by Elaine Weiss
The ratification dress hung in Carrie’s closet for a full year and a half as the Senate dithered and filibustered and twice more voted down the amendment. When the Senate finally passed the amendment in early June 1919, Catt was not even in the Senate gallery. She refused to suffer through the torment of watching stubborn men make a mockery of justice any longer and remained in New York. Mollie Hay was there, keeping tallies with Marjorie Shuler and NAWSA’s lobbying team. They had to sit through the last, vituperative gasps of opposition: one senator bloviated for five hours about the downfall of the nation. Other die-hard senators introduced insidious amendments to the amendment, including one to allow the states to enforce the law as they saw fit, another inserting the word “white” to define the women citizens entitled to vote.
When the amendment finally squeaked through, with a margin of votes you could count on one hand, Hay ran out of the chamber, commandeered a telephone, and called Catt at home. Catt listened quietly, placed the earpiece back in its cradle, and broke into a wild dance, stomping all over the house, whooping and singing. Then she calmed herself, settled down to her desk, and wrote telegrams to the governors of every state, asking them to convene their legislatures—in special session, if necessary—to ratify the amendment. She quickly dispatched another batch of wires to all the National Association’s state presidents: Put your ratification plans into motion. Immediately.
It was finally time to put on the blue dress, but before she could, it needed to be remodeled and shortened by a seamstress, as fashion styles had changed so rapidly in the meantime. It became a joke among her colleagues, a rare political miscalculation, a flight of wishful thinking by the master pragmatist. The dress was a good reminder to not count chickens until hatched, to not count votes till cast, to distrust talk of promises. It might be a good dress to wear in Tennessee, if it weren’t so darn hot.
Though the dress had hung in her closet for an infuriating eighteen months, Catt eventually put it to good use as she blazed through the states, chasing the thirty-six required legislative ratifications. The Anti senators, in their spiteful wisdom, had delayed passage, knowing that sending the amendment out to the states in a year when most legislatures weren’t in session would make it much more difficult to complete ratification with any speed. Most legislatures did not meet every year, and the governors of thirty states would have to be convinced to call their legislatures back for extraordinary sessions, which, many of them complained, involved too much bother, risk, and expense.
The amendment faced an uphill climb in the states where the legislature, or the male voters, had rejected woman suffrage time and again over the years, the states that had remained solidly black on the suffrage map. These states, most in the South and Northeast, would need to undergo quick conversions—or exorcisms—if they were to approve the amendment. Even the states that were white or polka-dotted on the map, those that had already enacted some form of suffrage for their women, might need to be cajoled into action. Catt knew ratification would be no cakewalk, but she believed that with strenuous work it could be accomplished by the end of 1919. She was wrong.
The first votes rolled in effortlessly. In the first week following submission of the amendment to the states, Illinois vied with Michigan and Wisconsin for the honor of being the first legislature to ratify. (Wisconsin rushed its certificate of ratification to Washington on a fast train, delivering it by hand to the secretary of state.) New York whisked its ratification through both houses in Albany in less than three hours, in a late night special session. Minnesota’s legislators stood and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in celebration of their ratification. Members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in Harrisburg also burst into patriotic song when the amendment passed in their chamber. Utah, where women had enjoyed the vote since 1896, approved the amendment unanimously, with an assemblywoman presiding over the quick, decisive roll call in the lower house. Ohio suffragists celebrated their legislature’s ratification at a saloon—toasting their success with lemonade—but even as they quaffed their Prohibition-compliant libations, Antis were already busy circulating petitions to recall the ratification.
After that initial burst of activity—within the first three months, seventeen states were in the ratification “Yes” column—the pace slowed and the trouble began. Some governors used the excuse that it was too expensive to call a special session. Both Catt and Alice Paul encouraged suffragists in those states to ask their legislators to accept a bare-bones per diem; the legislators of a few states actually agreed to pay their own way back to the capital city. Suffs also volunteered to serve as secretaries, pages, and stenographers for the special sessions, to minimize state expense. A few governors expressed broader fears, nervous that calling a special session exposed them to danger: revisited budgets, reconsidered bills, and hostile legislation slipped into the agenda. At least two governors worried that they might be impeached by their legislatures.
Governor Ruffin Pleasant of Louisiana tried to organize a bloc of thirteen southern governors to pledge to defy calls for special sessions and, failing that, to do their best to defeat ratification in their legislatures. That would have killed the amendment for the foreseeable future, possibly for good, right then and there. He wasn’t able to get his fractious fellow chief executives to go along, but Governor Pleasant and his wife made pilgrimages to many of the southern states to personally convince legislators to stand against ratification. Catt heard that Mrs. Pleasant was on her way to Nashville.
Even in the few instances where Suffs were victorious in the border states of the old Confederacy, as in Arkansas, they still had to endure the rabid rants of defiant legislators: “I’d rather see my daughter in a coffin than at the polls,” one doting father exclaimed during floor debate in Little Rock. When Texas suffragists finally prevailed in the knockdown ratification brawl in Austin, the Antis vowed to rescind legislative approval as soon as possible. But there was one statehouse melodrama below the Mason-Dixon Line that the suffragists enjoyed: West Virginia state senator Jesse Bloch’s wild cross-country dash home from California, on special express trains, arriving at the Capitol in Charleston just in time to vote and break the tie in the state senate, clinching ratification.
