4. The Court and the Pickets

“So long as you send women to prison for asking for justice, so long will women be ready to go in such a cause.”

Anne Martin to the judge before whom she was tried.

After Judge Waddill’s decision that the commitment of the pickets to Occoquan was illegal, the pickets filed sixteen suits for damage. Eight of these were against Whittaker, Superintendent of the Workhouse at Occoquan, and his assistant, Captain Reams, on account of their brutal treatment of the women while at Occoquan Workhouse. They were filed in the United States Court for the Western District of Virginia at Richmond. The other eight were against the Commissioners of the District of Columbia and Superintendent Zinkham of the District Jail for the unlawful transfer of the pickets to the institution of Whittaker at Occoquan. These suits were filed in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia at Washington.

The appeals in the cases of two groups of women arrested August 23 and 28 came up in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on January 8, 1918, before Chief Justice Smyth, and Justices Robb and Van Orsdel. Matthew O’Brien, of Washington, and Dudley Field Malone, of New York, appeared for the Suffragists. Corporation Counsel Stevens conducted the case for the government.

“Suppose,” suggested Justice Robb, “some upholders of Billy Sunday should go out on the streets with banners on which were painted some of Billy’s catch phrases, and should stand with their backs to the fence, and a curious crowd gathered, some of whom created disorder and threw stones at the carriers of the banners. Who should be arrested, those who created the disorder, or the banner carriers?”

Mr. Stevens gave it as his opinion that both parties should be arrested.

260“Did I make myself clear that the banner carriers were perfectly peaceful?” Justice Robb asked.

“When it is commonly known there is a forty-foot sidewalk there?” Justice Van Orsdel reinforced him.

“Well, then,” observed Attorney O’Brien, when he answered Mr. Stevens in his argument, “the honorable Justices obstruct traffic, according to learned counsel’s definition, when court adjourns, and they walk down the street together.”

On March 4, Judge Van Orsdel handed down the opinion, which was concurred in by the other two judges of the court, that in the case of those pickets who appealed, no information had been filed justifying their arrest and sentence. Since the offense of every other picket who was arrested was identical with that of these twelve who appealed their case, they were all illegally arrested, illegally convicted and illegally imprisoned. The Appellate Court thus reversed the decision of the District Police Court. In addition, it ordered the cases dismissed. All of the costs involved in the cases, it was decided, should be paid by the Court of the District of Columbia, for which an appropriation would have to be made by Congressional enactment.

Later, the case of Mrs. Harvey Wiley came up. It will be remembered that Mrs. Wiley was one of the forty-three women who picketed the President on November in the last picket line demonstration. She was sentenced to serve fifteen days in the District Jail. Dr. Wiley, her husband, appealed her case. Early in April the Court decided that there was no information filed justifying her arrest. So that she also was illegally arrested, illegally convicted, and illegally imprisoned.

Yet in spite of the brutalities to which the Courts sentenced the pickets, unconsciously they furthered the Suffrage cause. The women turned the Court sessions into Suffrage meetings. In defending their case at one of the early trials, the pickets, each taking up the story where the other left it, told the entire history of the Suffrage movement. Crowds thronged the Court. People attended these trials who had never been to a Suffrage meeting in their lives.