Alice Paul vs. Woodrow Wilson: Eight Years of Fighting Over Who Gets Liberty

When Woodrow Wilson arrived in Washington the day before his 1913 inauguration, almost nobody was there to greet him. The crowds were on Pennsylvania Avenue, watching a suffrage parade that a 28-year-old named Alice Paul had planned over about two months. In an account by writer Tina Cassidy, that day opened a long contest between Paul and the new president over what democracy meant.

The head of the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, DC (Library of Congress).

The parade that was meant to put him on notice

Paul was a Quaker from New Jersey whose faith included belief in human equality. As a child she had gone to suffrage meetings with her mother, and she had just come back from England, where she studied social work and was jailed for taking part in suffrage protests. At home she was impatient: only a handful of states let women vote, decades after the 1848 women's rights convention at Seneca Falls called for suffrage.

Her parade demanded a federal amendment giving all American women the vote. Floats and banners showed women's roles as mothers, teachers, nurses, farmers, factory workers and more. She chose inauguration weekend on purpose, to show the incoming president that women were rising up as never before.

Crowds drawn by the inauguration, mostly men, wrecked the peaceful plan. Men cursed, shoved, slapped and jeered the marchers while police generally did little. The procession, the largest of its kind in American history, covered only ten blocks in its first hour before a melee broke out. Yet the chaos, Cassidy writes, helped Paul: she and a revitalized movement were front-page news across the country.

Crowds block the 1913 suffrage parade (Library of Congress).

A president who looked away

Wilson came from a Confederate, slave-owning family and was the first president elected from the South since the Civil War. One of his first acts in office was to segregate the Civil Service. He thought of himself as a Progressive Democrat but was conservative on social questions and a strong believer in states' rights.

At first he tried to ignore Paul. In his first month she met him twice in the Oval Office, and both times he put her off, citing more pressing matters such as currency and tariff reform. Cassidy reports Paul's answer: the administration had no right to legislate on those matters without the consent of women.

President Woodrow Wilson (Library of Congress).

Silent Sentinels

By January 1917 Paul had a broader plan: a daily picket line outside the White House. The women, calling themselves the Silent Sentinels, stood quietly with signs asking what Wilson would do for woman suffrage and how long women must wait for liberty. They had been there only 40 minutes on the first day when Wilson drove back from golf through the gates. Nothing like it had happened before at the White House. Passersby reacted in every way, some with respect and some with laughter, and the women held their posts six days a week, eight hours a day, in all weather and under harassment.

In April 1917 Wilson committed to sending troops abroad. Some pickets went home, since women now carried the burdens of war, working in factories and on farms and losing sons, brothers and husbands. The weight of it brought sympathy, and within weeks Michigan, Rhode Island and Nebraska granted women the vote.

Wilson had framed the war around liberty, so the Sentinels changed their banners to point out the contradiction. One, held as Russian envoys visited the White House, read: "We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement. Help us make this nation really free." Bystanders enraged by what they took for an unpatriotic protest attacked the women and shredded the banner. The women brought a duplicate the next day and it was shredded too.

Arrests, and a bonfire of speeches

The picketing went on for months. Paul and many other women were arrested and sentenced to prison, where they went on hunger strikes against harsh treatment. Paul was also locked, without cause, in a psychiatric ward by foes who argued she was obsessed with Wilson. Cassidy says the war and the arrests only built sympathy for a federal amendment, even if some earlier supporters were put off.

In December 1918, while Wilson toured Europe, suffragists copied quotes from his speeches onto slips of paper and burned them in Lafayette Park, then moved the protest outside the White House. A suffragist, Dora Lewis, burned his line from a speech in Manchester, England, "We will enter into no combinations of power which are not combinations of all of us." She also burned his toast at Buckingham Palace, "We have used great words, all of us," and a line from Brest, France, that public opinion strongly sustains cooperation among self-governing peoples. For three days the cycle repeated: words burned, protesters arrested, replacements lighting new fires.

Suffrage protesters burn a speech by President Wilson at Lafayette Park (Library of Congress).

National Woman's Party watchfires outside the White House, January 1919 (photo by Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress).

How it ended

Germany surrendered on November 11, 1918. Cassidy argues Wilson surrendered to the suffrage cause in his own way: as public opinion shifted toward the 19th Amendment, he saw that opposing it would hurt his party at the next election. He still refused to credit Paul's tactics, and he kept publicly ignoring her and her followers while embracing suffragists seen as better behaved. The Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919. That same month Congress passed the 19th Amendment and sent it to the states, and ratification was completed in August 1920.

Sources

• Tina Cassidy, Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Battles for Liberty, originally published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission on April 8, 2020 on its blog The Suff Buffs and republished by the National Park Service; Cassidy is also the author of Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the Right to Vote. Rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs from the Library of Congress's collections, as credited in the source.