CENTENNIAL | Suffrage Marches, January 20

To find out about suffrage centennial events, consult the centennial website maintained by Marguerite Kearns and others.

The year 2017 celebrated the passage of votes for women in New York State.

In 2018, votes for women passed in South Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas.

INEZ | What would she do? Write to the President?

If Inez Milholland Boissevain were alive today (she would be 130 years old), what would she recommend that organizers of The Women's March do now?

What They Did Then

Inez was pretty aggressive.

She was on the radical end (she pushed Alice Paul to let a black sorority participation in the 1913 "Procession" that she headed up on her horse) of the radical offshoot (what became the National Woman's Party) of the established women's group (the National American Woman Suffrage Association).

What they did in 1917, about seven weeks after Inez died, was to picket the White House, six days a week, until public opinion changed (especially after the DC police jailed women who were force-fed in prison).

Then Wilson changed his mind, supported a Federal Amendment giving women the vote. The 19th Amendment became law in 1920.

Today

I am pretty sure that Inez would be in the face of the President.

Diana Chapman Walsh, former President of Wellesley (and Wellesley '66 classmate of my wife Alice), has suggested a way to be in the President's face without everyone making another trip to Washington. 

She suggests that everyone who reads this send in Tuesday's mail a very simple hand-written message to President Trump regarding the preservation of the Affordable Care Act. She suggests the following short letter. Written letters to the President must be opened, read and tallied. If everyone responds, it will create a mountain of mail and create a visually undeniable citizens' demand.

President Donald J. Trump
1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington, D.C. 20500

“Don’t make America sick again. Improve Obamacare. Don’t repeal it.”

If 53 million pieces of mail go out that will mean about $25 million worth of postage stamps sold, which will help the solvency of the USPS.

I have done it and so has Alice.

INEZ | Sister March, Jan. 21, in Lewis, N.Y.

The following is from a press release sent out by Sandra Weber.

Sister March Planned to Honor Inez Milholland 

Adirondack-Champlain Valley community will rally at suffragist’s grave

Elizabethtown, NY, January 9, 2017—Women, men, families and youths from across the Adirondack region plan to rally on Saturday, January 21 to show solidarity with those at the Women’s March on Washington. Local marches have been gathering momentum and the national organization says 300 Sister Marches are planned, each with its own program, “from music and speeches to a rally at a suffragist’s grave in upstate New York, to a verbal ‘human mosaic’ of people in Napa Valley sharing their vision for the future.” [See prnewswire on Sister Marches, 1/9/17]

“The day after the Presidential inauguration, people from around the country will unite in Washington, DC in the spirit of democracy, dignity and justice,” said Sandra Weber, co-organizer of the Adirondack march. “Some people are travelling to DC, but many of us will not be able to make the trip. When I heard that Seneca Falls was holding a Sister March, I thought it was a great idea for our North Country community to join the movement.”

Participants in the Adirondack-Champlain Valley Women’s March will meet at the grave of Inez Milholland in Lewis Cemetery behind the Congregational Church. The program will include a tribute to Inez, presentation of flowers, and a reading of the sonnet "To Inez Milholland" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The cemetery setting also echoes the famous “graveyard rally” organized by Inez when Vassar College officials refused to allow a suffrage meeting on campus. 

“In the Adirondack region, the most notable site of the woman’s movement is Inez’s grave. She rode a white horse at the front of the 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington and became the national symbol of the suffrage movement,” explained Weber, a local author and historian. “Three years later, Inez Milholland died, at age 30, while campaigning for Votes for Women. Her father, John Milholland (one of the founders of the NAACP), insisted that the body be buried in the Adirondack foothills, near the family’s estate, Meadowmount.”

“Inez was not only a suffrage martyr, she was an advocate of human rights,” said David Hodges, co-organizer of the local event. “Her message---Forward out of darkness, Forward into light---resonates as much today as 100 years ago.”

In recognition of her sacrifice and commitment to women’s equality, Inez Milholland was nominated for the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2015. The Inez Milholland Centennial project believes that now is the perfect time to award the medal to Inez, as women march in Washington following in her footsteps and others rally at her grave.

After the short graveside ceremony, the Adirondack marchers will reconvene indoors at the Whallonsburg Grange where Hodges, along with other musicians and singers, will lead participants in songs of hope and unity. The purpose is to stand together and send a message of support for values of human decency, equal rights and freedom from discrimination. 

