decades, and he very forcefully pushed for two things while he was a member. one was anti-lynching legislation, which no one had really championed before, and he pushes for that. he goes to the judiciary committee and never really is debated. he is out there talking about it on the floor. the other thing that he wanted was to because so many blacks were being denied their political rights in the south, he wanted to reduce the representation of southern states in congress based on how many people were being disenfranchised in southern districts, and so these are two issues that perculate for the next couple of decades in the house, but there's no african-americans who are there to champion. in 1901 white leaves congress. he faced some very tough elections. a lot of violence. a lot of fraud.

he leaves the house. when he does, he gives a speech in february of 1901 which is tremendously moving because he knows he is the last african-american who is going to be in congress for a while, and city end of the speech he says, but, you know, phoenix-like, someday the african-american will rise again in congress and come back. that takes three decades. >> well, i want to show you what i think is really sort of like that long dry period that happens after white leaves. one of the saddest parts of what the artifacts we have. in fact, this is one of the saddest artifacts in the house of elections, i think, and it's a recent acquisition. we haven't seen one of these. this is in 1907 print that was made of all -- it's called colored men who have served in had the congress of the united states. it is really a testament to the

persistence of hope in -- it's done in 1907. george white has been gone for six years. >> the world is done. it's a very popular method of showing a lot of the things. as if it's a scrapbook or photo album, some of the images have tilted a little bit as if they've been artfully placed in a scrapbook. it really is. a scrapbook is a bit of memories of disembodied pieces of memory. in some ways that is what this is. it's a memory of the past.

>> the newspapers had collapsed. he had a lot of connections with john mercer langston and other folks. those things had all evaporated. this is one of the last things we know he had done. he was attempting to put a marker done. this won't be forgotten and will come back as george white said. in the center we've got blanch kay bruce and hyrem rebels, the two african-americans who served in the senate giving the senate its due as we do, and they are surrounded by the much larger number of african-americans who served in the house. here's joseph rainy again, the first african-american in the house. it takes it all the way around to all of them who were there. i find this so poignant in that when this was printed, no one

knew how long would it be? it did they think 20 years was going to be a very long time? did they think that was going to be just a moment? what did happen to this print eventually, as you can see, it looks terribly damaged and like it's had a hard life, and, indeed, it has. it was at some point -- someone took this and pasted it on probably a wall because it's pasted on the board and underneath that is wall paper. underneath the print. on the to top was wall paper. it was perhaps paste odd someone's wall in sort of recognition of those things that had happened. it was printed in d.c., and we were able to -- we acquired it in d.c. it may never have left the nation's capital unlike black representation at the time that it was printed. >> american history tv airs on c-span 3 every weekend telling the american story through events, interviews, and visits to historic locations.

this month american history tv is in primetime to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on c-span 3. our features include lectures in history, visits to college classrooms across the country, to hear lectures by top history professors. american artifacts. takes a look at the treasures at u.s. historic sites, museums, and archives. real america revealing the 20th century through archival films and newsreels. the civil war where you hear about the people who shape the civil war and reconstruction, and the presidency focuses on u.s. presidents and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies, and legacies. all this month in primetime and every weekend on american history tv on c-span 3. >> nina was the political cartoonist for the national woman's party from 1914 until 1927. contributing over 150 cartoons, supporting the campaign for women's suffrage. next, we visit the belmont paul women's equality national

monument to see her work. >> my name is jennifer, and i am the deputy director and director of strategic initiatives at the belmont hall women's equality national monument, which was formerly the school of belmont house and museum on capitol hill in washington d.c. this house was the fifth and final headquarters of the national woman's party. the national woman's party was founded by a woman named alice paul in 1913 as the congressional union for woman's suffer raj. the congressional union for woman's suffer raj became the national woman's party in 1916. this group of women spent seven years actively lobbying the president and congress for a federal suffrage amendment at which time once they received the amendment in 1920 they began -- they wrote and began lobbying for the equal rights amendment. during the period when they were lobbying for suffrage they were working all over the country.

