The Parade of the Women in White Rocks New York

Note:  This was first posted on this blog a year ago.

On October 23, 1915 more than 25,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in one of the largest parades for Women’s Suffrage yet held.  That would be impressive enough, but the demonstration was only part of an unprecedented year long campaign to convince Empire State voters to approve a state constitutional amendment giving women the vote.  Nothing like it had ever been seen in complexity and breadth of organization.

New York had long been a leading hot bed of suffrage agitation.  The Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1869 and the New York City chapter a year later.  By 1903 there were at least 15 organizations in the metropolitan area promoting votes for women.  That year the indefatigable Carrie Chapman Catt brought the various organizations together under the umbrella of Interurban Woman Suffrage Council (IWSC).  Within two years it had more than twenty affiliates and 150 individual associate members who included both established leaders and wealthy women who could bankroll significant campaigns.  They established a headquarters in the Martha Washington Hotel and employed Fannie Chafin to manage day to day operations.

Catt, however, was not satisfied with just the stepped up lobbying, public rallies, and demonstrations.  She realized that support for suffrage was largely still confined to well educated, middle class Protestant women.  In order to secure passage, it would be necessary to secure votes—votes of men of all classes including the teeming ethnic and religious minorities of New York.  That required a political operation modeled on the existing apparatus of the Democratic and Republican parties.

 The IWSC called a founding convention of the new Woman Suffrage Party of Greater New York at Carnegie Hall on October 29, 1909.  804 delegates and 200 alternates attended the convention.  The Party set a goal of having a leader for each of the 63 Assembly Districts of the city and a captain for each of the 2,127 election districts (precincts), with a chair and committee in each borough, under the direction a city chair board of directors—just the way Tammany Hall did it.

 It was an ambitious project and obviously not all positions were filled immediately.  But the women were committed to the long haul and built membership and capacity steadily.  The party sent its forces to local political conventions; held mass meetings; issued thousands of leaflets in many languages; conducted street meetings, parades, plays, lectures, suffrage schools; gave entertainments and teas; sent appeals to churches and all kinds of organizations and to individual leaders; brought pressure on legislators through their constituents and obtained wide publicity in newspapers and magazines.

 The ground work was laid when the Assembly voted to submit a suffrage amendment to the voters in the November 1915 election.  Catt became chair of the statewide campaign, which divide the state into two upstate districts and metropolitan New York.  Mary Garrett Hay, chair of the City party, and her associates sprang into action.  They raised $50,000—an enormous sum in 1915—for the city campaign alone.  A careful campaign with designated tasks from January to Election Day was planned.  The campaign committee was established—including liaisons to the city’s ethnic communities.  In January alone there were 60 district conventions, 170 canvassing suppers, four mass meetings, 27 canvassing conferences and a convention in Carnegie Hall.  The plan was to personally canvas all voters 661,164 registered voters in their homes as well contacting them in factories, offices, shops, and all manner of public gatherings.  Women spent thousands upon thousands of hours climbing narrow tenement staircases, and knocking on doors in dark grimy hallways as well as visiting fashionable apartments and suburbs.  As the campaign rolled on, registered membership in the Party swelled to 60,535.

The Party made special efforts to reach out to men by meeting them where they worked.  The designated a number special suffrage days dedicated to various professions.  They visited firemen, barbers, street cleaners among others bring each special and appropriate gifts and literature.  Workers in the subway excavations were visited with Irish banners and shamrock fliers; Turkish, Armenian, French, German and Italian restaurants were canvassed as were the laborers on the docks, in vessels and in public markets. They did not neglect the denizens of the offices either—they visited brokers, bankers, and lawyers smothering them all with flattery instead of yelling in their faces.

No did they neglect public spectacle.  In addition to the great Fifth Avenue March there was a Night of the Interurban Council Fires, when on high bluffs in the different boroughs huge bonfires were lighted, fireworks and balloons sent up, with music, speeches and displays of illuminated transparencies. There were 28 neighborhood parades and numerous torch light rallies.  The party sponsored street festivals and dances on the Lower East Side for the Irish, Syrians, Poles, and Italians.  There were meetings conducted in Yiddish and dozens of other languages.  Big events like a night with opera stars at Carnegie Hall attracted wide spread press attention.

