by Elaine Weiss
The first Anti fusillade was already under way. The plan was for a coordinated bombardment, launched from different platforms, aimed at Nashville but also hitting prime targets in Ohio: Marion and Columbus, Harding and Cox. It began with threatening letters to Governor Roberts from the legal lights of the American Constitutional League. First from the league’s president, Everett P. Wheeler, a luminary of the New York State Bar Association, explaining all the legal reasons the amendment should not be taken up by the Tennessee legislature. This week the governor opened the envelope of a follow-up diatribe from Baltimore attorney William Marbury, who’d led the successful effort to defeat ratification of the federal amendment in the Maryland legislature, warning that Tennessee must think twice before imposing harm on other states.
“It seems monstrous to us here in Maryland, especially those of us who are Democrats, that the legislature of Tennessee should vote to ratify an amendment which would take away for us the right to determine this question for ourselves,” Marbury scolded. Adoption of the amendment would harm Marylanders even more seriously than Tennesseans, Marbury told Roberts, adding sixty to seventy thousand Negro women voters to the electorate. And while the Negro women would be eager to exercise their new franchise on Election Day, white women would be reluctant to go to the polls, due to “the conditions which would exist” in the state.
Those conditions were tacitly understood by the two southern men: white women would not want to vote at a polling station where black women were also present; this public mixing would be abhorrent to any proper woman and keep her from setting foot in an integrated polling place. Democratic white women would stay home, while black women (who were expected to vote Republican, the historic party of Lincoln) eagerly took up their new franchise. The Democratic Party was putting itself at risk of losing the white southern male voter as well, Marbury warned, jeopardizing the “solid South” that was the party’s power base. The Democrats, heavily dependent upon working-class and immigrant voters in the North, brewers and liquor industry men in the Midwest, and states’ rights and Jim Crow preservationists in the South—all of whom felt threatened by women’s enfranchisement—typically opposed woman suffrage more strenuously than their Republican counterparts. Governor Roberts was courting the wrath of them all, Marbury cautioned.
Soon after Governor Roberts received Marbury’s letter, chastising him for endangering the Democratic Party, presidential nominee James Cox received an even sharper note from Nina Pinckard, president general of the Southern Women’s Rejection League, just arrived in Nashville, furious at Cox’s cooperation with the suffragists.
“The home loving women of the South, who do not picket, card-index or blackmail candidates, appeal to you as the leader of the Democratic Party to grant us a hearing,” Mrs. Pinckard wrote in greeting. Cox and the Democrats had ignored and insulted the Antis while they kowtowed to the militant suffragists; southern Antis would stand for it no more. “The very safety of Southern civilization, the purity of Anglo-Saxon blood, is involved in this Amendment,” Pinckard told Cox. “Why should the South support the Democratic Party if Democratic Party candidates, in time of peace, intend to crucify us on a Federal cross with the same nails used by our Republican conquerers after a bloody war?” The bloody war was understood not to be the recent European conflict.
Balancing their assault, the Antis simultaneously turned their fire on Senator Harding. Like the Suffs, they too were annoyed by his flip-flopping and vague assurances. The Antis watched as Harding squirmed in discomfort, caught in the dual pincers of the Suffs, forced to utter allegiance to ratification. The Antis then methodically increased his pain by reminding him of his equally sincere pledges to them. And made those pledges public.
Harding had been most courteous to the delegation of Antis that met with him just before he clinched the nomination in Chicago, a meeting arranged by their mutual friends Senators Lodge, Penrose, Wadsworth, and Brandegee. All the Antis asked of Harding was that he not interfere in states considering ratification of the federal amendment, not push the Vermont and Connecticut Republican governors, not poke his nose into Tennessee. During the first part of July, he seemed to be keeping that promise quite nicely; Vermont and Connecticut were securely stalled. But recently he’d begun dissembling about his “earnest hopes” and “sincere desires” for ratification, and he sent those little love notes to Mrs. Catt and entertained the Alice Paul picketers on his porch. The Antis demanded he explain such double-talk. They released to the press the letter Harding had written to them less than a fortnight before:
“I have ever an ear for any one who may ask to be heard,” he’d written to the chairwoman of the Republican section of the national Anti association. “I should quite as readily give a hearing to those who are opposed to woman suffrage. I do not mean to be a candidate who is the partisan of any particular group in our American activities.” Harding’s trusted private secretary, George Christian, had sent another message to the Antis, reassuring them: Harding had no desire to “wield a club” over the states or the governors to satisfy the suffragists. The Antis released that statement to the press, too.
Now, in this third week of July, feeling more secure about Harding—as secure as possible when dealing with such a prevaricator—the Antis were calm as they watched Harding contort himself into knots. He was attempting to placate the Alice Paul women who didn’t like what he’d said in his Notification Day acceptance speech, while still sweet-talking Mrs. Catt, all the while avoiding the wrath of his manipulative sponsor Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, as the newspapers said. It was quite a scene.
