in prison she would always sing this haunting melody which we adopted as the Woman's Party song. “The Walls That Hold Us, ” you remember [hearing Consuelo's recording of] that song in our words. But she of course sang it in Russian; she was a Russian immigrant. Her father, we will say, was a tailor or something like that. We had, it seemed to me, every kind of—from the beginning to the end—every kind of woman.
Fry
Yes, you did, Alice. But I mean in your general profile. You know, there are different kinds of campaigns. Some campaigns just start with organizing masses and masses of people, which you did not have the time or funds to do, you told me a while ago. So it seemed to me that what you had done was choose women who were in strategically important positions.
I think more that we chose anybody who would come. We sort of put up a banner when we began to work for this Amendment all alone, about fifteen of us you see, the start of the little group, after the National American cast us out and put in another amendment. That's the reason we didn't know whether we could survive or whether we ought to do it or try to do it even; and so all we did was to put up this banner of what we stood for. The women would come. Wherever you went, women would come. And whoever came, we welcomed. Whoever she might be.
Fry
In your positions of leadership, did you have a preponderance of college-educated women?
Paul
No, we never thought about it.
Fry
It appeared to me that you did.
Paul
Well, we didn't. It is very likely that—I remember that in this campaign—not this campaign but the Equal Rights Amendment campaign, that the AAUW, American Association of University Women, of which I was a member then (almost all college women joined it) and it had its headquarters in Washington—they sent a letter to every member of Congress signed by their executive director of their national headquarters, opposing the Equal Rights Amendment for women. I went over there to see Miss M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr [president, 1894-1922], who had been a strong supporter always of ours, and asked if she would come down to their coming convention in Washington of this association [AAUW] and try to stop this opposition. She said she would.
Mrs. Lawrence Lewis and I—Mrs. Lewis was always our strongest woman in Philadelphia—we went out together to see her [Miss Thomas], and she said she would and she did. She came [to the AAUW convention]. Immediately she tried to use her great influence as the foremost woman college president in the United States, the foremost woman educator, perhaps (and I think the greatest woman in the field of education we ever had in America). She had a great deal of prestige we thought. She proposed that [AAUW] take up this whole subject and study it and immediately rescind this action that they had taken, and she carried it.
As a result of that meeting in Washington this
Then they sent out a letter to every member of the AAUW giving the pros and cons on this amendment, and Miss Thomas wrote the pros and sent it around the country and so for a time we heard nothing more in the way of opposition from the AAUW.
Then came their meeting out in Oregon, and by some trick, it seemed to us—because people didn't know it was coming up—they brought this subject up and voted to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. They had withdrawn their opposition some years before. So I went up to see Miss Thomas again. By this time she had retired as being president, but I met her at some relatives' home in Maryland, in Baltimore, and told her this whole tale.
She said, "Well, I have decided never to go to another convention of the AAUW or have anything further to do with them. I have done the best I could; I created the organization." She said, "College women today are so different from the college women in the early pioneer days when every woman was a personality. Now they all do what the popular thing is." And that has been my experience with these college women too. They haven't been much of a help to us.
Fry
In the days of the suffrage movement were they more individualistic? Is that what she meant?
Paul
No, she meant back in the early days when they were beginning to—early days of college education for women. Her early days when she became president of Bryn Mawr and started something unheard of, which was a girls' college with equal academic standing to the men's colleges. You know Woodrow Wilson was one of her professors. And she went forth and she had a doctor's degree from Zurich herself and was a highly educated woman. She was a Quaker, by the way. And she got up a group of people, of professors, that were equal to those in the men's colleges. She lifted up college education for women to where it had never been before.
And I had the same feeling about these college women. You see, in our own college, Swarthmore, which Lucretia (Coffin) Mott helped to form, only Mabel Vernon and Amelia Walker and Martha Moore ever stood with us. I don't think we had much support from college women as college women. Our members might have gone to college or they might not.
Fry
Well, the reason that I brought that up was that I have run into this as a complaint I've received in my own work for the Equal Rights Amendments that it's an elitist movement. I wondered if this had been true of the women's suffrage movement. And if you had that as an issue. Probably wasn't an issue then .
Paul
Well, I don't think it is an issue now either. I never heard anybody raise that idea before, that we gave preference to college women.
Fry
Oh really? It isn't that you give preference to them; it is that they are the ones who are interested in it and the implication is that—
Paul
Yes, but do you know that of all the women's organizations in the United States, the AAUW was the next to the last to support the Equal Rights Amendment. When we tried to get the Equal Rights Amendment endorsed at the first hearing in Congress, you know everybody spoke against it but ourselves at that first hearing; no one else said a word for the amendment. Then we started out on this campaign to go to all women's conventions to try to change the thought of American women—not to change Congress, because there was no use changing Congress if you couldn't change the thought of American women, because the women would dictate what Congress would do, now that they had the vote. So we stopped much work with Congress and went off to try to change women's attitude on this subject. And of all these organizations which have come, one by one by one by one till now we have practically every one in America, the last one to come in was the University Women last summer in Houston [Dallas?]—next to the last one. The last one was the League of Women Voters. They came in this very year in the autumn.
Fry
Was that your old NAWSA grudge that has kept the League out for so long?
Paul
Well, it might have been in the beginning, but I think at present very few of them ever heard of it.
Yes, I should think most of them wouldn't care about it.
Paul
Didn't know anything about it.
I don't know why. They were just all out for protective labor laws, that was all there was to it. So I feel very proud of our organization, I mean of our women in our group as a type of woman, because you know women of every experience and every walk of life you find have this same feeling for building up respect for their own sex, power for their own sex, and lifting it up out of a place where there is contempt for women in general.
I always feel, always I think, when I go into a little group, I don't know whether a single woman will respond, but very often one woman at least responds. You don't know who it's going to be.
Fry
There was no prototype that you could always be sure of, a type of person who would always be a pro-suffrage person?
Paul
No. No.
Fry
Okay.
The other question that I have on administration is on the inner workings of the Party. It was prompted by a note in the Suffragist in June, 1914, that Mary Marsh Lockwood had to resign as treasurer, and that from May, 1913, to June, 1914, the treasurer's task had grown from one desk to seven large departments, each one equipped with officers and stenographers. That was the first time I got a glimpse of how rapid your growth had been, and how enormous—
Paul
What is that? I don't understand what you are talking about.
Fry
There wag a very nice thank-you article written for her in the Suffragist, and it mentioned that when she first started there was one space in the office at 1420 F Street designated for the treasurer's desk. It told how she went ahead and worked at her job there even though all the distractions were around.
Paul
That's right.
Fry
Then by June of 1914 it had grown to seven departments, each one equipped with offices and stenographers.
Well, that must have been when we moved over—I don't remember when we did move over from our little basement room to the Cameron House, the Dolly Madison House. Then we had a whole building, of course.
Fry
Yes, this was after you moved.
Paul
I don't remember when we moved, but we must have moved before June, then. When we rented this building known as the Dolly Madison House and out in the back of it—I think this was this building—No, I don't believe it was though. It must have been later when we were put out of the Dolly Madison House and had to go across to the house that had been William Randolph Hearst's. I think that's the one that had this great big building, sort of an annex. And we had a carpenter cut it up into a lot of little offices, so that the Suffragist could have one office and the treasurer, one office, and so on and so on and so on. But if it was 1914 we hadn't done that yet.
I suppose that's just taking all the space that we had in the building.
Fry
Well at any rate it sounded like you had a pretty complicated organization and that just keeping things going from the standpoint of the treasurer and getting the Suffragist out and these routine things that had to be done all the time was quite a challenge.
Paul
Well, it certainly was.
Fry
I don't know how you did it. You must not have slept much then either.
Paul
Now my dear, I think you are getting sleepy. And I think I'm getting sleepy. Shall we go to bed and get up in the morning?
Fry
[Laughing.] Yes, that's a good idea.
[Tape off.]
What about representation on your board?
Paul
When any group in our organization didn't seem to have very many members, much representation, then we tried to put one woman from that group on our board, so that everybody would, in the direction of the movement, would have, people would feel they had a part in it.
Was this from any interest group or from any social class?
Paul
For instance, we didn't have very many Negroes in our group, although the National Association of Colored Women, as always, worked very closely with us. So we put one Negro woman, who is one of our ablest and best members, on our national board and she is there now, you see. I remember we had one woman of the Farmer Labor Party—out in Minnesota. She certainly was not a person who had any college education, didn't have any of these things you are talking about, any wealth or any social position or anything. But we put her on our national board. That was back in the suffrage days. And then she finally became our state chairman because she was so extra good. So we have had all types for state chairmen in different states. We only judged them by whether they wanted to help and were eager to help and were really helping.
Fry
Well, last night we—
Paul
And secondly, did you have enough breakfast?
Fry
Oh, absolutely.
[Conversation about the milk.]
Paul
Are you finding much or not finding much?
Fry
Oh I found so much in this 1917 Suffragist, Alice, I hardly know where to start.
Paul
Now this [taping] will be very helpful, I think for Consuelo [Reyes].
Fry
To review, we ended last night with the memorial service on Inez Milholland, and then you talked about Jeannette Rankin and her vote against war—
Paul
She came into our campaign you know, so completely—we should point out that we had this welcome meeting for her—you probably found it in there. And then we had her vote so she was a big feature, I think. She ought to have a photograph and such in Consuelo's [audiovisual] list, don't you think so?
Fry
Yes, I do think so.
Paul
The first woman who ever voted, the only woman, as she
Fry
She was one of the sponsors, too, of the [suffrage] bill in that war session that followed. That was one of the things I wanted to ask you—
Paul
The session that it went through was 1918 wasn't it, is that what you are talking about?
Fry
Well, right now I am talking about the 1917 session in which it did not go through.
Paul
No, but the 1917 was on war when she cast her vote—
Fry
Yes, but right now I am talking—
Paul
She cast her vote on the enfranchisement of women in 1918. Is that right?
Fry
That's right. What I am talking about is the 1917 war session when she couldn't vote on it because it never got to the floor.
Paul
I mean it wasn't there for a vote.
Fry
No, it was not there for a vote, but do you know what she did specifically to try to get it to the floor, because it was, as usual, in the House Judiciary Committee.
Paul
Are you asking me?
Fry
I am asking you, because it says that she was the "sponsor" of it, but I guess it had a lot of sponsors.
Paul
Well she was of course committed to it. When they say a "sponsor," probably—at that time we didn't have an official list of sponsors—she was committed to vote for it and support it and of course she did. We kept in pretty close contact with her, and whatever she could do which wasn't much because everything was turning around the war then. Even all the women's suffrage groups, as I say, were turning, working for the war. So it wasn't before Congress and it wasn't coming before Congress; and then as I recall, in 1918 they had first one vote. Then in 1919 they had a second vote. Or else they had them both in 1919—there were two votes, I know, in the House.
Yes, I don't have that chronology right here before me.
Paul
You haven't gotten to it yet, I guess.
That's the time that she cast her vote for us anyway. It must have been in 1919 vote in the House. And it was the previous one, then, when they voted down the seven years. That's the reason we paid so much attention to that one because it resulted in our not having to bother with the people working against uis.
I think when you go through all this, it is—from Consuelo's point of view—it will be very helpful because it gives a pretty vivid idea of what drudgery was in it. Doing it over and over and over again. Just as when you showed me the [story about our banner to the] Russians' [delegation to President Wilson], you know. I said, well we had this problem: how can we make it interesting and exciting and dramatic, on and on and on and on, the same plea, the same women (an organization of the same women although different women), and the same plan standing at the White House gate. Naturally it would get completely dull unless we could think up a new one.
So when these Russian people came (I had forgotten all about it) we immediately seized it as something different.
Fry
That was when you had the banner—
Paul
Not only that, but over and over again you notice how we changed what we were doing. We would have women from some one state come, or women from some one profession come.
It was another thing—this is just apart, not to be put in your record at all—when you asked me if we didn't—are you taking this down?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Could we stop it right now? I just want to tell you something about what we brought up last night.
Fry
Okay. Well, go ahead and we will just make a note here to the typist to not transcribe it.
All right. I don't object to it being transcribed, but it's not pertinent to what we are talking about now .
Last night you said to me that there was a general idea that college women were the women who were conducting this campaign, and I said it was such a new idea to me. I thought about it after I went to bed and I was thinking, well maybe in our present campaign. Of course in our first campaign not every woman went to college. Today almost every woman—it is hard to find one of the most obscure and the most impoverished that doesn't go to college. It doesn't mean much.
But in our present campaign, most women have gone to college as far as I know. Mrs. Chittick, our national chairman, I have never heard of her having gone to college; she has never mentioned it. No one has ever heard of it. She may have gone but she has not revealed it to anyone that I know of. Normally you talk about, "when I was at Vassar, when I was at whatever." Which was your college? You told me but I have forgotten.
Fry
Well, I have three.
Paul
Well, all right. [Laughter.] Anyway, if Mrs. Chittick had ever been to college, she would certainly meet somebody who was from a college and somehow or other we would have heard of her college, but we never have in connection with her. Our first vice-chairman and one of the most powerful people now on our board, Mrs. Butler Franklin, the cousin of Mrs. Belmont, I am absolutely positive has never been to college. So there is our first vice- chairman and our national chairman, and I could start and go down the list and think of a lot of people, I am sure, that even in our today's group have never gone to college.
I think if you are in any kind of a campaign for anything, anything under the sun, whether reform or not, you naturally tend I guess to attract to yourself (if you are trying to do something, you want people's help) people who are somewhat akin to you in beliefs and experiences and so on. I don't think I have ever attracted more college women than any other because I don't have much interest in college. I know it takes a large slice out of your life that, in my opinion, you could use better if you hadn't gone to college. So I never even inquire whether a person has gone to college if they want to come into our group. I don't care. I
[Background radio sound stops.]
So I thought you might try to somehow or other get that idea across—that this was a classless movement . I always felt you go into a crowd and you get up and you make an appeal and somebody comes to you, like Helen Hunt West came up to me, and from that time she never faltered. She just dedicated her life to this campaign. Well, it just struck a kindred note in her. And I found out afterwards that she had Quaker forebears; [Laughing] maybe that had something to do with it. Some little time before. But she just was a born feminist . When somebody presented a way to expedite this, she gave up everything else and threw herself into it. Then you don't ever think, have you been to college or not. You just think well, here is a kindred soul; she feels just the same way.
Fry
Yes, I think it is clear, too, from the examples that you have given of getting specific women to come to work, that your concern was not whether or not they had been to college, but what particular talents they possessed that the party needed at the time. In most cases your—
Paul
Well, I never cared much what talents they possessed. We tried to get—and I suppose Mabel Vernon did and all the other people who were trying to get people—we tried to get people who were enthusiastic, because there is nothing in the world that is more important than that, enthusiastic and eager and consecrated in their feeling about the movement. Anybody could be of service, you see. There was always something she could do.
Ages of Members
FryWell, this brings up another characteristic. Let me try this idea out on you. It seems that this was a young women's movement; although you had a few old women in it, it was the youth and vitality of it that distinguished it.
Paul
No, I don't think that's true at all , and I very much
But most of the women who came in were not of our age at all. For instance—I told you Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, who was one of the very greatest workers we ever had. She was a mother and had three grown-up sons, one grown-up daughter; her son was a physician and the other son was a lawyer and the third daughter was living at this Lighthouse Settlement I told you, where I met Jessie Wilson, President Wilson's daughter. Then one of our greatest helpers was Miss Lavinia Dock, did you ever know who she was?
Fry
No, how old was she?
Paul
She was an older woman. She was one of the first people who was ever arrested and, I don't know, she might have been sixty-five or something. I got to know her when I went to the School of Social Work as they call it now, the School of Philanthropy we called it. She was one of the distinguished lecturers who came there. She was a great world authority, more or less—she was a nurse and her field was everything to do with these things what they call venereal disease and things like that. And she lived at the nurses' settlement in New York which was just around the corner from us. So I just got to know her as a humble little pupil of hers in this School of Social Work.
So when we began to try to gather a group together in Washington, all these people I had ever met or knew I would telephone to or go to see and ask if they would help us. So she came right down. She was the founder of the International Nurses' Association. (When this visiting nurse of mine came here [this year], I said, "Did you ever know of Lavinia Dock?" She said, "Of course, we all studied her textbooks. She is one of the greatest, greatest women ever in the field of nursing.") And when we started to have the picketing
And then there was another one who founded the nursing school at Yale, and I will look up her name. She was about the same age, of course, as Miss Dock. And she was very cultured and what one would call an upper class person. She went into nursing and she was very shocked to find—I won't say shocked, but she was distressed to find—that the women in the nursing field were, she thought, not very suitable to be nurses. She thought maybe they had had nursing training, but they hadn't had anything else. So she went to Yale and persuaded them to open a school of nursing and make it a regular school like medicine or law or anything else, of the university, on the same scale, the same standing. And it was set up. Women students then did start to go in and become nurses, who never would have had a chance to have that training before. Do you want me to go on?
Fry
[Looking out the window.] Yes, go ahead.
Paul
I thought you were looking at something.
Fry
I was watching your—your tenant is leaving, and I thought you might want to know.
Paul
Yes, because [laughter] now we can turn the thermostat [more laughter]—as soon as she gets out of the way safely.
Well then she was one of our pillars. She got this great National Association of Nurses to endorse and support us and work with us. She was certainly not a young woman at all.
And then, of course, Mrs. Belmont was not a young woman. One time in Washington Mrs. Belmont conceived the idea that she might give a dinner at the Willard Hotel where she always went, where she had been a patron for years, to sort of try to move into the social world, to try to attract some people who might not come otherwise. She gave this dinner and she told us to invite whom we wanted, all our national board, all our state chairmen, everybody that had been important in our movement. We would have maybe, I should think, about
Then there was this other, Izetta Jewel Miller. Do you know anything about her?
Fry
Yes, I know that she is a Californian.
Paul
She is a Californian now; she never was before.
Fry
She was from Virginia?
Paul
West Virginia. Well, when I went to Washington, she was in what they called the stock company of Washington, and she was a most admired and beloved, and most beautiful, and most successful young woman actress that there was. She then married Congressman Brown, and she was the first woman in the country that ever presided at a national Democratic convention, after we got the vote. It never had happened before. And she brought her little daughter June up [in the Woman's Party]. I would say June would have been a young worker, but the one who was really the person who was always working and doing everything was the mother. We have paintings of both of them in the headquarters, down in the living room. You may remember.
Fry
I do.
Paul
Now this was Izetta Jewel. You couldn't think of the Woman's Party without thinking of Izetta Jewel. You see, none of these women were young. At this time, after she married Congressman Brown, she took over the state chairmanship of West Virginia, which her mother had had, and was all through this period coming up to our meetings in Washington as a state chairman of West Virginia.
Fry
Was that through the suffrage period?
Paul
Yes, through the suffrage period. I remember her saying to me one time, when I was perhaps impatient I guess, or something, about people asking so many questions, she said "But you know, I have taken this long trip up from West Virginia just to ask you these questions [laughing] so I'll know what to do." I remember so vividly.
So when you think of the people who put through that campaign—Mrs. Florence Bayard Hilles you can never call a young woman; she was one of the most active people and of course she was grown up with a grown-up daughter at the time we first met her and a sister of a United States senator; she was about the age of the senators and so on.
Well, I can just go on and on and on. Mary Beard, who became the chairman of our committee to decide on what amendment we should work for: well, she was certainly not a young woman. Her husband was already, and she was already [herself] established. I knew all about them when she told me her name was Mary Beard. I said, "Well, are you related to Charles Beard?" And she said, "Yes, I am his wife." Well, everybody knew about them. She had had time to make fame for herself and her husband in these books she was writing. So you did not have much feeling that we tried to get young women, or old women; we took any women that we could get, of course. I would not say that our movement was a young women's movement at all.
Fry
Well, I think I have read this statement made by people who were contrasting the advent of the Congressional Union with the leadership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. That here was Alice Paul who was under thirty, I guess, weren't you in 1914?
Paul
I am almost sure that the year I went down I was twenty-seven, because I had just taken my doctor's degree and I think I was twenty-seven.
Fry
And Lucy Burns—
Paul
—was about two years older, I guess.
Fry
Who were the young and vital leaders, and that that gave the campaign a character. Now I know—
Paul
But that wasn't true , you see. Now for instance, Mrs. Richard Wainwright (here was her husband who was the admiral, you know). She was our house chairman and she got us this new headquarters when we moved from this little basement place. All these people—Mrs. William Kent; there was never anybody who was more active every single day than Mrs. Kent. So we didn't really have any such feeling at all, at all , that we were immature and all the things that they were trying to say we were. They were really trying to say I was,
Fry
Well, now when people look back on this, I think they tend to see your youth as an advantage instead of a disadvantage, to the movement.
Paul
But that's what I want to avoid, their thinking so, because it wasn't true. It was a very stable group of women from the very beginning. You can tell from all these people I am telling you about—these are a few that just cross my mind. Now Mrs. Robert Baker—if you look in this magazine, and Maud Younger. They were not young—Mrs. Baker was our political chairman all through the suffrage campaign. She had one desk and one room all to herself. She was the one who went to see all these senators and governors and everybody. She was the wife of a physician and she had three sons; I think one son was still in Harvard and the other two sons were out in the world; I think one of them was in the army. Anyway, you couldn't possibly say she was a very young person. And then this Mrs. [Forest?] who got up most of our pageants and all that sort of thing, she was not young at all. So the people that we got in who were young, when we started to do it—I think—for instance, I remember Anne Martin—you couldn't possibly call her young. She wasn't old either. She was—you wouldn't have thought her a particularly young woman. She's the one who ran you know for Senate [in Nevada. And do you know Betty Gram Swing?]
Yes, I do. Is this the same Betty Gram who right now puts out the Congressional Digest ?
Paul
Yes, but now, of course, she is retired more or less. Her son does it. Anne Martin went, among many other people, over the country to try to explain the picketing and make people sympathetic to it and so on, and she stopped in the University of Oregon. There two young girls were thrilled at the idea of being invited town to Washington to participate, and they came.
I remember so vividly when they came. People went to me and said, "You must quickly see these two girls and see that they don't go back to Oregon because they will be of such tremendous help to us." One was Betty, who became Betty Gram Swing, you know. She married Raymond Swing, remember. She was young; she was still in college. The sister Alice was in college with her.
So we enlisted them right away and they turned in and we gave them small little salaries to pay their expenses so they could stay on. And they did stay on; they stayed to the very end, I think.
Fry
But that was the exception rather than the rule in age?
Paul
No, I wouldn't say it was the exception . I just—till you told me of it, I never heard or had given much thought to this view. I know that you go out now to the [1972] Democratic convention we are told, this is all youth, wanting what they want. You know they even call and say we are standing for this minority and that minority— women and youth. And you can't fail to realize it over the television sets, what they are emphasizing, the great beauty of the youth. (You must know that.)
Fry
But that's even younger, and that's in a different context from what I am talking about in 1914 and '15.
Paul
Oh, it is the same thing.
Fry
These people are even younger I think than the young ones in your movement.
Paul
Well, those I met haven't been any younger. In this liberation movement.
Fry
Eighteen to twenty-two year olds. And I am talking about those who were in their late twenties, for the most part, who came to your movement. At any rate, you have convinced me that it was a multi-aged movement.
Paul
When you say, about this "women's liberation"—I haven't met very many, but those I have met—for instance, when I was in this hospital in the spring, somebody came in to see me, and she said she was a nurse down the hall for some man who was very, very ill and had a terminal disease. I think she came from Austria. (I have
But you wouldn't have said she was so young . She was old enough to have come from another country and gotten an education and spoke English and everything in this country. Now she was a professional nurse earning an enormous salary by going and being a nurse for these people with great wealth in the hospital in addition to their hospital nurse.
I have met just a few of them. Now there is one of them called Gloria Steinem. I have never met her but this magazine that the girl brought in was this Gloria Steinem's magazine.
Fry
Is that the one called Ms. ?
Paul
I don't know what it was called, I don't remember. I gave it back to the girl, she wanted it back; I just glanced at it and I didn't read it.
But this Gloria Steinem I saw over the television at the Democratic National Convention. We had been trying, as you know, to get our Equal Rights plank in, and we had an extremely difficult time, extremely difficult, because all the women's liberation wanting to put in all these other things. So here I saw this Gloria Steinem get up and make a speech for all the things that they wanted. Other girls—other women—I'd say women —they didn't give the appearance of being teenagers at all—
Fry
No, they are not.
Paul
I think that these teenagers you talk about are people— they are not, I don't think, the leaders who are guiding these movements.
Fry
No, they are the new voters who were just enfranchised.
Paul
Yes, I think that's what they are.
Anyway, I wanted to say this.
Comparisons with Women's Liberation
FryIs there any way, Alice, that you could characterize the women in this movement? Is there any trait or characteristic that any of them had in common?
Paul
Yes, I always thought there was one thing that they all had in common, which I presume you have. (I don't know [laughing]; I think you have.) It was a feeling of loyalty to our own sex and an enthusiasm to have every degradation that was put upon our sex removed. That's what I had anyway. It was just a principle that I—if I belonged to any group and that group was regarded with contempt, given no power, and handicapped in every possible way it seemed to me, I'd have an impulse to—for instance, if I had been in India when they were fighting for the freedom of India, if I had been in Ireland when they were fighting for the freedom of Ireland, I can't imagine not [helping out]. Just as when I went as a student to England, I just couldn't dream of sitting down and seeing these women having such a hard fight—which was also, I thought, the universal fight of women—and not wanting to share in it.
As I say, when Alice Morgan Wright got up and left her sculpture work in Paris—she was very successful—and came over, we just became sisters right away. We just felt the same way, although I didn't meet her over there—not till after she came back to this country.
It seems to me that's been the only thing that united us. So many women think, "What's the difference" and, as you know, through the suffrage campaign, we didn't have very much support from the women of the country; we had this big and powerful organization against suffrage for women, and almost no group as a group came in to help us. You just had to go forth and get individual women to do it.
I think it is the same feeling that Margaret [Webb? inaudible] must have had, I've always felt, and Abigail Adams and so on down, and Lucretia Mott, and I know, I just feel I know that they had that feeling. They never talked about [personal] advantages. These people talk now about equality for women, liberation of women, they are always talking about advantages to women—how you will get promoted, and how you will get more pay,
Born Feminists
PaulWell, do you agree with that, or not?
Fry
I do agree with it. Sure I do.
Paul
Because I thought, I suspected—I haven't asked you anything, but I took for granted that you were of this point of view.
Fry
Yes, well, I am, and when we have lunch or dinner, why I can tell you more about it. I just don't want to take up our time right now to fill this with my experiences.
Paul
But I mean if you tell me you agree with it, that's all, I would be sorry if you didn't. [Laughter.] I meet so many people, and it's rather rare to meet somebody who does feel this way.
Fry
Is it rare?
Paul
Yes, very rare. You can see from what people do with their lives. Here was a great national campaign [last year] where this ERA measure was one of the measures in their platform. Well, even the women in [George] McGovern's own staff, even the women in our group, like Mrs. Colby, who could say, "Oh, well, we telephoned down to Mr. [Frank] Mankiewicz" [ head of the McGovern campaign]. It is not anything that they think is a burning need for the country.
There are just a few people over the country and now I try to keep in touch with them by telephone, like
Fry
And you work through these that are really on fire in the various states, from your telephone here?
Paul
That's the only way. I remember once asking Helen Hunt West [down in Florida?] to do something. She said, "You know , till the end of my life you may know that this is the only thing I am going to do, so don't worry about me. I am always going to be here to do the next thing that has to be done."
Fry
Real commitment. Let me test this tape recorder and see if it's coming across with the vacuum cleaner on.
Paul
How is my voice? Am I speaking too loud or too low?
Fry
It sounds perfect to me. Just fine.
Paul
Because it is only for you to get the notes from.
Fry
Comes across loud and clear, fortunately.
Paul
Well, now let's go back to your [outline].
Continuing Relations with NAWSA
Loss of Woman's Journal
FryWell, 1917 was a year of all the arrest—
Paul
And 1918 was. It began, I remember, when we entered the war in 1917.
Fry
Just before we went to war.
Paul
Do you remember who the chief of police was there?
Fry
Yes, I took his name down [searching for notes]—
Paul
Is it Sylvester?
Fry
Yes, he was the first, and then there was a Major something-or-other [Pullman] later on that year. Sylvester was the first one.
Paul
You know, I was telling you before that when I thought back to who was chief of police, I could only think of Major Sylvester. I wondered if he had been on as early as our first procession [in 1913]. I didn't know whether he was the same one or not.
Fry
I don't know about 1913, but in 1917 he is named as the chief in charge.
There were a few things going on in the background. Can we cover them before we get to the picketing and the arrests?
Paul
All right.
Fry
These are factors that might or might not have influenced the movement. I wondered if you were able at all to
[Vacuum cleaner noise stops.]
Paul
No.
Fry
Was any of that helpful?
Paul
No, we never had one single dollar, of course, of it.
Fry
I knew you didn't have any money from it, but I thought maybe their propaganda campaign might have helped yours.
[Vacuum cleaner noise starts again.]
Paul
No, no, no, no. Their propaganda campaign was against what we were for. You see, Mrs. Catt used it to establish a magazine and that magazine replaced the old Woman's Journal, which had been supporting us. And this new one didn't support us, at all.
Fry
I noticed that a magazine was established.
Paul
That's the main thing that they put their money into as far as I know. Let me see. Frank Stevens—I don't know whether you know who he is; he is the president of our Men's League for the Equal Rights Amendment—and he was not the president, but he was a member of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage in the suffrage days. When he was a young boy, just graduated from Dartmouth, he went up—he told me this and I know him quite well—he went up to Boston to find some work, after he graduated from college. By chance, he got a position in the circulation department, the business end, of the Woman's Journal . (You know what the Woman's Journal was through all these years.) And so he told me so much about how they sympathized with us and helped us, and I knew they had. I had gone up to see Alice Stone Blackwell who was the editor, the daughter of Lucy Stone. So then he told me how they finally gave up their paper when Mrs. Catt got this enormous bequest which enabled her to start one on a far bigger scale than theirs. The Woman's Journal was given up and was replaced by this one of Mrs. Catt's. Of course, I told you how hostile Mrs. Catt was to us.
Effort to Re-unite
PaulI don't know whether I did tell you—that—now what's that person's name out in Wisconsin—that woman writer—
Fry
Oh, in Wisconsin?
Paul
Yes, she was a very well-known woman writer.
32. Probably Zona Gale
At all events, this young woman out there—I guess she was young, about thirty or forty—anyway she was a very prominent woman in the United States in the field of authorship, and so she was a member of our organization in Wisconsin, also a member of the old National American, as nearly everybody was of that type. She conceived the idea that she would unite us—have I told you this?
Fry
No.
Paul
And so she called me up and said, "I am going to arrange a meeting at the Willard and will you come and bring anybody you want to bring to it to meet with Mrs. Catt, whom I am going to ask and insist that she come because I am a member of her organization, to stop this constant friction between these two groups, which is so bad for the women's movement and so bad for our ever getting the vote."
I said, "Yes of course, we will." Lucy Burns, I know, went, and we took one secretary to take down everything. That's all we took. Mrs. Catt came.
Fry
May I ask you a question? Was this the meeting with Maud Wood Park?
Paul
Oh, mercy no.
Fry
Okay.
Paul
You will know this woman, I am sure. [Pause.] I just can't remember what it [the name] is.
Fry
It will pop into your mind.
Paul
I haven't thought of her since all these years and
Well, at all events, Mrs. Catt arrived with some people on her side and I think Mrs. "Whoevershewas" said now she had brought us together thinking that we could solve whatever difficulties we had and so on. She told what she thought we ought to do and I said, "We certainly, for our group I knew, would do every one of these things, be glad to." We didn't want to have this continuing friction.
Then she turned to Mrs. Catt and Mrs. Catt said, "I want to say that I will fight you to the last bit ." That's the last word she ever said that I ever heard from her in my life, and she got up and walked out with her little group. So her paper was used that same way.
Fry
That was after the Woman's Journal changed to a thing called the Suffrage News ?
Paul
Was it?
Fry
That was the name of this new magazine that was put out with the one million dollars.
[Vacuum noise stops.]
Paul
I don't know what it was called. But it was a loss to us when we lost the Woman's Journal . When you just asked me that question, did we profit by this bequest, well we certainly didn't. And then Mrs. Catt used this money always—and I suppose she was very conscientious and thought she was doing the right thing.
The Retracted Invitation to the International Suffrage Alliance
PaulBut then when suffrage was won, I went over [to Europe], just sort of to—rest and so on, I guess. I was invited by Mrs. Belmont, anyway, to come over and stay with her a little while. I went over and stayed in England and met the president of the—what was it called—International Suffrage Alliance. That's the International to which the National American was affiliated. And her name was Mrs. Corbett Ashby. I telephoned to her and made an appointment, and went out to see her and she invited me out to lunch at her home.
I remember she said to me, "Now we would like very much to have the Woman's Party join us. [Vacuum noise starts again.] Of course we have the National American Woman Suffrage Association and we would also like to have the Woman's Party affiliate with the International." She was the International president. I said, yes, of course, we would like to. Naturally we would like to affiliate; now that we are through with our own campaign for getting the vote, we would like to affiliate with the women who are doing the international work, which really had been started largely by Susan B. Anthony, this international movement which Mrs. Corbett [Ashby] actually then inherited.
She said, "I am going to write you a formal invitation to affiliate with us."
I said, "All right, and we will accept it I know, because I know without asking that all our people would be in favor of doing this." Mrs. Belmont by that time had become very fervent in her work for this and she had moved over to live permanently in France to be with her daughter, Madame Belzan, as you know—Belzan had been the Duchess of Marlborough. So they were both living in France. So we accepted.
When Mrs. Belmont knew we were coming, she said she wanted to make quite a large gift to the International. Of course, she was primarily interested in the International. She said she would entertain the International and do all the things that she could do and would also make a financial gift to them. So we chose a group of people to go over, most of whom paid their own expenses, and we put in a few people who couldn't pay their own expenses. It was a very great, very big and I thought, very good delegation. Maybe twenty people or thirty people perhaps. For instance Elsie Hill went and she spoke French and had been teaching French. And Mabel Vernon went and Doris Stevens went, all of them. So it was a good group.
Before, I think before they left, they received word from Mrs. Ashby that they wished to withdraw their invitation to us, because Mrs. Catt who had been the International president before Mrs. Ashby, had felt that we were not a desirable group to have in the International and had said that she would give no more money to the International from her Leslie fund if they allowed us to become members.
So I wrote back to Mrs. Ashby. I think you will find all this in the Suffragist, probably. It ought to be in the Suffragist right at the end of the suffrage campaign. I said well we have had the invitation, we have made the plans, the people were all ready and prepared to go and probably whatever differences there might be could be ironed out at the convention. If there is anything in our program that is not in harmony with their program, we could settle it maybe at the convention itself. All the people who went on the delegation were in accord with that. They all felt—Mrs. Belmont was in accord—they all thought we don't want to be suddenly told by Mrs. Catt whether we can go or we can't go to an International convention when we have been asked by the International president and when we had certainly won the vote in our country. We shouldn't be put in this position. So they went.
Lady Rhondda went over, whom we had gotten to know very well, from England; you have heard of her I think. She was the head of what we called the Six Point Group, a group which belonged to the International and was very up-and-coming and forward-looking. So when they got there, Lady Rhondda was so incensed at what was going on that she rose and withdrew all her delegates and would have nothing further to do with the convention. I don't know at what state of the proceedings she did this, but she did withdraw, I guess her whole organization, as far as I know. [Vacuum cleaner noise diminishes.]
We had asked Mabel Vernon to make the main speech for us, because of all the people who were there, we thought she was our best speaker; she was in my opinion, without any question, obviously. People have often said it is a pity Mabel Vernon didn't die after that speech because it was the most wonderful speech that could ever have been made by a human being. [Laughter.] Everybody, everybody said this to me, who ever made any report about the convention. They said this was the high point of her life, it was such an amazing speech. The point had come up of whether [our American delegation] should be seated or not seated, that was what it was. She made the speech.
I think it was after that speech, maybe, that Lady Rhondda said, "Now if you don't seat them, I withdraw." Of course she was a powerful person too. But the whole thing, the only thing that came up was well, they couldn't afford to lose the Leslie money. I mean that wasn't put in the speeches , but that's what the whole thing was more or less about. Mrs. Catt was insisting
Mrs. Belmont was like Lady Rhondda. She [Belmont] was aroused to such a point —oh my goodness. So she said that she cancelled all her promises to give the International all this money, which would have been a great deal if she had continued, and she was going to give it to the local suffrage organizations in France, which she did, which more or less put them on their feet. But they were not connected, I guess, in any way with the International. So we were voted down.
I think that the point on which we were voted down was—of course they didn't [mention] the money part, but I knew from my letter from Mrs. Ashby what the point was. What they said was, if I remember rightly—Mabel will remember better than I, I am sure, this whole meeting because she led the fight there. But what they said was, if I remember rightly, that they couldn't have two organizations from the same country that had different policies. We had the policy of complete equality and they had the policy of protection of women. I remember somebody later from Holland who came over to our country and she said, "You know, I think that the death, really of the International took place at that meeting, because after all, most of us do stand for complete equality." And I found they did when I went over [later] and became a member of the International Committee on Law, I think they called it, of the International Council of Women. I discovered it was true. Those women over there were all pioneer women, you see, that were in the women's movement in Europe. Thet were not like the great mass of, as you say, [laughing] college women, that are flooding the marketplaces now and don't have any particular pioneer spirit. They were still in that pioneer stage over there when I went over later, and I don't know that I ever met a person that wanted protection. So this was not a—well, it was something that could have been solved at that convention. They certainly were not obliged to put people out because they stood for complete equality. These were the people who said, "Oh no, all these poor working girls and working women who work at night," and all that, you know?
Fry
What was the name of Catt's organization at this time? Was it still the NAWSA?
Paul
Well, it was not her organization. She belonged to it
Fry
I thought this was after our suffrage was won.
Paul
Yes, but it was almost immediately. I wouldn't know about that point. I don't know what day they changed their name.
Fry
The other thing I was wondering, Alice: Do you happen to know where the papers are, or the proceedings of this meeting? [Vacuum cleaner noise stops.] It would be nice to have a copy of Mabel Vernon's speech.
Paul
It certainly would. I doubt if they kept such good records as that.
Fry
You don't know if there are any proceedings. If they are, they might be where, in England?
Paul
I haven't the faintest idea who is the International president now. You see, we never became members of it. When they refused to take us, we were invited by the International Council of Women, which was the one which was founded in 1888 in Washington by Susan B. Anthony and all our women, you know—Frances Willard, all those people, you know about that I am sure. Well, they invited us to become members and we accepted, so we have always belonged to that group. But the others have an organization, I am sure, and a headquarters somewhere in the world—the International Suffrage Alliance. Now let's get back to your questions.
Fry
Back to the United States. That was a marvelous answer to that question about the one million dollars from Mrs. Frank Leslie.
Paul
I wouldn't put it, ever, in your records, you know. I don't like to have attacks on anybody going down in history.
Fry
Well, you will get this back, and if you would like for the typist to leave that out—
Paul
Well, you can just judge yourself. I don't want this to be something that is going to be a source of friction and so on down through the ages.
Fry
I wouldn't either. [Laughing.] Its time should have run out by now, as far as the friction is concerned.
There were also food riots. Five thousand women in New York were demanding government action to bring down the cost of food. Did this displeasure on the part of women and their frustration at not being a part of the political establishment for such actions as this, was this useful to you, do you remember?
Paul
Do you remember in reading whether that's the one that Mrs. Belmont participated in?
Fry
Let me see. [Reads.] No. It's just a little item here on page 4 of the March 3 Suffragist, 1917. The mass meeting was the culmination of rioting in many sections of the city.
Paul
What was the mass meeting?
Fry
It was this five thousand women who
"met in and outside of Forward Hall in New York City last week." They passed a resolution to the President demanding government action to bring down the high cost of food. It refers to "vigorous action of women in New York and Philadelphia and other eastern cities."Suffragist, March 3 1917, page 4
Paul
I know there was a period there where people were opening all kinds of soup kitchens and so on. Mrs. Belmont was one of the people who did it. All the people of a philanthropic nature who were sort of expected to do these things, were doing them. But it didn't cross our path, one way or the other. I wouldn't have known it excepting for having known Mrs. Belmont was doing it all the time.
Fry
This may be something different because in this President Wilson backed an appropriation of $400,000 to inquire into the food situation.
Paul
Yes, I just remember that this was going on. Women were—not only women—everybody was having [to struggle]. It was one of those economic crises, but they came and they went, you know, all the time.
The Turning Point: Militancy
Unifying the Part
FryOn March of that year [1917], you held simultaneous conventions of the Congressional Union and the Woman's Party, and they voted to unite into one organization.
Paul
What? [Fry repeats the question.]
Yes. Well, it wasn't exactly a convention. That was just a group, I think, of the leaders. You see, we had formed the Woman's Party of the members of the Congressional Union in the suffrage states and called it the Woman's Party for political reasons. Then we were confronted with two. We had all the women in the nonsuffrage states who were Congressional Union, and the women in the suffrage states calling themselves the Woman's Party.
I remember the person who did most of this business was Mrs. Belmont because she liked the name, National Woman's Party, and she was of course very influential in our board because she was giving us so much financial help and was also so much help in every possible way. So I don't know whether people thought the Woman's Party name was so wonderful, but we knew we had to have the same name. Our members in Nevada, for instance, who were members of this national headquarters in Washington, even though they called themselves Woman's Party members, were on the same relationship to the national board as the women, we will say, in Kentucky, who were in the non-suffrage states.
I remember our meeting together and I think Anne Martin and a few people who had been elected out of that meeting nationally, and probably our national board, I don't know that it was a real convention, but does it
Fry
It is called the "union convention," in the write-up here.
Paul
Say anything about it particularly?
Fry
Oh, it has a long article on it, the essence of which is that this will unite the two organizations and it will culminate in picketing of the White House, and it also culminated in women trying to get in to see the President, who, on March 4, had just taken his oath of office for his second term. And he refused to see them.
Paul
And who led that delegation, does it say?
Fry
Let's see. There were nearly a thousand women. (That will be in the next issue here, March 10.) It says here,
"Even the women's personal cards with the resolutions to be presented were refused transmission to the President."Suffragist, March 10
Paul
Didn't say who? In the photographs, does it say who?
Fry
[Reads.]
"The leaders of the delegation were Miss Anne Martin of Nevada, Mrs. William Kent of California, Mrs. Darrell Wieble of North Dakota—Suffragist, March 10
Paul
I don't remember her.
Fry
—
"Miss Mary Patterson of Ohio, Elinor Barker of Indiana, Mrs. J. A. H. Hopkins of New Jersey".Suffragist, March 10
Paul
Oh, yes. She is one of our very important women.
Fry
And Mrs. Florence Bayard Hilles of Delaware.
Paul
I see what we did. Mrs. Hilles was in the non-suffrage states just as an example and Mrs. Hopkins was in a non-suffrage state, and Mrs. Kent was in a suffrage state, and Miss Anne Martin was. As I recall—I remember very, very, very, very vividly—I remember we met and we agreed and said we could go forth now as one group—
Fry
It was a drenching rain.
Was there? [Laughter.] I remember the only point that I think maybe there was some [question of who should be the leaders]. This is March 7, 1917, was it? Just before we entered the war?
Fry
March 4, just before we went into the war.
Paul
We went to war April 17. All right. But this is the only thing, that there was a difficulty was who would be the board and who would be the leaders of this [united] group. I think Miss Martin, perhaps—Mabel would know much more about this than I—I think that Miss Martin and some of the people felt she had been elected at the convention in Chicago [in 1916] and she should be the new chairman. Anyway I remember talking to her about it. It either had to be Miss Martin as the chairman or I as the chairman because I was of one group and she was the other, you see. And so I told Miss Martin that I wished she would become the chairman and take it over. I had done it, I thought, maybe long enough. And that I would become a vice-chairman and work for them. She said no, she would rather have me continue and that she would be vice-president. I don't know whether that's how we settled it or not, but I think we did.
Fry
[Searching Suffragist ] I am trying to see. Oh, "Officers were elected unanimously at the morning session. Chair Alice Paul, vice-chairman Anne Martin, secretary Mabel Vernon."
Paul
Yes, that is what I have been thinking.
Fry
And then Lucy Bums and Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Brannan were all on the executive board. Mrs. Gilson Gardner, Mrs. Robert Baker, Mrs. William Kent, Miss Maud Younger—
Paul
You see, none of those were such young women—
Fry
—and Doris Stevens, Florence Bayard Hilles, Mrs. Donald Hooker, Mrs. J. A. H. Hopkins, and Mrs. Lawrence Lewis. All those now were on the new executive board.
Paul
Well, that was a magnificent group of women. I want to point out that, with the exception of Doris Stevens, none of them could possibly be called young.
Fry
[Laughter.] All right.
Paul
But I was much younger than most of them, except Anne
Fry
And yet she did not want—she wanted you to be the head, you said.
Paul
I really think she didn't , is what I mean. But anyway, when I asked her to take it, she said, and I said I would be just as happy to be vice-chairman, maybe happier. Anyway she wouldn't. Whether she thought the financial responsibility was too great, or having to come to Washington and having to spend every minute of her time. But she didn't.
So from that time we were the National Woman's Party, you see. We had been incorporated—let's see, we were incorporated in 1918, the next year. We had never been incorporated.
Fry
Well, this was an enormous demonstration with women from nearly every state and each one carried her state banner and so forth.
Paul
Well, that delegation to the President—does it say who took the delegation? Miss Martin, I guess.
Fry
Yes, I think so.
Paul
Oh, well, that's one of the biggest we ever got up. I know that was a day that it was drenching, drenching rain.
Fry
Yes, and around and around and around. It was Inauguration Day. All during this time there was no problem of violence or outward crowd hostility, apparently.
Paul
You see, we were never arrested until the war had been declared and we kept on [picketing]. That's when I told you we got this round robin headed by Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, urging us— our own women you see, began to revolt against us because we wanted to go on with the picketing and they wanted us to stop the picketing. The whole National American was solidly against us because they wanted to go right into the war, and wanted to push Jeannette Rankin and everybody else into the war.
Fry
And then we did get into the war.
And we got into the war on April 7.
Fry
And on April 14—you may have forgotten this, I thought it was worthy of note—the first war losses were mostly women. It was a munitions factory explosion in Chester, Pennsylvania. One hundred eighteen were reported killed with more expected to die.
Moment of Decision
PaulI remember at the time that I was called up by this Major Sylvester [on the Washington police force],
33. Doris Stevenssays it was Major Pullman, in Stevens' Jailed for Freedom, Boni and Liveright, New York, 1920, pp. 93-4 .
From that time on, while they were arresting the women, of course, that sort of [laughing] inspired the crowd I think to great excitement.
Fry
Yes, when you carried that famous "Russian banner," your first arrests came.
Paul
Yes, it was later on.
Fry
That was in June of 1917.
Paul
We began to be arrested pretty soon, I think. You can find an account of the first arrests that were made, I think you will find there this Lavinia Dock I have been telling you about. I think in this first group that were ever arrested was Katherine Morey, one of our very wonderful Massachusetts women.
[Break for lunch.] [Tape off.]
—when we'd be arrested. That was really a big highlight [in Woman's Party history].
Didn't you get that message from the police after they had already arrested you a few times?
Paul
No. He sent a formal [message]. I received it and I remember it very well. And then we didn't know exactly what to do, and various women, among them Katherine Morey I can remember, said, "All right, then we will have to have people willing to be arrested, and I will come down and I will be one." So she came down from Boston and she was one. And Lavinia Dock, it is my recollection, was the second one.
I am sure you will find them there [in the Suffragist ].
Fry
Their names should be right here because here is the story.
Paul
That is after it got going. This wasn't the first arrest at all, [in that issue you have] now. We didn't have any of that excitement or violence or anything.
Fry
No.
Paul
I might have been in the first group, but I don't think I was.
Fry
[Reading.] Katherine Morey?
Paul
Morey, that's one. She was.
Fry
And Lavinia Dock?
Paul
Lavinia Dock, yes she was. Have you any other—Is that table clean enough?
[Tape off momentarily.]
Fry
Which was the turning point?
Paul
When people were willing to continue with that picketing when [they knew they would be arrested]. There was a big division in the women's movement, you see, when they sent this round robin from so many influential women headed by Mrs. Blatch to demand that we stop the picketing, and the White House had the chief of police call us up. So it was really a big turning point. That's when our militancy really began. This going out and standing there with our beautiful banners wasn't anything very militant. But this really was, I would say, the beginning of the militancy. Have you any other names? I was sure
Fry
Well, there is a good chronology of all the arrests in the July 21 issue.
Paul
No, but I—oh, no, no, but right here when we were first arrested we had to put it in [the Suffragist ]. Because— my goodness! I want to tell you one thing, may I? We were—a meeting was being held over in Pennsylvania somewhere and one of our well-known women, Mrs. Frederick Howe, was chief speaker there, and in the midst of the meeting, the press called up and said so many women had been arrested in Washington, and people were dumbfounded at this meeting, that we were all being arrested and well, it was just, the whole country was just all—
"...Lucy Burns, and I"—and "I" is Katherine Morey because she is writing this article.
Paul
Were they imprisoned this time? I presume they were but I don't remember.
Fry
[Reading.] Here is an account of the chief of police telephoning you. It was after the pickets had greeted the Russian mission at the gates of the White House with your famous Russian banner, and—
Paul
Oh, but that wasn't the Kaiser Wilhelm banner.
Fry
No. this was the one that said,
"PRESIDENT WILSON AND ENVOY ROOT ARE DECEIVING RUSSIA. THEY SAY WE ARE A DEMOCRACY. HELP US WIN A WORLD WAR SO THAT DEMOCRACIES MAY SURVIVE... "
Paul
That's right.
Fry
—And so forth. Then, in this story by Katherine Morey, she tells that when she arrived in Washington on receipt of a telegram from you she found a tense situation. That two women had the day before greeted the Russian Mission at the gates of the White House with that Russian banner and a mob had torn it down. That mob action had sent
Then Tuesday morning, Lucy Burns and she carried a similar banner over the lower White House gate but a few boys had destroyed it with the police "looking placidly on." One of the banners said "Democracy should begin at home." And a great crowd began to surge up and down the street and they "stood motionless." And then when she was in having lunch at the headquarters, another mob charged upon other pickets and tore their banners to shreds. The police warded off that mob and protected the pickets , and then that evening the chief of police telephoned that the Woman's Party could not again hold banners of any kind before the White House.
Paul
Is that all they said?
Fry
Well, she says that you were "amazed."
Paul
But he did say, in phoning, he said, "We have to say to you, if you do persist in going, and we hope you won't, that we have no alternative except to arrest you. These are our instructions." Something like that. And I said, "Well I think that we feel that we ought to continue and I feel that we will continue."
The First Arrests
PaulThen I probably notified people and said—because people were coming all the time and offering to stand [and picket] before the White House—and I said, "If you come now, you will have to be prepared for arrest. You will have to." I remember Katherine Morey saying, "Well, I am willing to be," and I remember Miss Dock, and the reason I remember both of them so well is that they did say they were willing.
But I would like to know who the others were who went out that day, and were arrested. And also I would like to know whether they were imprisoned. Because this event is one of the things Consuelo [Reyes] ought to concentrate on [in her audio-visual history].
There's a good editorial in the next issue of the Suffragist which I guess you wrote, and that's the July 7 issue—
Paul
That's a long time—July—I think the arrests began long before that.
Fry
—It says here six suffragists are tried, and the ones who were tried were Katherine Morey, Leah Neil—
Paul
Who?
Fry
L-e-a-h N-e-i-l.
Paul
I don't remember her.
Fry
And Mabel Vernon, Lavinia Dock, Maud Jamison, and Virginia Arnold. That was from the June 27 incident when "six American women for the first time in the history of this country defended their right peacefully to promote suffrage." They were arrested and charged with obstructing traffic.
Paul
How long were they sentenced for? You know, you should get Mabel Vernon to tell you this. She was in this group.
Fry
I think she did, in our interview.
34. Vernon, Mabel, The Suffrage Campaign, Peace and International Relations, Regional Oral History Office, 1976.
Paul
She probably remembers the names of the people who were arrested with her. I would like to get in touch with those women who were first arrested if any of them are living.
Fry
Well, those are the ones, apparently.
Paul
The one you call Neil, I don't know who she was. I know who Virginia Arnold was; I know she was from North Carolina; and I know who Maud Jamison was.
Fry
[Reading.] Well, the judge found them guilty as charged, of obstructing the highway in violation of the police regulations and the act of Congress, and he imposed a fine of $25 in each case, or, in default of that, three
Paul
And did they go to the district jail?
Fry
Yes, they stayed in three days.
Paul
And that was the first time, in July—
Fry
No, it was written up in July and the trial was in July, but they were arrested in June 27.
35. The very first arrests were on Friday, June 22, of only two women, according to Irwin.
Paul
June 27 [22]? Well, that's the big day I'd mark in your book as the beginning of the real militancy.
I remember this meeting now, out in Pennsylvania. It was Mrs. Frederick Howe. Did you ever hear of Frederick Howe?
Fry
No.
Paul
He was a government official, [Commissioner of Immigration; Port of New York] and Mrs. Frederick Howe—what was her name—I remember she was a speaker at this meeting, and she was one of our most distinguished women—when they got this news that electrified them all. Horrified them all. And it led to many resignations from our ranks, you see. They didn't want to have anything like this happening. So we sort of emerged from all this with, maybe, the sturdier feminists, people who wanted to continue anyway.
Fry
Yes, it would certainly be a purge of the faint-hearted.
Paul
Not so much the faint-hearted, but the people who didn't think it was important enough to upset the country about.
Fry
It is kind of interesting that on July 19, then, Wilson unconditionally pardoned sixteen women who had been sentenced to serve sixty days in the workhouse at Occoquan.
Paul
Well, that was natural in the beginning.
No one asked him to pardon them.
Paul
Who were they?
Fry
[Looks through Suffragist .]
Paul
I think this is the one led by Mrs. Hopkins of New Jersey.
You see how valuable it is to have a record like this. It's one of the things that upsets me so terribly: we are having just as many things happening today but we have no record being made. We have no paper [published now].
Fry
I know; and that's also why we need to tape record more people.
Paul
We need a paper so desperately.
Fry
We might note that there is a record of the arrests from June 20 on a good chronology here on page 7 of the July 21 issue. [Pause.] It helps to straighten out that date of the first arrests and the first convictions.
Paul
You know, we always marched out with a little group. It is my impression that a little group in which Miss Lavinia Dock was one, and so on (I didn't remember Mrs. Lewis was in the first group) but at all events, I know Miss Morey and Miss Dock were, and they marched out just as we did each morning, without any particular banner. That was the time they were arrested, because they had gone out in defiance and absolute noncompliance with this order from this Major Pullman. But we don't seem to find anything in there about it.
Fry
There is a story on that day's arrest. You are talking about June 25 Monday—
Paul
Yes, but that was of two people who were going out with a particular banner which was inflammatory, but I don't think that that was exactly—well, it is not what I have remembered. I just remember having a long consultation, "well, what shall we do?" when we had gotten this order. You know, I couldn't arbitrarily change the whole policy of the Woman's Party. Everybody there talked it over and communicated with people like Miss Morey, who was one of our leading women in another state, and so on, who had always said that if they ever did start in to
Fry
No, that was five days before , when the inflammatory banner was carried.
Paul
Oh, it was. I thought you read that they had gone out with that inflammatory banner on this particular day and that these two people had been arrested.
Fry
A quotation from the President and one from Susan B. Anthony was carried on this particular day (June 25, Monday) with fifteen suffrage flags and they were displayed on the picket line—
Paul
Oh, then we had fifteen people. That was splendid.
Fry
Or maybe seventeen. Five of them were arrested, surrendering their banners, twelve were arrested and ordered to appear for trial when summoned. That episode was on Monday, June 25. Then two days later, they were sentenced.
Paul
That was after the Major Pullman had sent his ultimatum, was it?
Fry
Yes, it was.
I think the very first arrests were on Friday, June 22, which was three days before.
Paul
Would it be too much for you to look up in Miss Katzenstein's book
36. Katzenstein, Carolyn, Lifting the Curtain, The State and National Women's Suffrage Campaigns in Pennsylvania as I Saw Them . Dorrance and Company, 1955.
Fry
She has some dates. [Reading.] It looks like it was Sunday, June 24, when the police major called you and warmed you.
Paul
It was Sunday, anyway. You got the day, it was Sunday?
Fry
Yes, it was June 24. And on Monday, June 25, quite a few women went out and were arrested, Miss Burns and Miss Morey. Their case had not been called.
Paul
It never was.
Fry
I don't know—I am only reading this—as of July 21 it had not been called. But those who were arrested—
Paul
And you gave me last night the names of about six people who were arrested and I know you had somebody named Neil whom I never heard of. And then we had Maud Jamison and Virginia Arnold and Mabel Vernon and Miss Lavinia Dock, and Miss Morey.
Fry
But you think the real red-letter day, Alice, is the day of the very first arrest? Or the day the first women went to prison?
Paul
No, I think the first arrest, because if you decided to be willing to be arrested, you change our policy, you see.
Fry
Well, that was June 22, and then June 27 was the day of the first sentencing.
Paul
So I think the day of the first arrest would be the turning point. (Excuse me a minute, I am going in to get my check for Mrs. Dolley [housekeeper].)
Well, now I think that's very important that we got through that period.
Fry
Yes, the first—
Paul
And then she gives those little summaries that you could use, that there were all together what number arrested and what number imprisoned.
I told you in the very beginning of that book, she tells about how we held our first open air meeting in
Fry
Yes. On page 206 Katzenstein sums up, [telephone ring interferes]
That's a big number of women, five hundred."More than five hundred were arrested during the agitation over the whole campaign, and out of these 168 served prison terms, some of them several terms."Katzenstein, Carolyn, Lifting the Curtain, The State and National Women's Suffrage Campaigns in Pennsylvania as I Saw Them . Dorrance and Company, 1955, p. 206
Paul
It's really quite amazing. Because you see it wasn't at all—today it's sort of commonplace to be arrested, but it was certainly extremely [laughing] unusual at that time.
Fry
Especially for women who were very cultured and, as you were pointing out, who absolutely would never think of even picketing in any other circumstance.
[Tape off.]
Paul
The first women who did it gave it such a good start because the women were of such prestige. For instance this Miss Morey was of a very distinguished family up in Massachusetts. There is a statue to one of her ancestors as you go out to Brookline. I used to go up and stay with her mother up in Brookline. Her mother was our state chairman. Every day we would drive home from our little headquarters on—what is that great park you always speak in in Boston—Boston Common, wasn't it—right there on the Boston Common we would drive home to the Morey house. There we always passed a statue of her great grandfather. It was a very well-known family.
So these people kind of gave it a standing; it wasn't quite so hard to get the others to follow, I think.
Fry
Well, [reading] I notice here in this court case, the names listed are the United States vs. Mrs. Julia Hurlburt of New Jersey, Mrs. J. A. H. Hopkins of New Jersey, Mrs. Minnie D. Abbot of New Jersey, Mrs. B. R. Kincaid of California, Mrs. Paul Reyneau of Michigan, Miss Anne Martin of Nevada, Mrs. Amelia Himes Walker of Maryland, Mrs. Florence Bayard Hilles of Delaware, Miss Janet Fotheringham of New York, Mrs. Gilson Gardner of Washington D.C., Miss Doris Stevens of Nebraska, Mrs. John Winters Brannan of New York, Miss Mary H. Ingham of Pennsylvania—
Paul
She was a very distinguished woman. Every one of these people was very well-known.
Mrs. John Rogers, Jr. of New York.
Paul
That's the one I was telling you was such a chum from the very beginning. She was [Secretary] Stimson's sister-in-law.
Fry
Mrs. Rogers?
Paul
Yes. Secretary of War Stimson.
Fry
And Miss Eleanor Calnan of Massachusetts and Mrs. Louise P. Mayo of Massachusetts.
Paul
Is that the end?
Fry
That's the end of those listed in that litigation.
Paul
Yes, so there was a very—my recollection is that Dudley Field Malone, who was a very close friend and associate of Mr. [Woodrow] Wilson, and campaigned with him and had been given by him the position of Collector of the Port of New York. He was then married to one of the big Democratic political families in New York—I have forgotten what her name was. He showed every sign of being quite infatuated by Doris Stevens. I guess he was. You said twenty-six—[Tape off momentarily.] I am sure he got those women out, that's all I am trying to say.
The Presidential Pardon
FryOut of jail and pardoned? Wasn't that later on?
Paul
He knew Wilson so well.
[Interruption, housekeeper.]
Fry
This was July 19 when the President unconditionally pardoned sixteen women who had been sentenced on a technical charge to serve sixty days in a government work house at Occoquan. Everyone seemed to feel that the pardon was what we would today call a "cop-out" by President Wilson. (There is a good write-up here on the trial on page 7 of the Suffragist .)
Paul
Anyway Mrs. Hopkins, I think, took a very good position. She said they hadn't done anything they shouldn't have
Fry
And the very next day she went out and picketed and—I suppose was arrested?
Paul
No, she wasn't arrested.
Fry
Oh, there was a time right after that pardon when they didn't arrest anyone.
Paul
The only one who wasn't arrested that I know of was Mrs. Hopkins when she went out. Nothing would induce them to arrest her [laughter], because it brought up the whole question of whether Wilson did have the right to pardon them, you see.
Fry
Which was a legal question they didn't want to get into.
Paul
They certainly didn't want to. Her position was quite right. You can't pardon a person for something that you are not in position to be giving a pardon. I thought it was very gallant what she did. Then we went on with our regular picketing, and we were regularly arrested, as far as I can recall.
Fry
Things got livelier and livelier, it seems, as the summer wears on. The Suffragist carries comments of the police encouraging the attacks of hoodlums, and in one of them in August there is a note that you were knocked down three times and a sailor dragged you clear across the sidewalk trying to tear off your suffrage sash for a souvenir. And there were no police around.
Paul
Does it say that in there? That's another question [Mr. Gallagher asked]. I don't know where this man got all these things.
Fry
That's August 15.
Paul
And I said, "I don't think I have ever heard of it or remember a single thing about it—ever being thrown down—and I don't see how I could be thrown down and not remember."
Fry
Don't you remember even being kind of frightened by all these crowds around you?
No. I don't remember. Maybe I was was I was more sensitive I think, not to any of these crowds and that sort of thing, but to the general feeling over the whole country that you were the scum of the earth and all that.
Charlie—[tape off while Miss Paul talks to carpenter.]
Fry
The thing we haven't brought out here is that most of your banners were not inflammatory, that you were quoting President Wilson's own words, back to him. [Laughing.] I think we kind of missed that point here.
Other Consequences
PaulOf course, really you know, we weren't addressing President Wilson, we just were addressing the people of the country.
Fry
Yes.
Paul
To try to get those words over to the country.
Fry
Well, you had another big one on Bastille Day and then on through August, and in the meantime, in September, there was a so-called investigation of Occoquan Workhouse.
Paul
By some member of Congress?
Fry
No. This was the one written up in the Suffragist as just a whitewash. Dudley Field Malone was ready to be your counsel for it because in the meantime he had resigned [from Port of New York] in protest.
Paul
Yes, but who was conducting it?
Fry
The investigation was called by the District of Columbia commissioners? There was a hearing which was secret.
Paul
Was Dudley Field Malone conducting the investigation for us? Representing us?
Fry
He was representing the women who had been in Occoquan and some of the men too. He was prepared, but when he got up there, the Suffragist say that this hearing was secret and Malone refused to take part in a secret hearing; he wanted a public hearing.
Oh. yes. And he couldn't get it.
Fry
He couldn't get it. And what happened was that the board of charities gave a whitewashed report and Superintendent Whittaker was reinstated. By that time it was October 2. A lot of other women were in. There was a period there where they began to not send suffragists to the workhouse but kept them in the jail.
Paul
Yes, I thought in the beginning, they went to jail and only afterwards to Occoquan.
Fry
It seems to go back and forth. During this investigation they didn't send—
Paul
It seems to me that I was in prison toward the beginning, I know I was in with Mary Winsor and Lucy Branham I remember, and we were in the district jail.
Fry
This says on October 20 you were arrested.
Paul
October? No, but I think I was arrested before that. When was the time when I went in the psychopathic ward? I think that was the first time.
Fry
Well, I missed it if it was earlier than October 20.
Paul
Because this man [who interviewed me last week], Mr. Gallagher, told me all about that. And all about how this newspaperman who was close to the President came out to interview me and how they put me in the psychopathic ward and the head of St. Elizabeth's came to interview me. He must have gotten that all from the Suffragist . You haven't come across any of that?
Fry
That's in Jailed for Freedom
37. Doris Stevens Jailed for Freedom
Paul
You haven't come across it here in the Suffragist ?
Fry
Not yet. But you had been sentenced to seven months in jail.
Paul
No, but that wasn't the first time. That was the second time.
[Discussion of succession of jail terms.]
The first time, as I say, I remember, was in the [summer in the] very beginning of our going to prison, and Mrs. Lewis had gone up to see Mrs. Dora Hazard in Syracuse, who was the wife of that great man up there in Syracuse who had the Eastman Kodak Company and all those things, I think; she was on our advisory board, or something, or the New York City board, or something. Mrs. Lewis went up to see if she would advance the money [because] this was the time that we were put out of our old headquarters. You know, I told you about how the man came and said they couldn't have people going to prison—
Fry
Did he really put you out ?
Paul
Yes, I told you all that.
Fry
You said, off the tape, that your landlords were unhappy. I didn't realize that they really put you out of your headquarters.
Paul
Well, maybe we could have resisted, but we didn't. He came in, I remember so vividly, and I was in bed. I guess I was just lying down for a rest or something. And he came in and sat down, very courteous, a lawyer, I presume he was, and said that the estate he was representing would like to request us to leave as soon as we possibly could. It was embarrassing to them to have people going to prison from this building and connected with this whole affair.
So I said, all right, how much time would they give us and so on and we would go and immediately try to find another place and go as soon as we could. So we were , really, just put out.
Then we had the problem of finding a place and we couldn't find a place right away, so Mr. Dash—Herman Dash—you have probably come across him many times; he was a real estate man who was also a very good personal friend. He found a place just across the street on Lafayette Square, but just a little tiny—apartment more or less. So we transferred ourselves across there and put things in storage I guess somewhere—I don't know what else we did with our possessions. Maybe we left them in the Cameron House until we could really find a place.
Then we did find that the owners of this building that I think
But I remember Mr. Dash coming and saying, "Well, Mrs. Lewis has returned." She was our treasurer. I would love, in these things, to get some honor paid to all these wonderful women. So Mrs. Lewis [had] said she would go up and try to do the terrible thing of raising this sum of money. And she went up to see this Mrs. Hazard. Mr. Dash came down and asked if he could see me as a client of his—I don't know whether you say "client"; we were a real estate, not a law client or whatever you are.
So he came in and came up to my little row of cells and was assigned to a seat, and I think I went out and sat down beside him and he said, "Well, Mrs. Lewis has come back with the $8,000 we had to raise." I think it was $8,000 she raised, in addition to what we already had. So he said, "Now I can make out the check and we will take over the building." And that is when we moved into—not our present but our last headquarters.
Fry
That was where?
Paul
Just about where the Brookings is. Do you know where the Brookings is? Right down on Lafayette Square, about two doors down from the White House.
Fry
Oh, I see; well, Brookings has now moved to Massachusetts Avenue.
Did they. I didn't know that. It used to be the William Randolph Hearst residence. It was owned by his estate, I guess, or by somebody who had inherited it from him. And they asked this enormous rent and we raised it, and paid it. By the time we came out, we could go into our own headquarters where we stayed until the campaign was over. But that was very early in this campaign.
Attack on Headquarters
FryAnd it was after a crowd had tried to attack your previous house, too. Could you tell us anything about that? The night that a mob surged across Lafayette Square and—
Paul
Yes, but did you find that in here?
Fry
It is mentioned.
Paul
Well, what does it say there?
Fry
It will take me so long to find it; I don't know the exact date.
38. August 14, 1917.
Paul
Oh. it will?
Fry
Yes, but it mentioned that there was a pistol shot or some kind of a shot that went into the window—
Paul
That was very early in the period you have been going over. It was very early.
Fry
It sounded like it was fairly scary.
Paul
Well, I can remember that there was an actual invasion of our headquarters. The only time it ever happened. They did fire shots; some shots went, I think, through the windows there. I don't know that there was anything more than that.
Fry
It was shortly after the police chief had issued his ultimatum to you. It was within a little while after that.
Yes, I thought it was a little way after that. I remember when—very well—one of our members, who had been chairman of one of our committees—and these people were all assembling around there [outside] and there was lots of noise and so on. Without a word, I saw her get up and go out the door, and she never came back. [Laughter.] It was a very alarming thing, and people didn't want to be in any way associated, so it was, "Well, now, this is the limit. I am not going to be here any longer."
But I don't think any great violence was done to the building. People were very terrified, that was all.
House Resolution 171 by Representative Jeannette Rankin, October 5, 1917, as reprinted in Doris Steven's Jailed for Freedom Boni and Liveright, New York, 1929, p. 352-3
Alice in Prison
FryThe other thing I wanted to ask you about was your hunger strike. By November 24, you had gone thirty days without food. There's a note about that. And there's a lot in the Suffragist about the leader being imprisoned. You managed to smuggle out notes some way.
Paul
I guess this time I was in the psychopathic ward, wasn't I?
Fry
It doesn't say that yet, but you were smuggling out notes.
Paul
Well, I don't remember anything about smuggling out notes.
Fry
You don't? Well, they printed one from you in the Suffragist, and a lot of times your notes were things like telling people what to do to get ready for the December convention; in other words, business of the party.
And then suddenly, everybody was released. This time they were released on a writ of habeas corpusin a U.S. District Court in Virginia. This was by action of Dudley Field Malone, because he alleged that when you had been transferred to Occoquan, it was illegal.
Paul
I wasn't [transferred] to Occoquan, I was [transferred] to the psychopathic ward.
Fry
But a lot of the prisoners had been taken to Occoquan.
Paul
Yes, she was also in the psychopathic ward with me. The only person who was transferred to the psychopathic ward, but this was toward the end of the whole campaign. I think if I look in Mrs. Irwin's book, I can probably find this, easily.
Fry
We should mention in the record about this long quotation from you that Doris Stevens put in her book.
39. Doris Stevens Jailed for Freedom, Boni and Liveright, New York, 1920.
Paul
Read that to me, please.
[Tape off. Fry reads the passage.]
I certainly owed a lot to that Dr. White because it would have been so very easy for him to have given an adverse decision and I might still at this moment be in the St. Elizabeth [psychopathic ward].
Fry
That's right! That's a chilling thought.
Paul
And all that, I owe to Dr. [William A.] White.
Fry
We might point out that he is the one who first interviewed you, the "alienist."
Paul
Yes, but he was the head of St. Elizabeth's [Insane Asylum], you see, and I know that he gave an absolute, absolute statement [for my release] because he came up to see us later in the headquarters when I was there, and we got to know him fairly well. And he just completely, he said, would have nothing to do with it. He wouldn't in any way consent to have me transferred to St. Elizabeth. And he had the final say as the head of St. Elizabeth. So I have always felt the greatest sense of indebtedness to him. And so I am afraid [I might have stayed there forever—like many, many, many, many, many women over the country.]
Women in Mental Hospitals
PaulAll the time you were reading this I was thinking of a
She had come down to Washington about two years ago while I was there in Washington and I was called up—(Do you want to hear this or not? Maybe I am diverting you too much—I will say it very fast.) Well, she came to me (not that I think you can do anything about it but it is so typical of what is happening to thousands of women is what I mean). I was called up by the Annapolis Hotel and they said, "Somebody has arrived from Chicago and she wants very much to see you." And I said, "All right, please send her up." And it was quite early morning, and I said, "I will have breakfast for her and invite her as my guest." So she came up and then she told me this tale and that she had come to Washington because she could get no justice out in Illinois. Her husband when he divorced her had given her a very tiny little alimony on which she couldn't survive, and she was so harassed by being constantly threatened that they would put her in an insane asylum if she made any trouble for this judge. So she thought she would come to ask for help.
So I said, all right, first of all I would give her a little money; she said she had none at all, just enough to pay her bus fare down to Washington. So I did, a tiny little sum. Then I said we would entertain her for a while at the headquarters and not charge her anything and she could have her room and her meals there while she was looking around to see what she could do in Washington.
She wanted to go to her congressman and her senator. So I called up the congressman, Senator Percy's office, and made arrangements for her to go see both of those offices and be received; otherwise, I guess, she never could have gotten in. She did get in very easily in the congressman's office, and I think Senator Percy's
This all happened this previous time; we did everything. Absolutely everything that I could think of to do for a person to—but we didn't have much—you couldn't hold her down. She was fluttering here and fluttering there, and going hither and yon. She went over to the Supreme Court and wanted to speak to the chief justice and things like that. She went down to the attorney general's office and wanted to speak to the attorney general and she was each time being turned away as perhaps out of her mind.
So finally, one day, after about a week or ten days, something like that, she just announced she was going back to Illinois because her case was coming up. And I said, "I don't advise you to go back, because if you get into this court, they may put you in an institution." But she went anyway. And right away you forget these people, so I had forgotten even her name when she called me up just now.
She said, "Now I am back in Washington and I went up to the headquarters and the person who is there, who is named Miss Chittick, wouldn't have anything to do with me and just swept me out of the house. So I found a little colored maid there and she told me your telephone number and so I telephoned you on the long distance. I have rented a little tiny room out in the suburbs, from—" some name, sounded like a Polish name, long—long involved, lot of consonants thrown together—and she said, "They just want to get a little money so they let me come in for a week, but I have to pay this rent or I can't be even here. So now I want to come right up to see you."
And I said, "Well, I don't know that there is a single thing I can do from here, but if you will give me your number and so on I am going to see what I can do and I will try to." But you just come up against this helplessness of people, men as well as women, I am sure, who are being sentenced to these institutions. You know even our Mrs. Hilles, our wonderful Mrs. Hilles, died in some kind of an institution, and her daughter, probably it was money, I don't know what else. One only child was a daughter. Her husband had died, her daughter married a Catholic man.
Your position as leader of the National Woman's Party meant that if you had gone into St. Elizabeth Insane Asylum that you would have stayed there? It seems to me that surely they could have gotten you out.
Paul
Well, people are so apt to say, "Well, this lady unfortunately was very good in her way, but she was mentally unbalanced." People are apt to believe it, I am afraid. I know that there was absolutely nothing the matter with Mrs. Hilles, and I think the cruelty of her daughter's doing a thing like this, probably under the influence of her husband, and maybe under the influence of the church at this time, to get possession of her fortune—we don't know what motive animated them. You wouldn't think that it was possible when you know the record and type of Mrs. Hilles, that she could die in this institution. So I could have died in this institution, and be there this moment. So I think it was Heaven protecting me, I guess.
The Campaigning Goes On
FryShould we go on to some of the things that were going on outside of the prisons at that time?
Paul
Whatever you want.
Fry
You did have speakers going around all over the country. Wasn't there a train for suffrage?
Paul
Yes, we had two trains. The first was the Suffrage Special and then there was the Prison Special. The Suffrage Special was a group of women I think we took one car on a train, and we sent [women] like Mabel Vernon the same way she [had] organized for Sara [Bard Field in 1915], we had people in every state where the Suffrage Special would stop get up a big meeting. And you will find all that, of course, in the Suffragist . It was just to spread—another way of doing something different so as to perhaps get a little publicity on it.
Fry
And you had a very dramatic story to tell at this time.
Paul
And then came the next one, which was the Prison Special, in which we took the women who had been in prison. They
Fry
When you look at the chronology you can jump to the conclusion that your picketing was very effective because just right after your picketing got started Mr. J. A. H. Hopkins tells about talking with President Wilson [about July 18, 1917], and Wilson asked him what he thinks he should do about the suffragists and finally asks him if he think—
Paul
It was his wife, you know, who wouldn't accept a pardon. My, what a wonderful woman.
Fry
Wilson was considering making suffrage a war measure at that time. And he asked Hopkins if he could find out about what would happen if he decided to put in suffrage as a war measure and would he please find out how it would be received by both the Senate and the House. And then right during this time the House Judiciary Committee voted that only war emergency measures should be considered.
Let me run down the chronology for this period. The Senate, which had voted out the suffrage bill on May 15, finally reported it out again with a favorable report on September 15. But before that, on July 19, Wilson unconditionally pardoned the sixteen women. In the meantime the state of Maine lost its suffrage referendum something like two to one.
Back on the Hill on September 22 the House finally created a Suffrage Committee. That happened on September 22 from Chairman Pou. How did you pronounce that?
Paul
[Phonetically] Pew.
Fry
And this was interesting because President Wilson had finally asked Chairman Pou to consider his request to establish a suffrage committee just a few weeks earlier, after your picketing began. Then on October 6 the war session adjourned. (And that was also when you were first arrested.) It adjourned without suffrage being considered.
On October 25, Ohio loses a suffrage referendum. Women continue to be arrested. On November 12 there were forty- one arrested. (At least it is talked about in the November 12 issue; that may not be the exact date.)
Paul
That was the end of '17.
Fry
That was the end of '17. Then in December, I guess, you had your big meeting of the National Woman's Party.
Paul
Wilson made the announcement that he would support the Amendment. He went up to the Senate, you know, and made this—
Fry
That was the next December, you know. That was in 1918.
Paul
1919 was it?
[Tape off to straighten out chronology.]
—and constant insistence through the picketing were the two methods that we used.
Fry
And one was constantly opposing the Democrats, you were saying?
Paul
Well, the policy of opposing all the Democratic candidates, in all the suffrage states, I mean, using the votes of women to win it for us. We couldn't have made it political issue by opposing it in any of these other states which weren't even for it. I think that was the more important thing that we used, and because we had a constant supply of support from behind at home in the Senate and the House. Because as I said, I don't think anyone but [Senator] Borah ever opposed us, or ever voted against us. I don't remember anyone else from the suffrage state.
Fry
When Maine lost the suffrage referendum in September—
Paul
So many of these lost. Pennsylvania lost and New Jersey lost it. You had so many of these go against us.
Catt Backs the Federal Amendment, September, 1917
FryIn the suffrage magazine of September 15, Carrie Chapman Catt says, in response to the Maine loss, that all
Paul
That's wonderful. Now when did she say that?
Fry
That was in September of 1917, after Maine lost but before the New York referendum.
Paul
That's simply amazing that, she finally did come out for it.
Fry
And I think England, at that point, had finally won equal suffrage; Russia had it and Canada was about to have it.
Paul
I know, but Mrs. Catt had opposed us for so long that I don't remember that [laughing] she ever did come out. That was 1917? Really? In the midst of war.
Fry
Well, I wonder if she ever really did?
Paul
Well, you say she said so.
Fry
[Reading.] She says that " in the near future " that they would do this. Maybe they never did?
Paul
I think at that time they were all working in the defense [effort] and maybe they thought that they could make some kind of a bargain about that. My goodness, as you recall all this, I realize what a very great resistance Mr. Wilson put up to something that he said he believed in.
Fry
[Laughter.]
Paul
Almost impossible to believe.
Fry
I wonder what he did with things that he opposed ?
Paul
Yes. Exactly. [Laughter.]
Fry
Well, later on Jeannette Rankin performed another service. She got the House to pass a resolution appointing a committee of seven to investigate Occoquan just at the end of the session, so I guess that that investigation came up—
Paul
And then, you know, the only member of Congress that
Fry
Oh, I thought—well, Jeannette Rankin visited it a couple of times, according to the Suffragist .
Paul
I don't think so, because I asked her about it the other day and she said, "No, I never went out there."
Fry
Oh, really? Well, there is a profile of her given in the Suffragist sometime in the fall of 1917, one of those issues, and it mentions in there that she had visited the women, either in jail or in Occoquan.