During the first ten days of the grass-roots effort using Facebook and e-mail, fifty people committed to attending the Adirondack-Champlain Valley Women’s March. Participants are coming from all over the region: Keene Valley, Essex, Westport, Elizabethtown, Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, Plattsburgh, Glens Falls, and Vergennes, Vermont, and other places.

The event is free and non-partisan. For more information, see the Facebook Event page for Adirondack – Champlain Valley Women’s March or email Sandra Weber at weber@sandraweber.com.

For more information on the Sister March Press Release: https://www.womensmarch.com/sisters-press

For more information on the Women’s March on Washington and Sister Marches, visit womensmarch.com or womensmarch.com/sisters

Additional photos available from Sandra Weber, 518-873-1137 . weber@sandraweber.com.

INEZ | NYC Parade Uniform, 1911

Inez with faceted-star helmet/crown,
cape, Maltese cross. What is this?
Photo by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr.,
c. 1911. Library of Congress. 

I have previously posted that Inez decided in 1913 to wear a herald uniform that  looked good and ignored Alice Paul's suffrage-tricolor (purple, gold, white) concept.

It's worth exploring what she wore on a mounted leadership of the 1911 New York City parade, i.e., a helmet-like crown topped by a star, and a cape with a black Maltese cross on the left arm.

No one ever seems to have commented on these two symbols. Where did they come from?

• The faceted star...

• The Maltese Cross...

The Faceted Star

The faceted star or mullet in heraldry signifies divinity. The helmet-crown is actually much like the hinged visor that comes down to cover the mouth.

The overall effect is Joan of Arc, although we are told that Joan was a cross-dresser–both because it was easier to be a warrior in a man's clothes and because it made her less vulnerable to male sexual predation. Inez below the neck has lost the Joan of Arc warrior look, at least from the front. That's not a man's fighting costume.

The Maltese Cross

The Maltese Cross is associated with the Knights of Malta (previously of Rhodes), who were founded  to care for and also protect pilgrims visiting newly conquered Jerusalem after the First Crusade. The message is that Inez is on a crusade for women, to care for and protect them.

During the American Civil War, the Maltese Cross was used as a symbol for rescue workers. It has become a favorite design for fire department shields across the United States, including the FDNY, and also in other English-speaking countries.

While the 1911 cape that Inez wore shows a black Maltese cross on a white cape, the Maltese cross she wore at the head of the 1913 parade in Washington was described in The New York Times on March 3, 1913 as gold on pale blue. In heraldry there is only one blue (azure) and it is not pale, so the color of the cape appears to be influenced by aesthetic preferences rather than informed by heraldic scholarship.

INEZ BIO | Mar. 8–International Women's Day (Updated May 19, 2016)

Jane Barker of the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial
 and the restored portrait of Inez Milholland Boissevain,
Sewall-Belmont House, 2011. Photo © by JT Marlin.

New York, March 8, 2016–This day, March 8, is the 105th Women's Day, later called "International Women's Day".

It was little noted in New York City five years ago on its centennial, despite the day having been born and reborn here. I posted something about it on Huffington Post.

In 1908 on this day, 15,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in support of working women. Many of their goals were advanced by the largely successful 13-week shirtwaist workers' strike of 1909.

Inez Milholland was deeply involved in assisting strikers as a first-year law student at NYU.

The owners of one factory never settled their strike–the Triangle factory, where the tragic fire of  March 25, 1911 occurred. The fire did not result in punishment of the criminally negligent factory owners, but it provided the emotional inspiration for:

• The suffrage parade in New York City in 1912,
• The Washington parade in 1913.
• The picketing of the White House in 1917, which led directly to woman suffrage in 1920.

Inez Milholland had a part in all three of these events, which turned around public opinion on the issue of woman suffrage. She led on horseback the parades in 1912 and 1913, and her death in 1916 was the inspiration for the confrontation between the National Woman's Party and President Wilson that in turn instigated the White House picketing and the imprisonment of picketers.

Today, despite the 95-year-old victory of the suffragists and the fact that young women are now better educated than men, working women are still trailing men in pay.

New York Origins of Women's Day

Descriptions of a Women's Day go back to March 8, 1857, when needle workers in New York City reportedly demonstrated for higher wages, a reduction in the workday from 12 to 10 hours, and no uncompensated work. Their protest was reportedly dispersed by shots from an army unit and by the arrest of 70 workers.

