'This is a free country, isn't it?' Militancy in Chicago

The last blog post ended by recalling Sylvia Pankhurst's lifelong opposition to the politics of Winston Churchill. New research that I've just undertaken in Chicago reveals that when Sylvia Pankhurst first arrived in that city, towards the beginning of her 1911 tour, she was confronted by questions about this Tory-turned-Liberal politician. A Suffragette in America recalls that Sylvia first came to Chicago on 18 January, arriving at Congress Hotel at midnight. Declining to speak to reporters because she wanted to sleep, she further angered the impatient press by informing them she was going to spend a few days writing. They had other ideas, harrassing Sylvia until she submitted to interviews. 

The Congress Hotel, Chicago where Sylvia was harrassed by journalists in 1911 and where she spoke in 1912.

The Chicago Daily News reveals some of their tactics: they proudly boasted that Sylvia 'found herself confronted by a reporter as she came from breakfast.' The reporter asked her about Winston Churchill: "What do you think of Winston Churchill's attitude in the great battle of the London police with the anarchistic burglars?"

They referred to the 'Siege of Sidney Street' in which two Latvian members of a gang implicated in a botched robbery were held up and involved in a gun fight with the police and army on a street in Stepney in East London. The introduction of immigration controls six years earlier, explicitly targeted at excluding East European Jewish immigrants, encouraged festering racism, particularly anti-Semitism. The Latvian gang were luridly portrayed as anarchists, part of a foreign, lawless conspiracy against Britain - hence, "anarchistic burglars"! Home Secretary Winston Churchill dashed to the scene, intent on grabbing himself a starring role in the 'battle' which was being caught on film.

Winston Churchill (in the top hat) at the siege of Sidney Street

So why was Sylvia being asked about this in America? Did the reporters seek to embarrass her by comparisons between the militant suffragettes and "anarchistic burglars", both of whom found themselves in combat with Churchill? Yes, it would seem. Sylvia ('impatiently', according to the reporter) declined to comment because she had not been in London when this took place, as she had been sailing to America, but would say that she thought Churchill would 'eventually' support women's suffrage. However, it was militancy that the press were obsessed with; their next question: "Do you expect to be arrested while in Chicago, as you were in London?" Sylvia declined to comment - and then added "I do hope, though, that Chicago policemen have better judgement than some we have in England. This is a free country, isn't it?"

These two questions: the role of militancy and the nature of 'freedom' in the USA would remain at the heart of Sylvia's encounters with Chicago over the four visits she made to the city in 1911 and 1912.

A substantial part of Sylvia's lectures in the US involved defending suffragette militancy. To justify their methods, Sylvia frequently drew parallels between suffragette militancy and the direct action of the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party, an attack on private property motivated by disenfranchisement, was a favourite example.

Some American suffragists were supportive - and recognised that the promise of a suffragette speaking about imprisonment was a very effective way to get people to turn up to the local meeting! Others thought that militants discredited the cause, their actions serving to reinforce views of women as hysterical and irrational. Leading Illinois suffragist Catharine Waugh McCulloch belonged to the latter and on 29 January 1912 protested in a letter to a Wisconsin suffragist that Sylvia Pankhurst - as one of the women who "act like tomboys" - should have been invited to campaign there. Two days before McCulloch sent that letter, she was sharing a platform with Sylvia at a meeting in the Congress Hotel in Chicago. Probably Sylvia invoked the Boston Tea Party, because McCulloch delivered a rather bizarre attack on that iconic moment of American history - denouncing it as a male attack on the "feminine luxury" tea (rather than liquor) which only went to show that "men are selfish and have always been selfish in their political views and practices"!

But it was not only, or primarily, with reference to past acts of militancy that Sylvia Pankhurst understood her political activism. When Sylvia first arrived in Chicago, at the time she was being asked about anarchistic burglars at breakfast, a strike of garment workers, most of them women, was drawing to its bitter end after a long struggle. As we have seen from the questions asked by the Chicago press, militancy was understood by many to involve getting arrested. This experience was certainly one that the Chicago garment workers shared with the suffragettes, many of them were arrested and imprisoned for their actions. 

