A Lot Going on When Divided America Observes Flag Day

Sunday promises to be a very busy day.  Americans of all--you should pardon the expression--stripes will claim the national banner as their own in many often conflicting ways.  Not only is it Flag Day, but it falls during Pride Month, the nation's 250th Birthday hoopla, and on the 80th birthday of the man who makes everything about himself.  He is celebrating with a widely mocked UFC fight on the White House grounds under a soaring pavilion--an event which seems to be still unraveling hour by hour.  

Naturally the folks behind the hugely successful No Kings Day protests are offering an alternative. A 90‑minute Rise Up, Sing Out concert at The Town Hall in New York City featuring Bette Midler, Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Sasha Allen, Jane Fonda, and Joy Reid, co‑presented with the Committee for the First Amendment. The event will stream nationwide as local groups host of watch parties. Despite organizers requesting that previously announced local rallies and marches, Indivisible McHenry County is going ahead with its plans for a We the People Rally on Sunday, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm at Rt. 31 and McCullom Lake Road in McHenry.  

  

Marchers in the 2025 Woodstock Pride Fest parade.

It is also LGBTQ+ Pride Month and McHenry County will celebrate at the Woodstock Pride Parade and Festival on the Square from 11 am to 4 pm.  That overlaps with the McHenry roadside rally.  This year there has been organized "push back" from MAGA groups and provocateurs at many local Pride marches and events.

Flag Day might be lost in the shuffle if folks on all sides were not waving it and claiming it for their own.

We’ve been here before as an updated blog post. 

In case you hadn’t noticed today is officially Flag Day, a demi-holiday easily overlooked.  It is celebrated by displaying the American Flag.  Veterans groups often organize solemn flag disposal ceremonies. 

No other country on Earth makes quite the fetish of its flag as does the United States.  The word idolatry comes to mind.  At its worst it elevates the symbol—the Flag—over the substance—the democratic values espoused in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution.  It is an absolute truism that those who wrap themselves most tightly in the Flag—and these days that is not just a figurative term—are the most disingenuous and dangerous.  Witness any performance by the Resident of the White House and the seditious mobs that laid siege to the Capitol.

Donald Trump and one of his regular Flag fondling.

On the other hand—especially those who served in the Armed Forces or who were raised in a veteran’s household—have been taught to respect the Flag and “the nation for which it stands.”  I still hang the Flag on my house on patriotic holidays and always place my hat over my heart when it passes by in a parade.  It’s just the way I was raised.

Part of the national devotion to the Flag comes from an odd combination of cultural coincidence and calculated political strategy.  Our National Anthem, not officially adopted until 1931 but widely used on patriotic occasions for more than a century prior, may be the only national song about a flag.  

The Grand Army of the Republic promoted the Flag as a symbol of the Union and a thumb-in-the-eye to former Rebels.

Not widely displayed except at military posts, on Navy ships, and on some Federal buildings prior to the Civil War, the Grand Army of the Republic heavily promoted its use after the war in a spirit of triumphalism of the Union over the vanquished South.  For that reason, display of the national flag was highly unpopular in the South until World War I.

The flag and the Pledge of Allegiance were used to Americanize immigrants, especially children as in this Jacob Riis photo.

The Pledge of Allegiance was penned by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and socialist, for use during celebration the 400th anniversary of the supposed discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus.  Quickly adopted by schools as part of the daily ritual of beginning classes, the Pledge does not swear allegiance to the government—an inclusive tip-of-the-hat to resentful former Rebels—or even to the Constitution, but to a symbol, the Flag.

By the turn of the 20th Century the Flag was being used as a symbol of assimilation for the waves of emigrants swamping our shores—and as a test of their loyalty.  The most popular composers of the era—the March King John Philip Sousa and Broadway’s George M. Cohan made literal flag waving as popular as moon-June-spoon ballads.