Paul
Well, then, of course, if it is in the Suffragist I am sure it is true, but she had evidently forgotten it the way [laughing] I have forgotten being thrown down. Because she told me that. She said she was sorry she never went but she never did. But I do remember Lindberg (we didn't know the famous son then) because he was a member of Congress, and he was the only one that I ever recall that went out to really see what was going on in the prison when all this fuss was being made.
President Wilson Comes Around
Fry[Reading.] Well, I do have a date to announce: that on October 25 Wilson publicly endorsed suffrage as a war measure.
Paul
When did he do that, in a speech to Congress or what?
Fry
I don't know how he did it, but it could not have been in a speech to Congress if Congress had adjourned its war session; I don't think there was anything going on.
Paul
I would consider that you would maybe mark that as one of the high points for Consuelo.
Fry
Do you remember that great day?
Paul
No, I don't remember it at all. We knew that he was coming along but I don't recall any one day when something happened.
Fry
Well, I guess there were a lot of indications by that
Paul
Yes. But which particular day—the time that he made it public to the world was when he went up to the Senate and made this appeal. Of course that was almost the end of the campaign.
That was a great speech. We have had it mimeographed and all through our present [Equal Rights Amendment] campaign we have been circulating it, to show what one President did for equality for women, to try to encourage the others.
Fry
[Searching.] Here it is on page 6 of the Suffragist, Saturday, November 3.
Paul
He made the speech before the Senate?
Fry
No, he did not. You were in prison, incommunicado. On October 25, 1917. That's why you weren't in on it.
Paul
I wasn't in prison when he made that speech though.
Fry
President Wilson was speaking to a delegation of New York women who asked him to encourage the voters of New York state. (Oh, this isn't the Amendment.) He endorsed suffrage "for the women of this nation as a war measure." He stated clearly that "the war burdening the country cannot excuse the leaders of any party in neglecting the question women are pressing upon them." And he says, "The world has witnessed the slow political reconstruction and men have generally been obliged to be satisfied with the slowness of the process, but I believe that this war is going to so quicken the convictions and the consciousness of mankind with regard to political questions that the speed of reconstruction will be greatly increased, and I believe that just because we are quickened by the questions of this war we ought to be quickened to give this question of woman's suffrage our immediate consideration."
Now he knew that legislation (the article goes on to point out) in New York state lies outside of his power. He knew too that "millions of women and men who demand that he pass a federal amendment in the next session were listening to him." So he "set out the case for national suffrage like a political leader who sees the side he must take on a national issue while at the same time he bade godspeed to the New York election, required by the occasion. His statement assures suffragists of
Paul
Well, then in the December session, he probably made this appeal, the speech I remember.
[Tape off.]
Fry
This particular volume of the Suffragist has a lot of the first-hand notes from women in prison and we can encourage people who use your manuscript to look it up here. I noticed here some prison notes of Rose Winslow, and here are some by Mrs. Mary A. Knowland describing that "night of terror," which was November 14.
Paul
Oh, she would be a very good person. I told you—remember— that when I went to Florida, when I was talking about age— that the oldest picket was the one who came up and volunteered. That's that Mrs. Knowland.
We used to have so many pictures. We [released] the photograph of the oldest and the youngest picket.
Fry
Did somebody in National Woman's Party know Mr. Joseph— how do you pronounce his name—Tumulty?—
Paul
Tumuolty. Frye —who was private secretary to Woodrow Wilson?
Yes, what about him?
Fry
Well, apparently he told members of the National Woman's Party in December, "Of course I am with you" and promised to speak to the President about the federal amendment.
Paul
No, but—I know he was Wilson's secretary—Tumulty was [also] the personal lawyer for our Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller and her family, you know. Senator Guffey of
Fry
Well, apparently somebody was able to arrange a deputation to Tumulty, senior.
Paul
December 26.
Fry
What year?
Paul
Let's see. [Reading from Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying ] What year? [Laughter.] Too bad that they don't put the date of the year on the top of each page or something. Well, let me see if I can find the year [tape off] the Senate passed the suffrage amendment. But what [ever] year it is, I have the date, and it was, if you look, September 26 it was.
Fry
Well, the Amendment passed the House January 10, 1918. So maybe that was in September of 1918.
Paul
But in the Suffragist, could you see the year you are on?
Fry
The President's speech there just before the Senate almost passed it, is on page 7 of the October 12, 1918, issue.
Paul
Well, I think you ought to mark that for Consuelo. Another highlight.
It lost by two votes.
Fry
After five days of debate?
Paul
Yes, is that it?
Fry
And this eleventh hour appeal by the President.
Paul
That was an eloquent and marvelous speech. As I say, we had it so many times mimeographed and sent over the country as far as we could. That was really the culmination of the battle.
The Finale
The Battle in the Senate
PaulI notice in this book it says that hereafter, having gotten the President, we turned our picketing to the Senate because that was our next obstacle.
We were two votes short. The President first went up and made the speech, and then over in Versailles he cabled back here for the last vote, Senator Harris of Georgia.
Fry
Yes, for the final vote. All this time you were continuing your—
Paul
We continued to picket now the Senate because the President was no longer—we had no longer any enemy there.
Fry
Did you move the locale of your picketing over to the Capitol or to the Senate Office Building?
Paul
No, we just picketed on the steps of the Senate Office Building.
Fry
Right up to the time that the President made his speech, you were burning his words in the park. Did you personally participate in any of that?
Paul
No, but I—we had a very beautiful picket line and I showed you the photograph of it. We went out from our headquarters to hold one of these speeches and on Lafayette Statue we began, "Lafayette we are here!" [Laughter.] And each time that a person got out "Lafayette we are here," she was promptly arrested. I was, I suppose, managing it, seeing they got there and everything, but I wasn't up making a speech. It was
Fry
Oh, that's beautiful. [Laughter.]
Paul
Putting a little flame and "Lafayette we are here!" [Laughing.] Then she was pulled down.
Fry
Yes, I see. She is holding it up very much like pictures of boys burning their draft cards today—hold it up high and put a match to it. But these are all dressed in white flowing gowns. It is the beautiful pageantry of it that is different from our protests today.
Paul
That really is lovely, don't you think? I mean it sounds sort of violent, " burning the President's words," but you see [laughing] it is not particularly so.
Fry
And there is not a big mob, they are all evenly spaced, much as they might be in a pageant.
Paul
But I remember I was way far out and suddenly was arrested.
I think maybe that's the time we were taken to the old abandoned workhouse [Occoquan].
Fry
Oh, were you arrested more than twice? I mean more than two or three times?
Paul
I think I was arrested three times, and the one you read about to me I think was the last. And I remember this one, which I hadn't gone out to be arrested, but I was. And I was imprisoned, I think. Of course, I remember being in the old abandoned workhouse. Elsie Hill was in that prison with me and also Hazel Hunkins. And then I think the first time [I was arrested] was when I was in with Mary Winsor, as I said, who made the prayer. I thought it was Lucy Branham, but you read she was in with me the last time.
Well, now we have gotten that date fixed and Wilson's speech. Now the only remaining thing is the two votes.
I know when the [successful] vote was, in the Senate—I know exactly where to look—the vote in the Senate was in June
40. June 4, 1919.
Fry
To get this chronology straight, the Amendment first passed the House, January 10, 1918, by a vote of 274 to 136, a two-thirds majority with one vote to spare. Exactly forty years to a day from the time the suffrage amendment was first introduced into Congress. That was the session that the Senate failed to pass it by two votes.
Paul
That was January, yes. Well, then the House met again and passed it in the spring of 1919, I think.
Fry
Yes, the House passed it again May 21, 1919, 304 to 89. And on June 4 it passed the Senate and was up for ratification.
Paul
I think the House voted on it twice that spring.
Supporters William Boise Thompson and William Randolph Hearst
FryYou had a mass meeting in Palm Beach, Florida. Do you remember Colonel William Boise Thompson who was chairman of the Ways and Means of the Republican National Committee?
Paul
I certainly do. He gave us $10,000.
Fry
Yes, and he said that "the story of the brutal imprisonment in Washington of women advocating suffrage is shocking and almost incredible. I became accustomed in Russia"—let's see, he had been a member of the United States Red Cross Mission in Russia—"to the stories of men and women who served terms of imprisonment under the czar" and so forth. And he says, "I wish now to contribute $10,000 to the campaign for the passage of the suffrage amendment through the Senate. One hundred
Paul
Yes, indeed, I will never forget it. And they telephoned up and said, "How many pickets had there been?" Because he was giving a hundred dollars for every picket who was imprisoned.
Fry
They telephoned to you?
Paul
I don't know whether it was to me, but anyway to the headquarters.
Fry
Did you know right off the top of your head, how many there had been?
Paul
No, we had to scurry around and find out how much it was. [Laughing.] This was Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, who was our national treasurer, you know. She organized the meeting down in Palm Beach, and didn't know Mr. William Boise Thompson at all, but he walked into the meeting. And then she telephoned up—I suppose it was she because she got up the meeting—and asked us to find out quickly. (We didn't know, I believe,) how many people had ever been in prison. So we quickly got the number and phoned down to her. And then she went to Mr. Thompson and said this is the number so then it came to $10,000.
Fry
I see you had the support of William Randolph Hearst in editorials calling for suffrage.
Paul
Oh, always from William Randolph Hearst, always. Always, never failed. You know his mother, Phoebe Hearst, was one of the greatest women of the country and was a great leader in the suffrage campaign. When we formed our little branch out in California she was a friend of Mrs. William Kent and helped with forming our Woman's Party branch.
Fry
Yes, that makes sense.
Paul
And you know that set of furniture we have down there was given by Mr. Hearst, you know that don't you?
Fry
Where, Belmont House?
Paul
Yes. It was made by slaves down on a plantation in Louisiana. Mrs. Hilles had always been in political life because her father had been such a great secretary of state, Senator Bayard, you know. Secretary of State Bayard. One of the greatest secretaries of state we
We have had it re-covered twice. When we were re- covering it the last time, Mrs. Longwell—and I think you must know all this—wrote to Mr. Hearst and went personally to his office in New York to say that since this is a set that your father (the present William Randolph Hearst) gave in memory of your grandmother and it is getting pretty dilapidated, and we would like, if we could get a modest estimate for putting it back in shape, if you would be willing to pay for it.
And she thinks that—she was under the impression that the answer was yes, find out what it would cost and so on. I don't think she ever saw him personally, but I think this was the reply she got from his office. So then she got an estimate and sent it up and the reply came back very cold, everything connected with donations from the Hearst family is in the hands of a Hearst Foundation or something. And no interest was manifested at all. So finally Mrs. Longwell and her friends, Wanona McGuire and some others, Wanona McGuire's sister, mainly, I think, paid for it themselves.
But he was always—the Hearst paper always helped us. And Mrs. Hearst was always a member—that is Mrs. William Randolph Hearst.
The Last Votes
FryTo go back a moment, I think I have found that first
Paul
That's the time I told you about when Maud Younger and I went and talked to these two men, Curtis and Gallinger, that's right.
Fry
Yes, it says the Republicans, led by Senator Gallinger, provided skirmishes from time to time. And the administration was accused on the floor of blocking action. Alice, did you think there were two votes lacking when it was up for the next vote October 1 of 1918, after the President's address to the Senate?
Paul
Well, of course, I guess everybody knew there wasn't.
Fry
Why couldn't you have postponed the vote that time too? [It lost, 62 to 34—two votes short.]
Paul
Well, we didn't postpone it the first time. The Republicans thought it was better and they postponed it.
Fry
Then on February 10, 1919, it was introduced in the Senate and it lost by one vote. So it was reintroduced, and in the meantime Woodrow Wilson came back from Europe.
What I wanted to get down, Alice, was the way that apparently they changed the wording a little bit to get the vote of Senator Gay of Louisiana, in February of 1919 I think.
Paul
I know. They did, you see. It was on states' rights, you see, again.
Fry
And the National Woman's Party—
Paul
—would have nothing to do with it.
Fry
So it never came to a vote, because Senator Weeks of Massachusetts, who was a Republican anti-suffragist, objected. And then Senator Sherman of Illinois, a Republican suffragist, objected. And then the session was closed so it did not pass the Senate.
Telegram from Alice Paul to Anne Martin
The Battle in the House
PaulI want the Suffragist .
Fry
The 1919 Suffragist ? I am going to read from your editorial that says on January 10, 1918, the vote on the suffrage amendment in the House of Representatives was 274 to 136, only one vote more than required. And on May 21, 1919, it was 304 to 89, 42 more than the required two-thirds. Again the greatest support for the Amendment is from the West.
Paul
Well, in that article, then, they must give an account of it.
Fry
Do you want me to go ahead and read it?
Paul
Not the editorial.
Fry
Here is a mention of the introduction of the Amendment. It was introduced by six members in the House—
Paul
No, I don't mean that. Is that when it passed?
Fry
Yes. It tells about it being referred to the Woman Suffrage Committee. You are particularly interested in the House?
Paul
I'm very interested in the House because that is when they struck out the seven years, you see.
41. A seven-year deadline for ratification. This limitation had been added also to the Equal Rights Amendment when it passed Congress just before this interview—over strong objections from Alice Paul.
Fry
[Searching.] See, this article says that in the House there were no hearings. On Tuesday morning, May 10, the first meeting of the committee was held and it was decided to report it favorably. [Pause.] It doesn't mention [a seven-year clause].
Paul
You haven't the article I am talking about.
[Tape off.]
Fry
Why don't you just go ahead and tell what happened.
Don't you want to go into that seven-year clause that was attempted?
Paul
I was just going to show it to you, try to show it to you [laughing], but it doesn't seem to be in this issue.
Fry
So I think you ought to tell it to me and let me get it down on tape because it is something that needs to be hunted up later. We need to have a record of it here.
Paul
Well, I will tell you all I can remember. That when it did come up—whatever date, and I don't know when the date was. I rather thought it came up twice in the House—
Fry
In May
42. January 10, 1918, and May 21, 1919.
Paul
It was the first time that it came up after a new session began you know, with the Republicans, and the prohibition amendment having just had the seven years put in. Mr. Gard of Ohio arose and just moved the addition of the words "provided that it is ratified within seven years." And the whole chamber resounded with cries of "Shame!" And it was voted down.
And then on the next page was a little statement that we had in—I don't see why I can't find it here—by Mrs. Wadsworth—it was the top of the next page. (And I had it copied so many times, is the reason I remember, in Washington to use it with people I couldn't seem to move very well.) At the top of the next page was a statement by Mrs. Wadsworth [head of the anti-suffragists] withdrawing all sort of efforts to defeat the Amendment, having lost the seven years. Because, as she said, "With no time limit, the women would keep on and on and on until they will undoubtedly ratify this. There is nothing further we can do. We have lost our campaign." Later I used her statement trying to try to show these women how they were misjudging the importance of the seven years they were trying to put on.
Fry
Later on in the ERA.
Paul
How these present women were trying to put it on [the ERA] and how they were making a mistake. Perhaps they
Fry
Okay. And now—
Paul
Now ratification—we went along fairly quickly, I think. We began immediately, the very next day, and appointed a committee headed by Mrs. Lawrence Lewis to head the ratification campaign. The states that we had to go to we went to, from the national headquarters.
[We didn't go to] the states where the campaign was very easy, such as, I remember, Iowa, where Senator Cummins of Iowa said he would give me one postage stamp, and "That's all the campaign would cost you, because I will"—he was a very powerful man in the state of Iowa apparently and powerful politically, and so he said, "I will have this brought immediately before the legislature and you won't have anything to do." So we didn't go into Iowa. Iowa ratified right away. If I remember, Wisconsin was the first state to ratify, I think it was. The father of the president of the suffrage organization came down— his name was James—came down to Washington with the ratification to get it in number one.
And so it went along pretty happily. We lost, for instance, in some states, and finally when—we lost in Connecticut, we lost in Virginia, we lost in Maryland, we lost in Delaware.
Fry
That Delaware battle was quite a long heart-breaking one because there for about three or four weeks, it looked like Delaware was going to be the state that would have the distinction of being the final state to ratify and put it into effect. And then it fell through.
Paul
Well, when we were getting down to the very end, of course, it dragged along, because we finally got it as you know through President Wilson conferring with the governor of Tennessee and asking him—as a fellow Democrat—to call the legislature. And then that was a long and very dramatic campaign—I think maybe Mrs. Irwin gave an account of it in this book
43. Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying
Well, that's about the essence of the ratification campaign. It was August 28, 1920, and it was submitted to the states in June, 1919. So it took us from June 1919 to August, very little over a year.
Fry
And that was just in time for the women to vote in the presidential election of 1920.
Paul
It was between Harding and Cox, of course. Harding was the Republican candidate. So we went out and had deputations to him, deputations to Cox and all those things.
Fry
Well, let's see. How many states was it? Thirty-six?
Paul
Thirty-eight.
Fry
Thirty-eight that was required, and you—
Paul
It took thirty-six then, thirty-eight it takes now.
Fry
You got thirty-five fairly rapidly. Why did it take so long to get that last state? Was there more resistance?
Paul
I wouldn't say that it went so rapidly. It went along, but we tried in a good many states to finally consummate it when we got up to thirty-five. Of course, that was the place—that's exactly what the seven years can do to us, you see—they could hold you off and get enough counter states to defeat you.
Fry
In the ERA, exactly.
Paul
I do want to have that preserved about that vote, and when we are through all this, I will take it and try to see, if my eyes are a little less fatigued. Maybe I could find it.
Fry
Well, there's a chance that it might be in that first vote in the House, which was—
Paul
No, it wasn't.
Fry
The first time it passed the House?
Paul
No, no, no, no, no. It was the vote that was taken in
Fry
It wasn't the 1918 vote?
Paul
No, the 1919 vote because it was then that they withdrew. This was the last vote before we went to the states for ratification, and the organization against votes for women withdrew from the campaign then, at the beginning of the ratification campaign, because they said, "We are now defeated. We can never, never defeat this unless we have that seven years' limitation." It was clearly true that if we were defeated in seven years, we would have tried eight years, nine years, and ten years. And they said that is something that the [suffragist] women will accomplish.
Ratification
FryWhat sort of campaign organization did you have for ratification? Did you just continue with your same organization?
Paul
Yes.
Fry
Did people tend to zero in on states like Delaware and Tennessee that were the hoped-for final states?
Paul
Well, Delaware wasn't exactly the hoped-for final state in my opinion. It was— any state. We were hoping to get Connecticut. I remember the same time we worked in Delaware because it was a little state and it was Mrs. Hilles' own state, you see, and her brother was a senator and her father had been secretary of state from there and it was a powerful political party. We had all the women's organizations there back of us. I went up there and stayed through most of the campaign in Delaware and the DuPont family were backing us. Nearly every DuPont woman was on our board up there. And there was a Senator Al Lee.
Mabel Vernon doesn't remember the Delaware campaign for ratification, but the Suffragist shows that she did work
Paul
She didn't ? Yes, she was the key to it.
Fry
You will have to tell about that, [laughing] because she didn't remember it.
Paul
How extraordinary. I don't see what she could remember if she couldn't remember Delaware.
Fry
She remembered the suffrage campaign but not ratification.
Paul
You see, Mrs. Hilles was state chairman and she conducted the campaign in Delaware. And I know that Mabel went up to help her and went over the state, and Betty Gram Swing went up and went all over the state. I went up, and Mrs. Lawrence Lewis went up, a great many of us because it was a small state and we thought it wouldn't be difficult. And the National American Woman Suffrage Association there worked in complete—completely with us. There was no conflict at all. We knew the president very well and she worked just as harmoniously as anybody else. But we lost it anyway. They didn't vote us down, they just didn't act.
They just had so many problems about their orchards and their pruning of their [laughing] trees and their peach trees and so on. We went almost all over the state into every little village and it seemed to me we talked to almost every woman in the state, but they were absorbed in their own agricultural problems and such things.
Fry
The Suffragist mentions that there was an argument going on in Delaware between the head of the Republican party there and the Republican governor. There were two factions in the party. The governor was very strong for suffrage, and the chairman of the state Republican committee was determined to fight the governor on every issue, and so he fought ratification.
Paul
Does it say that in the Suffragist ?
Fry
Yes, I think it was one of your editorials in the Suffragist . I wondered if you might remember that.
Paul
I don't see how that could be—
Fry
Dan Layton, state chairman of the Republican party in Delaware, was opposing the suffrage amendment because
Paul
Yes, I didn't realize that there was a—I hardly see how that could have been; and I don't think I wrote an editorial to that effect. Somebody else must have written it. Because I think the DuPont family were all Republicans and that was a very powerful family; and this Al Lee family were all Democrats and that was the other great political family. And I remember talking to the governor myself. I think he was a Republican.
Fry
Yes, and he was all for it.
Paul
I know he was.
Fry
And even the national Republican committee held a meeting and passed a resolution for the Delaware state committee to get behind suffrage, and they still wouldn't do it. But the governor continued in his support.
Paul
As I say, as I recall, they didn't vote. They just let time slip by with their agitation over other subjects.
Fry
Yes. Then on June 23 President Wilson appealed to Tennessee in a telegram to Governor Roberts.
Paul
That's right.
Fry
I wanted to ask you, were you very worried about all the matters that were going through the courts at this time? There was a question that came up of whether women could be allowed to vote in the election because the states hadn't had time to pass their election qualification laws to cover women, like the poll tax and the literacy test.
Paul
Well, you see, it was put in the Amendment itself, "Congress shall have the power to enforce this by appropriate legislation" or something like that. We went to see Senator Walsh of Montana, who was supposed to be the greatest constitutional lawyer, and we asked him what should we do to provide for what you are talking about. And he said, "Oh, you do nothing. There is no question about this at all, this will go. We don't have to consider this. Congress is not going to take any action directing the states what to do, they will do what they want—each state do what it wants." So we never had any trouble about that.
The Supreme Court did rule in your favor in one state—I think it might have been Ohio, if I remember. And it ruled in your favor before the election.
Paul
There was some technical point, and in that case Mrs. Lawrence Lewis got her son, who was this young lawyer as I told you, if not in the firm, he knew very well William Draper Lewis, who was the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a great constitutional lawyer. So Mr. William Draper Lewis and his son, Shippen Lewis, and I think they got a third lawyer, they just handled that Ohio case for us so we didn't bother with it.
Fry
The thing I noticed was that you had said, in the Suffragist that you'd better get two more states, just in case the ratification in these states [are invalidated by the courts].
Paul
Well, we did. We got one more and that was Connecticut.
Fry
After Tennessee, right.
Paul
Well now it seems to me that as far as your thing, that you really have covered the whole field pretty well from the beginning to the end.
What Next?
Alternatives
FryWell, I notice that right after it was ratified there was a series of articles and meetings called "What Next?" in the Suffragist, talking about what to do.
Paul
Then, you see, what we had to consider was, should we dissolve because we had been formed just for this [suffrage], or should we continue. And we really—I think I would have dissolved it because you just reach a point of such extreme fatigue you can hardly go any [laughing] longer, you know. Anyway I didn't want to go ahead and take the responsibility of raising any more money, and I had the responsibility, I thought, of paying up all our bills at the end of the suffrage campaign because we had about $10,000 of bills we had to pay.
So Maud Younger and I took a tiny apartment together and we started out. She didn't try to raise the money, but she started to help so we could have a little place to live and try to get the new organization started. Elsie Hill was made the new chairman, you know. I didn't even go on their new board because I wanted to be so free. So that took about half a year, of just raising the money to get the bills paid. Maybe a year, I don't remember exactly how long it took us to pay it all off. But we did.
And during that period we tried to find a permanent headquarters where we didn't have to be subject to our landlords putting us out and also having to pay such an immense amount for rent as we had been paying—$1,000 a month you know, for some period. At the beginning of this period, when we were raising this money and so on, we started in on putting the suffrage statue in the
At that convention, many people came. For instance I remember Miss Jane Addams came, and she said, "We hope you will just merge in with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and devote all your time now to peace." And a great many of our members wanted us to go into the peace movement.
A great many members, for instance Lucy Burns, she just said, "I don't want to do anything more, I don't want to be on any board or any committee or have anything more to do, because I think we have done all this for women and we have sacrificed everything we possessed for them and now let them—They say they want all these things, better salaries and better positions, and married women the right to work and married women the right to have their own earnings and married women the right to be employed by the government even if their husbands are employed,"—she said, "let them fight for it now. I am not going to fight for these married women any more." And she didn't. She never—I don't know if she even came to our final convention. From that time on she never gave any help, and she was a very devout Catholic, and I think she devoted herself entirely to her family and her church, until about a year ago, she died.
So at this last meeting perhaps the person who did the most to get us to continue was Mrs. Donald Hooker, our state chairman in Maryland. She was very eager to go on. She said the Woman's Party was a peculiar type of women that, if they should all disband, we'd lost that type of women who is so devoted to building up a respect and so on and a belief in the power of women. We can't afford to lose it. So Elsie Hill was made the first chairman, and Mrs. Hooker pretty soon was made the national chairman.
Fry
Let's see, was Mabel Vernon the secretary at that point? No, Mabel went to Europe at this point and then she didn't come back until about 1924 or '25 and at that point she became secretary of the Party.
Paul
Did she?
Fry
[The masthead of Equal Rights shows her as secretary]
In the meantime, Alice, was there ever any thought given to joining with NAWSA, now that the vote was won, in the League of Women Voters that they were forming?
Paul
Oh, no. You see, almost immediately we went to this meeting in Paris that I told you about,
44. See above.
Fry
She didn't stay that long, but she did go for a little while.
Paul
The only time I knew of her going was for this meeting in Paris where she made this remarkably wonderful and moving speech.
Well, we could hardly think of merging with this group that was keeping us out of the international world, and if we hadn't been asked by the International Council of Women we wouldn't have been in the international movement at all, unless we'd formed our own group. And here we were being kept out of this organization on the grounds that we were standing for complete equality while they stood for protective labor legislation and protection of women in all fields. Well, we could never merge with them. So I never heard of anybody proposing that.
But I should say that the biggest movement was to have us disband—the people who said they were too tired to go on themselves and they didn't know anybody else who would take up such a big burden (that was Lucy Burns' idea as I said)—and the people who were determined to have us go into the peace movement which was a very, very big movement. I mean not the peace movement was such a big movement, the desire to substitute peace for equality was a big movement in our group.
Yes, I think that's where Sara Bard Field left your group.
Paul
Well, she never formally left it.
Fry
Not formally
Paul
You see she had never been in the—every time we asked her to do anything [special] she would do it, but I don't think that she ever was one who took any responsibility, other than that. I never was conscious of her leaving because she was always, we supposed, still—just as when we went to her at the time of the founding of the United Nations and took for granted that she would of course be with us, and she was. She agreed right away to do everything; she always agreed to do whatever we asked her to do. But we never had her go forth, we'll say, like Maud Younger on her own initiative into taking any leadership.
Fry
She was kind of your special speaker and person who—
Paul
She was somebody who believed in us and supported us and every time we needed her help and asked for it she gave it. And her greatest gift in our movement was her speaking ability.
So we had all these little meetings of the branches and then we had the convention. At the convention I remember Miss Jane Addams getting up and from the floor saying, "I hope you will all decide to join in with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, make that your future." And Crystal Eastman went with a very involved feminist program. I don't know whether she went to the convention, but she drew it up beforehand, to be presented to the convention, which she felt was an extremely good one. But it was—well, we didn't give a second thought to it. It was more embracing everything that Russia was doing and taking in all kinds of things that we didn't expect to take in at all. [Pause.]
Debts and Transition
PaulI think Mrs. Belmont wanted us to continue. When we finally decided and voted that we would continue (she wasn't at the convention) and that we would get a headquarters, then we signed all these notes for the
I told you that we had this meeting in New York beginning to raise money again—this awful raising of money, such an awful task. I was staying with [Mrs. Belmont] on Long Island that day, and we drove in together to the meeting in the home of Mrs. Havemeyer, who was a very wealthy woman, very wealthy, and one of our members, had gone to prison with us. So then Mrs. Belmont got up and said, "I will pay off all the notes." You know that; I have told you that before.
Fry
Is that the $10,000 that you were talking about that you owed?
Paul
Oh, no, no. This was the $155,000 that we signed for to pay for the new headquarters.
Fry
Where?
Paul
The headquarters that was the old brick capitol. You see, prior to that we had rented the headquarters down on Lafayette Square. And the moment that we were through, the February 15 meeting, had had our convention, we moved out. I remember that I spent the last night in the headquarters with Katherine Morey. There was nobody left but Katherine Morey and myself as far as I can remember. And we were packing and moving everything that we could.
We first had a sale at the headquarters and Mabel Vernon I think was the auctioneer. Of course she was always our best speaker at everything I think. So we auctioned off everything that we owned because we didn't know whether we could get another headquarters or afford it or anything because then we were faced with paying off all our debts. I was faced with it anyway. So I remember our kitchen, which was well-equipped—are you taking all this down or not?
Fry
Yee?
Paul
—because we had had a regular lunchroom and dining room where we'd served lunch and dinners, I think. And breakfast too I imagine. And it was very successful from the point of view of having very many people come to it. And this Lucy Branham's mother started it. I know she said, "Well, there is not one single thing I can do to help in this campaign, my daughter is so
So she opened one and it was a tremendous success because it was right on Lafayette Square, right by the White House. All the newspaper people, with the Bureau of Information for the government were in the neighboring building. So they all came in and had their lunch there. Practically all the newspaper people in the United States, it seemed to me, who were in Washington for the war, came in to our lunchroom.
So when we got to auction it off, I remember we got $1,000 for their dining room equipment, and its good will. So that is one of the ways we paid off our debts in the beginning.
Then still perhaps with $10,000 left to pay after we had paid off all these things, we just started in this tedious work of dollar by dollar, ten dollars by ten dollars, a hundred by a hundred, getting enough in to pay it all, which we did. And that went up until almost the time for—[pause] yes, that was after our convention because we had our convention at that headquarters, I remember. It was right after the convention we did that.
There was a unanimous vote at the convention when we finally took the vote, because people had talked it over so long and it was clear that so many people wanted to continue. So we felt, well, so many people want to continue. There was only one thing if we were going to continue: it was perfectly clear we never would, never would have it continue for anything excepting complete equality, to try to follow up the whole emancipation program of 1848 [Seneca Falls resolutions] and bring it to a conclusion. So that we were all agreed on at that convention.
Then there was the question of whether anybody would undertake it. And finally Elsie Hill said she would undertake it. And she took the chairmanship, and I stayed on and helped her until we paid off all the money and until we raised the money for the new headquarters. Then, since I wasn't on the board, I then stopped, more or less.
Could you tell again how you discovered the new headquarters and how you finally bought it, because that wasn't taken down [on tape] when you told me before.
Paul
The new headquarters? [Pause.] Before I leave the other point about selling the things: you see, a few things like the Susan B. Anthony desk that had been given to me in the beginning, and just a few of these things plus our records, was all that we moved out of the old headquarters. Everything else in the old headquarters—if it had been loaned, we returned it to the person; if it had been bought, we sold it. So we started almost over again without anything. The new little committee under Elsie Hill rented, I think, one or two very tiny offices— maybe one room or two rooms, I'm not sure—and just went on with the work in a formal way, not anything excepting answering the mail and doing the things you had to do, while I was raising the money to pay off all the old debt.
And all this period we felt if we were going to continue at all, we had to have a headquarters again. And we didn't want to continue with a thousand-dollar-a-month place we were in that was costing so much. So, we thought this new equality campaign would be pretty much centered on Congress rather than one specific thing that would be centered on the President. So we looked up around Capitol Hill and we found this building, which was quite a dilapidated building, which had been the home of Congress, as I told you, in the time of President Monroe who was inaugurated there, right after our capitol was burned down by the British.
Then it had been used as a prison for the officers and important prisoners in the time of the Civil War. Mrs. Serat [?] had been a prisoner there and it was wellknown as the prison where important prisoners were placed. Then it was used as a home by different people, the last one being Justice Field of the Supreme Court. His niece was Mrs. Charlotte Anita Whitney; it belonged to his estate. So she helped and cooperated with us in making the arrangements for buying it. And this same Herman Dash, who had come to see me that time in prison—I told you how Mrs. Lewis got $8,000 to complete the amount due on taking the place when we were put out of Dolly Madison House; I told you how we had to, and the only place we could find was this William Randolph Hearst place which some estate was renting for $1,000 a month; and I told you how Mr. Dash, when I was in prison (that must have been one of these earlier imprisonments) came
Fry
And that's where the present Supreme Court is, did you tell me?
Paul
Yes.
Fry
It was built in the 1930s—
Paul
It was destroyed to make way for the Supreme Court, this old building, which was a very sad thing to happen. You never can restore a building with that history. I remember one night some people came to stay at the headquarters and we put them upstairs in one of the rooms that we didn't use very often, and they came down in the middle of the night it seems, and slept out in the garden or something like that, and they said, [laughing] "What is the matter with that room that you put us in? All night we seemed to have some kind of ghosts or spirits talking about the Civil War and so on."
We had at that moment staying in our headquarters a person who was always herself—Edith Ames, she was then our national treasurer—seeing people and having them speak to her—what they called extra-sensory, isn't it? She was a perfectly normal person as far as anybody could see, but she would say, "Somebody did come and stand by my bed last night and they said this and this and this." There was—well, these people said, "There was not any question, that somebody came here and talked to us for hours about the Civil War."
We said, "Well, it was a prison in the Civil War and the prisoners from the South were imprisoned in
They said, "Well, they are certainly still imprisoned in that room, and we are not going back in that room again." [Laughter.] It was an extraordinarily interesting headquarters with all this—it was so full of the traditions of the time of the British coming and burning down our capitol and the congressmen being suddenly pushed out in the cold and having to go over there and Monroe had to be inaugurated in front of this old whatever it had been—an old tavern, I suppose, in the. beginning.
Fry
That's really fascinating in view of the renewed interest now in the extra-sensory world. Did this other couple know it was supposed to be haunted by ghosts?
Paul
Oh, no. They didn't know anything about it. I don't know— it was a couple—who they were, but I just remember some people. We might have had several rooms upstairs in that place, but they all had the same experience whoever the people were. [Laughing.] So it was an extremely interesting building anyway, when we sold it.
But I wouldn't put any of this, I think, in our present one [manuscript] because it seems to me [enough] if we end up with the ratification having gone through and the aid that the President did hold true to his statement that he would help us and see it through. He certainly did. I think made that ratification possible, and it was a hard fight, the ratification. It was a very, very, very, very, very hard fight.
And then [you can] state what we agreed to do, which was to adopt the old program of 1848. We had taken up one plank only, which was suffrage. Can you imagine how these women felt when we had these resolutions? You know, there are two pages of [Seneca Falls] resolutions of things they would work for in 1848. Well, the people [in our suffrage campaign] had pretty nearly killed themselves, had no money left and no strength left and no health left or anything, [laughing] like Lucy Burns more or less, to think up all these other things of 1848. It was, "Let those other women take up something, I am not going to take up any more." [Laughter.]
Equal Rights Amendment at Seneca Falls in 1923
FryWas this at your Seneca Falls meeting? You had another meeting at Seneca Falls like the original one [in July of 1923].
Paul
No, that Seneca Falls meeting was just to commemorate Seneca Falls. It was the seventy-fifth anniversary.
Fry
But you did submit an equal rights amendment wording.
Paul
Yes by that time I think I had gotten all my awful bills [laughing] out of the way and paid. It is just amazing that you can have a—I always sympathize at the end of these Republican campaigns, Democrat campaigns, because I know that somebody is being left with these awful bills. Because you really would have thought, with wealthy women like Mrs. Belmont and so on that, while certainly one couldn't be too grateful for all she did, after all they all sailed away on their own lives. Suffrage was won and now the thing is over. We certainly had a hard time then.
But I would end up, it seems to me, by saying that when the ratification was over, we celebrated by putting in the Capitol the statues of the great pioneers who in large measure had started the modern campaign at Seneca Falls [in 1848]. It was one of the really big things we did, because it was starting women to have a feeling of respect for women and by putting statues of women in the Capitol when it had always been a Capitol of men. Until Jeannette Rankin no woman was venturing into the—like you say venturing into the Cosmos Club. And that then when we had a convention on and presented the statue to the Capitol, the last thing that we did in the suffrage campaign was that we voted to go on. Elsie Hill was very gallant and courageous and took the leadership.
Well then by the end of two years had gone by, we sort of I guess [laughing] gathered up some more strength. And this was a really very wonderful meeting up at Seneca Falls. There we proposed not only would we work for equality but we would work for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution. And we started on that campaign. That's enough to finish up with.
Fry
And you did submit a wording of the amendment, which is in that issue of the Suffragist (or I guess, maybe it
Paul
The amendment read—I made the speech, you know, presenting this [amendment]. Of course, by this time I had recovered enough strength [laughing] I think to feel convinced that we ought to go ahead with the campaign and we ought to do it in the form of another amendment to have complete emancipation as our goal. So the amendment that I proposed—and I said, "This is just a tentative proposal because we have asked a good many lawyers to work on the form and so on, and the wording doesn't make much difference if we agree on what we want." So I presented this:
"Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction."
That said it all, and I said, "That's what we want, let's say what we want, and if they can find—"
That's when I started in to study law because I thought, "I can't do anything without knowing as much as the people who will be our opponents. I don't know anything whatsoever about law."
So I then went up and lived at the headquarters and early morning about six I went to the American University and enrolled in the law department, and I got my bachelor's degree in law,
And then I thought, "I really don't know much, I must say, still about law, as far as being able to cope with the people who say you can't have any such amendment as that." So you see we went around from person to person who was supposed to be a great authority I went up myself to see Dean Pound at Harvard, who was supposed to be the greatest authority on constitutional law in the country, and Mrs. Lewis had her son work on it, and Elsie Hill met her husband when she and I went down to see him in the George Washington University law school to ask him to work on some kind of an amendment to the Constitution.
Fry
You mean, a man she later married?
Paul
Yes, her later husband. That's where she met him. Everybody drew up things, and we knew they wouldn't do. But I thought I wasn't very well-equipped to be
So then the Judiciary Committee of the Senate paid no attention to us at all. We went to all the national conventions of the Republican party and the Democratic party that intervened, and the first hearing we had in 19—this is just for your information you know, not for this article—but 1923 was the first hearing on the subject of the new amendment, and the amendment was "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction."
Well, at that hearing—and this seems almost impossible to believe—all the women's organizations that came now with the votes in their hands so they counted for something (while before nobody paid much attention to us or to anybody else when we went to hearings because we were all voteless) now became a great power, even more power in the minds of the congressmen and the senators than they really had, because they didn't have back of themselves any united, strong group that would always stand together on this subject. But they got up and spoke and the congressmen certainly felt they had power then. All of them spoke I think against the Equal Rights Amendment. And if they didn't speak against us they remained silent. They didn't speak for us. So we were the only group that spoke for the Equal Rights Amendment when it was first put in.
The Biggest Obstacles
PaulThen we saw just what Lucy Burns and all these people thought we would find. Our problem would not be the Senate and Congress and the President, because now we were voters and had this power; but it would be changing the thought of American women because more than half the country were now new voters, and if the new voters through
So we started then to one convention after another after another and kept it up until this year. We are still keeping it up, the last one being the League of Women Voters and the one before that the AAUW [American Association of University Women]. I have told you all this, I think, before.
Fry
Well, yes, and I remember myself taking long lists of women's organizations to use with congressmen for you. By 1971 huge numbers had gotten behind the Amendment.
Paul
I know, but you see our task through these years was this monotonous one of getting these women to change their minds to make them see what this principle meant and so on. So that's what has taken, more or less, all these years to do.
Well now, we went to convention after convention of the political parties. It was in 1940—this is just in case you are interested, all for your own information.
Fry
This is marvelous, Alice, to give me a good overview of this.
Paul
Well, in 1940 for the first time we got in the Republican platform. Then in 1944 we got it in the Democratic one. That was a very hard-fought fight. Then we had it in both. Well, by that time Congress began to—
Fry
When did Republicans—?
Paul
1940. 1944—Democrats. And that's when we finally began to work with Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller because she was so prominent in the Democratic party. She came in and joined us then and laid our fight before the Democratic National Convention to put it in the platform, and we got it in.
Wording the Amendment
PaulWell, then Congress began to pay more attention to us. It was in the political party platforms, and the Judiciary Committee of the Senate began seriously to consider the wording.
I remember going myself to—while I was not national chairman I went down whenever I could to try to help—I went in to see Senator Burton, I remember, from Ohio, who was on the Supreme Court later. At that time he was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I went to talk about how it could be worded. I remember him saying, "Well, Senator Austin of Vermont, who is perhaps the most concerned man on the Judiciary Committee, and I have worked and worked and worked and worked and we still cannot find the wording that we think will express what you want."
So this went on. We had asked Dean Pound, and the versions that everybody had given us we knew enough at least about law to know we didn't want it. A great deal of this responsibility fell on me because I was now beginning to know a little bit about law, you see. So I think it was in 1943 that finally we took a draft to— Mrs. Broy went with me; she didn't know very much about it but she was our political chairman so she went with me—to see Senator Austin. We handed him a draft, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged"
45. The Amendment read, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress and the several states shall have the power, within their respective jurisdictions, to enforce this article by appropriate legislation..." It was to take effect five years after ratification.
So Mrs Broy and I then went up to Senator O'Mahoney's office. He was just departing for Wyoming where he lived,
Then we were asked to make sure that the women of the country who had already (in a few cases, not many, but a few organizations had) endorsed the old amendment, "Men and women shall have equal rights," these two men said, "We don't want to put this in and then find that the women won't stand back of us. So will you get the signature of the responsible person in every woman's organization that has endorsed the old amendment ('Men and women shall have equal rights') saying that they approve of the new amendment." So that's what we started and did.
We drew up a paper with the new proposed amendment addressed to the Senate Judiciary and called up each women's organization or had them come to see us, or in some form or other had them consider it, and we got a page of signatures of all these different women's groups. None of them knew enough to have any objection! Especially when we said we thought we could get the Senate Judiciary to support this. You see, the difference was, the old one said, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." They took the position that while they personally were for equal rights throughout the United States, they didn't think Congress had the right to interfere so much in the lives of individual people; they thought it ought to deal with the government ; the government should not deny equal rights. So when we changed it to saying, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex,"
then they all signed, they all signed their approval of the new one.
Fry
That fixed that.
Paul
And so we went down to the Judiciary meeting the next time it was held and—I remember this so very vividly—I
This was one of our officers from Virginia, a very fine member. And you know you are so pulled down by this defeatist attitude and discouragement. (Of course you have been through all that; you know what it is.) Anyway we did. And quite a group of maybe forty or fifty women assembled in the hall outside the Judiciary Committee, and I had the paper there, full of joy myself, with all these people saying, "You are just wasting your time. That committee will never care twopence about it, will never look at it; we can be sure of that."
So anyway I sent the guard in to tell the senator that I was out there, as he had asked, with the paper. He came out and took it in and presented it to the Committee. Senator O'Mahoney was there and gave his report as he had promised to give and the whole Committee voted—I think the whole Committee voted unanimously, but I am not absolutely positive about that—anyway the majority voted to report out this new version.
46. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted it out 9 to 3 on May 11, 1942. The House Judiciary Committee voted it out 9 to 7 on July 22, 1942.
So from that time on we had this one that we now have before Congress, which is more limited because when it says, "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state " it is only a prohibition on the goverment of the country. An individual family, such as you and your husband, can have inequality with you the head of the family or he the head of the family or anything you want to do. It is not interfering with any private business or anything excepting where the government has some regulation on the subject, which I think is the right thing myself. So, from then on there was never any deviation, until this new thing that has now been sent on to all the states for ratification.
47. Paul is referring to two changes in the Amendment: (1) putting a seven-year deadline on ratification, and (2) in the enforcement provision, leaving in "Congress" but omitting "the several states" as enforcer. Both were strongly objected to by Paul.
Now this campaign in a very different one from the other campaign because the other one concentrated on the President. Suffrage was something that we thought was sufficiently in existence because we already had a number of states where it was in existence, and there was not any conceivable reason why it should not become universal for our country. But this one, you couldn't possibly start out to put something in the Constitution that all—practically all—women of the country who were supposed to benefit from it were opposed to. And that is what we were confronted by, which was a very hard thing to be confronted by.
When you think of the long hold-out by the AAUW— imagine taking all these years, and this very great educator I told you about, M. Carey Thomas, coming down and succeeding in having AAUW's name at least deleted from the letter sent to every member of Congress saying we are opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment. (They wouldn't support us; they just agreed not to fight us.) See what we were up against was about unbelievable.
Fry
You were starting from scratch like Susan B. Anthony, I guess, did in the very early days of suffrage, or would it be even worse than that?
Paul
I think as far as law and government, the Amendment won't do away with all the innumerable phases of the subjection of women; but as far as government , it seems to me, it completes the emancipation of women as far as can see.
Now the thing that I think is before us next is to work with the women of other countries where we have almost all gotten the vote now and try to make the power of women so clear and recognized that we can really make the world according to the ideals of women as well as the ideals of men.
I don't think we can do it all alone in our country. We've got to do it with the women of all countries because so much is being done through the United Nations now and it increasingly will be. While I am not very keen on our meddling in other countries, still we seem to be involved to do it, so when we meddle, it will be, I think, essential to have the power of women guiding that meddling—if we can't keep them from meddling.
I really think, if we can concentrate now on the thing that you are preparing for your library, that we
Fry
Yes, you have.
Later Leadership in the National Woman's Party
FryThere is one thing I need to know later on if I go into some research preparations for this ERA section. Can you tell me when you were in Europe and who ran the ERA campaign while you were working in Europe.
Paul
Well, you see, I have never run the ERA campaign since I went out as the national chairman. I have never been national chairman excepting about two years which was in the last World War, when I came back and was living up in Vermont in this little cottage I had up there, on the lake there at East Charleston. It seemed that nobody would go on with the campaign. They hadn't at that time agreed even on the amendment, because they were having all the opposition in the Judiciary Committee and it was before this new amendment was put before them.
Mrs. Harvey W. Wiley was the national chairman and she didn't want to run again although she was honored and beloved by everybody. But she just felt she couldn't do it any more. (She got out this Equal Rights magazine for part of that time.) So then I was elected at this Philadelphia convention in 1942.
I came down and took over the campaign all through '43 and '44 and '45 I think, and during that period we sent women out and got the equal rights clause in the United Nations Charter you know, in San Francisco. That was '45. That was perhaps the biggest thing we accomplished in that period. But anyway that is the only time I have had the financial responsibility and the real responsibility for the campaign. And then Anita Pollitzer was elected in the next convention, which I guess was in the autumn of I don't exactly know when.
Fry
Is Anita Pollitzer still alive?
Paul
Oh, yes. She is the one, I think I told you, I talked to her the other day over the telephone—and she says that she has very much upon her heart, if she can recover her strength. She has been very ill, because
Fry
No, I never did, Alice.
Paul
Well, she was one of our most, most wonderful workers, so I hope everything you write will pay real tribute to her. She was the most remarkable person. She had the most beautiful speaking voice and she could have been a great actress, I think. She is Jewish, you know, and had all the things that the Jewish have with all the great talents, and she just had a flair for knowing what to do always. And in the suffrage days she had been down in South Carolina and teaching up in the University of Virginia.
She lived in South Carolina, in Charleston. And she was teaching at the University of Virginia in the art department. And so when somehow or other at some meeting we had enlisted her interest, she started every weekend to save all the money she was earning to come up to Washington to help us. And then she would go back and do her teaching every week and then come back again. That's the way we got to know her.
From that day on she has just been a pillar. So for a time she was our national chairman and now at this very moment she is down in South Carolina with her family and she is thinking—at least I proposed it to her and I think she is thinking about it—if she can get
And she has a sister, Mabel Pollitzer, who is our state chairman in South Carolina and whom I have talked to over the phone many times about this ratification. (And you know South Carolina has just turned us down.) So I think if her sister would help her, because her sister is perfectly well and strong apparently, that maybe Anita could do this. Because she has all the records through the years up in her little apartment. She told me she was going down, she would have to take the colored maid on the train because she couldn't go alone.
Fry
To South Carolina?
Paul
Yes. And she would stay there two weeks and then come back. Because all her papers and all her husband's papers—a tremendous volume of them are all in their apartment. It's worse than mine as far as papers and books go, I am afraid.
The people who now engage in writing or think about writing about the history of the Woman's Party in book form really, seriously devoting themselves—when I asked Anita if she wouldn't do it, I know she would do it well , if her sister could help her enough through all the mechanical parts, save her strength. Another one is this Mr. Fox who I think I told you is coming to see me in the Christmas vacation from Kansas University. He is writing his book, not on the Woman's Party but on the women's movement, and he seems to want to put quite a great deal of emphasis on the Woman's Party part of it. Another one is Dr. Dorothy Rogers you know, up in Oswego. I think I told you about her. I just got the letter from her saying would I cooperate with helping her if she would come down here. So her mind was set on doing this. She has brought out several books which are travel books and then she has brought out quite a number of books on psychology, and they are, she says, bringing her in a very big income. She is herself professor of psychology up in Oswego University or College, whatever it is, and this is a textbook which has received enough support from college professors over the country so all the poor students are supposed to buy one of Dr. Rogers' books. So she says it has turned out to be extremely
Another one is Ernestine Breisch Powell. I don't know whether you know her. She is our leading member in Ohio, a woman lawyer, I told you, who had been the tax lawyer with her husband. She has been through the campaign, and if she does it, she would bring out a solid book like that Susan B. Anthony book, a big. thick book which would be absolutely carefully done and accurate. The trouble is that her husband just died of a heart attack, suddenly, and she is left with this enormous law firm responsibility and is trying to get her young son trained in so that he can maybe handle it.
Then there is a woman out in Los Angeles who wants to write a doctor's thesis—her name is Baker—on the Woman's Party, who has written to me for help. So I can see it is becoming enough in people's minds now so that it would be a right time to have this written. Of course they could write all of it—not bring it out till the ratification had occurred, so that could be included, too.
Fry
When you said that you had only been head of the equal rights movement for two years—
Paul
Chairman of the National Council, we call it. You see, according to our constitution—and I had better give you a constitution so you will have it, just as a supporting document—according to our constitution, every chairman, on ceasing to be a chairman becomes an honorary chairman. We are supposed to have an election at least in every four years—the same time as for the president. The chairman can go out if she wants to before, just as Mrs. Longwell did, but she cannot stay in more than four years. Of course in the suffrage campaign I stayed in from the beginning to the end. Then we made this constitution that the time for any chairman would not exceed four years, and every outgoing chairman, if the convention lets her, becomes an honorary chairman. And we have always elected all the outgoing chairmen as honorary chairmen excepting one, and there wasn't enough support for her so she wasn't elected. So I am an honorary chairman, and in that capacity I have gone down and tried to help each chairman when she wanted some help.
Fry
Well Alice, I have the distinct impression, though, that
Paul
Well, I wasn't supposed to be, but you can't always— even if you don't have officially the responsibility, if you care very much about something you do your very best, to help. Each chairman who has come along almost has been less able to give her time and less able to take responsibility almost, even though she is chairman, than I have been. For instance, our previous chairman (I don't know the new chairman at all, Mrs. Chittick, I don't know anything much about her, and what she is like or anything) but the previous chairman was Mrs. Longwell. Mrs. Longwell was out in California a great part of the time, and you know these things are happening in the capital and it's hard to do it. So I stayed on a good part of the time while she was chairman, trying to help. Just as when you came down, you know, I think she was out in California. The time that I sent you to help with [Congressman] Don Edwards.
Fry
Well, you sent me to help with Don Edwards both times— she was there once.
Paul
No, but what I really sent for you for was when Edwards was chairman of the House subcommittee and everything was depending upon him, and we weren't having very good access to him. That's when I really sent for you and you came.
Fry
No, she wasn't there then.
Paul
That's what I thought. She wasn't. Well, it was situations like that: I would try to help because she wasn't there.
Well, then the chairman before that was Mrs. Brookhead: she came over just as regularly as anything, as though she lived in Washington, and often she would come over and stay for weeks and weeks and sometimes for months. But her husband suddenly had a stroke of paralysis and she just couldn't leave him. She had to give him medicine every hour and that sort of thing, and she didn't have enough money to pay for a good nurse. So then although I was only honorary chairman (I got on very well with her, we were very sympathetic with each other) I stayed on and helped a great part of her regime. And of course Elsie Hill and I were always so close together that when she was struggling along I always tried to help her. So I don't—I think it is better for every
Fry
But this one was so discouraging at first, it required somebody who had a commitment for a long-term effort.
Paul
Which was so discouraging?
Fry
ERA. When all the other women in the country were so against it. My thesis is that if there hadn't been someone like you, who had an idea of a long-term effort over a long period of time and a real commitment to it, that it could have just fallen by the wayside.
Paul
Well, of course it could. But that's all any campaign needs, isn't it?
Fry
No, but you were really starting from scratch.
Paul
I mean a campaign that's involved as much in the changing of the thought of the country as this did. I guess they are always about like this. Probably Frances Willard and her temperance, and all these people have all faced the same thing I guess.
Fry
What I am groping for is the sense of what to research to trace the history of ERA, and I wanted to be sure that I had an accurate impression that even though other women had been chairman, you were in there and fighting for ERA all the time, except when you were busy in Europe with equal rights.
Paul
You see, if you are an honorary chairman, the way we put it in our constitution is that all honorary chairmen are supposed, if they possibly can, to continue to help the movement in any way they can. That's the way we created it so that we wouldn't be left always with the new chairman and she might be good or she might not be good. She might start us off on some strange course, but it wouldn't make any difference—all the past chairmen can assemble and try to keep it on the right track. I just don't really know whether—we now have a new chairman— how she is going to turn out, whether it will be helpful or not helpful to try to help her; I don't know.
Fry
I can't tell. Let me turn this off.
Thoughts about Quaker Forebears
PaulOf course, you have all kinds of ancestors. Probably there are some that are very much—to be proud of these people, I have the same reverence for religious freedom and for every kind of freedom that they had. So I am proud that they took the stand. But now this Grateful Penn—
Fry
on your mother's side—
Paul
—was the sister of Admiral Penn, who was the father of William Penn so when the King of England was in great debt and wanted money very much, you know he borrowed money—at least I believe in all history books they say this—from Admiral Penn, who was an admiral in the British navy. He repaid his debt by giving this land over in America to William Penn. Well then Ann married and I will have to look it up in my chart to see what was the name of the person she married, but her son, or grandson, one or the other—I guess it would be her son—was the first cousin of William Penn. He made this ancestor of mine, and I think his name was Crispin, the first chief justice of Pennsylvania and a member of the governor's council (whatever that was called) that set up the government of Pennsylvania. (I think this is it, but I have this in my chart, so I can verify these points.)
So then when this chief justice started over to America he took his daughter with him, who had married a John—if I can remember this rightly, I think his name was Blackpan—but anyway the man that she married was in prison as a Quaker leader and I believe died in prison, I think so. So then the father took the young widow with him over to America.
The father was to be the chief justice and one of the three commissioners to set up the colony. By the way, I
But on the way over, anyway, this chief justice died, so this young widow—
Fry
Before he ever got to Pennsylvania?
Paul
Yes. So the young widow—and of course the only reason he was ever appointed, I think, was because he was the first cousin of William Penn. The young widow arrived, and so William Penn asked her to come and stay with him. And so she did. She lived and brought up her young son in his home, which is one of the historic places they always show you in Philadelphia, a little bit out in the country. I have been there and visited it.
Then for one or two generations, and I have forgotten just how they go, but I do have it in my chart I think, emerged this lady whose portrait is hanging here up on the mantelpiece, who was my great-grandmother. Her name was Letitia Penn Smith. She was a direct descendant of the widow that was living in the home of William Penn. And she married my great-grandfather, a Parry.
In the meantime I was invited to join the—what are these things called?—Magna Carta Dames. That's the people who they think can prove are descendants of the people who drew up the Magna Carta. It seems that I qualify through this sister of Admiral Penn, and I will find out what her name is from my chart; he was the descendant of one of the groups that drew up the Magna Carta. So there is a Magna Carta Dames up here in Connecticut, and so they invited me to become a member so they have traced the whole thing, so I am perfectly sure it is correct.
Well, I think it makes no difference to anybody, because you can be a disgrace to your ancestors. It is also, I think, in our movement a strength to show you have deep roots in the country and your ancestors helped to build it up and so on, and I feel sure your Roberts is one of the early Quakers.
I hope so. I feel inspired to go back and look up my genealogy charts to see if I really had one.
Paul
Well, I am going to look up your Roberts here in mine.
Fry
To tie this up, when Letitia married your great- grandfather, who was your grandfather?
Paul
My grandmother was Alice Stokes. So Letitia had to be my great-grandmother. Oh, then this so [gesturing to picture on the wall] must have been the son of Letitia. I am sure now, what it was.
Fry
And what was his name?
Paul
His name was William Parry.
Fry
That is where the Parry's enter.
Paul
Yes.
Fry
So did Letitia marry a Parry?
Paul
Yes, but I will have to get out my chart and show you because I really can't remember. But I thought while I was up here I would get some genealogist to take my chart and finish it out.
Fry
[Reading book.] On your father's side, this starts with the Winthrops of Massachusetts, the governor's sister, Jane, who married Thomas Gostlin. Her daughter was Anne who married Thomas Fones, and Anne lived from 1586 to 1619 and they had a child named Elizabeth who was born in 1610. And there is a book on her—
Paul
Did you ever hear of Ernest Thompson Seton?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
This book was written by his daughter.
Fry
Anya Seton. And the name of this is The Winthrop Woman, in case anybody should want to refer to it. Now the heroine Elizabeth's brother from a second marriage is Robert Feake.
Paul
Yes, I want to tell you that she first married her first cousin, who was the son of the governor, and came with him and the governor when he set out for America to start the little colony that he became the head of.
Oh, that was—she married Henry Winthrop.
Paul
So she set out with her father-in-law who was Governor Winthrop, you see, and her husband, John Winthrop—
Fry
Henry.
Paul
Was it Henry? And arrived here anyway in Massachusetts. The day that they landed, or the week anyway that the landed (and I think it tells it all in this book here), there was a terrible storm, and he was swimming, a great swimmer apparently, and in the Massachusetts Bay somewhere up there where they were landing he was drowned. So she suddenly lost her young husband. Then she married this Robert Feake. He was the lieutenant governor under Governor Winthrop and he was a very prominent member of the colony. He was the one who got the grant of land down here in Connecticut. One thing I wanted to look up and see was if by any chance she owned all around Greenwich—the whole of that territory, which is right close to here, to see if my little cottage by any chance is on that original land, because it would be very nice.
Fry
Wouldn't that be something.
Paul
I would feel so much more at home. I don't know how you got me started looking up this because I've really never done it.
Fry
That's a very decorative coat of arms, Alice. You should have some jewelry made up with the rabbit on top and the lion underneath. Well, at any rate, to carry that down from Feake, Elizabeth and Feake were married—
Paul
I read you the dates. That's on the back page of the book, inside. It's halfway down the page, I think. "Were duly married and became famous and persecuted Quakers." Did you find it?
Fry
"Elizabeth's daughters," let's see, "Hannah Feake and John Baum," that's the one.
Paul
She is the one that became the Quaker minister. First time that we had any Quaker in that family. They were all Puritans.
Fry
Now, what's the relation of Hannah to Elizabeth?
That was her daughter. The reason that I took an interest in this book when Elsie Hill told me about it was because this told me my great-grandmother. beyond the Feake period.
Fry
And Hannah Feake married John Baum in 1656 and their biographies are readily available because he is the one who kept holding the illegal Quaker meetings and was finally banished to Holland where he got the—the King?—
Paul
He got the Estates General to direct Governor Stuyvesant to stop this interference with religious freedom.
Fry
And that is known as the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657?
Paul
Well, now that remonstrance, I don't remember from the dates whether it was before or after he went over to Holland, but it was a very famous document which was sent, I suppose, to Governor Stuyvesant—maybe it was sent to the Estates General: I don't know where it was sent.
Fry
From John Baum?
Paul
No, from all the people that he gathered together. There were a good many people who signed this remonstrance.
Fry
Like a petition.
Paul
And that's what the stamp was about, to celebrate the birth—one of the births—of religious freedom in this country, the issuing of this remonstrance.
It tells you if you want to read it right in the front: [Interruption: books dropped on tape recorder.] Elizabeth, the heroine in this book, stood by Anne Hutchison; you know she was expelled for her religious views. I am almost sure it says [Elizabeth] took this stand in the colony where her former stepfather was the governor. She was rather prominent in the colony and she took this stand against the way they were expelling Anne Hutchison, I think.
Fry
And also against a determined army captain bent on the massacre of her friends the Savinoy [?] Indians.
Paul
So she was a rebellious type.
Fry
She is the one whom Governor John Winthrop came to refer
Paul
I think your genealogy's real experience is very exciting. Everybody's is.
Fry
We don't all have such distinguished people on our family trees, Alice.
Equal Rights in the United Nations Charter
Charter of the United Nations—Provisions on Equality for Women
Tell what you know about getting the equal rights clause put into the United Nations Charter.
Paul
Just what I have already told you, I guess.
Fry
Yes, that was our first evening together when we were talking about what we were going to talk about. I didn't really get it down at that time; I didn't take any notes on it or tape it.
Paul
Well, I told you, you know, that after the suffrage campaign I was only one-time national chairman after I was not re-elected after the suffrage campaign, I just stopped everything. And then I was asked to come down and actually elected and asked to come down when the World War [II] broke out, and I came back for that reason from Geneva, where I had been, you know. I came back in 1941. Are you talking about this period?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Well, I came back in 1941 in the spring and felt that there was no possibility of going on with the work in Geneva, when from all indications we would very soon be engaged in the war ourselves. So when I came back I found that there was nobody here who wanted to go on with our own campaign, which was very exacting in the way of requiring raising money and spending all your time in Washington. Everybody was engaged either for the war or against the war or some kind of war activities. So I was asked to come down and take over the chairmanship. Which I did. I came down in 1941. Is that the year we went in the war? In the late autumn, about December, I guess.
I was elected as chairman at the national convention held in Philadelphia in the preceding November, and
48.
"...to reaffirm faith in the fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations great and small... do here establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations."From the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations
The United States delegation however, was very powerful of course, in this first opening meeting to found the United Nations, and there was one woman only in our delegation—Dr. Gildersleeve—dean of women at Barnard College. She objected very much to this statement submitted by Smuts and largely on its English; we couldn't comprehend [her objection] at all. So one of our members who was out there representing the National Woman's Party, Anita Pollitzer, had been in touch with Sara Bard Field at Los Gatos, California, because Sara Bard Field was one of our honored and beloved members in California and she had been seeing her just personally. Anita informed us in Washington that Sara Bard Field was entertaining Archibald MacLeish, a member of the United States delegation, the next day in her home for dinner. She thought that if Sara would take up with MacLeish the importance of having this in the charter, maybe she could get him to use his influence to bring this to pass. So Anita Pollitzer then went back to —
ask Sara if she would do this, take this matter up with Mr. MacLeish when he came to visit her for dinner and see if he could possibly save the Smuts declaration by removing the opposition of the American delegation, and she said she would do her best.
Then Mrs. Pollitzer telephoned to us that this interview with MacLeish had occurred at Sara's home at the time of this dinner she had arranged and that MacLeish had said he would certainly make a supreme effort to bring this to pass and that he now reported that the American delegation had agreed to support it.
It was put in, and not only put in the preamble in the opening of the whole charter, just as we had wanted and Smuts had wanted, but it was amplified in a good many sections making it specific with regard to other specific points. Is that all right?
Fry
That's fine.
Paul
One of the very biggest achievements that it [the Woman's Party] helped to bring to pass.
After-Dinner Conversations
Susan B. Anthony's Desks
PaulThe other thing you asked me to tell you about when we got the tape, I think, was about the Susan B. Anthony desk.
Fry
Oh, yes. Do you have time to tell me about that tonight?
Paul
I have time to tell you about anything because this is my last chance, you see.
Fry
Well, all right, but you could tell me in the morning.
Paul
No, I'd rather tell you now.
Fry
You look so bright-eyed right now, you might as well go ahead.
Paul
I think in the morning, if you are going on a plane, you have a lot to do.
When the National American Woman Suffrage board, acting upon the request and suggestion of Miss Jane Addams, appointed Lucy Burns and myself as members of their congressional committee to go down to Washington and do what we could for the passage of the federal suffrage amendment, which Miss Anthony worked for so long, we had no office to begin with and no place from which to work. The first thing we did was to put a little notice in the newspapers saying that we were coming down to take up the work that Miss Anthony had laid down "When she had to give up going to Washington, and we were going to open an office and start a procession, if we were able, through the streets of Washington, to occur the day before the inauguration of the new President, Wilson.
When this notice was read by Miss Anthony's former secretary, named Rachael Brill Ezekiel, Mrs. Ezekiel telephoned to me that when Miss Anthony left Washington she expected to come back again but she did not because of her death. Mrs. Ezekiel was in possession of her desk that she had left behind. She said that, having read in the paper about our trying to go on with the work of Miss Anthony, she felt that she ought to turn the desk over to those who were going on with Miss Anthony's work. And so she had called me to say she had the desk, what should she do with it, would I like to have it?
I said, of course, we would like to have it; we had not yet even gotten an office, much less a desk. We were getting an office in this little basement on 1420 F Street, so she said she would have the desk brought down to us. And she did.
The desk arrived, and we opened our office with only one piece of furniture, the Susan B. Anthony desk. We continued to use this desk all through the suffrage campaign and all through the following campaign for complete equality for women, and it is still at the headquarters of the National Woman's Party in Washington.
Fry
Now what about this desk, back here on your sun porch?
Paul
Well, after the suffrage victory, one of Miss Anthony's admirers (and perhaps a co-worker, I don't know whether that's true or not) named Miss Cary Harrison, who was a very active worker in the National Woman's Party for the votes for women, presented this desk which she owned, having somehow or other acquired it from Miss Anthony, and presented it to me in gratitude perhaps that I had gone on with the work of Susan B. Anthony. I rather think something was printed on there but I'm not quite— I'll have to go and look and see. I can't remember just what it was.
Fry
And that's the rosewood desk. The desk that's now in Belmont House—Do you know what kind of wood it is? It's very dark.
Paul
I don't know.
Fry
On this one the wood grain shows through better and it looks like rosewood.
Paul
I'd like very much to have the other one too.
It ought to be saved for posterity.
[Tape off.]
Responses to Civil Disobedience
FryI would think, Alice, that you would have had quite a feeling of support for any action of civil disobedience, as a result of your Quaker background.
Paul
We didn't do civil disobedience, of course, in our movement.
Fry
Oh. When you went to jail?
Paul
I suppose you would call it civil disobedience, but we didn't think of it that way.
Anyway I was just saying, I just meant the reason I haven't kept up with my college as much as I should have was the feeling that they were anything but pleased with me, for having—
Fry
For heaven's sake. Do you think that's true now ?
Paul
No. because last year they wrote me a note saying they wanted to confer a doctor's degree upon me. So I'm sure they didn't think so now. Somebody, some person—
Fry
It's fashionable now to have gone to prison for a cause. But that surprises me that a Quaker college—
Paul
But I think through all those years when we were not succeeding, not having won, it was just a general feeling with everybody, the women's movement, everybody.
Fry
That you could not be respected if you went—
Paul
Well, I mean the more and more things we did. There was certainly a feeling of regret among everybody, it seemed to me.
That's the reason I was very much tempted to go to prison under an assumed name when I was in England. I thought I would bring so much disgrace upon my family and everybody I knew, and so on.
Wasn't it Emerson and Thoreau who had that conversation in prison with one inside and the other outside. Have you ever heard of that exchange?
Paul
No.
Fry
I think Thoreau was inside prison and Emerson came to visit him—
Paul
I didn't know Thoreau was ever in prison.
Fry
Well, maybe it was Emerson who was in prison.
Paul
I didn't know Emerson was in prison.
Fry
Well, one of them was. To be arbitrary, we'll say that Emerson said to Thoreau, "Good heavens, what are you doing in there?" and Thoreau said to him, "And what, may I ask, are you doing out there?"
Paul
[Laughter.] That's very, very good.
Well, now I suggest you go to bed and I will get out my Roberts lineage [chart] and see if I can trace your ancestors.
[Tape off.]
Lobbying: Methods, Womanpower, and Maud Younger
[At breakfast table]
FryThe story on Maud Younger, the lobby chairman, is in the March 22, 1919, issue of the Suffragist, as a reprint from the New York Times of March 2, 1919. This says "Many rumors have been afloat in Washington about the methods used by the suffrage lobby in bringing pressure to bear on members of Congress."
Paul
Are you sure you had enough breakfast?
Fry
Positive. And then it tells about how, at the headquarters of the National Woman's Party in Washington, there is a card index so extensive and detailed, political and personal, that twenty-two different cards are required for each senator and representative. And then later on it gives a list of the cards. Card number one contains his name and biography from the congressional directory. Number two, the key card that talks about ancestry, nativity, education, offices held and general information. The next card is a subcard, more on birth date, place, number of children and so forth; it just goes on, where he went to school, where he went to college, his religion, his military service, his occupation. Number fourteen is what newspapers the member reads, and those that have the most influence on him and so forth.
It all sounds fairly innocuous but valuable information to you. His suffrage record is on one card. So maybe you could just repeat what you said before off the tape about how this file was built up and how Maud Younger and everybody operated.
Paul
All right, just let me swallow my tea and orange juice. I think maybe I better—
This isn't a very good article. [Machine off.] Let's see, Alice. You told me that although you had this elaborate card index system that it had kind of grown naturally and that actually you and Maud Younger had most of the information in your heads by this time anyway.
Paul
Well, no. I said that as long as you had a congressional chairman like Maud Younger who endeavored to know personally every member of the Senate and House, and really, we thought, succeeded, you were not dependent on our card catalogue. But it was part of her organization in her department.
Fry
The article says that when a lobbyist starts out for the Capitol she receives a lobby slip which has a list of entries to bring out fully all the information that she obtains and then on that slip, under the heading "Exact Statement and Remarks," are remarks made by the congressman to the lobbyist. An example was given: on one card, the congressman had told the lobbyist, "Put me down on the mourner's bench, I am thinking about it." So that apparently this file builds up a running account of how the congressman is feeling about suffrage. All of these are filed in the Library of Congress now, we should note.
Paul
Well, we loaned it to them, the whole catalogue. It was in our loan; I suppose it is still there.
But as I said, Maud Younger always said, "What I do is to take the temperature of the members of Congress and then inform the people at home of how at this particular moment he is feeling on the measure."
Now, do you want to ask questions, or are you doing it now?
Fry
I am doing it now. The tape recorder is on. I am trying to get kind of a picture of the whole lobbying activity that went on. Maud Younger was in this for about four years, right? Had been the head of it, I gather. This article says she was in it for three years, and this is March of 1919.
Paul
I met Maud Younger when we went out to the Convention of Women Voters at the San Francisco fair in 1915. I remember vividly how I met her. We were—I was in a car with somebody or other out there, with various people. We were going somewhere to a meeting on equality for women in the political field. We passed
And she said, "I certainly will," and responded with great joy at the whole thing. And that was 1915.
Not long after she came to Washington and took a little apartment and began to come in to try to help. Soon she saw she couldn't operate from her apartment; she had to be right in the headquarters. So she moved into the headquarters and stayed in her particular room until the campaign was won. Then she took one little office as her congressional office. From that time on she took complete charge of all congressional work. I would think that no organization could have ever had a more, greater leadership really, in that particular field that she took under her charge. So she got a very good secretary, a young woman from Kentucky, whose husband was employed in the government as a lawyer, and this secretary was always there. Whenever the lobbyists went out she would get all the instructions from the secretary, and when she came back the report would be filed. It was the most ship-shape, business-like little office. It was perhaps not so helpful to Maud Younger because she knew the congressmen so well anyway, but helpful to everybody else, especially to the congressional chairman, who at that time was Anne Martin of Nevada. She would take all these reports and write letters back home to people and report what the temperature was at that particular moment of this particular congressman.
Then at the very end, people in Congress began to get rather interested in seeing that they had a very good record here. Then when we placed it in the very end [of the suffrage campaign] in the congressional library, at the request of the congressional library, the loan, they were particularly interested in the card catalogue from their point of view, for the use in their districts, when we began on the same plan [for the ERA campaign] for which Maud Younger still was the head. She started the whole congressional campaign on the Equal Rights Amendment, you see.
She built it up until she finally, in the Equal Rights Amendment campaign, she did even more on the congressional work than she did in the suffrage campaign, perhaps, because she bought a house right next to our headquarters so she could always entertain congressmen
I remember morning after morning going over and eating breakfast with her with Senator Curtis, who was the Republican whip. He became a great friend of Maud Younger's. Then this card catalogue became, in the minds of the congressmen, almost a privilege, to be on the card catalogue list.
Fry
They began to ask you to be on it, or what?
Paul
I don't know whether they asked, but they were more enthusiastic about seeing us and having it reported just as it should be, you see.
Fry
A progress report, their accomplishments on equal rights?
Paul
No, I mean the man would take it, it would be something he could use in his district, to show what the women said about him in this report.
Fry
Right.
I wish that somehow we could get the feeling of the effort and so forth in the lobbying. One thing I was wondering about was how could you tell who to ask to go lobby and who not to go.
Paul
Well, we never felt there was anybody who shouldn't go. We always thought everybody who wanted to go—especially of course we wanted them to be people from the man's district or the man's state; no congressman could have his time taken up with constant visiting from somebody who is not in his district and he doesn't have any responsibility for—but anybody who came from the state and wanted to help, we sent her over to see her congressman or see her senator or see both. Then Maud Younger, of course, undertook with her own little lobby committee, to see everybody. Then we would know whether it was safe to bring a measure up for a hearing, safe to bring it up for a vote, safe to bring it up in a committee, and we would know where we were weak and where we ought to be getting more meetings started in the districts and [with] the people, and so on. I guess it is just exactly like all these professional lobbyists, because you know lobbying is a very big profession now in Washington. They would probably think our little efforts were very amateur.
Fry
I wish I knew how to compare such a, as you say,
Paul
I think that's really an effort to show that we were trying to get votes by threatening congessmen with things we had found out about them, which, as Maud Younger said, is totally and absolutely as far away from our thoughts as anything could be. I never heard of any information that we ever even received that was derogatory to a congressman. We didn't go after that. We went after things that were related to what his position was on this particular subject, and what were the groups in his own district who were the people he was trying to please.
Fry
And what his habits were. They bring this out in this article. The reporter asked Maud Younger, "Why do you want to know the habits of the congressmen?" She says, "For several reasons. If they get to their offices early, the one that comes at 7:30, this is often the best time during the day to see them. And if a member is a drinking man we want to know that. One of our lobbyists may go to him and not know what's the matter with him, or how to evaluate his answers." She says, "In 1913 the money we allotted for lobbying was $10. Since then we have raised more than $425,000. Our expenses in Washington this year will be $100,000." Was that just lobbying expenses?
Paul
No, I think that's everything about the headquarters. We didn't break it up. For lobbying we had only one expense really, and that was the secretary in Maud Younger's office. She was a volunteer worker and all the lobbyists who came were volunteers. We didn't have any paid lobbyists. We never, never from the first day, ever did we have a paid lobbyist.
Fry
They would simply live there and probably get their food and their meals?
Paul
I don't know about their meals, because we always had this little restaurant. Well, they would come to Washington and stay with maybe the—I remember one from California who always stayed with her congressman who always lived just outside of Washington and they would always stay with Mrs. Kent [wife of Congressman William
And another one was invited by one of our members, Mrs. John J. Waite, who had a large and beautiful home. She was our Connecticut state chairman so she was always taking in two or three people who came to help and they would stay weeks and months or days, as it might be. So almost all the members would—of course there were too many people to put them all up in our headquarters.
Fry
In the last couple of years of the campaign, could you give some idea of the volume of lobbying? How many people, would you say, was the average number of—
Paul
Let's put it on, don't you think we'd better keep this on the suffrage? I'd like to keep that one campaign—
Fry
This is suffrage I am talking about.
Paul
You mean how many people were working on lobbying?
Fry
Yes. Because what we always read about for those two years are the picketing and the prison experiences, and we need more information on what was going on in the halls of Congress by the Woman's Party. I thought if you could just remember the numbers—
Paul
of people who came—
Fry
—to lobby. To give us some indication.
Paul
Well, nearby places where we had a big membership like Philadelphia, it seems to me, there were always a great many coming and going, like Maryland and so on, New Jersey. Then the far away places, they would do as Maud Younger did, come and try to make a stay and see everybody they possibly could and then go home.
It was just something that went on all the time. For instance I told you how Anita Pollitzer was teaching at the University of Virginia and came up every weekend. The first thing we sent her over to do was to go and see her congressman, and she was so enthusiastic and so good,
Fry
Were you doing any lobbying yourself during these years?
Paul
Oh, yes, sure. In the beginning, it seemed to me that I had to do it all because before Maud Younger came, before we had any chairman, we just started in, not knowing anything at all about how the people stood in Congress. Lucy Burns and I did, together. And then sometimes we would get somebody, I told you the National American Woman Suffrage Association sent down Jeannette Rankin to help. She was their paid organizer, so when we got started we had her. She spent all her time going up that's before we won the vote in Montana, you see). Practically everybody who came, turned in, went to see the people they thought they could.
We were not received with any great enthusiasm. It was just a necessary evil the men had to put up with [laughter] especially in the suffrage states, where they felt they had to receive the people. Then we worked particularly on trying to get women from those states, I mean to be in a lobbying group.
Fry
Then as the years progress in the suffrage campaign, did you continue to lobby, all the way through?
Paul
Yes, but not very much. Unless it was some person it was necessary to see. Remember I told you, I think, after we had this first procession and they decided to have a Senate investigation, I went up myself to make all the arrangements necessary. That's what I usually did for a hearing or anything like that. I told you, when I said to Senator Jones, "Well now, when shall I come to confer with you about this—it looks as though it might be going on for some time," and he said, "7:30 in the morning I'm at work." [Laughter.]
Fry
So primarily, yours was more and more limited to testifying at hearings, is that right, before the committees, in the latter stages?
Paul
Well, no, it was more going up and seeing about [arrangements]. Well, something like this with Senator Jones that somebody had to make all the arrangements for. It wasn't testifying. I suppose I did but that wasn't
Fry
—who would keep you informed?
Paul
Well, with whom we could confer and know we were getting the right kind of information. I wouldn't call that lobbying exactly, but it was working with the members of Congress. I'm sure that's what all these professional lobbyists do, that that's the way they proceed.
Fry
Did you have the congressmen's administrative assistants then to deal with that we have now?
Paul
No.
Fry
You could talk more directly to the legislator himself?
Paul
Oh, yes. A hundred times simpler then, a thousand times, I guess. This business of not being able to see your congressman and so on, I don't remember an experience like that.
Fry
In the committee work of the Judiciary Committee or the suffrage committees, did you work any with the—what do they call it—the executive secretary of the committees, the person who is paid to do the work of the committee?
Paul
You had to do it somewhat but I don't remember. We might have a preliminary talk, perhaps, I suppose. I don't remember any slowing up of things because of any, as it is slowed up now, because of all the stages you have to go through before you can get to anybody. I mean just as when I asked you to come out and see if you couldn't take on Don Edwards; well, we didn't have to go to all that effort then in the suffrage campaign. We could go to see the congressman himself, usually.
Fry
Judging from my experience, we were able to get a lot
Paul
Maybe they had them but I don't think they had the power they have now. I don't remember even knowing whether they had any particular secretary. Of course every senator and congressman probably had some secretarial help.
Fry
But I am talking about the Judiciary Committee secretary.
Paul
They undoubtedly had some. See, there wasn't this great, enormous staff like there is now.
Fry
You just didn't have to deal with that bureaucracy then.
Paul
No.
Fry
Is there anything else that you can think of that would help us get an accurate picture of the lobbying activities? I have run out of questions on it, but I still feel like the picture is fairly fuzzy.
Paul
In what way is it fuzzy?
