Who would hold out against the war hysteria? Not the federal government, which finally opposed internment but called for increased state vigilance and state suppression of IWW propaganda. Not the religious leadership, which typically showed little Christian tolerance: a Congregational minister called the Lutheran Church in Germany “not the bride of Christ, but the paramour of Kaiserism,” and another favored hanging anyone who lifted his voice against American entrance into the war. Not judges, who often denounced Wobblies from the bench, or juries—the designated defenders of citizens against their government—who often came in with anti-Wobbly verdicts within an hour of retiring. Not the AFL leadership, which despite its own experience with antilabor bias in the courts seemed only too pleased with the persecution of the IWW.
Early in September 1917, federal agents swooped down on the Chicago IWW headquarters, seizing membership lists, leaflets, buttons, books, office equipment. The authorities seemed intent on destroying the IWW leadership. The following June, two weeks after a deliberately provocative speech by Eugene Debs in Canton, Ohio, a federal grand jury indicted him under the Espionage Act of 1917, which provided heavy penalties for persons aiding the enemy, obstructing recruiting, or causing disloyalty, and under the May 1918 sedition amendment, which banned “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” against the American form of government, the Constitution, the flag, the armed forces, or necessary war production.
In court, Debs invoked the memories of the “rebels of their day” like Tom Paine and Sam Adams, of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison and other fighters for justice. “You are teaching your children to revere their memories,” Debs told the jury, “while all of their detractors are in oblivion.” Promptly found guilty, Debs affirmed on sentencing his “kinship with all living beings.” As the impassive judge stared down at him, he said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal class, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” The judge condemned those “who would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal power.” His sentence: ten years in jail.
“Once lead this people into war,” President Wilson was reported to have said before American entrance into the conflict, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life.” Given this insight, why did not Wilson himself swing his presidential influence more strongly against the intolerance of 1917–19? He had been raised in the tradition of civil liberty and free speech. Liberty for him, as for millions of Americans, was the very linchpin of democracy. To a people who feared government and repression, the Bill of Rights was the essence of the Constitution. Once again from the crucible of war, however, liberty emerged as a misty symbol for most Americans and their leaders rather than a concrete guide to public and private action.
For some Americans, the worst wartime loss of liberty was their right to take the swig of their choice. By 1917, twenty-six states had prohibition laws; about half of these were “bone-dry.” Converted into a win-the-war measure by the Anti-Saloon League, a constitutional amendment banning the “manufacture, sale or transportation” of intoxicating liquors won congressional approval by the end of that year, and passed the required number of states during the following year, just in time to serve as a welcome-home present to the doughboys returning from the vineyards of France.
Not only did Prohibition constitute the kind of governmental intrusion into personal life that Americans had fought since the days of the Mayflower. It was also a federal intrusion. But many a lawmaker who had declaimed for years about states’ rights and individual liberty swallowed without a murmur an act that challenged all the ancient war cries about individualism, personal choice, family responsibility, and local option.
Amid the jingoism and intolerance and repression of the war to save democracy, some Americans fought a heroic battle at home that would produce a vital step in the democratization of American life and politics. This was the battle for woman suffrage.
Not since Civil War days had a body of Americans faced such an intimidating set of political and intellectual problems as had the suffragists during the progressive years. Not only did they confront the most impossible problem of all—how to gain the right to vote without having the vote itself as a weapon to gain it—but they had to conquer a political system loaded with booby traps, minority checks, devices of delay and devitalization, group and individual vetoes. They had to work with Southerners who were anti-Negro, with Californians who were anti-Oriental, with Northerners who were anti-immigrant, with businessmen who were antilabor.
And by now the women leaders were politically bone-tired after seventy-five years of almost ceaseless struggle. Again and again in their letters, they refer to their fatigue, the overwork that was making “physical wrecks” of women, the racking journeys by train and trolley and auto, the late-night speeches and conferences. Elizabeth Cady Stanton talked of the “wrangles, pitfalls, and triumphs” of the suffrage leaders.
“Have I not served out my sentence,” Anna H. Shaw asked in 1914, at the age of sixty-seven. “Has the cause any right to ask more of me? Why may I not go home, home, the one quiet spot in all the world, and with my books and trees and flowers and birds, rest away from all antagonisms, and fruitless misunderstandings.” But Anna Shaw would labor for another five years, then die of pneumonia while on one more speaking tour.
Despite the decades of grinding battles, some women leaders believed that victory was just a matter of time and persistence. Women continued to move into factory jobs; perhaps more importantly, they were entering professional and office positions long reserved for men, while a few more men were taking “women’s jobs” such as cooking and baking. Industrialization, along with its human evils, was generating money and leisure that freed some women to confront such evils. Women leaders were highly conscious of these trends. “Little by little, very slowly, and with most unjust and cruel opposition,” sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman had written in 1898, “at cost of all life holds most dear, it is being gradually established by many martyrdoms that human work is woman’s as well as man’s.”
