Sue White was running on pure adrenaline. Her nerves jangled and her mind was racing. If only her friends Betty Gram and Anita Pollitzer would arrive in Nashville already! Sue couldn’t wait to see her fellow Woman’s Party members. They always made the tough work feel like fun.
They each had a lot of ground to cover, winning over the men who pulled the strings around Nashville. Sue’s knowledge of her home state would be very useful.
Before Sue left her hotel room, she pushed the sharp point of a pin through her blouse and fastened it on. The small silver rectangle was the most special thing she owned. She’d earned it after she was arrested the year before. Alice Paul had given all the women a pin after they got arrested, in thanks for taking such big risks for the Cause.
As Sue gazed out her hotel window onto the busy Nashville streets, she remembered that exciting day in Washington, D.C. It had been February 1919. The Senate was finally going to vote on the federal suffrage amendment. Of course, no one expected it to pass. It was one measly vote short. President Wilson had been in Paris negotiating the peace treaty at the time. He didn’t exactly seem to mind letting the woman’s suffrage amendment die.
That’s where Alice Paul had stepped in. She and the Woman’s Party had already been protesting outside the White House, lighting small bonfires and burning the president’s words about democracy. On the eve of the Senate vote, she and her troops really turned up the heat.
At dusk, a silent procession of seventy-five women, including Sue, had marched toward the White House. Leading the parade was Woman’s Party member Louisine Havemeyer, holding the American flag. Women propped up banners saying things like, “The President is responsible for the betrayal of American Womanhood.” Others followed, carrying kerosene-soaked wooden logs and kindling in their arms.
Almost two thousand people and a hundred policemen had gathered in front of the White House gates to watch. They weren’t quite sure what to expect from these rebellious women.
Louisine, who was a wealthy New York widow, planted her flag. Her heart was beating wildly, she would later tell the Woman’s Party members, but once she stepped out with the flag, she “instantly felt as placid and calm as if I were going out to play croquet on a summer afternoon.”
At the White House gates, her booming voice had risen above the crowd: “We women of America are assembled here today to voice our deep indignation that, while such efforts are being made to establish democracy in Europe, American women are still deprived of a voice in their government here at home.”
While Louisine spoke, the logs were lit. The flames rose high. Sue knew this was her moment. She stepped up to the fire and held up over her head a paper figure of President Wilson drawn in black ink. It depicted him delivering one of those empty “freedom” speeches of his. Sue nodded to Louisine. Then she dropped the Wilson image into the flames.
There was a flash. Chaos broke loose. Police rushed toward the women, spraying them with fire extinguishers and arresting as many protesters as they could. They grabbed Sue and shoved her straight into a patrol wagon. She found herself next to Louisine and thirty-seven other Woman’s Party members. Before they knew it, they were driven straight to the station house.
Five days in jail, the policemen thundered, for each of them. The Occoquan Workhouse was a decrepit, nasty-smelling, vermin-infested jail. The women entered dark, damp, bitter cold cells. Rats and cockroaches scurried on every surface. Still, the conditions were better, and the sentences much shorter, than the six- and seven-month ordeals, often in solitary confinement, that Alice Paul had suffered through.
When Sue and the others were released after their five-day sentence, they were welcomed home by their Woman’s Party comrades. Alice Paul held a small ceremony to give them their prison pins. The pin was a miniature of a jail door gridded by little silver bars, draped with a chain of tiny links, secured by a heart-shaped lock. Every woman who was “jailed for freedom” was decorated with one. No piece of jewelry could ever mean more to Sue White.
When Sue’s Tennessee suffrage colleagues had heard she’d been arrested, they were furious. She was going to give suffragists a bad name, they cried. Protesting the president was unpatriotic, even treasonous!
Sue had rolled her eyes. She didn’t care what those goody-two-shoes NAWSA women thought. She and her Woman’s Party comrades understood the power of fighting against injustice. She believed they were the true daughters of Susan B. Anthony.
Suddenly, Sue snapped out of her memory haze. She switched off the lights in her Nashville hotel room before dashing down to the lobby to meet her next batch of legislators. Sure, she knew it was a little bold to wear her prison pin in Tennessee. But she would wear it nonetheless: brazenly, proudly, every day.
