11

“Prepare to Die, Workingman”

Marie Equi, MD, a rebellious soul—generous, kind, brave but so radical in her thinking that she was almost an outcast in Portland.

Margaret Sanger, birth control advocate

Across the country, 1916 was a troubling, contentious year fraught with foreboding and disruption. Americans felt uncertain and unsteady as the hostilities in Europe worsened and threatened the nation’s tenuous neutrality. Strikes flared east to west with picketing shoe workers in Philadelphia, steel workers in Detroit, housemaids in Denver, and loggers in Washington. It was a presidential election year with war and peace, woman suffrage, and labor rights dominating the political campaigns. For Marie Equi, events tumbled forth in a jumble of complexity that thrust her into the public realm like never before.

In early June 1916, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, England’s foremost militant suffragette, stirred Portlanders with a glimpse of war on her country’s home front. For years the American press had vilified the aggressive tactics of English suffragettes—the smashed windows, harassment of government officials, and hunger strikes in prison—leaving many Portlanders expecting to be appalled by Pankhurst. Instead, the petite and cultured fifty-seven-year-old woman surprised them with her gentle manner and pleasant voice. She spoke with persuasion not stridency, and she addressed Portlanders’ beliefs about patriotism and their fears of what lay ahead.1

Pankhurst recounted the terror and destruction wrought on a defenseless Edinburgh, carpet-bombed by German zeppelins two months earlier. She described Londoners’ edgy anticipation of more attacks, and she recounted the domestic unrest that flared during Easter Week that year when Irish republicans staged an uprising to wrest independence from England. In the midst of both panic and resolve, Pankhurst told Portlanders, she had shelved woman suffrage—her cause of twenty-five years—and joined the British war effort. Instead of clamoring for the vote, women marched fifty thousand strong in London and demanded the right to work in munitions factories, military hospitals, and every sort of civic endeavor. The women refused to accept that war service should be limited to men alone.2

Pankhurst lectured on behalf of the British government, and she zeroed in on her most important message. “Patriotism isn’t enough,” she declared. “Preparedness is necessary.” Britain wanted the United States to join the Allies, but it judged “preparedness” a more palatable, initial step for Americans wary of the hostilities. The audience cheered Pankhurst and donated $1,000 to her fund for humanitarian relief in the Allied countries. For pacifists and suffragists like Equi, Pankhurst’s story held great irony—a militant who had dropped her suffrage demands to support the war just as Equi retreated from suffrage to protest the war that the United States stepped closer to entering.³

Much of America accepted the message of preparedness as necessary self-defense even if they objected to a foreign military adventure. For a full two-and-a-half years, Americans resisted the pull of war and took comfort in their distance from the changing, dangerous world beyond the country’s shores. At the same time, war boosters enthralled young men with visions of the glory that awaited them in the fields of France, far from their grinding factory jobs or farm work. Progressives feared that reform efforts at home would be scuttled by a government preoccupied with war and by a population consumed with nationalism. In this jumble of sentiments, a significant minority, including Equi, suspected “readiness” was a capitalist ploy that would inevitably lead to war with a grab for power and profits.

President Wilson had already distressed pacifists with a turnabout on military policy. Earlier he had kept the hostilities at a distance with his own fears of losing momentum for his reform agenda, but, as his reelection campaign neared, he abandoned the hands-off policy and adopted “reasonable preparedness.” Progressives felt they had little choice but to “throw a monkey wrench into the machinery” and resist Wilson’s initiatives. In 1915, several of the nation’s foremost advocates of reform—including Jane Addams, the Chicago settlement organizer; Florence Kelley, the founder of the National Consumers League; and Rabbi Stephen Wise, an early Progressive—formed the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) to lobby Congress, lecture, and organize local chapters. Members in Oakland, Seattle, and other cities staged peace demonstrations, and Equi joined the union as did her friends Charlotte Anita Whitney in California and Dr. James Warbasse of New York. In Portland, the AUAM claimed less of a presence but leaders in the East urged Equi to protest the government’s plans.⁴