actively garnering support from western women voters and bringing the fight directly to the president's doorstep. they had head quartered in lafayette square where they could walk out their door and be right at the president's doorstep in a matter of minutes, and they began picketing the white house, one of the first groups to do so. when the united states entered world war i in 1917, at that time the picket to the white houses were quite peaceful, but they quickly turned ugly when crowds watching these women picket the white house believed their behavior to be unpatriotic. crowds would throw things at the women. they would converge on them and tear the banners from their hands. in june of 1917 the women began being arrested on charges of obstructing traffic, and they were taken to prison and sentenced to prison sentences anywhere from three days to six months, and they were imprisoned at the district prison here in

washington d.c. and out in lorton, virginia, at the work house. they weren't treated like political prisoners. they were treated like any other prisoners. often thrown into their cells wrk at times their handcuffs were handcuffed above them. these women began protesting that treatment, and they went on hunger strikes. they were force fed. because of their activities, there was a lot of press around what was happening to them, which ended up garnering a lot of public sympathy for their cause. in 1919 thaungs to nnks to not work of the national women's party and other suffrage organizations, the federal amendment was passed by both houses of congress and the states for ratification. in 1920 it was ratified by all 36 states and became law. by 1921 and 1922 the national women's party believing that suffrage was only the first step in a many step process to

achieve full women's equality began working on the equal rights amendment. alice paul and a woman named crystal eastman wrote the amendment and presented it to the party in 1923. from that time the national women's party worked for legal, social, and economic equality for women throughout the united states and later throughout the world. they worked for the equal rights amendment from this house from 1923 up until 1997 when they became a 501c3. today we work to maintain our equal rights artifacts and educate the public about this movement and the stories of this community of women who worked for total equality for women. the belmont paul house is actually named after alice paul, our original founder, and then alva belmont. belmont was the benefactor and president of the national women's party for many years, and it's because of her that we have such a large collection of books, scrapbooks, artifacts,

and many other objects that allow us to tell the story. now we're upstairs, and we're going to talk a little bit about our collection of political cartoons by the national women's party's official cartoonist nina alande. it w alander's work appeared on the corps of their publication "the suffragist" and its later title "equal rights" for more than ten years. she grew up in kansas. she was born in 1872. her family actually moved to washington d.c. around 1900. her mother was one of the first women employees at the department of the interior, and alander studied painting at the coccoran school of art here in d.c. with the intention of becoming an art teacher. she was a painter. she loved to paint. that was a big part of her

identity. she also worked for the government land office. she recognized that painting wouldn't pay the bills. she was president of the d.c. branch of the national american woman's suffrage association for many years, and when alice paul came to d.c. in 1912 with the intention of lobbying for the federal amendment, it alander watched first with interest in this new woman. there's a great story in one of the early biographies of the national woman's party where alander and her mother receive alice paul at their house, and both of them, of course, were very interested in the suffrage movement, and they were eager to hear from this woman who they claimed was about as big as their finger, walking into their house, and the story goes that by the time alice paul left, they had committed both time and money to the suffrage movement and to the congressional union without realizing what they had actually committed to or how

this little woman had managed to convince them to begin lobbying for the federal amendment. alander all of a sudden was an active member of this party working for the federal suffrage amendment. i think she always sort of looked around in amazement at alice paul's negotiating and strategic way of convincing people to not only work for the moou movement, but also to give money. she began her career as the cartoonist of the national women's party. her first work appeared in 1914. one of the interesting things about her early work is that a lot of it focused on poverty, child labor, the exploitation of women, and labor legislation. her first work appeared in -- on the cover of the suffragist in june of 1914.

