The American Experiment

by David M. Rubenstein

  EW: The suffragists pursued a double-track strategy throughout. They begin with a state campaign in Kansas in 1868. They realize it’s going to be a huge undertaking, but they try. There are scores of these campaigns in almost every state, and sometimes multiple tries. Oregon has five attempts. New York has three attempts before it was successful.

  It’s very slow going. Congress sits on this amendment that’s introduced in 1878. They do not act on it for forty years.

  In the meantime, the suffragists are going state by state and trying to convince the men of each state that they should share power with women. They are successful in some of them, mostly in the West.

  They go to Theodore Roosevelt and they say, “What will it take for you, Mr. President, to support this federal amendment?” He says, “Bring me another state.” Basically he’s saying there have to be enough states who have allowed women to vote so that they’re voting for their representatives. If there’s that kind of pressure, then Congress will begin to listen.

  So it’s really this double-edged campaign where they’re trying to get enough states to put pressure on Congress to make it a political reality that women can vote. When New York State does pass women’s suffrage in 1917, that’s a game changer. Now the politicians can’t really ignore it anymore. It’s not a coincidence that soon after, in 1919, at the conclusion of World War I, is when the amendment finally emerges from Congress.

  DR: By 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment is passed, how many states allow women to vote at that time?

  EW: About fifteen already have given women full suffrage. There’s another group of states that, almost as a prevention against the Nineteenth Amendment, have given women what’s called limited suffrage. You can vote for president or the presidential electors, but you can’t vote for your congressman, your senator, your mayor, your governor, your state legislators.

  There was something called the suffrage map, which was like a crazy quilt designating which states gave which kind of suffrage. But by 1920, almost nine million women are able to vote. So now the pressure is on.

  DR: You mentioned World War I. Was there a feeling among men that women had done a terrific job in helping the war effort and maybe we should thank them by giving them the right to vote?

  EW: Yes. Women participate in the war effort in ways they’ve never been allowed to before. They’re not only nurses, rolling bandages for the Red Cross, they are also in the mines, they’re in the fields, they are working in munitions plants, they are making airplanes and tanks and ships.

  They are doing what was considered men’s work. This whole idea that women are too fragile, too temperamental, too weak to have the vote is really blown out of the water when you see women in uniform, working in the mines. World War I makes a big difference in how men view women, and those old canards just don’t work anymore.

  DR: When was the first time that there was an actual vote on the floor of the House of Representatives or the Senate on the Nineteenth Amendment?

  EW: Over forty years, it’s actually voted down either in committee or on the floor twenty-eight times. It’s finally passed by the House in January of 1918.

  The Senate will delay for another eighteen months, and they will humiliate President Woodrow Wilson, who goes before the Senate and begs them to pass this amendment as a war effort.

  And the Senate votes it down again. It’s not until June of 1919, a good six months after the war is over, that the Senate relents and finally there’s congressional passage.

  DR: To amend the Constitution, you need two-thirds of each house and three-quarters of the states. We had forty-eight states then, and needed thirty-six states to approve. Relatively quickly some states were saying, “We want to be the first.” Who was the first state?

  EW: Wisconsin and Illinois kind of tie. They had a race, and they both sent their ratification certifications on fast trains to Washington, and one got a little delayed.

  So yes, there is this race to be first, and sometimes it passes unanimously and the legislators get up and sing “America the Beautiful” or “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In other places it’s really close. In New Jersey it was extremely close. Then in other states, like Delaware, it fails.

  DR: Thirty-five states approve it within a number of months, and it’s generally thought that a thirty-sixth state will approve it at some point. Why was Tennessee, a southern state, thought the most likely to be the thirty-sixth state?

  EW: By the summer of 1920, thirty-five states have ratified, but there are a few outstanding. In two northern states, Vermont and Connecticut, the governors refuse to even call their legislators in for a special session to consider the ratification.

  One of the things the Senate did spitefully was that, by dragging their feet and not allowing the amendment to go out to the states until the summer of 1919, they knew that most legislatures would not be in session the following year. Most state legislatures then did not meet every year. So thirty governors would have to be convinced by the suffrage advocates to bring their legislators back from every corner of the state for a special session.

  Governors were very reluctant to do this. It was a bit expensive: the legislators had to be paid per diems. Some governors thought they might be impeached if legislators came back, because there were other issues that might come up.

  It’s politically dangerous for some governors to do this, and so they don’t want to do it. In Vermont and Connecticut, there are corporate interests who are threatening the governors and saying, “You better not do this,” and so they refuse. There are a few other states outstanding, but they’re also southern—North Carolina, which everyone assumed would reject the amendment, and Florida, where the governor refuses to call the legislators back.

  So it turns out that Tennessee is the last best hope, even though it’s a very dangerous place, because it is a southern state and it is going to be riven by the racial issues. Suffragists are not pleased that that’s their final, best chance.

