The Washington Women’s Suffrage Procession of 1913 Unleashed New Militancy

The stunning program cover for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington.

Note—This has become an annual post because it is much requested.  It is also a timely reminder of the importance of bold action.

The giant Women’s March on Washington and sister marches across the country that greeted Donald Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017 and they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done even larger marches a year later were seismic events that brought a broad, united, new intersessional feminism to the forefront of American social and political life after years on the defense as hard-fought gains once thought secure were under attack at every level.

Mass demonstrations no matter how large, critics maintained, had lost their power as the media lost interest in them and the public became bored.  Huge anti-war demonstrations that broke all records were barely covered by the press and had no discernible effect on curtailing a vastly unpopular war in Congress or in the Bush administration and only moderately moved the needle during the Obama years when painfully slow withdrawals of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were matched by a brutal escalation of bombing and drone attacks not only in those two countries but across the region. 

The Women's March on Washington was a rough welcome to Trump and a game changer for the feminist movement.

Instead, the media became fixated with a shiny new object—the tiny but colorful Tea Party movement.  Events drawing a few dozen in silly hats waving "Don’t Tread on Me" flags, and toting misspelled homemade signs received lead coverage night after night on network and cable TV news. Part of it was the sheer novelty of a right wing “grassroots” movement.  Traditional conservatives were at first dismissive and doubtful, but a hand-full of deep pocket millionaires saw potential and pumped unlimited money into the movement, created faux grassroots national organizations to “lead it,” and soon used it to capture the Republican Party for their oligarchical aims.  Within what seemed like a blink of an eye they were in control of dozens of state governments, Congress, and the Presidency and seemed capable of completely remaking America with no effective opposition.

But there were signs of restiveness and resistance—the Occupy Movement which spread like wildfire, the up-from-the-streets youth-led Black Lives Matter movement, the May Day Immigration Rights marches and the rise of the Dreamers, the New Civil Rights movement represented by Moral Mondays.  But it was the Women’s Marches, perhaps because they included so many middle-class White women, that finally recaptured the media and nation’s attention. 

To its credit the Women’s March movement has, not always smoothly, taken pains to broaden its leadership and representation and to stand for an intersessional struggle that includes not just traditional feminist objectives like preserving abortion rights, removing obstacles to social and professional advancement, the Equal Rights Amendment, and election of women, but in support of Women of Color, immigrants and refugees, Muslims and other minority religions, the LBGTQ+ communities, Native Americans, the disabled, the labor movement, and environmentalists.  It was a perfect process, and serious divisions remain over issues like electoral politics, particularly endorsement of Democrats, and levels of street militancy, but it was a game changer.

One 113 years ago today, another march of women in Washington, in some ways quite different, marked a radical turning point in the long struggle for women’s suffrage and became a spiritual ancestor of today’s movements.

Alice Paul was inspired by the militant campaigns of the British Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst seen under arrest in the right foreground and her daughter Christabel in custody behind her.

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were uppity women.  Worse they were angry, uppity women.  They were more youthful than the dowagers whose decades’ long drive for women’s suffrage had been noble, but fruitless.  Paul had been in England and was impressed with how Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, leaders of a new militant suffrage movement which was making a sensation by using direct action tactics such as publicly heckling politicians, window smashing, and rock throwing raising the profile of the cause there.

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910 she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and soon advanced to a leadership role.  Although the national organization was committed to a state-by-state strategy as its top priority, Paul was made Chair of the Congressional Committee with the responsibility of lobbying for Federal action.  Carrie Chapman Catt, the formidable leader of the NAWSA, did not have much faith in Paul or her project, but was probably glad to have the gadfly out her hair in New York where she was carefully planning an elaborate political effort to win state approval of the Vote by referendum.

Carrie Chapman Catt of New York was the formidable head of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.  She would split with Alice Paul over strategy and style and the two were sometimes bitter rivals.  Their two-pronged suffrage campaign, moderate and radical, actually complimented each other and help rapidly move to the goal.  But when the 19th Amendment was ratified, it was the moderate Catt, not the bur-under-the-saddle Paul who was invited to the Wilson White House.

By 1912 Paul and Burns set up shop in the Capitol as a semi-autonomous affiliate of the NAWSA called the Congressional Union.  

In the Presidential election that year, Catt broke ranks with many older suffragists who were traditionally Republican, and endorsed Woodrow Wilson, a distinguished academic and supposedly a new breed of progressive Democrat, in the hopes that he would swing his party behind suffrage.