At just twenty-five years old, Anita Pollitzer was already an experienced veteran of the radical Woman’s Party.
Anita was an artist who’d traded her brushes for picket poles. Unlike many young women who joined the movement, her family was actually very proud of her work. She was the adored daughter of a wealthy Charleston, South Carolina, cotton merchant family, pillars of the city’s thriving Jewish community.
Anita grew up assuming that being a suffragist was only natural for a young woman. Supporting women’s rights was just so obvious, she felt. She was smart, fun, creative, and courageous, just like all the girls she knew. Why should boys get all the spotlight? From a young age, she did everything she could to spread the word on woman’s suffrage, from drawing recruitment posters, to selling lemonade to raise money, to debating Antis in the street.
When the ratification campaign began, Alice Paul often sent Anita to Washington, D.C. It was hard for congressmen and senators to say no to her. She was charming and charismatic, and she really did her homework before approaching them. She sweetly asked questions. She listened carefully.
But she learned pretty quickly not to trust any politician’s promise. They would agree to things to your face, then break their promises once you turned your back. The petite Anita might appear innocent, but gullibility was not one of her traits.
Anita loved the work. It was so exciting! Like being a soldier and a spy rolled into one. Her job was to find things out and shake things up. She could hardly wait to see her friends Sue White and Betty Gram, now that they’d all be working on the big amendment push in Tennessee. They had an easy understanding, a sisterly bond, an unspoken trust. Best of all, they could make each other laugh—something that could come in handy if things got stressful.
As part of this latest push, Anita’s first stop on the Tennessee trail was Chattanooga to meet Newell Sanders, a former U.S. senator and loyal suffragist. He sat Anita down at his kitchen table and spent the afternoon giving her a crash course in Tennessee Republican politics.
He told her everything he knew: which men called the shots, which men were rivals, which ones had a vulnerable spot. Newell also pointed out which men might try to dodge her and which ones might cause trouble. She listened attentively, fixing her gray eyes upon him, scribbling notes down in a notebook on her lap. This was all really helpful information for her next stops. She shook Newell’s hand and thanked him with a grin.
Anita’s manhunt continued through the Appalachian foothills of East Tennessee. When she stepped off the train in Athens, the McMinn County seat, she went after the area’s pivotal players, one by one.
There was Senator Herschel Candler, who was anti-suffrage and powerful, a tough combination. Herschel had already made his stance crystal clear: “I unalterably oppose suffrage and shall vote against the bill,” he’d announced with his trademark stubbornness. But Anita reached out anyway. All she got back from him was: Cannot vote for amendment. Period. Anita groaned and crossed his name off her list. Well, forget that Herschel Candler.
Next, she hired a car to see Emerson Luther, the Republican house floor leader, and came away with his pledge. The delegate C. Fulton Boyer was next on her list, but he was known as a cranky old Anti—probably not even worth her time. She decided to skip him.
That left the last man on her list: Harry T. Burn.
At twenty-four years old, representative Harry Burn was the youngest member of the legislature. He was, according to everyone, likable, sweet, and hardworking. He was a hometown boy making good, living on his family’s land, supporting his widowed mother and his siblings. Like many other representatives, he had a day job outside of politics. In fact, he worked two jobs, one as a Southern Railway agent, the other at a bank, while studying law at night. That hardworking Harry Burn had the potential to go far, his peers all agreed.
Harry had voted for limited suffrage the year before. But he was keeping his cards close to his chest when it came to ratification. The Suffs thought he was being a little shady. Why not just say yes or no?
Anita quickly realized that speaking face to face with Harry Burn wasn’t going to be easy. She couldn’t afford a taxi to get to Harry’s small hometown. So she did the next best thing: she sweetly asked a Republican county chairman if he’d be so kind as to telephone Harry for her. No problem, the chairman agreed. Anita waited patiently as he dialed Harry’s number.
Lady here wants to know if you’ll be voting to ratify, Harry, the chairman said into the phone’s mouthpiece. Anita strained to hear Harry’s response through the muffled sounds. She couldn’t make it out.
The conversation was brief. The chairman hung the phone back on its cradle.
Harry will be all right, the chairman assured her.
Anita ticked his name off on her list. And with that, Harry T. Burn was marked as pledged to ratify.