By the turn of the century, these leaders had to confess failure in their campaign for the vote, save in a handful of states. By 1913, through this state-by-state approach, women could still vote for only seventy-four presidential electors. The problem facing women strategists was not only political but intellectual and moral: To what extent should they be concerned with the rights of blacks, immigrants, illiterates, factory workers, and Indians, rather than exclusively the right of women, to vote—never forgetting that each of those groups included women? One advantage of the state-by-state suffrage strategy was that it let legislatures decide suffrage issues on the basis of local attitudes. But the moral price was high, as lawmakers yielded to regional biases.
The cardinal issue was, of course, black voting in the South. Women abolitionists had joined with men in the searing struggle before the Civil War, and a postwar alliance of voteless women and still-deprived Negroes seemed both a moral and political necessity; at the same time, suffragists still resented the fact that Southern blacks alone were granted citizenship. During Reconstruction, Isabella Beecher Hooker, one of Susan B. Anthony’s Washington correspondents, had reported that she had gone in to see Charles Sumner and other senators with the first copy of a new suffrage pamphlet. She continued:
“I told him I heard him comment almost with tears in the Senate the day before on the case of a black man refused hotel accommodations in the middle of a stormy night—& my tears of indignation blinded my eyes & sent me out of the Senate chamber—because women had been treated thus over & over again….” Sumner asked if more Democrats might support suffrage. “When I told him that Southern democrats were really coming to think that if niggers voted it was high time their wives and
mothers should—he said ‘Well that party isn’t a big thing in the south you know.’ No Sir—said I—but a disaffected republican is about as good as a democrat —isn’t he?” Sumner seemed to agree. “Well then,” she continued, “if we can get some of the democrats & the disaffected republicans to unite with some of the labor people & some of the temperance people, this might be a bigger thing than you speak of—& he didn’t even laugh or attempt a joke.”
Forty years later, suffragist leaders had not only failed to forge a full coalition of the deprived—many were also resentful of immigrants, whom Elizabeth Cady Stanton had publicly pictured as “coarse, ignorant beings” fresh from the steerage, protected by the police in their right to cast a vote, usually a vote purchased by the bosses. She resented the “ignorant native vote” of uneducated workers, even—in South Dakota—of “Indians in blankets and moccasins” who were “engaged in their ghost dances,” while “the white women were going up and down the State pleading for the rights of citizens.” Still, by the end of the progressive and reform years many women leaders were fighting both for the suffrage and for the full panoply of human rights for all Americans—especially after horrifying episodes like the 1911 Triangle fire, in which 146 women garment workers perished and which suggested that women needed safe working conditions if they were even to live to vote.
Human rights for all Americans save—as always—for the Southern black woman and man. By 1915, it was clear that women could neither pressure suffrage through the Southern-dominated committee system of Congress, nor through the Southern state legislatures, in the face of the defenders of states’ rights, Anglo-Saxon civilization, and the “Southern way of life.” The problem was growing acute, for the Republican party was increasingly falling under the leadership of antisuffragists like Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Democracy under the leadership of liberals and progressives—but always there loomed the Southern Democratic lawmakers. The national suffrage movement was losing some of its ablest Southern leaders to the antiblack claims of the region.
Suffrage leaders faced other political problems of intellectually baffling complexity. To what extent should the woman’s movement try to work through either or both major parties, or exert leverage between them, or form its own party as of old? How strongly should it link with labor and consumers and even farmers—and with their causes and demands, some of them distant from the needs of women as such? What political tactics should be used—electioneering (when only a minority of women had the vote), propaganda, personal influence, militancy, even violence? And how deal with the two male leaders who still dominated the political scene—Theodore Roosevelt, who had taken a strong position for a federal amendment in 1912 but seemed to be backsliding ever since, and Woodrow Wilson, who was a master of rhetoric about democracy and women’s rights but somehow could not bring himself to make a clear and eloquent statement for the federal—the “Susan B. Anthony”—amendment?
Slowly during 1914–16, letter by letter, speech by speech, conference by conference, setback by setback, suffragist leaders felt and thought their way through the political murk. The issue was not whether to take a new stand but whether to stick to the federal amendment route despite enticing temptations to yield unduly to “states’ rights.” The decision was to stand firm “for Susan.” Several forces converged at this point. A new cadre of leaders had arisen in the movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had died in 1902, Anthony herself four years later, and Anna Shaw, longtime head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association—a brilliant orator but a poor administrator—had been succeeded in 1915 by Carrie Chapman Catt, a woman of enormous organizational energy, political skill, and fierce determination to mount a final assault for suffrage. Moreover, a more militant woman’s organization had sprung up to challenge the NAWSA—the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, headed by Alice Paul, who as an American student had been jailed in Britain for suffrage militancy and who felt that the time had come for suffragists to be less genteel and to hold the Democratic party—the “party in power”—strictly accountable for carrying out its campaign promises. It was also becoming evident by this time that the state-by-state movement was slowing down, that many suffragists even in the South were now favoring the federal amendment, and that the power of women who already had gained the vote in some states should be mobilized for one final push for “Susan B.”
