Anne Herendeen, “What the Home Town Thinks of
Alice Paul,” Everybody’s Magazine, October 1919.
A kindly Quaker named Thomas Moore appears to have founded Moorestown,
New Jersey, about the same time that William Penn was busying himself laying
out Philadelphia. . . . Mr. Penn’s town did nicely in point of size. Mr. Moore’s is
prettier than Mr. Penn’s, but has only attained a population of five thousand
souls. Still, Mr. Moore’s town has produced Alice Paul, the relentless leader of
the wing militant of American suffragists. Maybe that evens things up.
I asked Mrs. L. about this. She lives on one of the wide, tranquil, tree-bordered
streets of the little Quaker town, up beyond the Friend’s Meeting-House. Mrs. L.
has three lovely children, and has recently had her drawing-room done in wisteria
velvet. On the grand piano was a bound volume of “the World’s Best Classical
Pieces” and on the shining mahogany table, “Italian Painters since Leonardo.”
The question of Alice threw her fellow townswoman into something bordering
upon a state of mind. She would have much preferred talking of Mrs. [Carrie
Chapman] Catt [president of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association]. . . and said so frankly: “The National American Woman Suffrage
Association, which dates from Susan B. Anthony, emphatically disapproves of
Alice and her National Woman’s Party and their goings-on,” said Mrs. L. “Our
New Jersey Association has printed its disavowal of any connection with militant
methods in all the newspapers of the state. We think that Alice’s picketing the
White House and annoying the Senate, making bonfires out of the President’s
books and speeches was simply. . . outrageous.”
“Do her strenuous political activities affect her social position in the town?”
“Alice seldom comes home, and is not the kind to care about card parties and
dances. Her idea of a good time seems to be hunger-striking in a dirty jail!” said
Mrs. L.; “but if she were to stay here—after all, she is a Paul, and her family have
lived in the Paul homestead on Paul Road for generations. Everyone has the
highest respect for the family—and for Alice—personally.”
“Has Alice ever made an attempt to explain her actions to home-town people?”
“Six years ago when she came home after having served time with the English
militants in Holloway Jail,” said Mrs. L., “she held a meeting, and I will say
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everyone in town went. It appeared that Alice had simply joined a procession of
women who were taking a petition to the prime minister. We couldn’t make it out
at all, but the general impression seemed to be that she would far better have
kept to the sidewalk.”
“I suppose she wanted to feel that she had helped the Englishwomen,” I
suggested, “and after all, they did get the vote over there ahead of us.”
“The Englishwomen got the vote,” said Mrs. L. with decision, “because when war
came they stopped their militancy.”
“But if they hadn’t been militant in the first place they wouldn’t have been able to
stop being militant, and there wouldn’t have been anything to reward them for.”
(I’m afraid I teased Mrs. L. a little.)
“At all events, Alice shouldn’t have brought these methods over here,” said Mrs.
L. “They antagonize people. America is different and everything can be done
through education and persuasion.”
. . . . All over town it was the same story. . . . In effect they all said, “Friend Alice
behaved herself unseemly.”
So I walked a mile out of the town to the Paul farm, curious to see the birthplace
and background of America’s leading suffrage firebrand.
The house itself, a big, hospitable, semi-colonial affair, stood upon a knoll in the
midst of its hundred and sixty rich Jersey acres. A score of sheep cropped the
grass on the rolling stretch of lawn that rolled down to the road and reminded me
of the lawn-mowing sheep on the White House grounds, opposite which Alice
burned her indignant “watch fires,” alleging that the absent President ought to
attend to democracy for American women before bothering about it for various
unpronounceable other peoples.
Within, it was a real American farmhouse—oil lamps and antlers and shells and
almanacs, and on the wall any number of blue-grange ribbons for cattle and corn.
“Has thee had any luncheon?” were almost Mrs. Paul’s first words, and Miss
Helen’s, “Thee must be tired with such a walk. I must take thee back to town in
the machine.” No wonder they persecuted the Quakers. They make all the rest
of us seem so hard and ungracious.
“How is the National Woman’s Party membership hereabouts?” I asked Helen.
Helen is younger and merrier than Alice. But then she hasn’t a membership of
one hundred thousand to keep in hand and an annual budget of some ninety
thousand dollars to disburse in harassing presidents and senators.
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“It’s the hardest spot on the map to do suffrage work in,” she said
cheerfully—“either kind, Alice’s or plain. Thee can see we are all so wretchedly
well-to-do, we dread anything disturbing, even an idea.”
On the wall of Alice’s dignified old-fashioned bedroom is a framed testimonial
designed by Sylvia Pankhurst [a leader of the militant wing of the British suffrage
movement]: “To Alice Paul, on behalf of all the women who will win freedom by
her bondage, and dignity by her humiliation.”
“What did you think of all these goings-on?” I asked Mrs. Paul. She sighed.
“Well, Mr. Paul always used to say, when there was anything hard and
disagreeable to be done, ‘I bank on Alice.’”
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