she did more than 150 cartoons for the pages of the suffragist over a period of seven years. they appeared almost weekly. we have great attention to how that news sbaktd or was influenced by what was happening in the suffrage movement. here is one of her early works. this is one of my favorite pieces, actually, in the museum. this is called the inspiration of the suffrage workers. you can see how she's commenting on a lot of different ideas in this piece. she's talking about the importance of the vote as a way of changing the condition of women. you see the woman holding her child and her other little girl is standing in the -- sitting in the street playing with a cat, and there's trash surrounding

her. this is obviously in an impoverished area. alander especially in the early pieces was commenting on how the vote would change the ability for women to earn their own wages, protect their children, says and move up in society in a way that not having the right to vote or any voice in the laws that were being made would allow them to do. so now we're actually going to make our way into the gallery. in our collection today we have about 170 of alander's original works. one of the only known collections of her works in the country. as far as i know no other museum has any of her paintings or any of her other works either. beginning in 1914 as i said, she was doing a lot of work on the condition of women, but as the suffrage movement progressed and how the national woman's party's

activism increased, they began a strategy that they called holding the party and power responsible, and at that time that was the democratic party led by president woodrow wilson. alander's work pinpointed symbols of the democratic party and more importantly the main symbol of the democratic party which was the president. in this piece here alander -- this is called fairy godmother wilson, and it was published on the cover of "safr rajist." you can also see that alander is utilizing the fairy tale as i understand rela to make commentary about the power that wilson wielded over the improvement and condition of women and over the laws of the country as well. president wilson is playing fairy god mother. this woman is as i understand

r -- cinderella. president wilson is casting a spell to make it possible for her to use the amendment to use her constitutional amendment to vote for the people who represent her, so a lot of commentary about president wilson's power and just as an aside here in the background and in the mirror, you see the proud voting sisters, and this was indicating the fact that women in western states actually many western states at that point had the right to vote at that time. the national women eights party would ultimately start pinpointing those women to help vote as a block and try to vote the democratic party out of office. the title of this cartoon is lest we forget, and one of the things that is important to note about the national women's party in general and then certainly the way in which alander's work reflected, this idea is that the national women's party always paid tribute to the women who

were considered mothers of the suffrage movement, and that included in particular susan b. anthony. this cartoon is featuring a line of women paying tribute to susan b. anthony who died before the federal suffrage amendment was passed, about -- but who actually introduced the amendment. you see a group of women and children. you can see women who were college graduates in here. you see the tag here. that's voter. that's indicating western women votes who had the right to vote, and up here you see a lone woman walking up the steps of the capitol up to the capitol in that and the day 1875 when susan b. anthony first introduced that amendment.

then we circle over to this cartoon. this cartoon is called our hat is in the ring. it was drawn and published on april 8th, 1916. alander's belief that women needed to be presented with authority, strength, and control. she created an image that she called the alander girl, and this woman was in a different image than a lot of people saw particularly in images of the suffragist and images of women that appeared in the press at that time. oftentimes political cartoonists would mock the suffrage movement by making women look haggered or

ugly or frought in some way. alander turns on that its head and she creates a youthful and intelligent woman. her skirt was above her ankles, and that was quite different at that time. you can see the changing face of fashion at that time as well. her hands are on her hips. she throws her hat into the ring of politics, so here you can see her hat says the woman's party, and you see some of these comical images of a progressive, a democrat, and a republican who are kind of looking in wonderment at this woman, who is saying i'm moving in. the importance of this cartoon is also that -- as i mentioned brrk the national woman's party was originally founded as the congressional union for women's suffrage, and they changed their name to the woman's party in june of 1916. this is published in 1916, and you can kind of see them

predicting what's about to happen within their party the nwp lobbied for the federal amendment to actually becoming an active political player. just in the same vein of a democrat or a republican. this cartoon is called changing fashions. she used to be satisfied with so little. published on march 15th, 1915. this is, again, an opportunity for alander to comment on how they were targeting congress at this time. showcasing -- this is actually talking about so many different things here. not only are they targeting congress and you see the woman holding out her skirt saying national constitutional amendment in this very grand ruffly skirt that she's holding out, but she's also wearing a

hat that in new jersey and massachusetts. all states that were voting on suffrage referendums in 1915. this is a way for lobbying to receive municipal suffrage. then on her skirt she also has west virginia and iowa which may have been states that were also voting at that time. she's holding out the skirt, national constitutional amendment and the congressman is looking at her in bewillederment saying she used to be satisfied with so little. at this time you see alander focussing on the federal amendment, and also talking about how this continued to be state by state by state, and her work reflects that in other ways too. as they approach the ratification of the amendment in 1919 and 1920, alander's work began to increasingly reflect the idea that states were still having to ratify this amendment and that that could also be a

