November 13, 2009
A Teaser from the Upcoming 60th Anniversary Issue Posted by John F. Ross at 07:00 AM EST Just received a piece of artwork that we commissioned for our upcoming 60th Anniversary issue of American Heritage. It took everybody’s breath away! We’ve hired a wonderful artist to colorize certain parts of a number of iconic black and white photographs. This one is of a dozen suffragists (“suffragettes” in Britain) picketing in front of the White House in 1917. Led by the indomitable Alice Paul, these women stood outside the White House gates for months in rain, snow, and blistering sun, raising their signs and voices whenever President Woodrow Wilson left the grounds. Nobody had taken such a bold approach before. What had really infuriated Alice Paul was when Wilson announced that we were going to dive into WWI to “make the world safe for democracy.” She rightly pointed out that half the U.S. didn’t have the vote—and what kind of democracy was that? The story’s incredible: Wilson eventually had them arrested—and Alice Paul went on a hunger strike and they forced a tube up her nose and fed her. But the resulting negative publicity forced a reluctant Wilson to lobby congress for passing the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote. I know Hilary Swank starred in a movie about this recently, but it’s another thing to look at the real women, lined up in their coats and boots in front of the White House. When we colorized the women, they seem to come alive—the blue of their coats and brown of their furs. Our Assistant Editor Jenni Rodibaugh researched the color of the banners they carried (purple, white, and gold). (She found the black and white image boring and had lobbied for using an image of British feminist Emily Pankhurst. Then she saw the colorized version . . . )
What’s funny about looking at this image is that you can’t ignore the women because they don’t have the distance that black and white gives them. You look into their faces and see someone next door or in your family. It makes you look at history with new eyes. John F. Ross
Executive Editor, American Heritage
Author of War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier (Random House 2009)
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