Two key woman suffrage leaders of the second half of the 19th century–Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony–failed to obtain votes for women and died disappointed in 1902 and 1906. Their leadership torches were picked up by a new generation of brave women leaders who succeeded in their goal. One of them was Inez Milholland.

The year Susan B. died, the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union was founded. Needle workers in New York protested on March 8, 1908 under the auspices of Branch No. 3 of the New York City Social Democratic Women's Society. Women marched down Manhattan for better pay and a shorter workday–and in addition they called for woman suffrage and better protection against child labor.

In 1908 and 1909, the needle workers benefited from the support of wealthy women like Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and Anne Morgan, and also from a large contingent of volunteers from women's colleges like Bryn Mawr and Vassar. Inez Milholland was one of the most visible of these women in 1908, when she was a junior at Vassar College.

She signed up two-thirds of Vassar students in a suffrage organization. She was forbidden to hold a suffrage meeting on the Vassar campus, so she scheduled it across the road at Poughkeepsie's Calvary cemetery in June 1908. Vassar's President Monroe Taylor had threatened to expel anyone who attended, but faculty and alumnae showed up along with 40 students and he thought better of expulsion.

During the 13-week shirtwaist-worker strike of 1909, Inez Milholland was a law student at NYU, located next door to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on Washington Square East. She picketed with the workers and explained to them their rights.

Milholland became an icon of the suffragists in 1912 and 1913 when she rode horseback in costume at the head of the New York and Washington suffrage parades.

In 1913, when she surprised her friends and got married in secret, she was called "the fairest of the Amazons" by the NY Times.

In 1916 she campaigned against Woodrow Wilson for not supporting the Anthony Amendment to give women the right to vote, and she collapsed during the strenuous effort, dying (it was recorded) from "pernicious anemia", exhaustion and what we would call today counter-productive medical care while she was traveling (her prescriptions included arsenic and strychnine). Her death precipitated White House picketing and President Wilson's capitulation.

Woman Suffrage and Equality

The suffrage amendment was finally ratified in 1920, 80 years after it became a gleam in Stanton's eye and 50 years after the right to vote vote was recognized for all men. So now it's nearly 95 years after the first election in which all U.S. women had the right to vote. Has the right to vote spelled equality for women? In the educational area, increasingly so. In a word, young women are now better educated than young men. As I said five years ago in my Huffington Post article:

Women receive 58 percent of the bachelor degrees and 61 percent of the master's degrees in the United States. Of women 16 years and older, 37 percent work in management, professional and related occupations, more than men (for whom the figure is 31 percent). But women in the United States still earn just 77 cents for every $1 earned by men. Of the 259 members of the Financial Women's Association just surveyed in New York City, 96 percent say they get paid less than men for comparable work. In 2008, 86 women served in the 110th U.S. Congress, just 16 percent of the 535 seats. The proportion of women in state legislatures is slightly higher, 24 percent.

The U.N. supports and promotes International Women's Day, which is outstanding. But do its own actions match its words? When I wrote in 2011, it was promoting women at a slower rate than men:

In 2006 and 2007, the number of women appointed as directors (D-1 and D-2s), assistant-secretaries-general (ASG) and under-secretaries general (USG) was 25 percent. It was 38 percent in the professional categories. 

The worst news is how poorly women fare in developing countries dominated by non-Western culture. Women's choices are severely limited and in some countries women have few human rights. International Women's Day therefore is needed not just to celebrate the achievements of suffragists but to extend the rights of women where they are not respected–in the United States and globally. 

© 2016 JT Marlin. Follow me on twitter: @cityeconomist.

MILHOLLAND | John E. and the NAACP

Jean Milholland (L) and John E. Milholland (straw hat R),
in Holland in 1913 after Inez married Eugen Boissevain.

November 10, 2015–This post is inspired by the appointment of Cornell Brooks as President of the NAACP, the death on August 15 of former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, and the recent production of a play by Clare Coss on Mrs. Mary White Ovington and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is also inspired by a visit I made with Alice Tepper Marlin to the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore last Sunday.

There I picked up a well-documented biography of Ovington by Carolyn Wedin, entitled Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998).

At the time of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Booker T. Washington was the primary organizer of African Americans in the United States. He favored long-term projects like schools that allowed for gradualism in advocacy, a kind of Fabian advocacy of civil rights. For example, he was okay with the concept and goal of segregation, i.e., separate but equal communities, according to Wedin (p. 131).