According to an article by Oreola Williams Haskell, head of the campaign’s press bureau by Election Day the campaign had accomplished the following:

Voters canvassed (60 per cent of those enrolled): 396,698
Women canvassed: 60,535
Voters circularized: 826,796
Party membership increased from 151,688 to 212,223
Watchers and pickets furnished for the polls: 3,151
Numbers of leaflets printed and distributed: 2,883,264
Money expended from the City treasury: $25,579
Number of outdoor meetings: 5,225
Number of indoor meetings (district): 660
Number of mass meetings: 93
Political meetings addressed by Congressmen, Assemblymen and Constitutional Convention delegates:  25
Total number of meetings: 6,003
Night speaking in theaters: 60
Theater Week (Miner's and Keith's): 2
Speeches and suffrage slides in movie theaters: 150
Concerts (indoor, 10 outdoor, 3): 13
Suffrage booths in bazaars: 6
Number of Headquarters (Borough 4, Districts, 20): 24
Campaign vans (drawn by horses 6, decorated autos 6, district autos 4), vehicles in constant use: 16
Papers served regularly with news (English and foreign): 80
Suffrage editions of papers prepared: 2
Special articles on suffrage: 150
Sermons preached by request just before election: 64 

Despite all of these impressive efforts, the campaign failed.  In the City the vote was 320,853 opposed and 238,098 in support.  The defeat was more lopsided Up State.  But the women were far from discouraged.  Two days after the election the City Party united with the National Association for Women’s Suffrage in a mass meeting at Cooper Union, and $100,000 was pledged for a new campaign fund. 

Two years later they ginned up the campaign all over again.  That time they won.  New York State became one of the first Eastern states to adopt women’s suffrage—all due to good old fashion street level politics.

1844—The Great Disappointment. 2011 (Third Try)—The Great Shoulder Shrug

After his May 21 prediction of the Rapture got a lot of press attention and failed to occur, radio evangelist Harold Camping, recalculated and announced that yesterday, October 21, would be the big day.  It came and went with not only no Christians flying naked through the air to rendezvous with the Lord, but with barely any public attention.  Qaddafi’s corpse on display in Libya and thousands of Americans marching and occupying Wall Street and cities coast to coast pushed the non-event off of the front pages and the evening news.

It was Camping’s third attempt to predict the End of the World.  After the first failed to happen in 1996, he went back to the drawing board to come up with the dates this year.  Many of his followers followed his advice to quit their jobs and sell or give away all of their possessions in anticipation of immanent glory.  That left a lot of them in a pickle last May.  They were probably really hopping that yesterday would solve all of their problems.  Sucks to be them.

Camping was just following in a great American tradition of end-of-the-world excitement.  The most famous, and probably the most widely anticipated, event was supposed to happen on October 22, 1844.

Baptist preacher William Miller developed a large following based on his interpretations of the prophecies in the Book of Daniel 8:14 “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.”  Millerite congregations sprang up after Miller began to preach his doctrine of the Earth scourged by fire and the “Second Advent” of Christ come to save believers in 1831.  He calculated that Jesus Christ would return to earth and appear to the saved some time in 1843-44.  The movement spread over much of the northern states which had previously been gripped the religious frenzy of the Second Great Awakening. 

 

Although Miller never set a precise date he argued that the Advent would occur during the Jewish Year 5604, between March 21, 1843 and March 20, 1844.  Many of his followers, like those of Camping nearly 170 latter gave up all of their possessions to await the wind.  When March 20, 1844 came and went without either Fire or Jesus, many of his disciples were discouraged.  But many kept the faith, even when Miller admitted he had been in error, and sought explanations.

At a Millerite camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire in August Samuel S. Snow, announced that he had discovered the error in Miller’s original calculation, which were based on one day=one year from 457 B.C. when Artaxerxes I of Persia granted permission for the Jews to rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem. Using the calendar of the Karaite Jews instead of the Rabbinic calendar consulted my Miller, Snow determined that “The tenth day of the seventh month [Jewish] of the present year, 1844” as the true date.  He equated that with October 22, 1844.

Aided by sensationalized press accounts, Snow’s prediction spread like wild fire.  Not only was it accepted by—with Miller approval—the sect, but it spread to other Evangelicals.    On October 22 tens of thousands gathered, on high ground if possible, surrounded by their families.  Many, taking a cue from Scripture wore white robes for the Rapture.    When nothing happened they drifted off facing rebuilding their lives.  They called it the Great Disappointment.

Many, if not most of the Milerites abandoned their faith and returned to the conventional and orthodox denominations from which they had come.  Those who had not been committed Milerites, but accepted the prophesy were especially bitter.  Milerite churches in several towns and cities were attacked or burned and adherents violently attacked.  Miller himself commented on the cruel mockery of small children he had to endure.