On June 3, 1916, Portland observed National Preparedness Day with the largest parade in the city’s history. Fifteen thousand people marched along forty blocks downtown with their shoulders squared, heads held high, and spirits soaring. Hundreds carried banners with a one-word message—Prepare—while fifteen brass bands played martial airs and a dozen divisions marched in formation, grouped by profession and interest. A column of Civil War veterans hoisted flags behind a drum corps. A contingent of four hundred doctors and medical students, three hundred young men of the Athletic League, and five hundred suffragists—all stepped out for patriotism and readiness. It was a time of unity with the thrill of shared purpose and resolve.5

Equi was of a different mind, however. Earlier that day, she had motored around the city with an opposite message, daring for its difference. Then she steered her way into the parade route and approached the jubilant, patriotic crowd. She had mounted an American flag at the front of her automobile and strapped on the side a white banner that warned, “Prepare to Die, Workingman—J. P. Morgan & Co. Want Preparedness for Profit—Thou Shalt Not Kill.” With brazen courage, she rolled into the march behind the Knights of Columbus and the local bar association, two contingents known for their preparedness fervor. Quick and fierce, the marchers attacked. According to Equi, the attorneys struck first, yanking the banner from her and striking her with it. “I was scratched and bruised, and my hand bled,” she said. “They tore the banner to shreds and stomped on it.” At one point, a mob of fifty angry men surrounded and taunted her, yelling, “That’s what we do to your banner, now here’s ours.” The men thrust the American flag into her hands, daring her to rip it. Equi later admitted to tearing two strips from it, saying, “Your flag is no protection to me.” She put up a fight until the police intervened and arrested her and two of the men. She vowed to file charges of disorderly conduct; the men accused her of desecrating the flag.⁶

Equi’s protest inflamed many Portlanders, but she was committed to making a case for pacifism. On another occasion, she circumvented the police routine of pulling Wobblies from their soapboxes as soon as they started to speak. She borrowed a lineman’s spurs and climbed high on a downtown telephone pole, out of reach of the officers below. From her perch she unleashed a banner—“Down with the Imperialist War”—and addressed the crowd that gathered. The police tried to enlist the fire department to get her down, but firemen were in no rush to harass the Doc who cared for their families. Only when she was ready did she climb down.⁷

With both protests, Equi upset a slew of expectations and norms for womanhood. The attorneys, marchers, and police officers reviled Equi’s antiwar messages, but on another level her acts challenged the men’s prowess and their traditional role of defending the nation. They had wrestled with a woman on the street, and they were taunted by a woman climbing beyond their reach. Women objected as well. Many had vowed to do their part by ensuring their homes promoted American values and patriotism. Others professed a duty to produce valiant sons ready to take up arms. From their prospective, Equi actively undermined the virtues of patriotic motherhood. If her message had been less confrontational and her behavior more ladylike, men and women might have accepted, or at least tolerated, her demonstration of prewar pacifism. But she eschewed the norms to assert what patriotism meant to her.8

Equi was not alone with her dissent in Portland. At a public forum held the day after the big parade, a Reed College professor challenged Portlanders to reject noisy, emotional appeals and to seek reason instead. Rabbi Jonah B. Wise of Temple Beth Israel criticized plans for militarism as panic responses to conditions in Europe far different from those in America. C. E. S. Wood warned that repeated campaigns for preparedness fostered a militaristic spirit that posed a far greater danger than any foreign invasion. In the nation’s capital, Oregon’s US Senator Harry Lane, a progressive Democrat, complained that preparedness instigated an irrational “state of fear” that distracted Americans from dealing with the many pressing issues before the nation. Across the country, the Women’s Peace Party and the militant wing of the Socialist Party opposed the military planning as well. Although Equi firmly supported the IWW, she disagreed with the radical group’s hands-off approach to the preparedness debate. Wobbly leaders believed a dispute among capitalist nations held little importance to the class war they had undertaken. But stronger forces prevailed against the dissenters. Pressure groups like the high-powered National Security League, comprised of the nation’s most powerful capitalists, and the American Public League, 250,000-members strong, rallied vigilant citizens to mobilize in their communities.⁹

