Lest anyone mistake the purpose of the demonstration,
Alice Paul had displayed it on the very first float —
the so-called "great demand."
[WALTON:] This was very bold.
Women did not demand in those days.
And she was putting Wilson on notice
that the women wanted action.
Alice also wanted it to be a beautiful parade.
It was a narrative of women’s progress
from pioneer days all the way up to present day.
The present day consisted of phalanxes of women marching by profession.
You had your librarians.
You had your teachers.
You had your nurses.
The message was,
this the contribution that women make to society.
[NARRATOR:] For roughly four blocks,
the parade unspooled along the avenue as planned.
Then, rowdy onlookers began to break through
the steel cables lining the route.
[WALDMAN:] You had 5,000 women marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.
And surrounding them were 100,000 men,
many of them drunk.
And the men began jeering and spitting.
[WALTON:] They spilled into the path of the parade.
They hurled taunts at the women.
They threw lighted cigarettes at them.
They plucked objects off the floats.
[WALDMAN:] They assaulted the marchers
and sent a hundred of them to the hospital.
[WALTON:] The police, they weren’t much better.
They turned their back on the parade
and they’re smirking, like this is all some kind of big joke.
[ZAHNISER:] And so very quickly,
what were marchers marching four or even eight abreast
became a single file
in a very, very threatening atmosphere.
[NARRATOR:] Only the arrival of the cavalry enabled the marchers to complete the route.
One later compared the experience to being forced through the neck of a funnel.
"I did not know," another recalled, "that men could be such fiends."
Ida B. Wells took advantage of the chaos
––boldly stepping in with the Illinois delegation midway through the route.
"Illinois is Lincoln's State," she told a reporter.
"I don’t believe Lincoln's State is going to permit Alabama or Georgia or any other State
to begin to dictate to it now."
Given the punishing afternoon,
many expected the mood at the post-procession rally to be grim.
But as one marcher recalled:
"To our great surprise, [the] leaders were jubilant!"
"If anything could prove the need of the ballot,"
Anna Howard Shaw proclaimed,
"nothing could prove it more
than the treatment we received today."
[ZAHNISER:] Alice Paul and the National Association leaders
realized they had a media sensation on their hands.
[WALTON:] Alice was a public relations genius.
She saw that this parade on the front pages of newspapers across America
was a better story than her parade would have been.
And what was that story?
Men bad, women good, right?
It was basic.
[WALDMAN:] This march overshadowed the inauguration of the President of the United States,
because these non-violent marchers were attacked
for just trying to fulfill their rights as Americans.
[NARRATOR:] By the following morning, the newspapers were in receipt of an open letter,
penned in New York by Harriot Stanton Blatch
and addressed to the soon-to-be inaugurated president,
Woodrow Wilson:
[Blatch:] As you ride today in comfort and safety to the capital
we beg that you will not be unmindful
that yesterday the Government,
which is supposed to exist for the good of all,
left women,
while passing in peaceful procession
in their demand for political freedom,
at the mercy of a howling mob
on the very streets which are being at this moment
so efficiently officered for the protection of men.
[DUBOIS:] Paul pressed to have a congressional investigation.
And this prolonged the publicity that the demonstration had gotten.
So instead of being intimidated by the attack,
she used it as an argument
to get—effectively,
to get the Congress to begin to move on the federal amendment.
[WALDMAN:] The idea of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for women
was a pipe dream.
It wasn’t on the agenda.
And then Alice Paul said, "we’re going to do this."
[CASSIDY:] It put suffrage on the map in a brand new way.