SIXTEEN
On election day, William and his father left the house in Presidio Heights alone and went to their polling place. They walked through a gauntlet of silent women, lining both sides of the street. The women were dressed all in white, wearing purple, white, and green sashes and holding signs and banners that had been designed, and in some cases made, in the Frazier house. VOTES FOR WOMEN, they shouted without opening their mouths. OUR FREEDOM IS OUR RIGHT.
William didn’t ask his father how he’d used his vote. He felt more comfortable in the assumption that they’d both supported his mother and the women she’d fought for.
Back at the house, his father sequestered himself in his study and left the rest of the building to the suffrage workers. His mother had closed her storefront headquarters for the day and invited everyone to use the house as a home base.
That had been William’s suggestion. With each day that brought the vote nearer, the rhetoric, and the resistance to the cause, had grown more incendiary. Horrible threats had been mailed to the headquarters or simply tacked to the door. In one case, a vile threat had been smeared in feces across the headquarters window.
Threats had come to the house and the ranch as well, but William felt more able to protect his mother and aunt, and their compatriots, from the house. No one had tacked a threat to this door or smeared shit on these windows.
The house buzzed with the work and talk of dozens of women, and more came and went, relaying reports from the ballot watchers they’d deployed, but the atmosphere was sedate. They knew their chances weren’t good. Even Mrs. Catt had canceled a scheduled visit in San Francisco on election day because the prospects for success had become so grim.
Every major newspaper in the state had come out strongly against women’s suffrage, with editorials ranging from condescending—arguing that it was man’s duty to protect woman, not throw her into the lion’s den of politics—to offensive—calling suffrage a ‘disease’ and making snide caricatures of the cause leaders, like Angelica Frazier. In one case, a Democratic state senator wrote in the Los Angeles Times, that it was the ‘mannish female politician and the little effeminate, sissy man’ who supported women’s suffrage.
That opinion, William had heard directed at him scores of times by now. His list of men he’d soon use any slightest new provocation to punch hard and repeatedly about the head had grown very long. He’d left many meetings with his palms scored by his fingernails, from clenching his fists so hard.
His mother’s cause, and her family’s open advocacy of it, particularly William’s, was causing trouble for Scot-Western as well. The summer meeting in Sacramento with William Kent had been the first clear sign that trouble was brewing. Since then, even the simple deals William—or more importantly, his father—had tried to negotiate had been met with a ‘wait and see’ attitude.
After a full year of disappointments and failures, William had begun to question whether he was truly suited to follow in his father’s footsteps, or if he had any kind of future in politics, either. Perhaps his tongue wasn’t as silver as he’d been told, and had believed.
But to have his father set aside—that was a sobering development. Henry Frazier, like his father before him, had always been the oddball among the tycoons. He didn’t play the same game his fellows—the Stanfords and the Crockers, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers—played. But he’d had a seat at the table, and not because it had been pulled out for him. He’d taken that seat himself, and they dealt him in. He had power and influence because his way of doing business had been successful, and he couldn’t be ignored.
But they seemed to be willing to try, on the basis of the Frazier position on suffrage. With enough concerted effort, Scot-Western could get iced out of all kinds of contracts. The most damaging would be the contracts not for new work but for maintenance and supplies. A railroad and transit company that couldn’t keep its lines in repair would crumble and go under faster than a sandcastle at high tide.
And this was why William hadn’t asked his father how he’d voted—and why his father wasn’t participating in the election day activities.
The telephone had been ringing throughout the day, but when the polls closed and results began to be tallied, one of the women pulled up a chair in the hallway, next to the telephone, and fielded call after call after call.
San Francisco reports came in first, if only by virtue of being local, thus attached to the same switchboard as the Frazier’s house.
In their own hometown, the referendum was being crushed. That news turned the wary but companionable gathering into a wake.
A wire came in from Los Angeles. More devastation. The two most important cities in the state had rejected the enfranchisement of half their population. The cause seemed lost.
At that point, in the middle of the night, the stalwart serenity with which William’s mother had fought this battle—had been fighting it, for years—faltered. She stood without a word and walked away from her sisters in the cause.
Before they could all feel abandoned by their leader in their own hour of need, Adelaide stepped up and gave them the words they needed to hear. William left her to it and followed his mother.
He found her where he knew she’d be—in the garden. She stood and looked out over the moonlit city. Without a word, he stepped to her side and hooked his arm around her shoulders. She sighed and leaned in.
“It’ll happen, Mom. Five states have already granted women the vote, and they’re all in the West. Women will vote. The fight’s not lost. It’s just not over—but it wouldn’t have been over tonight in any case. There’s a whole country to change.”
“I’m tired, William. I’m tired of fighting every day. I’m tired of forcing people to listen to me. I’m tired of the condescension and derision. I’m tired of being threatened and insulted. I’m tired of feeling guilty for how I hurt your father’s success simply by expressing an opinion. But most of all, I’m tired of not counting. I matter. Women matter.”