Preparedness became a national watchword, and its spirit unified most Americans in the camaraderie of shared purpose. Throughout the summer of 1916, not only Portland but nearly every city and town outdid itself with a parade. In Chicago one million people rallied, waving flags and singing patriotic songs in an eleven-hour procession. New York City’s outpouring drew two hundred bands and fifty drum corps. President Wilson led a march in the nation’s capital, and, in Seattle, women garbed in white led a contingent of twenty thousand.¹⁰

Violence marred San Francisco’s parade, and its impact shadowed labor and civil rights efforts for decades. On July 22, 1916, fifty-one thousand marchers assembled at the foot of Market Street around the Ferry Building. Thirty minutes into the parade, a bomb exploded with a force so great that it tore off legs and arms of bystanders, killing ten and injuring forty. No one knew who had placed the bomb, but the police arrested Tom Mooney, a radical Socialist and union leader, as well as Warren K. Billings, among others, who they suspected of promoting violence for political change. The proceedings against Mooney and Billings were scandalous from the start with obstructions to Mooney obtaining legal counsel for days. Evidence was specious; the witnesses, unreliable. Murder charges were drawn up by a jury selected by the district attorney, and a conviction followed. Only an international outcry kept Mooney from execution, and he and Billings were left to languish at San Quentin State Prison with life sentences. In the years ahead, Equi’s own plight would often be likened to that of Mooney and Billings.11

Two weeks passed between the assault Equi suffered from Portland’s marchers and her next confrontation with authorities. In the interim, she cared for patients at a new location, the Lafayette Building at Sixth and Washington Streets, at the intersection that served as the prime rallying spot for free speech fights. Dr. Alys Griff, Equi’s good friend from medical school, kept her office down the hallway. Equi and Speckart passed their tenth anniversary together, in the company of Mary Jr., now a year old. Their bond had weakened over time, and the future threatened more tumult than the past.¹²

Nine days after Portland’s Preparedness Parade, in the middle of June 1916, the Oregonian announced the imminent arrival of Margaret Sanger, the most persuasive advocate of birth control in the nation. A year earlier, local authorities had arrested Emma Goldman for daring to lecture on birth control, but during the interim Sanger had become a new sensation on the lecture circuit with her pleasing demeanor.¹³

After Goldman’s 1915 visit, veteran Socialists and Wobblies organized the Portland Birth Control League, and it became the largest such group on the West Coast. Equi was an active member of the league, and she gave it greater visibility and credibility among radicals and poor and working-class women. The group drew sizeable crowds without incident to its monthly meetings held in the Central Library, and it staged rallies and lobbied to overturn laws that prohibited dissemination of contraception information and devices. In 1915, the league circulated a petition that reflected the sophistication of grassroots groups even before Sanger undertook her national tour. The document asserted a woman’s right to determine the time and pacing for bearing children, that motherhood is “dignified and noble” only when it is planned and wanted, that “unwelcome or unfit children” should not be brought into the world, and that scientific knowledge cannot be judged obscene. As reasonable as these tenets seemed to advocates, they challenged the prohibitions of local government, courts, and churches. In early 1916, league members anticipated a surge of interest with Sanger’s visit, and they helped organize her stop in the Rose City.14

Margaret Sanger launched her first national speaking tour on an emotional rebound following personal tragedy and a political triumph. Only six years earlier, in 1910, Sanger, her husband, and three children left their suburban New York home for a new life in bohemian Manhattan. While her husband worked as an architect, Sanger immersed herself in the turbulence of the city, first as a slum-visiting nurse and then as a Socialist Party organizer. The deplorable East Side slums exposed her to the harsh inequalities in America, and her party job left her feeling ineffective. What enlivened her and changed her life course was the passion and militancy of radicalism. She was especially drawn to the direct action tactics of the Wobblies, and she began writing articles in the radical press about women’s concerns, including “What Every Girl Should Know.” Her social and political circle widened to include Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Emma Goldman, and William “Big Bill” Haywood, the IWW cofounder, and she joined several of the strikes they led.¹⁵