During World War I, the Woodrow Wilson administration used flag imagery as part of their very sophisticated domestic propaganda operation designed to rouse support of the war effort and raise Liberty Loans.  After the war, the Flag was used to rally support for suppression of the labor movement, radicalism, Socialism, and Communism said to represent sinister alien ideologies.

The flag has often been appropriated to give patriotic cover to hate groups.  Witness this 1925 Ku Klux Klan march in Washington.  But it was also carried by militant unionists at the Lawrence Textile Strike and Chicago Memorial Day Massacre and also by Civil Rights Movement marchers.

Wilson proclaimed the first official Flag Day in 1916.  In 1949, with the country in the grips of yet another Red Scare, Congress made it an official Federal Holiday, although withholding the paid days off for Federal employees standard for other holidays.

June 14 is Flag Day because on this date in 1777 the Continental Congress passed the Flag Act which officially described a new national banner:

Resolved: That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.

Betsy Ross almost certainly did not sew the first flag, Washington never viewed it, and the 13 stars in a circle banner may not have never been actually used during the Revolution.  None of that stopped myth makers.

The new official flag—not, by the way, likely first sewn by Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross—was based on the unofficial Grand Union flag used by General George Washington during the Siege of Boston.  That flag had the same thirteen alternating red and white stripes but had the English Union Jack in its canton.  Of course, that was before Independence was declared in July of 1776.  It wouldn’t do to keep the reference to the British flag. 

The Act was vague—it did not describe the arrangement of the stars in the field, how the stars should be shaped, or even how large the field should be.  Local flag makers working from the sketchy description produced many variations with five, six, and even twelve-pointed stars; with stars of different sizes; and many variations of arrangement.  Also, the shade of blue used for the field depended largely on what blue cloth the maker might have at hand.

The familiar thirteen stars in a circle was not only not standard, but some historians also doubt if it was used at all during the Revolutionary War.  Others believe that it might have been the flag used at the British surrender at Yorktown.

After Vermont and Kentucky were added to the Union two additional stars and two stripes were added.  That was the Star Spangled Banner observed still flying over Ft. McHenry in Baltimore harbor after an all-night British naval bombardment in 1815.  It became apparent that with more new states, adding stripes would quickly become clumsy. In 1818, after five more states were added, Congress fixed the number of stripes at thirteen with an added star for each new state. 

But it still did not specifically designate an arrangement for the stars.  During the Civil War flags with all manner of arrangements were used.  It was not until the creation of the 48 star flag in 1912 that a specific arrangement was established.  The current 50 star flag has been in use since July 4, 1960 after the admission of Hawaii to the Union.  This year will mark the 66th anniversary of that flag, which has been in service longer than any previous national banner.

Today, the flag is waved by forces on both sides of the great social and political divide even as the nation for which it stood after the perilous on the verge of a second civil war in January 2021.  But many on the left are still chagrined and conflicted about the flag.  Does it represent the on-going lethal threat to which the Black Lives Matter Movement responded?  The ongoing expressions of White supremacy and the continued attacks on basic voting rights?  The attempts to degrade women and attack their bodily autonomy?  The treatment of immigrants and refugees? The continuing militarism and low-grade but bloody war around the world?  Or can the flag be honored as a yet unfulfilled promise? 

The upside-down flag is a traditional sign of distress and has been adopted by Trumpistas, election deniers, and some alt-right militia type groups much to the dismay of many veterans.  Even a Supreme Court Justice--guess who--was caught flying it at both his Washington area home and a Rhode Island summer retreat.

Both sides of the current American social chasm claim to love their country but have seemingly irreconcilable notions about what America is, what it means, and what it should become.

As for me, I will choose hope.  I’ve got my flag out today on the belief that it stands for “Liberty and Justice for All.”  What does your flag mean?

 

Mother’s Day Founder Anna Marie Jarvis Battled its Commercialization

  

 

Mother's Day founder Anna Jarvis, right, and her own mother and inspiration, left.

Note--Our annual Mother's Day post is back yet again.

