the delegates present should cast only their individual votes. The election resulted in a change of but two officers. Professor Breckinridge and Miss Ashley did not stand for re-election and Miss Anita Whitney of California was chosen for second vice-president and Mrs. Louise De Koven Bowen of Chicago for second auditor.
A serious controversy arose during the convention in regard to the deviation of some of the national officers from the time-honored custom of non-partisanship. It had always been the unwritten but carefully observed law of the association that no member of the board should advocate or work for any political party. Mrs. George Howard Lewis, a veteran suffragist of Buffalo, N. Y., sent a resolution to the convention declaring that officers of the association must remain non-partisan and Mrs. Ida Husted Harper presented it and led the contest for it. Dr. Shaw announced before it was discussed that the board recommended that it should not pass.
Women had taken a larger part in the political campaign which had just ended than ever before and one of the officers and many of the delegates present had spoken and worked for the Progressive party because of the suffrage plank in its platform. Other members had done the same for the Socialist and Prohibition parties for a like reason. As a result, while the resolution had some 'warm support it was defeated by a vote of ten to one, although it applied only to the officers and left individual members free. The consequences of this vote soon began to be realized by the board and the delegates and in the official resolutions was one which said: "The National American Suffrage Association reaffirms the position for which it always has stood, of being an absolutely non-partisan, non-sectarian body." When asked for an interpretation the officers answered that "the association must not declare officially for any political party."[1]
One of the most enjoyable evenings of the convention was the one in charge of the National College Equal Suffrage League, the program consisting of a debate between groups of clever speakers, each with one or more university degrees, half of them
- ↑ It is a noteworthy fact that although woman suffrage was a leading issue in the presidential campaign of 1916 no officer of the National American Suffrage Association took any public part in it, although the platform of each of the parties contained a plank endorsing woman suffrage.