Fry
Well, if I were writing a book, trying to describe the pressure and the combined dedication and enthusiasm and the snap and the crackle around the House on the lobbying that was going on for suffrage, I wouldn't have any sharp picture.
Paul
I think if you would look through all the photographs it would be very good, because we have people standing outside the door of a committee and you find them there.
I remember the first one we ever had, I think I was coming down the steps of the Capitol—the first year it must have been, back in 1914—from one of the committees, and I suppose there must have been other people coming down too. Where we would have a feeling of almost hopelessness how would we get it out of this committee with all the difficulties we were experiencing. So many of those lobbyists, and then all those great thousands of people—when you showed me one [picture] the other
I think there is something in that part of it that Consuelo could very well portray by taking picture after picture of these great groups of people—almost every time anybody looks at this magazine [the Suffragist ] here they seem to be so surprised and say, "Well, we never had any idea that the lobbying consisted of this great number of people coming." I suppose it was the first time that this did occur, because all these [instances of big demonstrations and delegations of] people now are more about anti-war and so on. We never heard of such then. As far as I know we were the only people who ever lobbied.
Fry
Oh, really, so that part was fairly unique then.
Paul
Yes, I don't think there was any other group that was sending delegations. You see in that photograph that we always use as a postcard with Susan B. Anthony going up all alone, that's what the lobbying had been as far as the women's movement was concerned.
Fry
I was going to ask you if you knew what the lobbying had been the year before you took it over.
Paul
I have told you many times how Mrs. Kent said how she gave back change from her $10 [annual expense allotment].
Fry
I knew that.
Paul
Because all she had done really was to write a few letters and get a few speeches made perhaps and have them mailed over the country. There wasn't anything like this personal, starting in to visit every man and to visit every committee and to visit the key committee that we had to have.
I don't know whether there were all these professional lobbyists. I never heard of them, they may have been there; but now, of course, it is a regular profession.
People [lobbyists] have an office and an enormous staff. They entertain, usually, a great deal and try to conduct their lobbying in a social way. Then they usually, well, we will say, if it is a man lobbying for,
I remember one time recently when we were having a great deal of trouble with the United Automobile workers and they were spreading out into Indiana, where the factories were going and therefore the United Automobile Workers were going. And they were becoming a force, as far as we could see, but we didn't know , against us, from Indiana. And so, one day when I was talking to our first vice-chairman ( now ; I don't know what she was then, but she was on our board) Mrs. Butler Franklin, and I said, "If we could have a little better idea of what is going on in this United Automobile Workers and whether they are putting a great deal of energy into opposing us or not, it would help us."
And she said, "Well, my brother"—you are not putting this down, are you?
Fry
Well, it's on.
Paul
Because I couldn't put this down. She said, "My brother is vice-president," (I think) "of a very big industry." I believe it was gas, or something like that, where it was a question of pipelines. It is vague in my mind.
And she said, "He is here visiting me now and I will ask him about Indiana because he has lived in Indiana."
So she came back and said now she knew everything about it. "Just call up Mr. So-and-so," whose name I don't know. "He is our chief lobbyist; he is paid a large sum to get better legislation on"—pipelines, we'll say, I'm not sure of this. "And he will know everything that is to be known about what the United Automobile Workers are doing, whether they are a force that has to be reckoned with now, or whether they are such a minimum force in Indiana, whether they are not important, and what attitude they are taking on this subject, whether you can count really upon the support of the senators and congressmen from that state," so she told me.
Then she got him on the phone, the lobbyist, and then she asked me to take the phone. She said, "He is talking away but I can't make out very much what the situation is, so will you talk to him?"
So I talked to this man. He said, "Now if Mr. So- and-so," (whatever her brother's name was) "wants me to get this information, of course I will get it for you. It would take me maybe two hours or three hours. That's what I am here to do. I am paid by that firm," by the gas company, we will say it was, "and he [Mrs. Franklin's brother] is the vice-president, one of the most important officers. If he requests it, it is my business now to find out, and I will call you back." And he did.
And he said, now—let me see if I remember what he said—"Now you say you want information that bears on the Equal Rights Amendment. If Mr. Walter Reuther and the UAW are for the Equal Rights Amendment or against the Equal Rights Amendment, I don't know anything. You must know about that, I don't know a single thing about that. But if they are against you, there is not much chance you are going to get any of the congressmen and senators from Indiana. They may give you all reasons and so on, or may be hesitating, but you probably won't get them.
"But if by chance Mr. Reuther and the UAW are for what you are working for, then you needn't worry at all and you will have all their support." He said, "We know [these men now] have recently become one of the great political forces in the state of Indiana through the transfer of so many of their industries, of their automobile factories, and so on up there."
Well, that's the way they were working, you see. And we would always try to just know as much as we could; naturally that's what anybody would do. These regular professional lobbyists they are more unknown figures; of course the company who employs them, sends them down, knows if they are skillful in sending in accurate information and helping with the things they are supposed to be helping with.. It is done quietly, nobody knows about it. Ours was just done in a more—in a way to try to make public opinion for what we were after.
Fry
Are you talking about both the ERA and the suffrage?
Paul
Now, I am talking about the suffrage. That's the reason
Fry
A lobbyist from one of the industries once told me that most of his work, in fact nearly all of his work, was to stop bills that might be hurtful to the industry. Yours was to get a bill put in, which he said was much more difficult to do. It is easy to stop a bill, there are a million steps along the way of legislation where it can be killed. But to put a bill in and avoid it being killed—
Paul
But I think the lobbying is always the same problem—it is to achieve a particular purpose. Ours was unpaid people and the professional lobbyists are paid. You know when they put through the bill requiring registration of all lobbyists—
Fry
That was about '47 or '48?
Paul
That was after suffrage victory. I remember very well what happened. We had a chairman. I don't remember for the minute particularly which one it was. She was one of those people who is always very meticulously careful about carrying out the letter of the law, and so she insisted—we said, well that lobbying law was not made to apply to us, we know that. We are not in that class at all, what they call lobbyists. They wouldn't call us lobbyists.
But nevertheless she registered us. Then you were subject to every kind of report and restriction, reporting, I think maybe every month, just what you had paid for your lobbying and whom you had paid it to and how much had been for railroad fare and all these things. It was a dreadful situation.
I think this was the first—probably the one who did all this was Mrs. Murrow who was a lawyer from Florida, and she got the organization into such a tangle in every possible way because she was down in Florida and couldn't very well keep track of things, I think. So one Jewish man who was a professional lobbyist, persuaded her to put him in charge of all the lobbying and every activity
(If ever I say a single word critical of anybody, leave it out, will you, because I am only saying it for you.)
Fry
At any rate, she was very prominent.
Paul
Well, she made, oh, a splendid chairman. She retired as dean. This was during the World War [II] and they said well, we can't let you go because we are going to increase your responsibilities because we can't get a professor of the stature that we need excepting if we let you take over the mathematics department and the astronomy department. So instead of being a dean—her specialty was mathematics and astronomy—she was in charge of all these great responsibilities.
Well anyway, she said, "I think I will just go up to see my Senator Ferguson of Michigan." (She came from Michigan.) And afterwards she asked him if we must again register under the lobby act. And Ferguson (who later became a judge and he was a distinguished lawyer) he said, "Oh no, the lobby act is not for people like you at all." So we then had the support of at least the statement of one senator as to what the lobby act was. So we all said, "Well then, we don't think we ever should have registered and we are not going to register," so we never did from that time on.
Every once in a while some poor lady comes down and she is intimidated by someone saying, are you properly registered under the lobby act. "Oh!" and they come back trembling all over. [Laughter.]
Fry
Well, I'm going to have to stop. I've got to get on that airline bus in twenty-eight minutes.
Paul
Then I think that I will proceed to stop too, and I
3. III. The Suffrage Campaign Reviewed
1914: Evolution of Congressional Union's Organization
Alice Paul Leaves Suffrage Campaign
[All Side A has a buzz and static.]
FryFirst, I'll just run down some questions that have emerged from research I've been doing since we last talked. Maybe this will help you warm up—it's about the early years of the Congressional Union: we didn't talk very much last time about how you evolved your organization , setting up council and so forth.
There was a lot of pressure about a year after you first organized the Congressional Union to hold a general election and have an elected national council to run it—all of this sort of thing. These things are going to be found by the scholars who will be delving into your papers, because Ivy Kellerman-Reed wrote a lot of letters about it. She was a woman early in Congressional Union out in one of the states; I don't know which one.
Paul
I never heard the name.
Fry
Her correspondence is in the collection at the National Woman's Party. At any rate, she is only representative.
Paul
It would be so much better if I could think who she was.
Fry
I think Mrs. Donald Hooker also was a part of this; this was the group that was campaigning for a constitution and so forth. They were opposed by the ones who wanted to have a very efficient, lean organization that could make decisions rapidly. How did you handle this? Because this was a threat to your authority.
Paul
I can hardly see that. We were appointed by the National
Fry
But this happened afterwards.
Paul
No—I know, but when we arrived that's what we were and what we continued to be for the whole first year.
Fry
That's right. And then—
Paul
So we didn't form anything but to get enough members in the District of Columbia and round about where we knew people who would turn in and help in the work of this committee. But you know all that [from our previous interview].
Fry
I know all that. And you told me about the break—
Paul
They made only one requirement, that we shouldn't send a single bill for a single dollar to the national board, and must raise all the money, and must do all the work, because they wanted to spend all their money and their work on their state referendum. And that was the purpose for which they appointed us, to have somebody who would continue what Miss Anthony had been doing. She didn't even have a committee. She just had herself when she went down [to Washington] with the National American, but by that time they were lucky enough to have Mrs. William Kent as their chairman.
And then Mrs. Kent just couldn't continue, she said, possibly. They had given her $10 and she had handed back the change to show how little they were doing and how necessary it was to have some people who would concentrate on it. So then when we came we added to the committee; the committee that they had appointed was only Lucy Burns and myself, with power to appoint anyone else we wanted. So Mrs. Kent went on our board.
We got an extremely good, powerful board with all of the members, of course, of the National American like Mrs. Kent. Of course our little tiny board of, say, fourteen people—Mary Beard was on our board, and Miss Emma Gillette, who was the dean and founder of the Western College of Law. It was an extremely good board we had. Crystal Eastman went on the board from upper New York. And that was printed; it's in all the early issues of the Suffragist, our first board.
And then, in order to have a group that would start in and help with the interviewing of Congress and the raising of money and the putting on of functions as a money-raising body, we formed this little "Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage" we called it. The national secretary of the old National American, Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett, was the person who suggested the name of Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. I don't know that it was a very good name but anyway that's what we started with.
In order to be a part of the National American, every group had to have a certain number, I think three hundred members. So we established some dues, say a dollar—I'm not sure what it was—and got the three hundred members that qualified us to be an affiliated group with the old National American. And throughout that first year that's all there was to it. They were to help the congressional committee.
At the end of the year, they first asked me if I would continue but not continue with the Congressional Union, because they said it was—
Fry
They didn't want you to be head of both?
Paul
It wasn't that. They said they didn't want the money to be—We had raised so much money, you see, that their national treasurer got up at the national convention (her name was Mrs. Stanley McCormick. There were two of them. There was Mrs. Stanley who was the national treasurer of the National American)—She got up and said, "Now I think we've raised," it seems to me, "$27,000 for this first procession," the National American's procession. That's all in that book that I gave you here, that hearing by the Senate on that first parade. I think it was about $27,000. She said, "Think of all that money going into this national procession in Washington when we need so much for the state referendum campaigns." She wanted all the money raised to go— according to her plan—into the national treasury, because it was the national committee, to be spent by the national board as they wanted.
At the convention then Jane Addams got up, as you may remember, and she said, "I had offered the resolution, you remember, to appoint this committee, and I think they have been extremely honorable and have carefully paid every single bill. They have left no debts and no
Fry
You mean the Congressional Union was?
Paul
Yes. Because we considered that was part of our duties. They said they were coming to Washington for their convention, and it seemed our duty to provide the hall and so on. So we paid it. And also we arranged for the entertainment in the homes of different people, especially Mrs. William Kent, the congressman's wife. All the board came, so it saved them from having any financial expense. So I thought that what we had done was quite right and proper.
So then when they said would I take it on and be only the Congressional [Committee] chairman so there wouldn't be this question of the money we were raising being in the treasury of the Congressional Union, there it was, you see. We didn't have any money in our little Congressional committee at all. So I said no, I didn't want to do that. I knew that you couldn't put through any campaign without some kind of financial assistance. And because the states would say, "Look here, we need it for our referendum."
Then they offered it to Lucy Bums, and she said the same thing. She didn't want it. She wouldn't do it under those terms. Then they had a time to find somebody and they finally found Mrs. Medill McCormick, who, we thought, had been a very good choice. She was the daughter of Mark Hanna, the great Republican leader in Ohio. She said she would want me to go on her national committee if she was going to be the congressional chairman, which I did; and I asked her to go on our Congressional Union board, which she did, so we would always work together and know just what was going on. So it started out very well, until —and we thought probably all of us would go home. We had taken it for a year, and all of the people who had just come in for that one year, we didn't want it to go on any longer.
You mean in the Congressional Union?
Paul
We didn't want to go on into any campaign. When the new board was appointed, when the new congressional committee was appointed and put under the chairmanship of Mrs. McCormick, we felt we could then give it up, you see, and not continue any longer. We never formed it, at first, with the thought of its being a perpetual organization, or an organization at all.
Fry
Oh, really? I thought you had formed it to work on suffrage until suffrage passed.
Paul
No, it never once entered our heads to do that. We formed it to make possible the first year we had undertaken. When we had undertaken to do it and we weren't allowed to have any money from the national treasury, we had to get it from somewhere . So we formed this group [Congressional Union] to do the work, as volunteers, to raise the money which we had to pay. Which they did. We raised, as I said, so much that the national board wanted to have it. Probably she [Mrs. Stanley McCormick] didn't know of this condition under which we agreed to take it in the beginning. So suddenly, after she [Mrs. Medill McCormick] was appointed, there didn't seem to be any particular reason for our going on. But that's probably what we would have done.
Fry
But you would have retained your chairmanship of the committee ?
Paul
No.
Fry
Not that either.
Paul
No, no, no. Because I said that if I went on, I knew that there must be some kind of a group ,to do this work for us, to raise this money for us. And they didn't want this to be.
Fry
Were you going to leave suffrage, the whole organization?
Paul
Well, we didn't have much of an organization. We had only about fourteen people on our national committee. We formed this little group [the Congressional Union] to help us; that's all there was to it. When this all happened I went home. Mrs. McCormick finally agreed to come on our board and we had this little
NAWSA Introduces Rival Amendment
PaulSo I went back to my home in New Jersey and sort of decided I would take a rest since it had been a very strenuous year. I had hardly gotten home when I got this note from Lucy Burns saying, "A most dreadful thing has happened. Mrs. McCormick, without telling us a thing about it, although she is on our own little Congressional Union board, and without apparently telling anybody, has introduced in Congress the Shafroth-Palmer amendment." You remember reading all about that.
49. The Shafroth-Palmer was introduced in the U.S. Senate March 2, 1914.
Fry
That would be the resolution for the amendment, only it was different from your amendment.
Paul
Let me tell you what it was. It was this. And you certainly can't write this thing up without making it very clear what it was.
Fry
I'm sure we have this.
Paul
It was this: Any state legislature was required, by an amendment to the Constitution—"upon receiving a petition of (some sufficient number) must have a state referendum"— to the men of the state on the question of suffrage for women, that is, suffrage for that state. If it had gone through Congress by two-thirds vote of both houses and been ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, made up of men at that time, all that women would have gotten by amending the Constitution after doing all this work and spending all this money, would be the right to have a referendum. So no woman in the whole country would have gotten the vote. It wouldn't have given the vote to women. Mrs. McCormick had been persuaded by those—which has happened again and again in our experience—by these men politicians, who were all friends of their fathers, that it was impossible, impossible , to get
So they persuaded her that what we were trying to do and what we had been trying to do the whole year and having a big procession for and all the lobbying and everything else, was doomed to defeat. It couldn't be done. The only thing to do was to gradually—they said gradually the state referendums, some of them, were won, and by making it obligatory to have a referendum to all the states, some more would be won.
That, I thought was the most terrible proposal that could ever be made. So I went back to Washington, and we asked for an interview with the national board of the National American and practically our whole board—I remember Mrs. Lawrence Lewis was one of the most prominent people on our board, and Mrs. Burns, and several others— went up and met with the national board. They summoned all their people from all over the country to this national board meeting.
We tried to explain why we thought that this amendment, which had been announced in 1878, introduced in Congress by one of the California men, one which Susan B. Anthony had worked for so heard year after year—we said everything we could think of as to why we should
Miss Addams sat there for two days, and I think she was—we always thought she was completely with us, more than anybody else, because she had been the person to propose the resolution that we go down there [to Washington] in the beginning. So it was a very sorrowful few days that we spent there. We just got nowhere. We certainly did fail. Whether we could have done it better I don't know. But I think. We had very sincere and honest people like Mrs. William Kent, very powerful people, and so our little board was completely united. There wasn't a dissenting person on our little Congressional Union board which we had still. And we just couldn't convince them.
So they said, "We think we'd better go ahead and continue our effort all over the country for the state referendums and it will be a help. It will make it easier to have a referendum because sometimes a legislature refuses." That was their philosophy.
So then this idea that we had all had of packing up and getting back to our respective homes as soon as we could really vanished, because we thought, "We can't go away and leave the whole woman movement without anybody working in Congress if women are ever going to get the vote."
The Congressional Union Reconfirmed
PaulSo then we started in. There was nothing but the little Congressional Union then, you see.
Fry
Which Mrs. McCormick was it who was chosen to lead the congressional committe?
Paul
Mrs. Medill McCormick, Ruth Hanna McCormick, daughter of Mark Hanna.
That was 1914.
Around January I think.
Paul
Well, we continued along with our same little basement office, and the first thing that happened was that women over the whole country who just naturally, without any argument from us or anybody else, thought this was a very fatal mistake [this step] that the National American had taken. And the first group, as a group to act, was out in Minnesota. They sent word and asked me if I would come out and explain this whole thing to the women there because they were very much opposed to dropping the Amendment they had all been working for and that they were all committed to.
So I did go out and spoke at a meeting that they had, and spent about a week I guess. Quite a great many of their own board—the meeting that they got up was presided over by their state president, Mrs. Euland. She was a Scandinavian woman, very fine woman. They had a splendid group of women out in Minnesota. Anyway, a good many of them wanted to become members and associate themselves with us, but we didn't have any—we did have a little [individual] membership; I suppose they paid a dollar or something but I don't remember much about that.
But then the state of Maryland, led by Mrs. Donald Hooker, a remarkable woman, a wonderful, marvelous, marvelous person, who had a great command over her own branch—they would do anything she told them to do—the whole branch voted to sever all relations with the old National American, withdraw from it completely, broke with them completely and wanted to join with us. So then we suddenly, not wanting in the least to become a national organization, had a branch. And we suddenly had some individual women out in Minnesota.
That spread all over the country, and I took a trip. I went to a great many—I don't know how many—states. I spoke to the state boards trying to get them, not to join us because we didn't want to be an organization, but to try to get them to refuse to go along with this new Shafroth-Palmer bill.
Fry
Also, about this same time there was discussion by your group of the strategy of holding the party in power responsible, in the 1914 election campaigns.
Paul
That was formally adopted later. This split was over
And then Crystal Eastman (she was on our national board) went out on one of these very successful trips across the states trying to—we had only one thing— trying to get people to come back to the original amendment.
Fry
Who did you see when you went to these states? The chapters of the National American?
Paul
We went to the state committees of the National American, with whom we had been working the whole previous year. So we knew them. They had come to Washington; we had corresponded with them. We also gradually, without wanting it or thinking about it, we suddenly found that we were getting little branches in different states who would not go along with the other amendment. That's the only thing that caused the Woman's Party to come into being.
Fry
Was this when your amendment was the Mondell?
50. According to Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying , the Amendment at this time was referred to in the name of its main sponsors in Congress—the "Bristow-Mondell Amendment," and later became the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment."
Paul
We didn't have any name for it then. Shafroth-Palmer was because Shafroth was a senator and Palmer was a House man, and they introduced it.
[Interruption for adjustment of furnace thermostat.]
We still didn't have any idea of having a national organization, of being anything very permanent, although it looked as though we might have to be permanent to get the old National American to come back to the fold on the subject of which amendment we were working for.
You see what an extraordinary situation it was.
Fry
At this point, did you still prefer to work with the National American, if they had let you?
Paul
We never thought of being anything but the National American. There had been for a long time two groups, one the National and one the American. This was before I ever came along. By the time we arrived everybody was in just one.
Supposing you belonged to a church and the church suddenly went off on something quite contrary to what it was formed to do. You wouldn't be thinking about whether you wanted to work with them or not. You would be thinking about bringing them back to what they should be working for, what we thought they should be working for.
We discovered that there was immense support for our view. For instance, the most powerful woman in the women's movement in California, in your state, was your own Mrs. Kent on our board. I think everybody out there— I never heard of anybody who didn't support the position we took. Charlotte Anita Whitney was in the College Woman's League. And Mrs. Phoebe Hearst. All these people were great followers there. Maud Younger—she was one of the most powerful people in that state.
You see, it was such an unheard-of thing when women who had worked for a long time, for generation after generation and had seen steady progress made, suddenly [saw] it completely abandoned, because you see, they [National American] were completely abandoning the vote- for-women campaign federally.
Fry
I understand that Carrie Chapman Catt and Dr. Shaw, who were leaders in the National American, said that the Shafroth-Palmer bill was just to be a supplement to the other one. Did you understand this, and could you explain that to me? How could it be a supplement?
Paul
Well, I suppose it could be, being an attempt to oblige legislatures to have a referendum. Some of them might be successful, and then that would give more support in Congress as it would then be a suffragist state and would be more apt to support it. I suppose that way it could be.
But of course when you face it, when you go down to see a man and your measure is introduced and you speak before a committee and the hearings and so on, and you speak for the one that's going to give the vote for women if it ever goes through, and other people speak for the other measure before Congress. which is to make a referendum (for the men of the state, not the women of the state) obligatory; if a sufficient number of people sign a petition, to an ordinary congressman or to an ordinary woman it's a very complicated situation. And so these women [we talked to] absolutely couldn't comprehend why, when Miss Anthony had been going down there [to Washington D.C.] year after year and they'd all been supporting what she was going for, why they suddenly dropped it. And I don't see, I can't imagine, I really never could comprehend any reason whatsoever for it. [Laughter.] But it went on. They continued their campaign. I'm not sure what year they gave it up. There was a convention, I think, in Louisville, where they voted it down.
Fry
It wasn't terribly long after that.
Paul
You see, we got into the war in 1917. And since the whole National American devoted itself to the war effort and practically ceased everything, it more or less left the field to us. So after a time we didn't realize that there was any counter-force at all. Everybody seemed to be working for the original amendment.
But our whole coming into being as a separate organization and continuing was due—If they hadn't introduced that Shafroth-Palmer we never would have thought of having a separate organization. I'm sure we would have closed up our headquarters and gone back to our respective lives, whatever we were trying to do before we went down there.
Fry
What would you have gone back to ?
Paul
I? I don't know because [laughter] I haven't stopped to think about what I would have done if I didn't do this.
Fry
I can't imagine you not being in the suffrage movement.
Paul
Oh no, I don't know. I certainly [would have been] in the suffrage movement. I don't know if I would have—I was in the suffrage movement when I was a student in
Fry
I read somewhere, I think it was in somebody's thesis— they mentioned that you one time thought that you would be a college professor.
Paul
I suppose everybody in those pioneer days, when there weren't very many women going to college anyway and almost no women taking their doctor's degree, it would have been a natural thing to do. The few women who were graduate students the same time I was, I guess they all became college professors.
I had what was called the Moore fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. I was so surprised when I met Dr. Crawford (out in California) and she was, of course, such a very distinguished dean of students at the University of Southern California. When she began to be active in our campaign, I met her once when she came to Washington. She told me that she had studied at the University of Pennsylvania and had had the Moore fellowship. I said, "Well of all things'. I had the Moore fellowship I don't know whether before or after you"—I guess she must have been after me, I'm not sure. I remember that it was after I had come back from England where I had been imprisoned as you know. Everybody I knew I supposed looked rather askance, rather embarrassed to know a person who had been in prison. Certainly everybody in my family, everybody from Swarthmore, it seemed to me everybody thought it was rather a disgraceful episode in my life. I went to the University of Pennsylvania when I came back. I had gotten a master's degree before I went to Europe and had studied at the University of Birmingham and the University of London (the School of Economics); so when I went back I thought that now I would finish it up.
I remember Christabel Pankhurst coming to me when I was in London and saying, "Wouldn't you stay on as an organizer for the Women's Social and Political Union?" They paid a very tiny sum, but up to that time I had been paying all my own expenses. I said, "No, I've started to get this doctor's degree; I think I'd like to go back and finish it."
So I went back to the University of Pennsylvania, where I had taken my master's degree. The professor of
I said, "Well, I thought I had burned all my bridges that time when I went to prison. I didn't think I could ever aspire to any honor like this."
He said, "Oh, we don't think that way at all. If you'd like to have the Moore Fellowship, it's now open, and we want to offer it to you." So—I felt just—oh so grateful to this man.
[Tape off. Interruption for dinner preparation.]
Fry
How did Mrs. Belmont come over to you?
Paul
You know Miss Crystal Eastman, don't you, who she was.
Fry
Was she Max Eastman's wife?
Paul
Sister. Crystal Eastman was one of those on our little Congressional Union committee, our original committee. She was very helpful. You know her mother was one of the first women, perhaps the first woman minister in America, very, very well known in the women's movement.
Fry
Did she work in suffrage or equal rights?
Paul
I don't know whether she worked or not, but she was the mother of Crystal who worked. Crystal went to Vassar.
Fry
Well, you would know if her mother was a part of it.
Paul
Well, I think her mother died before I ever knew Crystal. She was just a tradition of being one of the first woman ministers in the country. Crystal was a member from the time she went on our committee until she died. She knew so many people, and she was always trying to get them to come in and help in the campaign. She took one trip over the country which was very successful and where she got a great great deal of help.
Fry
Was this the same time that you took yours around for the opposition to the Shafroth-Palmer amendment?
Paul
No, she did it first.
So—she was always insisting that we do something to get Mrs. Belmont to take part in this movement because she was somebody everybody knew about because of her great wealth, and so on. I remember when we were getting up this first procession I don't know how many people were always insisting that we give a very prominent place to Mrs. Belmont, that she was the sort of person who liked to be known to everybody and to be conspicuous, and so on.
So they said, "What you must do is put her on one of the three floats." I thought, "What a funny lady she must be, to want to be on a float." I never had heard of anybody who wanted to do that. You had to labor and toil to get people to sit up above all the crowd and be on a float. But I thought that since they all said I must write to Mrs. Belmont I wrote her a letter asking her if she would preside over one of the floats in this first big procession. I don't think she even answered me. I guess she thought I was another lunatic come into the movement to ask her to go on a float.
But then when Crystal was always pursuing this and I said, "Well, I did do what you asked me—I asked her to be on a float." Suddenly one day I had a telephone message from Mrs. Belmont asking me if I would come in and have dinner with her and then spend the night so we could discuss the whole break that we had had over the new amendment. She was always working, of course, for the old National American, and I think perhaps paying for their headquarters, it was very much [?].
So I went up and had dinner with her. Then I spent the night there. She was one of these people who doesn't like to go to bed until very, very, very late. So she wanted to talk, on and on and on. We talked the whole evening until two in the morning or something like that. I guess that night she said that she had decided that we were the ones who would be able to put the amendment through, and it was insanity to be starting on just getting a referendum to the men of the states. So most of the people of course didn't sever their relations with the old National. They just belonged to both. But she definitely cut off all her connections—
[No words were lost here in the tape copying.]
—some form of an organization.
Fry
I think the issue was over
Paul
It was very simple maybe. Maybe they were a more elaborate one.
Fry
This was before a constitution was drawn up. Do you remember any discussions over whether to have a general election for officers by the general membership?
Paul
I think we always did. You see, we were such a tiny little group. Whatever we drew up—we had lawyers on our little board like Mrs. Gillette, as I told you, the dean and founder of the Western College of Law—I think we probably just asked one of them to do all that sort of thing for us. I don't remember a thing about it.
Fry
It was probably just part of your ordinary evolution, so you wouldn't especially mark it in your own memory.
Paul
Whoever this Mrs. Reed was—you say she was writing us letters—
Fry
Ivy Kellerman Reed. Also Mrs. Donald R. Hooker was involved trying to help get a constitution written, and so forth.
Paul
Yes, she was the one who joined almost immediately, before Mrs. Belmont even. At the time she joined she was one of our most powerful and prominent people. So anything she asked we would certainly have done. Maybe she was the one who did get us a constitution. (I can't remember one thing about getting the constitution.)
Fry
Well, okay.
Paul
She was one of the most involved and devoted and ardent and enthusiastic workers we ever had.
Carrie Chapman Catt's Opposition
FryWas Carrie Chapman Catt ever sympathetic to your cause after the Shafroth-Palmer amendment was put in?
See, she was International president. I guess we mostly heard of her as International president.
Fry
Then?
Paul
Then.
Fry
I thought she would be in on the National American board meetings.
Paul
No, no.
Fry
Wasn't she there?
Paul
I never heard of her.
Fry
Carrie Chapman Catt?
Paul
I never heard of her being present at anything. She was International president. She was supposed to be looking after things in Europe. This was something Susan B. Anthony really started, the whole international. She went over to Germany and started it.
I don't know what she was before, but when we came along she was International president.
51. Carrie Chapman Catt was elected president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in December, 1915. She remained the United States leader of the International until 1923. The outgoing NAWSA board in December, 1915 voted to begin the considerable effort that was to be required in dropping the Shafroth-Palmer amendment eventually.
Fry
Yes, you told me about that.
Paul
That was the meeting where Mrs. Catt made a very splendid speech, the night before our procession. We asked her to do it. I don't know whether she spent her time in Europe. I don't remember ever hearing about her one way
Fry
Something like that.
Paul
That idea. She said, "Here is somebody telling about an official organ that they have, and it's only a committee . What business has a committee having an official organ, getting out a weekly paper?" I remember this very well [laughing] because it was such agony to us to get it out, and we expected a little praise! She said that this was all wrong. "We have to do something about this, this relationship. This committee is getting to be more prominent than the mother, the organization itself."
So she made this protest, and then the treasurer, as I said [laughing), got up and made this protest: What in the wide world did we mean by not turning all the $27,000 they raised into her treasury? That's when Miss [Jane] Addams got up and said this was according to the agreement. She made a very fine speech. But nobody that I had heard of said anything to support Mrs. Catt. Usually, you know, in a convention people don't say very much. They all sit and listen. Then the next time, I think, I ever heard of Mrs. Catt—but I don't want all this recorded down [and attributed] to me.
Fry
It sounds like something so far that we could find anyway in the proceedings of the convention. It's already in print.
Paul
I know, but you don't like to be seeming to be hostile to any of your fellow-workers.
Then we had the division over the Shafroth-Palmer. As far as I know Mrs. Catt didn't ever appear in that one
Then—I'm sure I told you this—Zona Gale was a famous writer at that time, greatly respected and greatly admired. She had belonged to us, as so many people did, formally joined us and also kept on with the old National American. She conceived the plan of having a meeting at the Willard Hotel, which she arranged, at which the two groups would meet together and iron out their differences and we would have one society again and not have two. This was—I don't know which year, but I imagine around 1918.
Fry
That late?
Paul
I'm not sure about that date. It might have been, because, you see, the war came, and then Dr. Shaw and I guess almost all her officers took different positions in the defense movement in Washington, official positions, I suppose they were paid, I don't know about that. But they gave all their time and all activity that we were aware of ceased. So it was much better for us. We didn't have any friction because there was nobody to have any friction with; they were all over in this other camp.
I think it was at this time, somewhere along there, that they had their Louisville convention and withdrew the Shafroth-Palmer.
Fry
In late 1917, according to my chronology, they voted to back the federal amendment. The Shafroth-Palmer may have been withdrawn even before then, but they still wanted to put their emphasis on state-by-state referenda. Is that right? And then finally in late—
Paul
No, this convention was over the Shafroth-Palmer. That was what this fight was about, whatever year it was.
Fry
And it was in Louisville.
Paul
It's my recollection. And I'm almost certain that Mabel Vernon attended it. I think she told me about being there. think she was out in Nevada helping Miss Martin somewhere in that campaign; I guess that campaign was 1914. Then there was a later campaign out there [when Anne Martin ran for Senate]. Anyway she was somewhere in the West and she went down to this convention.
Anyway they did vote to do it [drop the Shafroth- Palmer].
Now what time of year and what year was it that Zona Gale conceived the idea of uniting the two groups? It seems to me it must have been toward the end of the war because I don't think there was much friction when they were busy in war work and we were—they had no use for us, of course. And Jeannette Rankin was one of those Mrs. Catt was very angry with because she cast this vote against the war. That was 1917. So Mrs. Catt must have been there then. Because I remember about her terrific appeal against Miss Rankin.
At this meeting, as I recall it, Zona Gale told of the importance of working together and not having a moment in which women couldn't get along together, and so on. That was her general theme.
I think I spoke then and said that we were in harmony with everything she said, of course, but we were certainly not going to abandon the amendment we were working for. And I remember Mrs. Catt spoke up for her point of view, and she said, "All I wish to say is, I will fight you to the last ditch."
I'll never forget her speech, because it was so cryptic. And up she got and walked out. That was the end of the whole attempt. I guess that's the last time I ever saw her.
Fry
There's a letter she wrote to the New York Times in 1914 in which she disclaims the activists, strategy of Congressional Union. She wanted the world to know she had nothing to do with it.
Paul
I'm sure of that, I'm sure that was her attitude.
Fry
Do you remember her letter?
Paul
No, I never heard of it. I don't think I ever knew there was a letter. But she was completely remote from our experience. We never saw or heard of her very much as far as I can remember. I remember one time that I did actually talk to her. (I can't really remember when it was, It might have been perhaps at that first procession in Washington when she made this big speech for us.) But
Impact of Congressional Union's 5% of the Suffragists
FryAnother thing that National American kept saying, after you really got started, was that the Congressional Union (or the Woman's Party, depending on what year they were saying this) only had about 5% of the suffragists and they had the other 95%.
Paul
I'm sure that was true.
Fry
I wondered if true, how important it was.
Paul
[Laughing.] Well, of course it would have been easier for us if we'd had all the ninety-five. But it certainly was true. There was no question at all about it. That's of course what made our work much much more difficult.
Fry
Was the rank and file out in the states really divided? Did a number of them belong to both, for instance, after you got all set up?
Paul
I told you how we never would have had enough to have a society, never would have had a society forced upon us, if there hadn't been some support for the old amendment. That was just a question, I think, of there being so few women in any organization. The old National American was a small organization, a tiny little organization.
I know when I went down to Washington I was driven by their headquarters in New York when we were the Congressional Committee. I was given a list of their leading members so I could get started on our congressional work. I started out to call on every one of these members or telephone or in some way to get in touch with them. I worked for quite a good many days before I found a single one, because they had either moved away or they had died; somehow or other there was no trace of them.
I went on and on and finally—of course I knew Mrs.
You can't imagine how unimportant, poor, without any reputation, any friends or anything—[laughing] we wondered what we'd taken upon ourselves. And then when we were suddenly thrown out of the old National American by their taking up this other amendment and then they didn't even want us to be a member of their society, to be an affiliated member or anything. So they practically put us out. And we practically put ourselves out, because we weren't going to be part of anything that was working for the Shafroth-Palmer. Well, you felt all womanhood almost was against you. So every word they say about our being 5%—I'd say we might have been 1%, [laughter] not as much as five.
Fry
But later on, by about 1916, you had grown. By 1917 I believe you had organized and had some kind of a chapter in almost every state.
Paul
We did, of course, we had to. We couldn't do anything else.
We were talking about people who joined up and left the old National American. Another one was Anne Martin. She was the head of her [NAWSA] state branch in Nevada. She left them completely too and she became our congressional chairman and she continued in that up until the time she ran for the senate herself.
Fry
What I'm trying to get up is a picture from you on the
Paul
Impact on whom?
Fry
On Congress and on the President, in getting suffrage.
Paul
We felt that we were the one that made all of the impact, because they weren't even trying to. First they went off working only for state referendums, officially, and then working only for war, officially, so—
[Interruption.]
You see, the first impression we probably made on Congress, was not whether it was the National American or ourselves. It was that big procession; it was an impression of course of enthusiasm, interest, excitement on the part of women which they probably never imagined, because it really was I think extremely successful and powerful, and had a great deal of publicity because it was new and there never had been a procession in Washington with women before.
Then we kept them up. We had another one on May 9. So that's one way in which—it wasn't their group or our group or any group. It was women for the first time being conspicuous enough to be recognized by Congress as demanding something they wanted.
And then you see when you talk about growing, the coming in of Mrs. Belmont brought her whole Political Equality Association into our camp. So we had these accretions that came without any thought or planning on our part, but just because of the fact that really we were, and history certainly shows we were, on the right track in keeping to this original amendment demanding in simple English the vote, which all women could comprehend. And they couldn't very well comprehend this complicated business of petitions and so on being obligatory by action of Congress through the medium of putting it in the national Constitution. It was a very long and complicated process to try to get the vote.
Assessing Results of Holding Party in Power Responsible
PaulThat first summer of 1914 we really went into the political
We did it on such a tiny little scale. We tried to get two women to go to each state. We paid their expenses, not any salary but expenses, for which we raised the money with great difficulty but did pay it all. Mrs. Belmont and a few people like that helped us to make it possible. They had this meeting up in her own home at her invitation, August 1914, when we adopted that policy.
Fry
That was the now famous meeting at Marble House.
Paul
It wasn't so famous.
Fry
Well, when you research awhile, everything keeps referring to it.
Paul
Anyway, she invited us to come and have a conference, which we were going to have anyway to draw up an election policy, to have it there. Doris Stevens, who was one of the best organizers that we ever had or could have, extremely good, went up in advance and stayed there, took a little room somewhere, and worked with all the prestige of Mrs. Belmont behind her. She got all the people that Mrs. Belmont thought were of any importance in Newport to come to the public meeting we had after we had the meeting in her home and adopted this policy.
The meeting was very successful. I remember Mrs. Thomas Hepburn, sister of Mrs. Donald Hooker, was the unquestioned leader of the suffragists here in Connecticut, just as Mrs. Hooker was the unquestioned leader down in Maryland. Mrs. Hepburn came to that meeting at Mrs. Belmont's She was the state president of the old National American. When you say, did many of the leading women leave, well, she didn't leave. She continued as state president but she also continued as one of our members and came and spoke and voted at that meeting up there in Mrs. Belmont's. So unanimously we—
I made the main proposal at the meeting what we should do, and then Lucy Burns, who was a very eloquent speaker made a long speech, I remember, showing the record of the Democratic party, how very bad they had been on this subject. And of course the attitude of President Wilson was completely hostile, and so when we took the vote it was unanimous.
Then I remember Mrs. Belmont standing in the back of the room, intensely interested, because she always was a great fighter. She was just a born born fighter. Whenever there was a fight on she took the leadership. So she arose and said she wanted to do what she could to further this and she would now give us $5,000, which was the biggest gift we had ever had. It seemed to us enormous. And it was, for us.
Then we did go to every state where women were voting, sent in two people who were the best we could find who were willing to go. Everyone of them did very, very good work. At the end of the campaign there wasn't any question now in the minds of the senators from those states that they were going to support this measure.
I remember Senator Wesley Jones from Washington state. Washington was one of the recent ones that had gotten the vote. I remember that we were trying to have somebody get up and begin to speak about this on the floor of Congress. (You can't have a movement to introduce a bill with nobody ever speaking for it in public.) I remember going to see Senator Jones and asking him what time I could see him in the morning. He said "I'm always in my office at seven o'clock." [Laughing.] That impressed me so much because I felt I had to get down there at seven. I don't think he meant that, but anyway I made a great effort and got there at seven, when he began his work.
He had conducted this hearing and I gave you a copy of it [to read] which Consuelo sent me, of the Senate investigation of the procession, of all the attacks— they weren't really attacks, just unfriendliness—that happened that day.
Fry
On the parade in March of 1913.
Paul
Yes. So I did go down to see him and got the hearing arranged.
This was the hearing for the investigation, or the hearing on the [Bristow-]Mondell bill?
Paul
You mustn't say Mondell because it was Mondell one year and somebody else the next year.
Fry
Well, 1914—
Paul
We called it the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. That's the reason we did it, deliberately, to try to educate the women of the country that that was the Amendment, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, we were working for, that they had all been working together.
Fry
So it could be called the same name each yeay.
Paul
Not so it would be called the same each year, but so that it would be called by a name that the women would know which one they wanted to support, we hoped.
Anyway, I went to see Mr. Jones to ask him if he would make a speech and he said, "Yes." At that time whatever we asked those few men from those states (Mondell, whom you always talk about was, I think, from Wyoming—or I have a feeling he was from Washington.
52. Mondell was congressman from Wyoming.
When Senator Jones got up I went to sit in the gallery, very proud of the fact we were going to have a speech, [laughing] thinking that all women would rally because we were notifying everybody, and all senators would be enthused. I believe that nobody was on the floor excepting Senator Jones making his speech, and I think almost nobody was in the gallery except for myself. [Laughing.] It shows what worlds we had to do before we we could get this measure through.
But that was just the beginning of making the congressmen want to do what we wanted them to do, even to make a speech to an empty house and gallery. He was willing to do it because we had fought out in that state and had sent a very wonderful girl out there to do it, Margaret Whittemore, with somebody else with her. We usually had one very good person and the other person was more or less an assistant so they wouldn't be all alone.
When you said, "impact on Congress," I think that by organizing the women voters in every state where the women had the vote, when a new one came in like Kansas we went there, you see. And Washington was a new state. Gradually a few came, but then immediately we got those congressmen by including them in whatever election campaign we were having. So after the first election campaign, which was in 1914, we went next in 1916 and and we kept it up every year there was an election until by the end I feel it was one of the main things that put the Amendment through Congress.
Fry
Did you run statistics all the time? Or how did you assess what influence this policy was having on elections and so forth?
Paul
We knew pretty well from the attitude of the men. I remember, for instance, a man from Kansas when we decided to go into Kansas which had just been enfranchised more recently. One of the congressmen from Kansas telephoned and asked me to come down to his office in the House of Representatives and talk with him about this announcement that we were sending two women out to Kansas to warn the Kansas women to oppose him on the grounds that he had supported the Democratic caucus of opposition to the suffrage amendment. He just besought me not to have anything to do with it. He just went to me because my name was publicly in the papers as having had something to do with it.
Naturally no congressman wants you to go into his district against him even when he can't tell and you can't tell what the outcome will be. But it probably will have some little effect. In some places it probably had a great deal, in some places very little. But certainly we had enough so it was recognized everywhere in Congress, that this was a group which was attacking anybody in the one place it could attack—where we had women voters.
So we had this meeting in California at the time of the world's fair [Panama Pacific Exposition, in 1915] where we had a booth from the beginning to the end of this campaign; you know all about that. Part of that whole effort there was another step in organizing the voting women. It was something that we worked on all the time. We would go from one state to another after these voting women.
There was an organization formed, I don't remember what it was called. One of the leading women in it was Dr. Cora Smith King from the state of Washington, who had led in the campaign to get suffrage out there. They held a convention in Washington, which we persuaded them to have, so that the congressmen there who had never visualized before could see right in their own capital these voting women coming. Then of course we had them all vote to oppose anybody who would oppose the Amendment or who did not support the Amendment. Every device we could think of was used to build up this idea of the women voters standing together against the party which was against them .
Fry
One thing I ran across, Alice, in all my reading, was a letter from your "Uncle Mickle Paul." He says, "Stop, think and decide: Is it an advance or a retreat to destroy instead of building up a force to aid in the battle for justice to women." He is talking about holding the party in power responsible.
Paul
He was the president of the Democratic Club of Pennsylvania. He came from a Republican family. Nobody else in my family had ever been anything but Republican. He started out as a drummer boy in the Civil War.
My father was too young to be in the war. But he was a little older. And so he always explained to us this extraordinary thing that he was a Democrat. He said, "You see, my experience in the war of getting to know all the common rank of soldiers so well and what their terrible problems were and their great heroism, and so on, has made me so different, perhaps from my brother," (who was my father and who was more conservative).
At all events he was always a champion of the underdog and was made the president for a time of the Democratic Club, I think, of Philadelphia (it may have been the state). And he was elected to the state legislature as a Democrat. But he always upheld me, you know, always.
Fry
He just hated to see you fight the Democrats.
Paul
I don't know about that; I don't remember this letter. At all events, when I was in prison in England, and my father wasn't living, and my mother was horrified and wrote to the British ambassador protesting against this terrible treatment of an American girl student in England, and so on. I never knew this until recently but my
Fry
In 1916, when you also were fighting against the Democrats, I ran across some letters that were written to "Dear Organizer" from you. Apparently you sent it out to all your state organizers. It sounds like you were having trouble getting the women out in the states to really make it clear that they were supposed to be asking people to vote against Mr. Wilson and the senatorial and congressional candidates of the Democratic party.
Let me quote from it here. You say,
"I find in looking through our press clippings that they frequently state that we are holding meetings and trying to arouse interest in the national suffrage amendment but that nothing whatever is said about voting against President Wilson and the Democratic national candidates." Then you say, "I think we cannot be too explicit in telling the people just what we are asking them to do at election time."Letters from Alice addressed to state organizers, dated 1916
Paul
Of course, that was the whole point.
Fry
And you say,
"We will, of course, arouse more antagonism by this course than we would by vague generalizations, and the result undoubtedly will be that people will resign."Letters from Alice addressed to state organizers, dated 1916
Paul
I'm sure when I wrote that that was exactly what the situation was and always is. This very week, for instance, when I was talking to our state chairman down in Alabama, she said, "Now the tactful thing is, not at all what you are saying." (But what I was saying I know is the right thing. She said, "It's so important to have no apparent difficulties with Governor Wallace, that [we] mustn't say anything about the Equal Rights Amendment."
Fry
To Governor Wallace?
Paul
No, to the state, to anybody. It's the same thing exactly.
You go on to say in this letter—
Paul
The whole power that we had was in the effort, whether we took away one vote or a thousand votes, to diminish the success in the campaign of the party we were opposing. And now [1973] our great need is to get this ratification of the [ Equal Rights] Amendment through, not to have all the people in Alabama rising up and saying how wonderful is equality for women, but not to touch the Amendment. That's no good at all. She said, "I think it would be so much better... "
Then Mrs. Longworth called me and said, "I don't know about this. I think we had better soft-pedal anything about the Amendment."
Another thing on this was your mentioning that some people would undoubtedly resign. Did you lose many people over this policy? When you think about your organizers, as you look back on it, do you remember that you had any further difficulties in getting them to come around and emphasize this business of fighting all Democrats, including those supporting suffrage?
Paul
Oh no, that's what they went out to do. That's what they purposely went for. But you know when you go with a set purpose and you find that people look askance at you and the newspapers are critical of you, certainly you begin to think, "Well, maybe I'd better not mention that too much."
That is just the way they say now, "Well, look here, don't mention the fact that Governor Wallace came out for the complete Equal Rights Amendment." But these people are so determined, all these NOW
53. National Organization of Women
How in the world are we ever going to get this thing ratified if we don't even mention it because it's unpopular with some peopl!
Fry
It seemed that a lot of this strategy, too, was to create a controversy so you could get in the newspapers and you could make a mainstream issue. That's what your letter sounds like.
Paul
It wasn't that we were trying to get into the newspapers. We were trying to make a congressman feel that all these meetings of all these earnest housewives all over this state were maybe going to be a danger to him, and then maybe he would come back and do something, whether we were in the papers or not.
Fry
You had some other problems with your organizers. It looked like in the correspondence I was reading (in the Anne Martin collection) and in the telegrams that went back and forth between your office in Washington and these outlying states, every organizer had her strong points and her limitations.
Paul
Did she?
Fry
Yes, let me give you an example here. Apparently you tried to get Harriot Stanton Blatch out to speak, and she wouldn't speak to anyone any more until after the election except at engagements already made and except to large audiences. She would not speak to small audiences.
Paul
Well, that was all right.
Fry
But your problem was, she was in Nevada and Utah at that time and [laughing] there weren't very many large audiences available in those states.
Paul
About Mrs. Blatch—she was the president of the Woman's Political Union, I think it was called, in New York state. It was a very big and successful organization. Then New York won, and the organization voted to disband and to ask all their members to join the Woman's Party and throw in their strength with us. Mrs. Elizabeth Seldon Rogers—I've told you about her—she was one of their most powerful women. Mrs. John Winters Brannan was perhaps the second most powerful woman. They had always been on the national board of the National Woman's
She was very ardent about starting the picketing. At the meeting where we had to decide whether or not we would begin to picket the White House she was probably the most vigorous person in speaking for it and wanting us to start. And we did start in January 1917.
Then, in April 1917 we went into the war, and so we didn't discuss changing our policy; we had started to picket and so we expected to go ahead and picket. And we did. We didn't have any vote about it or anything. We just continued.
She then resigned from our national board [laughter] that she had just been put on, on the grounds that this was unpatriotic. She then proceeded to get up what you call a round robin. It was late when it arrived to us. It was a long, long document with many signatures, I guess headed by Mrs. Blatch, anyway instigated by Mrs. Blatch, simply demanding that the Woman's Party stop its picketing: This was an unpatriotic disloyal step. She had married an Englishman and a great part of the time in the suffrage campaign while we were campaigning she was over in England looking after the financial interests of her children, because her husband died in England. I remember that Mrs. Brannan finally sent her a cablegram which said, "We demand that you come home and tend to your organization."
So she did come home because of this demand from her people at home. They thought that here in this very critical time that she ought to be there if she was going to continue as president.
So when you tell me about Mrs. Blatch, the period that she was with us was quite short.
Fry
This was October 1916, and, specifically you were hunting for someone to speak at Ely and McGill, two little towns in Nevada. You suggested that Gail Laughlin speak there instead of Harriot Stanton Blatch.
Paul
She was in California so she could go over easily.
Yes, and you thought that she might be better than Blatch under those conditions.
Then there was somebody who didn't want to go more than so many miles from home. And there was another one—
Paul
An organizer? Who was she?
Fry
I don't have her name down here. And—who was the one who died in the middle of a speech?
Paul
Inez Milholland, my goodness.
Fry
Inez Milholland didn't like to be on a platform with another speaker, because she was afraid—
Paul
I told you that, didn't I?
Fry
Did you tell me that?
Paul
Yes.
Fry
It was also in the telegrams and so forth.
Paul
I want to tell you about Inez Milholland, one of the greatest women we ever had in our movement. You know, we have that painting of her on horseback, on a white horse. We've used it ever since. My goodness, she was a wonderful girl! A wonderful girl! But she was a very modest sort of person. I told you this before—she said she wanted to make only one request, that she be the only speaker. She said, "You know, with a second speaker, I always know in my own bones that I'm not a good speaker and that she would be so much better, so the result is that I simply remain silent. I'm unable to overcome this feeling that poor speaker as I am I still ought to do it. So, if I'm the only person I know I have to do it."
As a result, she was just a superb speaker in the way of moving her audience. She was extremely beautiful and so radiant and lovely. And then she had this lovely sister—that was Vida Milholland—who always sang these wonderful songs that their father paid all expenses to have Vida go with Inez so she wouldn't be alone on the trip. So they were a marvelous combination.
There are so many people in every place where you get up a meeting that can't rest until they have gotten
So we got her successfully from the first meeting, which was in Wyoming, to the last meeting when she fell unconscious on the platform in Los Angeles, with no one else ever permitted on that platform, hard as it was, excepting Vida with her lovely songs, and whoever introduced her. So no matter how determined some of these queer people were to get up and have a chance to speak before an immense audience, we kept them off the platform.
Fry
My question is, with communications the way they were those days I just don't quite see how you were able to keep all of this coordinated.
Paul
Why not? I don't see how you could do it any other way.
Fry
It must have taken most of your time to do that. Did it?
Paul
It did of mine. I always thought I spent all my time, ninety-nine per cent of it, raising money (which I guess I did). Then far too much on just doing this work of seeing that every little detail went all right way out in Wyoming or wherever it was. But I never thought we ever had anything but the utmost and the most wonderful cooperation from all the organizers. I never thought there was a single organizer who hadn't been good.
Fry
I'm just referring to the way you had to route different ones. How on earth did you keep track of all of them? There were so many going so many places all at the same time. You had more than just your organizers, didn't you? You had speakers going out like Sara Bard Field who wasn't necessarily an organizer.
Paul
The organizers were supposed to be able to speak, but that wasn't their purpose of course. It was to go and arouse the people and have lots and lots of people, the local people speaking, in the suffrage states. Nobody cared very much, say in Kansas, if somebody from—Like what this lady said to Mrs. Chittick [the other day], "Nobody cares very much when you come down from New York and the campaign is right here in Louisiana to have you speak. You would do more good if you would come and get some of these Louisiana people to speak."
So that was the organizers' point of view; that was what they had to do.
Operating with Congressional Rules and Committees
FryThere was something I wanted to ask you awhile ago when you were talking about the Susan B. Anthony bill in the 1914 session. It was actually brought to the floor in the Senate in that session and then voted down and killed. What gave you the idea of having that bill resubmitted in the Senate during the same session, because that had never been done before to a bill in the Senate. Do you remember that?
Paul
No. I don't remember whether it had ever been done before, if that's what you mean.
Fry
You said, in a letter at that time, that it had never been done before but that you thought you could get the senators behind this and get the rules suspended.
Paul
Did we do it or not?
Fry
You did; it was re-submitted.
I just thought maybe you knew something about that, because it seemed like a pretty big thing to attempt, to get the Senate rules suspended for that. You were establishing a precedent.
Paul
That's what we have been trying to see if we could do up in Maine now, see if we couldn't get [the ERA] resubmitted, re-introduced I mean, [for ratification].
Fry
In your letter you said that you thought a lot of the senators would back you on this, because they wanted to get this precedent established so that if they had a bill killed they could re-submit it.
Paul
Yes, that would be so.
Fry
Remember your efforts to establish a suffrage committee in both houses? After you mentioned it to me, I wished I had asked you to spell out the advantages of having a special suffrage committee instead of a subcommittee in the Judiciary Committee.
Well, I don't know that there's much to spell out. On any subject, if it has great interest, you have to have a special committee. For instance, they have a special banking committee, banking and currency now.
Fry
That's an on-going committee, isn't it?
Paul
Yes. So would the suffrage one be until suffrage was won.
Fry
I thought maybe there was some reason that you did not feel it was to your advantage to continue to use the Judiciary Committee, which normally would handle it.
Paul
The Judiciary Committee has such a tremendous number of points—everything connected with that whole judicial system comes before the Judiciary Committee.
Fry
It was really easier to get a new committee formed and get those men to meet, than it was to deal with men who were already meeting?
Paul
Everybody was meeting on some committee.
Fry
Well, okay, I thought maybe I had missed a point there and I wanted to give you a chance to explain it if it needed to be explained.
Paul
No, I think it's just an ordinary custom to get your subject to have enough interest in it to have one committee deal with it. People are apt to go on the committee that they are interested in. I think they are always establishing new committees on subjects where there is considerable amount of public interest.
Fry
Was this done a lot then?
Paul
This was done before we were even born, back in the time of Susan B. Anthony, somewhere they started this Suffrage Committee. When we arrived there was a committee in one house and not in the other. We accepted it. We couldn't do anything else. We just took the Suffrage Committee and did the best we could with those men, and we took the other committee and did the best we could with them.
Fry
You did get a suffrage committee in both houses eventually.
Paul
I don't recall that, but maybe we did. I know we started
Fry
Yes, you did. You got one in the Senate.
Paul
I suppose we were probably having better luck with our Suffrage Committee, go we wanted to get one in [the other house, too].
Fry
There was a Representative Bums from South Carolina. In 1916 in the spring he called for an investigation of your lobbying finances.
Paul
Did he?
Fry
Yes, but the investigation never came off. This hit the newspapers at the time. Do you remember anything about that and do you know why Burns did this? Can you tell us anything about Burns and his part?
Paul
I don't remember. I could look it up, but I don't remember now.
Fry
Well, I thought I detected the fine hand of Alice Paul, because after all these threats and so forth he never did have the investigation. [Laughing.] Maybe you had a story behind that.
Paul
No, I don't think so. People were all the time —what year was this?
Fry
The spring of 1916, before the election in 1916.
Paul
After 1917 they were always charging that we were being financed by the Germans, because the war was on, and all these women in the National American and all these people who were for the war said we were interfering with American defense and therefore it was perfectly clear that the Germans were financing it. Always. I remember the many times that many people wanted to investigate this.
But you know we published in the [ Suffragist and] Equal Rights magazine, a separate magazine, every single two-penny contribution that we ever got. You've noticed them probably there. That was a great protection. I'm glad we did. But I don't seem to remember about Burns.
Fry
Did you have a congressional investigation over this charge of being financed by the Germans?
No, no. No one ever made an investigation. First of all, we had so little money that there wasn't much to investigate.
Fry
In our other interview you mentioned in passing the "Hazel Hunkins issue." Do you know what that was?
Paul
What do you mean, "issue."
Fry
I don't know. Maybe some controversy. I probably understood what you meant at the time. Maybe you can clear it up. It was referring to the first two or three years of the existence of the Congressional Union.
Paul
Hazel Hunkins joined us in 1916, I think, because I remember very vividly when she joined. She came down to a meeting we were having and I was there at that meeting in Colorado Springs. She came down from Montana right after the election. Then she just joined and went down with us to Washington. She took over the business management of the Suffragist and lived at our headquarters and was one of our very best workers . So I don't know any issue about it.
Fry
We may have just gotten the wrong word transcribed there.
Paul
Then she went over you know, to England. The only conceivable thing (that I never would have said was an issue because nobody was concerned with it) was that she had strong principles against getting married, for some reason. I remember once when I went over to England (when I was in Geneva) and I had dinner with her. She said, "You know, I've tried to be faithful to my principle that you should never have a marriage ceremony." (I don't see any point in that myself, but that's what she thought.) She said, "Now I'm beginning to have some doubts about it because I feel very passionately on the subject of vaccination. I'm determined that my children who are going to a British school where they require vaccinations should not be vaccinated. So I have sent a protest and said I won't permit it. And they have said that they don't care whether I permit it or not. Only the father's consent is necessary against vaccination, to prevent it. If your husband doesn't want it, then, of course we wouldn't have any vaccination." So, she said., "Now, they seem to think that I have no real say in this matter because I'm not married to Mr. Hallinan."
So I can remember that. But that was not exactly
Fry
That may have been it. We may have been referring to that particular belief as something held by a minority of women at that time, that would reflect on the suffrage campaign or something like that.
Paul
She didn't talk about it. I remember very well once somebody from the government coming to see me about Hazel Hunkins. I think perhaps it was years afterwards when she came back and for a time stayed in this country and tried to earn some more money for some reason or other. Her husband was a very distinguished, I think United Press correspondent, a war correspondent, and so on. Maybe she was having financial difficulties, I don't know what it was. But she came back for a time and did work maybe two years and she got a position with the government. I was extremely busy at the time. I really didn't know very much about her.
Anyway, this man came up to say that before employing her in something that had to do with the security of the country, some kind of thing that was very important, they wanted to know more about her and could I tell more about this Hazel Hunkins.
So I started in and told the man everything, how she had been an organizer for us and gone to prison with us, had been our business manager for our magazine, everything I could think of. Then I said, "Then she married Mr. Hallinan and went over to live in England, and she's been living in England and I haven't heard much about her since. Something like that." Then I believe I said, "I really believe she didn't marry," [laughing] that she had some principles on this subject. He said, "Oh yes, we know all about that. No, she wasn't married."
So he hadn't contradicted me. I just thought I would say all these things and he would see how little I knew.
She had never engaged in any public propaganda on
Fry
She didn't make a campaign of this?
Paul
Oh, she never mentioned it one way or the other.
Congressional Union Becomes the Woman's Party
FryMore on this organization—the Congressional Union remained separate from the Woman's Party until, March of 1917, as I understand. Is that not right?
Paul
No.
Fry
Because at that time they consolidated. Anne Martin was head of—Woman's Party? You were head of Congressional Union? Is that wrong?
Paul
No, we changed our name from Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage to National Woman's Party at the earnest request of Mrs. Belmont, who had become a member of our national board. [Different] people were always much concerned about this thing, or this thing or this thing: she was very concerned about our name . I was not a bit concerned about our name. I didn't think it made any difference what our name was. But when she wanted it so much we all said all right and we couldn't see any reason why we shouldn't take the name she thought was so important. She said, "It has so much more strength and more dignity and for future times it will be a stronger, bigger name that will help put the woman movement into a better position." She was very genuine and sincere in what she thought.
So I suppose at one of our national conventions we must have voted to change the name.
I remember this about Anne Martin.
I think we first changed it just for the women in the suffrage states that we were trying to mobilize. We called it the Woman's Party. I don't think we had "national." Everybody whom we enlisted out there—by that time it was growing to be a very big group out there, with all this campaigning—And we called that the Woman's Party. But that was because of this effort of Mrs. Belmont to have something called the Woman's Party.
Then we thought, "The name seems to be generally accepted. People like it. Congressional Union for Woman for Woman Suffrage is much more limited and less understood." Finally we said, "We'll make it universal, for the whole." At the time it was one of the many things we did to try to develop this woman voter idea. We had a convention in Chicago and we called it the Woman's Party Convention. That's what Mrs. Belmont was trying to get us to do.
Then we voted—it was 1916—to go into the election campaigns in all the states, appeal to all the women voters to stand by the Woman's Party, which was to be the woman's political organization for those states. I remember Mrs. Belmont was so pleased that we did it [laughing] and so full of interest that she got up and pledged on the platform some tremendous sum of money. I forget how much it was, but I think we can find it in the Suffragist, $50,000 or $100,000, I don't know what. It was some enormous sum. The meeting was extremely successful. Dudley Field Malone was a very eloquent speaker. He came to say what the Democrats would do. All because we had a "woman's party." [Laughter.] It was really marvelous. Then Mrs. Belmont just astounded everybody with this enormous gift she was going to make to make this possible, to put it through.
Then we elected Anne Martin to be the president of the Woman's Party, for this election campaign. Then we went into the campaign which was against Wilson, you know, in all the states. I think this was in 1916.
Fry
Yes, according to my notes.
Paul
And then—I don't know what we called ourselves . But we then decided, at the request of Mr. Kent, to incorporate; we had never incorporated. [Searching her memory] I know there was some little trifling thing—somebody—I just vaguely remember—somebody was threatening to sue us over some very little thing—I don't know what. But anyway Mr. Kent—I think there was not anything to it, I don't know exactly what it was, some bill somebody had incurred. So Mr. Kent, who was very, very wealthy, as you know, said, "Now look here, these people—you are getting to be a big organization and to have a big headquarters and everything else," and he said, "As long as you are not incorporated people are going to bring a suit against Mrs. Kent," although she had nothing to do
So we did. Mr. Kent incorporated us, paid for the whole thing. If you don't have the articles of incorporation I'll give them to you. We still have them. When we won the vote it was very fortunate for us we had such a skillful lawyer, because we didn't have to reincorporate. He put it in a way that would cover any possible future.
So, it was around this time that we took the name of National Woman's Party. The Woman's Party was in the West. We were probably still the Congressional Union. When he incorporated us as the National Woman's Party. We incorporated in 1918, in the spring.
Fry
Was control of this shared between you and Anne Martin, or how was this worked out?
Paul
No, she was in charge of everything that was the Woman's Party, just the women in the western states. She was complete president and everything of that. Those women in the western states were all members of our national organization. We wanted her to take it over, you see, being a western woman, or in that section. So she agreed to do it.
But we all, eastern women, worked with her. I stayed in Chicago through that whole election campaign. She went down to Nevada with Mabel Vernon to work there and had other people with her there I guess.
All this business of keeping the organizers going in all those states, Mrs. Belmont, who was an eastern woman, was paying for a large section of it because she had promised to do it, paid for more than anybody else did. And we raised all the rest of the money for it.
Then, after the election campaign, that was 1916, I think that Anne Martin took a trip around through the West, because I remember she got Alice Gram and Betty
Then she came back and stayed at the headquarters in Washington, just as before. Then when it came to starting the National Woman's Party (which we decided to call the National Woman's Party probably before we were incorporated. Sometime along there—it must have been at one of our conventions.) I know the question would have been then whether Anne Martin should be the president of the whole one or whether I would continue.
So, I asked her to do it. One is always glad in the middle of a campaign to have someone to step in and take up the burden. But she didn't want to do it. At least she said she didn't want to do it. So I suppose she didn't want to do it. So I continued, because there was nobody else to continue. And I continued until it was over.
Fry
The voting western states continued to be sort of an entity, it seemed like, because I notice when the decision was made to picket, that at first someone recommended and the council approved this, that western women would not picket because they already had the vote. Picketing would be done just by the eastern women. Then later this was changed. Do you remember that?
Paul
I don't remember it.
Fry
Later on more and more western women came to picket and [laughing] no one turned them away I guess. Is that right? You don't remember that being a big issue?
Paul
I don't remember that at all, because Betty Gram Swing came in in the very early days, and she was from the West. Her sister, Alice Gram, was from the West.
Fry
Had you ever thought of this as just something being done by the non-voting states' residents?
Paul
No. To get people to picket wasn't very easy, and we weren't in any position to lay down anything that would keep anybody from doing it if she wanted to do it.
Fry
There are about a hundred letters of resignation on file over that picketing. I don't know whether that was a very big loss to you or not.
Well, of course every person is a loss. I'M surprised there weren't more than that.
[Interruption.]
Fry
I wanted to ask you awhile ago about Ida Husted Harper. Could you tell me where she was in all of this evolution of splitting off, and so forth. She was pretty old then, wasn't she, Alice? I'm not sure of the ages of these people we were talking about.
Paul
She was the age of Dr. Shaw and Mrs. Catt and all the rest. When we came along she was what they called one of the elder statesmen, that idea. We were all brought up to have great reverence and respect for her when I went into the movement. When we had our first delegation to President Wilson we asked her to go. I think the delegation had four people on it. One was the wife of a congressman, and I think that Mrs. Harper was one of the four. We thought that she would give prestige, connection with the past, and so on.
I don't recall ever having any contact with her, or meeting or ever seeing her until after the suffrage victory in 1920. She didn't cross our path; she lived up in New York. She never opposed us—if she did we never knew it. She didn't help us—if she did we didn't know it. She was in some kind of a different world up in the old National American Woman Suffrage headquarters. We just never saw her.
History of the Sculpture of Suffrage Pioneers, Adelaide Johnson, Sculptor
PaulWhen the suffrage amendment had been won, I guess we all thought, everybody thought that we ought to have some tribute to these pioneer women. We knew that the bust of Susan B. Anthony was on the steps on the lefthand side of the Metropolitan Art Museum. We knew that there were these busts, because Mrs. Belmont had always had them in her home from the first time we met her. We were still, of course, down on Lafayette Square.
We knew vaguely about these statues, that there were these three busts. So I went up to New York. I think I went first to see Mrs. Adelaide Johnson, I'm not quite sure. But anyway I began an investigation, as we all did I guess, to find out where these busts that we had heard of were, to see if we couldn't get them to the Capitol and present them to Congress. I remember going to see Mrs. Johnson (wherever she was at that time. I guess she was living up at the Dolly Madison House. Is there something called the Dolly Madison House in New York?)
She told me all about this. She said in the time when Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were living she had gone somewhere, to their homes probably, and from life had made the busts of both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She said she made the one of Lucretia Mott from a photograph. She said that these three were all made at the request of a committee in the old National American Woman Suffrage Association. They had arranged for her to make the busts, as a young promising woman sculptress.
When they were made, among people who contributed was John Greenleaf Whittier and people of that type, who wanted these women honored. They had paid her whatever they were supposed to pay her for making them. She had gone over to Italy and had made the busts there in Italy, because she could get better marble and better labor.
She said that when she made them, they were put in storage. There was a committee in charge of it and the only living member of it was Ida Husted Harper. All the others who had contributed had died. She said, "I don't think Mrs. Catt ever liked my statues. She didn't think they were good. I don't think, because of Mrs. Catt's influence with the National American, that they will ever take those busts out of storage and will ever put them in the Capitol. I think if it is to be done that we will have to do it, the Woman's Party. I don't own them, because I was paid to make them, and I have been paid and that's finished for me. But I think the best thing to do is to go and see Ida Husted Harper and find out the legal situation and what she would like done about this and so on."
So I did go and see Mrs. Harper. It was perhaps the second time in my life that I ever talked with her. She said, "Well, Mrs. Catt is very opposed to those statues ever being put in the Capitol. She says they're not worthy from the point of view of their artistic value, and she doesn't want the National American to have anything to do with it. I don't think she can be changed on this. I am the only living member of that original committee that raised money and paid Mrs. Johnson and put them in storage. I think that I would have the right to transfer all my legal rights to you, to the Woman's Party, if you will put them in the Capitol. Because that's what they were made for.
"In the interval some of them have been copied, like the one that somebody had made and put in the Metropolitan. They thought it was a good enough statue to put on the stairway so everybody who ever entered the building could see it."
So we then decided to form a committee to put the busts in the Capitol, the purpose for which they had been made. We told Mrs. Johnson that we were going to do it, and that Mrs. Harper had transfered all the rights to us. Mrs. Johnson said, "Well, in that case, if they are to be in the Capitol, I made them when I was a very
This was shortly after the suffrage victory, which was in August, so we thought that we would have our wind-up convention on Susan B. Anthony's birthday— that's what we finally voted to do—the following year because we had to pay all the debts off of the suffrage campaign and we thought it would take us from August up until the next February. We thought that would give time to Mrs. Johnson to make the new busts, and of course we would arrange to get them into the Capitol.
Do you want me to tell you all this?
Fry
I think you told me the story of how you got those statues into the Capitol and how you raised the money.
54. This story was related late one night during the November, 1972 sessions—with no tape recorder.—Fry
[Interruption.]
Fry
The only organization that didn't come when you presented the statues at the Capitol—
Paul
They were received by Speaker Gillette of the House on behalf of Congress. The chairman of the meeting which presented them was Jane Addams, who we thought would unite all women pretty well. The speaker was Sara Bard Field, as you know, who made the speech presenting them. We invited every woman's organization that had anything to do with the suffrage movement to come and place flowers. I remember several days afterwards when we were cleaning up over there in the corridor we found a little bouquet from the National American Suffrage Association. They hadn't sent anybody, and whoever had delivered it, (evidently some expressman or somebody) apparently some guard just took it and put it in the corridor. So they didn't send anybody from that organization. Practically everybody else had somebody there—
Fry
[Laughing.] That's kind of poetic their flowers got put in the corridor.
Paul
So absurd, after all these years, to think of these little petty divisions that were so unworthy.
Fry
Did the National Association and you work together toward the end, except for the picketing?
[Interruption.]
Fry
Who helped you organize the parade in 1914?
Paul
Lucy Burns was the only person on it besides myself, a committee consisting of Lucy Burns and myself; you know that. Then, in the course of the getting up the procession we got to know Mrs. Beard. She went on our committee. Mrs. Lawrence Lewis of Philadelphia came on our committee; she was a tower of strength. We had a very effective group. And Elsie Hill went on our committee; she took the college section. Each person took a section that they organized.
Fry
And you only had two paid typists at first to help you organize this?
Paul
Those two typists didn't do any organizing. They just transcribed letters for us.
[Interruption.]
Newspapers as Sources for the Suffrage and Equal Rights Stories
PaulWe had these big volumes of clippings in Washington. Mrs. Belmont had her secretary paste them together. Have you seen that clipping book?
Fry
No, I haven't seen it yet; I want to look at that this morning.
Paul
Some volunteer put those together. Mrs. Belmont employed a person, a young Jewish girl, who now wrote a very kindly letter to the Washington Post about Mrs. Belmont the other day. She pasted them together. We have volumes , which show the enormous amount of publicity we were getting then.
Then, when suffrage was over, practically our whole national board that had carried that campaign wanted to stop because they were so completely fatigued and worn out. We elected a whole new board, and of course there wasn't anybody working very hard on the raising of money. So one thing that they stopped altogether was any press department. We never had a press department from the time suffrage was won. And we don't have any now, never had it at all.
But we didn't care whether we had it or not. We thought in the suffrage campaign we needed it very much because we were trying to have a short campaign to get it into the Constitution. This other looked as if it would be a long, long campaign of changing the thought of all American women on the subject. So that's one of the reasons we economized. And that's the reason we had so little in.
Fry
That's why the role of the Woman's Party isn't known as well in the Equal Rights campaign probably.
Yes, that's true. With all the government communiques going out from Washington, unless you steadily are thinking up something that will make it news and employing somebody to do it, you just don't get it done, especially now that in the country as a whole journalism assumes such a big part, which it didn't in the early days.
Fry
We have more in the media now.
Paul
Of course when we went to Washington there was no woman up in the press gallery. There were no women signing their names to the articles going out. One of the places that the suffrage movement helped to open to women—we always had a little tearoom always at our headquarters where most newspaper people used to come. The people that were doing the press for us were headed by Mrs. Florence Boeckel. They formed this Women's Press Club, which now exists. It was formed there in our little tea house by Mrs. Boeckel and two of her people who worked with her, a little group of three women: Eleanor Taylor Marsh, Florence Boeckel was the head, and Alice Gram Robinson. You ought to interview Alice Gram Robinson because she is still living and she, you know, gets out that Congressional Digest . Do you know that paper?
Fry
Yes. I met her briefly. Do you mean those three women started the press club?
Paul
Yes, and they are always considered by the press club— there is no dispute about it—I think they always have at the head of their magazine or whatever they get out, "founded by Florence Boeckel, Eleanor Taylor Marsh, and Alice Gram Robinson."
Fry
More women in the press is a spin-off that I didn't realize came from the suffrage campaign.
Paul
By their giving out these press releases and doing it so professionally and so well—Florence Boeckel could never have been exceeded. We never could, never have had a better person than she was.
Fry
And they gave out the press releases and they—
Paul
Well, they wrote them and did whatever they—we gave them one room in the headquarters. Florence Boeckel had graduated from Vassar and had married a man, Richard
[Some background static develops for a while on tape during discussion below.]
Then by always being available to the press, and we were right there in Lafayette Square where all the newspapermen would come in; we had this one office which we gave them. First Florence Boeckel had no assistants, then she got Eleanor Taylor Marsh, [interruption] then Alice Gram Robinson who had come down from Oregon when Anne Martin went out to speak there and she had interested these two college girls still in the University of Oregon. They both came down to help (and later they both went to prison). So she stayed on, and we paid a tiny little salary to them. They had somebody who did all the mimeographing and someone who took all the dictation and all of that. So they got quite a little staff, a very, very, for us, expensive staff compared to the rest of the work where we didn't have any professionals. Actually I think it was extremely well done for that period. Anybody who goes through our press clippings can see how well done it was.
Fry
Tell me about the beginnings of the Women's Press Club. Do you mean it grew out of this little group of women?
Paul
Well, they just got the newspaperwomen together, the few that there were, and formed a club while they were there, toward the end of the seven years that we worked there. And that club of course developed and grew to be quite a big power, I think, in our nation. The first woman (you might add to this story) apart from us—she was our first member, in fact, in Washington was—I can't think of her name. She was the first woman ever to be allowed to sign her name to reports going out from the big bureaus—Her name was Winifred Mallon. She lived up on Capitol Hill. The first member we ever had in
Fry
And she was the first woman to have a by-line in the press in the wire services?
Paul
One of the first. When we got to know her she was on the Chicago Tribune and this was before we met Florence Boeckel and started to have our own little press department. We had nothing but a little basement room, 1420 F Street, one room, nothing else. You had to go down the steps to go in.
Just across the street was the Chicago Tribune office. And somehow or other we got to know Winifred Mallon, who was there. She lived up on Capitol Hill with her mother and other members of her family. She would work all day I guess and all evening getting the material off to the Chicago Tribune, which was her livelihood. Then she would start in and write the little press bulletins for us before we ever had any press department. She would write up whatever happened and give it to us so we could give it out the next day. We did have a typist, that much. And we had a volunteer person who was taking care of the press by interviewing the people who came in. So it was a wonderful thing she did for us. And also putting it in her own things that she sent out [to the Tribune ].
Later on, I think she was one of the presidents of the Women's Press Club after it got started. She remained until her death one of our strongest members. She had very little money, so what she did was whenever anybody came to Washington to help and we couldn't pay for their going to hotels, and so on (and they often couldn't pay for themselves), she would take them one by one by one, as they came up, to her home. I don't know how many people who came down to help in those early days stayed as guests at the home of Winifred Mallon where her mother and the other people who lived there were very hospitable and took care of them.
Anyway, later she became the president of the Women's Press Club.
So that was really the way we started our campaign, was through this Winifred Mallon, our press work. So, in any story, I'd like to have her built up. Then she left the Chicago Tribune . (And I'm not sure whether she ever signed her name to the Chicago Tribune articles.)
After she went over to the New York Tribune, we had a very direct line into the Tribune . We could get a great, great, great deal of publicity there. First of all Mrs. Reid was herself for us, very strongly. (I think she was on our national advisory board, but I'd have to look that up. I'm not perfectly sure.) And the publicity that Winifred Mallon was able to get—she had a free hand and could write up an enormous amount for us in the New York Tribune .
So we had all this going when Florence Boeckel came along and then got it all put in a very systematic and orderly way down in one big room that we gave for the press. [Laughing.] Now that's the end of that one?
Fry
[Laughing.] Very good! This report that was done in 1926 on the National Woman's Party:
55. The National Woman's Party 1913-1926, " pamphlet, 16 pp .
Paul
Because she got out everything—
Fry
I mean, do you know what the purpose of this was?
Paul
That was the year there was held in Paris a world convention of the International Alliance for Suffrage for Women. We had been invited to send a delegation because we had just gotten the vote. She made this so our delegates who went over would have something in their hands. You probably know all about this. [Pointing to photograph on page 11.] That's Anita Pollitzer and myself putting flowers on the grave of Susan B. Anthony. I have on the wall the original [photographs] over there. These people who are just getting out this thing in Ms.,
56. Gurovitz, Judy, and Hofner, Evelyn, “Suffragists Still Going Strong, ” Ms., July, 1973, pp. 47-49.
When we got over there, Doris Stevens and Mabel Vernon—Mabel Vernon was sort of in charge—Mrs. Catt sent word to them. She had been the old International president; she no longer was. She sent word to the new president who invited us to come named Mrs. Corbett Ashby. [You remember I told you] she invited me personally, when I was over in England after we had won the vote, to her house for lunch and asked me to have the Woman's Party affiliate. She said, "We need more branches, to have money. Mostly the countries in Europe have only a few pennies they can give. We want some branches in America. Would your branch that has just won the vote become a branch?" So we said we would. So we had this big delegation that went over, about twenty or thirty women.
When they got there the letter was read from Mrs. Catt, I think it was read at the convention. If not it was read to people of importance, saying, "If you admit the Woman's Party to your International Alliance, I will cut off all help from the Leslie million." Mrs. Catt had received a legacy of a million from Mrs. Leslie. And that was to keep the International going. So in view of that, they voted down—after all our delegates were there—they voted that they wouldn't keep them.
Fry
I think Mabel Vernon told me about that too. She made a very eloquent speech at that time.
Paul
This is when we dedicated our headquarters in Washington [photograph, pp. 7-8].
Fry
That's a big crowd.
Paul
This was our old headquarters, you know. This is where the Supreme Court is now. That's the old building.
This is of one of our delegations going up to the Capitol [photograph, p.5]. Here is a delegation to the President photograph, p.4].
Fry
This is the one to President Coolidge for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Paul
That's the little pin that we gave to everybody who picketed the White House [inset on P.3].