process that could hold them up. in 1919 the national woman's party created a banner in which they started sewing stars, so for every state that ratified the suffrage amendment, they would sew a star on the banner, and by 1920 they had 36 states on this banner, and the day that suffrage was passed, there's this iconic image of alice paul unfurling the banner at headquarters and showing it for all of the members. we know what happened to that banner, but we're hoping that someone has it in their attic somewhere, but there's also a great alander cartoon that shows them also sewing those stars on the banner. her work is continuing to reflect the state movements while also showing the federal movement as well. >> this cartoon is called american justice, and it was published on june 1s, 1918. in the interesting thing about this cartoon is actually that

this is another instance of alander take the imagery of democracy and patriotism, certainly this is obviously uncle sam standing here, and turning it on its head just a little bit. this is a very powerful image. you are seeing uncle sam standing in front of this bound, gagged, helpless woman. he is holding a bouquet of flowers. what he is saying is american women, you are our inspiration, you give us our soldiers, you can serve our food, you work in our munition factories and serve our sick and wounded. accept this bouquet. he is sort of trying to force this on this woman. you see her bound with unequal political rights, equal work, unequal wages, and this kindly omit flowers rope. th these are issues that women continue to grapple with today, and this image is one of many

that alander used where she features uncle sam, the democratic donkey, the republican elephant, and other typical images of democracy to showcase how contradictory our country was towards women. particularly during world war i these women really focused on the fact that president wilson was lobbying for democracy abroad while not doing so here in the united states. we're going to look at another cartoon that shows that issue. let's look over here. this cartoon is called insulting the president. it was published on june 2nd, 1917. in january of 1917 the national women's party began picketing the white house through a sustained act of nonviolent protest. they were among the first group ever to do this.

every day these women who stand in front of the white house holding their banners that would basically speak for them saying mr. president, how long must women wait for liberty? talking about democracy in this country and using president wilson's speeches and his words to show, again, the contradictory nature of the direction of the united states. in april of 1917 we entered world war i, and then their banners became a little bit more problematic. they were seen as unpatriotic. this particular cartoon, like i said, was published in june of 1917, which is just before women started to be arrested. this particular cartoon shows our alander girl again. again, kind of the skirt above the aing tl. this was how women dressed when they were standing at the white house. her work also reflects the reality of how they were on a daily basis, and then you see the banner that she's holding is

a quote from a speech written by wilson saying we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments. then it w.w. down here at the bottom. this was fairly typical. >> are you see the donkey and the elephant being used to persecute women. they're kind of keeping up that targeting congress and targeting the party in power by using these banners to their advantage. they picketed the white house. they also picketed congress at times. they took their banners across the country too. they were really lobbying

against congress in a very national way. we're going to move across to the -- this cartoon. it was published in february 1st, 1920. we're almost to the finish line. this one is called training the animals. at this point the amendment had been sent to the states for ratification, and so passage is all but -- the hope was that passage was all but achieved. so you see the democratic donkey and the republican elephant standing there as the woman is holding a treat that says vote on it. she is literally training these animals to get used to the idea that women are now entering the political arena and will exercise their right to vote. her 1920 cartoons in particular are sort of reemphasizing this

over and over again. i believe this is one of the final times that she actually employed the donkey and the elephant. this cartoon is called call to the women voters, stand by your disfranchised sisters. this is obviously -- you can see it's an unfinished cartoon. it has the mast head started up here of suffragist, which would have been the masthead of their publication. this is another instance of alander using imagery to make an impact. they oftentimes showed women in this sort of -- in this way. this particular woman is wearing the flowing robes and blowing a horn, and the intent of this piece is actually to garner support from western women voters, to bring them together to vote as a block against the democratic party, and this is another instance. the finished product actually looked very different once it

was published in the suffragist, so you'll see that they added some slogans and pieces to the original drawing. alander did the bones, and then the editors at the suffragist added additional context to it. this is a great instance of a showcase of the editing of alander's work. she would work with editors to define the week's focus for the cover, and then the editors would also feed her information about the articles that who appear in the suffragist so that they would tie together nicely. in this case there's a great quote within the suffragist in this particular issue that talks about the need for western women to stand up for the disenfranchised women across the united states. >> we are now in the florence feminist library at the belmont paul house, which is the first feminist library established in the united states by the national women's party in 1941.