One Oklahoma Suff died fighting for ratification. Miss Aloysius Larch-Miller, though seriously ill with the Spanish influenza, ignored her doctor’s instructions to stay in bed and insisted upon speaking at a ratification rally. She summoned her strength to make an impassioned plea for a special session, stirred her audience to action, went home, and died two days later. The Oklahoma legislature made ratification of the amendment her memorial.
Both NAWSA and the Woman’s Party headquarters dispatched teams of organizers to help augment state efforts and stir up popular demand for ratification. Alice Paul showed up in the statehouses where legislatures were still in session in early June 1919, even before the amendment documents were delivered from Washington. In the next months she sent her best organizers, including Sue White, to all the states where action on ratification was tardy or in jeopardy. In parallel but uncoordinated tactical moves, Carrie Catt sent Marjorie Shuler and other trusted deputies to the most troublesome states. When she sent Marjorie to reluctant New Hampshire, Catt told her, only half-joking: “You thought you had a real job in Vermont—that was only a pleasure trip. This is a job. Come through with your shield or upon it.” The Spartan imagery was apt because by the fall of 1919, the fight had grown grimmer, the opposition stiffer. Catt marched into the field herself.
She put her dress to work again on her “Wake Up America” tour through the western states in the late fall of 1919, a trip to rally those states that had already accorded full suffrage to women but somehow were taking a very lazy—to her mind, selfish—approach to extending suffrage to the rest of the nation’s women. The governors there were balking and the state suffragists were too passive: their women could vote, why bother with ratification? By fall of
1919, only five of the fifteen full-suffrage states had ratified.
Catt packed her ratification dress and jumped on a train. It was like one of her old barnstorming campaigns from the early days: fourteen conferences in thirteen states in a whirlwind eight weeks. She gave pep talks, she administered scoldings, she negotiated with governors and legislators. Four thousand people packed the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City to hear her speak. It was nostalgic and gratifying, if also exhausting. She encountered women she’d worked with in her very first campaigns, in the horse-and-buggy days when some of these western states were still territories. The women were old and stooped but still fighting, still working for change, and they traveled long miles to greet Catt tenderly, like old soldiers remembering their wars together. A high school beau from Iowa showed up at one of the rallies and proposed marriage to her. She smiled, thanked him, and pushed on to the next event.
She wrapped up her “Wake Up America” tour with pledges from every governor she visited: yes, they would call special sessions. Some continued to drag their feet, but, prodded by newly energized Suffs in their states, they eventually came through. Still, by the end of 1919 only twenty-two states had ratified; by spring of 1920, the count had finally risen to thirty-five—one vote away from victory. But since March there’d been only rejections.
In May 1920, Catt rallied a suffrage Emergency Corps of representative women from all forty-eight states, to descend upon Connecticut in a massive lobby. The goal was to convince, or shame, stubborn Governor Marcus Holcomb to call the Connecticut legislature back into session to act on the amendment. The Emergency Corps was an impressive gathering of women doctors and lawyers, professors, scientists, and other professionals prominent in their fields. They held rallies in all the major cities and towns, gave rousing speeches (Catt herself spoke in New Haven, with the mayor at her side), and presented petitions and resolutions from tens of thousands of citizens, demanding the session. Connecticut could have been the thirty-sixth state prize—all the polls indicated the legislature was willing to ratify—but the governor would not budge. Now, in July, he was still adamant. Voting women would not be good for the political health of Governor Holcomb or for his friend Senator Frank Brandegee, both Republicans up for reelection in the fall, both rabid antisuffragists. Now Governor Holcomb dared not set foot beyond the boundaries of his state because his lieutenant governor vowed to convene the legislature to ratify in his absence. But presidential candidate Warren Harding simply refused to intervene.
Catt made an appearance in Richmond’s Capitol to urge Virginia’s ratification (the legislature still rejected the amendment) and addressed the General Assembly in Dover—and was so sure that Delaware would become the thirty-sixth state. She left for Geneva, optimistic that the final state would be won while she was away and she could return home to bask in glory, indulge in rest, putter in her garden at Juniper Ledge. Retire the ratification dress. It didn’t turn out that way. Which was why she was forced to be in Tennessee.
“It looks as though you will be lashed to the mast until after the special session, according to your wires,” Clara Hyde, Catt’s personal secretary at NAWSA headquarters in New York, teased her boss. But news of Catt’s intention to stay in Nashville for the duration made Sue White a bit nervous: “Things are interesting here,” White joked in a note to Woman’s Party headquarters. “I’m playing a four hand—Mrs. Catt in town.”
While Catt established her base camp in Nashville, she also widened her field of view. She had to look at the big picture, look beyond Tennessee, to Ohio, where the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Parties were gathering with their presidential candidates. It was where Cox’s men in Columbus and Harding’s men in Marion were making decisions about the upcoming campaigns, hatching plans, setting priorities, striking deals. It was where, she feared, political men were making their gentleman’s agreement. Just as they had in the Congress.