During a trip to Europe, Sanger became so enthralled with the widespread use of contraception in France that she embraced the cause as her life work. She endorsed the position of the American Left that withholding birth control information from the working classes left them struggling with overly large families and rendered them less able to fight exploitation. Like Emma Goldman, Sanger came to believe that birth control was especially important as a means to free women and empower them for positive sexual expression. After returning to the United States, she launched The Woman Rebel, a journal that asserted the rights of women to control pregnancy and express their sexuality. She challenged the federal prohibitions on disseminating birth control information, and the government obliged her with an indictment in August 1914 that threatened a forty-five-year prison sentence. At first she fled to England but then returned a year later even more passionate about the cause and ready to fight the indictment.¹⁶

Events rushed upon Sanger. As her trial date neared, her daughter, Peggy, became ill with pneumonia and then died in her arms. Early in 1916, she suffered an emotional breakdown from the loss and her guilt for being away so long. Her doctor thought she was unable to stand trial, but she insisted. In the meantime, her allies publicized her case as persecution for exercising her free speech rights. They swayed public opinion to the extent that the authorities relented. In February 1916, all charges against Sanger were dropped. She was ebullient with the public recognition, and she undertook a vigorous schedule of lectures, filling assembly halls and plazas across the country.17

With the encouragement of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others, Sanger added the Pacific Northwest to her cross-country tour. She intended to flaunt local obscenity laws, claim her free-speech rights, and exploit any controversy to publicize the cause. She continued to distribute The Woman Rebel as well as copies of Family Limitation, a small, purse-sized booklet with details on practical, affordable methods for preventing pregnancy. In it she dispelled myths about sex and birth control, and she dared to extol the pleasures of intercourse. Everywhere Sanger stopped, women sought her advice before and after her talks, even appearing at her hotel room. Women confided their exhaustion and desperation over the prospect of repeat pregnancies, their struggles to hold families together, and their fears for their children. Sanger was moved by their fevered pleas, but their needs left her exhausted. In San Francisco, she collapsed and spent three days in bed before continuing to Portland.¹⁸

“My welcome in Portland was delightful,” Sanger later wrote. On June 18 she was escorted to the grand, seven-storied Portland Hotel and then relaxed on the veranda, sipping loganberry juice over ice while talking with reporters. She appealed to Oregon’s enfranchised women to repeal the puritanical laws that censored birth control information. “We wouldn’t be so silly, puritanical, and narrow if we had a little more common sense,” she said. Attorney C. E. S. Wood charmed Sanger with his personal welcome and sent flowers to her room. Equi also greeted Sanger on this, their first meeting. She impressed Sanger as one of the West’s “robust, vital women.”19

Portlanders found Sanger a compelling, attractive woman, trim and small with a kind face, a warm smile, and captivating green eyes. She appeared determined about her cause but she was more approachable than Emma Goldman. Equi could easily have believed that she had found a kindred spirit in Sanger, who she called “a little bunch of hellfire.” They shared similar New England upbringings in immigrant, working-class, Catholic households. Sanger was also a middle child in a large family, and she had witnessed the debilitating effect of her mother’s frequent pregnancies. She had hoped to be a doctor, but she dropped out of school to care for her ailing mother. Later she completed studies for nursing, and, like Equi, used her medical training to position herself for greater impact in political causes. Both Equi and Sanger were influenced by the radicalism of Emma Goldman and the labor organizing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and they suffered the consequences of being strong, outspoken women who bucked the status quo. But like Goldman and Flynn, Sanger sought a national, even international, standing while Equi valued being a doctor in the Pacific Northwest.²⁰

On the evening of June 19, at the Heilig Theater, Sanger addressed a full house. She knew from experience that a hush would settle upon the audience when she described the occasions when birth control was needed—the presence of transmissible disease, threats to the mother’s health, parents who were adolescents or who already had “subnormal” children, and when family resources were too limited for another child. She advised young couples to delay parenthood for one or two years to adjust to marriage and to grow together.²¹

Toward the end of Sanger’s talk, Portland police moved in and arrested three men for selling Sanger’s pamphlets. Equi intervened and climbed atop a table to hand out pamphlets free to anyone who wanted them. Both the women followed the men to the police station where Sanger implored the captain to release them. She even offered to take their place. The captain refused, but he agreed to delay a trial until Sanger returned from lecture stops in Seattle and Spokane. Equi paid the seventy-five-dollar bail for the three men.²²