The celebration of Mother’s Day as we know it now is generally credited to Anna Marie Jarvis in memory of her mother, who died on May 9, 1905.  The first commemorative service was held at the Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia where Jarvis’s mother had been a Sunday school teacher on May 12, 1907. 

The following year on May 10 the church, at Jarvis’s urging, expanded the service to include honoring all mothers and Jarvis’s friend, Philadelphia merchant prince John Wanamaker, conducted a public observance in the auditorium of his store. 

Jarvis tirelessly dedicated herself to spreading the observance.  She wrote articles and pamphlets, lobbied city councils, state legislatures, and Congress for proclamations establishing an official observance. West Virginia was the first to act, in 1910, followed by several other states over the next years. 

Jarvis’s efforts paid off on May 8, 1914 when Congress established the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and requesting the President issue a proclamation. Woodrow Wilson wasted no time, issuing his proclamation the next day, May 9, the official birthday of the Federal observance.  

  

By 1914 when Woodrow Wilson issued the first official national Mother's Day Proclamation, greeting card companies were already busy peddling sentimental cards like this one.

Wilson’s proclamation directed Americans to show the flag in honor of mothers who had lost sons in war.  That part of the declaration is an indication that Wilson was probably aware of the earlier efforts of Julia Ward Howe to establish a Mother’s Day observance to protest war. 

Ward’s moving Mother’s Day Proclamation was written in 1870 in reaction to the carnage of the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War and called for women across the globe to unite to end war.  Although that noble effort never produced either the movement or the observation that Howe had hoped for, the effort was well known.  When Howe died only four years earlier in 1910 full of honors as the writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the most famous American woman of letters, her obituaries revived interest in her effort, particularly among pacifists.  

 

The memory Howe’s Proclamation has been revived by the peace and feminist movements and by her Unitarian Universalist faith community and has been re-connected to Jarvis’s celebration.

By the mid-1920’s Jarvis and her sister became embittered at the commercialization of the holiday they worked so hard to create.  The sisters spent the rest of their lives and all of their inheritance battling that trend.  They trademarked the names Mother’s Day and Second Sunday in May to try to keep merchants from using them.  But there were too many fires to put out and not enough lawyers in the world to stamp out flagrant infringement.  At least once she was arrested for protesting.

Card companies, florists, candy companies, restaurants, and merchants still hype Mother's Day, the third most important gift-giving day of the year behind only Christmas and Valentine's Day.

Merchants, and especially the greeting card manufacturers that Jarvis particularly loathed, actually organized and launched a counterattack portraying her as demented and obsessed.  They even questioned her patriotism.   Since newspapers profited handsomely from Mother’s Day advertising, they were more than happy to abet the smear campaign.

 Anna Jarvis's gravestone.

Jarvis and her sister spent their last dime in the fight and were reduced to abject poverty.  Anna never married or had children of her own.  Mother’s Day was her child and she fought fiercely to the end to defend its honor.

She died in obscurity in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1948 at the age of 84.

Ironically, many of the same merchants and business interests that had once vilified her later found it useful to enshrine her in legend, taking great care that her distaste for what the observance had become was carefully omitted from their new version of the founding myth—along with any mention of Julia Ward Howe’s earlier effort.

Lesson Learned When Labor Forced the Hand of a Conservative Supreme Court

The United States Supreme Court surprised everyone by upholding the Adamson Act in the face of a looming and crippling national railroad strike just weeks before the U.S. entered World War I.

One of the enduring myths about the U.S. Supreme Court is that in its lofty supposed impartiality it is above and immune from popular pressure, politics, or protest.  Of course, since it first asserted the right to rule on the Constitutionality of laws enacted by Congress and executive actions of the President as a Federalist thumb-in-the-eye to Thomas Jefferson, decisions by the court have often been nearly nakedly political.