During the agonizing Senate delays of 1918 and 1919, she and other suffragists frequently noticed a curious scene unfold during debate in the chamber. The small, obdurate band of Republican and Democratic suffrage opponents—Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, James Wadsworth of New York, Frank Brandegee of Connecticut, Oscar Underwood of Alabama, John Shields of Tennessee—what Catt called the Unholy Alliance, enjoyed the bonhomie of smug collusion. The Suffs watched these senators from opposite sides of the aisle, who were “as divided as the Kaiser and the King of England” on most policy issues, wrap their arms around one another’s shoulders, slap backs, and laugh in jubilation, and Catt knew the amendment would be knocked down for another round. That’s all it took: an understanding. That’s what she feared was going on now in Ohio.
Catt’s suspicions weren’t paranoid, they were practical: Why else would there be no report of Cox and President Wilson discussing ratification at their meeting? Because they were afraid of upsetting the Democratic base in the South? Why would Harding and the Republican leaders sit on their hands and make no real attempt to push the Vermont and Connecticut governors to grab the golden ring for the party, bring in the thirty-sixth state, get credit for securing the woman vote?
“Knowing men pretty well, I am very certain that these Republican governors would never have taken this action had they not been convinced that no Democratic state would enter the lists as the much wanted 36th,” Catt told a suffrage colleague. “They are confident no Democratic state can be secured. They are too clever and crafty not to have some reason for that attitude.”
The reason, she was hearing from her political informants, was that a mutual agreement was being forged between the parties to stop the ratification count at thirty-five states, both parties doing their part to quietly block the amendment from going into force before Election Day. “We are now so convinced that the opponents have sewed us all up in a bag and will prevent ratification before the Presidential election,” she fretted to another suffrage colleague. It was easier this way, relieving both parties’ anxiety about millions more unpredictable women voters flooding into the polls, upsetting apple carts. And, conveniently, neither party would get credit, or blame, for giving all women the vote. It would also protect vulnerable congressmen and senators who feared being punished by women voters for their long stands against suffrage. It made perfect sense.
And if that weren’t enough reason to stall ratification, the Antis were already making good on their promise to throw injunctions and lawsuits in the path of state ratifications, and now they were also threatening to contest the presidential election itself, if ratification was completed in time and all women could vote in the fall. The chaos of a disputed White House contest was spooking both parties.
Catt also heard that the Antis were busy talking to the big party donors, painting a lurid picture of potential November madness, and convincing them to make their campaign donations contingent upon a pledge that the party would put the brakes on ratification, hold it where it stood, at a useless thirty-five. After the election, well, who knew if the amendment would reach the thirty-six-state threshold or if some of the Antis’ legal challenges to the completed ratifications would keep things in limbo for years longer.
Catt felt that the women of America should not stand for it. She made her first move, sending a telegram to Esther Ogden, an officer of NAWSA and a Democratic Party insider who served as Catt’s personal envoy to the party leadership. Ogden was in Columbus awaiting the arrival of Cox, Roosevelt, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for their campaign-planning powwow. Ogden was poised to pounce.
Her demands were polite but had a distinct edge: the party had the opportunity to “render an act of supreme justice to the women of America,” she told them. The amendment was on the verge of success, “but the 35 ratifications it has to its credit make a lifeless record without the 36th to vitalize them.” She insisted the DNC assume responsibility for securing ratification in Tennessee, “and rest satisfied with nothing short of that achi
evement.” The message Catt wanted to convey was between the lines but perfectly legible: Enough of your resolutions and promises. We want action.
“Get some kind exclusive statement Cox and Harding,” Catt wired to Ogden. “Put in newspapers and wire to me so I can give it publicity here.”
Ogden, who also wore the hat of president of the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company, knew what the Chief meant by “exclusive”: grabbing the press spotlight from Alice Paul, who’d commanded so many inches of newspaper space in the past week with her meetings with Cox and threat of confrontation with Harding. After presenting Catt’s demands to the DNC, Ogden, together with a few other Democratic women, dined with Governor Cox and Catt got her statement, vague but useful.
Catt also sent a delegation of Republican women to Marion to wrangle a statement on Tennessee from Warren Harding. Harding was a sleek specimen of that genus of politician Catt found most odious: the white-plumed dissembler, the golden-throated waffler. She’d seen his kind before. For weeks he had been privately promising both NAWSA and Woman’s Party Suffs that he would soon announce the “good news” of his efforts to convince the Vermont or Connecticut governors to call their special sessions. Republicans assured Catt: Soon, soon. Nothing happened; the governors only dug their heels in deeper. “Nothing can give us that state except the death of the governor,” an exasperated Catt said of Vermont, “and we haven’t come to murder yet.”
The question now was: Would Harding commit to influencing the Republican legislators in Tennessee to ratify? Ogden and the NAWSA delegation paraded into his office, unannounced, just as he was stepping out to dinner. Their meeting lasted just a couple of minutes; whether Senator Harding was eager to improve his image among Suffs or simply eager to eat isn’t clear, but the women quickly left with their trophy in the form of a telegram to Mrs. Catt:
