The 1913 suffrage parade: a pageant planned to the minute and a near-riot

Alice Paul planned the 1913 suffrage parade down to the permit and the cavalry, and what turned it into a turning point was something she could not have planned: a hostile crowd. This account is by Rebecca Boggs Roberts, author of a 2017 book on the parade, who wrote it for the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission blog and published it on April 1, 2020; the National Park Service hosts it.

The official program of the Woman Suffrage Procession, March 3, 1913. Library of Congress.

A procession on the eve of an inauguration

On the afternoon of March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, thousands of suffragists gathered near the Garfield monument in front of the U.S. Capitol. At 3:00, Grand Marshal Jane Burleson was to lead them onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Roberts calls it the first civil rights march on Washington, DC, and a turning point in the fight for the vote. More than 50 years after Seneca Falls the movement had grown stale, in the words of one suffragist, and the parade brought new activism, tactics and leadership to it.

An allegorical pageant was to begin on the plaza in front of the Treasury Department, fourteen blocks away, so that its finale coincided with the parade’s arrival. Everyone would then go to Continental Hall, where the cast would perform the final tableau again.

Paul’s preparations

Paul had begun planning before the National American Woman Suffrage Association endorsed the idea or gave her a title. She pressed the DC police chief, Richard Sylvester, until he granted a permit for Pennsylvania Avenue. She used her contacts in the Taft White House to have a cavalry unit on standby at Fort Myer in case the police could not control the crowd, and arranged to use the inaugural committee’s grandstand at 14th Street. Her publicity made the march so familiar to Washingtonians that they almost thought of it as part of the inaugural celebrations.

Not everything went smoothly. Paul worried that southern suffragists would refuse to march in an integrated parade. After much dithering she announced that Black women could join, but they were left out of the official program and urged to march at the back. Black participants included Ida B. Wells and Delta Sigma Theta, a Black sorority from Howard University. Wells waited on the sidelines until the Illinois delegation passed and then marched with her white colleagues.

The Woman Suffrage Parade, Washington, DC, 1913. Library of Congress.

What was planned

Behind Burleson and her attendants came Inez Milholland, routinely described as the most beautiful suffragist, in white robes and a gold crown on a white horse. After her rolled a wagon with a banner demanding a constitutional amendment to enfranchise the women of the country, and then at least seven sections of marchers:

• floats from countries with full suffrage, ridden by costumed participants;
• floats showing the changing status of American women since the movement began in the 1840s;
• professional women, dressed alike and grouped by occupation;
• golden chariots, women’s marching bands and college women grouped by alma mater;
• a large reproduction of the Liberty Bell;
• “General” Rosalie Jones and her army of pilgrims, who had walked from New York.

Everything was designed to look striking on the street and in newspaper photographs.

Inez Milholland in the 1913 suffrage procession. Library of Congress.

The pageant that waited

The parade started a little after 3:00. At the Treasury the pageant went ahead before a packed grandstand. Columbia, in armor, called forth the virtues. Justice and her attendants wore purple, Charity arrived with children and rose petals, Liberty struck a pose that would feature in news photographs, Peace released a live dove, and Plenty and her attendants rushed down the steps. Hope completed the tableau. The crowd, including outgoing First Lady Helen Taft, was impressed. Then the cast waited for the parade’s head to appear. And waited. The crowd grew bored, the first lady left, and after almost an hour the cast could no longer bear the cold marble on bare feet and went inside the Treasury.

The actress Hedwig Reicher in the costume of Columbia with other pageant participants behind her, in front of the Treasury Building, March 3, 1913. Library of Congress.

The mob

Ten blocks up the avenue the parade was stalled. At 5th Street, spectators had spilled into the road, and the marchers could not pass. Burleson, on her horse, saw what she called a horrible, howling mob. Most of the crowd were men in town for the inauguration, for whom the parade was a sideshow. The women kept moving, stopping and starting and narrowing to single file. The crowd jeered, grabbed, spat at and tripped them. Many police did nothing, and some joined the taunts. At least a hundred people were taken to the local emergency hospital. Finally, DC officials called in the cavalry from Fort Myer. Mounted soldiers met the head of the parade at 14th Street and rode back toward the Capitol, pushing the crowd back, with their horses driven into the throngs, as the Washington Post reported.

Crowds block the 1913 suffrage procession on Pennsylvania Avenue. National Archives.

Why it mattered

Most marchers reached Continental Hall, where the rally became a meeting of indignation and protest. Every woman there was, Roberts writes, some combination of filthy, battered, exhausted, unnerved, insulted, tearful, furious and freezing. Paul, still in her academic robes, saw that it was the best thing that could have happened: a perfect parade would have made news for a day, but a near-riot kept the cause in headlines for weeks, as editorials condemned the crowd and a Congressional Committee held hearings on what went wrong.

Roberts sees the parade as the start of the final round in the fight for the vote. It won sympathetic press, introduced Paul as a leader willing to push convention, energized a new generation of activists, led to more visible and aggressive tactics over the next seven years, and announced a renewed push for a federal amendment instead of the state-by-state strategy the movement had followed. Beyond suffrage, she argues, it set the stage for thousands of political marches since, and everyone who has rallied in the shadow of the Capitol has followed the suffragists’ footsteps.

Sources

• Rebecca Boggs Roberts, The Great Suffrage Parade of 1913, originally published by the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission on its blog The Suff Buffs on April 1, 2020 and hosted by the National Park Service. Roberts is credited there as a journalist, producer and tour guide and as author of Suffragists in Washington, D.C.: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote (2017); her page's commission logo is left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.