So the target now was the United States Congress—and one man, Woodrow Wilson, who would have no vote in the long amending process but could have ample influence. The suffragists had about given up on TR, who refused to use his personal influence with Lodge and the other Republican irreconcilables in Congress. But would Wilson use his presidential and personal influence with his Southern irreconcilables in House and Senate?
By no means did all women support woman suffrage; some organized against it and sought to influence Wilson. “The men should stand fast & protect us, protect ourselves as a father refuses his child something he knows that child is better without,” Mary Wilson Thompson urged in a letter to the President. “In the eyes of the world you are the Father of this great United States & you personally know that Suffrage ought not to be granted through Federal Amendment & that it never will by the States individually, that the women of this country are not fitted for the vote & that it will not come if you hold firm. Therefore I ask you to be true to your ideals of States Rights & of womanhood.”
To suffragists, the President was both attractive and exasperating. Originally antisuffrage, he “passed through successive phases in which he pleaded that he could do nothing until his party acted,” though he had led it on the most factious issues; “that he could do nothing until Congress acted and could not invade the province of a Congressional Committee,” though he had often done so; and finally, “that the issue was one solely up to the several states,” in Eleanor Flexner’s summary. Late in 1915, he journeyed to Princeton to cast a vote for woman’s suffrage in a New Jersey referendum. But this was the old state-by-state approach. When, if ever, would the President support “Susan B.” in the face of intense “states’ rights” feeling in his party?
The woman leaders supplied their own answer through a marvelous combination of skill, persistence, and luck. In January 1917, militants began picketing the White House. Standing motionless outside the gates, they held banners demanding, “MR. PRESIDENT, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE?” and “HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?” As the weeks passed and the slogans became more provocative, passers-by tore the banners from their hands, and police began arresting the pickets rather than the troublemakers. Thrown into a notorious workhouse nearby in Virginia, women protested their brutal treatment, went on hunger strikes, underwent forced feeding—and became martyrs.
While the militants catalyzed public sentiment, the more genteel leadership of the NAWSA exerted influence inside the White House gates. While Catt mobilized the state groups, her lobbyists pressured lawmakers on the Hill. Her ablest lieutenant by far was Helen Gardener, an affluent Washingtonian who had the good luck—if such it was—to live next to Speaker Champ Clark. Occasionally she had her cook make up Southern delicacies and hand them to the Clarks’ cook over the back fence. Mrs. Gardener was not above waiting inside her front door, with hat and coat on, until she spied Clark on his front steps; then she “chanced by.”
Helen Gardener also had access to Woodrow Wilson—a resource she used to the hilt. As a crucial House vote neared in late 1917, she played on the President’s newest and strongest motivation by urging him to support suffrage as a war measure. Soon she asked Wilson to intervene with a wavering Tennessee congressman. In January of 1918, the combined efforts of the President, the militants, the organizers, the mobilizers, and the inside operators paid off when the House of Representatives passed the Susan B. Anthony amendment by exactly the required two-thirds majority, with Champ Clark’s “yea” held in reserve in case of a deadlock.
Next the Senate—and now Helen Gardener redoubled her White House oper
ation. Flattering Wilson with the observation that he had linked the cause of human liberty and democracy with the end of government by “male domination,” she persuaded him again and again to intervene with vacillating senators. In September 1918, on her urging and those of Administration officials including McAdoo, Wilson staked his prestige on a sudden personal appearance before the Senate. Coming before the upper chamber on only half an hour’s notice, the President gave one of his most eloquent speeches. “This is a people’s war,” he said; “democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them….
“We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” And women were vital to winning the peace as well.
Eloquent words, wise words—and they did not change a single vote. After a heartbreaking loss by two votes in the Senate, the indomitable suffrage leaders returned to the battle they had fought now for three-quarters of a century—and in another year they won that battle in the Senate. It would take the movement yet another year to push the amendment through three-quarters of the states, but the two-thirds votes in House and Senate, the voting power already achieved in key states, and women’s grass-roots efforts brought victory in time for the election of 1920. Nine Southern states and Delaware refused to ratify.
The final victory was a splendid one for women and all Americans, a victory too for liberty and equality, though a victory so delayed as to lose some of its savor for the exhausted suffrage workers. It was also a flawed victory. Women had succeeded through expediency as well as conviction, making deals, forming coalitions, lobbying like any votemonger of old. All this was necessary in a veto-ridden political system. But they had failed to form firm linkages with labor or immigrants or with blacks, with Democrats or Republicans, with a third party or a party of their own. Lacking such linkages, women might be hard put to use their newly won vote to realize the humane goals that had validated their long struggle.
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