Over most of its history the Court was in the continuous hands of the most conservative elements of society and naturally served the interests of the national elite from which its members were almost unanimously drawn.  Which is why until the Warren Court shifted into liberal hands, you never heard charges of judicial activism as it routinely struck down social reforms and efforts to regulate the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

But today we are going to tell the all-but-forgotten tale of how a conservative Court bowed before a powerful and united labor movement which had in its hands the power to bring the economy of the United States to a dead halt.

The Supreme Court in 1917—seated, William R. Day, Joseph McKenna, Chief Justice Edward D. White, Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr., and Willis Van Devanter, and, standing, Louis D. Brandeis, Mahlon Pitney, James C. McReynolds and John H. Clarke.

On March 15, 1917, the Court surprised the nation by ruling that the Adamson Act of 1916 which established an eight-hour workday, with no loss in pay, for interstate railroad workers was Constitutionally sound.  The Court voted 5-4 to reverse a lower court decision which ruled the legislation unconstitutional.  The majority cited the emergency nature of the Act and conformity to the “public character” of interstate rail transportation.  It represented a significant broadening of the interpretation of the Interstate Commerce provision of the Constitution in that it covered a government action that went beyond regulation.

What moved the Court in this unexpected direction?  It was simply the sure knowledge that 200,000 members of the Railroad Brotherhoods acting in full cooperation were prepared to go on a strike that would paralyze the nation.

Those same railroad workers had already forced the hand of both the President of the United States and Congress.

The eight-hour workday had been the holy grail of the labor movement for 60 years.  Wage workers in the rapidly industrializing nation routinely worked 12, 11, and 10-hour days, six days a week in often brutal conditions.  Such drudgery dramatically shortened the life expectancy of laborers, disrupted ordinary family life, and contributed to a culture of heavy binge drinking once a week on paydays as a release from the stress and misery of the job.

The Eight Hour Day had been the Holy Grail of the Labor movement since the Civil War as evidenced by this 1906 newspaper illustration.

In the post-Civil War era the National Labor Union, the country’s first national labor body, launched a series of strikes to demand an eight-hour workday with no decrease in wages.  Although the strikes failed, Congress was alarmed enough to pass weak 8 Hour legislation in 1868.  But there was no enforcement mechanism, and no proscribed punishments for employers who ignored it.  The law was essentially dead before the ink dried.

In the 1870s and ‘80s the Knights of Labor took up the call.  A nationwide strike for the eight-hour day supported by the Knights and by the craft unions which would later become the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was called for May 1, 1886.  After the so-called Haymarket Riot in Chicago the executed anarchist editors, organizers, and labor leaders who became martyrs to the movement.

For the next decades virtual open class warfare raged in America.  In some local situations and in some industries, the 8-hour day was won—often to be snatched away later when the repeated cycle of panics of those years routinely drove down wages and set workers fighting amongst themselves for the scraps.

In the early 1890’s Eugene V. Debs united craft divided workers into a powerful industrial union, the American Railway Union (ARU).  Their first great victory against the Great Northern Railway included an eight-hour day.  But in 1892 Federal troops smashed the ARU’s Pullman Boycott and sent Debs and his fellow union leaders to jail.  Although the eight-hour day was not an issue in the Pullman affair, the destruction of the ARU effectively ended progress to winning that goal in the railroad industry.

By the early years of the 20th Century the old Railway Brotherhoods, who regarded themselves as the aristocracy of labor, learned the bitter lessons of being divided by craft.  They agreed to act in concert for a new push for the eight-hour day.

The timing could not be better than 1916.  The country had emerged from yet another Panic and was in a solid boom caused in no small measure by the horrible war raging in Europe.  American industry was stepping in to fill a global market disrupted by the war.  It was also in the process of re-arming America in Preparedness in case the country was dragged into the foreign squabble.

The railway unions announced that they were ready to launch a nationwide strike unless they were given an eight-hour workday with no decrease in wages and time and a half pay for overtime.  Railroad operators were intransigent but were aware that the Brotherhoods were well organized, had strong rank and file support, and could rely on broad support from the labor movement.