That's a meeting at Lafayette Square [p.3]. I was arrested there. Everybody got up on Lafayette's statue,
Fry
Lafayette's words, "Lafayette, we are come"—too inflammatory.
Paul
I think our declaration of principles is here. That's the new one that we adopted [pp. 1 and 2].
Fry
New compared to the old Seneca Falls declaration of principles?
Paul
Based on that. We took Seneca Falls and brought it up-to- date. When we started the Equal Rights campaign that we were going to work for. At that time when we began ours only one of the things that they were going to work for had been achieved, which was the vote. So we put in our new one. We had a meeting and adopted this as our program.
Fry
I'd like to have a Xerox, or some kind of a copy, of your declaration of principles for our appendix. Maybe I can get this copied downtown.
57. See Appendix.
Paul
You see the great trouble is that when a whole new board comes in that hasn't lived through any of these things they don't know which to save or which to throw away.
[Interruption.]
This is the last thing I'm going to show you. The day that we dedicated our headquarters, we started a system of getting what we called "founders" of this new movement. And everybody who was a "founder" had to give $100. We drew up new membership cards, a whole system, starting a new permanent group as against the old group. This [a framed citation] is what we gave to the founders.
Fry
What was the year of this?
Paul
1923, I guess, the day we dedicated the headquarters. You'll find the date on all these things. 1922 was it?
[Interruption.]
For the record, this is the inscription of the founders' award. It's illuminated in gold and purple with vines and flowers and it says:
| "Greetings to our honored founders. | |
| "We taste the spices of Arabia, yet never feel | |
| the scorching sun which brings them forth. | |
| "To those women of the National Woman's Party | |
| who have borne the heat and burden of the day | |
| we now pay reverent tribute; especially to | |
| those who, for a time, gave their liberty that | |
| we might gain a fuller freedom. | |
| "This scroll of honor is committed to the | |
| future, an imperishable parchment, illuminated | |
| by the vision of a small band of faithful | |
| women, who, inspired and led by | |
| Alice Paul [name of each founder] | |
| nobly have striven and nobly achieved in making | |
| that vision come true. | |
| "'As one lamp lights another nor grows less, | |
| So nobleness enkindleth nobleness." |
[Interruption.]
Passage Through Congress
Amendments to the Amendment in the Senate, March 1919
FryI'm talking about the 1919 introduction of the Amendment into the Senate, when Senator Jones of New Mexico first refused then introduced a variation of it. I'm looking it up here to see what the variation was, to see what happened, because that's the only note I have.
Paul
I don't remember that point; I certainly can't—
Fry
Yes, it kind of surprised me.
Paul
I'm glad you are such a scholarly type; it's a protection to us.
Fry
Here it is. I don't think it means very much and it probably disappeared the next week. But it does tell about it here. It says,
"Introducing suffrage resolutions has become quite the rage up at the Senate."Suffragist, March 8, 1919
Paul
Who wrote this article?
Fry
This is in the Suffragist of March 8, 1919. It's not signed.
"Senator Jones of Washington, Senator Gay of Louisiana, Senator McKellar of Tennessee all have their own private little resolutions which they offered to the committee on woman's suffrage. Senator Jones of Washington, a Republican, was first, and got to re-introduce the original Susan B. Anthony Amendment following its defeat, because no motion to reconsider was in order and because Chairman Jones of the committee, [the senator from New Mexico], had refused to do the re-introducing himself.
― 364 ―The others followed with new versions of the proposed amendment of their own. And last week Chairman Jones of New Mexico offered one himself."Suffragist, March 8, 1919
That's what was confusing me. Because he up to this point, as the chairman, had been handling only the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
"He couldn't withstand it any longer. He too must introduce a resolution. So after a conference with the President"—.Suffragist, March 8, 1919
Paul
Yes, I can see how that works.
Fry
—
"he read before the Senate a still newer version of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment"Suffragist of March 8, 1919
Paul
This is exactly what we are facing now in the legislatures that have turned it down, that they can't reconsider.
Fry
Yes, on the Equal Rights Amendment. Now, let me see—
"which also was referred to the committee on woman's suffrage. The new resolution differs very little and not at all materially from the original and yet it was hoped that in its wording it might serve to conciliate some previously hostile senators. This hope has not been entirely in vain, for Senator Gay of Louisiana, who had made the statement that his own resolution, providing that the states should have the exclusive right to enforce the provisions of the measure, was the only one for which he would vote, and has since stated that he would vote for Senator Jones' new resolution."Suffragist, March 8, 1919
Now Senator Jones' new resolution provides that— let me see—two-thirds of each house of Congress concurring therein,
"the following article shall be proposed to the legislatures of the several states as an amendment (and so forth) ... and when ratified by three-fourths of the said legislatures shall be valid ... the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account
― 365 ―of sex."Suffragist, March 8, 1919
That's Section One. Section Two—
Paul
That's the original amendment that we were working for. So that's not what he changed. Maybe he changed Section Two.
Fry
Yes, maybe in the enforcement part.
Paul"The several states shall have the authority to enforce this article by necessary legislation, but if any state shall enforce or or enact any law in conflict therewith, then Congress shall not be excluded from enacting appropriate legislation to enforce it."Suffragist, March 8, 1919
Yes. Well, that's just the enforcement clause and that's not part of the Amendment.
Fry
Was it new? Was that the different part?
Paul
I think when it went through it said, "Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." That's my memory . Somewhere up here where we always gave the text—the version we always proposed, I think on the editorial page we always had it, down at the bottom somewhere.
Fry
Here it is. Okay. The original Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Paul
Could you read it right through? I'd like to hear it.
Fry
Section Two says,
He had made additions to that. That was the only thing."Congress shall have power by appropriate legislation to enforce the provisions of this article."Suffragist, March 8, 1919
Paul
Of course that didn't affect the Amendment itself. It was only an enforcement thing. Now they have taken out the "several states" altogether in our new one [the Equal Rights Amendment]. As long as they don't touch the Amendment , I think it's all right. But of course by changing the enforcement clause you imperil ratification.
Fry
In this, the Suffragist goes on to say that
So I gather this was not a problem then for the Woman's Party."Senator Jones' substitute resolution is practically as acceptable
― 366 ―as the original."Suffragist, March 8, 1919
Paul
No, but probably they didn't go along with it. You see, you are reading 1919—
Fry
March 8, yes.
"This resolution has already been reported favorably out of committee and Senator Jones hopes to present it to the Senate on Monday,"Suffragist, March 8, 1919
Paul
It was the following June if you will turn to that, that they voted on it.
Fry
Yes, I have that.
Paul
Let's see what the text of that one was.
Fry
They voted on June 4.
Paul
Here's the place you will undoubtedly find the text that they voted on. I think this was merely a device, because Senator Jones of Washington was a great friend of ours. He was the one that got up the whole hearing.
Fry
Oh, is that the same Senator Jones?
Paul
I suppose so, I don't know that there were two.
Fry
Well, there was one from Washington [Senator Wesley L. Jones], and I keep getting them mixed up.
Paul
This isn't the Washington one?
Fry
This is the New Mexico one that introduced the bill, Senator Andreus Aristides Jones, the committee chairman.
Paul
The first you read to me was introduced by Jones of Washington, and then you said, "Senator Jones of New Mexico."
Fry
They both introduced an amendment change.
Paul
Anyway, they were trying all of them to change the enforcement clause to make it not the same amendment, so they [wouldn't lose the right] to reconsider. It's almost always a parliamentary ruling that you can't reconsider the same measure]. You have to reconsider within three or five hours or something; then that's finished. Then you can't later on reconsider in the
That's what we're up against now in a state like Maine. However much you may want to you can't do it.
Fry
The Amendment in its final version has the original Susan B. Anthony enforcement section too in it, the version that was passed June 4, 1919.
Party Endorsements
FryLet me look at our chronology here. You began picketing in January 1917. Congress adjourned on October 6 of that year, the same day that you were arrested. You were carrying a banner which read, according to the Suffragist, "The time has come when we must conquer or submit. For us there can be but one choice. We have made it." You were arrested then and sentenced to seven months in October 1917.
Paul
I think that must have been at Lafayette Square. We had a long procession led by a beautiful girl from Michigan.
Fry
A week before the next session reconvened, December 3, 1917, all women were released from prison. Then on December 10 a date was set for a vote in the House; they decided to take up the suffrage issue on January 10 of 1918. This was Chairman Pou's Suffrage Committee in the House. You may also remember that in September or 1917, a month before you were arrested, the House had voted and it had lacked seventy-three votes for passage. So they took it up again on January 10 and the House passed it with only one more vote than was needed.
The Senate then became your big problem, I guess. You had to have eleven more votes than you had pledged.
But in February, and I thought you might remember how you did this, or what you did to bring this about, "the first favorable expression of the national Republican party was when the Republican National Committee commended House Republicans for their votes for suffrage." [According to Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying, p. 341. ]
You say that's the first time? The National Republican Committee? I think we got it in the platform in 1916 in the one headed by Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose one, but we didn't getit in the Republican National, I'm sure about that, in 1916. So this I suppose would be the first. I don't remember.
Fry
The same day in 1918 the National Democratic Executive Committee held a telegraphic referendum of their national committee and it showed two-to-one in favor of the suffrage amendment.
Paul
In 1916 they hadn't put it in when we went to them in Missouri, I remember, at their convention. At the Republican Convention and the Democratic conventions we made a tremendous effort.
Fry
What I read about that was that in 1916, when the parties put it in their platforms, they came out for suffrage, but they did not come out for a national amendment ; the Democrats specifically recommended state-by-stae suffrage, but it was in their platforms for the first time.
Paul
I remember Chicago just vaguely (because I haven't thought about it from that day to this—I have to go back and think about it), because it seems to me—
Fry
Would you like me to get those platforms, the quotations for you? [See quotations from platforms below.]
[Tape off.]
Paul
They did exclude the federal amendment. Borah, that was his point.
Let me just tell you about my greatest memory. (It may not be right.) 1916 was two years after the Shafroth-Palmer had been introduced. It showed by their actions that they were still—something that you or somebody said to me indicated that they [NAWSA] thought they really did not stand against the federal suffrage amendment, but I think you said they regarded this as a supplement [to our amendment].
Fry
That the National Association—
Paul
Now that this is all past, this is what they do say, that this was supplementary and they were always working for
So I did go and talk to this person, a perfectly lovely woman, and she said, "Of course we can't allow you to have this banner that you are always carrying at the head of your processions, which demands an amendment to the United States Constitution, because we are trying to get the state constitutions changed through the Shafroth- Palmer amendment." (Not an amendment to give the votes to women but only to give the right to a referendum.) Then I said that we wouldn't go in any procession that didn't have the complete demand for complete equality to obtain votes for women in the Constitution itself. Therefore, we said, "We won't participate."
So they went ahead with their procession. And we said we would just go to the resolution committee with our fight. So that day we did go. It was a terribly stormy day. Everybody came in dripping, with umbrellas and everything. They presented the demand just for suffrage. That's all they did, and I think that was incorporated, if I remember rightly. And we presented the demand for the equal suffrage amendment to the Constitution, not just to say we believed in suffrage. So we didn't get ours.
Then we went down to Missouri to the Democratic one and with about the same result. They [NAWSA] were absolutely opposing our amendment in both hearings.
Fry
There's a very bitter editorial in the Suffragist on that.
Paul
At that same time in 1916 I'm almost certain that the Socialist convention put in a plank for the equal suffrage amendment. At least their leaders did. And at what they called the Bull Moose convention, which was the last one that Theodore Roosevelt tried, they also
Fry
You managed to get Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican presidential candidate, to come out for the Amendment.
Paul
We didn't get him at the convention. We didn't get him until the end of the election campaign in November. I told you how I went out to see President Roosevelt at that time. It wasn't until he came to this final meeting in New York that he came out for us, after going through all those suffrage states where it would have helped him and not being able to make up his mind yes or no. Because his party didn't have it in its platform. President Roosevelt had it in his party [platform]—that's my faint recollection.
Fry
Here is Wilson's interpretation of the Democratic suffrage plank. This is in the July 1, 1916 Suffragist . It says,
"On June 19 President Wilson sent to Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of National American Woman Suffrage Association, the following letter. This is a reply to a telegram from her asking what the suffrage plank in the Democratic platform meant. His letter is, 'My dear Mrs. Catt'Suffragist, July 1, 1916
Paul
I don't think she was president. She was of International American, of course.
Fry
This calls her "president"—
Paul
Probably people didn't even know whether she was president or not. She was president of the International anyway.
Fry
Wilson says that he wishes to
"join his fellow Democrats in recommending to the several states that 'they extend the suffrage to women upon the same terms as to men.'"Suffragist, July 1, 1916
So then in 1918 you did have this expression from both national committees. I have a note here that the Democratic telegraphic referendum was somehow inspired by the women who worked so hard in 1916, with the Democrats down in St. Louis.
Paul
Oh no no.
Fry
They had something to do with inspiring this telegraphic referendum in 1918? You don't think this is true? Do you know how that happened, who got them to make that
Paul
I don't remember a referendum at all.
Fry
The Democratic central committee sent out a lot of telegrams to Democrats all over the states.
Paul
I think any action they took was because of the campaign by the women voters in the states where we were having them oppose the Democrats. That probably brought the matter before them so that they began to look into it. Now I'm sorry, but I've got to get this check written [for the carpenter].
Fry
During this interruption, let me quote the following for the manuscript from the Suffragist of June 17, 1916, page 4 :
“SUFFRAGE IN THE REPUBLICAN PLATFORM”
"Already members of the Republican committee on resolutions which drafted the suffrage plank in the Republican platform have made haste to say that it in no way declares against the federal suffrage amendment. Senator Sutherland states on June 8 that the plank, while recognizing the right of the state to settle the question of suffrage for itself did not declare against the right of the nation to settle it also."
From the Suffragist, July 1, 1916, page 6 :
From the Suffragist, July 8, 1916, page 6 :
"Democrats and Republicans are now busy defending the suffrage planks in their respective platforms with the plea that one is no worse than the other. This is strictly true.
"Both planks declare for the principle of woman suffrage, advocate state action upon the question, and say nothing whatever about federal action
"The Republican plank reads: 'The Republican party ... favors the extension of the suffrage to women ... but recognizes the right of each state to settle the question for itself.'
"The Democratic plank reads: 'We recommend the extension of the franchise
― 372 ―to the women of the country by the states upon the same terms as to men.'"
"Suffragists are keenly aware that the suffrage plank in the Progressive platform reads, 'We believe the women of the country, who share with men the burdens of government in time of peace and make equal sacrifices in time of war, should be given the full political right of suffrage both by state and federal action.'"From the Suffragist, July 22, 1916 :
"The draft of the Socialist platform in its political demands declares forFrom the Suffragist, July 29, 1916, page 5 :
1. unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women;
2. the immediate adoption of the so-called Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the Constitution of the United States granting the suffrage to women on equal terms with men.'"
"The Prohibition party, meeting at St. Paul July 19 and 20 adopted in its platform the ringing demand for national women's suffrage. The plank embodies the text of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment." (It was already on record, prior to this, of being in favor of woman's suffrage.)"
[Tape off.]
A Senate Vote Not Called
Fry—What you see is two things together that pushed this into Congress—and into the Republican and Democratic national committee endorsements: the Woman's Party campaign against the party that didn't support the Amendment, and the picketing.
Paul
Well, I mean the particular thing that came up [as a
Fry
I'm not sure that this was the first time.
58. On January 12, 1915, the House had defeated it—over a year before the issue came up in the party Platforms. ( Stevens, Doris, Jailed for Freedom, P.348 .)
Paul
I think that was the first time it went through. What month was that—January?
Fry
Yes and this was apparently before the newly elected Congress took its seats.
Paul
Then I think on March 4 the new Congress came in if I remember rightly. Then we had to begin again and get it through the House again, because it always had to go through both houses. The first time we failed in the Senate by—I'm not sure whether we were voted down or whether we didn't have the roll call.
Fry
Do you remember those times when it was scheduled for a vote in the Senate and Senator Andreus Aristides Jones who was the chairman of the Senate Suffrage Committee—
Paul
Oh, from New Mexico. What was that name?
Fry
[Laughing.] He is usually called A. A. Jones. He didn't call up the Amendment, because there were three votes absent. That was in May, 1918. So they set a new date.
Paul
I think it was prior to that, sometime in the winter.
Fry
You may be thinking of 1919.
Paul
No, it went through in June 1919 the Senate. But the previous winter, I think, it came up and we had a marvelous attendance of everybody in the woman's movement almost, because we thought it was going to be voted on in the Senate. Have you come across that? It must have been after it went through the House. I know exactly what happened and I'm sure the Suffragist must have recorded it. I've probably told you this before. Maud
So we went down together. She had this marvelous relationship, which I hope you'll make clear in all your accounts, with the senators [congressmen] in the House [Congress] because she had rented a house up on Capitol Hill; there never was a congressional chairman like that. She paid all expenses and she gave party after party after party, very nice intimate social little ones until she got to know these people personally, their wives and their children and everybody. So she knew them so well that she could go up and talk to most any man on a personal, friendly basis. I couldn't do any of those things. I practically never went up to Capitol Hill, so I didn't know them personally. But I went with her.
There at the entrance to the Senate chambers was Senator Gallinger who was the Republican leader from New Hampshire, a very great friend of ours, and Senator Curtis (who later became vice-president under Hoover; then he was in the Senate). One of them was the Senate leader—they both had high political positions whatever they were. They were standing each one with a poll in his hand.
We said, "Why in the world don't you start the vote?"
They said, "Well, we'll tell you—Borah has changed his mind. We had him. He promised us to vote for us. We put him on the poll. We assembled all these people to vote and gave word to you and all the women to come to hear the vote. And now we dare not, because we're one vote short. We've been spending all this time with Borah trying to get him to stand firm and he won't. And we can't do it. So now we've sent word to the men just to talk and talk and talk, make good records for themselves in their states, get good publicity for themselves so they won't be too down on us for having gotten them
That's what they did. I never, never will erase the memory of that occasion from my mind. It's so vivid still.
Then we started to rebuild strength so we would be able to proceed without Borah. I don't know just when that was but it was probably in the winter.
Fry
It sounds like it was perhaps the first of October, 1918, vote. They had a long debate of four or five days in the Senate.
Paul
No, it was only one day. It was called for the vote. It wasn't a debate at all.
Fry
They had been debating for three or four days when they called for the vote in October 1918.
Paul
No no no, not this time.
Fry
This day it failed to pass by two votes.
Paul
No no; no vote was taken this day.
Fry
Then that must have been a previous Congress.
Paul
It didn't come up at all to a vote. They were determined to pass it, you see. We had passed all the debating period and it was up to the point where they thought—of course the Republicans were in control of the situation; it had to be after that November election or they wouldn't have been in control [of Congress]; and they were in control, or it wouldn't have been Gallinger and Curtis there that we saw.
Fry
I'll find the date on that and put it in.
59. Votes were scheduled and speeches made on the Amendment in the Senate on both May 10 and June 27, 1918. Both resulted in no vote by the end of the day due to lack of support, Borah being one of the defectors. [ Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying, pp.355-7 .]
Paul
That was the time when the sentiment had changed and You had the feeling that the Amendment fight had been won. Because here we had enough votes—excepting for whatever the reason on Borah's part was. All through
Filling in Chronology: the Senate and the President
PaulYou were trying to tell me about 1919, weren't you?
Fry
Well, in 1918 the Senate did have a debate for quite a long time, from September 26 to October 1. Wilson addressed the Senate for suffrage finally, and the next day—
Paul
What day did he make that address?
Fry
It was about September 30; the exact date is not given in the Suffragist .
Paul
We had many thousands of mimeographed sheets, so that date should be easy to get. Even this past campaign we've been using it all the time with the Democrats.
That was September, you see.
Fry
The point is that they did take the vote and it failed to pass by two votes.
Paul
When?
Fry
September 30 or October 1.
Paul
The vote wasn't taken at the time he made the speech.
60. Paul is likely referring to Wilson's first public declaration in favor of the federal amendment eight months before, on January 9, 1918.
Fry
Well—do you want me to read it to you in Irwin?
"Wilson's appeal had started only two weeks before. He had written to Senator Shields of Tennessee in the summer and Senator Baird of New Jersey asking them to back it.. "Irwin, Inez Haynes, Up Hill With Banners Flying
Paul
He got that last vote when he was over at the Peace Conference in Versailles. He cabled back that he had the last vote.
This happened before then.
Paul
I know it did. It had to happen before then. The speech happened before.
Fry
This was just a month or two after the Woman's Party began carrying banners at the Lafayette statue across from the White House.
Paul
That was a continuation of our picketing, only we just moved across the street.
Fry
Then when this failed to pass the Senate by two votes, Inez Haynes Irwin says that then you began picketing the Senate on the steps of the Capitol. Do you remember that?
Paul
Yes, that's right.
Fry
That's the period I'm talking about now. There was a lot of picketing and a lot of arrests, a lot of "detentions."
Paul
Anyway, the whole picketing was one. The whole year of 1917 was picketing. I was saying the result of it at the end of the year, plus the election campaign in 1916, brought us high up to the point of general expectancy that the victory was around the corner.
Fry
There was a winter vote scheduled in 1918, but the Senate recessed on November 21 without any further consideration of suffrage.
Paul
That was an election year, was it not? Not for the presidency but for congressmen.
Fry
The election was just over; this was November 21, 1918.
Paul
They must have had that recess for the purposes of the election.
Fry
That would have been after the election, wouldn't it? That was November 21 that they recessed.
Paul
Anyway, what was the next thing after they recessed and came back?
Fry
When they came back, Wilson on December 2, 1918, included suffrage in his formal message to Congress, and then he sailed for France.
He didn't include it in his message. He made up a special appeal. It was an appeal that he made to the Senate, a personal appeal because the feeling had got to such a point that he did this and made a wonderful speech, which we've used from then on.
Fry
Yes, it's quoted in both the Suffragist and in Irwin.
Paul
Now what time was this that he went over to France?
Fry
That was December 1918.
Paul
When was the Armistice?
Fry
November 11, 1918.
You were arrested a lot during all this time. At any rate, the burning cauldrons and all of this sort of thing were going on.
Paul
They were when he was at Versailles.
Fry
That's this time—the winter of 1918-1919, December and January of that winter. And on January 1, New Year's Day, Irwin says, you "started the watchfires of freedom."
Paul
Then, he must have been over in Paris by that time, because we didn't start—
Fry
That's right. He had left in December.
Paul
In the winter of 1918.
There wasn't any message. There was just an appeal that he made because the feeling in the country had grown so great, and he had changed his mind personally.
Fry
He was asking the Senate to get behind it.
Paul
I know he didn't get any vote at the moment.
Fry
The vote was set for February 10, 1919. Two days before that the President was burned in effigy in the urn; it was a cartoon of him that you burned.
Paul
I know. All that period we were having those watchfires.
Fry
And it was defeated by one vote on February 10, although the new senator, who was Senator Pollock of South
Paul
The new senator that carried it, when we finally got the total number, was Harris of Georgia. That was in June, when we got it.
Fry
How did you get him on your side?
Paul
The President got him, President Wilson. Senator Harris was over in Italy doing something or other. President Wilson got in touch with him over there and cabled back, telephoned back, communicated back in some way, with our Democratic leaders. The main person was Matthew Hale, the main person who was working on the Democratic side to get this done. He got word (some said directly to him, some said through somebody else) that they could now count on Harris, that he had given his pledge to the President to be back and vote on it when it came up. I guess you'll find all that.
Fry
My note says that Tumulty sent a cable to President Wilson to confer with Harris, who traveled from Italy to France to meet with Wilson.
Paul
I know that they met; I don't remember where they met but evidently they met at Versailles there. Probably Mr. Hale was the one that we dealt with altogether. I don't know what his title was but he was a very prominent Democratic leader, a very wonderful man.
Fry
Was he former chairman of the Progressive national committee? Inez Irwin says he was, on page 427.
61. Irwin, Inez Haynes Up Hill With Banners Flying, 1964edition.
Paul
I don't know what he was, I don't remember. We dealt with him because he was the person outside of Congress who would do the most for us. All our relationship with Senator Harris was through Mr. Hale with whom we dealt. Mr. Hale may have asked Senator Tumulty to send a telegram, very likely he did. Because he was very close to the President.
Fry
Do you remember Senator Keyes?
Paul
Of West Virginia? Yes, but he never took any particular part.
He was still one of the unknowns who leaped on the bandwagon right at the last minute. At any rate, on May 21 the House passed it again.
Paul
Let me get these dates in my mind. The first time it came up in any place and it was passed was when? January or February of 1918?
Fry
In January of 1918 the House passed it.
Paul
I guess that was the first time it was ever passed. Then what happened? What's the next vote?
Fry
There were some votes set but not taken in the Senate because you didn't have the votes to pass it.
The Senate brought it up on October 1, 1918, and it failed to pass by two votes.
The Senate recessed, and so forth.
Then there was Wilson's appeal to Congress.
The next vote was in February 10, 1919; the Senate voted again and it failed by one vote. Then in—
Paul
Wait a minute. Let me see if I have this in my head. In the beginning of 1918 it went through the House. Is that right? Then at that time that's the only victory we'd had—the House in 1918 at the beginning. Congress came to an end with no favorable action excepting that one vote. Then we started in 1919, March 4 I suppose—because Congress used to begin then—so then we had to do it a second time in the House, and they did vote it a second time in the House.
Fry
Yes, the House passed it again on May 21, 1919, 304 to 89; then on June 4 it passed in the Senate—
Paul
—Then it went over to the Senate and passed in the Senate. So it never passed in the Senate but once, and it passed in the House twice. It told in the Suffragist, I remember, that in that second vote in the House, in the debate Mr. Gard, representative from Ohio, proposed the seven-year limitation because it got to such a point that they thought the only way they could defeat it now was not by an outright vote against but by making difficulties in ratification. So they—this was brought up by Mr. Gard.
I looked this up recently when the seven-year limitation] was put on [the Equal Rights Amendment] by Mr. [Senator] Bayh and we saw the same thing was happening. This time when it was brought up in May, when Mr. Gard proposed this, all over [the chamber you could hear cries opposing it].
Individual Efforts for the Equal Rights Amendment
George Gordon Battle
FryMay I read the title of this onto the tape so we'll have exactly what we are talking about?
This is "Excerpts from the Brief in Support of the Equal Rights for Women Amendment," by the late George Gordon Battle, distinguished jurist of Virginia and New York. It was submitted to the Judiciary Committee of the Seventy-seventh Congress and printed as a Senate committee print by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D. C.
Excerpts were pesented to the platform committees of the 1944 and 1948 Democratic National Conventions.
Paul
It was presented by Mr. Battle, personally, before his death. The Battle family was an old and distinguished Virginia family. Mr. George Gordon Battle went up to New York after he became a lawyer and established a law firm. I think he was head of the firm. Does it give the name of the firm?
Fry
No, it just says he was a "distinguished jurist."
Paul
Anyway, when Mrs. Belmont inherited a large fortune from the Vanderbilt family, after her divorce from Mr. Vanderbilt and his death, she needed, she felt, a lawyer of the highest possible rank to look after her affairs. She made a search to find the person who would be the best person to help her, because she knew nothing whatsoever about managing her investments and so on, and she finally asked Mr. Battle to become her lawyer. She told me that the retaining fee that she paid him was $1000 a month. And in addition, any time that he took
So when Mrs. Belmont began to help the Woman's Party and finally became our national president, we began to have some dealings with Mr. Battle, especially about money that she was giving to the national headquarters to enable us to complete the purchase by her actually paying off all the notes that the Woman's Party had signed when we originally contracted to buy the headquarters, the old brick capitol.
Then Mr. Battle, getting to know about our work, said to us one day, "I don't understand why you don't get a lawyer of great knowledge of legal position of women in the country that you are trying to change, and of knowledge of our political make-up in Washington, to just take this thing over and present it to the Judiciary Committee. I feel sure that Congress will be more willing to pass it if you do do this."
We said, "Yes, we know, but we don't know how to get enough money to pay a lawyer of the type you describe." He said, "Oh, I'll be glad to do it for you and I wouldn't charge anything."
So that's the way we came to have the aid of Mr. Battle from that time on. The first thing he did was to prepare a brief to be presented to the Judiciary Committee of Congress.
He said, "It's very simple for me to do this. I have a large staff who will look up all the details for me and everything and I will merely prepare the brief. I will go down to present it personally."
So he did. The next hearing we had he went down and personally presented this brief. That was the time we got our first favorable report from the House Judiciary Committee.
Then, shortly after—this was in 1944—he went out to the National Democratic Convention as a delegate—I presume a delegate, as a member of the convention in some capacity. And we went out to present our appeal before the judiciary platform committee asking for a plank in the Democratic platform being drawn up in 1944 at the Democratic National Convention. (Four years before we had gotten a plank in the Republican platform.) The Democratic National Convention met that
The person who took charge of our presentation was Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, who was then on our national board.
Mr. Battle went before the platform committee personally and gave these excerpts from the brief that he had prepared for presentation to the committee in Washington. At the meeting at which the platform committee recommended to the national convention that they adopt the plank, Mr. Battle was heard, and he I think was one of those who helped immensely in our victory, because it was put in for the first time in the national Democratic platform and used in their campaign and from that time continued up until it was finally passed by Congress.
I'd just like to add this so that our gratitude to Mr. Battle can be made clear. Through the years after this first help that he gave, Mr. Battle always was the person to whom we went when we had any legal matter coming before us. When we were acquiring the old brick capitol as a headquarters, he drew up all the papers concerning it and put in the deed from Mrs. Belmont to the Woman's Party including the provisions that are in the deed now that tried to safeguard the property forever, as long as we wanted it safeguarded, from anything that might take it away from us.
He put in, for instance, a clause that this property should be used only for the advancement of women and for no other purpose." It would revert to the heirs of Mrs. Belmont if it were used for some other purpose, or if the management was turned over to men and taken away from women, and if salaried positions and positions of authority (positions paying considerable amounts to any person) were taken away from women. We did all this so what happened to the Red Cross wouldn't happen to us.
You know, the Red Cross was founded by a woman, Clara Barton, and all the money was raised and the work that was done at the beginning was done by women, Clara Barton and her associates. And then as it became a great and important and powerful and wealthy organization it fell again into the hands of men. So the women have very little to do now with the running of the Red Cross. When we tried to have a bust of Clara Barton put down
So we were trying to protect our headquarters. Then at each successive step whenever any legal problem came up, such as whether to change the wording of the Amendment and accept all these different variations that people wanted, all the struggles that we had, to keep it just on equality for women and nothing else so that it couldn't be attributed in any way that we didn't want, one of our greatest supporters was Mr. Battle. This was always so, and without any charge at all he would always give us his advice which was of such value to us. (Now that's the end of that one.)
Pearl Mitchell Sayre and Emma Guffey Miller
FryCan you tell about Mrs. Pearl Mitchell Sayre from Oklahoma and her role in the—
Paul
We got to know Mrs. Sayre first at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, I think it was about 1948. Mrs. Sayre worked for many months in Philadelphia before the convention opened in the general capacity of a member of the committee in charge of the convention. She joined the Woman's Party and became a very ardent supporter and helped us in every way with our preparation to present our case to the platform committee. From that time on she was always on our national board as representing Oklahoma, her home being in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Then, when Eisenhower became President, she took a delegation from the Woman's Party to the White House where one of the chief aides of Eisenhower—he was an Oklahoma man who had been introduced to Eisenhower by Mrs. Sayre—endeavored to help her in pushing forward the Equal Rights Amendment claims upon the attention of the President and getting support for it.
Mrs. Sayre continued always up until her death to be one of the national officers of the Woman's Party. She was one of the vice-chairmen year after year. She was unfailing in trying to put the Equal Rights Amendment into the Constitution.
Fry
In this 1948 convention, did the platform committee adopt a resolution backing the Equal Rights Amendment?
Paul
It was first adopted in 1940, and so there was no difficulty at all [in 1948]. A few speakers led by Dr. Mary Sinclair Crawford, Dean of Students of the University of Southern California, who was another one of our national officers. The principal speaker was Anita Pollitzer, who was also on our national board. All the arrangements were made by Mrs. Sayre so that we might have this good presentation of our case. But there was no difficulty whatsoever. The platform committee accepted our draft exactly as it was presented and exactly as it had been presented at all conventions beginning in 1940, of the Republican party.
Fry
Did she come to Washington to help lobby the Oklahoma senators?
Paul
She didn't exactly lobby. She of course was a person who was so high up, (she was national committeewoman from the state of Oklahoma for the Republican party,) that she would—I wouldn't say lobby, but would invite senators important to us to have lunch with her, for instance, to discuss the matter, and almost invariably they would agree to what she was asking them to do.
[Pause.]
I'm trying to think of some more about Mrs. Sayre.
Fry
All right. [Pause.]
Paul
I think I'll have to go back and fill this in later.
Fry
All right, if you think of anything else, I'll take it down.
Paul
Let me tell you why I'm hesitating.
[Tape off.]
Fry
—in Pennsylvania?
Yes. That's because of the great political work that Mrs. Miller did.
Fry
Did you say Emma Guffey Miller?
Paul
Yes. You know, when she went on our national board and began to help us, then she took, as her special place for working, Pennsylvania naturally. Then she got the Federation of Democratic Women Clubs, which she belonged to, to unanimously —they had a convention to which someone came from every precinct, it was so well organized—and all of these women were pledged to support, to get the endorsement of their congressmen if they could. And the Republican women were rather spurred, I think, by all this to do exactly the same. So we had a unanimous vote when it was taken in the House this last time, it went through both times. you know. It went through the first time the way we wanted it. The second time it was the way Mr. [Senator] Bayh wanted it; the wording was the same [as his]. Only one single person from Pennsylvania voted against it. Mrs. Sayre had about the same control over the voting from Oklahoma. Some of these states we didn't bother about. We had such a good person there.
Fry
She was that effective?
Paul
Her capacity was the same as Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller could do all this because she was on the National Democratic Committee. And Mrs. Sayre could do it because she was on the National Republican Committee.
I wanted to tell you another thing. On the National Republican Committee, for several years they had an executive committee. On the executive committee there were only two women, and one of these two women was Mrs. Sayre. She had a supremely important position.
President Richard Nixon
PaulNow I want to tell you—this is just of no importance for your manuscript, so you might turn it off. But I want to tell you about Mrs. Sayre.
When Nixon was vice-president under Eisenhower, we were trying to get greater activity of course from him.
Fry
It was not the Equal Rights Amendment?
Paul
No, but it was something that was along the line of the Equal Rights Amendment. I think that—it seems to me it was something to do with all contractors dealing with the federal government having no discrimination on the grounds of sex. It was before Congress and we were trying to push it. It was in harmony of course with the Equal Rights Amendment. If the Equal Rights Amendment had gone through we wouldn't have needed it, but in the meantime we did need it.
So I went over myself to Nixon's office and talked to his assistant. I remember very well, it was this girl Rose Mary Woods, and I asked her if I could make an appointment for two very important Republican women who were coming shortly to Washington, to come and see Mr. Nixon. I told her that what we had proposed, and very much had to heart, was this non-discriminatory measure about government contracts. (I think this was what it was about.) So she— the two women who were coming for one of our own National Woman's Party national board meetings were Mrs. Sayre and Dr. Mary Sinclair Crawford. Dr. Crawford had campaigned for Nixon, and she told me herself that she had canvassed her whole congressional district personally as thoroughly as she could. She had even gone, she said, into every saloon in the whole district, and really labored for Nixon's election. I told all this to Rose Mary Woods and she gave me some other secretary and so they said all right, they would make an appointment for this particular day when the women would be here.
So when the day arrived that they were to come, I told them we had this appointment which I thought was a perfectly secure appointment. And they came a little bit, I guess, early, but at any rate they managed to be there at the time of the appointment. They went over.
They said, all right, could they speak to the secretary. Of course, here we had two of the highest women in the Republican party, Mrs. Sayre on the national committee and Dr. Crawford had been the chairman of the campaign committee for Congressman McDonough when he was running for Congress on the Republican ticket. They were both Nixon supporters, and great Republican supporters of course.
So this secretary came out, and was anything but cordial. He didn't even ask them to sit down. Can you imagine two people of this rank! He kept them standing while they tried to talk about what it was about. They said, well, could they make another appointment for some other date when they could arrange to come, and they said if they couldn't come themselves they would arrange to have someone else come to represent them to deal with this whole subject with Nixon.
The secretary was very casual. He said he would take it up with Nixon. He didn't know, since he was such a busy man, whether he could possibly see anybody on this subject or even see them if they came back, or see anybody in their place. It was finally left that he would notify them whenever Nixon could see them and they would endeavor to come back again. Dr. Crawford was then leaving for Europe. She was going to be back in some short space of time. Mrs. Sayre was leaving again for Oklahoma.
I kept calling and calling and asking if Nixon had been able to arrive at a date when he would be able to receive these women on this subject. And finally we all gave it up. It was always being deferred. Nixon was always too busy; his secretary hadn't been able to see him and hadn't been able to bring it before him, and so forth. Of course it's one reason I suppose why Nixon hasn't been as effective a president as he might have been.
Fry
On equal rights wasn't it rather difficult to get Nixon as a president to come out for the Equal Rights Amendment?
Paul
No, not for the Equal Rights Amendment, because when he
When he was vice-president, of course Eisenhower went much further and put it in 1957 in his message to Congress as part of the administration's program, the first time any president had done that. That was his second term. Naturally he spoke not only for himself but for his vice-president when he gave his administration's program.
When Nixon was running himself for the presidency, he issued a statement (and I can give you this to put in your record here) stating his complete support for the Equal Rights Amendment. That was when he was defeated by Kennedy. Then when he became President—I remember we were getting statements from all the candidates for the presidency in 1968; that was the time we got Governor Wallace and all the others. We got statements from— everybody running for the Republican nomination, then from everybody running for the Democratic nomination. I think there was appreciably nobody running who didn't give us a statement of support for the Equal Rights Amendment.
After he was elected President—first of all before he was elected President, after he had been nominated, he appointed as manager of the women's division of his campaign Louise Gore, who was our own legislative chairman, as you know. Louise Gore was installed in the old Willard Hotel with an enormous staff of assistants to campaign among women, to organize the women of the country for the election of Nixon. This was the first time he ran. [1968.] There was no question at all about his supporting the Amendment. It was something Louise Gore was so strongly for herself, officially for. And the statement he had issued was [sent] widespread over the whole country.
Then, after he was elected, we hoped that he would really give a big push. Louise Gore undertook, as our legislative chairman, to keep the matter before the White House all the time. She went down to the White House to confer with the person whom the President had appointed
After a time when she went back to see how everything was going and to push further, he had been changed and assigned to another department. So she had to begin all over again with another person who was given to her to work with. She kept on but didn't have any very great success because Nixon's mind was evidently on getting something else through Congress, not particularly on getting our amendment, although he had—[Spoken] for us.
It wasn't until this present year when the Amendment had gone through Congress, and of course Nixon, through Louise Gore who was able to have the lobbyist who went up to the President on other matters, always encouraged to be as strong as they could for this measure too. It certainly helped in getting it through. I feel perfectly sure. Getting it through the House, I mean, and getting it through the Senate.
Fry
I don't remember Nixon coming out for it while it was going through Congress.
Paul
Well, he had come out for it in his whole election program.
Fry
Hadn't it already gone through Congress then? [1972]
Paul
No, it didn't go through until 1970. It went through the House for the first time. In 1968 he was elected, wasn't he?
Fry
And at that time Nixon came out for the Equal Rights Amendment?
Paul
No, I told you he came out first when he was campaigning as a young congressman.
Fry
When he was President , did he ever try to—
Paul
It was part of his program in his election campaign that he was campaigning for, the statement that he gave out. We circulated it, and everybody else working for the Republicans. We were not working for the Republicans, but we were working for any candidate that would support
But they weren't putting any great volume of pressure on this. I know that they weren't. Because the person to whom we owe the most thanks, Louise Gore—she wouldn't have been appointed chairman, an unpaid position, honorary, to organize the women of the country for Nixon if she hadn't had his ear and his approval. One reason I think he appointed her was—you probably know all about her—her home is one of the showplaces of Maryland, a great, very beautiful estate; there she has had many fundraising meetings, among others, for Nixon; she did raise a great deal of money for his campaign. So she was given as cordial reception as possible when she went up to try to push for the thing. The doors were open to her and people were assigned to her to work too. So, I think when we got it through it was with the cooperation and support of the White House.
But it wasn't until this [present] election campaign came on and had gotten quite a good way toward success that suddenly Nixon issued a statement, which had wide publicity. I have it here. I can show it to you if you haven't seen it. He said, "We are officially joining the ratification campaign and doing everything possible to see this measure become part of the Constitution." And of course it wouldn't have gotten in the platform again without Nixon's supprt; but you do have the planks, I guess.
Fry
No, I don't have a copy of the Republican planks, and I don't have a copy of Nixon's statement anymore because I gave them all away.
Paul
Suppose I get you right now the platform, because I have
Fry
All right.
Paul
It got in at the Miami convention, as you well know. It couldn't have gotten in if he hadn't wanted it, and what he did want got in. Nixon controlled this Miami convention.
It was very interesting to see that in the Republican platform at last—what we kept emphasizing and calling to their attention all the time—they emphasized that they were the first political party to come out for the Equal Rights Amendment. Not only to just say we'll do it now, but —. I think I'll mark the page and let you look at it and I'll go get the Democratic one for you.
Here is something I got out for you last night, which is a nice summary from a newspaper written by Carolyn Katzenstein before her death. Here is the governor signing it, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. This is Mrs. Lawrence Lewis on our national board. It's a very good story.
Fry
This is 1955, August 21, the Sunday Bulletin of Philadelphia, Section 4, page 6. This is a good twenty- two year history of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Paul
I think these clipping ought to be kept with your compilations.
Fry
I can Xerox it.
[Discussion of Xerox quality.]
Fry
I want to ask you one more thing about Nixon.
Paul
Well wait a minute—did you find the one where he says that we were the first?
Fry
Yes, it says, "our party being the first national party to back this amendment" (that was referring to 1940).
Paul
This is the Democratic one which is equally good. Only they can't say they were the first.
Fry
This is on page (Roman numeral) 111-16, the 1972 Democratic National Convention. I wish I could take these
The Republican platform book for 1972 has the equal rights platform on pages 60 and 61. The title is: “Republican Platform, a Better Future for All” .
The thing that is sticking in my mind, Alice, about Nixon is that few days or weeks of lobbying that I did for the Equal Rights Amendment—was it in '69 and '70?— I remember the judiciary subcommittee in the House was split along party lines with the Republicans voting against it and the Democrats voting for it (with the exception of one). At that time we were trying to get President Nixon to come out and say something to those Republicans.
Paul
But let me tell you. We were trying to get him to push harder the whole time. We never stopped trying to get that final push, which he made only a few weeks ago. It came out first in the Michigan paper, the Detroit paper, then it was spread all over the United States. It was some statement given, I believe, to the AP [Associated Press] or something like that. It just put the party wholeheartedly back of it.
It was really what enabled us to ratify up here in Connecticut. Because the legislature voted it down, and [then] the new election of last November, there was a Republican sweep up here which replaced Democratic control by Republican control. Just about that time—the governor was Republican—and the governor called a press conference. (As you probably know—I don't want to put this in the book at all.) At the press conference he announced that he had changed his position.
We began our appeal to the National Republican Committee as a whole to come out for it so that the ratification, in accordance with the platform pledges, would perhaps insure a ratification. And it was through this support that we got from the National Republican [Committee] — but this is all an inside, intimate thing about the campaign which mustn't be put in your book.
Well, let's put it under seal then so nobody will use it until much later.
Paul
No, no. Don't put it down. I'm not going to tell you if you put it down because we never could get another state if I began on telling you all this.
Fry
Why don't you put it under seal for five years?
Paul
No, I don't want to do that.
Fry
Well, we've got to get it down for history; but not for use immediately.
Paul
No, no, no.
[Tape off.]
Paul
Anyway, in a part of this general effort that's been made to get the Republicans to back the ratification in accordance with their own pledges in the platform—it was through that effort that we succeeded in getting this enormous vote up here in Connecticut.
Then, this was followed up by the President, probably in reply to questions from newspapermen, giving out this statement, "We're backing up to the hilt, in every possible way, the ratification." I must get one of the copies of this if I have it. I have it here and I'll show it to you. I gave it to Mrs. [A. Scott] Reynolds, the lady next door, to paste in the clipping book we're starting up here on the ratification. So, I can show you.
That brings —oh!—completely and wholeheartedly and absolutely back of the ratification. Now, if we could only keep him there [laughs] and hold him to it now the tide is running the other way, now is when we really need that Republican support. I'm hoping we will take it one state by another, and work through the Republican national headquarters to make this seem a politically wise move for the Republicans and Democrats in one legislature after another.
Because that's the way it was put through in Connecticut. When you had even the governor committed—a—a—even a press conference had been called . You see what a thing we had to overcome. And we went to the national headquarters of the Republican party and succeeded in getting such support that the governor turned
So, at the present time, we've got to begin again, I think, to obtain greater support from President Nixon than we're getting. Suddenly it's more or less stopped.
Fry
Maybe he can give more attention to it and a lot of other things once Watergate is straightened out.
Paul
Of course, the National Committee has a new chairman, Congressman Bush, who was, you know, up at the United Nations. He came from Connecticut. His father was for many years a United States senator here. That was the reason we were able to, without the White House, get this political support from the Republicans.
Fry
I see. Do you know Bush?
Paul
No, I've never seen him. We just got in touch with him by telephoning and then he responded right away.
Now what's the next question you want to have discussed? We've gotten away from your chronology but now I guess we've gotten a chronology [of our own?].
Assessing the Tactics of the National Woman's Party in the Suffrage Campaign
FryAlice, we don't have any statements from you on that final whirlwind, from about the first of 1918 to the middle of 1919. If you feel like it now, I wish you'd—
Paul
What kind of a statement did you mean? I mean, we found the things that we did [laughter]—
Fry
We've outlined the things and pieced them together from the Suffragist now, but what I'd like to know is what your impressions are of what you personally were doing in that period. You were in and out of prison and it seemed like you had a lot of things to direct. When you were in prison, who kept the pressure up in Congress? Were you able to direct it from prison?
Paul
Yes. But I was never in prison for any very great length of time, you see.
Fry
Except that fall of 1918.
Paul
I think that was a month, if I remember rightly, that I really was in prison. But that wasn't a very long period.
Fry
Did the discontinuity of people going in and out of prison make a problem in the campaign to keep all of these things going in this very busy time?
Paul
You mean was it a problem, because so many women were in prison, to keep the campaign going?
Fry
Yes. And the jobs that they would be assigned to, because some of your leaders went to prison.
Paul
Nearly all of our leaders went to prison.
Yes, who had definite administrative jobs in the party.
Paul
That wasn't very difficult to arrange. Somebody else would always take on whatever it was.
Fry
How did you decide when you wanted to picket and when you personally wanted to go over?
Paul
Whom we wanted as pickets?
Fry
No, when you, as the coordinator of all of these activities, would picket and risk arrest and imprisonment. I'm asking, How did you decide between those two alternatives staying at headquarters, where you were invaluable as the leader and the coordinator of the whole campaign, or showing your support in personal participation in the picketing and getting yourself arrested (as you did more than once) but having to face the fact that that would deprive the whole movement of its chief coordinator and executive at that time?
Paul
I never thought of myself as a coordinator. [Laughter.] The last thing in the world I ever thought of being was coordinator. But of course you can't lead people to do something that you won't do yourself. I never had any particular problem about that.
Fry
You say you didn't see yourself as "coordinating" all of this. What did you see your job as?
Paul
I just had—had the main responsibility of doing whatever had to be done.
Fry
[Laughing.] And there were a lot of women involved in it too.
Paul
We never had any problems that I saw along that line.
Fry
What about the health of the women who went to prison and things like that? Is this something that you can remember and tell me about?
Paul
I don't think it ever injured anybody's health. It was for a very short time; it wasn't any great hardship.
Fry
How do you see this last year and a half of the suffrage campaign along a continuum of importance in the whole suffrage campaign?
It was the culmination, of course, of all the efforts that had been made since 1648 [1848], when our first petition was presented. I think the part that the Woman's Party contributed in coming along, toward the end—because we took probably the leading part in the last seven years, but not any before this last seven years because we came into existence seven years before the final culmination—I think that the women in the Woman's Party succeeded in increasing the support and arousing the enthusiasm of women all over the United States to an extent that it had been never aroused before.
I think that by standing in front of the White House and calling the attention thereby of all political leaders in the country from the President down and, really, calling the attention of the whole country to the desire and demand of women for political equality, it gradually brought it to having a foremost place among the different reforms that were being advocated. It impressed upon Congress. It impressed upon the President.
When women were actually being imprisoned for it, it made it a still more insistent demand that the country had to give thought to it. Then, I think, by taking it into the field where women who were already voting were lined up with the women who weren't voting, and were using their votes and their political power to make it something that was politically useful to members of Congress to be supporting, was one of the biggest things that was done to finally put it across.
Fry
Did you feel at any time that your tactics of fighting the party responsible and your tactics of picketing and going to jail created more opposition to suffrage from people that felt this was improper?
Paul
No.
Fry
[Laughing.] Do you remember ever worrying that this might have been a disadvantage?
Paul
No, no. No. I had no doubts about that point. [laughter] any of those points.
Fry
Okay. [Laughter.] That seemed to be what the opposition would always dwell on.
Yes.
Fry
Speaking of that, I noticed that the Prohibition Party also came out for the Amendment. Did you consider that an advantage or a disadvantage?
Paul
Yes, of course.
Fry
You thought it was an advantage?
Paul
Yes.
Fry
Weren't you afraid you'd lose the vote of all good drinkin' people?
Paul
No. [Laughter,] I believe myself that women by nature are the great force for all these things that are constructive and up-building to a nation.
The Nature and Role of Women
FryDo you?
Paul
Yes. I think men contribute one thing and women another thing, that we're made that way. Women are certainly made as the peace-loving half of the world and the homemaking half of the world, the temperate half of the world. The more power they have, the better world we are going to have.
Fry
And that with the vote—
Paul
Don't you think so?
Fry
No, I haven't made up my mind yet about how much is intrinsic in women and how much is a part of their perceptions because of the role society has thrust upon them as being the chief homemaker and the chief raiser of children and so forth.
Paul
Yes, but being raisers of children just makes them all these other things. [All these other things] come , don't you think, from the role that women have in the world. They are going to make the home for the children, for their husbands, and so on. It's—they want to make it the best possible home and the best possible community and so on; you have a force that's not thinking all the time about going out and fighting somebody in the economic struggle or in any other struggle.
Fry
But what if women do go out and fight in the economic struggle or in the political struggle? Then they're not any more responsible for rearing their kids than their husbands are.
Paul
No, but I think these qualities that they have, however we've gotten them down through the ages and ages—but wherever you go to a new country, as when they came over
When I spent two years in the School of Economics in London, I had a Professor Westermarck who was a Danish professor. Every half year, if I remember rightly, he would go down to some more or less undiscovered part of the world where people were in the most primitive life that he could find and he studied the whole marriage system and family system and so on. Then he would come back and lecture on that field to all of his students. I had the great privilege, I think it was, of being one of his students.
The thing that so impressed me was that every place he came back from all fresh with what he'd discovered, the system of marriage was the same. He wrote this book, The History of Human Marriage, which was a textbook at that time all over the world in universities. So, wherever he had been, the one thing that I can always remember that was about the same: the role of women, the role of men. Women were the peace- loving, constructive part and men were the aggressive, fighting part.
So, I look forward to when we get real equality and everybody can be what he or she wants to be, so that we'll have a very much more perfect world in which to live. I haven't any doubt about it at all.
Fry
But what about the present movement, Alice, toward equalizing the roles of male and female in society so that there is not a distinct role any more? Do you think that when that happens—
Paul
Well, of course, our effort is to give an equal opportunity, as when we were trying to get through these measures about all government contracts. It's the simplest thing in the world: if we tax men and women equally, certainly we should give an equal opportunity to the contracts on which this tax money is spent.
These long, long, long, long fights we had over each little detail , because all the time we were working for the Equal Rights Amendment we took one measure up after another, after another; that's just a sample of them. And you find somebody would come forth for the principle but they wouldn't be for the application of the principle. Now it seems to me that when women have, not only in
Fry
Related to this is a question that I've been wanting to ask you. After the vote was won, there was—
Paul
If all my answers, you know, aren't sensible, just skip them when you have them transcribed.
Fry
I'm fascinated and I'm learning a lot, too.
4. IV. The Equal Rights Amendment
The Contest for the NWP to Support other Causes, 1921
FryAfter the suffrage was won, there was a big proliferation of women's organizations, as you'll remember, to put forward these very things that you're talking about that women have a natural concern with.
Paul
You mean that they were trying to get the Woman's Party to take them up? Is that what you mean?
Fry
I don't know. That's what I want to ask you. I know that the Woman's Party didn't take them up, but that there were causes like voter education for women, and—
Paul
Suffrage was won in August, and we voted for the first time in November. We had the problem then: "Well, should we dissolve?" because we had been formed for the purpose of getting the vote, although we had been incorporated in a way that left it open to anything for the advancement of women that was included in our program. But we actually undertook in our own minds to try to get the vote and that's all we tried to do. We didn't look forward beyond because that seemed to be a Herculean task that was enough to undertake. So, when we had the vote, we had this problem: "Well, shall we now dissolve, or shall we—?" We never had a permanent home, we just rented, of course, because we thought it was temporary. And we called this convention, as I told you, on the birthday of Susan B. Anthony, February 15, 1921, which we thought would give us sufficient time to make up our minds what to do, and sufficient time to pay off all the bills we had left over from the suffrage campaign. So, at that convention, we did have all these different points that women were interested in presented, people being extremely anxious to get us to take up their particular problem. You know that, I think.
Fry
Just from my readings. There were things like maternity and child medical progress that was the concern of one
Paul
At this convention, it was a large convention held in the big hall of the Washington Hotel. Representatives came and were given every chance to talk. [Small interruption.] Oh, is it dinner? Let me just tell you quickly then. Miss Jane Addams came and sat in the front row. I remember I presided at this convention and she was right down in front of me. She said that she hoped—and she was a very beloved person by the National Woman's Party because she stood by us always so strongly and faithfully when we were being—usually when we were being attacked by somebody, she certainly didn't vary in her support. So, she said, "Now, I hope you'll all join us in coming into the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom." That was a very strong feeling among most of the delegates, that peace was, after all, the next thing to work for.
We had succeeded when they didn't think we could succeed in such a short time in getting the Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution.
Fry
You mean the suffrage amendment.
Paul
I mean the suffrage amendment. So, for the moment, we were regarded with some respect and as powerful people that they'd like to have take up their reform. That was I would think the strongest effort that was made: to get us to become affiliated with or in some relationship with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, of which Miss Jane Addams was the international president.
Crystal Eastman, who was much more to the left I would say than most of us, drew up a whole program of all kinds of social reforms that she wanted us—a very good program, she thought it was. Maybe it was, but it was sort of more like—well, we'll say the program that had been adopted by Russia in general. And these people were not only wanting it, but they wanted it with such intensity, the different ones, that they were full of almost rage
Some were very strong for anti-vivisection. [Pause.]
Fry
What about birth control?
Paul
[Simultaneously.] Some were all for throwing all our effort into the Republican party. Some were for throwing all our effort into the Democratic party. Many were for throwing all our effort into the Socialist party and into the Labor party, whatever labor group there was. Oh, that was an enormous, enormous campaign to get us to go into the field that the Consumers League, with Florence Kelley, was into. That was tremendous because so many of our women had helped put through these special labor laws for women.
Fry
Yes, right. And Florence Kelley—I've seen her name in the suffrage books. She used to help with the suffrage campaign.
Paul
Oh yes. She was one of our strong members in the suffrage campaign. She was a leader in the campaign and had a meeting in Washington to which she invited all women's organizations to try to get them all to form a sort of coalition to work together for what the Consumers League was working for. She was one of the strongest people in trying to get this put in in our program. Well, we kept saying, "But we stand for equality and your special labor laws are not in harmony with the principle that we're standing for."
So we had these debates day after day, people coming to our headquarters and asking us to meetings over in the country where they were discussing what to do next, just because it was a group of women who were being credited with having won something that was important to win and maybe we'd win something for them. [Dinner is called again.] I remember these just bitter fights with the special-labor-laws-for-women people.
Fry
Let's take up on this labor question when we come back after dinner.
Paul
All right—.
[Break for dinner Tape on during dinner.]
Those who were on our national board had worked together so long and had borne most of the burden of raising the money and of doing the work, because it was practically all a volunteer group. One thing that united us was that we were so anxious that if it did continue, if we could find any group that was willing to continue (because we were too exhausted to start right in again on another campaign) that we wanted to continue just for equality for women. We wanted this first movement, from the very, very beginning in the colonial days, which was equality, nothing else. That one that I just showed you, from Lucretia Mott and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and all through the 1848 convention when for the first time they made a more formal presentation to the world of their demands. Down to our time, the thought or mainstream of the women's movement had been for equality and that was all it was. The whole difference in rights should be wiped out, and [so] we wanted to go on. It was going on and all until this really had been accomplished , till not only equality in political rights, but equality in all rights had been won. We thought that was something that ought to be done and we hoped somebody else would rise up and do it. [Laughs.] That was our general feeling.
So, we elected a new board and we most of us tried not even to go on the old [new] board so it would have a whole clean field to work in. Elsie Hill took the chairmanship and a good many of our people were finally put on the new board. [Interruption.] So then, according to Mrs. [Sarah T.] Colvin, who wrote this up—I never had known that she disagreed with this (because she had been on our national board) until he [Robert S. Gallagher of American Heritage ] told me what she said and read it to me. She probably wanted us to take up one of the groups that were, say, more like Crystal Eastman's, to go in for more radical reforms in labor. I think that was probably, probably her idea.
Anyway, what she wrote was, she said [something like], "We all went down with such glory and happiness to this convention, and we all wanted to present our programs for what we ought to do next. But," she says, "we really didn't get any chance. There was no general discussion on the floor. We didn't have a real debate of all the different things that people had before them, which we ought to have had. But, instead, they voted to continue because it had sort of been thrashed out through all these months and the different people said
She said, "Well, the rest of us just went home feeling frustrated. We hadn't had a chance to present our programs, which we thought would have been much better, and we thought this was about the worst convention we'd ever been to as far as people not having a chance to talk about what they wanted to talk about."
So, I said to him [Mr. Gallagher], "Well, this may all be true. I didn't realize it. I thought the whole question in most people's minds was: 'Should we continue or not? If we do continue, can we find some group that will be willing to really devote their time to it and their money to it and not just vote to continue and then disappear?'
"When people got up and said they wanted to have us join the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, or they wanted us to form a new peace society, just change our organization into a brand new peace organization, a great many of them wanted that." I said, "There really wasn't much discussion because in the minds of most of the people that were leaders in the convention, the only problem was: 'Should we continue or not? Can we find the people who will do it?' The idea of deviating from the equality thing we just didn't even register . [Laughing.] We knew a few people wanted it, but we didn't think there was any feeling in the convention for it. So, when people got up and presented it and nobody got up and said much in support, we weren't trying to suppress any discussion, but there didn't seem to be anybody that wanted to discuss that."
Fry
Was the equal rights concept then looked upon as a unifying concept of all these diverse interest groups?
Paul
No.
Fry
It wasn't seen as some symbol of women's equality like suffrage had been?
Paul
Well, you see, we never thought there was any great mass of people in the country that wanted equality. We knew we wanted equality.
Fry
Who's we?
We of the Woman's Party wanted equality. That's what we'd started out to do, to make a reality of what was drawn up, as you can see from our declaration of sentiments that we drew up, our Declaration of Principles. It's the same thing exactly. We didn't add to or subtract from 1848, which was the first convention, the great convention that started the women's movement in this country, as you know. We were just taking one point in their program and trying to bring it to pass. We always had perfect loyalty to the whole program and, if we could continue, we knew that the thing must extend to get the whole program a reality.
So, all the things that Mrs. Colvin said were certainly astonishing to me because I didn't realize—I knew that one or two or three people were sort of leaders, we'll say, in wanting us to go into a woman's peace organization, and others were leading us and wanting us to go into forming a whole new society. I mean, take the same society, but have a whole new program of whatever reform they had for trying to bring peace. So, with each group— we knew Mrs. Florence Kelley and two or three people thought the most important thing was special labor laws for women.
Well, they said their say, there was not any uprising from people; there wasn't any discussion because the main group of the Woman's Party people all did want equality. They just wanted the whole equality program. That's what had brought us together in the beginning because we all thought equality was the most important of all the things that we wanted to work for.
Fry
Who were the specific women who were supporting you at this time in this stand?
Paul
There wasn't any supporting me or supporting anything at all in the way of any individual person.
Fry
Well, I guess it was a group from the National Woman's Party—
Paul
But, I mean, the Woman's Party group—we supposed, or I supposed in my innocence, that almost every Woman's Party person was—I never even dreamt that one person on our national board—Mrs. Colvin—thought there was something else more important, such as the labor movement (which I think she thought was more important—I gathered from Mr. Gallagher, the one who told me about the book, that that's what she thought was more important).
Maybe it was more important, but for us, who were working on the equality program, our only question was: "Should we continue?" not what we should continue for. There was nobody supporting anybody else; we all thought that way.
Fry
What was Florence Kelley's reaction, then, when she found out that you were going to go ahead with an equal rights amendment?
Paul
Well, of course, at that time, we didn't have any equal rights amendment .
Fry
It wasn't an amendment. It was just equal rights, yes.
Paul
No, it was just to get equality between the sexes. Whether we'd have an amendment to the Constitution—we hadn't even thought that far.
Fry
What was her reaction to that?
Paul
As soon as she saw that we were really going to try to do it, I told you: she called this meeting at the Dodge Hotel and invited all women's organizations to try to get them all to [interruption] support her special labor laws.
Fry
We'll start there after we finish dinner.
[Break.]
Protective Labor Laws VS. the ERA
The Meeting Called by Florence Kelley
FryWhen you say "the meeting at the Dodge," is this Kansas?
Paul
The Dodge Hotel in Washington. The societies that she wrote to sent one or two people. Three went from ours— Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, who'd been our national treasurer all through the suffrage campaign nearly, [sculptor] Adelaide Johnson, who more or less represented the old school of Susan B. Anthony, with the busts she made and so on, representing those people who'd worked over the years and years and years, and I. [Interruption.] We were the three from the Woman's Party and nobody agreed with us, not one person, from any of these societies.
Fry
Now, one of the labor groups was the Consumers League.
Paul
Yes, only it wasn't a labor group.
Fry
It wasn't a labor group and yet it was this labor question where you differed with them, is that right?
Paul
It wasn't a labor group at all. It was people who were consumers, I understood. I wasn't a member, but I understood they were a group of womne consumers who had been organized by Florence Kelley to use the power of consumers to benefit women in industry. That was what it was, not a labor group at all.
Fry
I see. Could you tell me again, Alice, about the meeting in which Florence Kelley and her group apparently decided against supporting the Equal Rights Amendment?
Paul
Anyway, the Consumers League objected to the Equal Rights Amendment on the ground that they'd worked very hard to get special protection for women and this would
The AAUW on the Fence re: ERA and Equal Nationality Rights
FryWe'd run out of the tape and I didn't turn it in time, but all we missed was what you said about the letter that the AAUW was sending around to Congress at about this same time—Mina Kerr's.
Paul
No, it wasn't the same time. It was a result of this meeting. I don't know what action the others took; they all appeared to be supporting, and stated that they were supporting, special labor laws for women. But the AAUW [American Association of University Women], of which I was a member at the time, sent a letter, an official letter signed by Mina Kerr—she was their executive secretary at the time—to Congress. Whether to every member or not, I don't know, but to everybody they thought was important to communicate with, saying that the AAUW was opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment and hoped no action would be taken to further it.
When this happened, Mrs. Lawrence Lewis from Philadelphia, our national treasurer, and I went over to see Miss M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, who had been one of the founders of the AAUW when it was leading women and she was, of course, perhaps the woman who'd done more than any other woman to lift the— [Interruption.] In all events, I was telling you who Miss M. Carey Thomas was, in case you don't know. (But you really will know all that, I'm sure.) So. because of her relationship to the AAUW, she'd
So, she said that she would come down to the convention that was about to be held, their national convention to be held in Washington, and do her level best to have the AAUW withdraw its letter, which she had not known anything about and certainly hadn't been in any way consulted about it. So, she did come and she wrote up— offered a resolution repudiating this letter. The AAUW voted, after she'd made this appeal to them, to make a study of the subject of the Amendment and not to take any position of opposition or support or anything until they'd looked into it, which was a very good resolution, we thought.
Then, Miss Thomas agreed to (and did, herself) send out and write the case for the Amendment and to send it to all the AAUW clubs over the country in the effort to put the Amendment side before all the college women. Someone else was delegated to send it on the other side. So, they began, then, a study of the subject and also informed Congress that they no longer stood against it and were making a study of the measure.
Fry
They were neutralized, then, as I understand it, for many, many years. Is that right?
Paul
They kept on their "study" program until a meeting in—but you'd better verify all these things from the AAUW because I'm not very—I resigned after a time from them, over the nationality of women question. They would not support the nationality of women, but their international whatever they called it—
Fry
The international organization of university women?
Paul
No, no. They had a department in the AAUW, I guess on international work, something like that. The chairman of it, the head of that department, a paid person by the AAUW, (all of our memberships were going towards paying her salary)—let me see. She was Esther Calkins Banning, and you may remember her. No, Esther Calkins— she married another person. You could easily find out who this person was, this director of the international
But she took a strong position when we were trying to get the nationality of women in our country, a bill to give American women equal nationality rights as a part of our Equal Rights Amendment work, you see, in our equal rights campaign.
After suffrage was won, one of the first things we did was to try to give women the same nationality rights that men had, instead of a woman's nationality following her husband's on divorce or marriage or on naturalization. And the nationality of the child, at that time, followed the mother only if the child was illegitimate. A child born abroad of a foreign father and American mother had the nationality of the mother only if the child was illegitimate. If it was legitimate, our country just didn't recognize it any longer. We didn't recognize the mother as any longer an American (although she was an American) because she had married a foreigner, and we didn't recognize the child because the blood of the mother was never recognized at all, excepting when it was an illegitimate child. We were trying to get this whole law changed, and we did get it changed in 1934.
In 1934 came forth then a great opposition from the lower people in the State Department, not the top. The top man was Secretary Hull, who was in sympathy with us, but the lower ranks weren't. So, they had introduced in Congress a bill to have a commission set up to study the question of nationality of women. Three people were to be on that commission and it was to be a paid commission. So, we didn't oppose it or support it. We did nothing with the bill, but we put all our effort on getting our own bill through. We did get it through in May, May 24, 1934.
At that time, this Esther Calkins (Brewer, we'll say) had an article which appeared almost the day that our bill went through, in which she spoke passionately supporting the Commission set up to study the matter. I tried my level best then, as a member of the AAUW, to do something about it. I didn't make a dent in this Esther Calkins—Breunaur [?] I believe it was, Esther Calkins Breunaur's position. And here came forth this article. Instead of supporting an equality program for nationality, they, by having this article in their journal by their paid official on the subject, gave their
So, therefore, I don't know so very much more about it [AAUW and the ERA] after that. But I do know that it continued to be studied, perhaps in a perfunctory way, by both sides being questioned, the propaganda for both sides being put forth before their branches. Until one of the national conventions, which met in Oregon. At that time, they, I think , gave their—they apparently withdrew from studying the Amendment to taking for granted that the organization was for their previous position of being against the Amendment altogether. Then, after a time, it seems to have come back to being just a question of study, because I know at the Washington convention, our national chairman, Dr. Agnes Wells at that time—she had been the dean of women at the University of Indiana—then she became our national chairman, she went out while she was our national chairman to the AAUW convention in Washington state and made a great effort to have them support the Amendment. But she didn't succeed. They still took the stand that they would look into it further or something like that.
Then, at the Minnesota convention, which was still later, I know that they voted because they wrote to us and said so. The vote was exactly the games we'll say 200 for, 200 against; 200 for the Amendment, 200 against endorsing the Amendment. The person that can give you all of this if you just telephone down to her [in Southern California] and get it when you go home is Wanona McGuire, because she went down two years ago—she was on the national board, I think, of the AAUW. At Dallas, Texas, I think, the convention was held. I know she telephoned up to me at night and said, "Well, at last, through all these years and years and years, we've endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment."
Fry
Yes. It had always failed by a small margin, I guess, for many years.
Paul
No, I don't know about that, whether it had a small margin or not.
Fry
But it had never passed before that convention in Texas, around 1971.
I don't know that it came up very many times. I know that [once] when it was coming up, probably right after the Oregon convention, when they took the first steps that seemed to be more positively endorsing the opposition, I went over again to see Miss M. Carey Thomas. By that time she had resigned and was no longer living out at Bryn Mawr; but she was visiting, as it happened, in Baltimore. So, I went over to see her again and told her, "We need your help again."
She said, "Yes, but I think that the type of women that are in the "—Goodness! I mean, I shouldn't be saying this, I guess. But—"The type of women that are in the AAUW now are not the type that [they] were in the pioneer days when we were trying to open educational opportunities to women. I think that I won't make any further efforts. I think, as far as I'm concerned, I can't do anything more with them."
But her support was just the same, her support, of course.
But at last—and more or less, of course, it was Wanona McGuire, who carried on the work, who was the one woman on the inside who went forward with it more steadfastly, I thought, than anybody else.
Fry
As a matter of fact, Alice, I happened to be there at Belmont House when she called with the good news that they'd finally passed it, and I was the one who took the telephone call and carried the news to you and the others who were having dinner in the garden. She said that they'd been working on it for years and years and years.
Paul
Of course, they had been. We all know that. But I think she'd give you the details. I don't know you need it, but for your work.
Fry
It is probably available in collections on the AAUW.
Paul
But I've just sketchily given it from the outside, how it looked to us.
Fry
I never did know precisely what AAUW's objection was. Was it just this protective legislation issue?
Paul
Well, I don't know what it was.
Fry
Could you explain to me what issue was it that was so
Paul
[Pause.] I don't know that you would say that they opposed equal nationality for women, that anybody did that. But in the practical point of view from what was before Congress, the measure before Congress was that a commission should be set up to study this question. When we went to Congress to ask that—I think about January we had the bill introduced—for complete equality in the field of nationality of women.
Equal Nationality Rights
The Montevideo Conference, 1933
PaulIn 1933, at the Montevideo Conference of American Republics, we had gotten through the Inter-American Commission of Women, which we had formed and through which we could operate, have a voice in affairs at the Conference of American Republics. We had gotten this set up, you know, in 1928 at the Conference of American Republics that met in Havana, Cuba.
One of the things that this commission began to work on—you see, one of our own officers, Doris Stevens, was made the international, I suppose you'd call it, chairman; anyway she was chairman of the Inter-American Commission of Women. As we were trying right up to getting the votes to get equality of nationality for women, she succeeded in having them take this up at this Montevideo, and the treaty was passed there, as you know, adopted there, and submitted to all the American republics for their signatures, their ratification for complete equality for women in the nationality field.
After getting the vote, of course, it was one of the most logical and reasonable things to go to see that you not only had voting rights, but that you had equal rights to your own nationality, to keep it on your marriage to a person having another one. If you were naturalized, to be able to be naturalized in our country, and to change your nationality in any way you wanted (an American woman), that they could have their own passport and that they could transmit the nationality to their children—even if married to a foreigner, that is—that our country would recognize it. That was the essence of what we were trying to do.
So, the State Department, which was the part of the
So, I wouldn't say they were exactly opposed, but they would not support our effort to have the measure passed right away because they said they approved this other policy of having it all studied.
Now, you know, the husband of Elsie Hill was one of the three men who was appointed by our government when their bill finally did pass. But they didn't get their bill through—it didn't make any difference to us whether they did or they didn't. We said the State Department could study it to their heart's content, we were still going to put our measure through. And we did get ours through, as I say, the 24th of May in 1934, I think. You can verify that, but I think it was the date, because I remember it because we worked so long and so hard.
I rather think this commission to study it got through later. I'm not sure when it got through because we paid no attention to it. This was set up and, as I say, Elsie Hill's husband, who was working then, I think, in the Justice Department, was made one of the three people on that commission to study. They had a little staff to work through and all the facilities of the government to make this study [laughing] and they kept on studying. I think it was five years. Then they made a report. We didn't pay any attention to the report; we don't know what they reported. I think one was from the Justice and, say, one from the State Department, and I don't know who the third one was. Three men.
Anyway, when this went through both houses of Congress—May 24, I think—in the morning, in the afternoon we put the measure through the Senate ratifying the treaty at Montevideo, which had been for complete equality for women. It was in 1933 that it went through at Montevideo and it was presented by our United States delegation for the Inter-American Commission of Women.
At that time, we gave most of the money, for instance, for the Inter-American Commission of Women because, I think, through that whole period we raised quite a lot of money and we did everything possible for them until they became so official that the commission itself was later on financed by the Pan American Union itself.
So, when this went through at Montevideo, we of course couldn't ratify, although we'd helped get it through at Montevideo. We'd been the main force of getting it through, with all our support of the Inter-American Commission of Women and having the chairman from our country and from our own organization.
It was, I think, the following January after the Montevideo treaty was voted. I guess we had no dissenting votes in Montevideo. We then, of course, wanted our country to ratify, not only all the other countries, but ours. We couldn't do it since we didn't have equality at home. So, that was the reason that we concentrated at that moment on getting it through our Congress. We had it introduced in the beginning of the year and worked for it steadily until it was ratified.
Fry
Who helped you in this in Congress? Do you remember any special congressmen who were good friends in all of this?
Paul
Well, the nationality question we took up for the first time when they were starting to work on the World Code for the World Court at the Hague. The conference was called to consider drafting the Code; it would be the code that the whole World Court would carry out. The United States began to do that.
The Conference for Codification of International Law
PaulThe first conference, I believe, was in 1930. I have a little draft. Maybe I could get the date of that for you.
I think I have it here. Let's see. [Looks through papers.]
Paul
If you don't have it, I think I have it and can get it. I'm almost certain it was 1930.
Fry
Yes. In 1930, there was a plenipotentiary person to the Conference for Codification of International Law to be held at the Hague in March of 1930.
Paul
That's what I thought the year was. Anyway, we sent over a delegation there and we persuaded the government to send one official person as a voting member of the college for our country. That was Emma Wold.
Fry
Oh yes. It was almost Doris, wasn't it, your chairman of the Inter-American Commission? I think that there was some move to get Emma Wold and—just a minute. [Looks through papers.]
Paul
Where did you get all this from?
Fry
I just picked it up in a letter in the Anne Martin collection in the Bancroft Library.
Paul
[Are you speaking of] Doris Stevens? She's the one who wrote Jailed for Freedom .
Fry
Yes. Did she go, or did only Emma Wold go?
Paul
Well, this was what happened. [Interruption] music from apartment below.] The sequence was this: When this conference was called, when we were just beginning to work on the nationality of women for our country. We learned that this Codification of International Law was going to be started about that time, just almost after the Inter- American Commission was formed, which was in Havana in 1928 at that Pan American Conference. It was set up. And we then started to work on this subject through the Inter- American Commission of Women.
Doris went over to the Hague as the chairman of the Inter-American Commission of Women. Then we thought we might probably—she undertook to go before the conference ever started and try to press from the outside, as we had always to do at international conferences. Then we thought maybe we could even aspire to get somebody on the conference itself as part of our United States delegation.
So, we went to President Hoover to ask that he appoint somebody.
Fry
Was it easy to see Hoover about that?
Paul
You could always get to see him. We never had any trouble getting to see him at all. He was always accessible. So we sent quite a large delegation to him and asked him that the United States support at the Hague complete equality in every field that might come up in international law within the code.
Then it developed that in the draft that they were going to work on, one of the first articles dealt with nationality, including the nationality of women. So, it became extremely important, we thought, and we submitted the name of Emma Wold, who was one of our lawyers who'd been in this group that was working with Burnita Matthews. I've told you other times of how Burnita Matthews undertook one of the first things we did. She undertook for us to put through this study of all the laws in this country. I told you how we began this with Burnita and then we raised enough money for her to have an assistant, and then another assistant, and another assistant, until she had about twelve. (I remember telling you all this.) They were making this first survey that was ever made of the legal position of women in our country.
So, among others who helped her and one of those who was perhaps the best in helping her, from the point of view of doing that all the time for a much longer perio—some of these other lawyers came in for a short time and then went on to their private practices or something, but she [Emma Wold] stayed on working in this group. So, she was a very logical person to have go and a very good person. We were perfectly sure that she would be steadfast and stand up in every possible way for what we wanted. So, President Hoover appointed her. Then, while this was pending, before he appointed anybody, one of the people, perhaps in the White House, that we talked to, but I don't know who it was—
Mrs. Harvey [Anna Kelton] Wiley was one of those who undertook to have an appointment made; she may have been our national chairman, I'm not sure. But I know she came back one day and she said, "When I went to see this particular man, he said,"—this was part of our general work of trying to get Emma Wold appointed—"he said,
Mrs. Wiley said, "Well, of course, we would like very much to have Doris Stevens too. We're not saying it has to be Emma Wold, but we wanted a woman and she seemed to be perhaps the best qualified person who had indicated an interest in going." Then she said, "We could take them both in our arms," or something like that.
So, after all, we then gave our support also to Doris to show that we were not only supporting Emma, but supporting Doris. But I guess it had gone so far that it had probably already been decided to appoint Emma, so she was appointed and Doris continued, as she had planned in the beginning, to go for the Inter-American Commission of Women and work for it from the outside. So, we worked for both. We were for anybody who could be appointed and who would be willing to go and take the time to go and so on.
So, we did have Emma on the inside, which was a big step forward, because I think she was the first woman who had ever been appointed by any government of the United States to participate as a full-fledged member of the delegation from our country in an international conference. As far as we knew there never had been such a thing before. So, it was another big forward step, and she was a very good representative and did everything she possibly could.
Fry
Did you go too?
Paul
No, I didn't go. I never thought of going. [Laughter.] It never entered my head to go.
At that conference, we had a hearing at which Doris presented the case from the outside for the Inter-American Commission, Just taking the one point of the nationality of women because that turned out to be one of the first subjects that they were to have under discussion. It looked as the whole old point of view with regard to nationality of women would be incorporated in the World Code, and not the equality view at all, because all the governments of the world were having in their own laws the subordinate position of women with regard to nationality and everything else.
So, then we started to try to get President Hoover—do you want me to talk about this?
Fry
Yes, I do. This is very interesting. I wanted to start a whole session on all of this international work.
Paul
Well, we then started to try and get President Hoover to stand for complete equality in nationality. You see, we didn't have it in our own country in 1930. The man who helped us the most with this was Dr. James Brown Scott, and he's given me a photograph and I'm going to put it up here because he did so much for us. He was then president of about everything in the field of international law.
They had a headquarters just opposite the White House, on the opposite side, almost next door to where our headquarters had been on Lafayette Square, right across from the White House. And they were still there. I think it was then called the headquarters of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, or something like that.
But anyway, he was the president at that time of the World Organization of International Law. I remember that just about the time they were going to vote over in the Hague and we saw that it was going to go no along the equality—that the Code would not open on the equality basis as we wanted it to—he went over twice that very morning to see President Hoover for us and said, "I want, as president of this International Law Organization and so on, to tell you that what these women are asking for, from the point of view of international law and so on, is perfectly right and proper." Then he went back a second time because Hoover had been the first time a little bit— well, I mean, he had not known it was this important for him to intervene after he'd sent a delegation over there, to instruct them.
So then when Mr. Scott came back and told us what the President said, we suggested further things that he might emphasize to him, the great importance of a World Code not starting on the basis of inequality. So, he went back a second time to see the President. I remember very vividly that he came back and said, "Well, Mr. Hoover said, 'Well, now, just stop talking. Just get out and leave me alone so I'll have time to get this message over. I will send the message right over saying that we are not to participate in any vote that does not
And the result was that since the United States was such an important member after our participation in the World War and we had a bigger say, a bigger voice, I think, in international matters, so the vote was to refer the whole subject to the League of Nations.
