n
me."[379]

In 1892, the year of the presidential election, Susan hopefully
attended the national political conventions. Again the Republicans
made their proverbial excuses, explaining that they not only faced a
formidable opponent in Grover Cleveland but also the threat of a new
People's party. The familiar ring of their alibis, which they had
repeated since Reconstruction days, made Susan wonder when and if ever
the Republicans would feel able to bear the strain of woman suffrage.
Their platform remembered the poor, the foreign-born, and male
Negroes, but it still ignored women. Yet hope for the future stirred
in her heart as she saw at the convention two women serving as
delegates from Wyoming. Here was the entering wedge.

The Democrats as usual were silent on woman suffrage, but undismayed
by them or by the Prohibitionists, who this year failed to endorse
votes for women, Susan moved on to Omaha with Anna Howard Shaw for the
first national convention of the new People's party. Here she met
representatives of the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor,
both friendly to woman suffrage, and men from other groups, critical
of the two major political parties for their failure to solve the
pressing economic problems confronting the nation. Susan was
sympathetic with many of the aims of the People's party, having seen
with her own eyes the plight of debt-burdened, hard-working farmers
and having crusaded in her own paper, _The Revolution_, for the rights
of labor and for the control of industrial monopoly. However, she
still viewed minor, reform parties with a highly critical eye. The
People's party gave her no woman suffrage plank and she found them
"quite as oblivious to the underlying principle of justice to women as
either of the old parties...."[380]

With the election of Grover Cleveland, whose opposition to woman
suffrage was well known, and with the Democrats in the saddle for
another four years, Congressional action on the woman suffrage
amendment was blocked. Nevertheless, the cause moved ahead in the
states; Colorado was to vote on the question in 1893 and Kansas in
1894, and New York was revising its constitution. In addition, the
World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 offered endless opportunities to bring
the subject before the people.

* * * * *

As soon as plans for the World's Fair were under way, Susan began to
work indirectly through prominent women in Washington and