Paul, however, did not want to wait for a painfully slow lobbing process to nudge the new Chief Executive in the right direction.  She declared her intention to “hold his feet to the fire” from the very beginning with a huge Suffrage demonstration on the eve of his inauguration.

Don’t imagine a modern march on Washington with mobs of somewhat disorganized marchers in pink pussy caps carrying banners, signs, and puppets in a mass throng on the Capitol’s wide avenues.  Paul’s Woman Suffrage Procession was planned out with military precision, the thousands of women marchers were arrayed in designated units, marching abreast.  Most units wore white, the symbol of purity and adopted color of the suffrage movement.   The procession would be led by equestrians and floats with women as various allegorical figures broke up the ranks of marchers.  An elaborate program was printed, and a proper parade permit was obtained from local authorities.

Wilson arrived by train from his New Jersey home on Monday, March 3, 1913, the day before his inauguration.  As the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to break the grip of Republican dominance and as a man of known Southern roots and sympathies, he likely expected a whoopsie-do reception in the culturally Southern city.  Instead, only a handful of dignitaries, politicians, and the press were at hand.  Everybody else in town seems to have been lining Pennsylvania Avenue.

No wonder, for Paul had put on a dazzling show led by the beautiful blonde lawyer and activist Inez Milholland astride a white horse in flowing Greek robes.  Behind her, Paul and her friends, also on horseback, led 8,000 marchers, almost all women, and on parade.

An estimated half a million onlookers crowded the route including cheering supporters, the idly curious, a lot of very, very angry men.

Mobs of men swarm and menace an ambulance trying to transport injured marchers as police stood by.  It took Army troops to restore order and allow the parade to finish.  Despite the violence, maybe because of it, Paul knew the Procession was a triumph.

The procession was quickly attacked by mobs of men along the route, throwing rocks and battering participants with clubs and fists as the police stood by without intervening.  Retaining as much courage and dignity as they could muster, the marchers continued on their route while running a virtual gauntlet.  Before the rear of the march reached its destination some hastily mobilized troops from Fort Myer arrived to provide some protection.  Over 800 marchers, almost all women, were injured in the attacks.

Reaction to the parade and the attacks threatened to overwhelm news of the Presidential inauguration the next day, much to the annoyance of Wilson.  And to the delight of Paul who regarded the operation as successful in every way. She was sure that public outrage would lead to greater support for the cause.

A subsequent investigation held the police derelict in their duty for failing to protect the lawful demonstration and the District of Columbia Police Chief was fired.

In New York Catt was less than thrilled and feared the bold confrontation would alienate male supporters critical for her state-by-state campaign.  None-the-less, Catt staged her own giant parade down Fifth Avenue in May as the kick-off for her ballot initiative plan.  A fifth the marchers in her parade were men.

The breach over militancy and confrontation between Catt and Paul became irreparable in 1914 and Paul’s group severed ties with the national organization.  Two years later they reorganized as the National Women’s Party (NWP.)

                     Alice Paul and her Federal strategy was big news in the New York Times. 

They continued to press Wilson for action with daily picketing at the White House.  When the picketing continued even after the country entered the Great War in Europe, Wilson had Paul and dozens of her associates and supporters arrested, jailed, and force-fed during hunger strikes.  When word got out about the abuse, Wilson was embarrassed yet again. Exasperated, Wilson finally declared support of a Federal Constitutional Amendment for women’s suffrage as a “war measure” and in recognition of the contribution of women to the effort.  He made no mention of Paul or the NWP, but no one doubted that their stubborn militancy had forced his hand.

Both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919.  Then the battle moved to ratification by state legislatures and the state-by-state struggle advocated by Catt was back on.  The NAWSA and NWP played a kind of “good cop/bad cop” tag team on state legislatures with Catt’s group wooing them with compliments and charm, and Paul threatening disruption and defiance.

Alice Paul raises a grape juice toast to the banner that she and members of the National Women's Party sewed by hand to hang on their Washington, D.C. headquarters building in celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment just over 7 years after the Suffrage Procession--a remarkably swift victory.

It proceeded, all things considered, with astonishing speed. On August 19, 1920, Tennessee passed the Amendment by one vote in the legislature, securing the necessary support to become a part of the Constitution.  When the Secretary of State certified the adoption on August 26, Paul and her cohorts proudly unfolded a banner on the NWP headquarters building in Washington and toasted the event—with grape juice, of course.

Electing His Fraudulency Rutherford B. Hayes--Not the Only Popular Vote Loser

In the Presidential election of 1876 Democrat Samuel Tilden, right, won the popular vote but Republican Rutherford B, Hayes wound up in the White House anyway.

