Friday is the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or thought provoking. Since today is Veterans Day, there is a lot of material to choose from. I settled on a quotation that might surprise you. It comes from a woman who never served in uniform, but who helped wartime America find its way. Her name isn't widely mentioned in this country, and hasn't been for a long time. But it should be. Her name was Lucy Burns.
In mid-November 104 years ago, Woodrow Wilson issued a grateful Thanksgiving proclamation. "This year we have special and moving cause to be grateful and to rejoice," the 28th U.S. president told a war-weary nation. "God has in His good pleasure given us peace."
President Wilson continued: "Complete victory has brought us, not peace alone, but the confident promise of a new day as well in which justice shall replace force and jealous intrigue among nations."
The optimism of 1918 would prove to be misplaced. Yes, Armistice Day brought an end to what was then called the Great War. But its terms were so punitive toward Germany that it set in motion events that would lead to a second worldwide conflagration even more gruesome than the first. World War I and its aftermath led directly to the rise of Nazism, a totalitarian Communist takeover of Russia, and the exporting of a virulent form of anti-Semitism to the Arab world.
The envisioned institution Wilson hoped would replace "force and jealous intrigue" (the League of Nations) never really took hold in his lifetime. In large part, this was because the deadly horrors of European politics caused Wilson's own country to retreat to an isolationist "America First" posture that, while appealing, was unsustainable.
Moreover, the U.S. had unsolved problems of its own, and in some respects was moving backwards when it came to human rights. To curry support in the Senate among his fellow Democrats for the League of Nations, Wilson had acquiesced to the re-segregation in Washington and much of the federal government. The Ku Klux Klan was ascending not just in the Old South, but in places like Indiana. Women couldn't even vote, except in a handful of western states.
Like every presidential candidate who preceded him, Wilson was elected in 1912 almost exclusively by men. But when he arrived in Washington, D.C. for his inauguration, the throng he expected to find at Union Station hadn't materialized. "Where are the people?" he inquired.
Watching the parade, he was told. Remember the Women's March the day after Donald J. Trump's inauguration? Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and other early 20th century feminist leaders went one better: They organized a march along the presidential parade route the day before Wilson's inauguration.
By mid-1917, platoons of suffrage activists were picketing the White House daily. At first, Wilson was chivalrous; encountering a female protester, he'd tip his cap and say hello. Today, many would consider this patronizing, but what came next was much worse.
Wilson had won his second term on a promise to keep the United States out of World War I. This was a pledge he could not keep, and with American boys in the killing fields of France, Wilson's attitude toward the women picketing his residency hardened. The president believed these women were missing the big picture. But this is exactly what Alice Paul and Lucy Burns thought about him.
"There will never be a new world order," Paul proclaimed, "until women are a part of it."
In any event, with the president's imprimatur, Washington, D.C., police began arresting the protesters and taking them to jail. When they went on hunger strikes, these women were force-fed, a ghastly procedure that would be considered a war crime today, and which generated increased sympathy for them.
I can't cite public opinion polls that would prove this to the satisfaction of a political scientist -- such surveys did not exist in 1918 -- but what seems to have happened was this: As American public opinion turned against U.S. involvement in Europe's war, it turned in favor of the suffragists.
Although Wilson detected this shift and eventually got out ahead of it, he is hardly the hero of the story. If courage can be defined as "grace under pressure," as Ernest Hemingway said, the suffragists who marched in front of the White House were as gutsy as the bravest Doughboys in the trenches.
Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, along with their platoon of suffragists, weren't arrested in the kind of performance art you see celebrities undertake today. Lucy Burns was sent to prison six times. When she exhorted other prisoners not to eat, she was force-fed by five jail warders who held her down and jammed a tube up her nose. She was also handcuffed with her hands above her head, and when that didn't silence her, placed in solitary confinement.
A devout Roman Catholic, Lucy Burns never buckled. She took solace in her faith, and in the knowledge that her cause was right and just. A photograph at the time shows the tall, red-haired Burns dressed in prison garb holding a banner. She is smiling defiantly. The banner reads:
RESISTANCE TO TYRANNY IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