  DR: The suffragists and some of the antisuffragists descend on Tennessee. They take over the hotels, they start lobbying.

  The governor was supportive, but he said, “Not right now.” Is that right? He wanted to wait until he got renominated?

  EW: I wouldn’t say he was that supportive at the beginning. He didn’t want any part of this.

  He’s up for a very difficult primary challenge, and then he has to run for reelection. He’s not very popular. The last thing he needs is a divisive debate about women’s suffrage.

  There’s also a part of the Tennessee constitution that might make it more difficult for the state to consider ratification—a waiting period, so to speak. The Supreme Court wipes that away in June of 1920, and suddenly there are no more excuses. So the governor has to call his legislature back, but it’s only after his primary. Then there’s a very limited amount of time for the suffrage supporters to actually get to work.

  DR: Which chamber takes it up first, the Tennessee Senate or the House?

  EW: The Senate takes it up. There were rancorous debates, but the Senate actually does pass it with a pretty comfortable margin. As you said, everyone descended on Tennessee, not only the suffrage leaders but also antisuffrage leaders from all around the country, the corporate interests, and the political operatives from the different political parties. And not just the Democrats and Republicans. There were some minor parties involved. Also the presidential candidates or their representatives, because it’s a presidential election that fall. So it’s a wild time in Nashville.

  DR: The Speaker of the House in Tennessee comes out against the amendment?

  EW: He flips. At first he says he’s going to support it. His intention, he tells the suffragists, is to be the great champion and bring it through the House.

  But he flips right on the eve of the opening of the special session. It’s very peculiar that he does this. The historical assumption is that he has been pressured or induced by the railroad industry, because he will soon have a ve
ry lucrative job with the railroads.

  DR: There’s a motion to table, which means to not vote on the amendment, and the vote is forty-eight to forty-eight. It’s obviously close. What is the ultimate vote?

  EW: It gets kind of messy. It does come down to this tie, forty-eight to forty-eight. A few legislators were absent. There’s a young delegate, the youngest representative in the legislature, a twenty-four-year-old freshman delegate from a little hill town in East Tennessee, and he has been voting with the antisuffragists all this time. He wants to duck. He’s up for reelection. He is reading law to become a lawyer under his mentor, who is a rabid antisuffragist. It just would be safer for him to go with the flow and vote this down.

  Personally he does feel that women should have the right to vote, but politically it’s very dangerous for him. He’s wearing the red rose in his lapel, which is a symbol of antiratification, antisuffrage. The suffragists wore yellow roses in their lapels and on their dresses.

  It comes down to this tie, and young Harry Burn realizes he can’t duck, that actually his vote matters. He can break that tie.

  It’s one of the great romantic stories in American history. That morning, he has received a letter from his mother back home in East Tennessee. She’s written to him and said, “I’ve noticed you’ve not been supporting suffrage. Do the right thing, Harry, and be a good boy and vote to ratify.” In that moment, when he realizes he can make the difference, he can kill the amendment or pass it, he has his mother’s note in his breast pocket, and he changes his stance and he votes aye.

  DR: So it passes?

  EW: Yes. Then what happens is the Speaker of the House, using a parliamentary maneuver, changes his vote to aye. He is very much against ratification, but by doing that, he can trigger something called reconsideration. He puts the vote in limbo, and at any time in the next seventy-two hours he can call the House together again, whoever is there, and reconsider it. He’s buying himself some time to twist arms and kill the ratification. And all hell breaks loose in Nashville.

  DR: But in the end, the amendment passes again?

  EW: It does. He isn’t able to shake that very tiny majority, though they try through threats like blackmail and fake telegrams that “your house is burning down, you better leave Nashville.” There’s a lot of dirty tricks going on during those three days.

  DR: You pass an amendment and it’s certified by the governor, then it has to be sent to the United States secretary of state so he can officially certify it. Did they send a person on a train to Washington, D.C., to get the secretary of state to sign it?

  EW: There were a lot more shenanigans between that vote on August 18 and August 26, when it finally arrives in Washington. The antisuffrage lawyers are successful in getting a series of injunctions that at first freeze the governor from certifying. When he finally is able to certify it, they put it on a train and it chugs its way up to Washington.

  Meanwhile, the suffragists are following it, hoping they can be there when it is signed. It arrives in the middle of the night in Washington.

  The Post Office is the hero of the story. They have their employees waiting for that mail train, and they’re told, no matter what time it is, take that certification envelope and bring it to the secretary of state. They do that at like four in the morning. He receives it, he has it checked over by his attorneys, and he signs it because he doesn’t want any delay. He signs it basically in his bathrobe in his own house, with one witness.

  DR: And that’s August the twenty-sixth?

  EW: That’s the twenty-sixth. So that’s the day it is proclaimed as the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

  JON MEACHAM on John Lewis and Civil Rights

  Historian and Biographer; author of His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope and many other books

  “The world he was fighting to change sixty years ago is in some ways resurgent, and the lessons and the strengths he brought to the fight bear our attention.”