There have been plenty of screwy Presidential elections, none more embarrassing than when the winner of the popular vote somehow doesn’t end up with his feet up on a desk in the White House.  It has happened more often than you probably suspect.  Five times in fact.  Six for those who believe Richard J. Daley stole more votes for John F. Kennedy in Chicago than Republican bosses stole downstate.

In 1824 John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson by a slim 44,804 votes nationwide but won when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives and a third candidate, Henry Clay, swung his votes to Adams.  Then Adams then appointed Clay Secretary of State.  This pissed off Jackson who raged against a corrupt bargain and went on to create the modern Democratic Party to whip the New Englander’s ass in the next election.

In 1888 Benjamin Harrison deprived Grover Cleveland of a second consecutive term despite losing by 95,713 popular votes.  Four years later the Democrat was back in office, the only man ever to serve two non-consecutive terms until Donald Trump.

George W. Bush waltzed into office thanks to those Florida hanging chads, and a stupefying corrupt decision of the Supreme Court.

Trump's loss to Joe Biden in 2000 set of a round of comparisons to the 1888 election.

Then in 2016 a former reality show host with an inflated reputation as billionaire business genius lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but was able to claim an Electoral College landslide due to the unfair quirks of that system of electing chief executives.  Four years later he clearly lost to Joe Biden, refused to accept the outcome, made wild and easily refutable claims of election fraud, encouraged the coup attempt seizure of the Capitol, and barely survived two impeachment votes.  Despite all of that he managed to squeeze by Biden in the 2024 rematch.

But the most famous minority president was Rutherford B. Hayes.

On March 2, 1877 Hayes became the first person selected for the Presidency by a Bi-Partisan Commission. 

Hayes won the Republican nomination only after the leading candidate James G. Blaine failed in six ballots to win the majority of delegates at the party convention.  A bland non-entity picked because “he offended no one,” Hayes went into the election an underdog to Democrat Samuel Tilden. 

And indeed, Tilden carried the popular vote by a not insignificant 250,000 vote lead out of 8.5 million ballots cast.  Other presidents were elected by more slender margins.  But in the Electoral College, Tilden came up just one vote shy with the results from four states—Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon still contested. 

If the Electoral votes of the three states from the old Confederacy were counted for the Democrats, Tilden would be an easy victor.  Fearing civil unrest if the election was determined by the Republican controlled House of Representatives, Congress decided to appoint the Bi-Partisan Commission to decide the contested electoral votes.

Despite losing the popular vote, Hays won the Electoral College by a scant one vote after a controversial Bi-Partisan Commission awarded the disputed votes of South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon to the Republican.

The commission was to be composed of 7 Republican, 7 Democrats and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the supposedly independent David Davis in whom both parties had confidence.  But before the Commission could act, Davis resigned his seat on the Court and on the Commission to take a Senate seat from Illinois.  Another Justice, a Republican, replaced him on the Commission.  The Commission then voted along party lines 8-7 to award all of the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. 

Senator James Garfield and Southern Democrats, however, worked out an agreement to prevent trouble.  Hayes would withdraw the last Federal troops from the South, end Reconstruction, and appoint at least one Southerner to his Cabinet. By prematurely ending protection for Black voters and office holders in the South, this bargain ushered in the Jim Crow Era, rigid segregation, and disenfranchisement of freed Blacks.

The deal embittered Democrats, especially Northerners who got nothing out of it and the evolving big city, working class machine voters who understandably called the new president His Fraudulency.

                                                            Staunchly Republican Harper's Weekly portrayed the outcome this way.

Although the onset of open class war with the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and continuing fierce Indian warfare in the West provided plenty of national excitement, Hayes’s single term reign in Washington marked by inaction on the hottest political issue of the day—Civil Service Reform and turning a blind eye to rising White terrorism in the South.  He is best remembered now as the first of the long beard Presidents and because his devout teetotaling wife, Lemonade Lucy, gave stupefyingly dull dry dinners and receptions.  

Garfield got the Republican nomination next time around.  We all know how well that turned out. 

Frances Perkins Rose from Do Gooder to Real Power as Secretary of Labor

                                            Frances Perkins--Madam Secretary. 

On March 4, 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt, the day of his first inauguration, nominated Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor.  She was the first woman elevated to cabinet rank.  If anyone was expecting a docile figurehead, they were in for a big surprise.  Not only was she a key player in the New Deal and an indispensable backer of a wide range of labor reforms, she held down the job for twelve years through FDR’s first three terms despite efforts to unseat her.

