Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Ann Bauer paid tribute to L. Frank Baum, who took America on an unforgettable journey down the Yellow Brick Road. Today, Christopher Cox honors Alice Paul, the suffragist who picketed the White House without saying a word, was force-fed in prison at 60 pounds, and still rewrote the Constitution. —The Editors
At the millennium, the Gallup organization asked the American public to rank the most important events of the 20th century. Sixty-six percent named “Women gaining the right to vote”—ahead of landing a man on the moon, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Great Depression, and World War I. Only World War II ranked higher.
American women gained the vote in 1920 with the ratification of what has become known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Were it not for Alice Paul, it could easily have taken years longer. Woodrow Wilson opposed it in both his 1912 and 1916 presidential campaigns. So did the members of his party who controlled every key congressional committee. With America’s entry into the European war in 1917, they hoped to table the question of women’s voting rights indefinitely.
The national movement for women’s right to vote had been gathering pace for two-thirds of a century when the 28-year-old Alice Paul delivered her first spectacular coup to marshal support for the cause. It was an enormous parade down Pennsylvania Avenue—featuring 5,000 marchers, inspiring music, and beautiful floats—on the day before Wilson’s 1913 inaugural parade on the same route. Tourists jamming the nation’s capital for the inauguration couldn’t help but notice the front-page stories trumpeting Paul’s planned spectacle. Hundreds of thousands attended as spectators. When drunken hoodlums assaulted the marchers, the D.C. police not only failed to stop it but joined in with physical and verbal abuse of the women.