W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociology professor at Atlanta University, was opposed to segregation and wanted faster movement toward civil rights for people of color. In 1903 he wrote a challenge to Washington in an essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" in his book Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement, an organization by and for black people, and would become the first employee of the NAACP.

My purpose here is to explore the role in this process of John E. Milholland, whose role is left out in some of the NAACP's own histories of its origins. John E. Milholland and Mary Ovington helped Du Bois create the NAACP (p. 95) as a successor to the Niagara Movement that included whites.

Milholland's status as an American was recent. He was born in upstate New York but his father, an Irish immigrant, was forced to return temporarily to Ireland after a fire. On their return, John E. was able to attend NYU thanks to the generosity of a Congressman who saw a young man of promise. John E. then became a reporter for, and subsequently editor of, the Ticonderoga paper. Following that, he came to New York City to write for an then edit the Tribune, which was a liberal Lincoln Republican newspaper that was headed for years by Horace Greeley, whose statues may be found near City Hall and in Greeley Square.

Milholland was a second-generation Scots-Irish Presbyterian who was in the first decade of the 20th century at the peak of his wealth. He was modestly prosperous when he worked at the Tribune and his  brother headed the printer's union. Between them they settled a strike and he may have been rewarded for that.

At any rate, Milholland soon after invested in a pneumatic tube company based on the expertise of B. C. Batcheller. He became President of the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Co. and became very wealthy based on Wall Street's ratcheting up in paper securities the value of his future prospects.

With his new wealth, Milholland was able to pursue his Presbyterian religion-inspired vision of a world in which wealth was more equally distributed and civil rights were widely respected. He worked first with Booker T. Washington but became impatient with Washington's gradualism. Following critiques of Washington by Du Bois in 1900-01, Milholland decided to shift his financial resources away from Washington and toward Du Bois.

There is a direct connection between Milholland's religion-fired activism on behalf of African-Americans and the rapid loss of his fortune. Milholland attacked for racism Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster-General–the same man with control over lucrative contracts that were the basis for with the Batcheller Company's prosperity. His gifts to, and statements on behalf of, the cause of civil rights had an immediately negative impact on his business. He and his family paid dearly for their support of civil rights and the NAACP.

The 1904 edition of Polk's directory shows the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Company as a going concern with Milholland as President and B. C. Batcheller on the board. In 1905, the company had offices in New York City and Philadelphia as well as in London, Paris and Berlin. By the Poor's directory of 1917, John E. Milholland was replaced as President and no longer on the Board.  Instead, his son-in-law Eugen Boissevain was on the board. 

Milholland's wealth acquired in the pneumatic tube business financed the expenses of Mary Ovington in working with the poor and disenfranchised blacks in New York City and states in the Deep South (Alabama and Georgia). Milholland's money was an important enabler for Ovington's work for the NAACP.

Milholland met Ovington in early January 1905 at a Sunday supper at Greenwich House in Manhattan. She conveyed to Milholland her interest in working on low-income housing and he offered to take her idea to Henry Phipps.  Phipps had just walked away with $2 billion (in 2015 dollars) from the creation of America’s largest corporation, Carnegie Steel, in 1901. Just as railways and railway-car manufacturers had been rolled up into giant companies in the prior two years, Carnegie Steel acquired J. P. Morgan's steel mills and thereby allowed the three largest shareholders in Carnegie Steel to cash out.

Two of those steel magnates are well known – Andrew Carnegie and his designated Chief Operating Officer Henry Clay Frick. The third one, Henry Phipps, was the less-known bookkeeper. Phipps had a social conscience because he had grown up in poverty in Pittsburgh. He was a strong supporter of  Teddy Roosevelt-era progressivism. From his new fortune Phipps took $1 million (equal to about $30 million today) and by 1906 began construction work on "improved tenements" to be located on the far east side of Manhattan at 31st Street. Several iterations of the Phipps Houses were eventually built – they would become the oldest and largest nonprofit affordable housing in New York City.

Ovington proposed that a settlement-house component be included in the first, Tuskegee Model Tenement. Although Henry Phipps was initially receptive to the idea, he backed away from it at the last minute – probably because in February 1908 he opted suddenly to side with Booker T. Washington's all-deliberate-speed approach to social change (Wedin, p. 93).

