by Elaine Weiss
Kenny wasn’t convinced that the state’s suffrage split, though silly, was so harmful: last year they all managed to work together to push the limited suffrage bill through the legislature, giving Tennessee women the vote in municipal and presidential elections. Kenny was in charge of the Suffs’ publicity campaign, which appealed to Tennessee men’s vaunted sense of chivalry, while also making veiled threats to the state’s ego: “This [bill] will place our state among the progressive ones,” the Suffs told the legislators, “and belie the present indication that it is reactionary and slow in taking up new and progressive ideas.” They brought the Speaker of the state senate over to their side and even convinced a few of the red-handkerchief boys from rural East and West Tennessee to go along. Tennessee women’s record of selfless work during the war certainly seemed to sway some votes.
And in a moment Kenny would never forget, on the day of the vote, the Speaker of the house, the handsome and ambitious Seth Walker, experienced a hallelujah conversion, just as in a revival meeting. It was so thrilling. Walker had been openly opposed to the suffrage bill, but suddenly, with no warning or explanation, he switched sides. Kenny and all the Tennessee Suffs were in the gallery of the lower house, mouths agape, as Walker stepped down from his high perch at the Speaker’s desk, walked onto the floor of the chamber, and, like a man who’d been born again, announced that he was now converted to the cause of woman suffrage.
He declared that his former stand in opposition was wrong, and he was now convinced of the justice of enfranchising the women. He told his fellow legislators that suffrage had been granted to Negroes and that it should not be withheld from their own white women kin. What’s more, Walker reminded his colleagues, the American colonies fought Great Britain over taxation without representation, and the same principle was at the heart of the suffrage issue: women pay taxes and must obey the law.
“I declare to you that this is not right,” he boomed, “and that they should have a voice in our government.” It would be a “crime and a shame,” Walker insisted, “if women were not given this right.” The chamber erupted into cheers. The Suffs never quite understood why the Speaker switched sides, but no one was going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Walker’s change of heart no doubt brought more delegates over to favor the limited suffrage bill, but the governor’s people were still convinced it would go down in defeat and never reach his desk. Their head count was wrong: it narrowly passed. The governor was not pleased. The Suffs had to twist both his arms and legs, but he signed the bill in the last hour of the last day possible, as if he were waiting for the clock to run down and save him. He signed it, Kenny was sure, only because his advisers told him it would be declared unconstitutional. The Antis did try to get it tossed out by the courts (Kenny was told the governor was secretly supporting the Antis’ lawsuits), but they failed: the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case. Tennessee became the first state in the Deep South to give women such voting privileges, and Kenny was very proud of that. Tennessee women still had no say in choosing their state representatives or U.S. congressmen or senators—or their governor—but it was better than nothing.
Now it was going to take stronger muscle to get Governor Roberts to make good on ratifying the federal amendment. Of course, the Tennessee Suffs were also taking a risk in bringing Mrs. Catt here. The newspapers were full of her arrival, not only in the Tennessean and the Banner, but in the Chattanooga News and Memphis Commercial Appeal and Knoxville Journal, and in the wire service dispatches in all the small-town publications. There were already whispers about “Yankee carpetbaggers” coming to town, and Mrs. Catt herself was sure to become a lightning rod. But they would simply have to take that chance.
Suffrage had been Catherine Kenny’s ticket into Nashville women’s society, Protestant society, where Catholic women like her were rarely admitted. It would be a stretch to say she was also admitted into Nashville’s highest social circles; those were still off-limits to her. She was also an outsider, a native Chattanoogan from a large, very poor Irish family, which didn’t help her social standing. Her father died in Chattanooga’s yellow fever epidemic, leaving her mother to support six children under the age of ten. Young Catherine was considered very clever, began studies at a Catholic high school, but she could stay for only a single semester before starting work, at age sixteen, to help the family scrape by financially. She married an ambitious fellow from Nashville and moved to that city, and she moved up in the world.
