Alice Paul's Convention
By Crystal Eastman
"Mr. Speaker," said Sara Bard Field, turning the full force of her childlike smile and beaming eyes upon the unhappy Congressman, "I give you–Revolution."
With these naive words, gently spoken in a dim, echoing vaulted room at the heart of the national capitol, the victorious Woman's Party presented to Congress the statue of the suffrage pioneers, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Let me quote a few more sentences:
"Mr. Speaker, we do not commit to your keeping merely a block of marble wrought into likenesses which in a chaste repose like death itself will henceforth remain in Statuary Hall, but we commit to your keeping blood-red memories, alive and pulsing. . . . It is universal freedom for which the movement represented by these women has ever stood. . . . The very first Suffrage Association aimed to enfranchise the Negro as well as the woman. Listen to these words written by Susan B. Anthony and introduced as part of a resolution in the convention which formed the first American Equal Rights Association: 'Hence our demand must now go beyond women. It must extend to the farthest bounds of the principle of the consent of the governed.' Do you think that women who thought in those terms would sit, idle today because political democracy has become an accomplished fact in this nation? Do you think that women like these who published a paper in the Sixties called 'Revolution' would not see the need of that brooding angel's presence still? Needless to say I don't speak in terms of bloody revolution any more than did they. But men and women are not yet free. . . The slavery of greed endures. Little child workers, the hope of the future, are sacrificed to industry. Young men are sent out by the billion to die for profits. . . . We must destroy industrial slavery and build industrial democracy. . . . The people everywhere must come into possession of the earth."
And finally, "Mr. Speaker, you will see that if you thought you came here to receive on behalf of Congress merely the busts of three women who have fought the good fight and gone to rest, you were mistaken. You will see that through them it is the body and the blood of a great sacrificial host which we present-the body and blood of Revolution, the body and blood of Freedom herself."
"What does all this mean?" I asked myself as I heard the words go echoing ,up to the dome. If Alice Paul is such a confirmed reactionary as many of her former' followers say she is, why did she feature Sara Bard Field at that impressive ceremony? Why did she deny the claims of the Negro women and of the Birth Control advocates for a hearing at the Convention, in deference to certain powerful groups among her supporters, and then as if in complete defiance of these same conservative groups insist that the only ,words uttered in the name of the Woman's Party on the opening night should be the obviously uncensored words of a fairly celebrated rebel?
And now that the convention is over, I find myself wondering all the more: Why did Alice Paul stage this dramatic bit of Quaker defiance at the beginning and then treat us to three dull days of commonplace speeches, often irrelevant, often illiberal, with only a few hours reserved at the end for the essential purpose of the meeting-the discussion of the future of the Woman's Party, which to many meant the future of the feminist movement in America? Five hours fo'r that discussion-hardly time enough to determine the future of a high school dramatic society!
Nothing is more fun than to speculate about the motives and intentions of a shrewd and able leader who keeps his own counsels. I give my speculation for what it is worth: Alice Paul was not really interested in the convention, she was interested in celebrating the victory. After all, despite reports to the contrary, she is a human being. An explorer who had been away on a long and dangerous journey, whose best friends had doubted, whose foes had been many, whose rivals had been bitter, when at last he returned crowned with success, would rejoice in the celebration of his achievement. And the colder and lonelier had been his journey the more appropriate would seem the warmth and luxurious friendliness of his welcome. So it seems to me Alice Paul felt about the victory of woman suffrage–her victory.
In one respect, however, my simile of the explorer breaks down; it was strictly the achievement and not herself that Alice Paul arranged to have celebrated. Throughout that elaborate ceremony at the Capitol Alice Paul was not so much as mentioned by name. I had one glimpse of her behind the scenes after the show was over; with complete unconsciousness of herself as a personality, and with very effective indignation she was preventing the chief usher from covering up the statues and taking them away before the crowd outside had had a chance to come in and see them.
From beginning to end Alice Paul was never in evidence. But Jane Addams was there to s'ay the first words. The name of the President's daughter appeared on the program. The press announced that Mrs. Harding endowed the affair with her official blessing. The Speaker of the House, who had fought the Party for eight years, graciously consented to receive the statues. No, Alice Paul was not there,-even the Woman's Party figured with one silent banner among hundreds-but the General Federation of Women's Clubs was there, the Association of Collegiate Alumnae was there, the Eastern Star was there, the Maccabees were there, the Army Nurses and the Navy Nurses, the Republican Women and the Democratic Women, the Daughters of the Revolution, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Congress of Mothers, all, all were there, and dozens and dozens of others,-those who had scorned and condemned when the pickets stood for months at the White House gates, when they insisted on going to jail and starved themselves when they got there,–all these came now with their wreaths and their flowers and their banners to celebrate the victory. Supremely neglectful of respectability during the long fight Alice Paul saw to it that the victory celebration should be respectable. All doubtful subjects, like birth control and the rights of Negro women, were hushed up, ruled out or postponed until the affair at the Capitol was over.* Nothing was allowed to creep into the advance publicity that was calculated to alarm the mildest MaccabeeThe Negro women were finally allowed to "lay a wreath." and the Birth Control advocates were at the last moment given a hearing at the convention. But in each case the action was taken too late for the name of the organization to appear in the program.
