--the liquor interests controlling the votes of
increasing numbers of immigrants, machine politicians fearful of
losing their power, and financial interests whose conservatism
resisted any measure which might upset the status quo. How to
undermine this opposition was now her main problem, and she saw no
other way but persistent agitation through a more active, more
effective, ever-growing woman suffrage organization, reaching a wider
cross section of the people. She herself had established a press
bureau which was feeding interesting factual articles on woman
suffrage to newspapers throughout the country, for as she wrote Mrs.
Colby, the suffrage cause "needs to picture its demands in the daily
papers where the unconverted can see them rather than in special
papers where only those already converted can see them."[423]

Of greatest importance to her was winning the support of organized
labor. Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of
Labor, had already shown his friendliness toward equal pay and votes
for women and was putting women organizers in the field to speed the
unionization of women. Even so she was surprised at the enthusiasm
with which she was received at the American Federation of Labor
convention in 1899, when the four hundred delegates by a rising vote
adopted a strong resolution urging favorable action on a federal woman
suffrage amendment.

So far as possible she had always established friendly relations with
labor organizations, first in 1869 with William H. Sylvis's National
Labor Union and then with the Knights of Labor and their leader,
Terrence V. Powderly.[424] When Eugene V. Debs, president of the
American Railway Union, was arrested during the Pullman strike in 1894
for defying a court injunction, she did not rate him, as so many did,
a dangerous radical, but as an earnest reformer, crusading for an
unpopular cause. They had met years before in Terre Haute, where at
his request she had lectured on woman suffrage, and immediately they
had won each other's sympathy and respect. She did not see indications
of anarchy in the Pullman and Homestead strikes or in the Haymarket
riot, but regarded them as an unfortunate phase of an industrial
revolution which in time would improve the relations of labor and
capital.

That women would be effected by this industrial revolution was obvious
to her, and she wanted them to understand it and play their part in
it. For this reason she saw the