As her husband’s Coca-Cola bottling plant prospered, they were able to move out of the Irish section of Nashville and into the fashionable west side of town. Catherine could join the right civic organizations, the do-gooder leagues, where her can-do attitude was valued. She also climbed on the suffrage bandwagon and was welcomed into the Nashville Equal Suffrage League. The Catholic Church was no great friend of woman suffrage, it was true, she often had to explain to her WASP friends, but while many high-profile cardinals and bishops railed against suffrage, the church actually had no set dogma on the subject. Catherine Kenny chose to be a good Catholic suffragist.
And Catholic clergy were certainly not the only men of the cloth to castigate the idea of women’s enfranchisement, she was quick to remind her friends. “When you hand her the ballot, you simply give her a club to knock her brains out,” Reverend T. H. Harrison once proclaimed from the pulpit of Nashville’s Adams Presbyterian Church. “When she takes the ballot box, you’ve given her a coffin in which to bury the dignities of womanhood.”
Whatever your religion, it took some gumption to be a Suff in Tennessee; it wasn’t a very respectable calling. You had to grow a thick skin, you had to laugh about what people, and the clergy, said about you and what most of the other women in town thought of you. Your husband and children had to be able to let the nasty words and queer looks roll off their backs, too. Kenny put herself on the line when she presided over the very first suffrage parade in the South, the great procession in Nashville in May 1914. She’d directed it all: the flower-decorated automobiles driving through downtown and the stunning suffrage tableau performed on the steps of the Parthenon in Centennial Park. Some said it wasn’t “ladylike” to parade through the streets like that, but Kenny managed to make suffrage enticing, and fun, and the good publicity spurred the growth of local suffrage clubs around the state.
Mrs. John Kenny, forty-six years old, saw herself as a suffragist, a Catholic, and a Democrat, but most important, as a mother—of four children. It was motherhood that led her to suffrage, made her realize how important the vote would be for protecting her children and making their world safer and healthier. The abstractions, those greater goods of justice and democracy, were all fine, but it was the concrete things, such as better schools, safe milk, and decent hospitals, that drove women like her to want, and work for, the vote. Now all those years of work might be coming to fruition, right in her own backyard.
Kenny walked into the hotel through the ladies’ entrance on Union Street (unless accompanied by a gentleman, that was the only proper way to enter), and the uniformed operator took her to the third floor. She needed to explain just who was expected to make an appearance today, how they fit into the political picture, how useful they might be, how trustworthy. And with whom they were aligned: that was crucial. Above all, Kenny needed to shine a positive light on the circumstances. The Suffs of Tennessee were determined to prove to the Chief that Volunteer State women could, as Kenny put it, “do something else besides fuss.”
As Mrs. Catt had ordered, the Tennessee Suffs had put together a Men’s Ratification Committee: “Get the biggest and most important men of the state,” Catt insisted, “and do it quick before the opposition has made it impossible.” They signed up almost two hundred men of all stripes, from the state’s U.S. congressmen to city mayors and rural legislators, sympathetic clergymen and businessmen, Republicans and Democrats, all headed up by former governor Tom Rye. As Catt instructed, th
ey’d printed all of the men’s names on official letterhead stationery; they had to shrink the type very small to fit them all on the page.
Most auspicious, two very prominent men, the publishers of the rival newspapers in town—Luke Lea of the Nashville Tennessean and Edward Stahlman of the Nashville Banner—men who couldn’t agree on anything in the world, had both signed on to the Men’s Ratification Committee. They detested each other, but they both joined, even contributed a bit of money, and said they would be coming by to greet Mrs. Catt this Sunday, at different times, of course. If these men both backed ratification in such a public way, it only proved how broad support for the amendment really was in Tennessee.
Even the delicate racial theme was moot in Tennessee, Kenny assured Mrs. Catt, who could only give her a sidelong look of skepticism. “I don’t believe the ‘nigger question’ will be raised here,” Kenny maintained, “since Negro women have voted now in the five largest cities of the state, and many of the towns, and in every instance have made good.