this is the primary place where we house our collection. even more importantly, we house all of our alander cartoons and all of our political cartoons in this space. i have pulled out a few cartoons to show some additional facets of alander's work. this particular piece is fantastic. it's one of her earlier pieces, and you can see it's quite large. it is more of a poster than any of her other work. you can really see the detail that she -- that she put into this. this is another one of those early pieces where she's talking about women workers, child labor, exploitation, the title of this work is child saving is woman's work. votes for women. and it appeared, i believe, in a june issue. june of 1914 issue of the suffragist. you can really see -- you can

see the factories here in the background and then the crowds, the line of women and children that are wrapped around. this is also a great opportunity for us to talk a little bit about the materials that alander used to create these works. she often used graphite or charcoal to grdraw them. there are few instances where alander uses color in any of her work, and i will show you in just a moment a piece where she uses color. sometimes she would use water color paint. interestingly with these pieces, she was never picky about the type of paper she used. it was obvious that alander would use whatever she had in her studio at the time. it could be anything from artist paper or poster to something thicker like a poster board, cardboard, sometimes you see that she started a work and then didn't like it so she would scratch it out and turn it over and use that -- the same material to start a new piece.

to the very -- it really varied the type of materials that she would use to draw on. what they would do with these is once alander drew them and she would either draw them in her own studio at home or there are images of her at national woman's party headquarters drawing them there, what they would do with these pieces is she would give them to the editored s of the suffragist. alander would make recommendations on captions. sometimes those captions would be changed. just went back and forth on that. they would make markings on the backs. then these items would be put on to metal print blocks that were then used to print the newspaper. it didn't matter how large or how small the items were. they always appeared to be about the same size once they were on the cover of the suffragist. i'm going to close this piece,

and i'm twug you actually going to show a few pieces that demonstrate the editing process. i also want to draw your attention to -- because of the many different materials that she used, you can see that this piece has split in two over time. it also gives us a chance to talk about how fragile these materials are. preservation of these items is very difficult. they have sustained water damage, flaking, every time you handle one of these pieces something will flake off. there are holes in them. the nationalist party didn't mean for these pieces to survive as long as they have. they were work product. that's how they were treated.

>> i'm going show this piece here, and this is quite a powerful drawing. you can see the woman is held by a noose. the senate has her in a noose hanging from the tree. she's representing the suffrage amendment here, and then there's this group -- this person riding in to save democracy. i believe this is woodrow wilson here. she's dawg about this is wilson's last chance to save them. if you flip it over, a lot of these have alander's original notes. in this case she's addressing this to the editor and saying i am sure you can come up with a better caption than i have. she's suggesting that they need to about the caption they want to use for this and rethink what her recommendation is.

this is one of the pieces that i mentioned where she uses color. this is water color that she uses on here. this is a fairly simple cartoon. it was published in if 1919. the caption that she wrote is 31 more days, so they're showing the date, and this would have been right around the time that it would be published, and she's demonstrating that they only have 31 more days for a particular deadline to achieve their -- to perhaps get suffrage passed or get arguments held in congress or something along those lines. then you flip it over. there's a pretty lengthy note from alander, and i'll paraphrase it. she basically says there's a lot behind this date, and our members won't necessarily know what 31 more days means. we need to find a way to caption it or put more information in

the suffragist about what this de deadline actually means so our members will understand. this is alander's way of saying this is not so simple. i think people are going to need a little help with this one. >> this was work product. this was something that necessity had to do every week to get their issue "the suffragist" out. this was her job. she worked very hard to make it happen quickly, efficiently, and get it to the editors so that they could add it to the issue.