Fry
I see.
And so the question of nationality of women—I'm not sure what way it came before the League of Nations, but it came before the next assembly. It was put on the agenda of the next assembly of the League of Nations, and that's the reason that we started to go over to the League, because having gone this far and putting our hand to the plow, we had to more or less follow through.
Now after we had got the Inter-American Commission of Women committed to this (and certainly we did because if we hadn't manifested all this interest, probably some other subject would have been taken up by them first) but they did take up the whole question of the treaty on this subject in 1933, after we'd gone over to the League and gotten the League working on it also. Then when it went through in the Montevideo Conference, we then undertook with great vigor to make our own country to do what we were advocating now in the international field. So that's the way we did; we had them put through the nationality of women treaty in the afternoon, after we'd made our own country absolutely equal, as far as laws could do it, in the morning. This was May 24, 1934.
Then you said, who helped us? (when we first started this whole thing with your question, when I began to tell these other points, how we worked). When we first began on the nationality of women, there was one woman in Congress who'd had trouble in getting in because she'd married a foreigner. Under our law, normally, she would be considered to have been no longer an American citizen. But she'd run for Congress and been elected and was in Congress. Her name was Ruth Bryan Owens; she was the
So when we campaigned in our own country, we naturally went to the one woman in Congress at that time. Perhaps there may have been another woman in Congress, but she was the logical person because she was having a problem of establishing her own nationality rights so she could sit after she was elected. I went over, I remember, myself and saw her in the Methodist building where she was living and had a long talk with her. She said she wasn't in a very good position, she thought, to take the matter up because people were challenging her own right to be in Congress and on this very subject.
So then we went to Hamilton Fish and asked him, and he did it. He took it up with great enthusiasm and called a hearing on the subject. Then we did as we always did at hearings—got the speakers and so on. I presided, as far as our delegation was concerned, and introduced the people and spoke for complete nationality rights for women. Hamilton Fish told me that it couldn't possibly have been better. We got very good publicity about it. We had daughters of Americans whose mothers had lost their nationality and so on.
One very lovely young American girl—we would have said young American girl—had Austrian nationality because the mother had married an Austrian officer who'd been killed in the First World War and she was over there when her little daughter was born. Then, the mother tried to come back to our country. You may probably know all about her. She was the sister of Maud Younger, our congressional chairman. But she couldn't go back and she couldn't get any money sent over to her because she was an enemy alien—this American girl and the American mother, Maud Younger's sister, who had married, as a Californian, an Austrian—or Hungarian; I don't know—it was Austria-Hungary.
Fry
It's probably written up in Equal Rights somewhere.
Paul
I can't remember whether he was Austrian or Hungarian. Anyway, she married a foreigner—an officer in a foreign army. Of course, she married before the war broke out; but when the war broke out, naturally he was involved, and he was killed. So Maud Younger's sister was suddenly the widow of this very distinguished Austrian or Hungarian—whichever it was—family, and she sought to
She got as far as Switzerland and then she couldn't get a passport to come home; she was stuck in Switzerland. She was an enemy alien, you see, by our laws.
Fry
Both she and her daughter.
Paul
Yes, were enemy aliens. So Maud Younger, all through this time, was sending her family—of course, it was a very wealthy family and she'd probably married, as so many women do (the sister) into families that were not very wealthy over there but had titles and such. So Maud Younger was always sending money over to her sister and her niece. All the property that they owned in this country was taken over by the alien custodian; you know, that department took over all the property in America of— you remember that department probably called the Alien Custodian Office, I think it was—they took over the ownership and the administration of the property of the enemy aliens in this country. So they didn't have any of their property left or anything.
It wasn't until the end of the war that Maud Younger succeeded, and was helped a great deal by the fact that she was our congressional chairman and was seeing all the people in Congress who could help. Somehow or other they got it arranged so that she could come back to this country with her little daughter—who, by this time, after staying a long time in Switzerland before she could come back, because she was in this position of having lost her passport, lost her American nationality—when she did come back, we were having a hearing. And I remember this young daughter was one of the speakers; she was very moving.
Fry
Was this 1933? You said, "After the war," and I didn't know which war you meant.
Paul
The First World War. But sometime during this period, before our nationality bill went through in 1934, we had a hearing at which this young girl spoke. But all these things were organized by Hamilton Fish.
Then, then there was a great deal of publicity and everything seemed to be going our way, Mr. Fish called me and told me that Mrs. Ruth Bryan Owens had come to him and said, "Now I've gotten my nationality straightened out more or less; they're allowing me to be a member of Congress. Now I'm ready to take up the women's
He said, "Well, at the time when nobody would take it up and it was a very unpopular measure, you were asked and you refused. I took it up and I've gotten everything up to this point where we think the nationality bill will be in a position to go through; and I think I'd better just stick to it and go on." Of the people who helped us, he was one of the best—very, very, very best—because he began when nobody wanted to be associated with it. Then, it was introduced in the final year—1934—I think (but I'd have to verify it) by the chairman of whatever committee was in charge of it. He was a Jewish man from New York City, not a very powerful man; Dick Stein I think his name was. You know, I haven't looked this up since 1934 and I might be mistaken, but I think it was Dick Stein. I suppose in Equal Rights in 1934 we could find it.
He introduced it with the firm belief that it was a ridiculous thing and wouldn't go through—couldn't possibly—but he would introduce it for us. I think he was chairman of the committee and that was the reason we asked him to. But he didn't give much hope that he could ever do anything with it.
But nevertheless it went through in the morning, and in the afternoon we ratified, through the Montevideo treaty. So that was the end of the thing on nationality. You see, we always took some measure and had not only the Amendment that we were working for, but whatever particular thing that happened to be before the country that was discriminatory.
Fry
This interested me because whereas with suffrage, there was no variance by the Woman's Party in working for any other issue, any other bill, even though it might relate a little to suffrage. I wondered if you saw this as a change in policy, when equal rights was the main goal? You did have more diversity.
Paul
No, but of course our situation was so very different. After we got the vote, all these congressmen were people the women could ask to do various things. Before, when we had the little handful of congressmen who were responsive to women—the women of Wyoming and two little states—
The voter states, yes.
Paul
And all the rest, we were not in a position to ask them to do anything. But then, we concentrated on having the women who were voters ask their congressmen the one thing of getting us the key to the vote for all the women; I think it was a logical thing to do.
After we got the vote, and women were beginning all over the country to ask congressmen to do this for them and that for them, we tried to do the one thing only of keeping, as far as our organization was concerned, what we asked for—something that was part and parcel of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment, if it had gone through then, would have settled all the nationality problems and all the others. I think it was very reasonable. We didn't have to argue it, nobody ever disputed it, ever questioned it. We just felt natural to do that.
A measure like nationality was coming up; our country was taking a stand on it because it happened to be one of the opening sections of the world code; our government was publicly participating in it. Well, that sort of thrust you into taking up nationality. Of all the things that you might have taken up, that was the current one that happened to be before Congress.
Fry
I have one more question to ask you on this. What other organizations were working for this equality of nationality act?
Paul
I don't think any other ones. Anyway, women had just gotten the vote and the organizations weren't taking much part in working on national measures at all, unless somebody gathered them up, as Mrs. Kelley did, to try to get them to oppose the Amendment. And we didn't go forth to get any others; we just undertook to do it and be glad we had the field to ourselves and nobody interfering very much excepting this—I don't know that any other organization opposed. Opposed the nationality measure, I mean. I don't know that any other did.
Relations with Organized Labor
Maud Younger
FryThere was a National Women's Trade Union League. Did they give you much trouble on the Equal Rights Amendment?
Paul
No. They were part of—supporting—the AFL, CIO, the general labor movement. We didn't come into contact with them as individuals at all.
Fry
My guess is that they would have opposed the ERA.
Paul
It was such a small little organization; I don't remember anything about them. Now, Maud Younger, for instance, who was our congressional chairman, in our group was the leading woman who was in the women's trade union movement. You probably know because you must know all about the Californians.
Fry
No, I don't; I don't know much about Maud Younger. [Laughter.]
Paul
You know who she was, don't you?
Fry
I know that she handled the lobbying and the congressional contacts.
Paul
She belonged to a quite wealthy San Francisco family. As a quite young woman—young girl almost—she undertook to help the waitresses from a waitresses' union. She's written a good many things in popular magazines about this.
Then this waitresses' union, under her leadership— she did everything, I guess, that was done—succeeded in getting through an eight-hour law for women in California, which I suppose was one of the first that
Then it was carried to the Supreme Court of the United States by the people who had a personal interest in not having the eight-hour law for women. She carried it there herself and financed the whole campaign and paid all the expenses, largely; maybe other people helped, but she was always supposed to be the main person back of this. The eight-hour law was sustained by the Supreme Court, for women. So she was regarded in all this protective labor law group as the mother of the eight-hour law for women.
When we first met her, it was in 1915 when we went out to [San Francisco] have this women voters' convention which we organized to be held out there at the time of the [Panama-Pacific] fair, and in conjunction with all the people who were going to the fair.
I remember that I was in one car going to some meeting in the street and passing a car with Maud Younger in it, whom I didn't know and had never perhaps heard of, but at least I might have known her name. For some reason—perhaps the drivers of the two cars knew each other (I suppose there was just ordinary people driving, not chauffeurs at all anyway, we stopped, and somebody introduced me to Maud Younger over in the other car. That's the first time I ever saw her.
She was then completely engaged in this protective labor law for women movement. I just invited her, saying, "We're going back to Washington; won't you come help us in Washington," or something or other. Later on she turned up in Washington, came and took a little apartment, and said she had come to see if she could help. Then she began to help; she was so wonderful, we made her our congressional chairman. Finally, she gave up the apartment, came over, and took a room in our headquarters where she stayed, in our headquarters, and by paying for a room and so on, up until suffrage was won, as you well know.
Then, when we started in on our new campaign of equality, of course equality ran counter to all these special labor law ladies. Some came out against us and were just flatly against the Amendment.
Maud Younger was so much on the inside; she'd been the national treasurer of this women's trade union league. She was very perturbed, naturally. We certainly didn't want to lose Maud Younger, whatever else happened, because in the suffrage movement she'd built up this great power in our organization, and we didn't want her to stop because of this difference with the trade union people.
She thought a long time about it and she finally decided this was the right principle, and that all the efforts she'd been making for women in industry had been right, in her opinion, and they ought to be extended for everybody, not make it for one sex.
Everything to do with labor, we always turned over to her. She still had many strong friendships. I remember that—well, one of the principal people in the AF of L—I don't remember what his name was—who was always representing the AF of L in things in Washington, would always leave it to her. They had any number of social affairs always going on. She would go to all these social affairs, from us. But she kept up this very cordial relationship with the people she'd known for so long, from Gompers down.
I remember when we were picketing, and Gompers was making apparent some objection and passed by—I don't know whether she ever picketed or not (that was in the suffrage campaign) anyway, if she wasn't actually picketing herself, she was there with the pickets. Maybe she was picketing herself; I don't know.
I remember that Gompers passed by, and he was rather frowning or something, I guess. She said, "Now, don't you forget, you taught me to picket; you were the one who trained me to be a picket," and so on. [Laughing.] But she had this very good relationship with them. Your question was about the Women's Trade Union League, and I guess that's all I know about it, that she always was our liaison and on very good terms with them.
Fry
Didn't you have an industrial council in the Woman's
Paul
For a little while. I remember the name Josephine Casey and I remember that, when I came back from Europe, she was the chairman. Did you know her?
Fry
No, I just picked this up from the Suffragist . Her name was there, and I thought that maybe she also was a good liaison between you and the labor groups.
Paul
No.
Fry
She was a former ILGWU [International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union] organizer, apparently; that's the only note I have on her.
Paul
Was she? I don't think I ever knew Josephine Casey at all, but I do remember the name. We did, of course, when we began the whole campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, we had an excellent person—a splendid person— named Isabel Kendig to take up our membership work.
We hadn't worked very much on membership while we were working for the vote. People joined and so forth, but we didn't seek to have an organization; we didn't care much about it. Then when we'd gotten the vote and we began to have an organization we hoped would be on a permanent basis for some years to come—until we got equality for women anyway—we started a membership department.
Isabel Kendig
PaulIsabel Kendig was one of the very few people we started on a paid basis because she'd agreed to do it, to take this membership work. She'd been a volunteer and we didn't know too much about how well she could succeed or not, but she wanted to try it. We raised some money and gave her a little salary.
She's also known as, I think it was, Mrs. Howard Gill, if you've ever heard of her. She'd be a good one for you to interview.
Fry
Somehow I connect Isabel Kendig or her husband with Harvard.
I think she later went up and got a degree at Harvard, herself, after she left us. But at this time, she was the mother of two or three little children and the wife of Howard Gill. She was one of the few women at that time who was making a point of keeping her own name. She called herself, when we first knew her, Sally Gill; I think her name was Isabel but she was always called Sally Gill. Then she developed, before she became our own chairman of membership, a desire to be known as Isabel Kendig. I remember her coming to me one day and saying, "From now on, I'm going to be Isabel Kendig; please call me always that."
She was an extraordinarily good organizer. She started out and we gave her free policy and I think she must have begun about 1922 or '23, somewhere along in there, because I think we persuaded Mrs. Belmont to be responsible for her salary so that we could really try— when we got Mrs. Belmont to be the president—try to get an organization formed for her. She took an interest in that and so we were assured of her salary and we gave her an office. I think she probably typed herself, but we may have given her a stenographer and so on.
But she was able, anyway, to build up our membership to about sixty thousand in a very short time.
If you go into the secretary's office in Washington, just across from the chairman, you'll see these rows and rows and rows, up to the ceiling, of card catalogue drawers.
Fry
In Belmont House?
Paul
Yes, just across from the chairman's office. They've been kept in there ever since. After she stopped the work—I think I was in Europe when she finally stopped—because I think she was going with her husband when he was transferred up to Massachusetts or somehwere. (She did take this doctor's degree, I think, or maybe a master's degree, took something at Harvard.) But anyway, for several years she kept on doing this.
The first thing she did was decide to organize by councils, and take each profession and get a chairman for that profession and let them build up the memberships. She had a lawyers' council, doctors' council, nurses' council—we had every profession there was.
Fry
Oh—she's the one who did that. I wondered how that
Paul
So when you're talking industrial councils, she started that. And she got them themselves to choose the head of their councils—the most distinguished doctor, the most distinguished lawyer, and so on. She would perhaps invite her, but she would say that the women themselves [in the field] must decide whom they would like to have. And then these council heads were supposed to have their meetings.
As long as she directed it, I mean—such a good organizer—I was no longer even hardly taking any part in any of this except in trying to get Mrs. Belmont to do all these different things and get them started. I went over to Europe and stayed there off and on and didn't do too much or see too much of what was going on in Washington.
I remember coming back and finding that the membership was no longer being looked after very much because Sally Kendig had gone. But she now lives right outside of Washington and she's still—she seems to be— a very good well-wisher for us, but to have sort of been drawn into her own family life.
When you ask about the industrial council and Josephine Casey, you see I'm not telling you very much. But I can remember when I did come back—I think that was when I came back to be the chairman in 1941, in the war time—I believe it was then that Josephine Casey (I'm beginning to remember about her) and I found that we were paying her a salary and she was working over in Pennsylvania. I think that I discontinued it myself because I thought it was costing us a great deal and we were not getting anything very much from it.
I think then we got an unpaid chairman—Ella Sherwin. Have you never come across her name in the Suffragists ? She was very very active and wrote a great deal, so I think you'd—she was a very excellent chairman of that industrial council.
Fry
Did you keep these councils through the forties and fifties?
Paul
We had one chairman after another; if the chairmen don't keep working on these things, they're apt to dwindle, and most of them didn't do so very much work. They just gradually seemed to disappear when nobody took very much interest in them.
Bolshevik Charges
FryI ran across something that today is amusing; I wanted to ask if it was a problem for you then . Because you had this organization of different councils, the Woman's Party was criticized—just a minute; let me see if I can find the source here—for being set up like that because the Communist party was also set up like that.
Paul
[Amused.] Oh, is that so?
Fry
Yes; I wondered if you had any problems with these allegations of being Bolshevik (or something like that) in the twenties.
Paul
No. Maybe people accused us but I never heard of it. No; we were much more apt to be accused of being too conservative you see. Because so many, almost all our members [laughing] seemed to be of the conservative school.
Fry
There was a periodical called The Woman Patriot that seemed to be ferreting out all kinds of organizations that were communistic or Bolshevik. I believe it may have been something put out by the DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution]. And it charged the Woman's Party—
Paul
No, not the DAR. I'm a DAR member and I've never heard of that. It certainly was not put out by the DAR. I have their paper here; it comes every month. It has no name; I think in the front it just says, "Daughters of the American Revolution."
Fry
At any rate, you don't remember any problem, then, of being accused of your work being dictated by Moscow or anything like that?
Paul
Oh, I don't doubt that people would say that; they would probably say it all now when we're trying to have this Amendment ratified. It's a favorite thing for people to say, you know—dictated by somebody.
Alice Paul and a Union
FryOn this labor thing, I read a little note somewhere that you had once been in the milliners' union. What did that
Paul
The first years I was out of college, I think I told you, I had this college settlement scholarship or something that way. You know what a settlement house is and how they work?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Ours was down in the Jewish-Italian section on the East Side of New York.
Fry
Did you have anything to do with a union ?
Paul
Of course, all of our people would naturally be the poorest people almost in the city and presumably belonging to some kind of such organization. But I rather think that we did form a union—helped it. This is the sort of thing we were trying to do all the time, was trying to help these particular people, who were all foreigners, in getting—just like any settlement—it settles there to try to help its community.
I wasn't a member of it, of course, but I vaguely remember that one of the things we did—maybe it was milliners—was helping some group of women who were trying to get into a union. They couldn't get into— because most of the other unions wouldn't take them in without being apprentices and all sorts of things you know, and they had a hard time with the unions, as you well know, I presume, if you know anything about the labor movement. What we were certainly trying to do was to help the women get their own unions so they wouldn't be debarred from all union benefits. So very likely, there was a milliners one that we were working on.
Fry
That's probably where it comes from.
The other thing that was going on in the early twenties was the formation of the joint congressional committee—Women's Joint Congressional Committee—which was a committee [loud hammering on roof above begins] of all the people who were working with Congress to get legislation passed that women were interested in.
Paul
Yes, and I was the one who formed it.
Fry
Well, it came out in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.
It came out for the Equal Rights Amendment. It was I is formed and it still existing and the present chairman is Mrs. Nina Horton Avery. [Hammering stops.]
Fry
That's a different one; we'll talk about it.
Paul
It was called the Women's Joint Legislative Committee for Equal Rights.
Fry
That was the one that was formed in the forties, right? When you came back from Europe?
Paul
Yes, and I formed it when I was the chairman; this little period when I was the chairman, one of the first things I did was to ask the women to come together who were working for the Amendment and form a joint committee, which we did. To our first invitation, I think we got only two people who accepted. There was the Woman's Party itself; then the American Medical Women sent a group or a person to represent them, and the National Association of Colored Women, and ourselves—I think we were the ones who were at that first meeting. Is that what your records say?
Fry
Yes it is, but—
Paul
That's my memory, very vague memory.
Fry
I was asking you about one that was formed in the early twenties—the Women's Joint Legislative Conference , with Mary Dreier as chairman. They pushed five new laws for the protection of working women, and she was the moving spirit of New York's National Women's Trade Union League.
Paul
I knew Mary Dreier because I went to the School of Philanthropy—now they call it the American School of Social Work—the first year that I was out of college, when I was living at the college settlement. Every morning I went up and spent the whole morning there in that school. Edward T. Divine was the master, the dean, or the head of the school—whatever it's called—and Mary Dreier was one of the students. I was another student, so
I knew her. She was the sister of Mrs. Raymond Robins, you know, who was then the president of the National Women's Trade Union League. Mary Dreier was her sister. I knew her quite well that first year. Then, after
Fry
Oh, you weren't aware that they were working against the Equal Rights Amendment?
Paul
Well, I never heard of this committee, as far as I know. They were perhaps working up in New York and I didn't know anything about it.
Fry
That may be.
Paul
Because I certainly never heard of Mary Dreier opposing us—never knew it.
Fry
Well, maybe she didn't; it's something we should check up on, and go back to some original sources.
Paul
I don't know; maybe she did. Maybe they had some congressional committee operating. I certainly didn't know there was one. When we formed ours, we thought it was something new and original, to get them all to work for us. Of course, a good many by that time had come out for the Amendment.
Fry
That was twenty years or more after this first one that I'm talking about. It's hard to tell how real committees are when they exist on paper.
Paul
Well, it's very likely that there was a big powerful one in New York, but we wouldn't have known about it perhaps.
Fry
It may have been strictly a New York thing.
Relations with Women's Organizations
The General Federation of Women's Clubs
FryI wish now that you could tell me (again—for the tape this time) about the General Federation of Women's Clubs and put down their relationship to the Equal Rights Amendment—
Paul
I told you how when I did become national chairman for a moment—the only reason I remember particularly about that organization. I became national chairman in 19—
[It was] one year we had our convention in Philadelphia. I was elected there, and I was living up in Vermont when I was elected. They asked me if I would come down, by telephone, and take over and be the chairman. I think that I came in about November '42. But one could easily find that out by the Equal Right who would have the chairman list. I came back in '41 and I went up to my little cottage and was staying there, and I think that convention was that autumn—1942, I think. I'm not sure, but somewhere around there.
62. The bulletin, Silver Anniversary of Suffrage Amendment: 1920-1945 issued by the Woman's Party, lists the chronology of "national chairmen" to 1945. See Appendix. Alice Paul was elected chairman at the October 23-25, 1942 Biennial Convention.
Anyway, it was the next year—'43—that we got to the point of trying to get all the women's organizations
She was the person really who accomplished it, because she went to their national board meetings and herself tried to persuade them not to take this stand against the Amendment. Then when she failed, we adopted the plan of trying to see if they wouldn't—we not all agreed on the plan, I won't say—I was trying to get them to take a referendum with their membership. I told you how Mrs. Wiley found that she couldn't seem to make any impression on them about getting them to change their policy of opposition because they had all this staff advising them that this was the proper course.
Then she proposed to them, which we all wanted her to do, "Why don't you make sure of this by consulting your membership?" They said, "Fine idea; we'll be glad to." Then they took a referendum, and by 1944 they'd completed it. It showed the support in the organization was for the Equal Rights Amendment, although in Washington they were speaking in hearings and so on against it. Then they immediately said, "Of course, whatever our membership votes, we carry out here in Washington."
So they disregarded and brushed aside all the advice of their staff and followed the advice of their membership, as it had voted.
The next year, for the first time, they came and spoke [to congressmen] with us. From that time on, every single time we had a hearing, always, wherever the hearing had been—before Congress, or the national committees of different political parties—wherever it may be, always the Federation has been our splendid ally and supporter.
Fry
I was wondering about the character of your membership and the character of the Woman's Party membership. Did they overlap much at this point, do you think?
Paul
No, our membership was always very tiny. We didn't go in for a big membership because we thought that there were enough organizations by this time in the country, of women, and all of them had to spend enormous amounts of time and money on just organizing. We thought the easiest way to get the Amendment through was to try
Now, by following that policy of getting organizations , the membership, as the people give their memberships, is up in the millions. To take the time to build up an organization of millions, we wouldn't have been able to have gotten very far [laughing] with the whole campaign of teaching so many women if we tried to do it de novo, get new women and so on, with all these organizations, like the [American Association of] University Women.
For instance, this last ratification, when Congressman [John] Wold telephoned to me and said, "To get this ratification through in Wyoming, you'll have to get some of the more conservative women." Then, immediately, by having the University Women's whole organization ready to help you, you get a supply of women voters so quickly.
The Task of Changing Women
FryWhen you were first made aware that you were not going to have in the twenties the support of the other women's organizations, at that time did you have a different idea towards—
Paul
I don't know that we were made aware that we wouldn't get any support, but we had expected universal support; we thought, "All these women have the vote now in their hands; naturally they'll want to get everything for women they can get." We were very much astonished to find we didn't. The thing that stands out most in my mind was people who thought we were going to imperil their alimony, and the people who thought we were going to imperil their support from their husbands, and the people who thought we were going to endanger the health of women by opening them to working tremendous hours—all night and so on. I don't know that we thought all women—that we were going to have no support; I don't think we thought that.
Fry
From bigger organizations. Well, I was wondering about the problem then, which you told me you faced at that time. You said you recognized then that what you had
Paul
We really thought it was more than educate; we thought it was really changing . I thought we were going to have to simply change the thought of the women of the country, because they were being led—of course, most organization didn't take any stand on the subject at all—but those that were working vigorously, like the General Federation of Women's Clubs (and Consumers League was a small one)—you see, we did from the very beginning have the women physicians; there was some that we always had. Of course, they never hesitated—and women nurses; some we just counted on from the beginning because there were so many of them in our own ranks.
But we knew that the thought of the country, we could see, had not come around to supporting the idea of equality for women. In fact, it perhaps hasn't come around even today to get a ratification.
Fry
It seems like this was a wholly new problem for the Woman's Party, that of mass education and changing the opinions of great masses of women.
Paul
No, it was the same kind of a campaign for suffrage, certainly when we started in our little group. As I told you, when I came to Washington, I couldn't find but about three women who were willing to have anything to do with the suffrage amendment, of the long list that the National American had given to us.
Fry
That was for the federal amendment idea?
Paul
No, I couldn't find any on any suffrage list at all; there wasn't any kind of an organization at all.
Fry
For working with Congress, you mean?
Paul
No, for working for suffrage in any way. They told me Mrs. William Kent had been chairman of the committee appointed, and she couldn't produce any women; nobody could produce any women [laughing]—there just weren't any.
And certainly the opposition of these powerful groups, such as the one led by Mrs. Wadsworth, were well financed and powerful in prestige by being connected with Congress. You can't imagine the feeling that you had as you look over the whole United States and see almost no place where women could vote, and
So I think our campaigns, as far as I know, have always been the same.
Fry
That the main problem is making the issue visible to women, making them conscious of it?
Paul
Making women want it. You can't suddenly get the vote for women if the women don't want the vote, never heard of it, thought of it, and don't care about it one way or the other.
Fry
One of the Equal Rights magazines—
Paul
For instance, the first thing I did in this country myself, when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, since I'd been in prison in England, as I said, I was given all these invitations to come and tell about [laughing] this extraordinary career. I remember one place I was asked to go and I did go and made a speech, and I was the only speaker. When it was over, some man came up and spoke to me.
He said, "You know, I guess you made up this tale. I don't believe for one single moment anything you said tonight. I don't think you ever were in prison." It was so inconceivable to anybody in this country. He was a very nice man—[laughter]; he was really quite sincere in thinking I was letting my imagination run away with me. [Laughter.]
Of course, at that time, nobody had ever been in prison in this country, and they couldn't imagine such a thing. They thought, "Well, in telling about her life abroad, she makes it very exciting by saying how other countries are so peculiar."
I think you have to do in life, if you're trying to help some measure, the thing that that day seems to present itself to you; you don't sit down and make a long plan of what you're going to do. And if you discover that what you're trying to push before Congress and get action on, that nobody else practically is asking for that, you know you've got to go forth and get some allies. Then you try to get the people who seem most possible. And if they're in an organization, then you'll get a good many of them at the same time. I
Questions Raised by Equal Rights Newsletter
FryThere was an interesting legal work-up on the connection between your efforts in the international field to get equality for women, and what might be accomplished in the United States as a result of that. This was a brief article that appeared in the Equal Rights magazine saying that, according to past legal opinions, if the United States ratifies an international accord or treaty, this becomes a part of the highest law of the land here.
At that point I wondered if this effort really was two-pronged. In other words, you not only would have gotten an international agreement, but you also would have gotten equality between the sexes by virtue of the United States government having signed a treaty. This was the United Nations—
Paul
No, but that wasn't the real point. Whenever the United States was about to take action in the international field—when we knew they were about to take action, as we did when the World Code was being started and as we did at the Conferences of American Republics where we were always represented by our government—[it was our task] to try to see that whatever they did, not because we wanted in this rather—well— unusual way to try to amend our own laws—we never thought about that—we thought about seeing that they didn't do anything adverse to equality if our government was participating.
Fry
I think this was in reference to the United Nations—
Paul
Of course, we were not members of the United Nations when we were over there.
Fry
I mean this was later after World War II, after the United Nations had been formed in San Francisco. I think it was in reference to the equality-between-the-
Paul
Yes. I gave you that little leaflet, didn't I?
Fry
Yes you did, and you told me a short story about getting it in the Preamble of the U.N. Charter in 1945.
63. See a copy of the Charter of the United Nations—Provisions on Equality for Women
Paul
And we established that; nobody else did that at all but the Woman's Party.
Fry
Now that's what we don't have any information on at all, except what's in Equal Rights magazine. So I hope you can tell me a lot about how that commission functioned.
Paul
Yes. We've never done the whole equal rights [story] from beginning to end. We've never done that at all because we left off with the winning of suffrage, I think.
Fry
Yes. So we want to be sure to bring that in.
Paul
Yes, but that's a later development. It wasn't until 1938 that we formed the World Committee. We first formed the International Committee. The International Committee was just a committee of the Woman's Party. Then we voted in 1938 to form a world committee that would not be just a Woman's Party international committee, but would be one that would take in other countries who wanted to work with us.
But I think that had better come later. We did record our actual work for equal rights, but we weren't far enough along to venture, to try to work in [the story of] other countries.
Fry
All right. I guess I do have a few questions where things aren't quite clear from my reading of the Equal Rights magazines here last night.
Paul
And did you read the first two volumes?
Yes.
Paul
All right, then, let's begin there.
Submitting the ERA the First Time
FryAll right. You and I have covered a part of that: your early meetings and the decision and the Seneca Falls conference and so forth. But I wondered if you could tell about the first time you submitted the equal rights measure to Congress.
Paul
Yes, but that will all be in that first issue, if you've read that.
Fry
I know. I thought maybe you could tell us how you did it and what efforts it took, and if the response was very difficult—if it was hard to find a congressman that would submit it.
Paul
Well, it wasn't a bit difficult because it was right after the suffrage victory, and anything anybody asked congressmen to do—anybody connected with the suffrage victory—they were received with great respect which, as I told you before, was so totally different from the way we went up when we were still trying to get suffrage. The response not only of congressmen but of everybody. Everybody . Suddenly we were regarded as having some power in the world. I mean, people were coming to you wanting you to get things for them. Women were coming wanting you to have them promoted in the government because they never could get the positions they thought they ought to have, and wanting to be appointed as ambassadors and everything they imagined, we could suddenly have so much much power. All women began to flock down to Washington to get for themselves something.
Congressmen began to suddenly have women secretaries; when I first went there, there was no woman secretary in all of Congress and they never heard of such a thing. You walked into an office—all were men. And the press gallery— you look up and all were men. Everywhere—all the employees, the people earning their living by being sent to [work for] Congress were [men], because the congressmen were trying to build up votes among their
Fry
Something else on the context of this work in these early years that I wanted to ask you about was the attitude toward constitutional amendments, because at this time Prohibition was in effect through one constitutional amendment and a lot of people were having second thoughts about the ERA, some historians say, as an amendment.
Paul
It was the one just before us, the eighteenth.
Fry
Yes. And there was another constitutional amendment then being attempted for child labor laws. This never was ratified, but it would have been before the judiciary committees at the same time ERA was. (It was a miserable failure.) I wonder if you ran up against a problem of opposition from people who felt that constitutional amendments were getting out of hand.
Paul
No, I never heard of that. [Pause.] You see, when we had this introduced, we had our amendment introduced before we were aware of the lack of support that would come from the women; we didn't really discover that until we had the first hearing. And I told you how much Senator Curtis had helped in the suffrage campaign. He was a very powerful man; he wasn't then vice-president but he was extremely powerful. Maud Younger, who had known him so very well. I showed you the picture of that first dedication of our headquarters which was in about 1922, and I think there was some senator in that photograph that was addressing us, or some congressman.
We were at that moment, while we were putting the Amendment in—it was not really until we had our first hearing that we discovered how really little solidity there was back of this equality movement among women. Congressmen hadn't discovered it. When we asked Senator Curtis, he considered this was a really proper recognition of his great effort in getting the suffrage. And Mr. Anthony thought it was a proper recognition of the great part his family had played in it. And so, there was not any trouble at all about that.
It was only when we had our hearing we discovered
But this time, at our first hearing after we got the vote, everybody came and said, "I represent two million women," or whatever she said she represented. Well , that was two million voters and was a totally different situation than when she came before. So of course, we had supposed that when they came with the vote in their hand, and they would have this immense effect on Congress and that they would all be for complete equality.
We were [laughing] really thunderstruck when we heard them get up and talk about this ridiculous point that they wanted to preserve their alimony. It seemed to us ridiculous because, of course, they could have alimony given to the husband, and it has been given to the husbands over and over again since. We didn't see what in the world was the matter with these women.
So that's when we saw that it was perfectly useless to go and say, "Will you stand with Senator Curtis?" because suddenly all the men were being made aware that this was not a very popular measure for the women. And the women suddenly caught it.
Fry
That was pretty ironic.
Paul
Most of the thing the women saw in it was to get something for themselves, to come down to see if they could be secretaries, and they could be clerks of committees. Did I tell you about this Mrs. Gilbert, who was phoning me the other day from Kentucky? She came from a miner's family, from Hungary, who'd settled as mining immigrants in the woods up in Pittsburgh. Her family earned enough money to send her to a little school down in Washington; she went there and learned to be a secretary. She went over [laughing] and got a position as a clerk immediately and then was married by the chairman of the committee. He then ran for governor and died three days before the election, when he was certain to have been elected because
That was what was happening. All these women were dashing down to get something for themselves, and were getting it because they were voters suddenly. That's the reason that you walk in Congress now and you go in the offices, they're largely women.
Whether to Become a Political Party
FryWhen you were trying to get support and so forth and round up any kind of political segments on your side, did you think about the Woman's Party as a regular political party? There's a speech from Mrs. Belmont in which it sounds like she is proposing—and this is very early, like 1921 or something, when she first became president— she was proposing that the National Woman's Party be made into a regular political party, as a third party (or fifth party, or whatever the number was then).
Paul
Well, she always wanted that—I don't mean wanted, but she always thought it would be wise to nominate women for—get the Woman's Party to nominate women for as many offices as we thought we could carry.
Fry
And run them as members of the Woman's Party?
Paul
Yes. And perhaps we could have pushed it further than we did. It was pretty difficult under the election laws to comply with all the things that you had to do in the way of signatures of people to allow you to get on a ballot. She didn't realize, of course, any of those difficulties, and when we—On one occasion, I remember, when she was very anxious to have us do it, and she wanted to run them from the President down, you see. So we made a very careful study of what we had to do. At that particular time we couldn't do it because the time limit made it impossible. You had to, a considerable time before you put your candidate in the field, you know you had to comply with so many requirements in the way of bona fide signatures from citizens of that place to show that you had enough strength to get on.
If it was going to be put up by some group calling itself anything under the sun—if any labor group now tries to get a party—they all find the same thing, as you well know, I'm sure.
Fry
Did you ever consider throwing yourselves into one of the already established political parties, and in that way working—
Paul
As I told you, at our first convention when we decided to go on, this is of course was what many people—if they were Democrats they wanted us to throw our strength in the Democratic party, Republicans into the Republican party. We wanted nothing but equality; we couldn't very well suddenly consolidate [ourselves] with the—the people who were most anxious to do it was the Progressive party; they had made themselves finally into a party and had given wholehearted support to us.
I think, Mr. J. A. H. Hopkins, if I remember rightly— you know, when you think something from forty years ago, [laughing] it's hard suddenly to remember it, when you see you haven't thought of it once since. But I believe it was Mr. J. A. H. Hopkins, who was the husband of Alison Hopkins, who was our New Jersey state chairman—this was a quite wealthy man and had a marvelous wife who went to prison with us. He therefore became very much interested. He had succeeded in getting his Progressive party actually recognized as a party, complying with everything about the number of members they had to have and so on. He was very determined to do everything he could to get the Woman's Party, when it came to having a new program after suffrage won, for having them vote to join his Progressive party, as a party. We would throw all our strength and money and any power we had into building up this Progressive party. I don't know how he was going to work it out but that's what he wanted.
That's just to answer your question, "Did they ever really contemplate it?" Well, we didn't contemplate it but he did.
Fry
But it was never really seriously discussed or anything by the Woman's Party?
Oh yes, it was discussed by us, because they came to us and spoke before us, he did and other representatives, and showed all the merits of our being able to take a bigger part in political life more quickly and easily if we identified ourselves with a successfu group that had been able to start in as a political party. But then it would have committed us to all of their programs, you see, and we wanted to stick to one program. We thought we could do it better—and I think it was the right decision—much better by just sticking to the issue and trying to get all parties to take it up, than to become a part of one party which has many issues.
Whether to Support Women Candidates
FryYes. In 1924, you chose the course of trying to get women [to run and be] elected to Congress. Do you remember that?
Paul
I wouldn't say that.
Fry
It seemed to be a big push [according to the Equal Rights newsletter].
Paul
No, no; I wouldn't say that. We may have made more of an effort for somebody, but we always tried to get women elected to Congress. [Pause.] That was two years after we put the Amendment in; maybe that was the first time we ever went into a—
For instance, one of the people who worked hardest to get elected was Anne Martin; I don't know what year that was. We really put a great deal of power and effort into getting her into the Senate. Her papers will show what year it was. We sent out Mabel Vernon and other people to help her. We raised money for it, and we gave her a large farewell luncheon in Washington at which Julia Lathrop, I remember, opened with a speech. She was the head then of the Children's Bureau; you know who she was. And we had many people wanting us to go in. If we'd had more money and more women and more strength, of course we could have done better in that. We had a constant series of women coming and wanting us to go into their election campaigns and help.
Fry
In doing this, did—
But we just couldn't do all.
I remember one woman coming to us, and she wanted to come to Congress—but she was such an un—we didn't know her; we just knew she existed. But she came down to Washington—and she was very insistent. And I remember saying to her, "But just why? You've never helped in our campaign; you've never done anything particularly to connect to [it]. Of all the women in the United States— so many other women—why would we suddenly start in and do all these things you're asking us to do for your election campaign up in New York?"
And she said, "Well, you see, if you should say you'd want to run for Congress in my district, you could never be elected. Maybe you could be elected somewhere, but you could certainly never be elected in my district, and I probably can be elected.
I said, "Well, just why do you think you could be elected so easily?"
She said, "You see, I live in a Hungarian district and my husband is a Hungarian, and I am (someting else) I am a Jewess, (let's say). I can get all the Jewish vote; he can get all the Hungarian vote, and I think I can be elected if I can get the support of some well-known group of women."
So we had these all the time, but we didn't—I thought she was a purely selfish immigrant who'd arrived in this country and wanted to use us for her own personal advantage. She didn't even have any principle she was trying to further or anything, but thought it would be nice to be a congresswoman and have an enormous salary and not have anything to do but to go down and sit in Congress. So we had all types who wanted us to help.
Fry
I thought maybe there was a problem of getting women to run, because there weren't very many women candidates that year, just as there are not now. I understood there were Woman's Party organizers who went out to try to find women in the states to run.
Paul
No, we never did that. Our problem was finding enough money and workers to help effectively. We didn't want to go into a campaign and say we were going to help them and not be able to help them.
I remember Izetta Jewel Miller. I worked very hard myself, I must say, on trying to get enough money and enough help for the women that we did try, but I don't think there was too much enthusiasm. I can remember one time—I was sorry about this—Izetta Jewel Miller, one of the very finest members we had ever had in all our lives or ever could have (her painting, you know, is up in the living room)—
Fry
Yes; beautiful woman.
Paul
And a wonderful woman, absolutely superb. You have regrets, as you look back at the things you didn't accomplish. One regret that I have is that we didn't get Izetta Jewel Miller into Congress. She wanted very much to be a congressman. Certainly if I had been down there in Washington at that time, I would certainly have, I think, devoted all the time I had and strength I had to getting the money and getting the women in doing this.
Fry
Where were you?
Paul
I guess I was probably over in Europe, but I wasn't anywhere in Washington. After I ceased to be national chairman, I just came and went when there seemed to be some crisis. But I remember coming back and finding that Izetta Jewel had asked wouldn't we come down to her state, send speakers, and you know this is a lot of work to do and a lot of money to raise. Because in order to get the speakers down you have at least to raise the money for their traveling expenses and such. I know what it cost when we helped Anne Martin; it was a very expensive campaign for us, sending out all the things that we had to send. So, that board at that particular moment just shrugged its shoulders and said that nobody could undertake all that had to be done; we just said we couldn't help her. She ran anyway, but she was defeated.
Fry
Oh. Earlier than that, wasn't she the lady from West Virginia who was the first one to speak before a national political convention?
Paul
First one to preside.
Fry
She presided at the—Republican convention? if my memory is correct on this. So she must have had a pretty powerful—
I don't remember which one she presided at, but she was a Democrat, so she must have presided at the Democratic National Convention.
She's the one who was so remarkable because she was the first. Of course, they didn't let her preside for a very long period, but long enough anyway to preside—she's the one that I told you that didn't even understand how to use a microphone. She talked to the person next to her and said, "I'm going to tell my little daughter; she'll be so proud. And wouldn't Susan B. Anthony be proud if she could see me standing here!" The whole little colloquy went out over the whole great audience with not the faintest idea on her part that we'd heard the whole colloquy that she'd entered in with her neighbor there. [Laughing.] It was so sweet and charming.
Fry
When you were thinking about these women running, and supporting women for Congress, were you going to support them whether they were for the Equal Rights Amendment or not?
Paul
No, we certainly wouldn't have ever dreamed of doing such a thing. Anyway, nobody would have ever asked us unless she was assuring us that she would support it.
Fry
I thought at first you planned—
Paul
Nobody in this whole world ever had any idea that we would do such a terrible thing as betray the woman's movement by trying to put somebody in Congress who was not for equality for women. It was unthinkable!
Fry
Okay. One of the books says that at first the Woman's Party planned to support all women candidates, regardless of their position on the Equal Rights Amendment.
64. O'Neill, William 0., Everyone Was Brave, The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1969; p. 283 .
Paul
No.
Fry
And then after that you narrowed down to just those who'd already come out for it.
Paul
Well, they needn't have already come out for it. You
Fry
I know, I agree it doesn't make sense. Was the idea that you would campaign to get women to vote exclusively for members of their own sex, regardless of the party?
Paul
What?
Fry
I was wondering if the idea behind this was to urge women to vote for members of their own sex, regardless of the party. Such as in the suffrage campaign.
Paul
You mean that after we tried to assist somebody—
Fry
For Congress.
Paul
When Anne Martin was running for the Senate, of course we tried to elect her; I suppose the people out there who conducted the campaign—she naturally directed her own campaign—would be to get—she told what her platform was, what she would stand for, and I don't exactly see [what you mean]. Would we ask women to vote for her regardless of her party? She was running on the Democratic ticket, I imagine; I don't know, but I presume it was. The people we sent out to help her were probably guided by her wishes of whom to ask, where to campaign. We didn't try to direct a campaign of anybody, you know. If they wanted our help and we wanted them to succeed, we tried to furnish them with whatever things they needed.
Fry
For instance, when Mabel was sent around the country in 1924 to help women who were running and to encourage others to run, did—
Paul
I don't know that we ever went in for that purpose particularly.
Fry
I was wondering at that point, Alice, if you could remember what you and—
Wording and Intended Meanings of the ERA
PaulThere's really not too much necessity, I guess, for us going into those years because we were paying off this— I was staying in a little rooming house with Maud Younger; we got a little tiny apartment together. I started to pay off all our debts and she started to begin mainly on how to start the new campaign with Congress. So there wasn't anything but sort of preparatory work; there wasn't anything the Woman's Party was doing but just sort of cooperating. And Elsie Hill was then our national chairman, so I don't see there's much to say about that.
I mean, we were submitting possible amendments. We weren't doing much ourselves but we were asking possible advisers, like Dean Pound of Harvard and so on, to tell us how to get equality because they voted it, of course in 1923, on the one that we drew up ourselves because nobody had ever drafted anything for us.
For all that period, Elsie Hill, as I told you, met her husband and she married by going down to the George Washington University and seeing the law professor of domestic relations to ask how in the world we should present something to Congress; we don't know what to present.
He undertook to draw up something. Then we asked Mrs. Lawrence Lewis's son who belonged to a very prominent law firm in Philadelphia (but don't put that down; I don't want to get his name into it because we didn't use his draft); that's just to tell you what we were busy about.
Fry
This is Seneca Falls before 1923 when you were first trying to draw it up?
Paul
Yes. This was between 192O—The first thing we did was start to try to remove discrimination by going to the state legislatures. We did get a great many of them removed. If I can find them before you go, I must get you this little history that nobody seems to have given you; it's gotten out by the New York City committee— chronological history giving the dates and the number of bills we got through and all of that. It was gotten out I guess about 1960 or something.
Maybe this is it by Dora Ogle?
Paul
No; it was done by the New York City committee. By Nina Broderick Price, the one I was telling you to go see. The New York City committee paid for it, published it, and drew it up.
Fry
That would be very helpful if we could have it.
Paul
I had it here; I showed it to somebody the other day. I'll try to go through some of these papers before you go and get them for you; they have all the dates.
Fry
In the meantime, I have this that will cover us up to 1949, which is a very thorough chronology.
Paul
I'm not so sure whether it's very accurate because Mrs. Ogle was very faithful and a very good worker, but she was—she wasn't any too good on accuracy. She had wonderful, wonderful spirit. She had very bad diabetes and would go into comas and just pass out completely.
[Interruption for lunch.]
Fry
I wanted to read into the record the resolution from Seneca Falls. It says:
"Be it resolved that in order to bring the complete equal rights ideal to the victory that was won for suffrage, we undertake the following program: the securing of an amendment to the United States Constitution stating, 'Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.'"Resolution adopted at Seneca Fall meeting
So that was the version you were using then.
Paul
I made that speech, you know, and presented this resolution.
Fry
Yes, that was yours.
Paul
Yes. We did this because, at that time, we had—for two years of Maud Younger and Elsie Hill had been going around trying to get an authority to formulate
I stated in this whole speech that these were just the ideals we were to strive for, put into ordinary, simple English. I think it was about that time that I decided to go to law school myself so I would know a little bit how to do this. And I did, as you know; I got a bachelor's degree and a master's degree and a doctor's degree, thinking each time desperately, "Maybe I'll learn a little more."
But I didn't learn very much [laughing]. But at least it gave you a feeling that you could talk to these lawyers and that you would know what you were talking about.
When I presented that resolution, I don't think I'd started law school. I think I was just putting the idea before them of what we were going to try to put in. Then we always took the position that if we could change the wording to make it any better, it could be done; that the wording wasn't final but that the idea of what we were trying to put in the Constitution was. That showed its purpose perfectly.
I think it was about '43 when I came back from Europe and so on and I found we weren't making any progress really with the Judiciary Committee and I thought, "Now we can get down to the question of wording. They're taking it seriously because they've agreed to put it on their national platforms, both Republican and Democrat." And that's when we had the final version, which we drew up ourselves.
Again we couldn't get anybody on the committee. I remember going to see Senator Burton once, who later was on the Supreme Court. He was then a senator. This is one of the first things I did when I came back and became a chairman.
I said, "Just why is it you never get to the point of changing this amendment if you are not willing to pass it in the form that would be best, not only to get what we want but to have a possibility of being adopted by Congress?"
I remember he said, "Senator Austin and I have worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and worked on this wording, and we can't seem to arrive at anything that would be what you want to accomplish and still be a possibility of getting it through Congress."
So then, after we found that nobody showed any signs of ever drafting anything on the committee itself, as though we'd never get it through because they'd say—
[Interruption—food brought in.]
Paul
And that's the way we finally got the present one; we drew it up ourselves and we took it down to Senator Austin—Mrs. Roy [?] and I took it—and he said that as far as he was concerned, it was perfect. If Senator O'Mahoney would support it, who was leading on the Democratic side—Austin was Republican—with the new wording, he would bring it before the committee. That's the present wording—"equality of rights under the law"—
It appeared that the problem of the Judiciary Committee and of the friends that we had—not people opposed to equality but friends who were only working on the points of—like Burton and Austin—of getting it through—said the main difficulty was that in "men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction," there's a problem of how Congress can establish equal rights, which means complete equality, in fields in which Congress has no—nothing to do.
Fry
No jurisdiction?
Paul
Saying "equality shall not be denied by Congress or by any state" government it meant. And then if equality was denied by some church or by some individual in his home— the main thing we would have gotten, which was preventing government that did have jurisdiction from ever doing anything that was contrary to the equality program. And we did it, really, by basing it on the suffrage amendment which was drawn up the same way. "The rights of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on the grounds of sex."
So we said this has been sustained in every way, is now accepted as far as the Constitution. If we use the
Fry
What's the difference between "before the law" and "under the law"? Is that significant?
Paul
Well, Mr. Austin and Mr. O'Mahoney accepted "before the law." Then we took it over to Judge Sumner, chairman of the House Judiciary [Committee], whom we knew extremely well over the years, and he said that he thought we'd better say "under the law."
The Judiciary [Committee] of the Senate was willing to take "under the law," and since it was apparently going to get more support in the House by saying "under the law" [we used it]. I think "before the law" perhaps isn't quite as thorough-going and all-covering; it would mean people coming before the law with their problems and so on, rather than "under the law" being everything that is in the legal field at all.
So we accepted that. Then Senator Austin said, "Now I'm not going to propose this to the Committee unless I know that all the women's organizations are going to be in accord."
Fry
Before you get to that part, can I ask you one more question on this wording and the intent of it? I remember that one of the arguments against the Equal Rights Amendment is that it only pertains to equality of treatment in the federal government or in state government jobs and positions and things like that. How limited is its effect, if it gets ratified?
Paul
All legal matters; anything that's under the law.
Fry
Would it pertain to a private business practice?
Paul
Yes; everything.
Fry
It would?
Paul
It cannot be denied by the federal government or the state government on the grounds of sex. That is, you can have all the inequalities in a private business you wanted [pause] if that business is not an area in which the state government and the federal government have something to say. But practically all businesses come
If the state government, we'll say, on the ground of sex—this particular business you're talking about—would be considered as having denied or abridged equality on the ground of sex, if the code under which this particular thing were operating—say their right to give a license—the state would be denying it [equality of rights] by having a business operating under its own code that was denying it. Do I make it clear?
Fry
I see. That's quite clear.
Paul
Of course, that's the reason we're having all the opposition.
Fry
Because it does pertain to private business, is that it?
Paul
Yes. For instance, the American Tel and Tel (isn't it called?) [American Telephone and Telegraph Company]—their vice-president came down and testified at a hearing where we testified—Louise Gore testified for us—very recently. This was a question of whether they could continue their present policy of having pensions that did discriminate on the ground of sex. The vice-president of the American Tel and Tel spoke for continuing the present policy of allowing lower pensions to women than to men. This is what the vice-president said in his speech, which he made quite briefly down in a meeting in the Labor Departments
He said he'd suffered tremendous loss when they gave equal pay under the equal pay bill, which went through in Congress; the Amendment hadn't gone through, but the equal pay bill had. It doesn't cover everything but it happened to cover the American Tel and Tel. He said, "We have such an enormous number of women employees that when we had to put the salaries of all these women employees— telephone operators—over the whole United States up to the point that we were paying the men, it almost bankrupted us.
We have now a new proposal that's being agitated and the Labor Department is now looking into it, in which they propose that all people who are no longer employees but have been employees in the past, shall
Then Senator Dirksen made the report from the committee before [whom] the whole problem was pending recommending that it should not include the pensions. and that bill didn't go through because Congress adjourned before it got to the bill. But it was reported from the committee, advocating only the existing people should not be paid less.
All these problems, of course, are making a new group who are rather opposed to the Amendment because they foresee, with the experience they've had with the equal pay, which was rather small and limited—but still it gives them enough damage for them not to want to see it made into a federal amendment which would cover everything. That's a little side thing that's not very important, I guess, but—
Fry
Except it is a big problem because we must have many, many industries that have been set up and run with expenditures set for lower pay for women than for men, and it's going to be very painful for them to switch over and also include equal pensions and everything else.
Paul
Yes. That's just a concrete illustration today of the people who would normally be for the principle, but there's certainly great difficulties. Well now, what's your next question?
Fry
I notice there is a new name who introduced it in the Seventieth Congress, which was 1928 and part of '29. Then it was still introduced by Representative Frederick W. McGrady of Pennsylvania, and I wondered if he was a new friend, at that point.
Paul
I remember that, but I know I was in Europe when he introduced it. We had somebody down there working from Pennsylvania who asked him; I suppose Mr. Anthony hadn't
Beginnings of International Work
Headquarters, World Woman's Party, Geneva, Switzerland
I'd like to go into the story of how the whole international aspect of the Woman's Party got started.
Paul
I think we'd better finish up equal rights—
Fry
You mean the national?
Paul
—because it was, oh, much later, in 1938, that we voted in our national convention held in Detroit, Michigan, [that] in addition to having an international committee as we had all during this period—a Woman's Party International Committee—to try to form something that would be like the other organizations. [Women's International League for] Peace and Freedom was international; the International Suffrage Alliance was international. We thought we had formed so many contacts, had so many friends, were doing so much in the international field, that it would be a good thing to do. So we voted that.
Fry
Well, I'm talking about the international work that got started in the twenties, when—
Paul
Well, we did it first by just doing it where our own government took part in [an international] conference, having an international committee that would handle that subject.
Fry
You told me about the one in 1926 with the International Suffrage Alliance.
Paul
Oh, we didn't mean international in that sense. That was an international woman's organization that we had been invited to join , and we returned now when we got there. Then we did join another one, which was the International Council of Women; we're still members,
Fry
You joined it in the twenties?
Paul
I don't know what year we joined, but it was founded in Washington in 1888. That was the first international gathering of women I guess ever held in the world, and it was held in Washington in 1888 and formed the International Council of Women. That's before there was any Woman's Party, of course. The leaders in doing it were Susan B. Anthony and all the people associated with her, and Frances Willard and all the people associated with her, and May Wright Sewall of Indiana and all the people associated with her.
These women were the foremost women in the woman's movement, in different fields of course. Frances Willard was in the field of temperance and Susan B. Anthony in the field of the franchise. But they worked together on all these things. I mean they were equally working for the vote. So that's a very famous meeting—1888 in Washington—and that was the date of the beginning of the International Council of Women, the first in the world, long before the International Suffrage Alliance was formed.
Fry
Was the National Woman's Party officially involved in the meeting of the Pan American Republics in Cuba in 1928?
Paul
Yes. I told you how we sent down a delegation because they were bringing up the subject of something to do with the status of women; it was on the agenda, and we certainly didn't want our government going down there entering into international relations with all these Latin American countries on something affecting the status of women without much knowing what they were doing.
We went down and there's a photograph in the chairman's office of the national headquarters of Mrs. Clarence Smith, who was our national chairman at the time and who led our delegation down there, directing the whole plenipotentiary conference, and we've noticed it.
Fry
And then they elected Doris Stevens as their first chairman?
Paul
No no no. We went down to present the equal rights
And then they defeated this proposal that Mrs. Smith put before them—our whole delegation put before them, our whole Woman's Party delegation. When they defeated it, we then proposed that the Conference of American Republics set up a commission—it had commissions on highways and everything—a commission on the status of women to study this problem, because we couldn't get the treaty itself, but to study the problem of a treaty on equal rights for men and women, and that it should be called the Inter-American Commission on the Status of Women. I think that was the title.
That went through. The person who perhaps did most to get it through was James Brown Scott who was one of the delegates and who became a deep, warm supporter of our whole equality campaign when we asked him to help us down there get this commission set up. So they voted then to set it up.
Dr. Scott had great power, as I said before to you when I talked to you, there because he was president of the World whatever it's called—International Law Association. So it was set up and it's continued. And I wanted to tell you they had not so very long ago an anniversary meeting and they asked to have a delegation come up to the Woman's Party headquarters and thank us publicly for having founded the Inter-American Commission of Women, because of course we did do it. In the beginning we paid all the bills that they had; then we persuaded the Pan-American Union to give them an office, and gradually they got sort of established within the organization. So now they're all on their own; we don't have to do anything more for them.
Have you any questions about all that? But I'd much rather, if we could, go ahead with equal rights; I'm so afraid that that'll get left out if we don't.
Fry
All right. I thought it was kind of significant that by the mid-twenties you did have a definite interest in the international thing. And then you left for Europe—
Paul
You know if your government is starting to make treaties that involve the United States' treatment of women, you have to watch over it; you haven't any choice. But incidentally, it's helped us, I think, to get to know the women of other countries and so on.
All the time I was in Europe, I was put on the International Council of Women ever since we joined them. They had an International Council of Women Committee on Laws, I think they called it, and every country had a right to put one woman on. Mrs. Clarence Smith was the chairman at the time; so she wrote to them and said that our country was asking that I be put on because I was the only woman in our organization staying over there at the League in Europe and could go to their meetings.
So they put me on this International Laws Committee, and all the time I was over there—I'd not only authority to represent our National Woman's Party at home (and we had no standing in any possible way because we were not a member of the League, you see; our country wasn't a member) but then by being on their International Laws Committee, I could also speak for the International Council of Women.
Fry
I see, and did you find that this really did help in your work?
Paul
Of course, it helps greatly to have a formal close connection with the oldest and biggest international woman's organization in the world, because it is the oldest and the biggest, far and away the largest. In most countries in Europe, the suffrage movement wasn't so developed, and so the International Suffrage Alliance was a very small group very often, but every country that I knew of had a big flourishing Council of Women.
Therefore it is important for us to retain our membership in it. But we had an unceasing campaign at home from people who said, "Think what we're paying!
[Tape 15, Side B not recorded on]
Endorsements of ERA
Minnesota Farm Labor Party
FryWe were talking about the Minnesota Farm Labor Party endorsement, Alice, which was your first.
Paul
It wasn't anything very important. I was out there at the time and I remember. Wherever we went, we tried to get endorsements. It was just part of the general endorsement campaign. And the Farm Labor Party was strongly supported by our national chairman, I mean our state chairman, Mrs. Sarah Colvin (who later became our national chairman) and I stayed with her and heard all about the importance—stayed in her home as her guest while I was there, and I heard all about the importance of the rising Farmer Labor Party that they thought might become a great force in the country.
We had this one member in the legislature, I think she was in the legislature, Myrtle [Cain? or King?] and so she took the main part in actually getting the endorsement. Later she did so well in that that we put her on our national board and she became one of our national board members. And in this recent campaign that we had for [Senator Eugene] McCarthy when he became our chief sponsor and a candidate and supposedly was going to make a great effort to put the Equal Rights Amendment through (which he didn't turn out to do) but at all events, we tried to help in his primary.
Fry
When he was running for President?
Paul
When he was running for President. And Myrtle [Cain? or King?] at that time was in charge of his Minnesota office right just now when we were working with him. So
Fry
A little bit before this, Wisconsin passed a state statute on equal rights, but I think it included an exception so that it didn't cover all women.
Paul
How do you mean, a state one?
Fry
I think in 1922 Wisconsin passed a state law on equal rights, although it had a—
Paul
They did, but they had exceptions. It was not completely— you know this is the time that we drafted the laws for all the whole forty-eight states as fast as we could do it. And we got one ready for Wisconsin because we had a very extraordinarily active group up there in Wisconsin at that moment, and they undertook to get the whole state to do it, to make it the first in the country.
Fry
Was this the same group of women who enabled Wisconsin to be the first one to ratify the suffrage amendment?
Paul
Well, they all worked together. But the person who ran this campaign was a person named Mabel Putnam. (You'll find her in the [ Equal Right s magazine]—and one who helped a great deal was this writer—I told you about her before, now what was her name. I will think of her in a minute. I have told you about her before because she did so much in that first Equal Rights Amendment campaign out there when it was put in in Wisconsin. Let's go on to something else.
Fry
It was kind of interesting in Seneca Falls; I think someone proposed a resolution to try to get this exception removed from the Wisconsin statute at that point.
Paul
The one that we drew up and that they offered [in Wisconsin] was complete equality and I think it was—I know it was in the field of labor, whether it was excepting employees of the state legislature or what I don't remember, but it was something. It was added in the legislature itself, we didn't get it [our version] through. But this was the first equal rights law in the country, passed after we began our campaign.
National Association of Women Lawyers
FryThe National Association of Women Lawyers endorsed you.
Paul
Yes, and that was because in Washington we had so many women lawyers, they had the convention out in California and Burnita Matthews was the national president and she submitted it. I was a member of it [NAWL] then and I went to the meeting in Washington where we drew up the plan of trying to get the first endorsement, I guess it was the first endorsement we had of any organization. Perhaps not the first because some of them just automatically went right over from the suffrage, which I told you was the National Association of Colored Women who worked in the suffrage campaign, and the women doctors.
Fry
I thought woman doctors came in in 1943, about ten years later. Maybe it was a different—was there another group in the early twenties?
Paul
I think I told you about having a meeting of this joint committee we formed, because they had always been with us. I don't think that they ever varied from starting with us in the suffrage campaign.
Fry
Oh, I see. That is why they show up in 1943, because they responded to this joint legislative committee—to be a member of it.
Paul
Yes, we sent this invitation to all the societies that were working for it and they were the ones who were willing to join this committee. The others who were working for it of course still didn't want to join the committee in the beginning.
Fry
At any rate Burnita Matthews I guess was the main worker for getting the women lawyers' endorsement?
Paul
We didn't have any trouble. All the women lawyers we knew were for the Amendment. There weren't too many women lawyers in the country, you know.
Fry
What about the American Bar Association? Did you have a lot of trouble with that one?
Paul
It is one of the last ones we've gotten. I don't feel we had trouble, but we were not important enough in
National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs
FryAs near as I could tell, the next endorsement after the National Association of Women Lawyers—which was early thirties—was 1937, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs.
Paul
That is right.
Fry
Business and professional women are not "working" women in labor unions. I wonder what their objection was for so long. Were they objecting to the ERA threat to the protective legislation anyway?
Paul
They supported it at all events—special labor laws. I'd like to tell you these things for yourself, but I don't like to put them down as source material for other people.
Fry
Okay, let's label this for my record only.
Paul
Well, you can put that , because that is known to everybody.
[Miss Frances] Perkins at that time was secretary of labor and in the cabinet, the first woman ever in the cabinet, and the whole administration was for special labor laws as a result. Mrs. Roosevelt was. Miss Perkins was in the Labor Department under Roosevelt and was taking a very strong stand for special labor laws for women. And the Business and Professional— it off now?
Fry
No, it is on.
Paul
Can you turn it off for a minute?
Fry
I was wondering if you couldn't explain, in a way that you felt was innocuous, about the very interesting thing that some of the women's organizations were more
Paul
[About the Business and Professional Women's Clubs' endorsement] Is all this being taken down now?
Fry
Do you want me to turn it off?
Paul
If you would like really to know what happened, I'd like to tell you.
Fry
Okay. But I won't remember it, Alice. I would like to take it down, but just mark it.
Paul
I don't want you to remember it, but I would like you to know—have a real picture in your own mind of what this fight was.
Fry
Can't I tape it and we will just mark it not to transcribe?
Paul
No. No. It might get transcribed by mistake.
Fry
Okay.
[Tape off.]
The Women's Bureau (Department of Labor) vs. the ERA
FryAbout the 1926 Women's Industrial Conference that left equal rights off its agenda, and Gail Laughlin and Mabel Vernon managed to get the floor so that there was debate on ERA from the floor; now do you remember that?
Paul
Yes, very well. That wasn't anything very important, though.
Fry
Well, I guess it was important in that it showed the attitude at the time of the difficulty of dealing with something like the Women's Industrial Conference on the ERA.
Paul
Oh, it wasn't anything important. It was just a tiny little conference in Washington. It was under the auspices of the Women's Bureau. They were always having
And at this one we deliberately— deliberately thought we would just would go into the enemy camp because the Women's Bureau was the enemy camp, one of the great enemy camps of the Amendment. And at this conference, Gail Laughlin was going to be in Washington and she was a very outspoken person for—she was passionate, one of the leading people in the country, in opposing special labor laws for women. So we thought it would be—I imagine that that was the reason that we particularly thought of doing it while she was there. And she was the leading, only outside person that we had there. She came down from Maine and was a member, I think, of the Maine legislature. Anyway she was a very prominent Woman's Party member, and she was one who had converted probably most of the Woman's Party leaders in the beginning before anybody was thinking about it. She was out there campaigning against special labor laws for women, long before we ever knew there was such a problem.
Fry
That's good to know that she had also played that role. Well, this was written up in the book as quite a sensational thing.
Paul
What book is that?
Fry
I'll have to check the bibliography. It's one that came out quite recently on the women's movement.
65. O'Neill, William L., Everyone Was Brave, The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America, pp. 283-85 . also Equal Rights, January 30, 1926 .
Paul
I wanted to tell you that when I was out in California the first, I guess, first time I met Gail Laughlin. She lived in California, you know, a long time. After she graduated from I think it was Wellesley, she went out with a very close friend she had who lived in San Francisco and they worked together out there in California for the vote. So when we came out for that 1915 [Panama Pacific] Fair she was, of course, a leading California woman that we got in touch with.
I remember she began right away to talk about the subject that was so dear to her heart, to get women away from the special protective laws and to stand for complete equality and so on. We were only thinking about getting the vote then. And I remember so vividly meeting her, and of course it was all a new idea to me. I hadn't thought about special labor laws once at all, hadn't thought about it at all . Of course I knew that when I lived in the college settlement, people were taking these special protective laws for women for granted. We didn't hear any discussion of it.
And I remember that I said, "Well, will you just explain it all to me." And she said, "No, I don't think I will explain it to you. All you have to do is just think about it, that's all you do, do nothing but think and then you will know."
So I proceeded [laughing] to think about it, and I just felt, "Well, how true this is. I can't think of a reason in the world why we should have the special labor laws for women." It became very clear to me. So that was the way she—I guess she talked to everybody. But she was the great leader in thought in that field.
And so it was probably for that reason that we asked her to go to this conference, I imagine. It was a conference to which anybody could go, a government conference, to discuss this subject. And she was a great speaker, and of course a lawyer, and knew all about parliamentary law and [laughing] how to hold the floor—get the floor and hold the floor—so everybody that we could think of that we could persuade to take the time to go down to the conference, we sent so she would have some supporters.
As far as I can remember, she got up and made some kind of a motion, something that gave her the floor to speak on her favorite topic [laughing]. It was such a relief to us to find somebody else who wanted to get up and talk about this subject so we didn't have to do it. So she did, she took the floor, and she had a plan by which she turned it over to somebody else—
Fry
I think Mabel Vernon was there.
Paul
Was she? Well, I don't remember, but probably she was. If you have her name, she probably was. She was in Washington, so it would be very natural for her to go because she was always, we thought, our best speaker.
So anyway, whether they could speak or not, seems that Miss Laughlin had some plan which she devised which [laughing] was proper from a parliamentary point of view and, I suppose, having been probably in the legislature already (I'm not sure about that though) that she knew how to manipulate these things. But somehow or other she contrived to grant some time to somebody else, as far as I can recall.
Having gotten the floor, I suppose, in a perfectly normal way, then she granted some of her time to someone else, so they kept on, just capturing the whole meeting with a protest against the Women's Bureau. And so the result was (and I suppose you know all that—probably they put it in this article that you were talking about) that—Hoover was President then and certainly was very much of a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment when he stopped to think about it; every time that we had anything where he came into it, he seemed to be always with us.
And his secretary of labor was named Davis, from Pennsylvania. So Secretary of Labor Davis (I don't think we took any initiative in this) but he [Davis] seems to have thought it was something you should look into—that there was this storm of protest at this conference about what the Women's Bureau was doing. And so far as I know, without any suggestion from us, he stated that he would like to form a consultative body to assist with the Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, and he would invite the Women's Bureau to choose three people that they would like to be on this consultative body and in harmony with the point of view with the head of the Women's Bureau—who was the head then, do you know?
Fry
I don't have her name down here, Alice.
Paul
She was the head, at that time, who was the one who was so many, many, many years—she came from Norway—and for years she was the head of the Women's Bureau, for years and years and years.
Fry
I know, she was quite the symbol of it. But it will be
Paul
But whoever that woman was, she was the head of it at that time, and then he sent a letter to the Woman's Party asking us if we would appoint three members to be on this consultative committee. The people who were appointed were Maud Younger, who was our congressional chairman, and Doris Stevens, who was then—I think she was our national organizer or something like that, and myself. And so we were half of the consultative body.
And so then the Women's Bureau set a date for a meeting of this consultative body, and they certainly did everything they could to defeat us. They certainly were— Mr. Davis didn't evidently make clear to the head of the Women's Bureau his displeasure over this or his anxiety over it, of having part of his department causing so much outcry against what they were doing. Because when we got there, the head of this—whoever this Women's [Bureau] head was [Mary Anderson]—she said, "Well, of course, our time is very limited. We are not employed to work beyond four-thirty or four" (or whatever it was) "and we must make this very brief."
And we said, "Well, look here. You are getting a salary for sitting here. We are getting no salary for sitting here. We come from some distance." I believe this was after Doris Stevens had married Mr. Malone and gone to live in [Quilton?]. I remember saying, "Well, Miss Stevens has had to take a trip down here and not only is she not paid for coming and sitting here, but she has had to pay her trip down and back to sit here. We are not even reimbursing her for that. And if we're willing to come and stay the whole evening and discuss this measure at our own expense, why shouldn't you be willing to at your expense?"
"Oh, no, no. Oh, not at all. We of the Women's Bureau always leave at half-past—anything we do, we do in the Women's Bureau time for which we are paid , we don't do one single thing after that "—She couldn't have been more—ooh!— un interested in making this women's consultative committee amount to something.
She said, "Now the thing we must do. It is very important to get information, and I think the Woman's Party can look up this and can look up this and can look up this and can look up this."
And we said, "We are to look up all these statistics
"Now you just investigate in this state whether there's a law on this or there's not a law on this. So I will assign this to you, and this to you, and this to you." This was the type of a woman this woman was. Merciful, goodness me. I never, never, never, never believed there could be such a woman, seriously, [laughing] as this woman that we met. So we didn't really, I think, get anywhere.
I remember Maud Younger when we came out saying, "I certainly was proud of the Woman's Party, prouder than perhaps I've ever been of the Woman's Party, when I saw what types of women we had and what types of women they had." Because she was one who really had investigated before she decided to take this great step that she took, after being the mother of the eight-hour law in America. And none of these women had a special labor law to her credit, or had actually gotten one through the Supreme Court or done what Maud Younger had done. And here she was standing against them! It was perfectly true, our people seemed so superior to these people who were all sitting there with their nice big salaries and just breathing incompetence. I think it was probably out of that that we got started on—perhaps we were already started but we were perhaps encouraged to keep on with our surveys we were making of the laws all over the country. What year was this?
Fry
This was 1926 so you had, I guess, already begun some of your surveys.
Paul
This meeting was in 1926?
Fry
That is when the conference was that began all of this.
Paul
Well, immediately this meeting was right after the conference, you see.
Fry
Well, then, that would have been 1926.
Alice, something else, I think, came out—
Paul
The next thing that happened was—We got nothing , no
And then we were one day having a meeting over in Baltimore, which Mrs. Hooper had organized, a very large luncheon. And I went over to be one of the speakers. And I remember the telephone—I was called to the telephone before I made my speech. And there was someone saying, "We've just received word from the Women's Bureau that they have decided to have no more meetings of the women's consultative group." So when I went in, I just announced this, that the whole thing has now been abolished by act of—I don't know she could do it, one woman, but she announced there would be no more meetings. So we did have no more meetings and that was the end of it.
Fry
Also—and I think you can record on this—the conference did ask that a study be undertaken and two years later a report was published—
Paul
What conference?
Fry
This Women's Industrial Conference. As a result of the debate on the floor, they voted to have a study undertaken of the Equal Rights Amendment and protective legislation.
Paul
The only thing that I know that they voted—I don't know whether they voted it, but the only thing I know that came out of it was this immediate action by the secretary of labor. And maybe he considered that this was a study that we were going to make, but we certainly didn't I don't know—
Paul
No other study was ever undertaken but that one was being undertaken by this consultative committee that I ever heard of.
Fry
By the Women's Bureau? Weren't they always publishing studies on the status of women and things like that?
Paul
I don't know what they were publishing at that time. But anyway, what they were always doing was opposing
Fry
I think this was their departmental study, and sounds like—
Paul
But this was a department study; they said that we do this all on Women's Bureau time, in the Women's Bureau. It was certainly, I would have thought, you could call it a study; but the result of the study would have been a complete division, the Women's Bureau taking one point of view, Woman's Party the other point of view.
66. The Women's Bureau study which was published two years after the 1926 conference is footnoted by O'Neill, William L., ( Everyone Was Brave, The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America ) on page 285 . The reader is referred to Henry Raymond Mussey, “Law and a Living for Women, ” Survey, November 1, 1928, p. 195 .
Time Segments of Alice Paul's Work in Europe
FryDid you go to Europe then late, in the late twenties? I don't know what dates you were in Europe and when you were back here on the scene with the Woman's Party in Washington. There seems to be no chronology anywhere.
Paul
After suffrage was won, you mean?
Fry
Yes. After suffrage was won, I assume that you were on the scene in Washington for about eight years, is that correct? And then you went to Geneva—
Paul
I don't know being that much "on the scene"—
Fry
At what point do we leave the Washington scene and go to Geneva?
Paul
Well, before I went to Geneva, I went up and bought this little cottage up in Vermont.
Fry
Did you buy that in the twenties, before the world codification conference?
[Interruption. Tape off.]
Paul
—been trying to help always.
Fry
So even when you were in Europe you were helping here?
Paul
No, no. I consider that "helping," in Geneva; but I mean I did that as a result of a vote, you know, that we took in 1938, when we voted to form a world committee. But I'd rather just go ahead [and complete the section on the Equal Rights Amendment].
Fry
Yes, that's what I want to do.
Paul
I can't remember exactly when I went up and—
Then there was no break for you then?
Paul
There was never any break.
Fry
You were consistently involved with the Woman's Party effort for the Equal Rights Amendment here in the United States, and we can go ahead and talk about it, just go continuously down the line?
Paul
I have been all my life, [never] having varied on that.
Fry
I thought there might have been a time when you were for several years in Europe.
Paul
The longest time I stayed in Europe was the time we opened our world committee headquarters, which was in I guess in 1939. Let me see. [Pause.] Maybe we opened it in 1938.
Fry
Well, we are not to that yet.
Paul
I don't think so. I think it was in 1939. I can look all these things up very easily. I think we opened them about August. When did the World War start?
Fry
Hitler marched into Austria I believe in March of 1938.
Paul
But we started when they went into Poland; that is when the World War started.
Fry
That was I guess 1938?
Paul
No, it wasn't that; I don't think so. Well, anyway it was somewhere around there and I stayed—it must have been 1939, September 2, 1939, I believe. Then I stayed all through 1940 and then it was in 1941 that I knew we were going into the war. And everybody in Europe knew we were going into war. They all said, "It took us so many years to get the Americans in the first time [World War I], but this time, we'll do it in a year," they were always saying. And we did, we went in in 1941 I think. And so I came back, I think, in the spring of 1941. You see, I wasn't over there a very long time. I was in Europe all of 1940, part of the spring of 1941, and maybe half of 1939.
Fry
What about ten years before that, how long were you there?
Paul
I never was there any definite—any very long time
Using Publicity Media in the Twenties
FryThen there is one more thing I want to ask you about, before we leave the 1920s and the Equal Rights Amendment. [Interruption.] In the twenties you started broadcasting on radio, I believe. The reason I think you probably did was that in the 1923 Equal Rights magazine, on the cover, it depicted a woman broadcasting over the radio for equal rights. And then I noticed that later in the twenties, you had regular weekly broadcasts over the National Broadcasting Network or something. Do you remember any of that? I thought that was a good way to educate women.
Paul
When was this?
Fry
In the twenties. Nineteen twenty-three was one date, and I think the other one was 1928 or 1929 when you had your regular weekly broadcast. I wondered if this was national.
Paul
We didn't have any. Some local place may have. It was never done very well.
Fry
In the Equal Rights magazine they said it was over the National Broadcasting—
Paul
Maybe Mrs. Hooker did it; she was very good. She had a very good branch. Maybe they did it.
Fry
Now all of this time in the late twenties, you were still introducing it into Congresses, and Senator Nye emerged—
Paul
From North Dakota, yes.
Fry
—for the first time in 1929, yes.
As the chief sponsor?
Fry
As the chief sponsor, yes, for the Senate, and Frederick McGrady was still sponsoring it for the House.
Paul
Yes, McGrady, I remember that he did, but he didn't—and I remember that I was away in Europe when they did it—he was never, didn't keep it up very long. Maybe one Congress or two.
You see, the reason we didn't do broadcasting and those things was because we'd spent so much money over in the suffrage campaign and then we had this debt that we had to pay in the end. It took a long time, it took about half a year, I guess, to raise the money. Then when we started in something that looked as though it might be a campaign of a good many years, the one thing that I think the new board particularly didn't want to do was to get themselves into having this nightmare of money raising because the new chairman, Elsie Hill, had never taken much part in money raising. She did do the very big thing of authorizing and signing herself the always tremendous number of notes for the headquarters, and that was about as big a task as anybody could want to take upon her shoulders. So we just gave up making any attempt to do press work on the scale that we'd done it in the suffrage campaign. Because we thought, well, the other things were so pressing that we had to do, so I know that we didn't have any kind of a professional backing of anything like broadcasting. Maybe some of the local places did it in some of the states.
Fry
Well, I ran across a printed speech that had been made as one of the weekly broadcast series by the man who was head of United Press, for Washington. And this was a very eloquent speech on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment; I think he was the husband, I am not sure, of somebody in the Woman's Party.
Paul
I am sure these were done, but—as they are done today, we didn't do it on any very big scale.
Presidents Harding to Eisenhower
Franklin Roosevelt Administration Opposed
FryThere was one other question I wanted to ask you and that is about your presidential delegations. I wanted to ask you to evaluate for us the value of the presidential delegations. You saw Coolidge, and Harding, and Hoover each time you had the Equal Rights Amendment submitted—
Paul
Well, we always had it submitted, it was never not submitted.
Fry
And that was when you saw the presidents, I guess.
Paul
No, no. No, no. Of course, you always tried to keep it before the presidents and we went to all the presidents excepting [Franklin] Roosevelt, who wouldn't receive us.
Fry
He wouldn't?
Paul
But up to that time, we never had any difficulty. Up until Roosevelt's time.
Fry
Did the presidents after Roosevelt receive you?
Paul
Yes, Truman.
Fry
And Eisenhower?
Paul
Yes, we never had—he was the first one who put it in his presidential message, you see.
Fry
Well, how was it that President Roosevelt never met with a Woman's Party delegation?
[While tape is being turned: transcribed from interviewer's notes:] When Eleanor Roosevelt was first in Washington, she invited all the women's organizations to the White House except the Woman's Party.
We had an extremely good state chairman in New York, Mrs. Clarence Smith, who worked—
[ Audio note: volume rather low] —for the Equal Rights Amendment. But in New York the special labor laws for women were working a good deal of hardship to a great many women, and so they were always coming to our New York office asking us to go up and testify for the women because they couldn't afford to go themselves and they didn't know enough to say what to say. When women were being laid off in great numbers by special labor laws, then the women affected would want to go up and make a protest at Albany. But they wouldn't go up themselves, because they didn't know how to do it they thought, and would come and ask us to do it.
So Mrs. Smith was constantly going up to hearings in the name of the Woman's Party and having other people go with her, making protest against these laws. And Mrs. Roosevelt was always appearing with the labor leaders for these laws and she began to have a tremendous feeling of opposition to the Woman's Party while she was governor's wife, because of all this. When she came to Washington, it was transferred to us. She just—we were just completely ignored, as though we didn't count for anything, and it wasn't until after she was out of the White House and was with the United Nations, you know, that she finally came out with a statement saying that she'd withdrawn her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.
