H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/March 3, 1913

Sun Bureau, Washington, March 3. This is the suffragettes day. Woodrow, perhaps, may flap his wings tomorrow, but today he is well-nigh forgotten.

The Stars and Stripes are blanketed on the streets by the suffrage purple and green. Hundreds of thousands of yellow streamers, each marked “Votes for Women,” billow and flutter in the breeze. The warm spring sun shines down upon marching hosts of triumphant girls. A crowd of 200,000 lines the sidewalks, gaping, marveling, eating peanuts in benumbed silence.

A week hence the glad news will be percolating through 40 States, poisoning the yeomanry, bringing forward the day of days. The suffrage cause has gone forward five years in 48 hours.

Nowhere is the fact more apparent than in the headquarters of the antis, at 1307 F street. A week ago the exhorters assembled; they were sanguine and even exultant. They believed the suffragettes were due for a damaging reaction, a devastating horselaugh. But today they know better and the knowledge is visible in their demeanor. In brief, they have taken to the woods. Their headquarters bears the aspect of an abandoned camp—and of a camp abandoned in a hurry.

But three stalwarts remained on guard this morning, and they were plainly despairing. I asked for news from the front. There was no news from the front. There was no longer any front. The suffragettes were in complete possession of the whole field.

And with victory has come union. The warring factions join forces against the common and fleeing foe. “Gen.” Rosalie Jones, resting at the Fourth street quarters this morning, had only kind words for the rivals who sought to hatchet her but two short days ago. Did they take her letter to Woodrow away from her? Well, maybe it was for the best. Did they fail to turn out with a band? Well, what is a band, after all? A mere mob of sweating union men, too stupid to be inflamed. The “General” has forgiven and forgotten. There is glory enough for all.

At all other centres of suffrage activity the day began early. The field headquarters in Delaware avenue, a block from Union Station, were opened soon after dawn, and by 9 o’clock they swarmed with captains, colonels and generals of divisions.

As train after train came in, bringing regiments of suffrage marchers from afar, they were met by aids, given their banners and steered to their places of waiting. And those comers who were not suffragettes—militiamen, political clubs, Governors and their staffs—were deluged with suffrage pennants, buttons and flags.

So, too, at the headquarters in F street, a block from the deserted camp of the antis. Here the major-generals and field marshals did their work, pulling wires, issuing orders, correlating the work of the forces flung afield. The scene was full of military color. Orderlies dashed in with dispatches. Boy Scouts mounted guard.

Flags were piled in great heaps upon tables and on the floor. Workers, garbed as nurses with red crosses upon their arms, went forth upon mysterious, portentous mission. Anon a bugle note cleft the air. Maybe it was sounded by a militia bugler from Iowa staggering up Fourteenth street—but the suffragettes appropriated and were thrilled by it.

These questions of theirs were very artfully devised. They seemed to be flabbergasting. They appeared to put the fair Inez down and out. But each time she came back with an answer that completely routed the questioner—an answer epigrammatical, brilliant and confounding. And each time she made the crowd yell with delight. When it was all over her victory was enormous and unmistakable. Any woman with the cards so stacked in her favor might have won, but it took a woman of Miss Milholland’s good looks to make a killing.

So everywhere. The girls who sold flags and Woman’s Journals in front of Union Station this morning were all pretty girls. They were well dressed. They were clever. They knew how to smile. And so they made plenty of sales—and, what is more, plenty of converts. The handbills of the antis fluttered to the gutters. The Venusberg sent down its cohorts and routed the seminary.

In this afternoon’s parade, of course, the ancients are on view. Veterans of the Thirty Years’ War are exposed shamelessly to the public gaze. But in every squad of such heroic relics there is a saving dash of pretty girls. The crowd is not looking at the grandmothers, but at the pretty girls.

One to a block would be sufficient, but the suffragettes are providing 20. And every time the crowd looks it grows more mellow. Every time it sees an Inez Milholland it rolls its eyes, arranges its neckties and is inundated by a wave of geniality. If only the parade were four times as long the crowd to a man would be converted.

The connoisseurs of rabble-rousing must yield up their admiration to the leaders of the short, sharp campaign. They have shown skill of the very first order. Coming here with the chances of war all against them and facing the prospect of jeers and disaster, they have won a complete victory.

And how? Chiefly by throwing their beauties into the forefront of the fray. The ancients of the cause, gray, fat and weather-beaten, have sat in their tents doing the thinking, the scheming, the wire-pulling. Into the first line of battle have gone the pretty girls, well dressed, eloquent, appealing. And by that plan they have conquered.

The effectiveness of this strategy was well exemplified at Poli’s Theatre last night, when Miss Inez Milholland, an extremely beauteous damsel, lifted a packed house to enthusiasm. Technically, it was not a suffrage meeting at all, but a concert by the Marine Band. But the suffragettes got permission to send a spellbinder—and Miss Milholland was chosen. She is a tall, slim young woman of abounding good looks—no orator, certainly, but a highly agreeable spectacle. She was booked to speak for 15 minutes. She really spoke more than an hour, and when she bowed herself out at last the crowd yelled for more.