Unexpectedly without a patron for her work, Ovington went back to the man who had found Phipps for her, John E. Milholland. She became a regular visitor to Milholland at his office and his apartment at the Manhattan Hotel. She said she didn't get as much time with Booker Washington as Milholland did because she was "a woman of verity moderate means who, if she subscribed at all to his school, would not be able to get beyond the ten dollar bill" (Wedin, p. 67).

Ovington visited the Adirondacks for several weeks in July and September 1905. Her biographer believes she visited Milholland at that time and supports the idea that Milholland was having an affair over several months and that it was with her (Wedin, p. 67).

Besides the Phipps tenement, Milholland and Ovington worked on the Constitution League, which was a forerunner of the NAACP. The first offices of the NAACP were at the offices of the Constitution League, at 500 Fifth Avenue – at 42nd Street overlooking the New York Public Library – in Manhattan.

Milholland's activities in support of Du Bois were not unnoticed by Booker Washington. According to Du Bois' biographer, Washington threatened to use his contacts with the U.S. Post Office to terminate the Batcheller Company's large contracts for delivering mail by pneumatic tube (Wedin, p. 70), and his threat became a reality in 1916 at the time of Wilson's reelection.

In 1905-06, Ovington was the link between Du Bois' Niagara Movement and Milholland's Constitution League. Her work in this arena would pay off when she started working for Du Bois and then assembled lists for the "Call" to create the NAACP in 1909.

First, Ovington brought Oswald Garrison Villard into the Du Bois camp, with several articles in the New York Evening Post, which he owned, reporting first on Du Bois' Niagara Movement meetings  at Harper's Ferry in mid-summer of 1906 and then in August on Washington's Negro Business League in Atlanta with a subtly inserted Du Bois perspective (Wedin, pp. 74-76).

A month after the Negro Business League meeting in Atlanta, the worst race riots of the decade occurred in this city. The Du Bois followers saw this as a failure of Washington's League. Milholland promised to pay Ovington's expenses to report on the riots and poverty in Georgia and Alabama and  Du Bois supported Ovington in this project.

Ovington reported from the south until March 1907. Conditions, she said, were much worse in Atlanta than had appeared in the newspapers. No white man had gone to jail for killing a Negro. Whites freely purchased firearms whereas "colored fathers, in their homes, were forced by the militia to give up their means of defense" (Wedin, p. 80).

The year 1908 was a difficult one for Mary Ovington because as mentioned the commitment that she believed Henry Phipps had made to her was suddenly withdrawn. A crystallizing moment for her was an article by a white journalist, William English Walling, "Race War in the North," in the Independent of September 1908. Walling was the first person to throw down the gauntlet to all Americans, to fulfill the promise of Abraham Lincoln. As Ovington wrote at the time:

Here was the first person who had sent a challenge to white and colored to battle, as the abolitionists had battled, for the full rights of the Negro. Drums beat in my heart. (Wedin, p. 106).

She immediately sent a letter to Walling, but several months went by and he did not answer. After she heard him speak in New York City, she went up to him and proposed that they create a new organization. She followed up with a second letter, and this time Walling answered, suggesting they meet with Charles Edward Russell. In January 1909 she arrived at Walling's apartment. Russell did not show up, but sent Henry Moskowitz in his place.

At that meeting, the NAACP was created. They drafted a "Call" for a meeting, to be issued on Lincoln's 100th birthday. The only one of the original three who was able to make the "Call" an interracial one was Ovington, based on her many contacts during the period when she was traveling around with the support of Milholland. The signers of the Call – 53 people in Ovington's version, 60 in Villard's – did not all know one another, but they all knew Ovington (Wedin, p. 106).

An invited interracial organizing meeting of 300 people met in the Charity Organization building. An informer for Booker Washington reported that those present included: "Du Bois, Waldron, Walters, [Upton] Sinclair, Max, Barber, Wibecan, Dr. Moselle, Bulkeley, [John E.] Milholland, Ida Wells..." A public meeting at Cooper Union attracted 1,500 people. The resolutions "sounded much like those of Milholland's Constitution League and Du Bois' Niagara Movement". Ovington was distressed that the platform was "denounced by nearly every white man", while "a large number of colored people thought it unwise". A Committee of Forty was created to pursue the organization of the NAACP. (Wedin, pp. 110-111).

The Wikipedia entry on the NAACP once said that it was founded by black men and Jewish men, which based on Wedin's account would eliminated any recognition for the huge role of gentiles and women, including Milholland and Ovington. The historical record that Wikipedia keeps for each entry should show that I corrected the statement on May 18, 2008. Here is what I wrote on the Boissevain.us web site that I was then contributing to.