I was there when she did it, I heard it from the gallery. We didn't know she was going to say this, but she did. And we rushed down to the—I didn't, but I think Anita Pollitzer was with me—and somebody else rushed down to the American mission at the United Nations, to say, "Have you the text of what Mrs. Roosevelt just said? We just heard her say, 'I have withdrawn my opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.'" So we got the original statement that was given out by the American mission that day quoting what Mrs. Roosevelt
Harding, Hoover and Coolidge
PaulNow before Roosevelt was Hoover. Hoover actually went out of his way to support us and that was at the Republican National Convention and I was there so I know about that myself. That in 1944, this was; he was no longer President.
Fry
What about in 1928?
Paul
But in 1944 he was no longer President, but that is when we were trying to get the Republican convention. We already had it in the platform four years before, and it was a great fight to see it didn't come in a second time. And so we had the actual support of Hoover there, I remember. That is when he wasn't President then.
But when he was President he asked us for the different things that came up, for The Hague, for instance. But we hadn't gotten to the point where we had enough members in Congress where it was practical to try to print it through.
Fry
I have a quotation from what Coolidge said when you went to see him.
Paul
What did he say?
Fry
This is from a newspaper account in 1972 so it's not a—but it says that he said,
(Meaning with the Equal Rights Amendment.)"This is something of a novel experience for me. I have been engaged somewhat in legislation on the other side in attempting to protect women from possible impositions. But if the womanhood of the nation want a change, having demonstrated their ability even before they got the vote, I haven't the slightest doubt that Congress will respond favorably."San Francisco Chronicle, December 3, 1972
Paul
Who wrote that, because I think that is about what he did say.
Fry
I don't know who wrote it. This was in the Sunday issue, December 3, 1972, in the San Francisco Chronicle .
It wasn't signed?
Fry
No. I suppose the editor of this dug it out. The writer goes on to say, "That was the promise President Calvin Coolidge gave two hundred fashionably gowned women of the National Woman's Party."
Paul
This delegation went out to see him in South Dakota—
Fry
That was 1923.
Paul
I think he was spending a vacation in South Dakota or something like that.
Fry
Yes, that is what I understand.
Paul
Seems to me that's where we went.
Fry
It was in South Dakota.
Paul
Anyway, [in the ERA campaign] we didn't emphasize the leadership of the President the way we had done with Wilson, because there was—well, we had so much to do to sort of get the Amendment idea off the ground, it seemed to us, with the women's organizations. We felt we had to do [that] first, get some little more substance to demand from the country, but Harding was—let's see, I know the first delegation we took to Harding [pause]—I believe he was always a supporter, but it's not very—and I led the delegation, I remember, and introduced people to him. But we had on our board then, a woman from Ohio whose husband was one of the chief backers of Harding. Do you remember what her name was? I'd have to look it up.
Fry
No.
Paul
And she had constant access to Harding. Could always arrange interviews and everything else. Seemed to me that, as I remember it, that he seemed to have the sort of answers of the same kind that more or less Coolidge gave. "Well, if the women want this, of course." And this lady, whoever she was, asked him to come up and make the main speech at that photograph I showed you in the little report—1926.
67. The National Woman's Party, 1913-1926 . Pamphlet. Senator Curtis speaking at NWP headquarters.
Fry
Was he supposed to show up?
Paul
Yes, he was supposed to be our main speaker.
I think there is [also] a photograph of Harding in that one.
Fry
[Checking pamphlet.] It has a picture of a delegation to President Coolidge at the White House. And yes, here is a picture also of a delegation to President Harding.
It says that three deputations have been sent to Coolidge, including one composed of New England women from his own part of the country, and a delegation of wage-earning women to urge the Equal Rights Amendment.
Paul
And what's it say about the Harding one?
Fry
It doesn't. It's just a caption under a picture.
Paul
Doesn't say anything about it?
Fry
No, he doesn't make it in the text.
Paul
Well, isn't there a delegation to him?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
It doesn't say what we were asking him?
Fry
It just says "Members of the Woman's Party appealed to President Harding."
Paul
Then it was presumably about the Equal Rights Amendment. I didn't know whether it was over some other topic.
Fry
Would there have been another topic ?
Taking Related Issues to the White House
PaulYes, we often went—I know we went to Hoover, for instance, about the world code, you know. [Pause.] And I know we organized a delegation to Roosevelt which he did receive, but it wasn't a Woman's Party delegation
Fry
Was that one of the NRA [National Recovery Act] codes?
Paul
No, 213 was the Economy Act put through under Hoover trying to stave off a depression by which only one of the two spouses could be employed by the federal government.
Fry
And if you were married, one of the spouses had to resign, and it was nearly always the wife.
Paul
Yes, that's it. It was Section 213. They called themselves the 213ers. And we helped very, very—we practically did the whole campaign for those women, so they always say. And we gave them an office in our headquarters without any charge and we raised the money and engaged an organizer for them and one of our officers, Mrs. Hooker, paid the salary, I believe, of this organizer.
And then we called up all the women's organizations and asked them, one by one, if they would join in this campaign to have 213 repealed. And then we finally—I think I was away at this time—finally got an audience with the President for all this combined group of women to President Roosevelt. So I meant, we did take up other things than just the Amendment, you see. Always we took up any crisis that was affecting women.
Fry
What about jury duty, Alice? We haven't talked about that and that may be something that you were involved in because I noticed Equal Rights magazine would sometimes include a map. The white states were the states in which women were still not allowed to sit on juries, and there was a big discussion—
Paul
Well, of course, these were all published because they were arguments for why we needed the Amendment.
Fry
This says that,
Let me note that this is from this little pamphlet, The National Woman's Party, 1913-1926 ."Hearings have been held also on minor points covered by the Amendment, such as equalizing citizenship rights of married men and women, giving jury service to women of the District of Columbia, giving equal contract rights to married women in the District of Columbia, and the equal application as to men and women of pension laws"—which you mentioned to me—"Through these hearings not only has the attention of Congress been concentrated upon the equal rights
― 494 ―question, but the attention of the whole country has been called to this unsettled problem still confronting Congress."The National Woman's Party, 1913-1926
Paul
Yes, was there anything you wanted to ask about that?
Fry
Yes. That since you must have been busy on a lot of these other issues, I wondered if there were any others who were given space in the NWP headquarters. For instance, the move to get women on juries or anything like that. Let's see, I believe you said you didn't go into the old Margaret Sanger group of birth control.
Paul
No, we didn't take it up, but we let her have meetings— have at least one meeting, maybe many, in the headquarters.
Fry
On into the thirties it seemed that from the Equal Rights Amendment—
Paul
Now in 1928, you see, was the first time—that's in the twenties, if you're doing the twenties—first time we went to an international conference. That was the one in Havana.
Fry
Yes, and I think you've talked about that.
Paul
I did, yes. Out of it we got the Inter-American Commission created.
Fry
Is this right? In 1933 there was the Montevideo Conference—
Paul
After it was created, you see. Every five years at that time, they had the Conference of American Republics. So the next one, after it was created, was the one in Montevideo. And so we got it created in Cuba, and at the first time they met afterwards we got to the Montevideo Treaty.
Fry
How much work was there going on in the Woman's Party between 1928 and 1933 on that treaty—especially on the equal rights terms of it?
Paul
Well, our main work was on an equal rights treaty on all subjects, an equal rights treaty which we were trying to get the women's organizations' international [sections] to endorse. I told you the Business and Professional Women had endorsed it. And then we presented it at
Fry
Did Ernest Gruening have something to do with that? He was later governor of Alaska and senator.
Paul
Yes, and his wife was on our national board, Dorothy Greuning. No. No, he didn't. The only time we came in contact with Senator Greuning was—of course he supported the Equal Rights Amendment when he got to our Senate, but when he was a newspaper editor—I guess editor, or owner, something or other, up in Massachusetts, he aided us in our suffrage campaign.
Fry
Yes, I think I've got that. Well, I had a little note here; I thought he did something in Montevideo. Maybe he was covering the meeting or something.
Paul
I don't remember him at Montevideo. He's the one who told me what he did himself up in—I wouldn't have remembered, but he's writing his memoirs now and one day he told me that in writing his memoirs he was going to put in the letter that I had written to him thanking him for his great help on his paper in the time we were working for suffrage up in Massachusetts. Must have been the time, I guess, that we were burning the President's words on Boston Common; we were being arrested. So he said, "Oh, you know, I did so much to help and you wrote me this wonderful letter and I'm printing it in my memoirs." So he told me that not so long ago.
The Women's Bureau Neutralized via Dorothy Greuning
FryHow did his wife get interested enough to be on your board? Do you know?
Paul
She was one of those few women who attended this very historic gathering at Vassar when they had their meeting in the cemetery.
Fry
Oh, and they wouldn't let the suffrage speaker on the campus? Was that a suffrage speaker?
Paul
Yes. They invited three distinguished women in the suffrage movement, and Inez Milholland was getting up the meeting. And the president sent for her and said the board of trustees was not willing to have this meeting at Vassar. And so the women who were interested in the meeting, including Dorothy Day—Dorothy Greuning—decided to hold it next door, which was in the graveyard. So they all went out and hopped over the wall—I guess you know this tale because it's so famous—and how they got the three speakers out there, I don't know, but the speakers came anyway. [Laughter.] And the whole meeting was held over there in the graveyard. It was very convenient, it was right next door. Then they apparently, somehow or other, hopped back or walked around the wall or went in the entrance, I don't know how, but they had the meeting anyway.
And she has been a very ardent suffragist all these years.
Fry
Was she active in your suffrage campaign?
Paul
She may have been, but I don't know her. I mean, I don't know—of course, I don't know when she married Mr. Greuning. If she was his wife by any chance when he was up in Boston, I suppose she was perhaps encouraging him. I never even knew any of this until Consuelo came
Fry
Consuelo Reyes? That's where I found out about it too, from Consuelo and her audio-visual story of the history of suffrage. In the thirties—
Paul
Just to continue that—so when I learned that she had. been in that meeting, we got in touch with her from the headquarters right away and got to know her and found out what a champion she was and had been all her life. And I asked her to start in and help us now, and she agreed right away and went on our board.
Fry
What position was her husband in at that point?
Paul
I guess he was still senator. And she went on the board. She took it very seriously, and the thing that she took up immediately was to try to get the Women's Bureau from continuing to stab us in the back. The first thing she did was to call me and say, "I have, I think, gotten Mrs. Esther Peterson to the point where she will no longer continue the Women's Bureau policy of opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. And I want you to come up and have tea with her." And she said, "I'm having nobody but you because I don't want to get it complicated by lots of people talking and she's agreed to come on condition that there's nobody else."
And when I was calling a taxi to get ready to go, I remember—I can't think of who the people were, but certainly great alarmists—and they said, "It's absolutely unsafe for you to go up through Rock Creek Park all by yourself in a taxi. You may never come back." They said, "You don't understand the terrific opposition there is to you on the part of the Women's Bureau and all the people in that field." And so one person who was there said, "You simply can't allow it. You can't get in that taxi alone and go; it will just look like some ordinary accident, but you will never be seen again."
Fry
My goodness.
Paul
So one of the people who was there and the only one I remember who was there at the headquarters, finally said, "Well, then, if you're determined to go,"—I just said, "I have to go. There is no question at all that I certainly have to go to that meeting. Nobody here seems to have a car. The only way I can get there is
So then one person spoke up and said, "Well, if you're so determined to go, then I'm going to go in that taxi with you." And they were really most extraordinarily serious about this idea.
And that was Margie Leonard, who was our Massachusetts chairman. How she happened to be there at that moment, I don't know. I think it was she. But anyway, I remember that when we got to Mrs. Greuning's—I knew Mrs. Greuning wouldn't be a party to anything like this. But I didn't know anything about the Women's Bureau, about this terrible Esther Peterson, that they all considered so terrible that she would do anything she could in opposition to our Amendment campaign. So anyway, when we got to Mrs. Greuning's, and went in safely— nothing happening to us [laughing]—and kept the taxi man to take us home again. (I think it was that way.) Mrs. Greuning was lovely beyond words, a beautiful hostess, had a beautiful tea, and—but she was very concerned about what to do with [laughing] poor Miss Leonard. And Miss Leonard was quite an important person and used to being treated with great respect, because you know she was about the only woman in the John Hancock Life Insurance Company, in the legal department, and had been there ever since she graduated from the law school. So she was used to being treated with great respect and so on.
So Mrs. Greuning, having promised Mrs. Peterson nobody would be in the room but Mrs. Peterson, Mrs. Greuning and myself, she said, "Now, I think that you had better stay here ."
Fry
Speaking to whom?
Paul
To Miss Leonard. "And because Mrs. Peterson wants this to be a very private interview where she is going to possibly state that she will no longer oppose the Amendment." So I couldn't see anything objectionable at all to what she said, but it seems that they had a kitchen, with somebody in the kitchen preparing the dinner at that moment, and they sort of placed her in a little kind of a hall outside of it. So she was practically being consigned to the kitchen, because there wasn't very much but the kitchen and this little ante place.
At all events, it appeared that she was somehow or other seated in the kitchen. And [laughing] up to this day, whenever we talk about that interview, she says, "Yes indeed, that person who put me in the kitchen"— [laughter]. And evidently the person in the kitchen wasn't very welcoming, and probably nobody is very welcoming to somebody coming into their kitchen. But she's always had a great grievance against Mrs.—a personal one [laughing]—against poor Mrs. Greuning, who had the best motives in the world.
So then Mrs. Peterson did come, and she said, and I know that she said this that she would never again participate in any [pause] active opposition to the Amendment. I don't think that she said that she would support it. But she said, "I have written against it and spoken against it and debated against it, but I've made up my mind not to do so in the future." So of course, it was a big step, I guess.
Fry
So they were neutralized at that point?
Paul
And that was a very little while ago, you know, while Mrs. Peterson was still down at the Women's Bureau.
Fry
Yes, that would have been fairly recently if it was when Greuning was a senator.
Paul
But I mean Mrs. Peterson was by that time assistant secretary of labor as well as being head of the Women's Bureau, and she remained there, I think, until Nixon came in. And it was Nixon, I think, who appointed Mrs. Koontz, the Negro woman. Nixon came in in 1969, didn't he? I think he won in 1968, and so by 1970 probably he'd gotten Mrs. Koontz in probably. So it must have been around 1970, I suppose. That would be about two years ago.
Fry
When this happened with Mrs. Peterson?
Paul
Yes.
Fry
It was right at the end of her tenure then.
Paul
Yes, it was very recent.
And then Mrs. Koontz came in, and she continued really the same opposition of Mrs. Peterson, the historic opposition. And it wasn't until a new secretary of labor
Fry
Had you sent a delegation to see the new secretary of labor?
Paul
No. He did it right away. I think Hodgson is no longer there, if I remember it rightly. Is there a new one since?
Fry
Yes, but I'll have to fill that name in. [Peter J. Brennan] I'll check on the Hodgson name, too.
Paul
And there's a new woman appointed. So you know who she is? I don't know who she is, in place of Mrs. Koontz.
Fry
No, I don't. How is she toward the ERA?
Paul
Well, you see, all that has happened in the time since I've sort of been out of it for a year. I don't know. I don't even know who she is.
Fry
I'm about to change the subject. [Laughing.] If you have anything else to say on—
Paul
I was going to say that if you would excuse me a moment, I'll go and see Mrs. Dolly [housekeeper]. And maybe now you can take your orange.
[Tape off.]
The Woman's Party in the 1930s
Inequalities of the Depression
FryAs I was going through the Equal Rights magazine in the thirties, the thing that hit me as an impression was that there was a general slowing down of the movement. Now is this a true impression or is it just one that one gets from reading the Equal Rights magazine? There were so many difficulties involved in fighting these minimum wage and maximum hour laws, all these things that were against women, that it seemed to sap a lot of the vitality of the movement.
Paul
I don't think it did. [Pause.] It doesn't seem to me that it did. Of course I wasn't in it so very much myself, as I had been in the suffrage campaign, so I wasn't—and each new chairman, I think made her particular contribution the sort of thing that she could do the best. And I thought it was a very wholesome growth. All of those of us who worked so hard in the suffrage campaign, as I told you, deliberately tried to get another generation to take on this one. And they didn't take it on as much as we had believed they would.
I thought the thing that we basically tried to do was to get the women of the country [aware]. You see, in the suffrage campaign there [had been] more lethargy and indifference and so on in the part of women, but we didn't have people actively going to legislatures and getting measures through prohibiting women to vote and so on. Here [in the equal rights campaign] we were having the whole labor movement, almost, guiding the woman movement. And of course, the Labor Department was an expression of it. Here was a Labor Department with a woman movement as only a subsidiary of the labor movement. And instead of having an Equality for Women
And here we have, as you say, minimum wage laws for women, all kinds of things being enacted, through the power of the labor vote, and it all had to be [dealt with]—and it was different in different states. it was certainly a hard thing to do. And it seems to me, I don't think there's any question now but that the thought of the country is for equality for women in industry and in earning a livelihood and so on. All these fields that, a short time ago, the whole thought of the country was on the other side. So I think it's really been a very great achievement.
Fry
Certainly when one reads these articles from the thirties, you can see this big, big difference. That then women were losing their jobs because of the enactment of minimum wage laws that applied only to women.
Paul
Yes, of course.
Fry
And, as you say, this appeared to be true in many states and in the District of Columbia it was at least tried. (I haven't followed it through to see if they got one.)
Paul
Now each of our chairmen was so different, and each one, I think, played a big part in making this change, and the thing that united all the group—it was a very little group, but it was [laughing] of one opinion on this subject anyway. That group didn't perhaps get any bigger numerically, but the people who came to that opinion increased and increased and increased, until now certainly the vast majority of women, I would think, are today of the same point of view that we had when we started this whole crusade in 1923.
Christian Science Church Help
FryI noticed that one of the chairmen was Mrs. Steven Pell of New York for a while at least. Sarah Thompson Pell, from 1936 to 1939.
Paul
She was extremely good.
This is in 1937, and Anita Pollitzer at that time was a vice-chairman with Gail Laughlin. The thing that—
Paul
One thing for instance—as I told you when we came up before the Business and Professional [Women's Clubs], (and I say her name was Dorothy Schuler [?] but it might not have been, but you can easily find out what it was. It's my impression that's what it was.) But when she got up to speak and made this speech [for debating the Equal Rights Amendment]—against the whole board and against the whole administration in Washington that was headed by Miss Frances Perkins, a member of the cabinet and head of the Women's Bureau—we asked her afterwards how this all happened, how could she have done this thing. What made her do it? It was wonderful for us but we were so unaware of her support. And we discovered that she was a Christian Scientist and that they all have teachers—do you know anything about Christian Science?
Fry
Not much.
Paul
Well, their system is to have teachers who are accredited by the church, and there are only a few in the country. I think there are about thirty in the United States
68. There are over a hundred in the United States, and many more than that all over the world. - Donald D. Paul.
So she had a teacher—she enrolled in one of these classes—and his name was Mr. Heitman and she made him thoroughly aware of the Woman's Party and went to him when we asked her to be national chairman. (She told me all this herself.) And she said she wouldn't become national chairman unless he thought it was the right thing for her to do, and he looked into the whole matter and he strongly urged her to do it. And then when there was a question, should she run for a second term, he strongly advised her to do this. So we learned from Mrs. Pell that this mysterious Miss Schuler, who
And so then, when I went down in 1942, I guess it was, to become the national chairman when the war was over and (I told you when nobody would want to take it and I was elected in Philadelphia) one of the first things I did was to begin to see if I could get some newspaper support because we never had an editorial support for the Equal Rights Amendment since we introduced it—of any importance, maybe little papers, but no big papers. And I went down to the office of the Christian Science Monitor to see if they wouldn't take the lead. (This was before Mrs. Pell came along, a long time before Mrs. Pell, I think. I have forgotten just when Mrs. Pell was chairman.
69. Sarah Thompson Pell was chairman 1936-1939.
When I talked to the man in the office, he said he knew all about this, he said, "because I've talked so much to Mrs [Perle] Mesta"—Mrs. Mesta, you know, is a great Christian Scientist—and he said, "Mrs. Mesta's told me so much about this and about the Woman's Party. And I am all for your Amendment, and I will see what I can do about bringing it up with the editorial staff of the Monitor, putting in an editorial for you."
And he said, "Well, I'll just write up to Mr. Canham the editor." You know who Mr. Erwin Canham was, I guess; the editor of the Christian Science Monitor —
Fry
Yes.
Paul
So he said, "I'll write to Mr. Canham." He called me up and said, "You know, I find Mr. Canham is even more enthusiastic about this than I am. And he says he'll
So then he telephoned again and said, "Mr. Canham says that he presented it to the board. He [had] found on the board, one of the most influential members of the board, Mr. Heitman and that Mr. Heitman [had] said, 'Well, I will propose this and get the endorsement of the Christian Science board.'" And so then he called me again, and he said, "Mr. Heitman has presented it. He's gotten the national board of governors"—or whatever they call it in that church, board of trustees, maybe
70. Board of directors. - Donald Paul.
Fry
And at the time they appear to be little things, but—
Paul
So I mean, each chairman has been doing the thing that maybe has had enormous results, but each one in a more or less different field.
The ERA Enters Congress
First Times Out of Committee
FryI'd like to talk about the legislation in the thirties for the Equal Rights Amendment, because there were some important milestones, it looks like.
Paul
All right.
Fry
On January 3, 1935, this chronology says that it was introduced in the House as Resolution number one by Representative Lewis Ludlow of Indiana and it was the first favorable action ever taken by the Judiciary Subcommittee of the House, or of either house, according to this.
Paul
Now there's one whole issue that I noticed in that pile [of Equal Rights magazines] that I gave to you. The heading was—this was the House now?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
And I think it was the year the Republicans came in and we didn't have Mr. [Imanuel] Celler's opposition—What are you doing over there?
Fry
I'm just writing on the tape, labelling it. Go ahead.
Paul
Well, I think this is an extremely important issue, and I would get it out if I were you. And I know I put it over there, so it must be in yours.
Yes, that was a big day when we got it in the House.
Fry
[Searching.] Well, there's nothing between December of 1934 and March of 1935 in these.
I remember [1947] because Anita Pollitzer was elected [chairman of WP] and some people didn't want her; it appeared to be because she was Jewish, as far as I could make out. So we had a very terrible time—
Fry
Because the mail ballot that you'd had was not considered legal, was that it? Was that the grounds that they challenged you on?
Paul
No. I don't of course know what the reason was that they were so determined she shouldn't be chairman.
Fry
I read about that in the Equal Rights magazine. That was the contested Woman's Party election that finally had to go to court.
Paul
So anyway, I stayed on—well, I was no longer chairman because she'd already been elected, and I had voted for her and—when we get to that I can tell you more about it.
But at all events I think I was still in Washington, either as chairman or being there to help Anita in the troubles that had developed, when we got that report from the House, is what I'm talking about. So I didn't think it could have been 1936 [1935].
Fry
In 1945 it was reported out from the full House Judiciary on July 12, with a recommendation that it "do pass"—
Paul
1945? That's what I thought.
Fry
But 1935 was the first time it had been reported out from the subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.
Paul
Well, that didn't make so much difference. It was getting [it out of the whole] Judiciary itself, getting it out before the House. And I think that was the year the Republicans were in control of the Committee—
Fry
In 1945?
Paul
Well, I don't know whether it was 1945, but I think that whenever they reported it out, it was because of Republican control.
71. Republicans won control of both houses in the 1946 elections, for the '47-'48 session.
Fry
And you may have been there?
Paul
I know I was in Washington when we got it in the Charter. Anita went out for the Woman's Party (I think as chairman, but I know she went in whatever capacity) to San Francisco.
Now take another cup; it's nice and hot. I'm taking this to keep me up as long as you need me.
Fry
I'm sure I'll fold long before you do.
Well, what about the Senate Judiciary Committee? It was reported, without recommendation but it did report it out, in March of 1938, with a nine-to-nine vote.
Paul
Nineteen thirty-eight? I know when they reported it out all right. And it was under [Frederick] Van Nuys;
72. Senate term 1933-39.
Fry
Nineteen forty-one the subcommittee reported it out and then in May—
Paul
Which are you reading? [Dora] Ogle's [chronology]?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Well, as I say, I'm never sure about her.
Fry
That does go right along with your memory, however. Then the Senate Judiciary Committee reported it out on May 11, of 1942, a favorable report.
And when was the next one?
Fry
After that?
Paul
Of the whole committee.
Fry
Nineteen forty-three.
Paul
Yes, I think that's the [Senator Warren R.] Austin one that I told you about [when we had its new wording in the bill]. You know, where I told you he said he would report it if we got the signature of every women's organization. I think then for some reason I stopped.
But I wanted to tell you we did get the report signed. We got a recommendation of one page on which every organization signed its name, to supporting this version. It went through [the Senate] in 1970; and it was reported favorably that year [1943] by Austin.
Fry
Yes, and that's exactly what she says here. The new wording of "equality of rights under the law"—
Paul
Yes, it was 1943, wasn't it?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
That's what I thought.
Fry
May 28. And the House Judiciary sub committee, about three weeks later, reported it out unanimously.
Paul
What about the full [committee]?
Fry
I don't see anything else in 1943, Alice.
Paul
You mean the House didn't do it in 1943? When did the House do it next, after 1943?
Fry
In 1945, "the first favorable report ever made by the House Judiciary Committee" was made in 1945.
Paul
All right, then we'd better look up 1945. I'll look it up when I've finished my tea. Because I remember what it looked like on the front [cover].
Fry
It's in these that I brought over from Anita Pollitzer's. Shall I read it?
Paul
Yes, that's the one that I just saw over there; you must
Fry
No, I didn't get up to 1945. This is an article in Equal Rights, volume 31, number 4, July and August, 1945, by Amelia Himes Walker, the lobby chairman of the National Woman's Party.
Paul
You know, she was our national chairman once. She was with us and went to prison with us in the suffrage campaign.
Fry
The page next to this of the previous issue, they announce that the executive committee postponed a convention due to the death of President Roosevelt.
Paul
Well, Truman took over, [pause] so I don't see where the Republicans would have come in. [Pause.] Does it say who was chairman of the Judiciary then?
Fry
Representative Fadjo Cravens, a Democrat of Arkansas—
Paul
Oh, yes.
Fry
—made the report on behalf of the House Judiciary. (It doesn't say he was chairman.)
Paul
Yes, now I remember. But it must have been a later one when the Republicans came in. Because of course, he was a very prominent Democrat. I was there at that time that report was made.
I remember perfectly. It was made in about three minutes and Mrs. [Cecil Norton] Broy and I were, I think, the only people who went over for it. We knew it was going to come up, and we went there to be there and hear all the discussion and everything else that we could. There were very few people in the room, and we sat down more or less outside where we were supposed to sit.
And suddenly we learned, I suppose from Mr. Cravens, who was a very, very good friend of our cause, that it was through. And we said, "But we've been here waiting for it, we didn't know it had even come up.,,
And he said, "Oh, yes. We don't do things very slowly. We did it right away." So it was about as undramatic a meeting as you could go to. We never even heard a word said or saw anybody get up, or saw anything . How they ever did it in about one minute, I don't know. But I suppose it was the power of Mr. Cravens. And you
Fry
I wondered if that had anything to do with it. The Committee made a long statement about it, I believe.
Paul
And who signed it, did Mr. Cravens sign it?
Fry
Yes, Amelia Walker Bays that Cravens was the person who made the report "on behalf of the Committee," and I guess the Committee then signed this report. But it's a very long statement.
Paul
It probably gives the history up to that time.
Fry
Not particularly—
Paul
What was the next time on that list?
Fry
—the Committee report mentions the 1944 platform support of the Equal Rights Amendment, and it quotes the party platforms.
Paul
Oh, yes. This was the next year.
Fry
No, this was the platforms of the year before.
Paul
That's what I say, and this was the next year.
Fry
That's right—
Paul
So evidently it was the platform that got it.
Well now look here, when was the next time? I think it came up a second time when the Republicans came in.
Fry
Yes, the next time was in the Eightieth Congress. The bill was introduced by Representative John Marshall Robison with 102 co-sponsors and had a hearing in the subcommittee of the House with a favorable report on May of 1948. That was when both houses were Republican.
Paul
That's it, then.
Fry
And also, a favorable report from full Senate Judiciary Committee. So both of those voted it out favorably, but there was no vote taken on the floor.
I know.
Fry
The first vote had been taken on the floor of the Senate in 1946, July 19.
Paul
Oh, Yes. That's right. We got a majority.
Fry
It was thirty-eight to thirty-five. You got a majority—
Paul
We got a majority, but we didn't get a two-thirds. What year was that? Nineteen thirty-six? Or 1946?
Fry
Nineteen forty-six.
Paul
It had to be 1946 because it was after we put it in the Republican platform.
Fry
July of 1946.
Paul
Yes, I remember that vividly. [Long pause.]
The Turning Point—1940
PaulI wish that perhaps now women could have a more respectful, if you had more repect for the campaign for the equality for women and for the women who took part in it. Because when I came along from England as just a young college student, I had never heard of the name of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and only vaguely of the name of Susan B. Anthony. Just it was a name I knew I'd heard, but I didn't know anything about her.
And I only knew about Lucretia Mott because her painting was up in the head place of honor in the collection hall where we met every morning. All the students met and every day I looked up at Lucretia Mott, and we had a fellowship that was called the Lucretia Mott Fellowship. And that was because she was a Quaker, and they had preserved her name. But in the woman movement, I didn't know she had anything to do with the woman movement.
Fry
It's hard to think of you not knowing that at one time, Alice. [Laughing.]
Paul
But I meant, nobody knew it. Nobody who had just an
So then I really think that by encouraging one of our members to start a [postage] stamp—a Susan B. Anthony stamp and things like that, and having pageants—we had one great pageant in Washington put on by Hazel McKaye on the life of Susan B. Anthony: this was the time that we were trying to get people to follow the old Amendment. We thought if we could identify it in any way in their minds with some heroic woman who had been outstanding, it would help.
Fry
Today they call that consciousness-raising—
Paul
Do they?
Fry
—Of women about women.
Paul
Is that so? I didn't know it. At all events it certainly has then we started having meetings every birthday of Susan B. Anthony in the capital, and birthdays of Lucretia Mott once in a while, Elizabeth Cady Stanton once in a while. And then we started having meetings, general meetings in the capital in Statuary Hall, for instance, on the death of Inez Milholland and we started out to make Inez Milholland known and revered. So that's one—I think when you think of this period, not only did it—as you can see very easily—in a very short time, change the feeling of people toward accepting an amendment to the Constitution.
I think the turning point was in 1940 when for the first time we put it in the Republican convention platform. (And by the way, that was done by one of the delegates from Oklahoma, so when you try to get Oklahoma into the field [to ratify the Amendment]. remember that.) The person who did it was Mrs. Perle Mesta. I was in Europe in 1940 at our headquarters in Geneva, but when I came back and became national chairman, and started to try to get it in the national Republican convention platform in 1944, and I went to see the leading Republican women who were going out there, one of them was Miss Jane Todd who was perhaps the most important one, a
Accidental Inclusion in Republican Platform
“Don't Fumble it” ( New Canaan Advertiser, New Canaan, Connecticut, Thursday, Nov. 2, 1944)
She said, when I said, "You see, the Republicans put it in their platform," they said, "'Yes, we did. And that was all in error. It was all a mistake.'"
Fry
[Laughing.] Oh. Really?
Paul
It seems at that time Mrs. Mesta was one of the delegates from Oklahoma and of course that was her—I guess— birthplace, where she grew up anyway. And they had some kind of a hotel in Oklahoma City, Scrivner Hotel, is there such a thing as that?.
Fry
Skirvin.
Paul
Skirvin Hotel. That was their hotel that the family owned, and I think it was through oil that they acquired this fortune because she came, she said, of a very humble origin in—went to some little, very ordinary little school. And anyway, when they got this great wealth in the family and she married a Mr. Mesta then, after she became wealthy, who was also an Italian. He was an Italian who had come in, had some kind of a business in Pittsburgh which prospered. So by that time she was—she was always, it seemed, a Republican. Now she's a Democrat, you know.
So she went up as a delegate from Oklahoma to Chicago to the Republican National Convention. And it seems that she tried to get our plank in the platform, (so Mrs. Mesta told me) and it seems that they put in a kind of a plank which the women had drawn up which was, I guess, just rather vaguely for equal rights, not for the Equal Rights Amendment, apparently.
But you mustn't put this in your thing—my goodness me, [laughing] it's a very private secret.
So then she said that the delegate on the platform committee from Oklahoma, of course, knowing Mrs. Mesta (she was standing somewhere around waiting to see what they were doing about this particular plank) he came
She looked at it and said, "That's all wrong. This is not what we want at all." And it was what Miss Todd and the other Republican women had all handed in. Perfectly all right, but not for the Equal Rights Amendment at all.
So he said, "Oh, well, I thought this is what you wanted."
And she said, "No, this is the way it should be: just a frank endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment, in a few words."
And so he said, "Well, my goodness me, I'll have to have this substituted right away in our report, because we certainly don't want to make this mistake."
So it was substituted and read to the convention. And all these women said "Well, who played this trick on us?" and so on. So, [laughing] my goodness, the hostility of Miss Todd and all the other Republican women that I went to see to ask them to help us again! And they said—
Fry
That took place in 1940?
Paul
Yes. I was there in 1944, but I wasn't even in the country in 1940 when this happened, and I didn't know one thing about it, the greatest possible—thank heaven I didn't know! So I'm sure they were sure that I had nothing to do with this trick that had been played. And I said, "Well, anyway it's in , and we certainly have to continue with it." And very reluctantly they didn't stage any opposition.
And so I remember I sat in my bedroom and called up practically every woman delegate to the convention, and said, "Now be sure you get our plank back again in 1944." And we got it in. But that, I think, was the great turning point.
Then I went—and the Democrats were going to meet in about two weeks or three weeks. So after it was in the Republican one—there were other people with me, you know, I wasn't doing all this alone, but all the people who went out, two people went out—it's when I
Anyway, I stopped on my way down at Mrs. Miller's—Emma Guffey Miller's home out in the country near Pittsburgh, I think it is, out in the country though, on the farm. And told her all that happened at the Republican. And I said, "Now we have it in, could you take the leadership and come up and put it through in the Democratic one?" Because we knew she was going to be a delegate, she knew she was, and she was just beginning to be interested in this campaign.
So she came up and she really—Mrs. [Perle] Mesta by this time had become a Democrat , so this year she was at the Democratic convention and was on the platform committee. So Mrs. Mesta and Mrs. Miller together really got it into the Democratic one. Then we had it in both. Absolutely, unqualifiedly for the Equal Rights Amendment.
I think that the years from 1923 to 1940 were all building up to this culmination when it went into two platforms. And from that time on it was only, really—1944—the one you just told me went through in 1945 in the Democratic [Congress]. Nineteen forty-five was the Democratic, yes, because of Cravens. It was carrying out, of course, what that platform had said. And then in 1946 was the vote. And I remember that because I was there then.
The 1946 Vote in the Senate
PaulAnd that was another trick that was played on us, because Mrs.—whoever the [WP] chairman was, I'm not quite sure who the chairman had been—but the new chairman who came in right then at that moment almost was Ernestine Breisch Powell from Ohio. And she didn't have time to organize her forces or strength or anything else, when someone telephoned, "Within fifteen minutes the Equal Rights Amendment's to be introduced." I was there with Ernestine Powell trying to help her get started. And [the caller] said , "It's going to be introduced in the floor for a vote." It had gone through the committee.
Well, you know, this was simply an impossible situation.
[Interruption.]
So let me see—it was in the Senate it was coming up. I think our chief sponsor at that time in the Senate was Senator [Homer] Ferguson of Michigan. So we asked Senator Ferguson if he could defer the vote. Does it say anything about Senator Ferguson?
Fry
No, I only have the names on the committee here.
Paul
No, I'm not talking about who was on the committee, who was the chief sponsor. I think he was the chief sponsor at the moment . Anyway, he was the man who helped us the most.
So he went around to all the leaders trying to have this deferred, saying, "Well, the women aren't ready. They just haven't had any notice of this. There is nobody here to see the different senators." And he couldn't hold it off. So our opponents arranged it so we had this vote taken just by surprise. But we did get, of course, a majority, and that was because we'd just gotten it in the platform.
And so I remember I was so depressed because—and I guess everybody else was—that we did get a majority but we didn't quite get the two-thirds. And so Mrs. Miller, who had gotten it in the Democratic platform with Mrs. Mesta's help, said she wanted to take me over and talk to her brother, the senator. Senator [Joseph F.] Guffey was a senator and a very powerful senator, Democratic senator. And I went over—I remember very well his room was just covered, every inch of it with portraits given to him with signatures and so on, of all the illustrious people in the country, I guess.
And he said, "Well, it's nothing to be discouraged about. If the first time you get a majority vote, it's doing very well. And the next time we'll probably be able to get the two-thirds." But all this feeling of success not being too far away we've really had since we got it into the two platforms.
Fry
It's sort of like the rabbit running after the carrot—
Paul
And we've gotten more, I suppose, a great deal more opposition as it got to be stronger.
ERA and the Hayden Rider 1950-1971
The 1950 Narrow Escape
PaulAnd that was 1946. And then four years later we got the two- thirds, you know, in the Senate, but that's when we got the [Carl] Hayden rider. So you always seem to have one [problem]. The major point I think you have to have in your equipment is patience [laughing] if you engage in a reform of this type that you have to get through a legislative body. And my goodness, the ways they can oppose you! And if you could only have—the people were not so impetuous, if they could only have a little more trust in the people, usually, in the people who are doing the work to know that they know what the next thing should be. Because when this Hayden rider came on, what do you think the University Women [Business and Professional Women?] did but to endorse it!
Fry
Why would they do that?
Paul
Yes, why would they?
Fry
Now was that the same Hayden rider that was put on last year when I was lobbying?
Paul
There's only one Hayden rider.
Fry
So it was the same thing that was in 1970, 1969, in the bill.
Paul
Well, every year, the Hayden rider was always, always a thorn in our flesh. And you know they nearly got it through in 1950, almost got it through. You probably know that.
Fry
I knew it was sometime in the fifties.
But it was in 1950 that it went through the Senate by a big majority right over to the House. Now when it went, nobody knew it was coming up. Senator Hayden didn't know it was coming up. Nobody. And he was a very, in my mind a very fine man, Mr. Hayden. Very, very, very, very friendly to the cause of women. And he was known and famous almost for the things that he did for women secretaries and clerks and so on over in the Senate.
Fry
Oh.
Paul
He just couldn't possibly be more fatherly, more kindly, and more concerned. And he was powerful so he really could help. So when this happened we went over to see Senator Hayden to talk to him about it. It had gone already to the House, ready to be voted on.
I was up in New York working at the United Nations trying to work with Elsie Hill on what we were doing over there, our little World Committee. And I discovered, somehow or other, somebody informed us, that the Business and Professional [Women] were employing a lobbyist, paying her a salary, Marjory Temple was her name, to get the measure through the House, and it was almost ready to go through.
Well, now, if it had gone through, it would have gone on to the states and probably been ratified, and here we would have had it in the Constitution, as a result of all these years of labor, in equality written in for women!
Fry
Jim trying to remember how the Hayden rider was worded—
Paul
[Pause.] It was almost something like this: "This article should not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or"—something—I can't remember the third thing—"now or hereafter conferred by law upon persons of the female sex."
Fry
Yes, which was again that old bugaboo of special protections.
Paul
"This article should not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or exemptions" —I believe that was it— "any rights, benefits, or exemptions , now or hereafter conferred by law upon persons of the female sex."
Well, immediately we called up all the women's organizations when this happened. (Yes, I know now, I was down there [in Washington] when this vote was taken and then I went back to New York. We thought nothing more would happen about it.) It was such a dreadful thing. Now I want to tell you while the Senate was— now all this you can record if you want to. But when Mr. Hayden introduced this, Mrs. [Representative Katherine] St. George told me herself—Mrs. St. George, you know, was our chief sponsor in the House. Do you want to hear this?
Fry
Yes, it's right here [in the 1950 Equal Rights ] while you're telling me about it. Marvelous.
Paul
Well, she told me that—of course; she wasn't a senator, but she said she'd gone over to sit with Margaret Chase Smith, the only woman in the Senate. They didn't know anything about the Hayden rider, that it was coming.
They thought it [the Amendment] was going to go through; we had the votes so we thought it was going to go through. We had enough votes to carry it that day in 1950, and I can remember now I came down from Vermont
73. Where Alice lived when working in the United Nations.
So I went down to try to help, never knowing about this Hayden rider, and no one else knowing it was coming up as far as I knew, excepting whoever was engineering the Hayden rider, and I don't know yet who it was. So Mrs. St. George said that she went over, and all relaxed feeling that it was going through with nothing for her to do and she would just sit there and hear the roll call.
And then when Hayden got up and proposed this rider, she said she and Margaret Chase Smith immediately—saw immediately what it would do, that it was impossible, she said. So they divided the hall. And she said as rapidly as they could walk they walked down the different aisles and stopped at every man that they thought they might affect and said, "This is not what women want."
So then I went over to see Mr. Hayden. I was, I think, with Cecil Broy. She was always such a wonderful person to lobby with. Just a very good person. She was the widow of Congressman Sisson [?] of Mississippi, and she had long experience. He was in Congress twelve years and was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, for part of the time anyway. A very powerful congressman, and she could always get access to people, by calling up and saying, "I'm Mr. Sisson's widow, may I come and see you?" So we went together to see Hayden.
That's the first time I'd ever had a talk with Hayden—
And this is what Hayden said. He said, "As I was walking into the hall and going to vote for the Equal Rights Amendment as I had told you always that I would do," he said, "a young man came up to me whom I'd given desk space in my office"—because he was always doing that sort of thing—
Fry
Hayden was?
Paul
Yes. This young man came and said he was out of work and he wanted to try to get some assistance from various congressmen and senators in trying to find a position, and he couldn't afford to stay at a hotel and he couldn't afford to have any place from which he could work, and could Senator Hayden help him, and so Senator Hayden said, "Oh, yes, I have a free desk. You just take this desk.
[Interruption. Tape off.]
No, I didn't meet Senator Hayden in the hall. I told you, Mrs. Broy and I went in to call on him, after we [had] been told by Mrs. St. George, you see, that all the people that she and Mrs. Margaret Chase Smith spoke to and had time to speak to, voted against the Hayden. And we wanted to find out now all about it, how it happened to be introduced and so on.
Then Hayden said that he was taken completely by surprise when this young man walked up and said,
"This amendment which you're going to support and which is a very good one, of course, is not acceptable to everybody on the ground that it may perhaps deprive some women of advantages that have been won for them, and that people will think they are doing a good thing for women, they really will be doing harm to some women who will lose what advantage has been won for them." And he said, "Now here's a draft I wish you'd look at and see about putting on this as an addition. Why not safeguard and make this a better thing for women?"
Senator Hayden said to the young man, "Well, I'm not a lawyer and I wouldn't be able to pass upon this myself. I do want just what the women want, and what would help them. And I thought this was a measure which would help them, this Equal Rights Amendment, but I'll send up your draft to the drafting clerk who goes over all these measures, and see what he thinks of it."
And so he said, without even looking at it, he sent it up to the top floor of the building [where] the whole floor is given to drafters who pass for the Senate upon everything that's offered. They look into it from every point of view. Its legality point of view, and the history and anything that the senator may want to know. So he said in a short time he sent it down and said, "This is perfectly well drafted, and if it's what we want in its purpose, the drafting is all right."
So he said, "I then just sent it up to the desk to be read as an amendment and I really didn't know anything about it. I hadn't the faintest idea that it would be adopted, because usually if there's anything like this
And so he said, "Now when you tell me why you don't want it"—which we did—he said, "I really don't know what to do. "Because," he said, "I don't ever deal with any group but the official group that has to do with appropriations"—because Hayden was chairman of the Appropriations Committee. And he said, "If I began to deal with all individual people on appropriations, I would never get anywhere." So he said, "If something comes up related to Indians"—welfare of Indians, we'll say—"I call up or ask the advice in some way of the head of the Indian Bureau here in Washington, the official head appointed by the government. And they'd tell me, that's a good bill or a bad bill or we want this changed, and so I just accept it. I don't pretend to study it myself."
The Women's Bureau, a Hayden Ally
PaulSo now, he [Carl Hayden] said, "When all this controversy begins to develop and Margaret Chase Smith, my only woman colleague and Mrs. St. George, the leader in the House of the Equal Rights Amendment forces, and you come, leading the Equal Rights Amendment forces on the outside of Congress, and you say you don't want this, the only way that I normally would proceed—and I have proceeded this time—I call up the head of the Women's Bureau and they are supposed to—I would always that's my duty, I'm supposed to call up, I'm not supposed to make an investigation myself into the merits of all this thing, it's impossible to do. We make an appropriation for the Women's Bureau and we're in constant communication with them as the official group appointed by the labor secretary, so they seem to think that my amendment is just what they want."
[Interruption.] So, we didn't get anywhere except to learn of the
So I was working in New York especially with our New York state chairman, who lived at the moment in New York. Mayor [John] Lindsay, who's now Mayor of New York, was her nephew, and she was very familiar in many ways with political work and an extremely good person, in my opinion, extremely good chairman. So I told her the situation, and she said, "Well, I will go down with you. And together maybe we can do something to stop this before it gets off to the states for ratification."
She had been in her young days a professional dancer and had opened up in her home, which was then in northern New York, a dancing school, and it was very well established and very successful. And so after she ceased to dance herself so much, she had made a great success of teaching others to dance. So the only thing she discovered when she went to Washington was that in going around the halls of the Congress your feet is the part of you that suffers. She said, "My precious feet! that's the way I have earned my living." When she married into the Lindsay family—she had had a German name, [Annawelt?], and she was of German extraction and descent, it seems. So she bought herself some shoes, which it seems the professional dancers use when they're compelled in some way to have to walk some distance. Simply enormous , I've never seen anything like it in my life; maybe you know what this is, like little boats. I'd never seen them, didn't know they existed. But it seems very common among professional dancers. So she got herself, or maybe she already took down with her, these boots—not boots, but large shoes [laughing], very enormous shoes. It protected your fragile little feet, that had to be doing this exquisitely detailed dancing. So she would start off
She started out faithfully every single morning and she was charming and thoroughly convinced and determined. She couldn't have been better. And we started to do everything that you could possibly think of to—I especially saw and was trying to get mainly the leaders, the Republican leaders. The senator from New York, Senator [Kenneth B.] Keating, who was, well, was a very powerful senator in determining the program that would come up. I'm not sure whether the Republicans were in control or who was in control at that moment of the House.
Fry
Let's see who's on the House Judiciary Committee.
Paul
I don't think it has to go to a committee when it goes to one house. I'm not positive about that, but I don't think it did have to go to committee.
Fry
It was introduced by Katherine St. George, but that doesn't tell us which party was in control.
Paul
Well, at all events, we faithfully tried to see every single man that we thought we could move, to say, "Don't take any action on this. Congress is going to adjourn in a very short time, and this is something that ought not to be rushed through without a little more study and so on. And we went especially to the leaders. I remember going to the Republican leaders, so I guess the Republicans were in control of the House. But it might have been that we just did that to get the Republican leaders and line up the Republicans, perhaps.
The Woman's Party vs. The Business and Professional Women
PaulHowever it was, Mrs. St. George telephoned over one day and said, "I want to ask the president of the Business and Professional [Women], who lives out in Iowa, and some other representative from them, and I want to ask
She said, "A congressman comes to me, one of my fellow congressmen and says, 'Will you tell me what the situation is about this Equal Rights Amendment and what you think we ought to do.' And he says, 'In the morning bright and early comes somebody from the Business and Professional and says, "We insist, we just insist, all American women want this rider accepted with the great vote it's had in the Senate and quickly passed in the House and sent off for ratification."
'And then in the afternoon comes the lady with the boots, the enormous boots that she wears, and she says, "No, under no circumstances must this measure be allowed to get to ratification until this rider is eliminated." And they say, 'We just don't know what to do.'" And so Mrs. St. George said, "And I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do about this. I'm of course against the rider, but I really don't know what on earth to do with this situation," because of this Marjory Temple that was being employed by the B and P—which is this awful trouble with the B and P; they don't study—you know what the B and P is?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Because they don't really—as you keep saying—"do the homework." It seems to me that they don't, ever.
So Mrs. Powell came down, our national chairman from Columbus. She's a lawyer, very good, and their B and P national chairman came down—I think they call her the national president—came down from Des Moines. She was in real estate or insurance, maybe both, an agent, I suppose you say. And she was absorbed in her own business and didn't know one single thing about it. And trusted this lobbyist that they'd employed.
And another person, I think, went from the B and P and I don't know who it was, don't remember. And I went for the Woman's Party. So we had two and they had two. And there we sat in Mrs. St. George's office maybe three
Well, then we saw it was hopeless. She was employed to do it and she was going to do it. Or maybe she was persuading her employers—persuading the B and P leaders, perhaps. Finally I got up and said, "Well, we mustn't take any more of Mrs. St. George's time, because we don't seem [we're] ever going to come to an agreement. The B and P say that they have almost the number of votes, they're almost to the point of having the vote taken in the House, and they know that they will have within three or four weeks, that they will have the total number, and nothing will cause them to desist. And we say maybe we can't stop it, but nothing is going to cause us to desist from trying to stop it. And we never are going to come to an agreement." So we got up and went out and left Mrs. St. George, who indicated that she stood with us. She didn't make any bones about that.
So when we got outside I remember we stood in the hall for maybe another hour [laughing] going on with the conversation, getting nowhere. And then we invited them to come over to our headquarters in the afternoon and let us try another session and have more people, perhaps, on each, on their side. Because I know their lobbyist wasn't there so it must have been the—I'm almost certain she wasn't there—so we thought the lobbyist whom we had to try to counteract ought to be there.
So they said they would come and they did. And I remember our national treasurer, who hadn't been over in the morning, Mrs. Elizabeth Forbes (she was one of our very good workers) came in. She had a poodle dog
And then I remember Miss Marjory Temple, she said, "Well, no matter what you say we're going to be able to do this. We have practically all the votes now. And," she said, "if you hadn't come down," she said to Mrs. Lindsay and to me, "if you hadn't come down here we'd have had it off to the states by now. But you have put this monkey wrench in by coming down here and holding us up, by seeing all these different people. So we're having some difficulty, but we're sure we have enough votes to overcome it."
So, she gave me this flat statement, "Had you not come, we would have had it on the way now." And we began to see that we were making quite a good deal of headway with Mrs. Irwin, their national president, who really hadn't had the faintest idea of what was going on in the name of the B and P. But I remember that Mrs. Rawalt didn't once open her mouth from the beginning to the end and sat on this piano stool listening to the whole thing. And of course, she was the one in charge in Washington, she was the first vice-chairman, and she evidently hadn't informed Mrs. Irwin at all about the seriousness of the situation and about the reasons for not supporting the Hayden rider. So she was passively at least supporting everything that this lobbyist said.
Well finally, it went on a long time, and I thought it was producing some results because I could see very clearly that Mrs. Irwin wasn't aware of what was being done in the name of her organization and was quite troubled when we began to say, "This is the long history of this Amendment through all these years and years and years, beginning back in 1878 when it was first introduced, and now we suddenly repudiate it." I said, "Generations of women have labored and labored and
So suddenly Mrs. Forbes jumped up and said, "Oh, my dog, I have to look after my dog my poodle." And she always —this always happened, [Laughing.] I don't know whether it happened on purpose, she thought we'd talked long enough or what. So then they all said, "Oh, we didn't know it was so late. We certainly are trespassing on your time," (we'd served them tea and so on) "And we'll just all leave right now." So I begged them not to because I thought we were making such good progress, but they really thought it was a signal from Mrs. Forbes that they'd had enough, and so they departed and we didn't see them again.
Well then, finding out how serious it was—they were stronger than we had imagined they were—of course we redoubled our efforts and they probably redoubled theirs. And anyway we finally got enough of the leaders to agree not to allow it to come up.
Fry
What leaders?
Paul
The leaders in the House. I remember Senator Keating is the one I think of most. He was not senator then, he was a House man then, over on the House side. I don't remember [all] the different people. But we didn't change the B and P, and we didn't change Senator Hayden because he said, "I don't have anything to do with his. I take my orders from the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau."
But the only people we did succeed in changing were people who had a good deal to do with when Congress was adjourned and what the subjects were they would take up before. Both sides, Republican and Democrat, we worked just on them. And we did get enough of them to agree not to bring it up, and it wasn't brought up. And that session came to an end. At the end of that time, pretty soon, Mrs. Irwin went out of office and a new president was elected. And the new president was this Miss Rawalt, that first vice-president.
So Miss Rawalt tells me now, I've seen her recently, she said, "You know, I never was for the Hayden rider." Well, I don't think much of that statement. I think she was. She certainly gave every bit of the—she couldn't be there in charge and have the lobbyist go out every single day, and not be responsible for it. Somebody had
Well, now that's the Hayden rider as it started. Now the next thing that happened was it was introduced again, and again, and again and again and again and again. In every Congress somebody put in the Hayden rider, down to the last Congress. Always we had the Hayden rider.
That's about the end of the Hayden rider, I guess. We had to start, of course, then a campaign with all the women's organizations over the country to educate them on the Hayden rider: what it meant, what it would mean if it went out to the states to ratification, what it would mean if it got in the Constitution, and by the end, there was no—one organization after another finally joined us in opposing the rider.
Fry
Here in 1950 in your September-October issue of Equal Rights it says,
I wonder if also every two years you had this attempt to get in members of Congress who would vote against the Hayden rider."Members pledge congressional candidates for the Equal Rights Amendment without the Hayden rider. Support Senate friends who voted equality straight."Equal Rights, September-October 1950
Paul
Always.
National Organization for Women Enters
PaulFrom the time it was introduced it was one of the obstacles we had to overcome. And even as late as 1966, I guess it must have been, when the NOW [National Organization for Women] organization was formed, this Mrs. Betty Friedan, who's the national president and formed it, at a meeting of the D.C. branch—
I had joined this, I told you I think, the moment it was formed, as soon as it was formed, because I was
Fry
Did you jump to your feet?
Paul
I wasn't there. I didn't go to the meeting at all. And so we had a firsthand statement anyway from the person who was appointed to be the one to keep Senator Hayden in line. And I went back—Mrs. Broy and I went back together—several times to see Senator Hayden and we always found he was stronger and stronger in saying, "Well, I don't know what to do. You know how insistent the Women's Bureau is that they just keep after me to see that I always see that my amendment that they're so pleased with is reintroduced and reintroduced and really this—I just don't exactly know what to do about it. It seems as though I have to do what the Women's Bureau wants. And this is one thing that they want very much. And I've never considered our position to pass on these measures, with a slight change here, a slight change there."
So we pretty soon found out what was happening: that the Women's Bureau was really, actively, determinedly trying to get this Equal Rights Amendment weakened by putting the Hayden rider on so it wouldn't be so much good if it ever did get through: in fact, it'd be what they wanted. Because it was recognizing the whole idea of a different standard for women.
Fry
Protective legislation and so forth.
Paul
Now the last great opposition we had with regard to the Hayden rider finally made us think we would draft something that would incorporate the Hayden rider but make it apply to both sexes. So we did. It said: "This article shall not be construed to impair any rights, benefits or exemptions now or hereafter conferred by law equally upon both sexes." Instead of saying, "—conferred by law upon persons of the female sex." We just changed that.
Fry
Oh, [laughing] and suggested that for a rider?
Paul
No, we said, "If you have to have the rider"—we went to Hayden and said, "If your obligation to the Women's Bureau is such that you can't change this, that you can't refuse your rider and can't withdraw your rider, then make your rider apply, as you were talking about doing, equally to men and women." And so we said, "We've come here with a draft," and we showed it to him. "This article shall not be construed to impair any benefits, rights or exemptions, now or hereafter conferred by law upon persons of the female sex," we say, "—now or hereafter conferred by law equally upon both sexes." Or, "equally without distinction as to sex," some such word. "Without distinction as to sex" perhaps, I'm not sure, So we said, "This is our idea. Will you accept it?" And Senator Hayden said, "Well, I of course am always telling you am not a lawyer, but I can't see anything in the world that's the matter with that. And of course we don't want any exemptions and so on deprived because of sex. It applies to both sexes." So he said, "I'll send this up or I'll telephone this up and ask the drafting clerk. The best drafting clerk up there is the one from Sweden who's a very fine person and thoroughly understands this point of view of equality of sexes, and I'll call up and ask him to receive you."
So we went up and talked to this man and said, "Now this we think might be a way to unite everybody because it certainly would be accepted by all the real equalitarians
And so he said, "All right, I'll study it and I'll make a report in about a week." So he called up and told us he had made his report and sent it down to Senator Hayden, saying that as far as he could see, it couldn't be better drafted; it was drafted, as far as the wording we used, to express what we had in mind. If that was what Senator Hayden had in mind, he could go forward with it as far as the drafters were concerned. So Senator Hayden was prepared, I guess, to do it. He seemed to be.
And then we went to see him again and he said, "Well, you know, I've been called up by the Women's Bureau, and they say they want no change in the Hayden rider. It must be just as they had drafted it," just as he had presented it in the beginning. We don't know who did that original drafting or whoever started this whole business. We've still never found out and Hayden never found out. So there we were, we were saddled with it.
Well, then, this Mrs. Peterson came into the picture. She was made the director of the Women's Bureau and assistant secretary of labor—given all authority in this whole field, what was done on anything, any measure like this. And she certainly couldn't have been more active in opposing it. So one night, I was telephoned to by a person in the Women's Bureau who had been very helpful to us, and what's her name? Catherine East, you may have heard of her. She's now the executive secretary of the Status of Women Commission, appointed by President Kennedy and later continued by President Nixon. The national executive director of that commission.
So she called me up and—I'd never seen her or met her, but I'd known by telephoning to her that she was always very cooperative and she seemed to be very friendly in the Women's Bureau and most of the people weren't. And so she said, "I'd like to come up and bring somebody to talk about this amendment." And the person she brought, although I'd never seen her, but she brought in Mary Eastwood, who was one of these three people appointed by Mrs. Friedan to draw up for NOW a new amendment because a new era required a new amendment [laughing]. So Mary Eastwood, the first time I ever saw her told me she was employed in the Justice Department,
I said, "I don't think it requires a new amendment at all. We'd used the old one in the suffrage campaign, we didn't change it in any possible way. We had the same problem of people thinking they could write a better one, and it's gone through and it's worked successfully and I think this will have the same luck if we can stick together."
So Mary Eastwood became from that time on a very stalwart supporter. And we had the other person, whoever she was. So we had two on the committee of three that stood for the old amendment. And then the whole question was presented by the D.C. branch to the national convention which met that year—
Fry
Of NOW?
Paul
National convention of NOW, their first national
Fry
[Laughing.] Maybe you were better off when they wanted another amendment.
Paul
What they have done, you see, for instance, going to the legislatures and insisting on talking all the time not about equality for women but talking about these other subjects, which gets the men all mixed up, and they think that—
Fry
You mean, like abortion and—
Paul
Yes. Because this happens all the time, and I don't know exactly [laughing] how to meet it. Well now, I guess that's about the Hayden rider. You know everything.
When I was telling you about Mrs. Dorothy Greuning, I was telling you about going out to meet with Mrs. Peterson. That was the day that she changed.
1970-1971: Victory in Congress
Hayden and Anti-Draft Riders
FrySo this brings us up to about 1970, is that right? Alice, remember those riders that were put on it, I guess, in 1971 in the House Judiciary Subcommittee about exempting women from the draft? There was that Hayden rider on it, and there was another to the effect that this should not be construed to mean that women should be subject to military duty.
Paul
Was that put in as an amendment? I don't remember.
Fry
Yes, that was one rider on it.
Paul
I don't remember anybody proposing that. It was never put on, of course.
Fry
It never did make it out of the full Committee. The reason it sticks in my mind is because I just happened to be there in June of 1971 when it was voted out of subcommittee, but—
Paul
Which committee?
Fry
House Judiciary Subcommittee, which Don Edwards headed. And I remember I was so impressed with all of the ways that you used to get that bill back into subcommittee to be reconsidered and get those riders off.
I happened to arrive at Don Edwards' office just as they got the bad news. It had passed by one vote in the subcommittee, I believe, and to everyone's surprise.
Paul
Had it?
Fry
Yes, and everyone had thought that it was going to be
Paul
You know, we didn't want it to get out of the Committee at all, you remember.
Fry
I remember you were trying to stop it. Because that was the same as the Martha Griffiths-Bayh version too.
Paul
Yes, that's the reason we didn't want that to get out of committee.
Objections to the Griffiths-Bayh Change in Wording
PaulThe last thing Bayh had proposed in 1970 when it went through the House, he had proposed to amend the [ERA]. Remember he got up and gave a speech saying, "We can't get the Equal Rights Amendment through the Senate in the [form] it went through the House, and so I am proposing to amend by substitution"—that means substitute a new one for the old one—" the insertion of something in the Fourteenth Amendment," which was really an amendment to the Fourteenth Amendment.
Fry
I remember that. Wasn't that in the fall? And Ted Kennedy talked about doing it too—
Paul
And so then he said, "I will not ask for any vote on it today or discussion of it today but it will go over to the lame duck session [late 1976] which is going to meet in a month"—or something—"and then it will be the first order of business." You may remember.
And so it was the first order of business, and up got Mr. [Ted] Kennedy, who was then the Democratic whip (not now, but he was then.) and he said, "For Senator Bayh, I wish to ask unanimous consent to postpone the first order of business, which is the equal rights for women amendment substitute of Mr. Bayh's, because of more pressing business now before us, and to have it temporarily postponed." And then [we had] this temporary postponement. We kept working all the time.
We had enough votes, we knew, to carry the original
Fry
No, I wasn't.
Paul
So one day she went up to the Senate and sent in her card and called Senator [Mike] Mansfield. Well, most people, of course, don't call the majority leader, [laughter] but she said that she had to make plans for some kind of a reception or dinner or party that she wanted to give to this whole Senate, now that they were going to pass it—it had just gone through the House [with a huge majority], and it looked as though it was going to go through the Senate. And I guess this was before the lame duck session, must have been before. Bayh got up and made his motion to substitute.
And he asked for unanimous consent the night before. No, it was [Sam J.] Ervin who asked for unanimous consent the night before, to propose an amendment to the pending Equal Rights Amendment. And you know all you have to do to stop it is for one hand to go up and say, "I object." Then there isn't unanimous consent and that ends it. And that's what Bayh, who'd arrogated to himself the management of the whole campaign, should have done, but he didn't. And so—there were very few senators left, nearly everybody had gone home—and so the handful or more that were left said nothing and so whoever was presiding announced, "Well, by unanimous consent, Senator Ervin will be given the floor at eleven o'clock"—or some definite time that he'd asked for—"in the morning to present his amendment."
And that's where all the trouble began. It was merely because Bayh, either intentionally or through negligence or whatever reason, didn't oppose it. It was so simple to prevent Ervin from ever getting the floor because you can't get the floor excepting by unanimous consent all out of order when he had no reason to be doing this.
So Mrs. [Cecil] Broy, who was always a very great admirer of Mr. Bayh, one day said, "I just want you to not be so prejudiced against Mr. Bayh. I think you're all wrong on this. I think his heart is in this, trying to put the Amendment through, and I wish you'd
So to please her, I said I would. And I went with her. She made the appointment. And so Mr. [Mode?] began to say how strongly Mr. Bayh felt in support of our measure and wanted it to go through but there were all these difficulties and you had to be practical and so on and this was the best that could be done. And I said, "Well, will you just explain to me why in the whole world—we didn't ask Mr. Bayh to be our leader, we asked Mr. McCarthy to lead, and Bayh wanted to do it and Mr. McCarthy stepped aside and let Bayh do it, because he was chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee in the Senate. And so he just was representing us and we couldn't help ourselves, apparently. And why, when he was taking that responsibility, did he allow Mr. Ervin to introduce his amendment—by unanimous consent when all he had to do [to block it] was raise his hand?
Well, Mr. [Mode?] said, "Mr. Bayh wasn't there at that moment and it was the fault of Mr. [probably Marlowe W.] Cook." Well, I don't know whether Bayh was present or not, but anyway he was in the city , he was available to be present. And he should have been there minding or have some faithful person there managing it.
Fry
That was before the last session?
Paul
That was before the lame duck session.
Then in the [1970] lame duck session when—I told you—that Kennedy got up and said, "We'd like to temporarily postpone the Equal Rights Amendment" which was a substitute, not our own amendment at all, but was a substitute amendment that he had gotten—by unanimous consent he had then gotten this through, and it wiped out our amendment; there was no amendment left of ours . And he was—his amendment was to change the Fourteenth Amendment.
So when we were trying to have it brought up, we thought, "Still we have a majority here pledged for the real amendment, and by some way or other they can certainly get rid of Mr. Bayh's substitute by voting it down." Well then Mr. Bayh said, to all the women who went to him, and all the NOW people—that's when they began to make themselves, I thought, a supporting group for Bayh and I thought they didn't understand what they were doing really. Especially Mrs . [Carol] Burris if
Fry
Yes, she was there when I was there.
Paul
Well, she was taking the lead with these people and I don't think she paused long enough to know what on earth it was she was doing. She was all for action, all for activity, always saying, "We want action." That was her [laughing]—no matter what the action was, she seemed to want it. So Mr. Bayh would reply to everybody, "Well, never mind, the regular session's almost here in January. Then we'll start fresh and I will introduce the Amendment again," my—our original amendment. So no one , I guess, was aware—and that was excepting perhaps maybe Mrs. Rawalt, who worked with him all the time—was aware of what he was doing. So when he got up—I guess it was maybe a week or two before we discovered that he'd changed the Amendment, because the Amendment [itself] was intact and we didn't realize that he'd changed the enforcement part.
Fry
Section Two.
74. The Bayh-Griffiths version referred to enforcement "by Congress" and omitted "and the several states." A time limit of seven years was also added for ratification.
Paul
And at the same time had gotten Mrs. Griffiths to introduce the same [Bayh version], and almost everybody thought it was the same [original version] in the House.
Fry
And I guess that was when I came to help lobby, in June, 1971. The House Judiciary Subcommittee staff told me that the reason we should leave it alone as the Bayh-Griffiths version was that the version had been agreed on by the Senate supporters and the House supporters, and it would work better because the conference committee, then, would not have any problem.
Paul
You don't have a conference committee if they're introduced the same [in both houses].
Fry
That's what they were saying: that they wanted to avoid a conference committee, because they felt that—
Paul
They wanted to, naturally.
Keeping it in Subcommittee
PaulYou know, I was the one who called you and asked you to come, do you remember?"
75. For the last week of June, 1971.
Fry
You're talking about Don Edwards as the chairman of the subcommittee, and Celler as the chairman of the full Committee.
Paul
So it had to go to Celler if it left Don Edwards. The only way we could [do it was to] keep it away from Celler. We knew that Celler would push through the Bayh amendment. That was the only way we could do it, was to keep it in the sub. And you know, we did keep it in the sub until after Labor Day, I think it was.
Fry
Yes, I was surprised at how long it stayed there. [Laughing.]
Paul
I know, but I mean it didn't stay there of its own. It stayed there by our getting enough people to keep it there, as you well know. You know that. It's the only way it could be done.
Fry
I didn't know it firsthand, because I had to return to California the first part of July [1971]. But I was quite sure that this was your work, when I read the reports.
Paul
I mean what you were starting , you see, to do, to try to keep it there, we did succeed. We did it by going to
Then we started in again to try to keep it from getting out of Don Edwards' hands. And we didn't have you there. We didn't have very good luck with Don Edwards, you see, because none of us knew him personally.
And I went—I just worked morning, noon, and night, all night and all day, trying to keep it from coming up before Labor Day. And then I'd planned to go up to this little cottage here, and I had this housekeeper who went up with me, Mrs.—made life very easy when I had her, until she just died, I told you—Mrs. Ewing. And so as soon as we staved it off and it wasn't going to come up until after Labor Day, that much was done, then I came up here to try to get the house opened again and see that it didn't go to destruction again by being left alone.
Disagreement Within NWP
PaulAnd when I went down [to Washington] after Labor Day, as soon as I—I thought it was all fixed and the work of keeping it from coming up would continue even if I was not there. So when I went down, almost the first thing I discovered was that our own headquarters group were urging an immediate vote, that it be brought up for a vote.
Fry
On that version, on the Bayh version?
Paul
And I remember Mrs. Longwell. One night I made an appointment, just as soon as I got back almost, about an article for the Swarthmore Alumni paper. Somebody had come down and tried to write an article about the whole equal rights movement and so on and she'd talked to Mabel Vernon and to me as graduates. (She took the alumni paper.) I think it was the only one she'd talked to. And then she'd gone home and written the article, and it was a very poor article. She probably did her best, but in one or two interviews, you know you can't learn very much about a movement, and she hardly could have made many more mistakes in it than
So I'd rewritten—I'd first of all tried to get Mabel to correct this and Mabel didn't want to do it. So finally I said, "Well, I will do it," and when I started to do it, I thought, "The easiest thing is to write a new article." And I know when I did it and gave it to Mabel and Consuelo to work on also, Consuelo said, "Goodness, your article is a hundred times better than this one that she sent down to us. And certainly we can probably get her to use it." And then she said, "I'm not going to say it was a hundred times better; I think it's a thousand times better." Which shows you how awful her article was.
I changed it and said in my article—[pause] the topic was "Swarthmore and the Equal Rights Amendment," you see, that we were supposed to be writing about. So instead of having it just little dinky points, (it was no good at all, it really was a thousand times [laughing] worse than mine) I started with—said the first efforts made in the founding of Swarthmore was made when Lucretia Mott was one of the leaders of the feminist movement in our country and was on the committee that raised the money and turned the first piece of sod for the building of the college hall and so on. And [one] could identify our college with the whole movement beginning with Lucretia Mott when she was this great influence there, then on down to Amelia Walker, who was before my time and who'd become our national chairman and was continuing this work, exactly the same thing as Lucretia Mott had done. She was following Amelia Walker in these things you've been telling me. And then Mabel Vernon, and then myself, and then another person, Martha Moore, who'd been in prison with us, who'd been a Swarthmore graduate—just to show that this was a principle of the Quaker religion and that every one of these people had graduated Swarthmore or been at Swartmore, or had anything to do with Swarthmore, from Lucretia Mott down to our present time. Well, I thought that was a very good article [laughing]. But anyway, evidently the editor didn't think so.
So Mabel Vernon was more concerned about it than I was; I thought, well, we've done our best, we've given them all the facts and if they don't want it, all right. But she was very determined, so she phoned and said she'd come up, a day or two after I got back, and we'd go over together and see if together we couldn't take some action that would cause them to use all these
So when Mabel arrived—and Consuelo came with her— almost the same moment came in Mrs. [Carol] Burris
76. At this time, Burris was embarking on the development of what later became known as the Women's Lobby.
Fry
No.
Paul
—and sat herself down—I don't want this recorded, this is just trifling gossip, I guess—so then Mrs. Longwell, I would say, was silent perhaps most of the evening. But for two hours, Mrs. Burris (and I know it was two hours because Mrs. Longwell said it was; she evidently timed it) for two hours Mrs. Burris delivered a speech and the speech was—gave nobody a chance to interrupt or say anything, and she said, "This is all fixed and all arranged that this vote is going to be taken in the House Judiciary Committee"—full committee. And this, you see, was just after the Labor Day extension was exhausted. We now were starting in again, had to make another extension, which I had thought they were all going to do, having won the first one.
She said, "We have gone there, we have just invaded Mr. Don Week's office and we're"—
Fry
You mean Don Edwards'?
Paul
"Don Edwards' office. We've surrounded it. We have people there every moment and everyone is saying, 'An immediate vote! We demand action! [Thumping table.] We're standing for action for now, right now. We are the NOW women, we went everything right away.'" Over and over she said, "This and this is what has got to happen. And we don't want you to come bac k and you've already started , we find you've started, you're already
But her questions were all rather expressing doubts, as to why she thought she'd get through the Amendment we'd all stood for and so on, by this process of having it taken up right now. And we'd had this one victory and therefore—And [Mrs. Burris would say] "It's impossible, you cannot do such a thing, you cannot do it, you cannot have any effect on Mr. Edwards, it's going to be done, it's all arranged," and so on.
And I really didn't do anything but sit and listen, because I was hoping every minute she'd stop and get up and go out. I didn't know why she'd come, why she was making this speech to me. I'd never known her, you see, very well. I just didn't know what it was all about.
And finally she went. And it was so late that Miss Vernon said, "Well, I can't begin on the Swarthmore article now at this late date, so we'll go home too." So she got up and Consuelo went and Mrs. Longwell went. I did continue, you know, right afterwards, because I thought we could probably do it by getting leaders of—it was only a question of postponing, not of doing anything, but of postponing. That's usually pretty easy to accomplish because people are more ready to postpone than they are to do something positive usually.
So I was proceeding happily [laughing] for maybe a day, talking to the same people who had helped us to get the first postponement, when in came Mrs. Longwell. And she said,
"I—understand that you're asking people to have this postponed again. Well, how can you do such a thing? You heard Mrs. Burris and Miss Vernon; they both came here to urge you not to do this."
And I said, "Well, certainly Miss Vernon didn't.
"Well," she said, "she came in the same time with Mrs. Burris."
And I said, "I know very well she came at the same time, but I had an appointment with Miss Vernon. She and Consuelo came up about an article that we are somewhat responsible for in the Swarthmore magazine, and we had to do something about it. So she came. She happened to come exactly the same moment that you came and Mrs. Burris came, but she didn't come for the same purpose. She didn't know anything about what you were talking about. She didn't come to argue with me, as Mrs. Burris did."
"Well, you heard Mrs. Burris. I think when Miss Vernon came at the same time, that was what she was trying to say to you, too." And, "You have no right, you have absolutely no right to come here. Here we've made this plan. We're sure we can achieve it. We can have a vote taken now, in the House Judiciary Committee."
And I said, "Well, of course, I know you can have it taken now. The hard thing is to see it is not taken now. There is no difficulty about having it taken now."
So then, I finally said, "Well—I can see that—I don't know how you can possibly do this after the vote that the whole [NWP] council took not to have anything to do with this [Bayh] amendment. The whole council meeting before I went up to [Connecticut]—I put the motion myself and it went through unanimously." I said, "You all voted not to do what you're now doing ."
Fry
Oh yes, I remember that.
Paul
Well, you can't probably remember it because you weren't there.
Fry
I remember the report that the vote had been taken, at the time.
Paul
So, I said, "Well, you are all disregarding the vote that was taken and you're the national chairman. And I don't know what to do. I don't want to start and make a difficulty for you as national chairman and to cause a division in the organization. So I think probably the best thing is for me to just withdraw from it, not go
Alice Paul Drops Out
PaulWell, I did withdraw. I didn't ask another person. I didn't go forward with it at all. I just dropped out of it.
And then they had the vote and of course they voted out the [Bayh-]Griffiths measure. And now you see, when Mrs. Longwell, when she sees the difficulty, this very difficulty about the states' rights business and so on down there in Alabama, she just gives up the fight. You notice she said, "I'm leaving now"—
Fry
Oh, in her letter today.
Paul
Yes.
Fry
She said she thought she'd found a person there to head up the fight.
Paul
I know, but we maybe find one woman or two or a thousand women, but the thing is to stay when you undertake these difficult things and get it done.
Fry
She said it was really very difficult.
Paul
She went down to do this, and she finds what we told her all the difficulties there would be.
Fry
Well, you were there when it passed the House and the Senate? Were you in Washington when it passed?
Paul
When it passed the House the second time? Yes. And when it passed a second time, when it was introduced a second time in this version, in the [Bayh-]Griffiths version, we thought—I thought—we could possibly find somebody who would have enough interest and enough power to [substitute their previous vote on the original version]. But it did come up [on the floor] when we couldn't prevent it from coming up, which is what I had hoped we could do. When it was certain to come up, I thought we might find someone who would move to substitute their previous vote [for] the [original] amendment they'd just adopted, to reaffirm their previous
First of all, we knew we couldn't get Mrs. Griffiths to do it. She would have been the logical person—for her to say, "I would like to withdraw this version in favor of the one you've all voted for." The person who really took the greatest, I think, part in trying to bring this to pass and to find somebody was Mary Kennedy. And she found a man named Mr. Myers who was a congressman who simply couldn't conceive why, when they had voted one measure a few months ago, they should suddenly be asked to vote another version which—they had all thought the first version was right or they wouldn't have voted for it. And why in the world should they be asked to vote another one because the Senate, a senator, had made this change over in the Senate.
Well, so he undertook to take a poll of the whole House and see if he could—maybe you know of this, his name was Mr. Myers
77. Probably John Thomas Myers, Republican of Virginia in Ninetieth and Ninety-first Congress.
Fry
No, I only know she was an old faithful worker. [Laughter.]
Paul
No, no, no. not an old worker; she was a congresswoman from New Jersey, and one of the people who was the strongest that we had in all of Congress for the Equal Rights Amendment and a great co-worker with Mrs. St. George and the other people who had brought it to this stage.
And she said, "You know that you don't have to
So then Mr. Myers called me up the morning it was to come up. And he said, "Now I've taken a poll of the whole House, pretty well, so I know what's happening." And he said almost the same thing. He said, "I don't think, as much as I'm for this, and I certainly don't like to be announced, as I have been announced, as wanting to go back to the original one and then not carry it through, but I find it is all tied up. And I don't know what at this late date I can do to change it."
And I said, "Well, if you can't, we wouldn't want you to move to bring it up in the original form and then have your motion defeated because it would be very bad for us in every way. Now at least we can say this was the sentiment, this was the way the people felt."
Fry
You had that overwhelming vote record on it in the House the previous year.
Paul
Yes. And so I said, "Well, that's all right. We'll understand if you think it's better not to do it."
And he said, "I think it's impossible to change it. I don't know why it's impossible. But for some reason or other it's been so consolidated, we can't do it." So we lost it [the original version], you see.
I don't yet know how Bayh manages to do all these things.
Fry
Well, maybe some day we can piece together the whole story.
But I don't believe it's Bayh that's doing it, at all. I think that there's some master mind that's planning all these things and making use of Mr. Bayh.
Fry
Some interest group?
Paul
Some interest group perhaps. Somebody who wants its defeat, anyway. That's it. Is it time for you to go?
Fry
Yes, it is.
Paul
I think you are looking as though you are ready for bed.
[Break. Tape off.]
Coup d'Etat within the Woman's Party 1946-1947
Draft RidersElection Dispute in 1945
FryNow last night we ended by bringing the equal rights struggle up to date, and I thought that first priority this morning would be that 1945 challenge to the Woman's Party election that you said you wanted to be sure and tell me about before I left. I have some research here on that that might help.
Paul
Now what was the 1945 that you were talking about? What point was there in the 1945?
Fry
The challenge to the Woman's Party election. Remember that, when a group challenged the legality of an election?
Paul
I hadn't thought about putting that in at all. You think that's important?
Fry
You told me you wanted to put that in, at least I understood you to say that. Because you've already alluded to it a couple of times and you said, "Well, we'll talk about that later."
Paul
That of course was a very—it wasn't exactly a challenge to the election. Of course, we thought it was an effort of the Communist party to take over our organization, by bringing a lawsuit. You see, we were in the courts and it's all in the Equal Rights magazine where it will be [found] written up in the greatest detail and length.
Fry
I have that.
Paul
It was in—the person I think who signed most of those
Fry
No, you didn't. We haven't talked about it.
Paul
Anyway, a suit was filed against us in the name of the National Woman's Party against Emma Guffey Miller,
78. Mrs. Miller was also a National Democratic Committeewoman at this time.
Fry
Anita Pollitzer was the contested leader?