While Sanger traveled, Equi revised Family Limitation as Sanger had requested to provide more of a medical perspective. To counter objections leading to the arrests, Equi toned down the text on sexual pleasure and dropped specific mention of abortion. She also targeted the pamphlet to working women and men, and especially union members. The inside cover castigated the “stupid persecution” by Portland authorities who arrested the three union men. West Coast labor leaders who promoted birth control were identified, and readers were encouraged to view contraception as a means to emancipate women and improve working conditions. With the prospect of the United States entering World War I, Equi also reminded women of their responsibility to limit the “human material for exploiters and militarists.”23

In the meantime, Portland’s city commissioners—all men—had rushed to call an emergency legislative session to criminalize distribution of any newly defined obscene material like Sanger’s birth control booklet. Their act outraged Sanger’s supporters who organized a protest meeting to coincide with her return. On June 29 Sanger appeared before a crowd packed into the Baker Theater in downtown Portland. Equi and others sold copies of the revised Family Limitation at the door. As soon as Sanger started to speak, the police arrested her along with Equi and two other women. The audience clamored in protest and more than one hundred women followed the arrestees to jail, calling out in solidarity and defiance, “We also have broken the law.”²⁴ Portland had almost certainly never heard or seen such a march.

All four women refused bail, and they spent the night in the county jail. Sanger noted that the other female inmates, mostly young women, “scampered around talking over their troubles and complaints with Dr. Equi.” She also later wrote, “Portland is the first city to interfere with my work since I left New York.” Forty-eight Portlanders signed a petition to Mayor Albee to release the women. Anna L. Strong, a Seattle activist, wrote that wealthier women readily obtained birth control information from their physicians, but working women were barred from similar access.25

Over the next two days, Equi, Sanger, and the other women were tried separately from the men in proceedings that drew more than two hundred women to the Municipal Court trial. Several carried signs outside the courthouse reading “Poor Women Are Denied What the Rich Possess” and “Poverty and Large Families Go Hand in Hand.” C. E. S. Wood argued the advocates’ case and asserted that obscenity had not been proven and that no established criteria for defining obscenity existed, but the judge found all the defendants guilty for circulating a “lewd, obscene and indecent book.” He claimed that birth control itself was not on trial, but he believed that the material could reach the “lascivious” minds of youth. He ordered fines of ten dollars, suspended, for the men and no fines for the women. Sanger bristled with indignation and declared the ruling a “cowardly decision.” “It’s practically the same old story,” she said, “that knowledge, if it’s hidden away on the musty bookshelves or in the narrow confines of the medical profession is moral; but as soon as it is distributed among the working people, the same book becomes obscene.” Equi, according to the Oregonian, “vehemently protested” until the court warned her against contempt. Sanger completed her tour and found a surge of interest in birth control while Portland’s local league found ways to distribute more copies of Family Limitation.²⁶

Other physicians in Portland, no doubt, recognized the importance of birth control to women’s health and independence, and many probably advised their patients how to prevent pregnancies. But none are known to have joined Equi and Sanger in defiance of a spurious municipal law or to have protested their incarceration. Three months after she visited Portland, Sanger opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn. She had concluded that women were more likely to adopt birth control methods after speaking directly with doctors and nurses rather than by attending lectures. Clinics offered privacy for fittings of the best means of contraception—a vaginal diaphragm. Authorities continued to harass Sanger, but she helped establish a model operation that evolved into Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. In Portland, ironically, two months after Equi’s and Sanger’s arrest over birth control, Emma Goldman lectured on the topic without incident.27

Following Sanger’s departure, Equi sent her impassioned declarations of love and affection. She recounted the days and nights they spent together while awaiting the judge’s verdict, and, in one letter, she wrote that Sanger’s love for her had swept away the bitterness and pain she had experienced since being jailed during the cannery strike three years earlier. She described a “spiritual death” that had engulfed her during those difficult times, one that had burned out her “old rebellious attitude.” In its wake Equi described feeling stronger but more remote as if her “higher senses had become inanimate.” With Sanger’s “beautiful love and friendship,” Equi anticipated leaving behind the intolerance she had used as self-protection and thought she could forge “a new life out of the ashes of the old.”²⁸