But a core group remained true believers.  However they soon split into three factions.  The first faction, initially the largest, believed hat Oct. 21 had “shut the door to salvation” to all but the “Wise Virgins—those who believed in the message.  This group awaited daily rapture.

The second group soon eclipsed the first.  It held that the Oct. 21 date was in err.  Led by Joshua Hines who eventually recruited Miller himself, argued that since the door was not shut, people newly coming to the faith might also be saved in an imminent, if unknowable, Second Coming.  This group eventually founded the Advent Christian Church. 

         

The third group was the most successful of all.   The believed that Oct. 22 was a correct and significant date, but that it had been misinterpreted.  The “sanctuary” cleansed that day was not on Earth but in Heaven.  Eventually a “light would be given and their disappointment explained.”  Out of this group arose the Seventh Day Adventist Church   and all of its many splinters, each with its own interpretation.

Oddly the Baha’i incorporated Miller’s prophesy and identified the return of Christ with their avatar the Báb who proclaimed himself in Persia in 1844.

Miller, the founder of all of this excitement, died in 1849 still waiting daily for the End.

There other reported “ends of the world” in American history.  Notably the Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted the end in 1914, 1918, 1925, and 1942.  They were wrong, too.  As were Chuck Smith and Edgar Whisenant in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s.

It is apparently a game anyone can play.  Anybody up for an End of the World pool?  Winner takes the pot and has eternity to spend it.                                                                                                                 

The March on the Pentagon—A Paradigm Shift in ‘60’s Anti-War Movement

An iconic image of the March on the Pentagon

There were other big marches in Washington in opposition to the Vietnam War.  Starting in 1965 they had practically become a semi-annual event.  There would be more—and larger—ones later.  But the March to Confront the War Makers on October 21, 1967 was different.  It signaled a new phase in the anti-war movement that incorporated the rising youth counter   culture on a large scale for the first time and willingness for more aggressive confrontation of authority.  It also introduced onto a national stage some figures who would become house hold names within a year.

The march was organized, as were previous ones, by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—universally referred to simply as the Mobe—a shaky coalition of more than 150 organizations including traditional pacifists, Ban the Bomb groups, liberals, the old Left, the New Left, Viet Cong sympathizers, a sliver of the Civil Rights Movement, student groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and anti-war veterans groups.  It was united only in opposition to the war. 

The organization was so shaky that after the tumultuous events of this demonstration it fell apart.  It was re-assembled, minus its less militant components as the New Mobe the following year in time to organize protests at the Democratic National Convention.

The Mobe was led by veteran radical pacifist Dave Dellinger, the fifty-something editor of the Madison, Wisconsin based Progressive magazine.  In order to reach out to more young people—earlier marches, in retrospect seem like the sedate affairs of the middle class—Dellinger recruited California activist Jerry Rubin to be project coordinator for the march.  It was Rubin’s idea to add a March on the Pentagon after the main rally on the National Mall broke up.

The rally and March were just part of a series of actions in and around Washington.  A day earlier a march of hundreds on the Justice Department organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other anti-draft groups presented more than 1,000 returned Draft Cards to a reluctant Assistant Attorney General.  Other small demonstrations and picketing were organized by various component groups in the Mobe around Washington.

A highlight of the Rally on the Mall was to be the arrival of the Peace Torch, lit in Hiroshima on August 6.  It was carried across country from San Francisco in a highly publicized relay reminiscent of the journeys of the Olympic Torch.

Although several Blacks were spoke from the podium of the Mall Rally—mostly long time members of old Left parties—most African Americans boycotted the main demonstration where President Lyndon B. Johnson was sure to come under attack.  Many were grateful for his steadfast support of major Civil Rights legislation.  A separate rally was held at Howard University where opposition to the war was largely separated from opposition to the President.  The most important Black leader to come out strongly against the war, Rev. Martin Luther King, was absent from both events. 

The huge rally was typical of others of its type—a parade of speakers representing the component organizations interspersed with brief entertainment.  Dellinger hinted at a shift in anti-war strategy by saying that it was time to “to go from protest to resistance.”  Norman Mailer, then the most celebrated novelist in America, famously spoke.  His role in the Rally and later events was celebrated in his book Armies of the Night, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 

The main speaker was Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby care book was the bible by which most of the young members of the crowd had been raised.  Spock had supported Johnson in 1964 and felt betrayed by his escalation of the war.  The kindly Spock was one of the last nods at getting the parents of Baby Boomers on board the anti-war movement.  But the days when he and organizations like Another Mother for Peace could be the face of the movement were ending.

