Silent Sentinel

June 20, 1917: Peaceful "Silent Sentinel" pickets, who have been protesting President Wilson's lack of support for woman suffrage by holding up banners each day along the White House fence since January 10th, were attacked by a mob today as they stood alongside a banner directed at the Russian envoys who are meeting with the President. The banner read:
"TO THE RUSSIAN ENVOYS
"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.
"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. Tell our government that it must liberate its people before it can claim free Russia as an ally."
There has been a good deal of verbal hostility directed toward the protesters in recent months, even though their banners contained only President Wilson's own words of praise for democracy, or asked: "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?" and "Mr. President, what will you do for woman suffrage?" But this was the first time the White House pickets have been physically attacked, had their banners torn away from them and then destroyed. The ringleader of today's vigilantes has been identified as Walter S. Timmins, a consulting engineer from New York City.
U.S. Secret Service agents and D.C. police officers were present, and could have prevented the violence. But the agents only stood around observing, while a police officer simply asked those in the crowd to restrain themselves long enough so he could copy down what was on the banner. There were, of course, no arrests of the attackers.
After the incident, some other members of the National Woman's Party came back to the White House fence and hoisted up some of the same banners they had been displaying for months. They were not interfered with. But Alice Paul said tonight that she and her fellow National Woman's Party members would not be deterred from exercising their right of free speech: "We have ordered another banner with the same wording, and we intend to show it in the same place."
Needless to say, all those who have been critical of the picketing from the beginning were quick to denounce today's banner, and they were joined by some new voices. The only woman in Congress, Rep. Jeannette Rankin, Republican of Montana, was the only politician expressing an opinion today who refused to join the chorus of criticism, taking a neutral stance on today's action by the "Silent Sentinels" for the present.
Picketing a President is in and of itself a new and radical activity that tends to provoke hostility, and ever since the U.S. entered the war on April 6th, anyone criticizing the President has been liable to charges of disloyalty. But the National Woman's Party feels that demanding democracy in the midst of a war being fought for democracy is not unpatriotic, but quite the opposite, and totally consistent with American principles.
How can it not be the height of hypocrisy for President Wilson to deliver speech after speech about democracy being such a sacred ideal that American lives must be sacrificed on the battlefield to win it for those in other nations, but apparently feel that it is an insufficiently noble cause for him to endorse and then lobby Congress to pass an amendment to the Constitution, which when ratified by 3/4 of the States, would enfranchise 20 million women in States where only men may vote and women now have no voice in choosing those who make the laws they must obey?
Demanding a government "of the people, by the people and for the people," is no more anti-American now than when Abraham Lincoln spoke of it, and "taxation without representation" is no less unjust when imposed by Congress or a State legislature on women in our time than when it was forced on colonists long ago by the British Parliament and King George.
Failure to use one's influence to help bring about a government representative of all its people, however, is a clear betrayal of democratic principles, and therefore of America. The National Woman's Party has once again made it clear that it will continue to point out Wilson's lack of understanding of the fundamental concept of "democracy" until he takes a leading role in helping bring it to the female half of his own country.