In the White House, President Woodrow Wilson had a problem.  Although he was running for re-election with the boast “He kept us out of war,” he was increasingly convinced that the United States would sooner rather than later be ensnared.  He launched his highly publicized Preparedness campaign to quickly ramp up production of war materials and supplies for a huge new Army and modernized Navy.  A railway strike would disrupt all of that.

Moreover, he had a political problem.  He was running as a progressive Democrat, but unlike 1912, the Republicans were once again united and Deb’s Socialist Party was making serious inroads in his support among urban workers.  He could not afford to force the railroads to continue operations with military force like another Democrat, Grover Cleveland, did in the Pullman Strike.  Such an action would alienate the big city working class without which no Democrat could hope to be elected.  And armed action against the strikers would inflame general anti-war sentiment and threaten national unity he would need to go to war.

Wilson called the Railroad operators and the Railway Brotherhoods together for a meeting at the White House where he offered to act as “an honest broker.”  Wilson proposed the eight-hour workday, but without wage guarantees.  The railroads agreed but the unions balked.  They would not accept a plan that essentially reduced the take-home pay of their members.  They walked away from the negotiations and noisily resumed plans for the strike.

This anti-Wilson political cartoon from 1916 illustrates the pressure on the President over the eight-hour issue before the Presidential elections that year.

Wilson had no good options.  On August 29, 1916, he appeared before a joint session of Congress and demanded emergency legislation to prevent the looming strike.  In a virtual total capitulation to labor he called for the eight-hour day with no loss of wages and the overtime provision which discouraged bosses from simply continuing to schedule long shifts. 

Enabling legislation was introduced by Democratic Congressman William C. Adamson of Georgia.  It sped through congress and passed both houses beating a September 4 strike deadline.

Even though a special commission was set up to allow the railroads to raise their freight rates, which were regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, there was no doubt that the Railroads would turn to the courts to block the new law.  Wilson not only expected it, but he was also pretty sure that the operators would prevail.  He himself vetoed far less sweeping reform legislation in the past based on his constitutional doubts about the authority of government to meddle in private industry.  None-the-less, he directed his Justice Department to defend the expected attacks.

This full-page newspaper illustration shows the owners and managers of the nation's most important railroads united in opposition to the Adamson Act and the pressure they put on Wilson.

The Act was quickly struck down by the United States District Court for Western Missouri.  The unions announced that they would resume preparations for a nationwide strike.  May Day, traditionally tied to the struggle for the eight-hour day, was a likely target which enhanced the possibility that it might even spread into a general strike.

The Justice Department urged the high Court to rapidly consider its appeal.  Questioning lawyers on both sides of the case by the Justices led the press to speculate that the law was doomed.  The Brotherhoods allowed scattered local “wildcat” strikes to occur as demonstrations of power and major rallies and marches were held in cities across the country. The labor and radical press were full of news and offers of support and solidarity.

Finally, on March 15 enough justices bowed to the pressure of an impending national emergency to uphold the Adamson Act by the narrowest of margins.  Chief Justice Edward D. White, a Louisiana Democrat first appointed to the Court by Grover Cleveland and made Chief Justice by William Howard Taft, was the surprising author of the 5-4 majority opinion.

Soon the U.S. was at war. In December Wilson nationalized the railroads for the duration.  They continued to operate under the provisions of the Act, however.  And the law remained in effect after the operators resumed control of their lines.

The war proved to be a body blow to militant labor.  Wilson enthusiastically intervened time and again against strikes in “essential” industries like copper mining and timber.  He equated the most radical wing of the labor movement, the Industrial Workers of the (IWW), major champions of the eight-hour day, with treasonous interference with war effort.  An unprecedented wave of repression stung not only the IWW but Debs and the Socialist Party, and even AFL unions’

After the war was over the great Red Scare saw thousands of labor leaders deported or jailed.

Under those circumstances moves to extend the eight-hour day to other elements of the economy fizzled.  It did not become the law of the land until late in the New Deal when the Fair Labor Standards Act finally went into effect in 1937.

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.