Equi clearly reveled in the affection she had shared with Sanger. In one of her more intimate messages, she wrote, “Last night when you leaned over me—held me within the shelter of your arms—the very warmth and beauty of your nature became embodied within my heart and brain.” She held back little, writing “My sweet girl I love you with an ecstasy, an understanding of spirit that you alone have imparted to me. . . . My arms are around you. I kiss your sweet mouth in absolute surrender.” One letter from Sanger to Equi has been located in which she recalled, a few years later, their time together in 1916. She wrote, “Your picture is on my dresser always as I look into those blue, blue eyes, I remember our dinner, our ride, everything—everything.”²⁹

Sanger apparently did not continue to respond as passionately, and Equi shifted in her correspondence from fervent entreaties to more practical concerns. She applauded the idea of a birth control clinic as “the real thing,” and she offered ideas for getting subscriptions to a new publication. But occasionally her feelings lingered, and she closed one letter with a plaintive note, “Am blue—lonesome for you—sometimes I wish I had never met you—sense of loss—mental detachment love me, Peggy—do not wait too long before writing me. I am a very sad—very lonely woman. I love you.”³⁰

Later that year, Sanger composed her thoughts in a note that she intended for Equi alone but never sent: “Marie Equi, MD, a rebellious soul—generous, kind, brave but so radical in her thinking that she was almost an outcast in Portland. Upon arrival she captures every well-known woman who comes to Portland. Her reputation is or was Lesbian but to me she was like a crushed falcon which had braved the storms and winds of terror and needed tenderness and love. She was living with a younger woman in Portland and had adopted a child—I liked Equi always.”31

By mid-1916 Equi juggled her medical practice with what seemed full-time activism. In October of that year her antiwar sentiments clashed with the play of suffrage politics. During that year’s presidential campaign, President Wilson faced off against Republican challenger Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson’s backers touted his record—“He kept us out of war”—while Hughes charged the president with inadequately preparing the country for hostilities. At the same time, the candidates sought support from women who had won the vote, most of whom lived in western states. Wilson struggled to retain his constituency in the antisuffrage South, and he promised action on suffrage at a better, distant time. Hughes ultimately backed the federal suffrage amendment, hoping to boost his campaign in the West.

The choice for suffragists was far from black and white. Though NAWSA remained nonpartisan, it generally placed its faith in Wilson, trusting that years of lobbying his administration would ultimately deliver results. Critics disagreed. In June 1916, the Congressional Union transformed itself into the National Woman’s Party (NWP), the first political party created by and for women. The NWP’s one and only concern was the adoption of the Susan B. Anthony amendment to the federal constitution to ensure that the right to vote would not be denied any citizen on account of sex. The organization’s leaders refused to back candidates of any political party that did not support the amendment. Alice Paul and her allies figured if women in the suffrage states voted against the Democrats, they could swing the outcome of the race and move suffrage through Congress. But for suffragists who were also pacifists like Equi, the peace candidate trumped the suffrage supporter.³²

The conflict in Portland erupted in October 1916 with the arrival of the Golden Special—sleek Pullman cars bustling with East Coast suffragists—that had streaked across the country to rally women to vote for Hughes. When the emissaries gathered for a noontime rally in downtown Portland, Equi led other Wilson sympathizers in yells and catcalls loud enough to drown out the “Hughesettes,” as they were called. She carried a banner painted with the words, “What Goose Laid the Golden Egg?” and charged that the easterners’ train was financed by wealthy New York industrialists and their wives. That claim was mostly accurate. Besides the threat of war, Equi objected to eastern women from nonsuffrage states presuming to tell enfranchised women in the West how to vote. At another Hughes event, according to the Republican Oregonian, Equi clashed with people waiting for the speeches to begin. She argued with a police officer, who then arrested her. Her friends paid her bail, and she returned to the streets for another protest.33

Equi was almost giddy in a letter to Margaret Sanger about the protests. “It sure has been a good Friday for me. . . . We sure did have a strenuous time—Put the Hughesites entirely out of business. . . . We had 5,000 people at Sixth and Alder. . . . Say it was the richest thing ever pulled off—and a complete surprise—even to the Democrats.” Equi wrote that she “didn’t believe in either Hughes or Wilson,” but she believed the president was “the lesser of two evils.”³⁴