Paul
Well, against her, but it was a suit filed against every person on the new board that had been elected. A suit brought in the name of the National Woman's Party and the first one that was served on anybody, the complaint they call them, was served by a marshall on Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller. She was rather a fairly new person in our ranks but had gradually come to the point where she was willing even to go—first she wasn't even willing to be identified with us, and then finally she came on the national board. One of the first things that [laughing] happened after she came on the national board—she was living up with her brother, Senator Guffey, keeping house for him, her husband having died and her children having grown up, she lived there with him. And another sister lived with Senator Guffey. Senator Guffey wasn't married. So, one night—they lived fairly out in the suburbs—and a very, very snowy night a marshall arrived and I think they had a Filipino or a Japanese butler, and he went out to the door and they handed him this complaint and he accepted it, of course. He was really accepting it for Mrs. Miller; he didn't know a single thing about what was happening. So he came in [laughing] and with the paper, and therefore she had been officially served with this complaint, demanding of Mrs. Miller as one member of the national board—the [so-called] National Woman's Party demanded that Mrs. Miller hand over as one member of this board that [according to the insurgents] was "pretending: to be the board of the National Woman's Party, hand over to the ["real"] National Woman's Party all property
Fry
It was? There wasn't anything that led up to this?
Paul
Well, we didn't know that they were going to bring a law suit. We knew that it was a lot of—we had a paid secretary named Caroline Lexow Babcock and she was our executive secretary.
I just don't want this to go down in history any more than it has gone down.
Fry
Well, it needs to be explained because here's all the newspaper stories on it and—
Paul
Well, then you do know about it all.
Fry
I just got these clippings from Anita Pollitzer.
Paul
Oh, you did?
Fry
Yes, this was one of the things that she had preserved. I guess she had planned to put this in her write-up of the Woman's Party history, and so she asked me to get some copies made for her and I did.
Paul
What sort of thing is it then? Can you give me an idea of what kind of papers?
Fry
Christian Science Monitor , Washington Evening Star, Washington Post, New York Times, Baltimore News Post, and a Charleston, South Carolina, paper.
79. See Appendix
Paul
Well, you know, it's very well she kept all that. I didn't know she had. Is that all she had on the subject?
Fry
Yes. You know where it was? It was folded up inside her copy of Inez Haynes Irwin's book, in a little plastic folder, and was being preserved there.
Paul
Well, did she tell you anything about it?
No, she couldn't tell me about it, Alice, because she wasn't able to talk that much. So she wanted me to take that, and I didn't want to take the originals because they were old and crumbly. So I made a Xerox for her and one for me.
Paul
Oh, you did. How wonderful.
Fry
So she got it, and now I have it.
Paul
That'll give the whole—
Fry
Well, it doesn't. All of these stories go something like "Anita Pollitzer, national chairman of the National Woman's Party, and other present incumbents are now the legal officers of the party."
Paul
That's after we won.
Fry
Yes. All of this is late November and early December, 1947.
Paul
Well, that's when we won.
Fry
—which is the story of when you won. So what I need to know is what happened before that.
Paul
Well, you'll find it written up in great detail by an absolutely officially-speaking-for-us national secretary, Mabel Griswold, in the Equal Rights magazine .
80. See Equal Rights, January-February, 1947, for a chronology of previous four months' events.
Fry
And I read that.
Paul
You see, the suit was filed, say, in February, 1947, and I know it was decided just before Thanksgiving because I remember thinking what an unhappy Thanksgiving we would have if it was decided against us. So you see it was a long, long trial going on and on and on and on and on and on.
Now I'll tell you the gist of it all.
We discovered we didn't even know what was going on. We had this paid secretary and we discovered that
But I went—you see, after this election had occurred and Anita had been made the national chairman [for two years] by this vote by mail [October, 1945], I stayed on all the time to try to help her because she was living up in New York. She had to come down and leave her husband and make lots of changes in her own life, which kept her away a little part of the time. [Pause.]
Well, this agitation—exactly what, we never did know what it was about—and I gained the impression from the people I heard about and learned some things about, was that Miss Pollitzer, who had been—it's impossible to say how much the Woman's Party owed to her and the woman movement owed to her. But of course, she was pronouncedly Jewish and her grandfather was a rabbi and she was from a long, long line of rabbis and so on. And very—she wasn't a Jewess, you know, who tried to conceal she was a Jewess, she was one that was clearly very proud of her Jewish heritage. And her family was certainly distinguished surgeons and doctors in this country, at the very top of their profession. And they'd been here a long time in the country.
Well, I don't know whether that was a cause—I don't yet know, or have any real idea why this insurrection broke out, and it was certainly largely directed against me because I was identified completely with this Miss Pollitzer. We had a nominating committee headed by Mrs. Elizabeth Forbes you remember our national treasurer. And she was pursued and hounded to have a certain person named Dorothy Shipley Granger made the new chairman and she didn't think—Mrs. Granger came from Baltimore where Mrs. Forbes' family had lived a long time, and she didn't—and I had been the temporary chairman, as I told you; was the outgoing chairman.
So they asked Mrs. Harvey [Anna Kelton] Wiley, who had been a previous chairman and was beloved by everybody and trusted by everybody. Mrs. Wiley had been, I think for maybe two terms, the national chairman. And she was having a lot of difficulty that her son had gotten into—different things and she had personal problems and so on—so that she wanted to lay down the burden of being the chairman. And all the time she'd been chairman, she'd been the editor—
When Mrs. Wiley refused—just the chairmanship, she didn't refuse anything else—but she didn't want to continue to have to edit the paper. She just wanted to have more leisure for her family and for herself and her own things.
So then they asked Anita Pollitzer, and Anita Pollitzer said, "Well, if Mrs. Wiley will take it I will support her and work for her and assist her and so on, as I've always helped the chairman, whoever the chairman is. If she absolutely will not take it and can't be persuaded to take it, then I will take it."
So [1945] Mrs. Forbes got out this ballot by mail, which we'd never done before but still all the organization nearly in the country were doing it, and practically everybody voted for the ticket that was presented by the nominating committee, which was Miss Pollitzer and her general board; there was not much change on the board. And so she was considered elected and she began to serve as chairman.
And then, prior to this election, while it was going on, we'll say in the month perhaps that the people had to get back their ballots, in that period, Mrs. Wiley was prevailed upon by somebody, we don't know how it happened. Mrs. Wiley was that kind of a person: people always said, "Well, the last person who talks Mrs. Wiley always has Mrs. Wiley's agreement." So the last person, [laughter] whoever the person was,
And so her name was put up by whatever this little group was that was in existence, though we hadn't known it was in existence, and sent to all the membership. Submitting Mrs. Wiley's name. Well, had Mrs. Wiley's name been submitted in the very beginning, of course, she would have gone out on the official ballot sent by the nominating committee. But since the nominating committee sent Miss Pollitzer's name out, then this had to go from— in an informal way. Now they rejoiced to say that Mrs. Wiley, who had been such a gallant soldier in this movement, had allowed her name to be put up, and a letter was sent by whoever these people were—and I think that's all in the Equal Rights magazine there, who sent this out— I don't know, I don't remember. And so only, well, a scattering response came in from people who hadn't already voted for Anita, saying that they would support Mrs. Wiley.
So we had two candidates as it turned out, and Mrs. Wiley had just a tiny little group. But of course had [she] been [the nominee] in the beginning, she would have had [the vote of] everybody, because she would have been on the special ballot, and there was no question that everybody in the whole organization was grateful to her for all she'd done and full of trust and confidence in what she would do. But I think they had the same feeling for Anita. I never knew anybody in the country—all over the world where she went, she left friends and admirers, and people certainly had great trust in her. How on earth this came to be, I haven't the faintest, the faintest idea.
While all this was happening, one day Anita Pollitzer and I went over to see Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, who had recently more or less joined us and we knew didn't know anything, and we thought anybody who's trying to make this defection will certainly go to Mrs. Miller. And she was one of the great assets that we had when she finally came because they were a power in the Democratic party, being the national committeewoman for the Democratic party. So we had a really, a very good and valuable addition to our campaign in getting
So we went to see her and I remember so vividly we sat there and talked to Mrs. Miller, told her the whole situation, and she said, "Well, I don't of course know very much about anything yet, but I certainly know Miss Pollitzer and have worked with her and I'll support her completely and absolutely, you can count on me."
And it was a good thing we did go because pretty soon they began on Mrs. Miller, but she didn't waver.
And then, suddenly, which we didn't know they were going to do, they filed a suit, this group. And when you'd say, who were they, well, they'd say, "We're the National Woman's Party." And it was most extraordinarily mysterious. [Laughing.] And so poor Mrs. Miller, whom we just wanted to join our ranks in every possible way, suddenly one night had this disgrace (to poor Senator Guffey, [laughing] and to Mrs. Miller the national committeewoman) to receive a complaint brought in by their Japanese or their Chinese or whatever the man was— Filipino or something—and giving it to Mrs. Miller. Here is an officer serving you with this paper, ordering you to surrender all the money and everything that you're holding from the Woman's Party "illegally and willfully" and so on. So you know it was a great shock [laughing]—terrible shock to Mrs. Miller. And then we discovered they were going to serve everybody. So we closed the headquarters.
[Interruption.]
I remember there was one member of our board, Dr. Florence Armstrong, who was working in the government and so she lived out in Alexandria, I guess it was, just outside of Washington. And so she invited everybody who was on the national board, as many as they wanted to come, to her small little house that she had. She lived there all by herself. And she invited them to come whenever they came to Washington, not at the headquarters because they might suddenly be served with this paper, but to stay out there with her.
And so I went out, when I went down to Washington, I went out and stayed with her. And our first vice-chairman, Mrs. Clara Snell Wolfe, went out and stayed there the same time I did. So we had this sort of second little headquarters that we thought we might be safer in that nobody would know we were there.
And then we just closed the headquarters itself, as far as the door went; we had a tiny little staff of very few people. We made it clear that they mustn't open the door to anybody at this moment, because it would be probably trying to serve a paper on somebody who was there. What did they turn around and do? [Laughing.] Serve the papers on the stenographers and on the bookkeeper, and I think the houseman, sort of like Charlie,
81. Alice Paul's carpenter/handy man who had been taking care of her Ridgefield cottage and lake property for over fifteen years—since he was a boy.
Fry
They did open the door.
Paul
Well, but they didn't open the door to let anybody who was on the board be served. We never dreamed that they would be serving the papers on all the people who had no official connection except they happened to be employed there for the moment. But they all were very good sports. They all [laughing], I think, were sort of thrilled at being part of the whole war that seemed to be arising.
And so since I wasn't there and they didn't know I was there, I was served (and I didn't know about it for a long, long time) by what they call publication, by putting a notice in the paper, where I was living up in Vermont. So my little Vermont paper had this very same complaint. I guess nobody ever saw it up there and I didn't know it was there until, I guess the whole lawsuit was over before I ever discovered that I'd been served by publication. Guess it was a matter that got in the courts—must have been brought up how each one of us had been legally served.
So then we asked Burnita Shelton Matthews, who'd been so long doing all our legal work for us, if she would act as our representative. We had no lawyer. Of course, we had George Gordon Battle in the past, but that was all on the legal part of the wording of the Amendment and so on, and on getting the headquarters. I don't know whether he'd died before this occurred or not. I guess he had probably. So we didn't think about anybody but Burnita.
Defectors
Anna Kelton Wiley
PaulAnd she said that she didn't want to take the case—she'd now become quite an independent lawyer and trying to build up and succeeding pretty well in building up her own law office—because two of the people that were on the side that brought the suit were connected too closely with her. One was Mrs. Harvey Wiley and again it was the last person who talked to her. How on earth she ever got into this is past human understanding. It's impossible to think anybody as good, really as fundamentally good a woman as Mrs. Harvey Wiley could have let herself be used, but she did. And as one of the people who was in the suit against us. The second one was the national treasurer, Miss Laura [M.] Berrien and the third one was the national secretary, Mrs. [Dr.] Margaret Sebree. Well, these people were really Woman's Party people. Now we don't know yet what happened to them. And the fourth one was Doris Stevens.
Fry
That one is surprising!
Paul
So we don't know, maybe in reading it back in this Equal Rights because I've never read the account since. I know that Mabel Griswold wrote it and I knew it would be all right, but we don't know what made them do it. But I think it was some personal grievance probably on each one's part. Excepting I don't think Mrs. Wiley ever had any grievance, but I think she'd gotten herself put up as the rival to Miss Pollitzer and somehow or other she was persuaded to join in this suit.
Doris Stevens
PaulWith regard to Miss Stevens, we did know—we knew pretty well what had happened. You see, when Mrs. Belmont's will was up for probate, Miss Stevens got a lawyer whose name was Frank Wallace [?] or Walsh [?] if you've ever heard of him, but he was a very well known lawyer and he'd been very, very, very strong in helping the Woman's Party through the years. So we knew him very well. And Doris knew him in that way. So she got him
Fry
No, I've never heard this before.
Paul
You'll find it, I think, all in the Equal Rights magazine if you read it. But anyway, this is what happened: He sent his son, Frank Walsh sent his son, when he took the case for Doris, and he only knew Doris because he'd met Doris through the rest of us, through our knowing and working with Mr. Walsh, and so of course he accepted her as one of our people when she asked him to represent her in contesting the will of Mrs. Belmont. She was a very convincing and plausible person and she succeeded somehow in getting him. But he sent his son around the country, which was the first that I knew anything about it, because different people phoned me and said, "Well, Frank Walsh's son has just been here and he's bringing this suit to contest Mrs. Belmont's will and the ground that he's contesting it on is that you have used undue influence"—I had used undue influence to have Mrs. Belmont not leave any money to Doris Stevens! Well, and I remember one person after another said, "Well, this is the most extraordinary visit I've just had from Mr. Frank Walsh's son wanting me to come down and testify at the probate hearing that I know that you had the confidence of Mrs. Belmont and that you prevailed upon her not to leave any money to Doris Stevens."
Well, nobody was more surprised [laughing] than I, and finally the day of the probate court's hearing of this will occurred in New York, a certain day. And I was called up very early the next morning by Mrs. Belmont's secretary, who'd been over there with Mrs. Belmont for some years and her sister had gone to prison with us, and the whole family had always supported us, and then we had helped to get this position for this young girl, named Young, Mary Young, I think she was. (Anyway, she was a Miss Young, and I think she was Mary Young.) She'd stayed over with Mrs. Belmont say a year or two and had a very good position as a secretary, very well paid. And so she called me up, and I knew her of course, pretty well, not very well, but knew her, and had always encouraged Mrs. Belmont to keep this young girl and she lived and had a very interesting experience there and was well paid. In France, this all was.
And so she called me and said, "I want to tell you,
So Mr. Walsh said, according to Mary Young, she said Mr. Walsh announced, "We are changing our—paper"—whatever it's called that you present to a probate court—"We wish to change it and to omit the name of Miss Paul as the person who had influenced Mrs. Belmont because we can't find any evidence to substantiate this. We were told this was the case and we wish to change our"—legal document— whatever it's called—"and substitute the name of Elsa Maxwell. We believe that she was the person who caused Mrs. Belmont to leave out Mrs. Stevens' name from the people she would be leaving her money to." So poor Elsa Maxwell had no notice of this—you know who Elsa Maxwell was, don't you?
Fry
Wasn't she a columnist, a writer—
Paul
No, she was a great friend of Mrs. Belmont's and one who Mrs. Belmont helped a great deal and she was an American girl—not a girl exactly, she was an older person by the time we knew her. But we first knew her when she wrote a little play during the suffrage campaign, a little play to be used as propaganda, for suffrage. And Mrs. Belmont— maybe this is the first time Mrs. Belmont knew her perhaps— anyway Mrs. Belmont
And then she got to know Mrs. Belmont and other people, a great many people, and she went over to live in France and lived there the rest of her life, I guess, and she lived her—she called it a profession—her way was to arrange parties for Americans who came over and invite people who were celebrities and they were wanting to meet celebrities, wanting to come back having met somebody and established some connection, whether they were for professional reasons, or business reasons, or just their own pleasure, I don't know. But she had a genius, almost. She was very musical, very talented in all ways, and she knew theatrical people, knew music people and so on.
Well, Elsa Maxwell among other people got to know Mrs. Belmont pretty well, very well, and would get Mrs. Belmont to come to give some social glamour to the parties that she—Elsa Maxwell—would give. So she also was invited by Mrs. Belmont a good many times, I guess, to come up to her own home for lunch or for dinner. And it seems that, unfortunately, [Elsa was a guest at her chateau] the day that Mrs. Belmont had changed her will. She did have Doris's name in her will originally, for some small sum apparently, and she did change it. She had it changed by—as all this came out in the probate as the result of Mr. Walsh's researches, and Doris's researches— she'd had a lawyer who lived in Malesherbes [?], which is very close to where Mrs. Belmont—it was the biggest little town in France nearest to where the chateau of Mrs. Belmont was, This lawyer came out from Malesherbes and changed the will and omitted Doris's name. And unfortunately it happened that poor Elsa Maxwell, certainly knowing nothing about this, had happened to be the guest of Mrs. Belmont at her chateau. Thank heaven I was in America [laughing], I wasn't there this day or it might have all happened and I might never have known about it. But this was the ill fate of poor Elsa Maxwell. She happened to be there.
Therefore Mr. Walsh said, "Well, it's perfectly clear somebody got Mrs. Belmont under their control mentally and got her name taken out, and it must have been Elsa Maxwell because who else was there?" [Laughing.] So poor Elsa Maxwell's name was the one that was presented that day. (And this was all told me by Mary
So what happened at this court was that the family of Mrs. Belmont, her daughter and her two sons, were persuaded themselves, they were convinced, that the best thing to do with a person like Miss Stevens, who was so determined on getting some money, was to make a settlement out of court. And this I was told by Mrs. Belmont's own lawyer, this Mr. Battle, because Mr. Battle had been there looking after the estate and the children. So he told me this, and he said, "I can't remember whether it was $5,000 or $10,000." But he said, "Anyway, they bought her off, saying 'We don't want our mother's name dragged through the courts, lots of newspaper articles and so on. We want the whole thing forgotten, and we want to get rid of this person as fast as we can.'" So they gave her whatever it was $5,000 or $10,000. I suppose that was the sum, that's what he told me anyway—that he couldn't remember, but he thought it was one or the other.
Well, in the interval before this court proceeding which finished it up occurred, apparently when the will was first made known to the public, Doris had helped and she'd worked with me because we tried to make really an event of the burial of Mrs. Belmont, because she had asked me once when I was over in France, she said, "I've written out directions as to how I would like my funeral to be conducted." And she said, "Any man who's been in the public eye and been of service to the country, when he dies there's a public ceremony, the government has it or something like that." And she said, "Excepting what you have done to try to have some tributes paid to women after their death, by having meetings in the capital as we did with Inez Milholland and other people, nobody ever pays any attention to the death of a woman who has made a great gift to her country in the way of working for some reform. Especially reform for women, I've never heard of anybody," she said. "Excepting what you have done in the capital."
So, she said, "I've written it out, what I want done for me." And she gave it to me in France, and she said, "Take this down and give it to my lawyer, Mr. Battle, when he gets back to America and make certain that this is carried out." And she said, "If you don't do it, if you've changed your mind and say you can't,
So I was entrusted with this, and when I came back that time, from that trip to Europe, I know that I saw Doris. And I think she invited me to spend the night with her when I got back. She was married then to Dudley Field Malone. So I did spend the night and I told her the next morning I was going down to see Mr. Battle to take Mrs. Belmont's instructions about how she wanted her funeral and so on conducted.
Well, I think that she must have thought that I also took the instructions about what the will was to contain. That's all I could imagine. But I didn't know anything about her will or ever speak to her about her will.
And so Mr. Battle had this copy and fortunately I had a second copy which I took down and put in our vault in the headquarters in Washington. So we carried all these instructions out and we had a funeral which was—well, unusual in that we had all around the whole church—it was in St. Thomas—we had young girls standing with purple, white and gold banners; we had right up in front Mrs. Hilles and one of the DuPonts, sitting beside her, two people one on each side of the coffin. And so the Woman's Party just did all the spectacular things that she had demanded as well as we could.
And Doris took part in it, of course, and helped because she was always such a good organizer. And I remember she and I sat together in the very front pew and then walked out behind the coffin and so on together. It showed that until this time there was nothing in Doris's mind but friendship for everybody. And I suppose she was still thinking that I'd taken over the will and had it put in Mr. Battle's possession and that she was going to be one of the heirs. Which I had never heard of—that idea.
So, then, shortly after the funeral—and I had gone back to Washington and Doris was up in her home with her husband at Croton-on-Hudson where she was living—a newspaper article came forth in Washington—I hope it's one that Anita preserved—but with a great streamer across, I think it was the Washington Star, saying, "Doris Stevens Accuses Alice Paul of Having Alienated Mrs. Belmont's Affections"—and so on—"And it charges her with having caused Mrs. Belmont to
And I remember I was immediately called up by the Star or by the other papers perhaps, and said, "Well, what is the truth about this charge?" Whole enormous page of what I'd done to Doris! I said, "Well, Doris has always been somebody we in the Woman's Party greatly honored and respected. We don't know of any change in her position. We don't know anything about this whatsoever." And I said, "I don't know anything about Mrs. Belmont's will, what it contains."
You see, it had contained a gift, the only time she mentions in her will, a gift of $100,000, not to me, not to any individual, but $100,000 to the National Woman's Party to carry on the work in which she had been doing as president, something like that. That's all there was. And Doris charged that she had been promised $50,000, which was a big gift. Well, maybe she had, and maybe she hadn't. I have no way on earth of knowing. It's quite possible of course that Mrs. Belmont, knowing how much Doris was doing, and $5,000 would have been very little for Mrs. Belmont, maybe she did once have it in her mind to do this, and maybe she once told Doris; but certainly I didn't alienate [laughing] or get Mrs. Belmont to change her mind.
Doris said I was so anxious to get the money for the Woman's Party that I persuaded her to give the Woman's Party the $100,000. Well, I didn't. I'm glad she did, but I don't think that I caused it. I think Mrs. Belmont, being president, so it was a natural thing for her to have done. It would have seemed very unnatural if she hadn't done it. I would really think she would normally have given more than $100,000.
Fry
Yes, I'm surprised it was that small.
Paul
But that's the way the whole trouble with Doris started. So when she came down to Washington, I tried to talk to her, and I said, "You know, Doris, this is all something that I know nothing about; I had nothing to do with Belmont's will and never discussed it or mentioned it. I did nothing to get this $100,000, or nothing to deprive you of what you say was $50,000 that she promised to you."
But she was just like an iceberg, and from that time on, she was always like an iceberg to me. And wouldn't come anywhere, not if she could help it, ever have a thing to do with me or with any of the people that'd been her colleagues in the Woman's Party, because of this terrible injustice she thought had been done to her. Money seemed to mean so much to her, so much more than it did to most of us, that we could hardly conceive of her attitude, and not refusing to believe this.
[Interruption.]
[About the] attitude of Doris. I think that some group in the country, just as I think there's some group—and I don't have any idea really what this group anybody who wanted to make use of the Woman's Party—because at that time we had, I think, a great deal more public prestige because we were about the only group that was associated with the suffrage victory. There was almost no rival that was working. Of course there was only the old National American, and they'd practically stopped because of the war.
So we were generally respected as a group that—I can see that anyone who wanted to capture a group of women—they probably would want to take part in the Woman's Party. So in doing this they would naturally go after the disaffected people, and try to use those disaffected people to get other people so there was enough to make a little showing.
So it was some group that did it. And the only group that we could think of was the Communist group. You always think of the Communist group; maybe it wasn't the Communist group, maybe it was some other group. But it was somebody, because we discovered when this lawsuit was finally filed against us and the complaints were being made and served on all these individual people, that none of us ever suspected, we found they had been using our headquarters and had a series of meetings with apparently very well paid stenographic—I don't know what you would call it—firm, group, that was going in and taking these elaborate minutes in great detail the way they do at big corporations and so on. And we found these meetings were going on in our library. We didn't know they were going on. And it was all done sort of under cover until the minutes were read in the trial. First time we ever knew that this had been happening.
What was the group?
Paul
The group that filed the lawsuit. They called themselves the Woman's Party. So they'd been having National Woman's Party meetings, and the name National Woman's Party, that Miss Pollitzer never knew anything about, I never knew anything about. None of us knew that—if we ever knew people were meeting there, well, we thought people were meeting on [laughing] something in the library, I guess.
So finally in the court they read, we'll say, [minutes of] September, October, November, December, these meetings and what they had voted to do and so on. All written up so they'd be—and here they got the Dean Acheson's law firm, and of course he'd been assistant secretary of state, I think he'd been even secretary of state, I'm not sure. And they had a trial lawyer—well, he's a famous trial lawyer. I don't remember, I guess I'll probably think of this name but I've forgotten what it was— but he was the trial lawyer of the Dean Acheson law firm. And then they had another man, (All this will be in that Miss Griswold's article, the names of these different lawyers.) And then they had the lawyer who prepared all the cases for the Dean Acheson law firm. And he was the one who'd been up here in our headquarters conducting this series of meetings. And all these minutes were there—it was all brought out in the court by that side, this group. So apparently Doris, who was not I think at that moment on our national board—I'm sure she didn't originate it, I'm sure she was made use of by some group, knowing here was a person who was publicly dissatisfied and didn't hesitate on all occasions to say this great injustice had been done to her and so on (which was a very strange way to act, of course, but she certainly did it).
Laura M. Berrien
PaulNow this Miss Berrien, who was our national treasurer, we don't know what happened to her, because she and Doris had been at swords' points for a long time, and every time that we would, which we normally did, we gave some honor at every meeting to Doris and had her reside or had her speak or do something, and Miss Berrien was always being quite disagreeable about it
And Dr. Sebree, who was the secretary, she was new. She was a government worker and was in peril over her position or would be when the husband and wife couldn't both serve and so on. Somehow or other, I think while Mrs. Wiley was chairman and they were getting appeals from this Dr. Sebree to help in the campaign against that economy act [in the thirties], not allowing two people in the same family to have a salary from the government. She had a high position in the government and I guess probably from [that experience in that campaign] she was put on the board by Mrs. Wiley, who was a very thrifty person and had an idea that by having a [national secretary we could save money]. We'd always had an honorary secretary and often she wasn't much good at taking notes and so on. She had an idea that by taking somebody employed in the government who was a member of the Woman's Party and putting her in as the national secretary, they would have all their correspondence and minutes and so on costing less than we were having. So she wasn't exactly important; she was just an ordinary government worker who was able to type and so on. She was the secretary.
So we understood what was the matter with Doris, we understood the secretary all right—it didn't make much difference about her, and we understood Mrs. Wiley, we knew it was a passing moment, that she had let her name be used, being agreeable to people, and say, "Well, all right, you can use my name," and then she didn't realize what she'd done, I guess. But the last person, Miss Berrien, I never have known. Miss Berrien had sort of personal difficulties. I think her brother was in prison for having some kind of dishonesty, I don't know exactly what. And she was the sort of person that it's perfectly possible that whatever group that was using Doris would have found something that might have been difficult for Miss Berrien.
But at all events she also had a grievance. When we first knew her, she'd never taken part in the suffrage
Anyway, through his wife, we saw a great deal of this man, and just about this time he came up one day, and we told him about Miss Berrien who had made this appeal for promotion in the taxation department, and we said, "Perhaps you as an efficiency expert could look into it and see if you could get any advancement for her."
"Oh," he said, "I certainly would be glad to do that." He went down and met her and talked to her.
And within about two or three days she had quite a big promotion. Because that was his business, what he was employed to do. And he never, of course, would have interviewed her or seen her or known about her, if we hadn't asked him to do this. And so he would always go to somebody through whom he worked, he didn't go direct to the President to report, but he went to some one person, and anyway he made the report and he got her promoted right away.
So she was very enthusiastic and became a devoted member of the Woman's Party, really working hard, and finally we made her our national treasurer because we thought she had all this relationship with the government,
And then in a little while, she came and she wanted another promotion. And so we succeeded in getting the second promotion, again through this Mr. Brown; we couldn't have done it otherwise.
And she went on until she'd had a promotion to the top place she could reach, beyond the civil service, and that came up now to being a judge of the tax court. And that I remember, because she really hounded me to get her promoted to being a tax judge on the taxation level of the highest court that passes on everything in matters of taxation. I don't know whether this was all in the Bureau of Internal Revenue or what it was in, but it was—
Two days after our treasurer, who'd been our treasurer for some time—I think her name was Gladys [Houston] Greiner, at that moment the treasurer—but whoever the treasurer was, and someone else, I guess Miss Mabel Brissel, who was our secretary, went down to our bank where we'd banked since we came to Washington in 1913.
[Interruption.]
So—Mrs. Wiley was always so nice about doing everything she could for anybody—so she went down, she the proper person that Miss Berrien wanted us to [send to] interview about putting her name down as a candidate to be the first woman judge of the tax board. She came back—and I remember so vividly!—sort of dejected and sad.
She said, "Well, they told me that they have given us all the promotions we've asked for Miss Berrien, but they can't risk this tax board because that's a very vital place where decisions might wipe whole companies out of existence or do great injustice if they were in the hands of somebody who wasn't competent." And they said, "We must tell you she's not competent enough to be on the tax board. We can do these other things where there's somebody above her who will maybe correct things." So, we did about all we could think of doing for Miss Berrien but, rightly or wrongly, they were determined that she wasn't of the experience or the ability to be
So then Miss Berrien turned from being an enthusiastic supporter of the Woman's Party and all its things, to think that we had just—well, she was very personal about it. She felt as though we hadn't been willing to make the effort. She kept saying, "I'm perfectly sure if Miss Paul will go out and really try that I could be on the tax board and I am going to be on the tax board ! I'm determined to be!" So then she got us to try to get other people, you know, that might get her on the tax board.
So we knew she had a great grievance because she just felt we'd deliberately failed to do what we could have done. We didn't. It wasn't that we deliberately failed. We failed because I don't believe anybody could have gotten her on the tax board then. There had never been a woman. It was something that people were very careful about, who was on the tax board. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? The whole tax board, the final thing that people are up against.
Fry
Yes, your last appeal.
Paul
So, we knew she had this grievance. But how in the world she came to be allied so closely with Doris, who also had a very different grievance—but they were. So, that was the little group that formed. They were four Woman's Party people. And they were having these private meetings and planning this and this and this, and it was then brought before the court, so there was no question about it at the end.
But we were all surprised when we suddenly got these complaints served against us. For instance, to me, to turn over all this money I'm "willfully withholding" from the National Woman's Party. [Laughter.] Well, can you imagine! We thought we were the National Woman's Party and to suddenly have the Woman's Party bring a suit!
The Defectors Call a Woman's Party Convention
PaulSo then they called a convention. We had scheduled a convention that spring—1946, I suppose it was.
It was the spring of 1947 when they scheduled their convention, because I happened to see that Equal Rights issue.
Paul
Oh, it was 1947 then. I thought it was '46.
Fry
Do you want me to run down this chronology for you?
Paul
Where is this all coming from?
Fry
The Equal Rights statement to the membership.
82. Equal Rights January-February, 1947
Paul
Oh. That's Miss Griswold's I've been talking about.
Fry
I think so, except this only concerns that convention. It doesn't really concern anything else.
Paul
It doesn't concern the day they filed the lawsuit?
Fry
No. It says: "The party is now faced with a situation which may best be described as a coup d'etat, an attempt by a few individuals within the party to seize power by unlawful means," and then it reviews the past four months' events. This is from the January/February, 1947 Equal Rights magazine.
It says that:
"On September 28, 1946, the national council voted in New York for the biennial convention to be held in Washington in January of '47."Equal Rights, January/February 1947
Paul
Yes that's right. That was in '46, was it?
Fry
Yes. About a month later, another call for a biennial convention came from the other group for it to be held on January 10, 11, and 12, which was a different date.
So in November, your executive council was summoned to meet on the 24th—
Paul
Of what month?
Fry
In November of '46. Your council also met on December 15. They changed the convention dates that you had previously set to April, 1947.
You mean they changed it or we did?
Fry
You did. You changed it to April.
Then you had another national council meeting in January to reaffirm the action, and that council expressed the strongest possible disapproval of the "rump convention" that was scheduled and the rump convention took place at the Mayflower Hotel. They went ahead and had their convention in January.
Paul
When was that?
Fry
January of '47. So, they did have their convention.
Paul
I remember about the convention, but I'm not sure about the dates. I mean, was this before or after our lawsuit? I think the lawsuit was in '46.
Fry
Your lawsuit was over in November of '47. So it was finished ten months after their convention.
Paul
It was over in '47, was it? I thought it was '46.
Fry
I get those middle years mixed up there after the war.
Paul
It was '47, then, when the lawsuit was over and we won. It was before Thanksgiving, I know that.
Fry
Yes. Apparently, you won on November 22, in the New York Times story.
Paul
I told you we were all thinking, "Will we have a happy Thanksgiving or not?" [Laughter.] Well, that was over then.
Now, when was the rump convention?
Fry
January 10 and 11, 1947, at the Mayflower.
Paul
Before the lawsuit?
Fry
Their convention was in January and the lawsuit was won by you in the following November.
Paul
I know the lawsuit was started—does it say there—it was started in February. The lawsuit must have been started, then, right after their convention I guess.
Fry
I don't know when it started.
About then.
Fry
Right.
[Interruption. Tape off.]
Paul
We had held this [council] meeting up in New York. It was voted in, we'll say, December or something, to have this convention. It was about the time when we had the first suspicion that something was—all this building up that was going on, you see, we didn't really know about it.
[Exchange about warmth of cottage and opening the door.]
I remember this board meeting was held at the very beautiful apartment of one of our New York members. A very lovely person that she was. When the meeting opened, we hadn't one bit of inkling or suspicion that all this was going on. It's where we first discovered it, at this board meeting. [Pause.]
I'll have to think back about who was at that board meeting, but somebody that we never thought had any particular—she was not one of the inside people who was knowing about much, but she happened to be on the national board. She began with some kind of a questioning attitude, and one or two people joined, and we saw that something was afoot that we didn't understand. We didn't understand why there should be any particular debate about holding and fixing a date for a convention.
Anyway this person, whoever it was, just kept the floor and kept going on in a way that was apparently going to make it impossible to come to any decision about anything. (I haven't thought about this, you see, ever since we met and they did this, I guess.)
Fry
Do you want me to read the names to you?
Paul
Who were at that meeting in New York?
Fry
Who were on the board.
Paul
No, no, I know who they were. But who these were—there were some people who were inside the movement and some people who were on the board but who, for one reason or another, they hadn't had time maybe to attend meetings and such. I just seem to remember there was this protest.
It was so obviously filibustering of the meeting that they recessed for lunch. We were near that women's hotel called the Barbizon something-or-other, not the Barbizon Plaza but a little Barbizon hotel. This apartment was. And of course this lady couldn't entertain all these maybe thirty people at the board meeting. So we all went out and got lunch at this place. But the hostess asked me if I would stay there and be her own personal guest for lunch. So, I didn't go to the place where they all went for luncheon.
So when we reassembled—and our hostess wasn't on the board; she was just being a nice hospitable member, entertaining the board by giving her beautiful apartment. When we came back in the afternoon, quite a number of our people didn't return. They'd said, "Well, there's no use being at this meeting. We don't seem to be able to discuss anything. We don't understand what all this fuss is about." I remember our chairman from Connecticut was a Dr. [Emily Dunning] Barringer.
She was, I believe, the first woman in America who had ever been an intern in a hospital. She was one of the leading women in the American Medical Association. I think maybe she was their national president; if she wasn't their national president, she was their leading legislative person who came to Washington. She was one of our board members because the American Medical had been such loyal friends—
Fry
You mean the Women's Medical?
Paul
The American Women's Medical Association—because of the fact that we'd helped them in opening the Armed Service Medical Department to women doctors. They felt that we really had accomplished that for them and had aided them so much. The bill went through, you know, giving women medical people the right to be in the armed forces in the field of medicine and surgery and so on.
So she was a very prominent member and she said, "You know how busy I am and how hard it is for me to get down here to a board meeting, and I can't come to a board meeting where there's just this apparent filibuster that's stopping our having any deliberations." So she and quite a number of the most important people refused to return to this extraordinary meeting.
Anita Pollitzer was conducting the meeting and she lost all control of the meeting. I don't suppose anybody
I remember one of the people who came was Betty Gram Swing. You know about her, don't you?
Fry
I know who she is.
Paul
She said, "You know that Doris is the back of this whole thing. She's gotten all these people to come and get up and make all this dissent and so on." She said, "I've worked for Doris a long time and I know when anything's going wrong that this is what she's doing." Well, we didn't know what was going on. From what you tell me of the dates, it was before the trial began.
So anyway, in the afternoon, we saw a large number of our most stalwart people hadn't returned, and we saw that one by one people were getting up and announcing that they had to catch the last train home and they couldn't stay any longer. I saw pretty soon that what was going on was that they were going to get it down to where people who were really Woman's Party people were going to be outnumbered, and then they were going to vote whatever it was they wanted to vote [laughing]. We didn't know. So, I suddenly just arose and said, "Well, I'm not going to stay any longer in this meeting. I think it's—" whatever I said. And I walked out, and I didn't know what would happen.
But Mrs. Lloyd Williams, who was one of our most stalwart people and one of the most powerful women on the board, and about half the room got up and walked out, not knowing what on earth I was about, but they didn't want to be left alone. [Laughter.] So, they walked out one by one. The result was there wasn't any quorum.
What they were striving to do, I think, was to make it so impossible for the people who were really the heart and core of the Woman's Party to do anything by getting it down so we would be a minority and then they would vote whatever it was they were about. But we were so completely taken by surprise! We weren't prepared. We didn't know anything about it.
I remember Betty Gram Swing got up and walked right out behind me and Anita walked out behind me, so the chairman wasn't there. We all went out into another room that this hostess had given us, and we finally just
Well, then we started to get up this convention we'd voted to have, and suddenly we found that the Mayflower had a big sign up: "National Woman's Party Convention," with some other date. We found that a second paper had gone out to our whole membership saying the date of the convention was to be so-and-so, [presumably] our Equal Rights magazine. The publisher, who lived over in Baltimore, had called up Mrs. [Dora] Ogle, who was our business manager and always sent over all the material to him for the paper. (She didn't edit it, but she sent it all over as the business manager.) He called up to Mrs. Ogle and said,
"Some people have been in here to see me, whom I don't know, with material that doesn't seem to me would be coming from your office. Is it all right for me to go ahead and print this?" This was changing the date of the convention and things that Mrs. Ogle had never heard of and hadn't sent.
"Well," she said, "No, I don't know who these people could be. This isn't any material that the Woman's Party is sending to you."
And he said, "Well, I thought not." And he said, "So, I'm going to tell them I'll have nothing to do with it and I won't print it. They want me to use your regular letterhead, list of officers, and everything, the whole format, and make it look exactly like the issue that you've always gotten out. I don't know what they're about, but I won't do it." Later, he testified to all this at the trial.
Then they went to several other places in Baltimore, and finally they got somebody who agreed to make a complete reproduction of our paper as far as masthead and everything, but put in the contents that these few women, whoever they were—we don't yet know who they were—who went over to try to have this second call put in. And it was printed, finally, this new edition which we didn't know was coming out.
Very early one morning when Mrs. Ogle was down at the switchboard, which we had then down in the basement of our headquarters—she always went down and opened the house up for us and started the switchboard and looked after everything in the whole building to show we were
Well, they had their convention. And then I think we voted to have ours later because of all this confusion. They went ahead with it at the Mayflower.
They [Mayflower management] said well, Mrs. [Perle S.] Mesta, who lived at the Mayflower, had come and asked them to arrange for a convention. [I know] because when we first called up the Mayflower and said, "Well, why are you doing this? This is the Woman's Party headquarters speaking to you. We haven't planned any convention at all at this particular date."
And they'd said, "Well, Mrs. Mesta, who lives here, is one of your officers and she told us that the convention had been changed and this was the date and it was to be here in the Mayflower and we don't think we can take down the sign. That's what we've been told. We can't enter into some dissension you've had in your organization. We don't understand it."
So, Mrs. Mesta had done this in all good faith. They had gone to her, as we often did, and said, "Well, there's this and that that you can get at the Mayflower." So she just obligingly said, "Will you put up a sign having a convention this date?" She didn't have anything particular to do with any of this business and wasn't brought into it, as far as I know.
Well, then, when the convention occurred, we didn't know who went or anything about it. It was kept very secret and private. But later we learned from Miss Jessie Dell, whom we'd happened to get to know, being one of the three Civil Service commissioners—and she was a very loyal member of the Woman's Party because we were the ones she'd always known and she always was
In the last period of Miss Dell, after Hoover came in—she had been appointed by the man before Hoover. That was Coolidge, I think. Then she had to be reappointed. So, our chairman at that time was Mrs. Florence Bayard Hilles. She wanted to write a note to Hoover to say we wanted to thank the government for having made Miss Dell a Civil Service commissioner and to say how much we hoped he would reappoint her. When she got this letter ready, I think she read it to our board.
Miss Berrien was present and Miss Berrien made a great protest and said that Miss Dell had been a complete failure, that she had nominated Miss Dell four years before and caused her to take off in the beginning, but that she would have no more connection with it anyway. She thought we should not. She made a violent protest against Miss Dell.
So the relationship then between Miss Dell and Miss Berrien, who'd been the original person who had told us about her—we didn't even know Miss Dell when Miss Berrien brought her to our attention. There was a very great estrangement between these two people because, after Miss Berrien had gotten Miss Dell in, she wanted Miss Dell to join in and make her a tax judge. Miss Dell—well, whatever the reason was, she did everything in the world she could for Miss Berrien, but she didn't succeed in making her a tax judge. She probably encountered the same resistance we did.
So Miss Dell said she was seated next to Miss Berrien, who had been so very hard upon her and had tried so hard to get her not reappointed by Hoover. But Mrs. Hilles was a very strong character and she said anyway, "I'm going to write this as national president. This is what I believe and I'm going to recommend it." And the board also approved it, although Miss Berrien voted against it. So, we did ask Hoover to reappoint Miss Dell, and she was reappointed. She served until Roosevelt came in, who would have nothing, of course, of anybody from the Woman's Party.
But she was the only person we knew of who was at that convention.
83. 1)Minutes of meeting of insurgent group, January 11, 12, 26, 1947, led by Doris Stevens, held at Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C. 2)Minutes of meeting of the National Council of the National Woman's Party, January 9, 10, 11, 12, 1947, held at Alva Belmont House, Washington, D.C. Held at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, and copies deposited in The Bancroft Library with Alice Paul papers.
When we heard this convention was going on or was about to go on, we telephoned to our board members and our state chairmen all over the country to come down and have a board meeting and see what on earth we ought to do. That's the first formal time we took up the question. They did come from everywhere. A chairman came all the way from Wyoming, for instance. Everybody made a supreme effort to come, so it was a very big council meeting.
Most of us, I think, were too casual about it, took it too—didn't give enough credence to what was going on. So, we'd always had a board meeting that was—until the one up in New York, which was the preceding one before this—we'd never had any discussion or dispute or dissension at any board meeting from the time we were formed in 1913 till the time this occurred.
This board meeting was, of course, perfectly harmonious. They'd all come to see what they could do to rescue the Woman's Party from the terrible calamity that had occurred.
The Invasion of Belmont House Headquarters
PaulThe people, I guess, who were away from Washington were more or less suspicious, because I can remember our first vice-chairman at the time, Clara Snell Wolfe, from Ohio. She had been a teacher in Oberlin, I guess— well, her husband had been a teacher at Oberlin, a professor, when Doris [Stevens] had first been discovered; she was evidently a very able and brilliant young student. She became the state organizer for the state of Ohio for suffrage after she graduated from Oberlin. Mrs. Wolfe, having known her as a student because she was one of her husband's students, told us this was somebody she thought would be very, very useful to the suffrage movement, way back in the fairly early days, and that we ought to try to get her to come and be a national organizer and not continue just as the local state Ohio one. She persuaded Doris to come
But the person in our whole group, when this difficulty arose that Doris seemed to be more the center and core and guiding spirit of—[who was most suspicious and apprehensive was Mrs. Wolfe].
So, just to please her because we wanted to, we authorized her to take any steps she thought necessary to employ anybody she thought necessary to protect the headquarters. I guess every one of us who voted thought "This was the wildest idea that Mrs. Wolfe's had, but it won't do any harm to authorize her." [Laughter.]
So, she proceeded to telephone over to Baltimore. (It seems to me it was Burns, but it's hard to remember names of these great detective firms. Whatever it was, it's in that report of Miss Griswold's, I'm sure.) So we gave her the authorization and she went forth and telephoned to them to send people over to guard the headquarters, physically guard the headquarters from any [laughing] invasion from outsiders.
So that night, when we concluded our meeting quite late, maybe twelve o'clock or something, all the people who lived nearby went off in their cars or whatever way they'd come and went home. The rest of us began to just clear up the headquarters and get ready to go to bed when—[pause] there came to the door some I people demanding to come in and saying they were Woman's Party officers or something.
So, the Burns detective—we'll say it was Burns—the man at the door, employed now at the request of Mrs. Wolfe, very courteously opened the door and admitted them [Laughter.] The person who came in was Doris Stevens with one or two others. She, then, marched into the living room and started to have a meeting to—that they had now come to take over the headquarters.
When this all happened, everybody went up to the next floor, to my bedroom. I remember Betty Gram Swing particularly in the big Congressional Room; and our chairman [Mary Owens] from North Dakota, whom we'd
You know, most people who had never had any personal contact with us—and we hadn't with Mrs. Owens—I think would have sort of stepped aside and said—that's what Mrs. Mesta did—"I won't get into this controversy!" But not Mrs. Owens! She just thought, "Well, now I've been placed by heaven, I guess, right here in the midst of this thing, to straighten it out." So, she began on the Ninety- first Psalm and she kept it up until, I think, two in the morning, always.
And then Mrs. [Elizabeth C.] Forbes and this Mrs. [Miriam] Holden decided that they would protect the people who were most under attack, who'd all gone upstairs. So they occupied the ground floor steps, sat there together on the steps, and no human being, they said, was going to get up those stairs unless we opened up and let them go.
So people just arranged themselves [laughing] wherever they thought they could meet this assault of these people who said, under Doris—her little—only two or three or four people, mainly—that they had come up as the representatives of the National Woman's Party to take it over officially. They were going to pass some resolutions right then at the first meeting after they began their regime. So they entered the drawing room and sat down there for that purpose.
Then, Ailey Edson [?], Anita [Pollitzer]'s husband, had gotten so aroused over this attack on his wife and so on [laughing] that he had come down to Washington to be there to see that everything went all right, though nobody anticipated any of this sort of thing. But he kept [in touch] via the phone and the phone was always ringing and people inquiring where their wives were [laughter] and wondering what was going on. Then he would come (Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Holden would always allow him to walk up, so he would go up and make a report to us as to what was going on).
So then, pretty soon—there was one member [Mrs. Hays] that we had, a very fine person, who had taken a room there. She was an older suffragist and [pause] I think she and her daughter had taken a room, maybe over in the annex or something. They hadn't been doing very much by that time, but later they became very strong members; but then they were just people who wanted—you know, we've always used the headquarters for anybody who was in any way in our movement who wanted to just be a clubhouse member and have a room. So they were there and knowing nothing about any of this.
Doorbells kept ringing downstairs. So Mrs. Hays— she wasn't at our board meeting and was totally unaware of anything—went downstairs to answer this incessant pealing of the doorbell down in the basement, which normally people didn't use at night. (You know that door down there, the basement door.)
Fry
I've never been down there, but I know that there is an outside entrance, isn't there?
Paul
Yes. There'd be a door that opens into the entrance into the basement. We have several steps up to go into the second floor, which was always used for offices and that sort of thing always. That's where the offices were, always have been.
So, she went only to stop the ringing of the doorbell, to be helpful, there being no maid or anybody else to open it at that hour of the night or any typist down there or anybody. She went down the steps, turned on the lights, and opened the door. And there were maybe twenty or such, some big group, that had come up from the convention. They said they'd come up under Miss Stevens' direction and leadership, but they'd come in a different taxi or a different mode of travel, and they'd just gotten there. So, Mrs. Hays, of course,
So, they did come up. All this was reported by Anita's husband when he arrived up the stairs. They did come up, but the door was—let me see. The door that goes from that long hallway as you first walk in by the Bums detectives had been closed. So, when the people walked up from the steps down below, that door, when you come up from the steps down below, opens out into a little place we use for a dining room, you know.
Fry
In California we'd call it a lanai. It's an enclosed back porch, sort of.
Paul
Yes. This stairway comes up and normally you just walked into the chairman's office at the front hall door, but that door had been closed by the Burns detectives. So, when they got up to the top of the steps, all they could do was to walk out ot the kitchen end of the house, which they did. Then they walked from the kitchen into that back office. You know the back office where we keep all the membership files and so on?
Fry
Yes. And that's next to your dining room, isn't it?
Paul
Well, no. It's next to the kitchen.
Fry
Doesn't that back office connect?
Paul
When you walk out of the back office, you walk into where we have the ironing board and all those things. It's connected with the kitchen. Anybody who wants to press her dress walks out there and presses her dress. It's next to the kitchen. Then, outside of the kitchen and outside of the place where the ironing board is is the place where we have our meals, as you remember.
Well, they walked out and couldn't get into where they were trying to get, where we all were. And that [kitchen route] goes out to the library.
So when the meeting was over there was nobody out in the library they could do anything with; that was over and closed and most of the people had gone home—practically all had gone home who lived in the neighborhood. Betty Gram Swing was staying with her sister, who
But these people—say around twenty, and they were not particularly Woman's Party people; I never ever knew the name of any of them, so I don't know who they were— they walked out into the kitchen and then into the next little room where, as I say, our ironing board and that sort of thing is. And then, here was the door leading into the office, and that door was securely closed.
So what did they do? They battered at that door until the door fell down, and then they walked over the door into the office. Then they were in full possession of everything.
But they couldn't get upstairs because of Mrs. Holden and Mrs. Forbes [laughter], who were both so distinctly very good sports, but they were also extremely dignified and calm and very, very, very refined type of people that you would hardly start in to move, especially to fight with them. [Laughter.] So, they sat there and all they did was to sit and nobody could pass them but somebody like Ailey Edson or somebody whom we wanted to come up.
So here they were, so they went in and joined Doris. So they had quite a nice—they said—meeting of the National Woman's Party to draw up these resolutions. So they drew them up and then they addressed the resolutions to Anita, as the national chairman, from the National Woman's Party: "We demand now that you surrender the headquarters tonight—we've arranged tonight to take them over formally, and we want all the documents and the treasurer's reports and your safe deposit boxes and keys" and so on.
Then they had nobody to give them to because Anita was upstairs. Then I think they addressed it to me a being one of the chief conspirators in this terrible thing of illegally taking over the National Woman's Party. I just don't know how many people they addressed. It may have been addressed to everybody. But one by one, these resolutions were being brought up to us from somebody down below. Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Holden would say, "Well, we'll
Fry
What was the private guard doing all this time?
Paul
The Burns detective men? By this time, they knew they weren't to let any more people in and they didn't. That's the reason these people had to go down and get in the other way. But they were doing their very best. It seems to me that Mrs. Wolfe stayed down there. I'm not quite certain. I think after Doris had been let in—see, we left all the guardianship to Mrs. Wolfe, because these were her men that she had summoned and she'd arranged everything with them, and certainly she did do it efficiently. But after Doris had come in with her two or three people in the beginning, before the other people arrived, her whole contingent she was to have had, you see, came later and got in down below when they couldn't get in above.
But immediately, when this happened—the Burns people let in the first [laughter] people they were supposed to keep out—I remember Mrs. Wolfe went to the door while she was trying to get it explained to them that they must not let any more people in, and she put her arm through something that was on that front door at the time to keep it closed. These other people, who hadn't gotten in in the beginning, were trying to get in from the outside and they were pushing and it broke her arm. I remember that well. But she finally got things in order and got these Burns people to understand what they were to do. [Laughter.] But she did break her arm in that happening, as it turned out.
In all events, some policemen, anyway, arrived because Mrs. Wolfe had not only arranged to get the Burns people, but she'd gone around to the precinct [station] and somebody who shared her apprehension also went with her. I think it was Mrs. Holden who went with her; I'm sure because Mrs. Holden was also very much with Mrs. Wolfe for making a strong defense of the building and so on. So, the police had said, "Now if you need us and you find that there is some danger and so on, telephone. "
Then the police went in there, and they [the insurgents] said, "Well, we've had this meeting and the National Woman's Party has elected us as a group to come up and take over the headquarters. We hope you'll get these people there that are sitting on the steps and the people upstairs out, because we've come officially to take over."
So, then the police just didn't know what to do. So, they said, "Well, we'll have to call up for more instructions. We don't understand this situation." [Laughter.] So, the police then were calling up for further instructions as to whom they were to eject [laughter] and whom they were to protect. They said, "Here, everybody says she's a Woman's Party person and that we're to eject somebody else. Then we go to that person and she says, 'Oh, I'm the National Woman's Party. You must eject—.'" [Laughter.]
Fry
Eject the other! [Laughter.]
Paul
So, they were at the phone inquiring. Suddenly, the sirens began to sound. If you've ever stayed there, you know how often the sirens, going up to Faculty Hospital, right up on Eighth Street above us, you know, come with a tremendous amount of noise. So, the sirens all began to make a great noise, and they were taking some people—
Fry
Oh, how nice! Here's tea. [Tea is brought in.] Just what we need! [Small break.]
The sirens were going. The ambulance happened—
Paul
Anyway, the police were there making all this inquiry and the people in Doris's group, I suppose, were all down on that floor with no one knowing what was going on. They heard the sirens, and they thought it was the police in phoning for aid. That's what they said,
And when the sirens came—so, they began to come out in the hall one by one, tiptoeing, tiptoeing, out and down the front steps, as fast as they could get out of the building. So, we Suddenly—heaven maybe granted the prayers of Mrs. Owens. [Laughter.]
Fry
There was that Ninety-first Psalm working! [Laughter.]
Paul
She was persuaded that heaven had come to our rescue. Whatever it was, suddenly the whole group tiptoed out as silently as they could, as quickly as they could, making no motion at all. I believe one of them went out the front window in the living-room. They all got out somehow or other. I suppose they had some taxis or some cars of their own or something. Off they went.
We, then, continued to have the Burns detectives, maybe a month or two months, always there, and the house practically barricaded, because at this meeting that we had had we saw that we had to get a lawyer, that this had gotten beyond us, and that they would probably go to [court] against us, because they were apparently threatening to do so.
So, Miss [Burnita] Matthews had said, "I will send you somebody that has an office in my own personal suite, in my offices. She's not connected with my firm, but I know her very well. I will send her up and let you see if you would like to engage her to be your lawyer because I can't do it because I have this relationship with Miss Berrien." (In the meantime, Miss Berrien had joined Miss Matthews' own law firm, so it was Matthews and Berrien.) "So," she said, "You can see I'm not in a position to do it, and Mrs Wiley's one of my clients," and so on. "But," she said, "You can trust this person I will send you, In my opinion, she's very, very good, and her name is Olive Lacey."
Well, she was another gift from heaven. We never could have had a better lawyer. It would be impossible because we were up against the great law firm of Dean Acheson.
Fry
Goodness yes.
Paul
And this great trial lawyer. I remember when we were trying to get a lawyer before this night, Anita Pollitzer
Fry
Yes.
Paul
The one who was the running mate of La Follette's for the presidency. He and his wife were personal friends of a great many of us. Maud Younger, for instance, constantly used the little apartment and little house which she bought next to the headquarters when she entertained people, she had parties at which she would practically always have the Wheelers come.
So, we went to Wheeler (Miss Pollitzer was the one who went to him) and he said, "I can't possibly take this case. I have nothing out in that field of law at all. But I'm certainly sorry to hear that Dean Acheson's firm is doing this because they have one of the greatest trial lawyers in America. And for you to be up against that trial lawyer, you've got to have somebody that—my goodness!—would be able to help you out of this situation. "But," he said, "I know that you have to go forward and fight this case because you have been entrusted by your organization with really a very valuable property and your investment and endowment fund has quite a large sum of money and you absolutely have to do it. Otherwise, any member could bring a suit that you'd been negligent in your duties. And you would be negligent in your duties if you didn't defend this property that you're now in charge of."
So, we thought then we certainly were up against it and we'd have to get somebody. We had nobody to rely on but Mrs. Matthews, who guaranteed this [Lacey] would be a good person. But certainly, when she took it, she felt she was so completely inadequate to meet the people on the other side. But she was the kind of person who would devote all of her time, not just get a little scrap of assistant lawyers who came in. But she just sort of took in—she must have abandoned every other case she had. She just said this she had to give all her time to, she had to meet very great adversaries.
She would work with us all day when she wasn't in the court and all night if necessary until she was familiar with every single detail. We worked very hard at accumulating all the books and things we could, giving her all the chronology of everything. I sat down beside her, next to her, through the whole trial, and we just couldn't have had a better person, as it turned out.
Well, that night we engaged her, that night when we met just before the invasion by our opponents. She told us, "Of course, I think, in the law, to be in possession of a place is nine-tenths of the victory and you are now in possession of all the things that somebody else is trying to get from you in the way of records and your bank account and your investments and so on and the building itself." So, she said, "I think you have to keep on with the Burns detectives so that nobody else can get in. Now, it's clear that you are the possessors of all these things and I think the court will be impressed by that and that somebody else is trying to take it from you. We don't know who is trying to take it, but somebody's trying to take it from you," because we knew it wasn't any of these individual women, most of whom we didn't even know their names and they had no connection with us at all.
So, from that time on, for, say, two months or three months, our headquarters was protected by the Burns detectives, whom we paid, and nobody came there but the—maybe some people were still living there as having rented a room, but not any of our workers or any of our officers went in the place.
Well, I guess that's the end of that.
Its Effect on the ERA Campaign
FryCould I ask you about—?
Paul
You'd better ask me quickly now, since your plane's going to leave so soon, any quick points that you need, and I won't discuss them at length.
Fry
All right. Did this affect your work for the Amendment?
Paul
Yes, terribly.
Fry
The Equal Rights magazine that I read on this said that this was the time when, for the first time in the history of the Amendment, "we are able to go to an incoming Congress with favorable committee reports from both Senate and House Judiciary Committees. We are on the brink of victory and a Woman's Joint Legislative Committee has been formed under the chairmanship of Nina Horton Avery," and so forth.
So, it was just at this very crucial time, I guess, when it happened.
Paul
I wanted to say that these opponents, whoever they were, they were doing just what I feel is happening at the present moment; The problem you have with the people that you're dealing with—and you know that somebody else is [behind them]—that you're dealing with some unknown force.
For instance, they tied up our investment and endowment fund. Most of our women were too unfamiliar with all these things to know how to tie us all up. So, here we had all this money that we had struggled so hard to accumulate, we'll say $250,000 or something. They tied it up so that, since it was not certain that we were the Woman's Party, therefore the treasurer couldn't send any money to us or to anybody else. It was just all tied up. So, we didn't have any income whatsoever.
I don't know whether it was two days or not, but shortly after the invasion, perhaps the next day, our treasurer and someone with her—for your sake, I'd say it was probably Miss [inaudible] because she was the secretary. They went down to the bank to say, "We think this is perfectly useless and unnecessary, but we're bringing you a resolution adopted at our board meeting," (which was the night of the invasion, this board meeting had been meeting all day nearly; I told you about it— They came from all over the country.)
They had passed a resolution at the request of Mrs. Wolfe, the same one that was always so full of the belief that things would be beyond our expectation in difficulty. The resolution had been adopted saying that they wished to state that the officer entitled to sign such and so on was the treasurer and no one else, because Mrs. Wolfe [had] said, "You don't know what they'll do. They'll go down and try to take all the money we have in the bank."
So, they saw the vice-president and he said, "Oh well, you're too late. They have already been here. Somebody's come down saying she was the newly-elected treasurer (elected at the rump convention) and the new secretary came with a resolution authorizing them to
They said, "Goodness me!. We didn't bring the seal. We'll go off and get the seal."
So, Mrs. Matthews called up and I answered the phone and—I told you Miss Berrien had been taken in by Mrs. Matthews as her [law] partner. She said, "Miss Berrien is here, of course, in my office, and she wants the seal, the Woman's Party seal." And she said, "I said, 'I can't give you the Woman's Party seal. I've always been the Woman's Party lawyer and have always kept the seal here.'"
So, Miss Berrien said, "Well, I have to have it." Why she was having to have it was to get out the money from our bank account! The bank wouldn't give it without the seal, you see.
So thank heaven, you see, [laughing] how we were protected by heaven anyway, so many times. Mrs. Matthews said, "I'm going to take the seal up to the headquarters and give it to you personally and I'm not going to have it in this office and have any danger of somebody taking it out. I told Miss Berrien I'm not going to keep in here any longer, I will not allow her to take it or to touch it, and I'm going to go right up and give it to you personally."
So she did. We kept the seal and we still have the seal. So they couldn't get the money out.
But we, then, drew the money all out ourselves because we couldn't live in this situation, we thought. of constantly having this thing occur. One of our members, a very good and faithful one we had over in Baltimore, said that she would take it all over and put it in her personal account, so that nobody could possibly get it out of her personal account, and keep it until all this trouble was over, which she did.
So, we had a hard time then to exist. We had no bank account in Washington, and we had no access to our investment and endowment fund. But we did raise enough
When you say, "Did it injure the campaign?", well, it certainly did because we had to curtail everything we could curtail, and we had a very hard time to survive. Of course, they thought we wouldn't survive. By cutting it all off, whoever these people were, they thought we couldn't continue the magazine, we couldn't continue to communicate with our members, we couldn't continue to function.
Fry
Am I wrong, Alice? I got some very scratchy telephone notes once when you and I were talking—you were here and I was in California—I thought you said Alma Lutz was one person who was in with the insurgents. Is that wrong?
Paul
Well, I wouldn't exactly say that. She was a newcomer. We'd never known her in the suffrage campaign, you see. [Pause.] I don't know—I've never known her very well. I don't know her yet very well. [Pause.] But I think I would say that she sympathized with them.
Fry
I see.
Paul
She wasn't in a position to—she didn't take any active part in it.
Fry
Yes, I see. I guess what you were telling me was that she did not stand wholeheartedly with you, then.
Paul
Our only connection at that time with her was that she shared an apartment in Boston, where she lived, and a home out in wherever it is that they live in New York state somewhere with a fellow Christian Scientist. Miss Marian May, who was the chairman of our investment and endowment fund committee and a very prominent Christian Scientist, got in touch with these two people because they were also Christian Scientists and she was the chairman, you see. Marian May was the chairman. One of these two people was the treasurer.
That was one reason that they'd had an investment counselor from Boston so the treasurer could be in touch with the investment counselor. So, when all this thing was sort of brewing, long before it got to the stages I've been recounting and any of these things
So, Miss May said to me one day, "Well, Doris Stevens has been to see me and she says you're in a terrible jam."
I said, "Am I? Well, what's the jam about? I don't know what you—."
So, she began to tell me all these things that Doris was saying, and I just said,
"Well, I don't know really anything about it at all."
So, she said, "Well, now I'm going to see what we can do about this investment and endowment fund in case there's any attack made on that."
So, she communicated with both Alma Lutz, because they were together, and her treasurer up in Boston. She said something like this: "Our endowment fund is in need of protection." Something that she said Christian Scientists would understand; she told me she sent this telegram. And they began saying, well, they thought that probably there was some justice to this question. (I can't remember what on earth it was all about, really.) But finally, Marian May sent them a telegram and said, "I don't think that you are Christian Scientists or you would arise to the defense of this thing which is so vital to carrying on this movement," and so on.
So, they then called a meeting of the investment and endowment fund committee in New York. Mrs. [Margaret C.?] Williams, who was on the investment and endowment fund committee and always was one of the pillars of strength financially in our movement, asked me if I would go to the meeting. (When I'd gone to Europe, I'd resigned from the committee and said, "I can't be on this committed when I'm going to be over in Europe so much." So I thought. So, I wasn't any longer on the committee. So, Mrs. Williams said, "Will you come up to New York and be at this meeting? It will be a very crucial meeting.")
This was in the offing before all these things had happened, months and months before, I guess. So, I did go up to New York and went down to be at the meeting. When I got there, Mrs. Williams, since she was on the inside, said she would like to move that I be invited to come into the meeting because I'd really founded the investment and endowment fund committee and been on it at the beginning, had always been on it, and had probably been the person who'd gotten most of the money that they had in it. So she said, "I want Miss Paul to be here answering questions and to speak up for me because I'm not very familiar with anything."
So, they thereupon voted that I could not be allowed to go in. So, I sat out in the hall [laughter] all the time, expecting to be called in. But the treasurer, who was fairly new to us and had never been in the suffrage campaign at all—she had come in fairly recently into the movement—had been put on this committee because she was working in the field of investment up in Boston, I believe. So, I didn't get in. I couldn't go in. Alma Lutz was there with Margaret Smith, and of course was supporting her in the position that was taken. I think it was only just complete ignorance of new people who'd been entrusted with money and not knowing exactly what to do.
But the people who'd been with us longer, it was very rare we had anybody defect; I don't know if we had anybody , who'd ever been in the Woman's Party any length of time. So, I've always felt, and probably still, that Alma Lutz, you see, wasn't in the suffrage campaign at all and we knew nothing about her, had never heard of her. When she did come in, we made her chairman of our editor committee, and at that she was good because she wrote well and she was conscientious. I didn't mean to speak in any way against her and I wouldn't say she was an insurgent.
Fry
Okay.
4. V. Other Accomplishments
International Treaties for Equality
Work with Bedia Afnan on the Third Committee, the United Nations
FryOne of these newspaper items about the defection says that one of the issues of the Doris Stevens group was that the Woman's Party was formed to work for suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment and that it was spending too much of its time and energy in the international field.
Paul
Oh, is that so?
Fry
Yes. Were you aware of this complaint at the time? Do you think that that's a correct assessment by the newspaper?
Paul
Well, I mean, maybe Doris said—you said Doris Stevens thought I was doing too much time [in the international field]—
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Well, you see, in 1938, at our national convention in Detroit, it was voted that the National Woman's Party would take steps to form a world committee, of which the National Woman's Party would become a member, like other world committees which were in existence in almost all organizations. We were incorporated at a meeting in Washington. Sometime I will give you a photograph, if I can find it, of all the people, our whole national board, in fact, was there incorporating this world committee.
We elected Lady Pethick-Lawrence of England to be our world president or chairman or whatever we called
You see, as I told you first, we did it with just this international committee going to conferences where our government was represented. And then I just gave for quite a long time all of my time to building it up.
Fry
Yes. That brings us to another topic—the inclusion of the equal rights clause in the international Covenant on Human Rights that the United Nations was creating.
Paul
Yes, that's one thing we did. That was 1945.
Fry
Forty-five? No, this was later.
Paul
That's when Sara Bard Field helped us, you know.
Fry
Your efforts to get equality according to sex put in the Preamble of the U.N. Charter.
Paul
That was '45. Well, the Preamble was the United Nations Charter, really. In the Preamble, they told what it was to do. The Preamble, you know, begins: "We, affirming faith in the worth and dignity of the human person, the equal rights of men and women, of nations great and small, we now hereby assemble,"—or launch or begin or whatever they said—"this United Nations." And then I gave you all the different little points that were put in in that sheet. You have it.
Fry
Yes. And then, in 1951, the General Assembly was to vote on sex equality, to include it in the Covenant on Human Rights, at Flushing Meadows, New York.
Paul
Wait a minute. In the Covenant of Human Rights?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
You mean there was some treaty on human rights?
Fry
That's right.
Paul
Well, the first treaty that was proposed was the treaty on—I think the first one proposes that they have an international treaty on nationality of women and that
Fry
That would help if we could get it all put together. By going through the Equal Rights magazine, too, we might be able to cull this out
Paul
Anyway, we had this thing that was gotten out by our New York City committee, and it gives the dates of each one of those treaties.
Fry
This one seemed to me to be especially broad.
Paul
I believe the nationality one was the first, or perhaps it was—[pause] well, I can't say about that one. They called them "covenants" and they were just treaties. All those that had to do with the rights of women came to the Status of Women Commission, and you know we created the Status of Women Commission completely.
Fry
Yes.
Paul
And had it made finally a full commission through Governor Weinard [?]. From that time on, till I went down to try to help the national headquarters and I stopped working at the United Nations, we worked with very great success with that Status of Women Commission. But I really deserted that field over trying to save the Woman's Party from the [Carl] Hayden rider [to the Equal Rights Amendment].
Fry
In 1950 on November 14, there was the woman from Iraq, Madame Bedia Afnan, who was the one that submitted the amendment for "an explicit recognition of the equality of men and women on related rights."
Paul
Yes. But, you know, she was the person we got. Elsie Hill and I got her to do that.
Fry
I wondered if you did.
Paul
Yes. I mean, she was the person whom we worked through at that particular time. You see, every day Elsie Hill and I drove down to Lake Success, where they [the U.N.] were meeting there. Now, what year was that?
This is 1950.
Paul
And that's the year that we started in with our Hayden rider trouble, and I left to go down [to Washington] and work on that, unfortunately. But what happened was that we had this circle of women and men, mainly men, from all of these countries on what was the Third Committee, I think it was always called.
Fry
Yes. The January-February Equal Rights tells the vote of the Third Committee. They voted for it 34 to 0 on that date, November 14, 1950.
Paul
Whichever one of these various treaties it was, I can't remember, but we'd gotten it anyway to the Status of Women Commission and then it went up to the Third Committee. On the Third Committee, we didn't seem to have anybody willing to champion it and it might have been killed. I suppose at that time Mrs. Roosevelt was probably still there, I'm not sure. But in all events, we didn't have any friend.
I remember Elsie Hill happened —As we went in every day, we would take the same seats. I think this is when we were out at Lake Success still. We were right behind, she and I, but she was the person who did all this business, right behind this girl from Iraq. Iraq didn't have any voting rights for women anyway. So, Elsie was this outgoing type. Wherever she was, she always began to talk and make friends and chat away. So, she became quite a warm friend of Madame Afnan. Then, when we needed to have this proposed, we asked Madame Afnan to do it, and so she did.
I remember first of all she had to call up the head of her delegation and he said, "But women don't vote in Iraq. It will put us in a very preposterous position if you will be the leader of this in the Assembly of the United Nations. No, no, no. You couldn't do that." So she came back and said her chief wouldn't let her do it.
So, then we said, "Well, why don't you go back and say that the world doesn't know very much about Iraq." And all the things that she was always telling us, which were mostly—Let me see—I'll have to think up those things about Iraq. It seems to me it was the country where the ten commandments were given. Anyway, it was a long history of the wonderful, marvelous things about Iraq.
I said, "We have learned, Miss Hill and I, all about Iraq from you. It's incredible , what you've told us about the history of Iraq. But the world doesn't know it, and why don't you just get up and take this leadership and have the world know that Iraq has not only this glorious past, but it's now a leader in the whole new world of the emancipation of women. Talk about the advertising that you can give to this country, your country, and the good light in which you could make it appear before the world. See what reaction you get from your chief."
So, she came back and said, "You know, this was a most good idea you gave me because he's very much impressed and he thinks this will all be to the glory and honor of Iraq for me to do this. 'So, he said, 'Go ahead, do it.'" So, she became our chief.
And I remember that she was superb because of the way she worked. She went to every single man and stopped at his desk and talked with him. She told me, "Now, when I went to Saudi Arabia, I don't believe anybody in this committee could have gotten Saudi Arabia to sponsor this treaty that you have if I hadn't gone, because he knows that I'm of his world and they welcome me. But if anybody just from what they think is the other kind of a world [laughter] comes in, you couldn't get anywhere." So she turned out to be just superb.
I got to know her extremely well, and again and again she came over and had dinner with me at the Women's University Club where I lived. I was a member and lived there always at the time I was with the United Nations.
Closed to research until 1 January 1983
Paul
The last time that I was up there to the United Nations and I asked her right away to come over and have dinner, she came. And for the first time she was not very warm. [Interruption.] She seemed sort of anxious to terminate the dinner and not to stay very long and she was totally different.
I finally said, "You know, I have a different feeling about being with you today from other times because we've always been so of the same opinion and so on. Is there anything that I've done to offend you?"
She said, "Oh, no, no. Oh, no, no," and so on. After a little while, I kept persisting and I said, "I have a feeling that there's something that's happened that you're not pleased with. Is it something I've done, or that somebody's done, or what is the matter?"
And she said, "Well, I'll tell you. [Pause.] The first person who came in and"— Goodness, but this is so confidential, you know. You can't put these things down. So make a mark it's not to be transcribed. She said, "When Truman took over the presidency, the first person who came to see seems to me his name was Ben Gurion, but she told me the name—she said, "Your country's gone over to the Jews, and I am an Arab from an Arab country. I feel I'm dealing with a hostile group now here.
"Well," I said, "I don't take any part in that struggle and I don't know anything about that struggle. It's not anything that ought to disturb our relationship in working here at the United Nations." So she finally calmed down and I guess that was the [end of that].
But then I went on down myself and began to work again in Washington. In the last few years, you see, I've just deserted it completely and just let it be quiescent because I thought my main purpose in coming up here [to Connecticut] was to think I'd again go into the United Nations and build up again the committee and all the good feeling we'd gotten among all these women from other countries.
That's what I really want to do next. I don't want to spend any more time going down over the details, excepting I can see the ratification probably—I've got to put off the United Nations work until we win or lose that campaign. Because, you see, when I came up here that's what I said to all the people there on our board, "Now I'm going back to work on this [international] committee that was formed by the National Woman's Party and I took the main part in getting it successfully started over in Europe and successfully started in this country. Now, I've just"—
Blocks to U.S. Ratification of Treaties
Bogotá
Paul—said, "Well, we'd like to go in when you start it again on the American end of that."
Fry
May I ask you a very stupid question about this Covenant on Human Rights? It was passed by the General Assembly on December 4, 1950. Now, the last I heard about that was that the United States had not yet ratified that. Has our country ever done this?
Paul
You know, the first time that this whole thing came up was at Bogotá, whatever the year was. What was the year of that? Do you know? That was the Conference of American Republics.
Fry
Was that after Montevideo?
Paul
Oh yes, long after. About '41.
Wait a minute. I've got it right here somewhere. [Looks through notes.] I think it was around '47ish.
Paul
I think it was around '41.
Fry
Do you?
Paul
Well, I think it was in the forties anyway.
Fry
Yes. [Reading notes,] The World Woman's Party was first created in 1938—
Paul
Thirty-eight at Detroit, it was authorized. It was incorporated the next year in 1939.
Fry
And you had the dedication of headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on August 18, 1939. In December of 1941 you were at work organizing the North American chapter. In July of that year, they had given you a big, big dinner in Philadelphia.
Paul
No. I returned from Europe in '41 because—I wasn't busy about this business at all. I returned from Geneva because we were getting into the war.
Fry
I know.
Paul
I went up to my little cottage here, and I was asked to go down to a Philadelphia meeting. It wasn't to organize anything. It was just to be speeches, and I was one of the speakers. That's all there was to that.
Fry
Oh. Well, in the Equal Rights magazine it was written up as one of the largest dinners ever given for the National Woman's Party, in Philadelphia.
Paul
Well, it may have been, but it wasn't a dinner for anything—
Fry
And in Alice Paul's honor. [Laughter.]
Paul
It was nothing but a dinner at which I was one of the speakers.
Fry
[Looks through notes,] Here we go. May 2, 1948, was the Ninth International Conference of American States at Bogotá.
Paul
All right. Well, now wait. Let me just get this into my mind. At that meeting, we sent two people. Mrs.
Fry
Which Miller is that?
Paul
Emma Guffey Miller. She went over to try to get Muna Lee sent as a member of the delegation so we'd have a woman on the inside, and she was. She was appointed by— it must have been Truman, I imagine. Forty-eight. Who was President in '48?
Fry
Truman.
Paul
It's wonderful the way you know these dates and these Presidents.
Fry
But I flounder the whole time!
Paul
I think it's marvelous! Well, I thought it must be Truman, for Mrs. Miller to have gone. Truman agreed, and he appointed her to be in the inside of our delegation going down to this Conference of American Republics. Then Mrs. Walker—perhaps Mrs. Walker was our national president at that time, I'm not sure—Amelia Walker. But she went down on her own to be there for the conference, representing the National Woman's Party and she paid her own expenses, I think, and went down. Of course the government paid for Muna Lee. So, we had two people there.
Now, at that conference—you see, we had always pressed for this equal rights treaty. So, we went down in support of an equal rights treaty, complete equal rights in all fields, like the Equal Rights Amendment. Muna Lee undertook to press it from the inside and Amelia Walker from the outside, and it was adopted. It was called the Treaty on Equal and Civil Rights, I think.
The first treaty was on the nationality of women at Montevideo and the second treaty that came from the Conference of American Republics was this one at Bogotá", which was called an Equal and Civil Rights Treaty, I think. It was to cover all rights, civil rights.
Fry
"Political rights" was the article that I read, "treaty giving political rights to women," in Equal Rights .
Paul
No, but that wasn't right.
Here's the quotation of the title: "The Inter-American Convention on the Granting of Political Rights to Women."
Paul
But there was another one at the same conference which was on—the political rights one was one we had gotten through. We got it through with the United Nations. But this civil rights one went beyond political rights, and that's one that we couldn't sign because we didn't yet have it in our own country. We had political rights all right.
That's the time that the first Castro insurrection really started, you know, and broke up the conference.
Fry
I wondered what happened because it mentioned the madness of riot and the flames in the city.
Paul
Yes, it was. And it was the group that finally took over Cuba. Castro was there, and it was the beginning of that movement.
Fry
Were you in danger at any time?
Paul
I wasn't down there.
Fry
You didn't go to that one?
Paul
No one went for us except Amelia Walker and Muna Lee [?]. So, immediately when this disturbance occurred and practically broke up the conference, Muna Lee and all the other American delegates, I guess all of them, were removed by our country from any further participation. But Amelia Walker stayed on because she was independent and representing nobody but the Woman's Party. She had personal friends there that she lived with whom she'd known over the years, I guess. So she stayed on till the very end.
It's my very dim recollection, but I have it in this one little leaflet that I have to get for you, that at that one, the real one we were after, which was the new one of complete equality for the American republics including the United States, was called the civil rights treaty. Of course, we couldn't sign that. That's one of the arguments we've been using ever since; that the other countries could sign this treaty, the other countries that went to Bogotá, but we couldn't because, of course, you can't sign a treaty for something which—maybe you could do it, but you wouldn't be apt to do it—if you haven't obtained it in your own country. Just as we
That's one of the terrible things, that we've been held up so long with our [ERA]—you see, '48, and then in '50 came the Hayden rider, that long fight that women have themselves been responsible for.
Fry
Is it passage of the Equal Rights Amendment that is holding up the signing of that treaty?
Paul
Well, we can't sign the treaty for complete legal equality when we don't yet have it in our own country, quite apart from the Equal Rights Amendment. We don't have in many, many fields yet complete equality.
Fry
Is the problem the same with our ratification of the Human Rights Covenant of the United Nations?
Paul
I'm not sure when you say—I mean, I'd have to look what that treaty is that you're talking about (as I explained before) the human rights one. The only one that I can remember was the time that we had—and I'm not sure whether the equality section was put in that one—because I was there in the gallery when it was being discussed in the Human Rights Commission.
The United Nations: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Human Rights Commission Vs. the Status of Women
PaulWe had been striving to get the delegate from India or the delegate from Chile (both were with us) on that Human Rights Commission, which was presided over by Mrs. Roosevelt as you know, to get them to add to the treaty as it was drawn, making it include equality for women.
The one that I'm thinking about was a rather vague one that was being proposed on general human rights, and we wanted (Are you listening to me?)
Yes!
Paul
—to have specifically put in equal rights for women . I remember going to the Indian delegation and she said, "Well, I don't know really what to do about it." Then I ended up going to the Chilean one and she said, "All right, I'll move it." So, she moved that they add the word "sex" so it would include women, whatever form it was in. It wasn't certain that it was not going to be a general one on human rights but not mentioning the equality of the sexes. Sexes are already in the Constitution and so on. We thought this must be included in words so that nobody would misinterpret it.
