Owing to the continued misapprehension on the part of some of the public as to the stand taken by the league on picketing, the Ohio County Equal Suffrage League at a meeting held Monday night at its headquarters at 1421 Chapline street, reaffirmed the resolution, passed some time ago, expressing disapproval of the tactics employed by the Washington pickets.

The National American Woman Suffrage Association, with which the Ohio County Equal Suffrage League is affiliated, has through its president, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, openly repudiated picketing time and again, but an editorial in the Woman Citizen explains the position of the association, and incidentally of the local organization, in such unmistakable terms, that it is better to quote it than to further enlarge upon the subject:

The National American Woman Suffrage Association, comprising the great body of organized suffragists the country over, deplores as absurb [sic], ill-timed, and susceptible of grave and demoralizing suspicion, the tactics of the isolated handful of suffragists at the national capital who think to advance the cause of suffrage by demonstrations like the recent banner episodes at the White House.

Is that plain?

The National American Woman Suffrage Association likewise deplores as unfair the wasteful the reiterated demands upon it from friend and foe of suffrage alike to “repudiate,” “denounce,” “state its position on the subject.” It can, apparently, repudiate and denounce and state its position till the crack of doom and still be left at the mercy of clamorers for more denunciations and more repudiations. These clamorers, particularly those who are suffragists, could be about a bigger business than such footless insistence. Concerned as it is with a great constructive, forward-looking, forward-leaping program for furthering the suffrage cause, the National American Woman Suffrage Association deplores having its time, energies and attention constantly deflected to offset the effects of publicity tactics with which it is not and never has been in sympathy and which it has emphatically condemned and never condoned.

Is that plain?

And now--

The National American Woman Suffrage Association wants to point out that it is not blind, if the clamorers are, to the fact that every time it concedes to the clamor it is but playing the publicity game into the hands of the small group of suffragists to whose campaign publicity is fundamental.

For where agitation is the watchward publicity is the achievement.

Can it not be understood once and for all, by suffragists, by press, and by general public, that the White House tactics of the picketers are but a detail of a publicity campaign which suffragists and press and general public immeasurably further by the attention which they enter upon it? (The lady from Missouri who tore down the pickets’ banner built up the pickets publicity as no picket and no banner could have done)

Not all such publicity aids are hostile in their animus. There is no question that men are encouraging the small group that is committed to picket tactics. The grown-ups encourage a forward child whose antics are plaguing other grown-ups so do men of otherwise discriminative intelligence encourage the banner bearers.

And despite an increasingly fine balance of judgment on the part of editors and reporters, there is no question that the attitude of a part of the press is an encouragement. From the viewpoint of news a defy to the president of the United States, even flaunted on a pretty little purple and gold banner, is highly available “front-page stuff” and there is the gayest and friendliest of understandings between many newsmen and the banner-bearers.

While we are placing the blame, therefore, let us divide it fairly and squarely—none at all to the suffrage cause, none to the organized suffragists who resent having that cause drawn into such fracases—and one part to the pickets who incite these ructions, one part to the press that spreads the story in the way most calculated to make a prolonged sensation of it, and one part to the public that thrills humanly over its own shocks.

It is a fact that there remains in America one man who has known exactly the right attitude to take and maintain toward the pickets. A whimsical smile, slightly puckered at the roots by a sense of the ridiculous, a polite bow—and for the rest a complete ignoring of their existence. He happens to be the man around whom the little whirlwind whirls, the president of the United States.

The National American Woman Suffrage Association respectfully urges the rest of the country to take example from him in its emotional reaction to the picket question.