“I love you, Mom.” She didn’t need him to agree with her; she knew he did. So William simply tightened his hold on her and gave her his strength to rest hers on for a while.
They were still standing amidst the rosebushes when William heard rustling and looked over his shoulder. Adelaide hurried across the lawn, waving papers in her hand. He recognized them as telegrams.
“Angelica! The whole Central Valley went for suffrage! Come back inside! We’re not done yet!”
The margin was as thin as a sheet of paper, so thin that the next morning’s papers tolled the death knell for suffrage. But the workers held on, watching the tally of every ballot in the state. Their strategy of bringing the fight to the whole state had begun to pay off with the Central Valley. Then the rural north. The south, the east. The mountains. The desert.
It was the afternoon of the following day before the results were assured. With virtually all precincts reporting, and with just barely more than fifty percent of the vote, California became the sixth state in the union to grant women the right to vote.
It hadn’t been the wealthy, the cultured, the educated who’d lifted women up. It had been the working class folks. Farmers and laborers. Men who saw the raw strength of women every day and recognized that their minds and voices were as essential as their bodies.
The true ‘little, effeminate, sissy men’ had been the citified dandies on William’s list, too insecure in their own power to share it.
After a long fight, and a long night and day waiting for each new result to come in, everyone in the Frazier house was exhausted, and the celebration was more subdued than it would have been the night before. But he looked at his mother and saw that this weariness was different from the night before. This could be smoothed from her face with a few hours’ rest.
William’s father came into the room and leaned on the doorway, watching the women cheer the news, a contemplative smile on his face. When his mother saw him, his smile grew. “Well done, sweetheart. I’m pr
oud of you.”
William watched as his mother went to him, and his parents embraced.
This fight was over, but there were more fights ahead.
His mother chose the site of San Francisco City Hall to give her victory speech the next morning. The opulent structure had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, less than ten years after its completion, and construction on its replacement was still in the planning—more like the arguing—stage. She’d chosen the site for just that reason.
Wearing an elegant gown in suffragist white, her hat festooned with purple irises and white roses, looking for all the world like the refined doyenne of San Francisco society she was, Angelica Frazier stood before a ruined relic of the previous century and spoke to a crowd of supporters, reporters, politicians—and a few hecklers. But William’s father had hired some of the Scot-Western men to protect the women, and the hecklers didn’t get a chance to detract from her moment.
“This victory is not simply a victory for women,” she asserted. “It is a victory for all of California. Every woman, every man, every child in this state will know the beneficent power of a woman’s voice. It is a victory for our magnificent city as we continue to heal, to rebuild, and remake ourselves into something even greater. It is a victory for our great nation, as we take another long step toward equality. We will come together, all of us, as one, arm in arm, and walk into the future.”
William stood off to the side, with his father, out of the line of notice, and watched her speak. Never had he been more proud to be her son.
As the mostly friendly, or at least neutral, crowd applauded one of the better lines of her speech, William studied his father. While John Frazier had been known for his colorful comportment both in business and in leisure, his son Henry took after his German mother in most respects. As she had been, he was serious and inscrutable, unless he’d had a few glasses of scotch, which tended to, as he put it, ‘pull the Scot out’ of him.
Or unless he was caught unawares admiring his wife.
In the final weeks before the election, when the attitude among their professional and personal acquaintances had shifted from affectionate tolerance for Mrs. Frazier’s ‘little project’ to simmering hostility toward her ‘mannish agenda,’ William’s father had pulled away from the cause. He’d rarely been an open advocate, but in the past weeks, he’d absented himself even from family conversations on the subject. His support had come passively, in not interfering, and William knew he’d become deeply ambivalent about the cause.
But on this day, in the blush of the narrow, hard-won victory, he watched his wife stand in the sunshine, resplendent in the colors of women’s suffrage, and his expression was alight with love and pride.
Her speech finished, the crowd applauded. A few women held up the placards they’d made during the campaign. A photographer hurried up to her, burdened with his heavy gear, and she nodded. She turned and found William and his father; she waved them to join her.
William took a step, but his father held him back. “No, son. This is her moment. She’s won her prize. Now, you step out. You and I, we have to hunker down. The storm that’s about to hit us could wipe Scot-Western off the map.”
His mother saw their hesitation. Her bright smile dimmed a bit as she turned back to the photographer.
“She’s not done fighting, Dad. You know that. Her eye’s already on the next prize.” An amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
“You’re done fighting with her, William. Now, you focus and help me keep afloat the business that makes your mother’s fight possible. That’s the fight you’re needed in now.”