Anyway, when Madame Figaroa, who was the delegate from Chile, got up and proposed this—she's now over, you know, in the International Labor Organization in Chile at Geneva. Well, Madame Figaroa did propose it, and Mrs. Roosevelt staunchly and very vigorously opposed it.
Then this went on for some days and the newspaper people—I think one paper came forth saying it was such a strange thing for Mrs. Roosevelt to be opposing this. We were trying to get people that we thought might influence her to stop opposing it. So, she arose at this meeting and I think she was chairman at the time, but she may not have been chairman. Anyway, she was the one who was opposing it.
And she said, "Well, I wish to make clear I'm being criticized. I find in the press I'm being criticized for opposing the equal rights for women section being added to this as proposed by Figaroa from Chile. I want to state that at all events, I have withdrawn my opposition to the equal rights for women amendment."
This was a very, of course, important declaration. Anita Pollitzer was sitting beside me—I think I've told you all this—and she rushed down and got a copy of it.
Fry
Yes, you did.
Paul
And that was the time when the hostility of Mrs. Roosevelt to the Amendment was publicly withdrawn. But it was forced as a defense to the people criticizing her because she was opposing putting it in the World Covenant on the grounds, I think, that the World Covenant should be more general and just talk about general human rights.
You see, on those grounds, she'd opposed having the whole subcommittee ever established. And then when we did get established against her will and her opposition in London by our delegation led by Lady Pethick- Lawrence over there, she then—that was the opposition to having it anything but a subcommittee. First of all, she [voiced] opposition to having it brought up at all. She said the commission should have the right to take up all things in the field of discrimination and just be trusted to deal with human rights and not have a special committee. We wanted a special commission. So, at last they compromised and put in a sub commission. Then we had to have this fight in this country, for us led by Mr. Weinard, to raise the subcommission to a full commission. So that way we got a full Commission on Status of Women, with full commission rank.
So then, Mrs. Roosevelt went on with her Human Rights Commission idea and I think I vaguely remember that the treaty they were calling the Covenant on Human Rights was not specifically including women. About then I came down to Washington and I don't know what happened afterwards.
Fry
Now, just a minute. I may be able to find that—we're getting to the end of the publication of Equal Rights magazine here. [Looks through Equal Rights issues ]
Paul
It ended in '53. That was a great calamity that ended.
Fry
Yes. It will always be a calamity too for historians. [Laughter.]
Paul
Well, we did have a great many bulletins, and I think maybe I could get all these bulletins together.
Fry
"At the end of 1950, the United Nations Assembly had adopted a momentous directive to the Commission on Human Rights." That was what Madame Afnan introduced. "it directs that there be written into the World Bill of Rights the ideal so long held by the National Woman's Party and the World Women's Party. This Assembly resolution, formally approved December 4, 1950, read: 'The General Assembly decides to include in the draft Covenant on Human Rights an explicit recognition of the equality of men and women.'" [Read from Equal Rights magazine.]
Paul
Well, now that's what Mrs. Roosevelt, in the commission stage, was speaking against, you see, what she was trying to keep out.
I see. Then you had a deputation after that to Sir Ramaswami Mudeliar of India, a member of the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
Paul
Yes. He led us in the—"Medalia," he called himself. Sir Ramaswami Mudeliar. He was the chairman presiding. I don't know whether I told you about this, but he was the chairman at the Third Committee Subcommittee on dealing with this particular covenant. I told you Mrs. Roosevelt attended every session in the beginning. We were trying to have the subject brought up of Human Rights Commission not being the sole group to deal with it but having the Status of Women Commission made equal. I remember so well that this Ramaswami Mudeliar presided and day by day we would go down and stay till late at night there at the meetings of this particular subcommittee. And never would our subject come up.
Finally, one day Mrs. Roosevelt announced that she could attend no more meetings, that she had engagements to speak or do something or other and she couldn't be present thereafter. So the next meeting, Sir Ramaswami Mudeliar brought up the question of making this subcommittee into a full committee and giving it all the rights under the Status of Women Commission, that the Human Rights [Commission] had. He had evidently done it purposefully, but we didn't realize he was doing it purposefully, and to wait until Mrs. Roosevelt was no longer there to make any opposition.
So then, the man got up from the United States saying, "I'm speaking for Governor Weinard. He isn't present tonight. We didn't know this subject was coming up tonight. But my instructions say that whenever it does come up, the United States delegation strongly supports the raising of the Status of Women Commission to a full commission." Then, all over the little group that was on the committee, the men got up and supported us and it went through right away. Then we became the Status of Women Commission, equal to the Human Rights Commission. What was the date of whatever Mudeliar was doing?
Fry
This was in 1951 when "a deputation was sought to obtain Sir Ramaswami Mudeliar's support for the continuation of the Status of Women Commission, of which he had been one of the chief architects." [Read from Equal Rights .]
Paul
Who wrote that article?
This is by Mamie Sidney Meisen in the January/February 1952 Equal Rights .
Paul
Yes, she's one of our best writers, but I think she made a mistake. It wasn't to continue the commission. It was to raise the commission to the status of a full Commission.
Fry
Well, that may have happened a little bit earlier.
Paul
What I've just told you about?
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Because this was the real fight, you see. Mrs. Roosevelt would come in and make the report, which she did, for the Human Rights Commission and leave out everything that had happened on the Status of Women Commission. We probably couldn't get a hearing because she had to present the case always to the Economic and Social Council. So, we first had to change the status of it so that the Status of Women Commission could make the report for complete equality.
Fry
Yes, I understand that.
Paul
And in the Human Rights Commission, she was trying to keep this pending treaty from recognizing at all this equality.
Fry
Well, this is a review of 1951 in the international field, and she sees one of the milestones being on May 14 when "the Status of Women Commission approved at Lake Success a convention on the political rights of women with a Magna Carta." [Read from Equal Rights .] And she says that the Status of Women Commission had approved the principle of the year before.
Paul
Now I'm beginning to remember this. I remember it all now.
Fry
And then there were some sessions in Paris.
Paul
I couldn't remember whether we got through a political rights too. We did get through a political rights treaty and we got through an equal nationality treaty. The two of them got through.
Fry
Well, apparently, then, this was the big victory. "In Paris of May, 1951, the Commission on Human Rights adopted
Now, there were three other articles on the status of women that had been incorporated earlier, which you may remember having worked for. One is Article 1, which says, "Each state party hereto undertakes to respect and ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in this covenant without distinction of any kind such as ... sex." Then, Article 12 is: "Everyone shall have the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." Article 17 says, "All are equal before the law. All shall be accorded equal protection of the law without distinction on any grounds such as... sex."
Paul
That makes me think about Mrs. Meisen [?], you know. She became so terribly ill. I saw her just before I came up here and she said she no longer could work in the government she was so ill, but she said, "I think I can start back and begin to write again, some articles." If I can ever get down there and start again, she's a person I could appeal to. This makes me remember about her. She was so very good, and she had this gift for writing.
Fry
The first council meeting of the World Woman's Party to be held in Europe since the war went on at the time she was writing this article, which was January of 1952. Did you go to that, Alice?
Paul
What does she say about that?
Fry
She says, "As we write this article in January, 1952, there is now taking place in Paris the first council meeting of the World Woman's Party to be held in Europe since the War." [Read from Equal Rights .]
Paul
Well, what does she say about it?
Fry
[Leafs through magazine.] She mentions the international chairman is Louise Van Eeghen of Holland, and she says
Paul
Now, who says this?
Fry
Still Mrs. Meisen. She also says Lady Pethick-Lawrence is president of the World Woman's Party. That's all.
Paul
It's a great loss we didn't continue that paper.
You see, everything that Mrs. Meisen wrote—she was employed, you know, in Senator Hayden's office, and she would come across and get the material which I always gave her. I don't know that anybody else ever dealt with her or ever knew her very well. So whatever she wrote she must have written because I gave her; but I don't have any belief that there ever was a meeting held in Paris. So, I don't understand that. I don't think that meeting was ever held after I came home.
Let me see. You say that was after the war was over , though.
Fry
Yes.
Paul
All these people, so many of them, lost their lives in one way or another in the World War. Everything, everything was wiped out that we'd done.
Fry
You mean at your headquarters there?
Of course, in that part of the world it was everything; there was nothing but the war.
And then you see Lady Pethick-Lawrence died, and I know that we had a great deal in the Equal Rights magazines about Lady Pethick-Lawrence's death and what she'd done and so on, a great deal. Did you come across that?
Fry
There was a tribute to Lady Pethick-Lawrence in that; I
Paul
I'm getting all mixed up and I've got to go through these Equal Rights and sort it out again because I don't know just when—I knew I was in Washington when Lady Pethick- Lawrence died, and I saw to it that we had about two issues that gave a great deal of tribute to her. I remember Ann Carter was at that time the editor of the paper.
Fry
[Looks at magazine.] Virginia Star Freedom is editor at this time.
Paul
The last issue—who was the editor then?
Fry
Dr. Florence Armstrong.
Paul
She was the last editor?
Fry
I'm not sure; this is the September/October/November/ December issue of 1953. In here you wrote a statement on the vote from the Senate, so you were here in the United States, I guess.
Paul
Well, I know when I was here. I came back in '41.
Fry
No, wait. I'm sorry. They're reprinting a statement you wrote in 1950 here. Well, I think that all of this is available, too, in the records of the committees and the commissions of the United Nations.
Paul
Well, you ask me some things that I can remember, then, because I can't remember—I know that after I came back to— maybe a meeting was projected to be in Paris, but I don't think a meeting was ever held. I mean if it had been held, it seems to me I would have known about it. And I think that [inaudible] perhaps received a note from somebody saying, "We want to try to have a meeting," and I must have given all this to Mrs. Meisen and not, perhaps, supervised the article she wrote. Because I don't think this meeting occurred. I know that I didn't go to Europe again after 1941 and just because of being so wrapped up in the work in this country. I didn't try to do it. I knew I couldn't do both.
Fry
For a while there in 1948, Alice Morgan Wright was the World Woman's Party's observer at the United Nations General Assembly that was then meeting in Paris. She
Paul
What was she observing?
Fry
The General Assembly of the United Nations, that fall of 1948.
Paul
Oh yes. She was very good. Now she's completely just lost her mind, really.
Fry
What a tragedy, for a person to be so able, and—
Paul
So wonderful she was, so wonderful. She has a lawyer. She had quite a great deal of money and her great, deep interest was in the protection of animals. Edith Good—whom you may know, just died a few months ago, I guess, maybe a year ago—she and Edith Good went to Smith together and they continued friendships all their lives. They both worked in this movement of ours.
Alice Morgan Wright continued, I think, to live in the home that she'd always been in and she'd inherited—but her secretary told us that she just didn't know anything at all, didn't recognize anybody or know anything. So, so sad! [Pause.]
Fry
Well, I can ask you a few of these other smaller questions first to clear up some things, Alice.
Paul
Yes, go ahead.
"Sideshows" of the National Womans Party
National Recovery Act Code in the Thirties
FryI thought you might have some other comments to make on the National Recovery Act Code hearings because, according to my notes on that, the Woman's Party in the thirties had someone at all of those hearings.
Paul
Yes.
Fry
And there were over two hundred codes in all and I guess they had a hearing for each code or something. But, at any rate, the Equal Rights magazine—
Paul
But I told you we had all these what somebody's called "sideshows."
Fry
That was your term, yes. [Laughter.]
Paul
Did I say those were sideshows?
Fry
Yes. [Laughter.]
Paul
Anyway, that was one of them; it was only just because you almost had to see that somebody was there. But you knew that the only way to do it was to make it [women's rights] a fundamental part of the Constitution. Whatever we did would be changed pretty soon by some other code.
Fry
So that all of this activity, you knew, was not any permanent advance. Is that what you mean?
Paul
Well, I mean we didn't pay very much attention to it, except to have somebody go down and register our protests.
Fry
Yes. It was reported in Equal Rights at that time that
Paul
Whatever it was, some of the things were good and some of the things were bad. But we were trying to get the idea that the whole system of law must be changed by having as a basis the equality program rather than the subjection- of-women program. Anything that came up, we tried to give a little helping hand to make it look better, but I must say we didn't devote much time to these.
Fry
I see. Let me see whose name I have here for that. [Looks through papers.] I guess it's Maud Younger who was attending all of those hearings.
Paul
She would have been a very good person to go. She probably did. She felt the same way I felt about it.
You know, the League of Women Voters always were different with this because they said, "Specific bills for specific ills." And they seemed to glory in all these specific ills just to apply a specific bill. We thought you must change the basis, the whole inequality basis of our law, of our whole legal system; and you can only do it by doing it from the very top, which is the Constitution.
So I remember we always went to those, but that was a sort of a little dull duty we thought you had to do.
Sex Equality in the 1964 Civil Rights Act
FryWell, another little sideshow that last night when we were planning our interview we said we wanted to be sure and cover was the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Sex equality was put in that with the efforts of a Woman's Party.
Paul
Yes. And the efforts of nobody else. No other woman's organization helped us.
Fry
Do you have time to tell us—
Paul
It came up, you know, as a—a long series of these civil acts were coming up, with people working in civil rights. [Pause.]
You see, the Negro movement and so on, which was furthering—all the people that worked with the Negro movement did not want to have sex included. They said no because, again, "This is the Negro's hour." You probably remember all this.
Fry
Yes.
Paul
About two years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 there was another effort to get through a Civil Rights Act. It wasn't till '64, 'till Attorney General [Robert] Kennedy had sent this draft to the Judiciary, drawn up in the attorney general's office and wanting it passed as it was without a change of a syllable, that it seemed to be on the way to having a nationwide act on the subject passed. That's the first time we really devoted any great attention to it.
You see, this was '64, so you wouldn't have it, I guess, in [ Equal Rights magazine]. We would have it in all these little information bulletins and so on that we've gotten out. I'd better try to assemble those as soon as I possibly can, order and send them to you, I guess.
Fry
That would be good.
Paul
Because I can remember that before this came up as an act that we really knew was going to be probably on the statute books, it was introduced in Congress [probably 1962?] by the same people who were working for equal civil rights for Negroes, an act which was to prevent all discrimination in any way in the economic field—I think it was limited to some field like that; I believe it was— on the grounds of race, color, religion, and country of origin, and not sex.
We asked Congressman [Gordon L.] McDonough of California, who was the congressman that Dr. Mary Sinclair Crawford had been chairman of his campaign committee and had worked very hard for his election. So she said, "Anything you want done, I think you'll always find Congressman McDonough will be willing to introduce the measures and so on." So, we asked him if he would offer an amendment putting sex to this "there should be no discrimination," we'll say, "in economic fields." (It wasn't that, but it was something on that order.)
So he introduced it. The next morning I was called
I said, "Well, I'm certainly perfectly willing to say that we of the Woman's Party asked your husband and that it was our concern, it wasn't his; but he was very much in accord and he introduced it. But I don't think I ought to do that without asking him. I really think I ought not to interfere this way. He may not want me to call Mr. Mitchell and say this."
So, she didn't think so. She said, "I know that something has to be done. Since I can't locate him or get any idea where he will be, and Mr. Mitchell's pressing me so, I thought this was the best way out."
So, I said, "Well, let's leave it and see if I can get your husband and find out what I ought to do in his opinion."
A little bit later, she called up, maybe in the afternoon, cooing like a dove [laughter] and happy and tranquil. She said, "My goodness! I'm glad you didn't call up Mr. Mitchell because when I got my husband he said, 'Well, I certainly know what I want to do. I wanted to introduce this; I don't want anybody to think that I would introduce a thing and then withdraw the thing; I certainly stand by it and I believe in it and I accept all responsibility for it and don't want anybody else to try to bail me out and don't want to hear anything more about placating this Mr. Mitchell.'"
Well, after all, he was defeated. Whether he was
Fry
Okay.
Paul
Then it was a limited application. I don't remember whether sex was retained or wasn't retained that he was trying to put in. But it wasn't anything very fundamental. It was just some little phase of the fight that the Negroes were making.
Then, when this one [1964] came along on the presidential scale, being demanded by the President and being drawn up by the President's brother, a great many of our members felt, "Well, you mustn't take up these side things so often." But I felt this we must take up, absolutely must take up.
What happened was that it was sent from the attorney general's office to Mr. [ Emanuel] Celler, chairman of the [House] Judiciary [Committee] at the time and an opponent of ours. A note was sent and reached all the men on the Committee—of the judiciary—about, we'll say, ten at night or something, from the chairman, giving a draft of this Civil Rights Act and saying that, "This will come before the Committee tomorrow morning at ten o'clock and we will dispose of it then and send it on to the floor."
So it happened just that way. The minority report, which was presented from the Committee to the floor, stated this thought: that the men had not received any notice of it till ten o'clock the night before—we'll say ten—no time to study a long and complicated bill with many sections, many "titles," they called it. We were concerned with Title VII, which was the one adding the word "sex." That was the one on employment. We were concerned with putting in the word "sex." There was [also] a section on education. Of course, we wanted to put it in all of them, but the one we started work on first was employment as perhaps the most fundamental, and we never got beyond that. There was a section on education, a section on grants from the federal government in aid of every one of them, we wanted to have "sex" put in.
So, according to the minority report, the men arrived the next morning, not having had time to study it. Mr. Celler arose and said, "I will allow myself one minute to speak for this measure"—or two minutes, perhaps—"and I will allow the ranking man on the Repuplican side the same amount of time to express any views he may have. We will have no debate, no discussion, and no questions. But we are going to send it straight on to the House to vote on in the form in which it arrived from the attorney general's office, with no changes permitted." So, they registered the strongest possible opposition.
Men got up on the other side—not on Celler's side, Republicans or Democrats on the Committee—and said, "Well, we want to know about this point and this point and this point."
"No discussion is to be permitted. No debate is to be held. No questions are to be asked. I [Celler] of the Democrats, Mr. McCulloch for the Republicans, we each have the same amount of time to express ourselves and then we will vote."
They had enough people lined up with the administration. Of course, this was the way the Kennedy administration, I guess, acted usually. They just voted it out in the form in which it came from the attorney general's office—it had arrived there [in the same form] before to the Judiciary Committee. So, they had no chance to do anything about it.
Well, we held then a meeting of our national board. Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller was then president and a Democrat, of course, and presided. We passed a resolution saying, "This is not a civil rights act; it's a civil wrongs act as far as women are concerned." We sent this protest to everybody that normally would profess to pay any attention to us, in the House and in the Senate and in the White House and so on. We appointed someone to go over and try to find someone who would represent us on the floor of the House when this came up. It was to come up pretty soon after Christmas. Our meeting was in December.
Anita Pollitzer agreed to go over while we were having our meeting and talk to Catherine [Dean Barnes] May, whom we thought might be the woman who would make the biggest fight for us on the floor, because Miss St.
So, Miss Pollitzer came back saying, "Mrs. May said, 'Yes indeed' I'll be very happy to take this matter up and make the fight on the floor to put sex in.'" Because, you see, we'd said, "Try to put 'sex' in; put a general amendment that in all sections 'sex' should be included among the groups protected by the Civil Rights Act, some general one." So, she said, "Well, we'll work it out some way or other, but I'll get this thing done, I assure you." So, we left thinking that we had that pledge [from Congresswoman May].
Then Mrs. Miller sent a request to the White House, to be allowed to bring a delegation to protest to the President about the form in which this bill was drafted with the complete exclusion of women from it—race, color, religion, country of origin, and nothing on sex, in any of these discriminatory sections that were being taken up for the protection of Negroes against discrimination. So, then she departed right after the meeting to her son's home up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was going to spend Christmas. Then I think she went up after that to visit her son in Massachusetts and then was coming back some time in January.
So, pretty soon I was called on the phone by one of the President's secretaries [pause] the woman who was there so long, whoever she was. She said, "I'm calling up for Mr."—let's see—"Kennedy to say that"—[pause] .
Fry
You mean for the President or for the attorney general?
Paul
No, for the President. It must have been for the President. [She said,] "I'd like to speak to Mrs. Miller."
I said, "Well, she's gone up to Connecticut," and so on.
"Well," his secretary said, "He wants to say that the President would be pleased to receive you after Mrs. Miller's return." [Pause.] And I think he said that he would receive us in Mrs. Kennedy's apartment in the White House, or that Mrs. Kennedy would be pleased to receive us, I guess it must have been, and that the President would come in and discuss Mrs. Miller's
So, I sent word up to Mrs. Miller of this reply. Then, when Mrs. Miller came back in January, the first thing she did was to call up and say, "I want to make arrangements now for this interview." The secretary who she asked for, the one who had called me, wasn't available and wasn't there, and Mrs. Miller kept calling again and again and again and again for maybe a month, and never could make any arrangement about having the interview take place.
Then, in February I think it was, about the first week of February, it was due to come up in the House. We had somebody call all the different women's organizations and say, "This measure is coming up and we are hoping that you'll help in trying to get 'sex' included because it seems as though it will be enacted and be the law for the country. If only race, color, religion, and country of origin are protected in the Civil Rights Act, it would certainly be a backward step for women and have very serious, probably, practical consequences."
I remember we got one woman in the B and P [Business and Professional Women] to call their organization and they said, "Well, this is something that we could not do without a national convention and we won't have a national convention for perhaps another year." And each one, every one, refused to go on record or enter into this fight. We couldn't get anybody to agree.
I think it was then that Mrs. May called up and said that she had promised to do this, but she now found that the whole thing was so sewed up by the Judiciary Committee and the President and so on that she didn't—
We were defeated.
Fry
It was sewed up by whom?
Paul
By Mrs. May, the one who we had asked to take our lead.
Fry
And she said it had been so sewn up by whom?
Paul
Well, by whoever was running the Civil Rights Act. She
So, then we started in to try to get somebody else. I remember we went to Mrs. [Martha] Griffiths and she didn't want to do it. I went over personally to talk to—tried to—to Katherine St. George, but she wasn't in and the person in her office said, "Well, I know Mrs. St. George would approve and want to do this, but whether she can do it or not, I don't know. But she'll call you or I'll call you when she comes back." And the person did call, not Mrs. St. George but this secretary, and said, "Well, Mrs. St. George thinks that she's not the person to do this. She's, of course, against this whole act. Everybody knows she is, and if she starts to do it, they'll say, 'Oh, well, you're not trying to help women. You're trying to kill this act.'"
Fry
May I straighten out a point? A while ago you said that you asked Catherine May because Mrs. St. George was no longer there. I thought you meant she was no longer in Congress.
Paul
Yes, I did—and now you tell me that she was. Because I know that I went myself to Mrs. St. George's office, so she had to be there. But why we asked Mrs. May, I don't know.
Fry
All right.
Paul
She'd been a friend, but I don't know why. Normally, I would have talked to Katherine St. George. I really can't answer that point, why we didn't. I just took for granted that she wasn't, but I know she was now because I know I went to ask her myself. Mrs. Broy and I went together.
Then we went to Judge Howard Smith, who was chairman of the Rules Committee. He had always been a
I remember he said, "You ask Martha." That was Mrs. Griffiths. We said, "Well, we have asked Martha. I haven't personally, but somebody's gone to her, and she doesn't want to do it and I don't think she will do it."
Then, when Mrs. St. George's office telephoned, "No, she'd reflected and she didn't want to do it," we went back again and asked Judge Smith. We said, "The time is almost here and we have to have somebody who can be heard and attention will be paid to." He was chairman of the Rules Committee and in a powerful position in the House.
So, he said, "All right. I will agree to do it, but I want to tell you that I'm not the best person you could have. But I will do my best." And then he said, "I think of all the sections to begin on and the best way to do it is to do it when you get to the employment section. Perhaps that's the most important of all. There shouldn't be discrimination in the field of employment based on sex. Really, we will take them one by one by one and we'll begin with Section I, which is the right to vote. You don't need it in that because you already have the right to vote." And then he went down it and said, "Let's begin here and we'll see what we can do."
So, then came the morning when it was all to come up and begin the debate. Mrs. May called me on the phone and she said, "I want to talk again about this amendment, because you asked me at the beginning to put it in, and I've been again canvassing the situation and I find there's no possibility that you can get sex in. There's no possibility that it could be done and it will terribly injure the Equal Rights Amendment if you try and fail. So. I think the wise thing to do, and I make this plea to you, don't let it be introduced ."
So, I said, "Well, I think myself that we ought to
Then, when this debate began, suddenly a new man that we had never thought of asking, Mr. [John] Dowdy of Texas, arose and, with the very first section that came up—whatever it was, not voting rights, but the next one—proposed that they add to the words "race, color, religion, and country of origin," " sex ."
Fry
And you hadn't talked to him?
Paul
No. He was an obscure man as far as we knew. We didn't know him. We hadn't met him.
Fry
Did you ever find out why he did that?
Paul
Yes, we did find out; but we didn't know then. So, whatever that first section was, we'll say—there's one on public accomodations? Isn't there something? I've forgotten what that first section was. Anyway, when he said, "And now I move that we add the word 'sex.'" Well. this had been very well organized by, I suppose, the attorney general's office so that everybody was supposed to let it go through exactly in the form in which they had presented it. So I remember a howl went up all over the room, "Not" So they voted down adding the word "sex." They just howled him down; they wouldn't let him speak.
So the next day, we didn't still know who this Mr. Dowdy was. We were delighted somebody had wanted to bring it up but we were pretty much worried when we saw that he was howled down and not even allowed to speak on the word "sex." So, we knew somebody had been at work organizing a very strong resistance, and still we were only the Woman's Party and nobody else, excepting one lady who had come up from Texas, one recruit we had who belonged to the B and P. [Pause.] I'll have to think up what her name was.
But what had happened was that she, in her own right had various unjust treatment on the ground of or sex, she thought. She had married a dentist, I think
Then he opened an office, and in almost no time he fell in love with his secretary and just went off and left his wife. She had probably been supporting herself in some way before she'd started to do this with her husband, but she had a time of very great trouble just to exist, and she was existing by becoming, I think, a secretary or typist or something.
She was so impressed with the injustice of which she seemed to have no redress in any way that she went up to New York and got a position, I believe, in some office in New York to support herself. Then she thought she would start to join in and see if she could get anybody to join with her to see if she could get some law through Congress that women wouldn't suffer as she had suffered. So, she wrote, I think, to every senator and gave an outline of what had happened to her and asked if they would help her in some way to get some action by Congress. She didn't know anything about what Congress did, you see. She was very untutored in all this.
I think her first name was Hedy [?] and maybe I'll think of her second name. I'm not quite sure, but I think so. I know I have it here in my little telephone book because recently I had a note from the government saying, "This Hedy Somebody down in Texas has asked for an inquiry as to whether you have received some letters she's been sending you."
Well, at this moment, when she wrote to, I believe, the entire Senate, she got an answer, she said, from only one senator, Dirksen. She said it was such a very friendly and sympathetic answer, wanting of course to help her. He said, "The best thing for you to do is to come down to Washington and go to the National Woman's Party. They're working all the time on this thing."
So, she suddenly appeared at our door. When she
I said, "Well, you've certainly come at a wonderful moment. This is just when this Civil Rights Act is being voted on, being ready to be voted on, being discussed on the floor, and we can give you a room and let you stay here if you wish it."
"Well," she said, "I've already found a very cheap room right here in the neighborhood, but I will come over and help and begin right away. Tell me what to do."
I said, "Well, what do you belong to? Any woman's organization?"
She said, "Yes, the B and P down in Texas," which seems to be her permanent home where she comes from.
So, I said, "All right. Go to the phone and call them up and tell them that this is now on the floor and is going to be voted on in the next week. They probably will spend the whole week on the vote. Try to persuade them to help."
She came back and with this tale: "No. They say they will wait for a national convention. They couldn't possibly take any action on something as quickly as this. But," she said, "I'll go just for myself."
So, she went over and she talked to everybody she could get to listen to her in the House as they came in and as they went out the door. She didn't know anything but to tell them this was a very important thing. Then she sat up in the gallery and listened to it and she threw her whole being into it. I think she really was a big, big, big help. She felt so earnestly about it. And, of course it was so simple. Each little section was simple, guaranteeing to race, color, religion, and country of origin.
Well, then each day, second day, third day, fourth day, up got Mr. Dowdy, always—by this time, we got to
So I said, "Well, I think the best thing to do, since this is coming up tomorrow," whatever the next thing was, "and Mr. Dowdy doesn't know very much, we can see he just knows the general idea that women should be protected." This was the field of education. And I said, "Now, a report has just been issued from the legislature of Virginia showing that educational opportunities are being denied on the grounds of sex in Virginia just because they don't have the facilities."
This report showed that [pause] well, an enormous number of girls, maybe up in the thousands, had applied for college education and had no place they could go. It was so impossible to believe! The figures were so enormous! I remember calling up Mrs. Butler Franklin, who lives where the Mary Washington College is down in Fredericksburg, and I said, "You've had a great deal to do with the Mary Washington College. Do you think it's possible in the state of Virginia that 12,000 girls were turned down,"—whatever that figure was—"who wanted to go to college and they weren't allowed to?"
She said, "I'm sure of it because I know Mary Washington turned down such an enormous number last year. We just get almost no money from the state for our Mary Washington part of the University of Virginia, and there was no way we could do it. We couldn't take them." And this really probably is true what this report shows, issued by the legislature—well, by the government of Virginia, whatever bureau it is; I don't know. It was a governmental, anyway, report.
So, I said to Caruthers Berger, "Just get that report out and tell these harrowing things about Virginia and show this is a sample of why we must have equal educational opportunities for women students." So, she worked, that whole evening and got all the facts down, and she was writing these briefs for the government every single day, so she could do it pretty rapidly. She would even type herself and mimeograph herself.
So somebody went over at the crack of dawn almost, as soon as the offices were open, to get Dowdy and said, "Now, when you make the speech today, show all the facts to support it and maybe they won't howl you down if you begin on something factual like this." So, I don't know who went over, but whoever went over, Dowdy grasped it with joy and alacrity and said he would certainly present this.
So, he did and it's in the Congressional Record . (I probably have these Congressional Records of that fight. I know I kept them in Washington. Whether I have them up here or not, I don't know.) So, he got up to make his same remark that "I want to amend this by adding 'sex.'" And he succeeded in making his speech, being howled down when they could, just when he stopped to have the vote taken. But he was certainly howled down again.
But anyway it was all incorporated in the Congressional Record, everything that Caruthers Berger had prepared the night before. So, by this time, we regarded him as an ally and began to consult with him. He said, "Of course, I'm not succeeding in helping you, but at least I get the subject before [them], which seems to be all I can do."
We said, "When we get to employment, which is the Seventh Title, we think that nobody will howl down the chairman of the Rules Committee. His own colleagues will never do that. We believe it will be really presented, and you can start in then with all the facts you've accumulated and help."
So, when we got there to Title VII, Judge Howard Smith, who was the chairman of the Rules got up. Of course he was highly respected on the floor, being the chairman of one of the most powerful committees, and was the Democrat. I think Dowdy was a Republican. I'm not sure though. I think he was.
84. John Dowdy was a Democrat from the Seventh District of Texas.
So the chairman immediately recognized Judge Howard Smith, and he said, "Now, I have been sitting here for this whole week and haven't said a word, and many other people have been sitting here this whole week and haven't said a word for different changes they think ought to be made in this Civil Rights Act. We're given no opportunity whatsoever. We're not recognized. I was recognized, but we were not recognized when we wanted to bring up. our protests. I want to protest about the way this whole Civil Rights Act is being put through," and so on. Mr. Celler [Smith?] didn't say anything about he was talking about equal rights for women.
So Mr. Celler said, "Well, of course everybody wishes to hear immediately anything that you wish to say, Judge Smith, and we want you to have every opportunity to say anything you have at heart. We are unaware of anybody feeling that he has not been allowed to present his views, and will you just take the floor." And he was welcomed and given all possible attention.
He said, "Well, my purpose in rising is to make one specific amendment to this Civil Rights Act. I'm taking just the present one before us, Title VII, that says 'race, color, religion, sex , and country of origin," (or something or other; he put it in some way) "And I want to speak to it. "
So, he had the floor and he spoke to it very briefly. Then Mr. Celler got up and spoke, as chairman of the Judiciary, against it. He read something from the Women's Bureau, the director being this Mrs. Esther Peterson. He brought her name into it. He said, "Here we have an official statement from the Women's Bureau, representing the American women, and she says this is not the time or the place to begin to bring in the question of sex, discrimination on the grounds of sex." Then he told all why he thought it wasn't a—(I certainly must get this for you if you don't have it, this very historic debate).
So other people got up and supported Judge Smith. Among others, practically every woman whom we had labored with got up and made a splendid speech. I've given you the one from Mrs. Griffiths, which now she's extremely proud of and had made into a public document and we had it reprinted. That's when we had it reprinted, I guess, or maybe the one I gave you she had reprinted. But it says at the top: "Not printed at government expense." But you saw that.
Mrs. May spoke, and I don't think quite all but practically every woman in the House spoke in support of Judge Smith's additions, although they had refused to take the leadership and to do it when we asked them. Then, the one and only woman, I think, who didn't speak for us was Mrs. [Edith] Green of Oregon. [Pause.]
Fry
Do you know why?
Paul
Then a great deal of lobbying was going on right on the floor. Mr. Celler was managing it and also getting up and speaking and answering points and so on in the debate. Then when Mr. Celler was at the point, apparently, of exhaustion, he had James Roosevelt and Mrs. Green—I think perhaps they were the only two; they're the only two I remember—who would alternate, so that one would sort of take the floor and manage the opposition side, the Judiciary Committee side. And he walked up and down the aisles speaking to person after person after person and saying, "You understand, the administration is in back of this. The attorney general's office has prepared this. It's the desire of the administration this go through and it should not be changed," and so on.
All this lobbying was going on up and down the aisles. Mrs. Green was one of Mr. Celler's aides. So she not only didn't speak for us. She was actively doing all she could against us. I'm sure she didn't speak against it, but she spoke to the men against it, from all the reports that were given to us.
Then came the time for the vote. And someone—I suppose Judge Smith, but I don't know—asked that they have roll call—what do you call it—I've forgotten what the name is. It's when you march down the aisle. All the pro's march on one side and all the other side march to the other—two columns. Whatever that's called. It's not very commonly used, but whatever it was, they demanded this.
So, Mr. Celler headed the administration side and marched down the aisle and Mrs. Green marched with him in his. Our side was led by Judge Smith. He marched down and all the women (excepting Mrs. Green) marched down there behind him.
I didn't go over, but Mrs. Broy went and she was very—she said she used to go year after year when her husband was over there in the Congress. She was pretty
Mrs. Broy came back and I remember she came in, she threw her arms around me, and she said, "All the years I've been up in the gallery, I've never, never, never, never, never seen such enthusiasm as was registered when we won! We won and put it through and put 'sex' in." She said, "So, the people themselves who have been so terribly articulate against us really weren't voicing what they felt because the people applauded and applauded and applauded and applauded when it was announced from the chair that Judge Smith's amendment had carried."
Fry
You mean by the gallery or downstairs on the floor?
Paul
By the men on the floor. This is what Mrs. Broy said. She said, "I've witnessed so many debates, so many victories. But I never saw the whole floor rise up and applaud a victory the way they applauded today."
Fry
Now, let me ask you one minor point here. Was it this lady, Hedy Someone from Texas, who saw Congressman Dowdy, do you think, and talked to him?
Paul
No, no.
Fry
Oh that wasn't the connection, then.
Paul
No, but she—if you get these reports of the Congressional Record, and I'm sure it was in some of these bulletins we got out—Goodness, we did fail in not keeping the magazine going! Sometimes you get to the point of raising more money and you can't possibly stand it that it's so hard! Anyway the price of paper went up
So, she just said, "I give it up. I cannot possibly raise the money to go on with this paper." So, we just gave it up.
Fry
Well, I just wondered if you did find out afterwards what—
Paul
Well, I wanted to say, from the gallery, this Mrs. Hedy Somebody—[laughter] I'm almost sure she was Hedy. You see, she was as innocent as a babe.
Nineteen sixty-four was the year of the presidential election.
Paul
And I remember reading the Democratic platform that was issued to all voters, you know, every four years. And one of the achievements they put down was getting through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with all they'd done for women by preventing all discrimination hereafter in employment. Of course, we never got beyond this because Title VII was near the end of the titles.
And one woman got up. [Pause.] Anyway, and said she had an amendment she wanted to present, which was to cover all titles. After we'd had the victory in Title VI (I have to think of who this woman was) which was what we wanted to have done in the beginning, and that seemed to Judge Smith and everybody that we wouldn't get anywhere if we didn't take one specific title and try it out there.
So she got up [pause] I think it was Mrs. [Frances P.] Bolton—because I know she was a woman we had never dealt with very much, and she was—I think it was, but
Fry
Wasn't she from Ohio?
Paul
Yes. And she was one of the wealthiest women in Congress. And there was no doubt about her feeling of wanting to champion the rights of women. But she could afford to have a very elaborate office, and there was one Negro, you always had to encounter this Negro—whether he was her chief secretary or not, I don't know—who seemed to be guiding, we thought , taking too much control over what she did. We just felt, "Oh, if we could only get Mrs. Bolton to sit down and really listen to somebody who could help her a little bit in deciding what to do."
Well anyway, she arose, and this was certainly a very good thing she was trying to do. And so Mr. Celler was very polite and said, to the "Gracious lady" or somebody and so on, "Of course, she really probably doesn't understand that this is a subject that should be brought up at the very end of the debate, because now [her idea] would be applying to all [titles]. and this is not the point to bring this up."
So she said, "Oh, thank you very much for giving me this help."
And then someone got up, and we'll say it was Judge Smith but I'm not sure, and said, "Well, I rather question whether this advice from the chairman of the Judiciary Committee should be followed, because I think when we get to the end there will be no opportunity, because in the end we'll probably be on technical details, and there won't be anything to amend. I think this ought to be considered," or something, and it was very right what he said.
But Mrs. Bolton had already thanked Mr. Celler for the good advice she got from him. So after the next two. or three titles—however many there were—then came the windup, which was more or less a summary. But there was nothing to amend in it. And so then she got up as she'd been advised to do by [Mr. Celler], and [what happened was] just exactly what this other person [said] who'd tried to warm her, and didn't succeed in
So that effort didn't succeed.
Well then, at the end of the whole thing, which was concluded that week. (I think our vote was taken on Friday, and maybe they voted Saturday. They finished it up, anyway.). And on Monday they were to have the final reading, because it had been section by section by section—all the votes had been on individual titles. And the whole completed thing had to be voted as a whole.
So Mr. Dowdy on Sunday—I remember so well this point—called me up and said, "I have received a telegram from" [pause] (I guess it was) "national association of university women"—it was from some woman's organization. [Pause.]
Fry
You mean the AAUW [American Association of University Women]?
Paul
Yes. [Pause.] It seems to me it must have been from them. He said, "—asking me to try to have the word 'sex' eliminated in the final reading, when the whole thing will be adopted as a whole." And he said, "I don't know if they are criticizing me very much for having taken this part; perhaps it's gone to every member of the House. But anyway, I've got it."
And I said, "Well, we don't know how it happened, and we want to say as far as our organization is concerned, we're entirely behind you in what you've done and are grateful to you, and we hope you won't hear from any more people wanting to eliminate it, because we had thought it was done now."
But he said, "No, you see it isn't done. Whoever is managing that campaign is now starting in on another campaign, which I just wanted to let you know about, which could very easily be done when they vote on accepting the whole Civil Rights Act. It just could be taken out again."
So then we had that great anxiety. And when it was taken up again as a whole on Monday, it went through as a whole and was not taken out. So whatever effort was made by this group—I'm just telling you this so you can see what a great force we had against us, whoever it was. And the thing that they were always doing was saying, "Of course, we're not against, you know, but we don't want to imperil any forward steps that are being made in the defense of the Negro by this. This is the Negro's hour. The whole thing is for the Negroes, what the administration is trying to do for the Negroes. And you're just complicating it by insisting on putting in 'sex.'"
Well, then in the enforcement section, they created the Equal Opportunity Commission to enforce it. And we started right in, sent a delegation before they were even organized, when one of the Roosevelts was made the temporary chairman, led by Mrs. [Emma Guffey] Miller again as our president, to ask for the enforcement of this particular section, just to show we were back of it and watching over it and so on. And the Roosevelt [James] said that he was only temporarily there; they would have a permanent chairman.
Well, pretty soon the permanent chairman was appointed. And for a long time we didn't get much enforcement, any real—well, we could say we got no enforcement. Because people would apply discrimination against the Negro, and immediately it was forwarded to the attorney general's office to be acted upon. But women would go themselves or we would go for them, and never never a single case, as long as I was there, got into the attorney general's office.
Women were always told, "Well, you file a lawsuit." And some did file lawsuits, but as far as getting the Equal Opportunity Commission to help, by the time that I left anyway, we hadn't succeeded.
You see, in the suffrage campaign, I was there all the time and I could tell from the beginning to the end. But these times when I went down and then left when a thing was accomplished, I don't feel that I'm as much in touch with it, especially since we didn't have the record in our paper.
Fry
Well, that was a good narrative that tied everything together, which can be pieced—
You mean this particular thing.
Fry
Yes.
Paul
Well, I stayed on until that was finished you see, until we got the civil rights thing. Then I always came back again, trying to do something at the United Nations. That was '64, about eight years ago.
Appointment of Jessie Dell to the Civil Service Commission
FryWould you like to tell about how the Civil Service commissioner was appointed?
Paul
Which one?
Fry
The Civil Service Commission appointment of Jessie Dell.
Paul
That's all been written up in the Equal Rights magazine. Since we have so little time, you can get all of that from there.
Fry
One thing we haven't mentioned—
Paul
She was appointed by—let me see—[pause]. Yes, she's the one I'm sure that was appointed by Coolidge. The only difference of opinion among our own organization about her was when she wouldn't help Miss Berrien be the tax judge.
Fry
But that was later.
Paul
That was when Hoover came in. That was her second appointment. She was appointed the first time by Coolidge, the second time by Hoover, and we were the people who put her name up. Previously, right after the vote had been given to women, Wilson appointed a woman, Mrs. Helen Clem Gardner, to be the first woman on a Civil Service Commission. But that was sort of an honorary thing that she had, and it wasn't very long that she was in. And then women began to complain a great deal about their treatment in Civil Service, many thousands of women all over the country were complaining and saying they had no one to speak for them as a commissioner. So it became something they began to agitate from the inside.
And then a good many people came to us from what we called the [National Woman's Party] government workers' council. This was the time we formed all these councils. Miss Isabel Kendig formed them, and one of the most prominent and flourishing ones was the government workers' council because they did have a real grievance they felt, which made them glad to join somebody that was going to protest for them. They didn't have to make themselves unpopular by protesting, but the government workers' council they welcomed. It was one that flourished and became very big and prosperous. And so they wanted us to take up getting a woman commissioner from the ranks, who would know what women were suffering and would not regard it a political thing and think only of what she was going to get out of it, but would really seriously try to get for women the definite things they wanted.
So we agreed to do it. And then we didn't know any particular woman, and there was Miss Berrien, who'd just joined our ranks. She was a government workers' councilwoman herself, because she was in the government (the Bureau of Internal Revenue, I think it was, as I said). And so she presented the name of Miss Dell, whom she knew personally and she thought she would be a very good person for the position, and she had been dismissed. It was a period of economy, when they were not only having other regulations that were harmful to women but were dismissing a good many of them. But she'd gotten to quite a high position in the government, therefore had quite a high salary, I guess, and she'd been over in Europe quite a great deal during the war doing something or other for the government. And nobody seemed to question her ability or her character or anything; excepting in the general cutting down of high positions for women, she was eliminated.
So, we found that the government workers' council would help and that all the people connected with it were all for her. There was no opposition to her personally. So then we did agree to try to get her in. I don't know exactly, when you say how it was done—[pause] but anyway, somehow or other we got her name up to the President, and he appointed her. And the second time we merely wrote a letter to Hoover, and he reappointed her.
Fry
There were some notes in the Equal Rights magazine—
Paul
I remember it was a long campaign, because I can remember on and on and on, Jessie Dell would come up to our
Fry
To write letters?
Paul
No, I don't think to write letters, but to [pause] well, people who were somehow influential with Coolidge to—I don't think there was ever any opposition from Coolidge; [it was] just that it didn't come too easily. And after her nomination had been made she had to be confirmed. And I know when she was nominated we wanted to get up a dinner and so on in celebration. And she said, "Oh, no, no, don't do it until I get confirmed, because I don't know whether there's any chance I can get confirmed."
So then we had a long campaign again, where we perhaps helped more easily, by trying to show there was such support for her among the people who had to—probably the Judiciary Committee, who had to approve her nomination. And then when it was all accomplished and it was finally done and she was confirmed, and there was no question she was going to be the first woman commissioner who'd ever been in the ranks (a little bit different from the one who'd had it as a personal political plum for her because she'd supported Mr. Wilson in some way or other) we then did have a very big dinner at one of the hotels. And she turned out to be very good.
Appointment of First Woman Diplomat
PaulEvery one of the women that we have supported has turned out, in my opinion, to be very good for the nation. Perhaps the best one of all has been [Federal Judge] Burnita [Matthews]. She's been extraordinarily good in a very difficult place. And then this first girl that we ever helped with, this Lucille Atchison I told you about, who was appointed to go to Zurich and stayed there until she married. She was successful in every way.
Fry
She was the first one in the diplomatic corps, is that accurate?
Paul
Yes. There'd been women typists and telephone operators
We had on our board—I think on our board, anyway I guess she was a national officer—one of the people who was very close to Harding because her husband had been one of the biggest men in the political life of Ohio. And this person, whose name I'll get for you—a very, very wealthy family, extremely wealthy family, so they evidently contributed a great deal to the Republican campaign.
So, when this girl from Ohio was struggling along to get somewhere in the diplomatic world and not meeting any success, we asked Mrs. whoever-she-was to talk to Harding about her and she did, and she was just appointed right away. We happened to have this connection with a person who could do it.
Women Physicians Allowed in the Army
FryThe other sideshow that we haven't really talked about is that of changing the military rules during World War II to allow women doctors in as well as men. This was at a time when the armed services needed doctors.
Paul
Well, by the Second World War so many women had good training, that they felt they could apply to be in the armed service. When there was a general appeal to everybody to do what they could, you know, for the war, a great many women in the American Medical, a very considerable number (I don't know how many) volunteered as surgeons or as doctors in some such capacity. And they went wherever they were supposed to go for their training and so on, and then there came the question of the first pay they would receive. And the comptroller general gave a ruling that he had no authority to pay them, and he had no authority to have anybody serve without pay. And so all these doctors and so on were sent home; they couldn't stay.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Paul
You didn't? Well, then the first thing that we knew, a little committee came down from the American Medical [Women's Association] headed by the person who became later our state chairman up here in Connecticut, Dr. [Emily Dunning] Barringer. The president at that time was a Dr. Ratterman, but the person who was in charge of the whole effort to get women into the armed service was a committee headed by Dr. Barringer.
So Dr. Ratterman, Dr. Barringer, and other doctors arrived and told us this situation and asked if we would help them in trying to get a law passed by Congress authorizing the payment of women physicians and surgeons. The law as it existed didn't forbid it, but there never had been a woman. And he said, "I don't see any precedent for doing this and any law enabling me to do it, and while they don't say it must be males, it's always been males and I feel I might violate the law and get in a great deal of trouble if I paid the checks without some authorization from Congress."
So we said, "All right. We'll do everything we possibly can (And I was there at this little meeting) to help them have a hearing." And I remember their legislative person sitting there on that sofa in that window in the living room, and she said, "You know, I was entrusted with getting this thing done, and I have to report to you that I have completely failed." And she said, "I don't know how to put a law through Congress." And she said, "I was told that the way you do is to go through an agency. If you want to publish a book, you go to some book agency, and some agent who gets your book published. If you want to put a law through Congress, there's an agency for that." And she said, "You have to pay this agency," I think she said, "about $500," or some sum. "So I collected from the women doctors, and I went to New York, not knowing how to do it, but I'd been asked to do it by the American Women's Medical Association.
And so I phoned an agency that puts bills in Congress. And this man said to me, "I will get your bill in for you, and you won't have to pay the man who puts it in. He's not supposed to have any money for it. But you pay the agency. And then all the legal work that always results from putting a bill in, you give to this congressman's law office. And he can take the money from
She said, "Now I have gone back to the man, and I'm taking him the rest of the money that he wants and paid him, and he says I'm not to pay the congressman, but that the congressman he's gotten was so-and-so. And that now I can pay to his law office all the money that he needs for carrying it on."
And I said, "Well, that's not the way, of course, you get that bill through Congress at all. You don't go to an agent, you go straight to the congressman and you ask him to do it and he does it, and he doesn't charge you anything for doing it if he believes in what you're doing."
So they said all right, as many of them as they could would stay down there and help in the lobbying and help with the hearing and help with all if it, if we would go over with them every day and introduce them to the congressmen and explain it, which we did. Everybody turned out and was doing lobbying, like Maud Younger, and went over day after day and introduced them until they built up a movement, and finally, the bill went through.
[Tape off.]
Paul
—They've become the staunchest supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Fry
The women's medical association?
Paul
The American Medical Women's Association. Whatever else happened with any other woman's organization, we always could depend on them. Then, as I said, when we started to form this women's Joint [?] [Congressional Committee?] they of course came; we just knew they always would. And when we had a very hard time to form it and to get the women to cooperate in working together—
[Interruption—tape off.]
I wish I could think of this man that they asked to introduce the bill for them. I only wish Dr. Ratterman were living so I could call her up and ask her all these things.
Fry
You may think of that by the time the transcript gets
Paul
Well, I can look it up in Equal Rights and so can you. Because it was in that period, you see, that we had the Equal Rights magazine. [Tape off.] [Anyhow, her work with that agency, the only point was,] nothing came of that, it was money thrown away.
Fry
[Laughing.] I think that's illegal.
Paul
And he turned out to be a man that—whoever he was, he was the last man in the world we would have selected. [Laughing.]
Fry
He must have been well-heeled if that's the way he operated. [Laughing.]
Appointment of Burnita Matthews, First Woman Federal Judge
Fry—What was it that India Edwards did and what was it that Emma Guffey Miller did about Burnita Matthews' appointment for judge?
Paul
Wasn't it taken down when I told you?
Fry
No, I was just sitting in there eating dinner.
Paul
Well, I can say this: when it was learned that there was the thought of the possibility of appointing a woman as a federal judge, there never having been a woman federal judge in America, the Woman's Party officially presented the name of Burnita Shelton Matthews for this appointment. And Dr. Agnes Wells, then chairman of the Woman's Party, national chairman, and I went down to the White House—no, we went down to the national Democratic headquarters and presented Burnita's name to Mrs. India Edwards, director of women's activities for the Democratic party. And when we explained that Mrs. Matthews was a member of the Republican Women's Club, although not a particularly active person in any partisan politics, Mrs. Edwards said, "There's no use in even discussing her. I know nothing about her, and I couldn't possibly bring up her name because this is one of the biggest "plums," as we call it, that can be given to any woman, and certainly the Democratic
And then we thought the only person perhaps who could change the situation would be Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, who was dean at the time of the women on the Democratic National Committee. And so we asked Mrs. Miller if she would join in in presenting the name of Mrs. Matthews. And she said she quite agreed with Mrs. Edwards; this was unthinkable, to give a position of this importance to a Republican.
And so, after much thought and many conferences and so on, Mrs. Miller finally said that she had thought this over and she felt that this is not a political appointment in any way for a political position. It was a position for which the only thing to be thought about was whether a person would be the most competent woman, make the best record for women that could be found, regardless of what her party was. And she said she would change her mind, and would go down and tell India Edwards she'd changed her mind and thought that the Democratic women and the Democratic National Committee would back this appointment, because as far as she could see, Burnita had better qualifications than any other woman we could think of who had legal training.
Fry
What do you mean, "After much thought, she changed her mind"? I think you're leaving out the role of the Woman's Party here.
Paul
Well, it was really much thought on Mrs. Miller's part, really, much thought on whether she should be confined to a Democrat because of her party relationship. She decided that it was a position in which the only thing one should consider would be one's qualifications, because it was such an important position to be a federal judge, and it didn't make much difference what you thought about Republican policy or Democratic policy.
Fry
Oh, I thought you had meetings with her during this period.
Paul
Well, of course; we all discussed it constantly.
So Mrs. Miller did go down and see India Edwards and told her she'd reached this conclusion and she thought it would be supported by the Democratic National
So then Mrs. Edwards said, "Well, if this is your wish and you are willing to be quoted as the person who nominates Mrs. Matthews for this position, I'll go and ask the President to appoint her." And she did go in and she came out and said Yes, that President Truman said, "I've left it to you to choose the woman. I will appoint her." And he appointed her. And I think that but for Mrs. Miller's action on this point, she would never have been appointed.
Fry
It would seem unlikely, being a Republican woman.
Paul
Well, I mean in view of the fact that the decision had been made on her nomination when Dr. Wells and I had first presented it. They had taken the position, "We won't even consider her name. We won't submit it, won't consider it."
And of course, Burnita's candidacy had been supported and endorsed by a great many women's organizations all over the country, but I don't think it had very much influence on the final outcome.
Fry
I believe she said [in her interview] she had spent a lot of time and effort getting many, many endorsements and letters written in and things like that. That was this woman she employed—
Paul
Miss Ann Goodby had been employed by Mrs. Matthews personally to line up as much support as she could among women's organizations.
Fry
I saw some letters in the Anne Martin Collection in The Bancroft Library that were written by Mabel Vernon, who was apparently helping to get letters written in support of the appointment too. So, there was an enormous amount of effort that went into this.
How long did this go on, do you think? I just wondered how long it takes to appoint a federal judge when it's an unconventional appointment like the first woman or something. Would you say two years or three years, or about how long do you know that this took?
[Pause.] I don't know about that.
Fry
Of course, I don't know what you'd start counting from; do you start counting from the first time the Woman's Party mentioned that we need women federal judges, or do you start counting from the time that a specific vacancy occurred?
Paul
Well, a vacancy had occurred and there was the question of filling this vacancy, and of course, women were beginning to agitate for several appointments of women. It was becoming politically important to do it.
Fry
Alice, when I was in Washington there was that vacancy on the Supreme Court and I was staying at the Woman's Party headquarters, and there was a lot of talk about maybe a woman from Pennsylvania and another woman from somewhere else was being seriously considered. And then I left and I never did hear what happened. A woman was not appointed.
Paul
Nixon had announced he was going to appoint a woman.
Fry
We had high hopes, but Harry A. Blackmun was appointed ultimately. Weren't you making a few phone calls?
Paul
Of course, we would like to have, and I thought and still do think—[interruption] I thought that Burnita would still be the best person for the Supreme Court. And I've talked to her about it a good many times and she always says she's past the age limit where she thinks they would appoint her. Of course, she could be appointed; there isn't anything in the law that says she cannot be above a certain age. But she says she thinks that they won't appoint her because of her age. I don't know how old she is, I've forgotten. Anyway, she did resign [retire]— about two years ago, I would think—from being a federal judge, and she's able to get her pension and get everything else now.
Fry
You mean retire, but she's still working—
Paul
But when she resigned, there was such a backlog of work that they gave her some special title (I've forgotten what it is), to continue, not as a federal judge, but she's still doing the work of a federal judge, doing exactly the same work and trying to help get caught up. So she still goes down and stays there all day and does exactly the same thing. If you want to call her, you have to call down at the court, and there she
The only reason I'm liking to talk about Mrs. [Emma Guffey] Miller, I think it's so very important that people themselves know—and for some reason I don't think Burnita ever did realize—how much she was helped in getting this position. At times I think almost everybody I know is so apt to think that through her own unusual gifts, and so on, that this has come to her through her own merit, while practically never do I know of a case where I think it's come through her own merit.
Fry
No, I think that's a law of politics: [laughing] it's not the merit, but it's whom you know. Isn't that the way it works?
Paul
Well, women (maybe men too) are so apt to think, "Well, I'm unusual. You see what I've done." They always see what they have done, "How wonderful it's been. I've been a success. Why do you clamor for more opportunities and so on for women? Look what I've arrived at." Almost always. Not that I've ever heard Burnita say that, but I think she really thinks that [and] hasn't the faintest idea of how hard it was to get her in, and how really very much she owed to Mrs. Miller. How unusual for a woman who's the dean of all the women on the National Democratic Committee to buck a whole committee and a whole thought of the Democratic party that "this is a plum that must go to a woman who ought to be rewarded in our party."
So, it just shows what an unusual woman Mrs. Miller was.
Fry
Yes. That is a typical argument, isn't it, Alice, about the Equal Rights Amendment—that women who are in a position to really help feel that there isn't much need for the ERA because after all, they've made it. [Pause.]
[Interruption.]
Paul
Well, I hadn't thought about it that way as much of an
Biography of Amelia R. Fry
Graduated from the University of Oklahoma, B.A. in psychology and English, M.A. in educational psychology and English, University of Illinois; additional work, University of Chicago, California State University at Hayward.
Instructor, freshman English at University of Illinois and at Hiram College. Reporter, suburban daily newspaper, 1966-67.
Interviewer, Regional Oral History Office, 1959—; conducted interview series on University history, woman suffrage, the history of conservation and forestry, public administration and politics. Director, Earl Warren Era Oral History Project, documenting governmental/political history of California 1925-1953; director, Goodwin Knight-Edmund G. Brown Era Project.
Author of articles in professional and popular journals; instructor, summer Oral History Institute, University of Vermont, 1975, 1976, and oral history workshops for Oral History Association and historical agencies; consultant to other oral history projects; oral history editor, Journal of Library History, 1969-1974; secretary, the Oral History Association, 1970-1973.
Appendix
Letters from Alice Paul as Examples of Campaign Field Organization Work
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Suffragists' Songs
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National Woman's Party Declaration of Principles, 1922
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Page from bulletin, Silver Anniversary of Suffrage Amendment: 1920-1945 List of chairmen 1913-1945
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Samples of press notices regrading National Woman's Party contested elections, 1947, and letter from Doris Stevens to Anne Martin
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“How Alice Paul Became the Most Militant Feminist of Them All, ” article by Lynne Cheney, from Smithsonian, November, 1972
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Index
[The numbers below represent page numbers in the volume. Clicking on the hyperlink will take you to the top of that page.]
- Abbot, Minnie D., 222
- Addams, Jane, 63-64, 98-99, 105, 108, 116, 257, 259, 288, 309, 314, 324, 353, 405
- Afnan, Madame Bedia, 599-601 , 608
- American Association of University Women [AAUWI], 180-182, 412, 419 passim, 635
- American Bar Association:
- endorsement of Equal Rights Amendment; 473
- American Women's Medical Association, 576, 641-642
- Anderson, Mary, 479
- Anthony, Susan B., 66, 82,105-106, 159, 204, 257, 301, 308, 341, 351, 467, 512-513
- Armstrong, Dr. Florence, 558, 613
- Arnold, Virginia, 217, 221
- Ashby, Mrs. Corbett, 203-206, 258, 360
- Atchison, Lucille, 639-640
- Austin, Warren R., 461-462, 509
- Avery, Nina Horton, 438, 591
- Baker, Mrs. Robert, 194, 211
- Barker, Elinor, 210
- Barrett, Rachel, 44
- Barringer, Dr. Emily Dunning, 576, 641
- Barton, Clara, 384-385
- Battle, George Gordon, 382-385, 559
- Bayh, Birch, 381, 387, 537-555 passim
- Bayh-Griffiths version of Equal Rights Amendment, 537-550, 623, 630. See also Equal Rights Amendment.
- Beard, Mary, 105-106, 193, 308, 354
- Belmont, Mrs. P. H. P., 87-88, 122-123, 140-142, 153, 161, 188, 191, 203-211 passim 258-265 passim, 321-322, 329-331, 346-348, 351, 355, 382, 451, 560-568
- Berger, Caruthers, 628-629
- Berrien, Laura M., 560, 568-572, 579-580, 589, 593, 637-638
- Blackwell, Alice Stone, 201
- Blatch, Mrs. Harriot Stanton, 93-94, 124, 212, 214, 337-339
- Boeckel, Florence Brewer, 83-84, 356-359
- Bolton, Frances P., 633-635
- Borah, William E., 126-128, 130, 236, 368, 374-375
- Branham, Lucy, 226, 228, 243, 260
- Brannan, Mrs. John Winters, 222, 337-338
- Bristow-Mondell Amendment, 112-113, 120, 316
- Brooks, Robert, 18, 31
- Brown, Izetta Jewel Miller, 192, 455-456
- Broy, Mrs. Cecil Norton, 269, 510, 521-522, 531, 538-539, 623, 631-632
- Bryan, William Jennings, 150
- Burleson, Mrs.______, 77
- Burns, Lucy, 3, 48-59 passim, 63, 65, 86-88, 98, 102-105, 122, 190-193, 202, 211, 215-216, 221, 257, 264, 267, 288, 298, 308, 310, 331, 354
- Burris, Carol, 539-540, 544-546
- Burton, Harold H., 269, 460-461
- Bush, George, 396
- Calnan, Eleanor, 223
- Campbell, Jane, 60
- Canham, Erwin, 504-505
- Carpenter, Alice, 155
- Catt, Carrie Chapman, 76-77, 96-98, 115, 177, 201-206, 236-237, 317, 322-327, 350-352, 360, 370
- Celler, Emanuel, 507-508, 541, 619-620, 630-631, 634-635
- Chamberlain, George, 112
- Chapman, Sarah, 157
- Chittick, Mrs. Elizabeth L. 141-147, 188, 233
- Churchill, Winston, 53
- Civil Rights Act, Title VII, 1964, 616-636
- Colvin, Sarah T., 407-409, 471
- Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage [CU], 95-114, 122, 209, 307-329 passim, 346-348. See also National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman's Party.
- Coolidge, Calvin, 360, 490-492, 637, 639
- Coonley, Mrs. Avery, 162-163, 164
- Cravens,_____[Representative], 510-511, 516
- Crawford, Mary Sinclair, 386, 388-389, 617
- Cummins,_____[Senator], 250
- Curtis, Charles, 127, 247, 295, 299, 374, 449-450
- Dash, Herman, 227-228, 262-263
- Davis, James J., 478-479, 482
- Day, Dorothy, 496
- Dell, Jessie, 579-580, 637-639
- Dennett, Mrs. Mary Ware, 75, 101, 105, 115, 309
- Devine, Dr. Edward, 19
- Devoe, Emma Smith, 116
- Dirksen, Everett, 464, 626-627
- Dock, Lavinia, 190-191, 213-214, 216-217, 219, 221
- Dowdy, John, 625-630, 632, 635
- Dreier, Mary, 438-439
- Drummond, Flora, 51, 53
- Dwyer, Florence P., 548-549
- East, Catherine, 533
- Eastman, Crystal, 65, 120, 259, 308, 316, 320-321, 405
- Eastwood, Mary, 531, 533-534
- Edwards, Don, 277, 299, 536, 541-542, 544
- Edwards, India, 643
- Equal Opportunity Commission, 636
- equal rights:
- Equal Rights Amendment [ERA], 267-268, 336-339, 361, 411, 430, 439, 448-451, 458, 486-487, 647
- Bayh-Griffiths version, 537-550 passim
- Hayden rider, 518-530 passim, 599-600
- opposition to, 272, 429, 438-439, 442-451, 488-490
- passage, 506-550 passim
- political party platform positions, 268, 382-396, 513-516
- support for, 440-443, 471-475, 478-490, 502-505, 642
- wording and intent, 266, 269-272, 458-464
- See also equal rights; Women's Bureau; National Woman's Party; protective labor laws.
- Ervin, Sam J., 538-539
- Etheridge, Florence, 70
- Evan, Mrs. Glendower, 108
- Ezekiel, Rachel Brill, 289
- Ferguson, Homer, 305
- Field, Sara Bard, 149, 150-151, 170, 259, 286-287, 340, 353, 598
- Figaroa, Madame, 607
- Fish, Hamilton, 426-428
- Forbes, Elizabeth, 527-529, 555-556, 583-587
- Fotheringham, Janet, 222
- Franklin, Mrs. Butler, 142, 144, 188, 302-303, 628
- Friedan, Betty, 530-535
- Gale, Zona, 202, 325-326
- Gallinger,______[Senator], 127-128, 247, 374
- Gard, Hamilton, 136, 249, 380-381
- Gardner, Mrs. Helen, 68, 71, 78, 82, 132, 328, 637
- Gardner, Lucy, 36-37, 44, 58
- Gardner, Matilda Hall [Mrs. Gilson], 162, 222
- General Federation of Women's Clubs:
- support for Equal Rights Amendment, 440-441
- George, Lloyd, 50
- Gildersleeve, Dr. Virginia, 286
- Gillette, Frederick, 328, 353
- Gillette, Emma, 66, 67, 99-100, 308
- Goodby, Ann, 645
- Gore, Louise, 390-392, 463
- Gram, Alice, 195, 348-349, 356-357
- Gram, Betty, 194-195, 253, 348-349, 577, 582
- Green, Edith, 631
- Green, Rena Maverick, 111
- Greuning, Dorothy, 138, 496-499
- Greuning, Ernest, 138-139, 495
- Grey, Sir Edward, 52-54
- Griffiths, Martha, 540, 548, 630
- Griswold, Mabel E., 552, 554, 560, 568, 573, 582
- Guffey, Joseph F., 517
- Hale, Matthew, 379
- Harding, Warren G., 491-492, 640
- Harper, Ida Husted, 90, 350, 352, 353
- Harrison, Cary, 289
- Havemeyer, Mrs. H. 0., 260
- Hayden, Carl, 518-524, 529, 531-533
- Hayden rider to Equal Rights Amendment, 518-535, 599-600
- Hazard, Mrs. Dora, 227, 228
- Hearst, Phoebe, 245-246, 317
- Hearst, William Randolph, 245-246
- Heitman,______, 503-505
- Hepburn, Mrs. Thomas, 122-123, 330
- Hill, Elsie, 71-75, 83, 92, 118, 132-133, 163, 204, 243, 256-257, 262, 265-266, 277, 354, 357, 458-459, 487, 524, 599-601
- Hilles, Mrs. Florence Bayard, 141, 193, 210-211, 222, 233-234, 245, 252-253, 565
- Hodgson, James D., 500
- Holden, Miriam, 583-587
- Hooker, Mrs. Donald, 110, 211, 257, 307, 315, 322, 325, 330, 493
- Hoover, Herbert, 422, 424, 478, 490, 580, 637-638
- Hopkins, Alison [Mrs. J. A. H.], 210-211, 219, 222, 223-224, 452
- Hopkins, J. A. H., 235, 452
- Howe, Mrs. Frederick, 215, 218
- Hughes, Charles Evans, 155-156, 370
- Hunkins, Hazel, 161, 175, 243, 344-346
- Hurlburt, Julia, 222
- Ingham, Mary H., 222
- Inter-American Commission on Women, 418-425 passim, 468-470, 494
- International Council of Women, 207, 466-470
- International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 203-207, 258, 359-360, 467-469
- Jamison, Maud, 217, 221
- Johnson, Adelaide, 351
- Joliffe, Frances, 149
- Jones, Andreus Aristides, 298, 363-366, 373
- Jones, Wesley L., 331-332, 363-366
- Katzenstein, Carolyn, 61, 161, 220, 393
- Kellerman-Reed, Ivy, 307
- Kelley, Florence, 406-, 409-412, 429
- Kendig, Isabel [Mrs. Howard Gill], 433-435, 638
- Kennedy, Edward [Ted), 537, 539
- Kennedy, Mary, 199, 516, 548
- Kennedy, Robert, 617
- Kent, Mrs. William, 64-71 passim, 80, 97, 101, 105-107, 173, 193, 210-211, 245, 296-297, 301, 308-317 passim, 328, 347, 348, 443
- Kent, William, 80, 347-348
- Kerr, Mina, 181
- Kincaid, Mrs. B. R., 222
- King, Dr. Cora Smith, 115-116
- Knowland, Mary A., 240
- Knowland, Joseph, 151
- Koontz, Elizabeth Duncan, 499
- Labor Department. See Women's Bureau.
- Lacey, Olive, 589-591
- Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lee, 176
- Laughlin, Gail, 338, 475-482, 503
- Lawrence, Pethick, 49
- Lawrence, Lady Pethick, 38, 48, 597, 608, 612-613
- League of Women Voters, 182-183, 258, 405, 616
- Lee, Muna, 604-605
- Leonard, Margie, 498
- Leslie, Mrs. Frank, 201, 204-207
- Lewis, Mrs. Lawrence, 63, 65, 91, 105, 154, 180, 190, 211, 227, 245, 250, 253-255, 262, 313, 354, 393
- Lewis, William Draper, 255
- Lewis, Shippen, 255
- Lindsay, Mrs. ______, 524-529
- Littleboy, Anna, 40
- Lloyd, Georgia, 199
- Lloyd, Lola Maverick, 131
- Lockwood, Belva, 71
- Lockwood, Mary Marsh, 183
- Lodge, Sir Oliver, 32-34
- Longwell, Mrs.______, 276-277, 542-547 passim
- Lutz, Alma, 594-596
- McCarthy, Eugene, 471-472, 539
- McCormick, Mrs. Medill, 102-103, 106, 310-314
- McCormick, Mrs. Stanley, 96, 98, 105, 309-310
- McCormick, Vance, 165
- McDonough, Gordon L., 617-619
- McGrady, Frederick, 464, 487
- McGuire, Wanona, 415-416
- McKaye, Benton, 74
- McKaye, Hazel, 74, 76, 113, 513
- McKaye, Percy, 74
- MacGregor, Miss_____,54
- MacLeish, Archibald, 286-287
- Mallon, Winifred, 357-359
- Malone, Dudley Field, 153-154, 160, 223-225, 230, 347
- Marsh, Eleanor Taylor, 356-357
- Martin, Ann, 152, 160-161, 194, 209-212, 222, 294, 325, 346-349, 357, 453, 645
- Matthews, Burnita, 422, 473, 559-560, 589-590, 593, 639, 643-647
- Maxwell, Elsa, 562-564
- May, Catherine [Dean Barnes], 620-624, 631-632
- May, Marian, 594-595
- Mayo, Mrs. Louise P., 223
- Meisen, Mamie Sidney, 610-613
- Mesta, Perle, 504, 513-516, 538, 579, 583
- Milholland, Inez, 63, 170-173, 339-340, 496, 513, 564
- Milholland, Vida, 172, 339
- Miller, Mrs. Emma Guffey, 240, 268, 384, 387, 516-517, 552, 557-558, 604, 620-636 passim, 643-645, 647
- Miller, Izetta Jewel. See Brown, Izetta Jewell Miller.
- Mitchell, Clarence M., Jr., 618-619
- Montevideo Conference of American Republics, 418-420, 425, 494, 495
- Moore, Martha, 182, 543
- Morey, Katherine, 213-219, 222, 260
- Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 182, 197, 351; 512-513, 543
- Mudeliar, Sir Ramaswami, 609
- Mussey, Ellen Spencer, 67
- National American Woman Suffrage Association [NAWSA], 61-114 passim, 122-123, 200-208, 212, 253, 258, 298, 307-329. See also Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; National Woman's Party, Woman Suffrage Amendment Campaign.
- National Association of Colored Women, 132-134, 185, 473
- National Association of Women Lawyers:
- endorsement of Equal Rights Amendment, 473
- National Council of Women Voters, 115-116
- National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, 474-475, 518-530 passim
- National Organization for Women, [NOW], 336, 530-535, 539
- National Woman's Party [NWP]:
- archives, 140-147, 219
- compared to National American Woman Suffrage Association, 200-208, 329
- direction after 1921, 256-259, 265-268, 404-410, 451-457, 493-494
- help to women in professions, 637-648
- internal dissension, 552-596 passim
- international activities, 4l8-429,446-447, 466-470, 494-495, 597-614
- membership, 179-189, 436, 480
- merger with Congressional Union, 209-212, 346-348
- origin, 201, 209-212, 346-349
- policies and tactics, 329, 340-341, 397-400, 453-457
- See also Alice Paul; Congressional Union; Equal Rights Amendment; Woman Suffrage Movement.
- Neil, Leah, 217, 221
- Nevinson, Henry, 52
- Nixon, Richard, 387-396
- Nye, Gerald P., 486-487
- Ogle, Dora, 459, 578
- O'Mahoney, Joseph Christopher, 269-271, 461-462
- Owens, Mary, 582-583
- Owens, Ruth Bryan, 425, 427-428
- Pankhurst, Adela, 3
- Pankhurst, Christabel, 32-34, 48, 59, 319
- Pankhurst, Emmeline, 51-52, 57
- Pankhurst, Sylvia, 1-4, 38, 48
- Patterson, Mary, 210
- Patton, Simon, 22
- Paul, Alice, 60-69, 148-154, 162, 174, 276, 298, 397-398, 436, 437, 444-445, 647
- arrest and imprisonment, 2-4, 225-226, 319-320, 397
- Britain, first experiences in women's movement, 31-59
- education, 17-32, 42, 56-62 passim, 67, 319-320, 460
- family and childhood, 5-16, 279-284
- international work, 272, 468-470, 484-485, 599-602, 612
- involvement in National Woman's Party dissension, 592-596
- on women, 31, 181-189, 195-199, 267-272, 401-402, 442-451 passim 501-502, 647
- social work, 18-46 passim, 58
- See also National Woman's Party; Congressional Union; Equal Rights Amendment; Woman Suffrage Amendment Campaign.
- Paul, Mickle, 334-335
- Pell, Sarah Thompson, 502-505
- Peterson, Esther, 497-499, 533, 535, 630
- Pethick-Lawrence, Lady. See Lawrence, Lady Pethick.
- Phelan, James D., 150-151
- Pollitzer, Anita, 131, 273-275, 286-287, 297, 359, 386, 489, 503, 507-508, 552-558, 576-577, 584, 607, 620-621
- Pollitzer, Mabel, 275
- Potter, Mrs. Alden, 109-110
- Pound, Roscoe, 266, 269, 458
- Powell, Ernestine Breisch, 516, 526, 633
- Price, Nina Broderick, 459
- Protective Labor Laws, 183, 411-413, 476-482, 519. See also Equal Rights Amendment, Women's Bureau.
- Putnam, Mabel, 472
- Rankin, Jeannette, 161, 174-177, 185-187, 212, 237-238, 298, 326
- Rawalt, Marguerite, 528-530, 535, 540
- Reid, Mrs. Ogden, 359
- Reyes, Consuelo, 121, 146, 185, 216, 496-497, 544-545
- Reynean, Mrs. Paul, 222
- Reynolds, Mrs. A. Scott, 395
- Rhondda, Lady Margaret, 205-206
- Robinson, Alice Gram. See Gram, Alice.
- Rogers, Elizabeth S. (Mrs. John), 76, 124-125, 166-170, 223, 337
- Rogers, Dr. John, 167-170
- Roosevelt, Eleanor, 489-498, 606-610
- Roosevelt, Franklin D., 4-8, 493, 580
- Roosevelt, James, 631, 636
- Roosevelt, Theodore, 154, 369-370
- Rosenwald, Mrs. Julius, 163
- Saboroden, Nina, 179
- St. George, Katherine, 158, 520-527, 623-624
- Sanger, Margaret, 494
- Sayre, Pearl Mitchell, 385-387, 388-389
- Scott, Dr. James Brown, 424, 468
- Sebree, Dr. Margaret, 560, 569
- Seneca Falls Resolutions, 264-265, 459. See also National Woman's Party.
- Sewall, May Wright, 467
- Shafroth-Palmer Bill, 103, 104, 109, 111-113, 123, 156, 159, 312-318, 324, 369
- Shaw, Dr. Anna Howard, 75-93, 95-96, 102, 105, 317, 325, 350
- Sherman, _____, [Senator], 247
- Sherwin, Ella, 435
- Smith, Mrs. Clarence, 467-468, 489
- Smith, Judge Howard, 623-637 passim
- Smith, Margaret, 3
- Smith. Margaret Chase, 520-523, 596
- Smuts, Jan Christian, 286-287
- Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 94, 351, 512-513
- Steinem, Gloria, 196
- Stevens, Doris, 111, 160, 204, 211, 222-223, 330, 360, 420-423, 479, 560-568, 572, 577, 579, 581-597 passim
- Stevens, Frank, 201
- Stimson, Henry Lewis, 76-80
- Stimson, Mrs. Henry Lewis, 76
- Stone, Lucy, 201
- Suffrage News, 203
- Suffragist, 90, 104, 121, 178, 316
- Sumner, Judge, 462
- Swing, Betty Gram. See Gram, Betty.
- Taft, Robert, 61-62
- Taggart,______, 129, 149
- Terrell, Mary Church, 132, 134
- Thomas, M. Carey, 180-181, 272, 412-413
- Thompson, Clara Louise, 24
- Thompson, Colonel William Boise, 244-245
- Todd, Jane, 513-515
- Truman, Harry S., 645
- Tumulty, Joseph, 240-241, 379
- Vernon, Mabel, 23-25, 31, 79, 89, 146, 169-170, 182, 189, 211, 221, 257-258, 260, 325, 645
- Wadsworth, Mrs. James Wolcott, Jr., 137, 249, 443
- Wainwright, Mrs. Richard, 193
- Waite, Mrs. John J., 297
- Walker, Amelia Himes, 23-24, 30, 182, 222, 510-511, 543, 604-605
- Webb, Beatrice and Sydney, 42
- Weeks, _______[Senator], 247
- Wells, Agnes, 305, 643, 645
- West, Helen Hunt, 131, 189, 199
- Wheeler, Burton K., 590
- White, Sue, 131
- White, Dr. William A., 231
- Whitney, Charlotte Anita, 151, 262, 317
- Widemore, Margaret, 126, 128
- Wieble, Mrs. Darrell, 210
- Wiley, Anna Kelton (Mrs. Harvey M.), 273, 422-423, 441, 556-557, 560
- Willard, Frances, 207, 278, 467
- Williams, Mrs. Lloyd (Margaret), 577, 595-596
- Wilson, Jessie, 91-92, 190
- Wilson, Woodrow, 66, 70, 75, 82-83, 89-93, 132, 159, 163-164, 173, 208, 210, 218, 223-224, 235-242 passim, 247, 250, 264, 288, 331, 350, 376-379, 637, 639
- Winslow, Rose, 179, 231, 240
- Winsor, Mary, 226, 228, 243
- Wold, Emma, 421-423
- Wold, John, 442
- Wolfe, Clara Snell, 111-112, 131, 558, 581-582, 587, 592-593
- Woman Patriot, 135
- Woman's Journal, 201-203
- Woman's Party. See National Woman's Party.
- Woman Suffrage Amendment Campaign:
- arrest and imprisonment, 200, 213-226, 397-399
- lobbying, 292-305
- Vassim opposition to, 130-138, 248-250, 399-400
- organization, 118-119, 160-165
- passage through Congress, 363-381
- picketing, 210-220 passim, 349, 372, 377, 399
- political party endorsement, 367-372, 400
- political policies, 122-129, 329-337
- presidential pardon, 223-224
- publicity, 68-84, 120-121, 234-255, 329, 351-362, 486
- ratification, 250-255, 264
- Southern attitudes, 130-135
- statues of pioneer leaders, 351-353
- street meetings, 60-62
- World War I, effect on, 186, 212-213, 343-344
- See also Alice Paul; Congressional Union; National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman's Party; The Suffragist .
- women:
- Women's Bureau [Department of Labor], 475-482, 497-502, 523-535, 630
- Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 405, 408
- Women's Trade Union League, 432
- World Woman's Party, 603, 611, 613
- Wright, Alice Morgan, 197, 613-614
- Younger, Maud, 127, 131, 170, 194, 211, 256, 259, 292-296, 299, 317, 374, 426-433 passim, 449, 458-459, 479-480, 590, 616, 642
Courtesy of Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt6f59n89c&brand=oac4
Title: Alice Paul
By: Amelia R. Fry
Date: November 1972 and May 1973
Contributing Institution: Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley
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