5/18/08 John E. Milholland Added to NAACP Entry in Wikipedia as First Treasurer. Until today, the Wikipedia entry for the NAACP omitted Milholland from its description of the founders. The founding was scheduled for February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, and this is considered the founding date of the NAACP although it actually took place in May. The entry reads as of today: "On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee. Du Bois played a key role in organizing the event and presided over the proceedings. Also in attendance was African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, co-founder of the NAACP. At a second conference, on May 30, 1910, members formally called the organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and elected the first officers (as reported by Mary White Ovington): • National President, Moorfield Storey, Boston • Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling • Treasurer, John E. Milholland (Lincoln Republican and Presbyterian from NYC and Lewis, NY) • Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard • Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer • Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois."

As mentioned, the National Negro Committee was first located in John E. Milholland's Constitution League office at 500 Fifth Avenue. After Villard was persuaded to come aboard, the office was moved to space that he provided. The NAACP name was not established at the second annual meeting, on May 12, 1910. It expanded the Committee of Forty to 100, with a requirement that each of them give or raise $100. The Executive Committee was set at 30 members. The first Executive Committee created officers of the NAACP – Walling was Chairman, Milholland was Treasurer and Villard was Disbursing Treasurer.

On June 28, 1910 six members attended an Executive Committee meeting. Milholland moved and Ovington seconded a motion to hire W. E. B. Dubois as director of the Department of Publicity and research of the NAACP. Later in life, Dubois remembers Ovington, Walling and Villard as the founders of the NAACP. But if Ovington was the engine that drove the creation of the NAACP, the fuel to run it was provided by Milholland. The NAACP spelled the end of the Niagara Movement, because Du Bois saw quickly that an organization with establishment sponsors could generate more money to pay for staff, starting with himself. By the third and fourth meetings of the NAACP in Boston and Chicago in 1912, the NAACP was well established (Wedin, pp. 120-135).

Sources

Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998).

Related Posts

Inez Milholland—Herald Uniform 1913 . Her Engagement to Marconi . Short Biopic on Her

INEZ | Washington March, 2013 – The Deltas

March 3, 1913–Suffragist Parade. It was a Monday, the day
before President Wilson's first inauguration. Photo: Library of Congress.

I am back home in New York City from the centennial of the famed suffrage march in 1913, on the eve of the President Wilson's swearing-in.

It was on Monday, March 3, 1913.

The 1913 and 2013 parades were very different...

In 1913, It Became a Riot. Back then, the parade of women was huge for the time. The NY Times said 5,000 marchers; the National Park Service reported 8,000. It was the first major public demonstration in Washington. The 500,000 onlookers, mostly men, jeered the women as they went by. The parade devolved into a riot.

New Yorker Inez Milholland was on horseback at the front, and she pushed the edge of the crowd back with her horse. But behind her, push came to shove and the DC police couldn't keep order - some believe they didn't try. Secretary of War Stimson ordered cavalry in from Fort Myer to calm things down, but by the time the military arrived hundreds of women were injured. The marchers were protected by the First Amendment, but not by the police. The police superintendent was later cross-examined by Congress and was relieved of his job.

On March 2, 2013, a National Park Service Ranger tells
how the National Woman's Party met in 2017 with Pres.
Wilson to ask for support of Votes for Women, in the
name of Inez Milholland Boissevain, who died in Nov.
1916. Wilson ridiculed the women. Photo by JT Marlin. 

Back Story: Black Sorority Excluded. During the weeks before the parade, the participation of  black women in general was a thorny issue for Alice Paul. Later in life, she described this issue as her main preoccupation at the time.

To be specific, a new breakaway sorority at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta, demanded that it have a place in the parade. The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority's leadership at Howard University had decided to break away from the socially ambitious club to form a new sorority that would be more socially activist.

These 22 Delta women wanted to march in the NAWSA parade. Alice Paul feared that participation by black women in still-segregated Washington would end the participation in the parade of the southern chapters of NAWSA and destroy NAWSA's unity.

Alice Paul was in charge of the "Congressional Committee" of NAWSA in 1912 after working for the British suffragettes. She started recruiting new people and raising money, much of it in New York City where NAWSA was then based. She tried to hold together the fragile coalition for a Federal Amendment for Votes for Women.

