The Great Demand
The train carrying the president-elect sped into Union Station at 3:45 p.m. To Woodrow Wilson’s surprise, few people had gathered to welcome him to the nation’s capital. The Washington Post reported, “It was a strange greeting for the man who is to rule the destinies of the nation for the next four years.”
A crowd of only 500 awaited the former governor of New Jersey, a pitiful number for a man who had won the presidency just months before in one of the largest electoral landslides in history. Still, a “small but vociferous” crowd “made up in noise what they lacked in numbers.”
The date was Monday, March 3, 1913, and it radiated with significance. Not only had the next president arrived in the capital, but the first organized political march in the nation’s 137-year-old history was taking place on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Wilson’s motorcade hastened to the Shoreham Hotel through a deserted city. Taking a back way, the entourage hoped to avoid “the more alluring spectacle” taking place just blocks away. Peering out the window, Wilson noticed that something important was missing. “Where are all the people?” he asked. “On the Avenue, watching the suffrage parade,” came the reply.
Meanwhile, on the cold, marble steps of the Treasury Building, women stood barefoot and impatient, awaiting the product of months of tireless labor.
The plan had been simple enough. Clad in national colors and classical costumes, dozens of women would follow the trumpet’s lead and emerge from the shadows of the towering columns. Descending on the plaza, the women would dance in tableaux meant to illustrate “those ideals toward which men and women have been struggling through the ages and toward which, in cooperation and equality, they will continue to strive.”
Ten blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue, Alice Paul couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The procession, five thousand marchers strong, was besieged by an unruly horde composed mostly of men and boys—many prejudiced, many just plain drunk, others just interested in the commotion.
Newspaper accounts would later grossly idealize the marching conditions. “Like modern Amazons marching on to battle,” the Evening Star wrote of the spectacle, “the suffragists looked neither to the right nor left.”
But the truth was much less stoic. “Women were spit upon, slapped in the face, tripped up, pelted with burning cigar stuns, and insulted by jeers and obscene language too vile to print or repeat,” the Woman’s Journal reported. One woman was trampled, a young girl struck in the face, and many more abused in myriad other ways.
Riding in a car near the front of the parade, Paul jumped out. Just 28 and donning an academic robe adorned with medals from suffrage campaigns, she tried to carve a human furrow through which the women could safely continue. But her efforts were fruitless.
The police, many of whom looked on in amusement, were unable—even unwilling—to stop the madness that overtook the procession. Asked by a marcher why he was not protecting the women and dispersing the crowd, a policeman replied, “There would be nothing like this happening if you would stay at home.”
Two horses struggled to pull a cart through the sea of spectators. The bannered float, the first of more than twenty, bore in large font the central message (and hope) of the parade. Referred to as the “Great Demand,” it was simple yet provocative: “WE DEMAND AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES ENFRANCHISING THE WOMEN OF THIS COUNTRY.” Toward the rear, the National Men’s League for Women Suffrage marched under a banner that bore the timely words of Abraham Lincoln: “No country can exist half slave and half free.”
“We march today to give evidence to the world of our determination that this simple act of justice be done,” the official program declared. The women hoped to illustrate that Wilson, save in six states, had been elected by just half the taxed population. “We march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded,” excluded from, above all, the founding principle that just government is derived only from “the consent of the governed.”
By holding the parade the day before the inauguration, the suffragists resolved, “What politicians had not been able to get through their minds, we would give them through their eyes—often a powerful substitute.”
Just two thousand marchers out of the estimated five thousand completed the route and made the final hike to Memorial Continental Hall, location of the official celebration. “We learned that what had happened was not a catastrophe but an unlooked-for blessing,” Mary Foster, a marcher, recalled. “It would promote the cause of suffrage far more than any beautiful parade could do.”
“I never was so proud in my life,” Anna Howard Shaw said. “We have been living in unfreedom and in the shadow of fear,” declared the novelist Mary Johnston. “But now, in our valley of shadow, the dawn begins to break.”
Six years passed before the marchers’ dream of a constitutional amendment securing equal suffrage was realized. Yet, in the face of setbacks and governmental recalcitrance, faith in the American ideals sustained them.
Giving his inaugural address on Tuesday, March 4, 1913, Wilson “sounded a high moral note,” declaring that “the firm basis of government is justice.”
Wilson did not mention equal suffrage, reflecting too well the tendency of the American struggle to see moral advances, however modest, lost by a failure to reinforce and amplify the best of the national soul when it matters most. Wilson eventually chose better, but one wonders what if he had chosen better then.
Regardless, Monday, March 3, 1913, was one of Robert Kennedy’s “numberless diverse acts of courage” that shaped history—and ultimately for the best. It sent forth a tiny ripple of daring and hope and, as the currents swelled, generated the power to overcome the mighty obstacles holding America back from realizing her highest ideals.