Morgan and I went to the site of that imprisonment to try to understand more about it. The striking Chicago garment workers were taken to Harrison Street police court and jail. This place was notorious for its insanitary conditions - the prison itself was said to have brought down the surrounding area into criminality and it was torn down in 1911. We went to the crossroads of Harrison Street and La Salle where it had been (for more on the site see Chicagology). The inner city rail line runs past it now. The old site itself is occupied by a large office block which directly replaced the jail (asking a worker there on a cigarette break if this used to be the site of a jail, I was informed "it still is!"), it being built in 1912.

Harrison Street jail just before it was torn down (from Chicagology).

The site of Harrison Street jail today.

As Morgan observed, it was a jail in the heart of town: it was a significant presence in the city. The jail has been gone for over a hundred years but an incongruity remains. Giant buildings dedicated to banking, the ubiquitous expensive cafes frequented by the professionals working in this area sit right beside a shabbier Chicago, cheap cafes with hand written notices on the wall warning people they can't sit without buying food, homeless people stand on the street outside. Around the site of the old jail the land feels desolate and unfinished, tarmac is replaced by a sandy surface, when we visited this was punctuated by puddles filled with summer rain. The car park is 1 minute away but there are lots of cars parked up in this space, huddled up against the structure of the railway line.

The site of the jail today beside the rail line.

The building that replaced the jail, barbed wire from the car park.

The building that replaced the jail.

On 21 January 1911, Sylvia was taken to visit Harrison Street by Zelie Emerson - the woman who, a year later, would follow Sylvia to London. Together they established a branch of suffragettes in East London which centrally involved working-class women in the struggle for their political rights. The Chicago Daily News reported that when Sylvia visited Harrison Street 'she was especially interested in the cells girl garment workers had occupied'.

Zelie Emerson showing Sylvia Pankhurst the cells at Harrison Street published in the Chicago Daily News. The original negative is reproduced in A Suffragette in America.

Sylvia's judgement was unambiguous: "Fearful - shocking - appalling". At breakfast in the Congress Hotel, Sylvia said she hoped that the authorities would have better judgement in the US than in Britain. What she saw provided an answer: 

"Wherever I have gone in America I have been assured that suffragettes would never receive the treatment here that they receive in England," said Miss Pankhurst, "but" - then a sigh - " I think there would be little difference, if they incarcerate girls in these cells."

Sylvia looked at the treatment of the garment workers and she saw the treatment of the militant suffragettes. She saw them as a part of the same struggle and wrote to the press denouncing their treatment. 

Striking garment workers being arrested in Chicago.

Militancy was a defining feature of this period of British history and it was not confined to progressive movements. The prospect of Home Rule for Ireland drove the right to use their power inside and outside Parliament. In Parliament, the Tory Lords blocked welfare legislation and tried to gridlock the government. Outside, Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative Party, oversaw drills of armed Ulstermen threatening civil war against the elected government. On the other hand, from 1910 until the outbreak of the First World War, Britain experienced the 'Great Unrest' as groups of workers across the country revolted against low pay and poor working conditions by undertaking strike action. Reactionaries saw revolutionary plots everywhere, no wonder they called the army into Stepney.

The Pankhursts were steeped in a radical tradition of seeking change through Parliament. The actions of the Lords, the fact that women's suffrage seemed further than ever posed a serious challenge to this view. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst drew a pessimistic conclusion: that militancy would have to be coupled with elitism and reactionary alliances (Christabel was in secret correspondence with the Conservative leader) to make progress. Sylvia drew a more radical conclusion: if the British state would not yield to progressive change then there was something rotten about it, something fundamentally undemocratic at its heart. The solution was to link up with other groups who sought democratic change - workers in struggle, Irish fighters against British imperialism - and realise their collective strength to force change. In 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst, Zelie Emerson and the entire East London branch were expelled from Emmeline and Christabel's WSPU when Sylvia put that approach into practice by appearing on a platform alongside James Connolly, a socialist fighter for Irish freedom playing a leading role in working-class struggle in Dublin. It was because she also saw them as engaged in a struggle for democratic power over their own lives, that Sylvia identified with the garment workers of Chicago.