Born into a respectable Republican and Congregationalist New England family in 1880, she was radicalized by exposure to the yawning class divide while attending Mt. Holyoke College where she read Jacob Riis’s expose of slum conditions and attended lectures by leading reformers and labor advocates, especially Florence Kelley of the National Consumer’s League.  Graduating in 1902 she tried her hand at teaching science in urban schools while volunteering at settlement houses. 

                                             Perkins as a student at Mt. Holyoke.

But by 1909 she was ready to give up teaching for a career in social services and advocacy.  She moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University then joined her mentor Florence Kelley by serving as Secretary for the New York State Consumer’s League where she successfully led lobbing efforts to get the Legislature to limit the work week for women and children to 54 hours.  She also took up active support of the Suffrage movement.

In 1911 she personally witnessed women leaping to their deaths from the upper floors of the building at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, an event that would steel her determination to guarantee safe working conditions.  Where she had previously relied on legislation alone, she increasingly saw the need for workers to organize in their own defense and supported the work of Ladies Garment Workers leader Rose Schneiderman and others.  She even joined the Socialist Party, where she advocated gradual reform rather than revolutionary action. 

                                                The young reformer and New York civil servant.

In 1912 she supported Woodrow Wilson over Eugene V. Debs believing that the Democrat would more effectively advance labor’s cause.  She was wrong, but in the long run was one of the people most responsible for seeing that the planks of the 1912 Socialist platform were finally enacted under another Democrat.

She briefly retired from public life to marry economist Paul Wilson and to give birth to a daughter.  But Wilson suffered a breakdown and Perkins returned to work as the family breadwinner.

In 1919 she joined the administration of New York Governor Al Smith as the first woman on the state Industrial Commission.  By 1926 she was Chair of the Commission.  In 1929 Governor Roosevelt appointed her to head the state Labor Department.  She pushed through another round of reduction of hours for women and children to 48, stepped up factory safety inspection, and lobbied for minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws.

Roosevelt took her with him to Washington.  As Labor Secretary she helped craft and get the Wagner Act through Congress, which finally guaranteed workers the right to organize labor unions on the job and engage in collective bargaining. 

Perkins, one of the chief architects, witnessed FDR sign the Social Security Act into law.

The Fair Labor Standards Act embodied her long-cherished dreams for a minimum wage and a standard 40-hour work week for both women and men.  She chaired the administration’s Committee on Economic Security which drafted the legislation embodied in the Social Security Act of 1935.

As the labor battles for representation in the basic industries intensified through the Depression, Perkins stood relentlessly on the side of working people to organize and resisted traditional calls to use Federal force and troops to suppress strikes.  She held firm against intervention in the 1934 San Francisco General Strike.

Conservatives and business interests put her in their cross hairs and in 1939 the House Un-American Activities Committee drew up a bill of impeachment against her for refusing to deport Harry Bridges, the Australian-born West Coast Longshoremen’s leader who was a key figure in the General Strike.  The impeachment attempt fizzled from lack of evidence and Perkins continued to serve until 1945 when she resigned to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Organization (ILO) conference in Paris.

                                         The Secretary of Labor on a coal mine safety inspection.

She concluded her public service when President Harry Truman appointed her to the Civil Service Commission.  With the return of Republicans to power in 1953 she took a professorship at Cornel University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Perkins died at age 85 in her beloved New York City in 1965.

Although revered by labor and feminists, Perkins remains a reviled figure on the right.  In 2011 hyper reactionary Maine Governor Paul LePage tried to have a labor mural featuring Frances Perkins (center panel) from the State Department of Labor because it is too pro-labor and offended some business owners.

The Labor Department Building war re-named for Perkins on April 10, 1980—the 100th anniversary of her birth with President Jimmy Carter presiding over the ceremony.  On the same day the Postal Service issued a new 15-cent stamp bearing her likeness.

Ella Fitzgerald was the First Lady of American Song

Long before Rihanna, in 1972 Ella Fitzgerald sang Mac the Knife with trumpeter Al Hirt at Super Bowl VI in New Orleans as part of a tribute to Louis Armstrong.  Broadway star Carol Channing also performed.  They became the first celebrity artists to perform at the Super Bowl and Ella was the first Black woman.   

Ella Fitzgerald is regarded by many as the greatest female singer of the 20th Century and there is plenty of competition.  Her career spanned decades from a novelty song specialist as a teenager to the undisputed First Lady of Song.  She sang with big bands, invented scat singing, moved seamlessly to jazz improvisation in the bebop era, and reinterpreted the canon of the Great American Songbook introducing generations to popular music as an art form and preserving classics that otherwise might have faded from memory. 

Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, but moved to Yonkers, New York with her mother and Portuguese-born stepfather in the early ‘20s.  After her mother was killed in an auto accident when she was 15, she left her stepfather’s home quickly and moved to live with an aunt in Harlem.  Most biographers believe she had been physically or sexually abused.  

Despite being an excellent student in Yonkers, Fitzgerald began skipping school and hanging with a rough street crowd.  She was soon acting as a lookout for a bordello and ran numbers for a Mafia game, a common job in Harlem.  Arrested, she was placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in the Bronx and then at the New York Training School for Girls in upstate Hudson.  She may have again been abused there and escaped four times and was sometimes homeless back in Harlem. 

A virtual street urchin with all the predatory dangers that involves, Fitzgerald began busking on the streets dancing and imitating the jazz records of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and The Boswell Sisters.  Her first break came on November 4, 1934 when she unexpectedly won one of the earliest of the Apollo Theater Amateur Nights.  She got the $25 prize—which must have seemed like a fortune—but not the promised week-long booking at the theater because of her threadbare appearance. 

Young Ella with the diminutive Chick Webb at the drums in one of their famous Savoy Ballroom sets.

But the following January she did sing for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House.  Then she was picked up by drummer Chick Webb’s big band despite his reservations about her “scarecrow appearance.”  She became a favorite with the band in its famous appearances at the Savoy Ballroom broadcast on radio.  She recorded several sides with the band and was highly regarded by her fellow musicians. 

Fitzgerald already had a mid-level hit with (If You Can’t Sing It) You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini) when a ditty she co-wrote, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, became a smash and introduced her for the first time to wide White audiences. That was something of a mixed blessing—all they wanted to hear from the “little girl” were novelty songs.  Eventually it got her in movies with cameo appearances in Abbot and Costello’s Ride ‘em Cowboy in 1942. 

Ella singing A-Tisket, A-Tasket from the back of the bus in the Abbot and Costello flick Ride 'em Cowboy.

But Ella was working, touring, recording, and most importantly no longer hungry or tattered.  When Webb died in 1938 Fitzgerald took over the band, which was re-named Ella’s Famous Orchestra—almost unheard of for a girl singer and a recognition of her serious musical chops.  With and without Webb Ella and that band laid down almost 150 sides before the band dissolved in 1942 when many members went into the service.  Ella easily established a solo career recording at Decca and gained critical attention with her regular appearances with the prestigious Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. 

With the demise of big band swing after World War II Fitzgerald adapted seamlessly to the new bebop sound.  Working frequently with Dizzy Gillespie, she was credited with inventing scat singing—nonsense syllables improvised around the melody.  It was her way of doing as a vocalist the riffs the other musicians were inventing on the spot.  “I just wanted to do what I heard the horns playing,” she said. 

Ella in 1947 with then husband Ray Brown, left, and Dizzy Gillespie, right--the Queen of Scat and Bebop.

In 1955 with Bop fading in popularity, Fitzgerald shifted gears again when she signed with Verve Records produced by Jazz at the Philharmonic impresario Norman Ganz.  Beginning with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book together they produced a string of landmark albums featuring what came to be known as The Great American Songbook.  Those highly regarded albums which have never gone out of issue are regarded by many as defining the canon of 20th Century popular song. 

Ella and Marilyn Monroe were close friends.  The movie star was a longtime fan and the two also shared a bond of coming from abusive, troubled childhoods.  Monroe gave Ella's career a big boost in 1955 by convincing the owner of the posh Sunset Strip Mocambo Club to book her by promising to show up stage side every night with celebrity guests.  Although the story is often told that the club would not book her because of her race, the real reason was that the owner did not think the overweight singer had sex appeal and was glamourous enough for the gig.  It did prove a breakout for her from singing in small jazz clubs to the country's top night clubs.

Up to the early ‘90s Fitzgerald toured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia performing solo concerts and collaborations with most of the leading bands and her singing peers as well as appearances with symphony orchestras.  She also made many television appearances as guest star or in her own specials.  She continued to record, including two Christmas albums that rate with those of Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Mathis as indispensable holiday classics. 

In her later years, Fitzgerald was plagued by health issues—obesity, diabetes, and repertory failure—which only slowed her down a little.  When diabetes caused the amputation of both legs below the knee in 1993 and her eyesight was impaired, she continued to perform from a seat on stage. 

                                                    Ella was commemorated on a 2007 USPS  Black Heritage stamp.

She died in her Beverly Hills home attended by her adopted son Ray Brown Jr. and granddaughter Alice on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79.