The weeks immediately after the election were tumultuous, to say the least. There were immediate reprisals against the family and Scot-Western. The first volleys came in the form of direct attacks—bricks thrown at the house, streetcars disabled, workers intimidated. A ticking box was left on the Presidio Heights doorstep—it turned out to be a mantel clock and nothing more, but had caused quite a commotion before it was discovered to be harmless.
William’s father was convinced that these attacks were instigated by the Nob Hill crowd, and William didn’t disagree, though there was no proof. The most elevated among San Francisco society weren’t above hiring out for a little dirty work, and they’d accused William and his father, and his mother, of ‘disloyalty’ more than once.
Then came the less violent but no less vulgar social and business reprisals. William’s mother was kicked off the board of the San Francisco Symphony—a board she’d been instrumental in founding. Business meetings were cancelled. And the worst: orders stopped arriving. The supply line dried up.
William remembered the night of Nora’s dinner, when he’d argued that America was young and energetic and progressive, that it remembered its roots and didn’t fear the future. He’d made that argument dozens of times in those months in England, but it was that night he remembered, and her hungry eyes as she’d devoured his every word. He’d sketched an image of a better place, a freer place, than musty old England. He’d believed the vision himself. He’d lied to her, and to himself. He’d done that often, as it turned out.
The voice of Scot-Western, William spent the rest of October traveling throughout California and the West, trying to rebuild, or at least patch up, long-standing relationships with suppliers and associates who’d suddenly become suspicious of a company run by men who ‘couldn’t even control their women.’
Faced with that accusation, he’d had two options: disavow his mother, or make her case for her and convince the skeptics that it was a position of strength. In the end, he’d had only one option. His father had been wrong that he was done fighting his mother’s fight. He was still fighting; only the battlefield had changed. Because it wasn’t her fight. It was his, too. What she wanted, what he wanted, was simply just.
“I tell ya what,” Calvin Watters, the owner of an ironworks company in the Sierra foothills said, leaning back in his desk chair and putting his boots on his blotter. He enjoyed being in this position of power over William. “You show me your balls ain’t made of eggshells, and I’ll figure out what’s slowing up production downstairs.”
William knew damned well what was slowing up production downstairs: Calvin Watters. “What does that mean?”
Watters wasn’t a tycoon. He wasn’t a millionaire, and he’d probably never been closer to a society event than a barn raising. His roots were humble, and his success was local. But he was important to the railroad industry, because he made the parts and tools they needed.
“I heard all the stories about the Frazier men, how they’re better’n most rich bastards because they came up humble. Worked the railroads even when they didn’t hafta. Swung hammers just like men. Slept in the camps and all. That true?”
“I don’t know about being better, but yes, I worked on the line when I was younger.”
“I know it is. Heard stories about you in the camps. Made an impression in some bare-knuckle fights.”
“That was a long time ago. Fifteen years.”
“You know, my boys here got themselves somethin’ like a league. Got matches in the yard every Saturday night. Tomorrow night included.”
William knew, but he asked anyway. “What are you saying?”
Watters took his boots off his desk and leaned forward. “I’m sayin’, you show me you’re still man enough to go toe to toe with a roughneck, and I’ll believe you don’t got your mama’s apron string tied around your willie.”
“You want me to fight. And if I do, you’ll open the supply line to Scot-Western back up.”
“Smart man. Guess that’s why you’re the one in the fancy suit, ain’t it?”
Setting aside the riot that had gotten him arrested in London, the waterfront brawls Chris had pulled him into before he’d returned to England after the quake, and a few swings at bastards going for his mother during the campaign, William hadn’t truly fought in ten years—and he hadn’t been in a bare-knuckle ring sinc
e his time on the railroad.
“Terms?”
Watters grinned. “I pick your opponent. You’re still standing after three rounds, and I’ll trust you with my product again.
Watters clearly had an opponent in mind, and William had no doubt he would be significantly bigger and stronger than he was. Probably more skilled, certainly more prepared. Even so, he relished this turn of events. For months, his masculinity had been challenged—overtly and by innuendo—in civilized meetings with powerful men. He’d remained calm and swallowed every snide attack. Finally, he could fight back.
“Tomorrow night?”
“Seven sharp.”
“I’m in.”
He spent Saturday in his hotel room, doing what he could do to prepare. He was in good overall shape, he thought—he tried to stay fit and not overindulge egregiously in anything, he walked everywhere he could, and he did plenty of riding and physical work when he was at the ranch—but he’d spent the past four weeks in train cars and motorcars, traveling for Scot-Western, and he was not in fighting trim.
Back at the ironworks that night, he walked alone through the good-natured crowd and wasn’t remotely surprised to find a freak of nature waiting for him in the makeshift ring. Likely close to seven feet tall, broad as a barn and hard as a boulder, pale as moonlight and completely bald.
William laughed. There was no way he could beat this guy. Keeping his head on his shoulders for three rounds would be a damned miracle.
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