On Election Day, Oregon voters—including women for the first time in a presidential election—awarded the state’s five electoral votes to Hughes. Equi and her allies had failed to swing the state to the peace candidate, and everyone awaited the news from California. A victory in the Electoral College hinged on California’s tally in an extremely close race that extended late into the evening. Then, finally, the news arrived: Wilson carried the state by a mere four thousand votes. In the end, the president carried all the suffrage states except Oregon and Illinois. The power of the women’s vote became apparent, and Democrats resolved to settle the suffrage issue before the 1918 midterm elections. Keeping the country out of the war was another matter.³⁵

Three weeks after the Hughes protests, labor skirmishes in the timber town of Everett, Washington, flared into murderous attacks against Wobbly organizers. What became known as the “Everett Massacre” jolted Wobblies into yet another free-speech fight just as they planned to shift from street agitation to bringing workers into a more stable and permanent organization.³⁶

Located thirty miles north of Seattle, Everett was a true company town developed in the 1890s by agents of John D. Rockefeller and the Weyerhauser Timber Company. In the spring of 1916, shingle weavers at one of the mills staged a walkout to protest a 20 percent pay cut. They were beaten for their action, and the local authorities obliged the mill owners by outlawing demonstrations downtown. The IWW tried to enter Everett to help the strikers, but the sheriff’s department had already deputized men to keep Wobblies away. The deputies, often drunk and acting like thugs, attacked and blockaded the outsiders from the city. Their tactics were so brutal that more than two thousand Everett citizens protested at a street rally.³⁷

Looking to bolster the picketers, 250 Wobblies boarded the passenger boat Verona in Seattle early in the morning of November 5 for the trip to Everett. The sheriff and his fully armed posse waited for them at the Everett dock. Soon after the Wobblies made fast the bowline, a single shot rang out followed by volleys from each side, killing four Wobblies, two deputies, and wounding dozens. Another Wobbly died soon after the ship returned to Seattle, and most of the others were arrested for complicity in murder.38

Equi rushed to Seattle to provide medical care as soon as she heard of the trouble. “I have come of my own accord,” she told a reporter, “and will speak in Everett shortly.” She met Elizabeth Gurley Flynn upon her arrival, and together they comforted the Wobblies in jail and in the hospital. The men cheered her arrival, and several told her, “Good ole Doc. We knew you’d come to us.” At the hospital Equi found one of the men, a twenty-two-year-old, suffering from a worsening bullet wound to his leg, and she demanded he be admitted to a private hospital for better care. She also determined that the last Wobbly to die would have recovered from his wound if he had received prompt surgical care. Her testimony to that effect was presented at the trial. Discouraged but determined after their visit, Equi and Flynn rallied support for the Everett defendants in talks throughout Western Washington and Oregon.³⁹

Equi responded to the Everett crisis as a matter of course. It was what she did and how she understood her place in the world. She dropped everything to travel two hundred miles to stand with “her boys,” to provide medical care, and to testify in their defense. She let it be understood that she was on-call for the men and women who risked their well-being and sometimes their lives for causes that meant everything to them. She simply did what she believed was necessary and what she felt was right.

Weeks later Equi described in a letter to Sanger that she would be part of a loggers’ convention in the IWW headquarters in Portland. She intended to shed light on workers’ demands for camp cleanliness, sanitary sleeping quarters, wages, and working hours. She wrote that she expected to “wake old Oregon up a bit.” Soon thereafter, Equi served as the official IWW delegate from Oregon invited to help disperse the ashes of Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill. On the first anniversary of Hill’s execution, six hundred small, sealed envelopes were distributed to Wobblies and their supporters. Printed on each packet were his likeness and an inscription that read “Joe Hill—murdered by the Capitalist Class, November 19th, 1915.” One hundred fifty Wobblies gathered at his memorial in Chicago and recalled Hill’s last song, an antiwar tune titled “Don’t Take My Papa Away From Me.” After the service, the delegates convened their tenth annual convention and adopted a resolution opposing war.⁴⁰