Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/453

 Board approved. My indorsement would have been less enthusiastic could I have foreseen that I would be selected as chairman. A special finance committee was appointed, Mrs. Stanley McCormick, chairman; Miss Addams, treasurer, and I, secretary. Miss Ethel M. Smith, of Washington, D. C., spent her vacation establishing a speakers' bureau in the Chicago headquarters and it has been conducted by Mrs. Josephine Conger-Kanecko. As many national speakers have been routed through the campaign States as our finances would permit. We were faced with the discouraging fact that to do really active campaign service we would need a fund of not less than $50,000 and we had less than $13,000. We collected and distributed in cash a less amount than would be used on the campaign of a city alderman in an off year.

The plan of self-sacrifice day had been suggested to Mrs. Breckinridge by a Wisconsin suffragist and adopted by the National Board and a general appeal went out to the women of America to sacrifice something in aid of suffrage and contribute the amount to the general fund for use in the campaign States. [$9,854 were realized. ] Mrs. Funk, while walking through the Capitol one day, observed a bride with much gold jewelry in evidence and expressed the wish that a little of the gold used for personal ornament might find its way into a treasure chest to be sold for the campaign States and so the idea of the "melting pot" was suggested. . . . The plan was endorsed and put into operation as follows: A carefully selected list of names of women was taken from among the various suffrage organizations, colleges, churches, etc. These women received a letter asking for a contribution to the melting pot and further urging them to accept a sub-committeeship, making themselves responsible for soliciting from at least six people a contribution and keeping track of this group until their possibilities had been exhausted. The names of these persons were carefully scanned by the general committee and two or three out of each group of six were asked to go at the head of a further sub-committee and so something not unlike an endless chain was created. Although this was put into effect hastily and during the intense heat of a Washington summer, it was an enormous success and now at the close of the campaign contributions are still coming in and we consider that the top soil of melting pot possibilities has not been scratched. [$2,732 were realized.]

Mrs. Funk's report of her campaign work was an excellent showing of the situation which the suffragists faced in State campaigns and had done from the beginning:

From the time I left Washington August 25, until I returned to Chicago October 27, I covered approximately 8,000 miles. After speaking three days in Indiana, where the suffragists were straining every nerve to secure a constitutional convention, I spent two days in Chicago and then started into the western States. My first three days were spent in Omaha, and, although my original itinerary con-