Inez Milholland disagreed on excluding the black sorority. She was the daughter of the first Treasurer of the NAACP, John E. Milholland, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian who clung to the Lincoln Republican ethos of supporting equality among the races. She was adamant that the Deltas should be given their place, and allowed to march, in the parade lineup. She threatened to withdraw her commitment to lead the Washington parade on horseback. She had led the New York suffrage parade on horseback to great applause in New York City – it was a media attraction. She was also well connected with NAWSA supporters like Alva Belmont in New York City.

Alice Paul grudgingly agreed to allow the Howard University Deltas to join the parade. But she also had a plan, which appears not to have been shared with Inez Milholland, to minimize the danger to the parade by putting all the black women at the end of the parade, after the Men's League for Woman Suffrage.

It may be hard for some to appreciate how low the status of black women was in the Washington 100 years ago – or how threatened some white people were by signs of electoral activism. The outcome of the Civil War was to enfranchise black men. But the federal law was undermined by Jim Crow laws passed in southern states designed to suppress the black vote as well as the votes of some less-educated white men. For advocates of Votes for Women, seeing black women marching in a parade would remind southerners that adding women voters would double the number of potential black voters.

Contemporary accounts say that Alice Paul and the Congressional Committee leadership were  worried that a visible black presence in the parade would set back progress toward a federal amendment. They may have foreseen that including black women in the parade would add to the potential for the violent reaction that actually occurred. Suffragist Mary Church Terrell reported that the Delta marchers were required to assemble in a segregated area. It was her opinion that:

If [Paul] and other white suffragist leaders could get the Anthony Amendment through without enfranchising African American women, they would do so.

Linda Lumsden's biography of Inez Milholland makes clear that however much Inez may have gone along with excluding blacks in other social contexts, she was firm about the participation of the Deltas.  Milholland was, like her father, a member of the NAACP. Citing Mary Church Terrell again, Lumsden says that Milholland insisted that the Howard contingent be allowed to march in the college section. Emmett Scott, secretary-treasurer of Howard University, said that Milholland

was unwilling to participate in a parade symbolizing a movement which was not big enough or broad enough to live up to the principles for which it was contending. (Lumsden, Inez, p. 91.)

On the day of the parade, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a former slave who had become a leading suffragist, defied the ruling of the Congressional Committee and marched with her Chicago NAWSA delegation. Others followed suit. In the end, 22 women marched in the Delta contingent and an unknown number of black NAWSA delegates marched with their geographical groups. But the only black organization to march as a group in the parade was the Howard delegation of Deltas! If 250 black women altogether were in the march – probably too high an estimate – and we use the lower NY Times estimate of the number of marchers, it means black marchers were at most 5 percent of the total.

The Deltas listen to their leaders talk about the Deltas' mission,
 "public service" and "social activism." Photo by JT Marlin.

The 2013 March Reversed the Racial Balance. The March 3, 2013 march was a totally different affair. This time, the newly born, tiny Deltas were now the main organizer of the event. They have grown into an army of 300,000 black women world-wide.

For the 100th anniversary march, Delta Sigma Theta reported 20,000 marchers signed up to be in Washington for the parade. The National Park Service posted a crowd estimate of 20,000-25,000.

My estimate is that fewer than 1,000 of the marchers were white men and women. The racial percentages were therefore exactly reversed. In 1913, at most 5 percent of the marchers were black. In 2013, at most 5 percent were white.

Looking Forward, Not Back. Another major difference in 2013 is in the nature of the participation of the Deltas and the other women's groups.

• The traditional women's groups, mostly white women, were commemorating the actions of the suffragists to obtain the vote. They dressed up in the costumes of 1913 with purple, gold and white sashes and dresses. Although the picketing of the White House did not start until January 1917, the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial group had an effective tableau in place on March 2, 2013 showing the Silent Sentinels in front of the White House. When the demonstrators were arrested by the DC Police, Inez Milholland's sister Vida was one of those arrested, on July 4, 1917. They were taken away to the Occaquam workhouse in Lorton, Va., as described by a National Park Service Ranger who gave the history of woman suffrage in the United States while engaging the audience in some effective role playing (see second photo above).
• For the Deltas, the parade was less about history and pageantry and more about the next phase of the women's movement. Those Deltas marched with a purpose, every one of them dressed in their red and white colors, and the speeches in front of the Capitol (see bottom photo) were about moving on to new challenges, using their vote to attack continuing abuse of women in the home or in the workplace.