It was, indeed, no speech at all that she attempted, but an intimate, confidential, persuasive conversation. Discreet helpers were posted at all parts of the house, and when she invited the crowd to ask questions they came to the bat as arranged.

Pennsylvania Avenue, as usual, is bedizened like a yap town on circus day. Streamers of incredible hideousness flap from every building on the north side of the street, and many of them are helped out with rosettes, plumes, banners and shields. Portraits of Woodrow stare down upon the crowd from all sides—Woodrow frowning scholastically, Woodrow smiling politically, Woodrow wearing the blank face of an embalmed Indian. And here and there, amid all the red, white and blue of the decorations, leers the impudent yellow of the suffragettes.

Washington always assumes, and with considerable sagacity, that nine-tenths of the folks in the inauguration throng will be yokels who get to a large city no oftener than once in two or three years. The whole inauguration entertainment, in fact, is gauged to the tastes of such rustics. Their donkeyishness is scientifically played upon; they are inflamed and turned into spendthrifts by “novelties” that were old at the time of the Chicago World’s Fair. At a dozen places along Pennsylvania avenue today photographers offer to “take” the visitor “talking to the new President,” or shaking hands with him, or sitting on a rustic bench with him, or riding in a cardboard automobile with him. The yaps fall for it—and so the mails groan with thousands of such bogus but flattering picture postcards. Centuries hence they will flutter out of family Bibles when households break up—choice heirlooms, cherished souvenirs of past greatness.

Other photographers offer to emblazon the cold attic beauty of Woodrow upon handkerchiefs and neckties. He is to be had, too, upon seal rings, watch-fobs, scarfpins, beer-bottle openers, sea shells, celluloid hair brushes, cuff buttons, badges, cigar cases, shaving mugs, egg cups and individual drinking cups. And thousands stop to buy. Every souvenir stand has a crowd around it. Every faker is doing the usual land-office business.

All the traditional Washington souvenirs have been trotted out and given a rub. You know them, of course—bogus fragments of marble “from the Washington Monument”; busts of Lincoln made of macerated bank notes, $50,000 to a bust; oval boxes of figs, with portraits of George Washington on top; sea shells frescoed with views of the White House and the Congressional Library; yellow hat bands bearing such legends as “E Pluribus Unum” and “Remember the Maine.”

Can you imagine a man parading the main street of the capital of a nation of 90,000,000 people selling toy canes and bladders on strings? It is being done in Washington today, and not only by one man but by dozens. And other dozens are selling hand-painted conch shells, stick candy, celluloid badges, souvenir soap dishes, salt-water taffy, “Wilson” chewing gum, peanuts, popcorn. All the junk that fakers take to street fairs in fourth-rate mining towns is here offered in honor of the new President. And trade is good.

Meanwhile, the crowd exhibits a rapidly augmenting luxuriance of personal decoration. Each new marching club, as it staggers out of Union Station, brings a new badge with it—and each new badge quickly increases to two badges, and then to three, and then to a whole chest-full. Hatbands and armbands help out. The suffragettes distribute their pennants to all takers. Patriots fly flags bearing the names of their States. Yesterday afternoon the crowd still showed something of the decorous monochrome of winter overcoats. Today it gleams and glitters with all the colors of the rainbow and all the lustres of the precious metals.

The task of protecting so vast a concourse of the bucolic is one that naturally taxes the talents of the police of five States. Every trainload of visitors arriving at Union Station is carefully scanned by alert and eager Sherlocks. One such is posted at each gate, searching faces as they pass. In vain, in vain! If there is a pickpocket in America who has kept away, it is pride that has kept him—pride which disdains a too-easy task. The yokels stand and wait. They are ready and resigned. They expect it, almost hope for it. They have adorned themselves for the traditional rite. They will be disappointed if they are not robbed.

The standkeepers and hotelkeepers, knowing all this full well, display a more acquiescent hospitality. They are asking, for example, $5 a seat for places in show windows on the ground-floor windows, from which nothing will be visible tomorrow morning save the backs of the commonalty on the sidewalks. And they are also asking Waldorf prices for cot-room in boarding-house lumber rooms. But this is an old story—and no one makes serious complaint. Washington is the milkmaid and the nation is the cow.

Thus the bands play and the badges flash and the American people prepare for their solemn ceremony of consecration. Militiamen pour in from 40 states, in all the bravery of their full-dress uniforms and their shining side-arms. Marching clubs roll out of the station, break for the barrooms and await the day. The plain people tramp the streets, gape at the monument and load up with badges, hatbands, papier-mache Lincolns and hand-painted sea shells. Flags snap and crack in the stiff northwest wind. Washington takes its quadrennial bit at the fat calves of the country.