When the main Rally broke up, a large portion of the crowd began the two and a half mile march to the Pentagon.  By some estimates as many at 50,000 began the long walk, which took them across the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and up a long service road to the Defense Department headquarters.  Many did not finish the trip.  The line strung out so that it took well over an hour for everyone to get to the site.

When marchers got there they were confronted with a building encircled by 2,500 Federal troops and 200 U.S. Marshals.  A rope line was set up in advance of the security forces and authorities announced that anyone crossing the line would be arrested.

Marchers also encountered a smaller group already at the Pentagon.  Organized by Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, festooned in an American flag shirt and Uncle Sam hat, the newly formed Youth International Party—the Yippies, an organization that hardly existed except in flyers circulated on college campus in big city youth culture enclaves, were there to supposedly levitate the Pentagon.

Many of those first on the scene peacefully approached the defense line.  Images of young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15s became iconic.  But soon more militant demonstrators were challenging the line.  Arrests began.  Small groups managed to get partially up the steps of the building.  Others found an unguarded access ramp and charged in.  They were met with rifle butts and sheathed bayonets and particularly by the aggressive batons of Federal Marshals who busted several heads. Tear gas was used on the crowd and there was some chaos and panic.

But the majority of the demonstrators continued to stand by.  Many sang America the Beautiful and other patriotic and anti-war songs as the battle raged.  By 7 pm things had settled down.  Authorizes announced that the permit for the demonstration had expired.  Most of the remaining demonstrators drifted away, but about 7,000 chose to stay.  No move was made to dislodge them, but as overnight temperatures dropped, many more left. 

At dawn a few hundred left to march to the White House to “wake up LBJ.”  There were more arrests there, including those charged with picking flowers in Lafayette Park.  A few hundred others stayed behind to keep a vigil at the Pentagon.  At midnight the remaining 200 were rousted or arrested.

In all 681, including Hoffman and Mailer, were arrested over the two days.  Many demonstrators were bloodied or overcome by tear gas.  Over 100 demonstrators were documented to have been treated for injuries.  Many more were undoubtedly hurt.  In addition some soldiers, marshals, and police sustained minor injuries, mostly from objects thrown at them during the confrontation at the Pentagon or scuffles during arrests.

The events in Washington that weekend set the stage for even more tumultuous and confrontational protests around the country in the next few years.

Woodstock U.U.s Collect Aid for Occupy Chicago

Carrie MacDonald wished she could join the protestors at Occupy Chicago, a part of the growing national movement inspired by Occupy Wall Street.  The son of a close friend was among those who have been on the scene since the beginning.  But Carrie is the mother of a two month old girl and an active two year old boy. 

Unsatisfied with following events in the news and signing internet petitions, Carrie decided to help out by collecting donations of much needed supplies for the protestors and delivering them to Chicago.

“I want the folks who are down there protesting day in and day out to know that there are many of us out here who are behind them 100%.  Even if we can't be there physically for whatever reason, we are with them in spirit,” she said.

For help Carrie turned to the members of the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock who were excited to help out.

The Rev. Jennifer Slade, interim minister, said Unitarian Universalists around the country have been responding to the growing movement.  She cited a statement by Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President Peter Morales, “Unitarian Universalism embodies a long tradition of working for economic justice and workers’ rights. Today is another opportunity for us to live our faith, and the Occupy protests are a first step on the road to repairing our country.”

The Social Justice Committee is collecting needed supplies to be delivered to Occupy Chicago on Monday, October 24. Supplies can be dropped off at the UU Church of Woodstock, 221 Dean Street, in the minister’s office on Thursday, October 20 from 2-6 pm, Friday, October 21 from 10 am to12 pm, and Sunday October 23 between 9:30 am and 10:30 am Supplies needed include:  tents,  blankets, sleeping Bag, Tarps, Winter coats, gloves, scarves, hats, battery packs, power strips, hand and foot warmers,  fresh or canned fruits and vegetables, peanut butter, jelly, bread, protein bars, individual size cereal boxes.

For a more extensive list go occupychi.org and click on “supplies.”

On Monday, Carrie and other members of the Social Justice Committee will load up their cars and head into the city.

For more information and details how to make donations, call Carrie at 847 346-8413 or e-mail carrie@carriemacdonald.com.