Meaning of the 2013 Parade. The 2013 Centennial parade was scheduled to start at 9:30 am on Sunday but by the time the Deltas who had assembled at the foot of the Capitol were emptied out and other groups started to march it was 10:45 am. The women's groups were there, some in suffragist costume. The traditional women's groups were relatively few in number, several dozen each at most from the League of Women Voters (successor to NAWSA), the National Woman's Party/Sewall-Belmont House and Museum (successor to the breakaway Congressional Committee of NAWSA), the National Organization of Women, the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Committee and ERA of New Jersey.

There was no rioting – far from it! It was an eerily quiet Sunday morning. The Deltas are all business. They didn't bring any marching bands, which explains why the crowds were thin. Since Washington, DC workers now mostly live in suburban Maryland and Virginia, there were few onlookers, maybe 5,000 at most. Protest marches in Washington are now a regular occurrence. The Deltas were in D.C. in January and will be back in a couple of months.

Inez Milholland's insistence that the Deltas be allowed to march took on more significance for me as I watched an hour-long parade of the sorority's many chapters go by. Inez knew which way the winds were blowing. For the Deltas in 2013:

• The purpose of most of the marchers, and the meaning of the event, was not so much a memorial to the achievements of yesterday.
• Rather, it was a reaffirmation of what the original marchers believed in. Progress has been achieved – that is obvious – since the first parade. But the Deltas marched not so much out of reverence for the past as out of determination to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

[I have written a longer post putting the two marches in a more complete historical context. I have long been fascinated by the story because Inez Milholland married my mother's uncle, Eugen Boissevain.]

INEZ | Her Herald Uniform 1913 (Update Aug. 5, 2016)

1. Alice Paul's idea of Inez Milholland's
1913 costume as the Herald. The trumpet
was a non-starter; hard to handle that and
the horse at the same time.

The Woman Suffrage "Procession" was scheduled on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's first inauguration, on March 2, 1913.

Alice Paul, on behalf of the newly formed Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), asked Inez to lead the parade.

The Congressional Committee the following month, emboldened by the success of the parade, became the Congressional Union. In 1916 this entity, with significant new funding, became the National Woman's Party.

Alice Paul asked Inez to be a Herald and wear a uniform emblazoned with the three colors of the suffrage movement – gold, white and purple (in heraldic lingo – or, argent and purpure).

These are the colors that Inez is shown wearing on the flyers about the parade.

2. Inez Milholland on "Gray Dawn" (loaned by
Mr. A. D. Addison of Washington) at the
start of the parade. Photo: Library of Congress.

But Inez decided that an all-white–or, in The New York Times account, a pale blue–cloak looked better. Alice Paul was unhappy about it, but what could she do?

The white uniform was a success. The day after the parade, the N Y Times story devoted its early paragraphs to Inez's striking appearance at the head of the parade.

Later in the story, we are told that the event was marred by violence – the D.C. police were unable or unwilling to keep order, and cavalry from Fort Myer, Va. had to be brought in to keep the peace.

The Washington Post called Inez "the most beautiful suffragette" (this source also has a great collection of postcard photos of the parade).

What do you think? Photos of the actual event show Inez like a clothed Lady Godiva – white gown on a white horse.

The iconic poster of Inez, 1923 for the
 "Forward into Light" pageant at
Meadowmount, Lewis, N.Y.

One of those photos served as the image used to create the iconic posthumous portrait of Inez on a horse. For decades until 2011 it hung over the mantelpiece in the Sewall-Belmont House, now renamed the Belmont-Paul National Monument,  in Washington. (The mantelpiece was removed because of chimney leaks.)

The iconic painting was in bad condition and was carefully restored with the assistance of a Committee headed by Al Boissevain and Allegra Milholland.

The poster made from the painting inspired the National Woman's Party picketers and hunger strikers.

When Inez was married in July 1913, the New York Times expressed regret that a Hollander with a French name (Boissevain) had nabbed Milholland, the daughter of a Scotch Irish man (the family name Milholland is an Anglo-Irish transliteration of a Gaelic word meaning Follower of St. Chulann).

The Times described Inez as "the Fairest of the Amazons".

Related Posts: Suffrage Play June 11, 2017 in Vienna, Va.
Inez Milholland's Faceted Star Crown-Helmet, 1911