  John Lewis lived two storied lives: one as a very young civil rights leader in the 1950s and 1960s, and one as a selfless congressman widely seen as “the conscience of the Congress” from the late 1980s until his death last year from pancreatic cancer. During both of these lives, Lewis, a sharecropper’s son from Alabama, repeatedly showed physical and moral courage, as well as an unyielding dedication to the mission of improving lives by having America live up to the promises made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

  Lewis’s life in Congress lasted more than three decades. While there, he had the universal respect of his colleagues, and was a key voice on civil and human rights initiatives. But it was John Lewis’s life as a civil rights activist for a decade that will forever be seen as his most historic legacy.

  It was during that time that he was one of the leaders of the dangerous Freedom Rides; that he was imprisoned for leading countless civil rights and voting rights demonstrations; that he was the youngest featured speaker (at twenty-three) at the historic March on Washington in August of 1963; that he was physically beaten into unconsciousness while nonviolently protesting; and that he led over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, two marches that ultimately helped persuade Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  It is this period of Lewis’s life on which Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, focused his attention. In retracing Lewis’s steps, Jon vividly captured the challenges, risks, and courage involved in the life of this heroic civil rights leader. Jon was also able to interview Lewis about his early civil rights activities, and many of those interviews occurred while John Lewis was courageously fighting cancer.

  I have interviewed Jon Meacham in person on a number of occasions, but did so this time virtually from our respective homes for a New-York Historical Society program on September 11, 2020. The interview, like John Lewis’s life, was quite riveting, for Jon was able to eloquently capture the civil rights icon’s humanity, courage, leadership, and humility.

  * * *

  DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Your books are often about people who are not alive when you started writing about them. What prompted you to write a book about John Lewis?

  JON MEACHAM (JM): I was standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March of 2020 with my family and about a thousand other people. It was John’s last trip there, and that was fairly evident. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the previous fall.

  I’d known him for about twenty-eight years. I always thought I would write about him, but I wasn’t sure when. I thought I had another decade or so, because I thought he would keep going. I was standing there watching him, and he had, because of the cancer, lost a lot of weight. So he was physically more like the John Lewis who had been on the bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965, more like the Lewis of the Freedom Rides and the sit-ins of 1960, ’61, ’62.

  I realized, as he was speaking, that his life and message are exactly the antidotes to where we are now politically. He spoke of faith, both in God and in America, both secular and sacred terms. And I thought, “This is a story that needs to be told as much as possible. Not because it’s a fairy tale, not because it’s uncomplicated, but because it is complicated.” The world he was fighting to change sixty years ago is in some ways resurgent, and the lessons and the strengths he brought to the fight bear our attention.

  DR: He had already written an autobiography. When you told him about this, did he say, “I don’t need any more books about me”?

  JM: He was very generous. He has a really excellent autobiography, Walking with the Wind, published in 1998. What I told him was that I wanted to do a kind of theological view of what had brought him to the bridge.

  That was the fundamental question: Why was he on that bridge on Sunday, March 7, 1965? There were a lot of other places he could have been. What was it about him, his character, his background, his vision of the world that put him in the maelstrom of history?

  He said, “Call anytime.” We talked probabl
y a dozen times, from early March until the third week of June. He died on July 17.

  I don’t always do this, but in the three decades or so that I’d known him, whenever we’d spoken, I tended to keep notes on it, because he was a very astute student of history. John was one of the great listeners of all time. Howard Baker once said that the art of politics lies to some extent in the art of listening eloquently. And John Lewis did that.

  And when he spoke, he did so with this prophetic voice, this deep voice. And we argued for twenty-eight years about a very fundamental point, which was that John Lewis believed that if you and I put our hearts and minds in the right place, if we oriented ourselves correctly, we could bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. That the vision of Isaiah, the vision of Micah, the vision of the Christian New Testament could come into actual, tangible reality.

  I don’t believe that. I think that we’re too frail, too fallible to do it, but John Lewis did believe it. I wanted to explore the experience of someone born in a segregated society who faced white-sanctioned, state-sanctioned totalitarian violence. What made him think that perfection was possible? That was not an angle of vision that he had spent a lot of time contemplating himself, so he was very welcoming to that theme being explored.

  DR: Did he live to see a draft of your book?

  JM: He read it. I was touched by that. He contributed an afterword. I wanted him to have the last word, because this is an appreciative account.

  There may be warts to John Lewis, but if so, they’re pretty minor. They’re mostly about pride and ego, more than anything else, which is another reason I wanted to do it. You and I know a lot of folks who had exemplary early careers who tended to take care of themselves as life went on. They started out doing good and they ended up doing well. John Lewis didn’t do that. He stayed in the fight, he stayed in the arena. And I wanted to explore what the roots of that had been.