“The suffragists organized them and they voted with the best white women, thereby eliminating any political prejudice,” Kenny explained with pride. In the 1919 municipal election, Kenny had worked with Nashville’s leading black suffragists, whom she considered intelligent and very able women—mothers like herself—to register black women and get out the vote. It made her proud to be a Tennessean. It made Carrie Catt nervous. Unless Tennessee was different from every other southern state, and Catt doubted that, there was no resting easy about that particular issue.
In most respects, Catt admired Catherine Kenny’s political instincts and clever footwork. She’d executed a beautiful maneuver a few weeks ago, in late June, when Governor Roberts was still balking at calling the special session. Kenny went straight to the top, to the White House.
“Our Governor says Woodrow is his Moses,” she explained, “and he’ll stand by him and follow him forever.” So Mrs. Kenny deployed the Moses on Pennsylvania Avenue, the Virginian president who had publicly endorsed the Nineteenth Amendment, to soften the heart of the governor of Tennessee. “I conceived the idea of having the President wire him a loving message telling him to deliver the 36th state for the Democrats,” she crowed. It was a brilliant ploy. The governor was sunk. He agreed to call a special session the next day.
Now Kenny presented Mrs. Catt with the results of the first poll of the legislature conducted by the Suffs in every district of the state. Catt studied the poll results, noticing that only about one-third of the members of each chamber had responded. Kenny explained that many delegates simply hadn’t replied or had refused to commit just yet; there were also some influential men who leaned favorably toward ratification but weren’t yet ready to be placed on the definite “Yes” list. Seth Walker, the Speaker of the house, for one.
Kenny described to Catt, in dramatic detail, Walker’s surprise conversion to the Cause last year, how he’d helped swing votes for the limited suffrage bill. Walker hadn’t yet committed publicly but was letting it be known that he would support ratification and possibly even introduce the ratification resolution in the house himself, giving it his imprimatur. That would be a great boon, Kenny told the Chief.
The first in a parade of visitors knocked on Mrs. Catt’s door. Scores more followed: district chairwomen of the new Tennessee League of Women Voters (the league, launched by Catt in February 1920, was already established in states where women enjoyed some degree of suffrage); Democratic Party ward chairmen; local politicians who’d bravely stuck their necks out for woman suffrage long ago; and wary strivers watching to see how the political winds might blow. They lined up to shake the hand of the Chief, and Catt displayed her remarkable talent—a politician’s talent—for making each of the visitors feel important. She looked them straight in the eye, asked them specific questions, cocked her head thoughtfully as she listened to their replies. They all sang a version of the same refrain: Tennessee could do it; it could definitely be the thirty-sixth state. If only she would lead them.
Mrs. Kenny noticed that Major E. B. Stahlman, publisher of the Nashville Banner, was not among the visitors. Personally, Kenny was relieved not to have to deal with Stahlman; he could be so unpleasant, so abrasive. But his absence was puzzling. Perhaps he didn’t want to encounter Luke Lea, but not showing up at all was simply rude.
The stream of visitors continued into the afternoon, but the buzz of conversation abruptly stopped when Lea strode into the room. He was the sort of man who strode, never just walked and certainly never ambled. He was tall, six feet three, and broad-shouldered, youthfully handsome, with pale eyes, carefully combed hair, and full lips that curled into a slight smile. He was a sharp dresser and moved, always quickly, with an air of utmost confidence; some might call it a swagger.
He was the scion of a distinguished Tennessee family—his grandfather had been a mayor of Nashville—and he was raised on the thousand-acre ancestral estate, Lealand, just outside the city. After college he went north to Columbia University Law School in New York City, then came home to Nashville. He was an ardent “dry” man, not so much for moral reasons, but because he felt the liquor interests held too much sway in Tennessee politics, as did the railroads. He fancied himself a progressive reformer in the Theodore Roosevelt mold: he was for busting up the trusts, regulating the railroads and other corporations, and enacting Prohibition, and well before TR came over to the Suffs’ side, Lea supported woman suffrage.
