Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/541

A summary of the correspondence, etc., was given and the report said of the lobby work:

All the direct work with Senators and Congressmen is a time as well as brain consuming process. Usually it means tramping “up and down the long stone corridors, hour after hour, in order to find one man in his office. Then he may be having a committee meeting or a previous engagement or emergency business and you are invited to come some other day. Perhaps you have waited an hour before you are sure that he can not see you. It is not uncommon for the members of our lobby to state that they have made as many as six, eight or ten calls before they succeeded in reaching a man. Speaking from my own knowledge, I have wasted hours at the Capitol trying to see men who would not make appointments. I have called eighteen times to see one man and have not seen him et! He is the Representative from my own district. We carried 7 district for suffrage in Pennsylvania last year but I am told that he does not want to vote for the Federal Amendment. It is, of course, possible to interview members by calling them out of the session but this method is uncertain and not very successful, since they feel hurried and interviews in a public reception room are seldom satisfactory.

The latest piece of work done by the committee is the interviewing by letter of all congressional candidates who will stand for election in November. This has been done in cooperation with the State associations which have been urged to institute vigorous interviewing in the congressional districts.

Presidential Interviewing: The presidential candidates of the two parties whose platforms do not endorse the Federal Amendment have interviewed in person. On July 17 Mrs. Catt, Dr. Shaw and Mrs. Norman deR. Whitehouse, president of the New York suffrage association, called on Judge Hughes in New York and had a long and satisfactory conversation. He told them that in his speech of acceptance he could not endorse the Federal Amendment because this was the accepting of the party’s nomination and of its at form, which had not mentioned it. He said, however, that believed in it and that soon after his speech of acceptance he would announce his personal advocacy of the amendment. He asked them to hold this information in confidence, which of course they did. His public statement of August 1 was therefore no surprise to but was nevertheless most gratifying.

On August 1 Mrs. Catt and your chairman called on President Wilson in Washington. He reiterated his belief that woman suffrage should come by State action. We presented the arguments behalf of the Federal Amendment but he remained unconvinced. He is a fair and open-minded man and your representatives have by no means given up hope of proving to him the justice and advisability of the amendment.

Conferences: At the last national convention a special committee