3
The good press agent understands that the virtues of his cause are not
news, unless they are such strange virtues that they jut right out of
the routine of life. This is not because the newspapers do not like
virtue, but because it is not worth while to say that nothing has
happened when nobody expected anything to happen. So if the publicity
man wishes free publicity he has, speaking quite accurately, to start
something. He arranges a stunt: obstructs the traffic, teases the
police, somehow manages to entangle his client or his cause with an
event that is already news. The suffragists knew this, did not
particularly enjoy the knowledge but acted on it, and kept suffrage in
the news long after the arguments pro and con were straw in their
mouths, and people were about to settle down to thinking of the
suffrage movement as one of the established institutions of American
life. [Footnote: _Cf._ Inez Haynes Irwin, _The Story of the
Woman's Party._ It is not only a good account of a vital part of a
great agitation, but a reservoir of material on successful,
non-revolutionary, non-conspiring agitation under modern conditions of
public attention, public interest, and political habit.]
Fortunately the suffragists, as distinct from the feminists, had a
perfectly concrete objective, and a very simple one. What the vote
symbolizes is not simple, as the ablest advocates and the ablest
opponents knew.
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