The meeting thus broken up, we abandoned a further attempt that night. As our little, bannerless procession filed slowly back to headquarters, hoodlums followed us. The police of course gave us no protection and just as we were entering the door of our own building a rowdy struck me on the side of the head with a heavy banner pole. The blow knocked me senseless against the stone building; my hat was snatched from my head, and burned in the street. We entered the building to find that soldiers and sailors had been periodically rushing it in our absence, dragging out bundles of our banners, amounting to many hundreds of dollars, and burning them in the street, without any protest from the police.

One does not undergo such an experience without arriving at some inescapable truths, a discussion of which would interest me deeply but which would be irrelevant in this narrative.

"Two hundred maddened women try to see the President" . . . "Two hundred women attack the police," and similar false headlines, appeared the next morning in the New York papers. It hurt to have the world think that we had attacked the police. That was a slight matter, however, for that morning at breakfast, aboard the George Washington, the President also read the New York papers. He saw that we were not submitting in silence to his inaction. It seems reasonable to assume that on sailing down the harbor that morning past the Statue of Liberty the President had some trouble to banish from his mind the report that "two hundred maddened women" had tried to "make the Opera House last night."

Chapter 26

President Wilson Wins the 64th Vote in Paris

The "Prison Special," which was nearing the end of its dramatic tour, was arousing the people to call for a special session of Congress, as the President sailed away.

Although a Republican Congress had been elected, President Wilson, as the head of the Administration, was still responsible for initiating and guiding legislation. We had to see to it that, with his Congress out of ,power, he did not relax his efforts on behalf of the amendment.

There was this situation which we were able to use to our advantage. Two new Democratic Senators, Senator Harrison of Mississippi and Senator Harris of Georgia, had been elected to sit in the incoming Congress through the President's influence. He, therefore, had very specific power over these two men, who were neither committed against suffrage by previous votes nor were they yet won to the amendment.