He decided the most efficient way to promote his worldview was to have his own megaphone, so when he was barely twenty-eight years old Lea founded the Nashville Tennessean; he was its owner, publisher, and editor. He gained influence with men who wanted his support, and in 1911 the Tennessee General Assembly selected him as the state’s junior U.S. senator. (This was before direct popular election of senators, when state legislatures held that power.) He was the youngest senator ever sent to Washington, only thirty-one years old; they called him “the Baby Senator.”
Carrie Catt knew Lea from his time in the U.S. Senate, where he was a steadfast friend of suffrage and, remarkable for a southern senator, a solid supporter of the federal amendment. The Suffs could always count on him, and he was a champion of other progressive legislation as well. But before Lea’s first term was over, the Seventeenth Amendment took effect, state legislatures lost their ability to appoint senators, and Lea had to run in a popular election to retain his seat. The Democrats were splintered (it was a chronic condition), and he lost the primary election to Kenneth McKellar, the candidate of Memphis “Boss” Edward Crump. Soon after Lea returned home to Nashville, the nation went to war. Though he was almost forty years old by then, Lea recruited a brigade of Tennessee volunteers to fight as the “Old Hickory” artillery unit, and he took command. Colonel Lea grew a mustache, looked smashing in his high boots, and led his unit in some of the fiercest battles in France.
After the armistice, while Lea and his men sat in Luxembourg, bored, waiting to be shipped home, he had time to think about the war and the precarious peace. He decided it was simply not right for the German kaiser, the man responsible for so much misery around the world, to be sitting in luxurious asylum in a Dutch castle. The kaiser should be forced to go to Paris, where the terms of surrender were being drafted, and stand trial for his war crimes. Lea was a man of action and decided to take international matters into his own hands: he would kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm. He gathered up a few of his best men, got hold of some automobiles and fake passports, and took off with his little crew on what he told them was a secret mission. It was so secret that Lea’s superiors knew nothing about it. The party posed as journalists, bluffed their way through border crossings, found their way around a washed-out bridge over the Rhine, and talked their way into the moated and heavily guarded castle where the kaiser was kept. “We wanted to bring him to President Wilson as a Christmas present,” Lea explained.
Lea and his men got within earshot of Kaiser Bill but we
re sent packing by armed guards. They climbed back into their autos and scooted back to base, returning without the president’s Christmas gift. Lea came home a hero, marching with his men through the streets of Nashville and Chattanooga in the welcome-home parades in the spring of 1919. At the ceremonies, no one mentioned the little matter of Colonel Lea nearly being court-martialed for his kaiser adventure. Lea’s bravado was part of his charm, personally and politically.
Lea looked much older, his face more lined, than Catt had remembered him in Washington just a few years ago. The war, of course. But also the news he’d received while on the transport ship coming home to the States and the welcome parades: his wife was dead. No warning—gone—leaving him with two young boys. He buried himself in work, cofounded the American Legion to give war veterans a voice. But the boys needed a mother. So now, just over a year later, he’d married his late wife’s youngest sister. They were planning a new family. He was a very busy man.
Catt thanked Lea for his continued help and support, then got down to brass tacks. This parody of the governor he was planning to print. It was so dangerous to the ratification effort, it could cost Tennessee and, possibly, the amendment. She didn’t exactly plead but issued more of a calm, cool-voiced order. Lea listened. He was a man who relished a fight, and Mrs. Catt was demanding that he stand down.
After a long pause, Colonel Luke Lea reluctantly but gallantly agreed not to publish the parody, but only if the governor would agree to acknowledge other ratification committees besides his own. Mind you, Lea emphasized, this agreement did not mean his paper would relent in its critical coverage of Roberts. Mrs. Catt agreed that the First Amendment could not be sacrificed for the Nineteenth. The matter concluded, the colonel strode out of the Chief’s suite.