Just hours after Alice Paul rejected his acceptance speech comments on suffrage as inadequate, Harding’s managers scrambled to repair the damage. They hastily arranged for John Houk, a Tennessee state senator and Republican committeeman who was attending the notification festivities in Marion, to send a telegram to the nominee, asking what advice he’d give to his party’s Tennessee legislators facing a decision on ratification. The query was trumped up, everyone knew it was a plant, but it allowed Harding to once again play both sides of the fence.
“It is my earnest hope that the Republicans in the Tennessee legislature, acting upon solemn conviction, can see their way clear to give their support to this amendment,” he wrote to the pro-suffrage Houk. “I believe in suffrage; our party has indorsed it in our national platform; twenty-nine Republican states have ratified the amendment, but one more state is needed to enfranchise every loyal American woman and it would be gratifying to me personally if the Republican members of the Tennessee legislature accomplished that enfranchisement.”
The carefully phrased message enabled Harding to sound sincere and strong but contained enough airy ambiguities to make it soft at its center. It begged the question of what legislators’ “solemn convictions” really were and seemed to give weight to the idea that there was a valid question about the legality and morality of voting for the amendment. And it allowed Harding to maintain his promise of not interfering with state deliberations on ratification, offering advice only when specifically asked. It was the perfect, weaseling pronouncement.
Before packing her bag for her trip to Nashville, national Anti association president Mary Kilbreth warned both presidential candidates to beware suffragist manipulations. And in a display of notable bipartisanship, the Women Voters Anti-Suffrage Party announced that its members would work “against all enemies” and “tools of feminism” of both parties in the fall elections. “The politicians have figured on the Antis refraining from active opposition,” explained Mrs. Morton, the organization’s president. Blacklists would be issued carrying the names of all those targeted for slaughter at the polls, the organization promised, and Anti women were urged to vote against any candidate who has been “prominent in efforts to inflict suffrage on the country.”
As this aerial barrage intensified, the Antis moved ground forces
into Tennessee.
* * *
Josephine Pearson welcomed the first of her distinguished guests to Nashville with gracious southern hospitality and American Beauty roses. She announced their arrival to the press as visiting dignitaries: The brilliant orator Charlotte Rowe, star of so many Anti statehouse victories. And Mrs. James S. Pinckard of Montgomery, Alabama, the president general of the Southern League for the Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Pearson made sure to emphasize Mrs. Pinckard’s southern bona fides. The blood of the old aristocratic South ran through her delicate veins: she was the grandniece of John C. Calhoun, who served his country as U.S. senator from South Carolina, vice president, and secretary of state and who promoted slavery as a “positive good” rather than just a “necessary evil.” He developed the ideological foundations for states’ rights and nullification upon which the Confederacy and southern secession were based. Nina Pinckard kept her uncle’s political concepts alive in her fight against ratification.
It made Miss Pearson proud: southern women defending southern womanhood. She was almost giddy with delight; the idea that these important women, including several wives of southern state governors, were coming to her own home and she was their hostess. She couldn’t pretend to be on their social level, but they shared an essential outlook, a basic bond.
She was also pleased that this time around it would be women leading the fight for the Antis, not just men. From the beginning, Mr. Vertrees had instructed her how to use his arguments in her antisuffrage messages: he would supply “the idea and the bone-work” of the statements, but she should rewrite his communiqués and “put those frills and pleasant[ries] on it which you ladies usually do.” In the campaigns against state suffrage initiatives in 1917 and 1919, Mr. Vertrees had been adamant that no Tennessee Anti woman—not even Miss Pearson, the president—set foot in the statehouse to lobby legislators or testify. This time the women were going to be out in front.
Just as southern women had bravely defended their homes and virtue during the War of Northern Aggression, Pearson was confident that they would now rally to defend southern principles endangered by the amendment. Her pleas rang true with those white southerners alarmed by the louder, bolder demands black people were making in 1920, as they chafed against the tightening grip of Jim Crow laws. Black men’s service in the war and black women’s work on the home front had emboldened their calls for equality, and white southerners were reacting with alarm. Blacks were clamoring for better jobs and better pay, trying to push themselves into better houses and neighborhoods, agitating for improved schools and public facilities, organizing themselves into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; in the eyes of many white southerners, black citizens were getting too assertive. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan—it was experiencing a vigorous resurgence in Tennessee as well as in the other southern and border states—and a surge in lynchings were accepted by some as the most efficient way to teach black people to stay in their place.
Of course, many blacks were leaving the South, following the train tracks north in the first waves of the Great Migration. The exodus had begun in 1916 as America prepared to enter the war and factories in the North were hungry for workers. Now, even with the war over and white men demanding their jobs back, black families were steadily leaving the South, willing to brave the cold and the tenements for the promise of higher wages and the prospect of less demeaning segregation laws.
But the recent arrival of tens of thousands of black southerners to industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh had enflamed racial tensions there and made northerners nervous about this influx of black men able to vote and make policy decisions. It also made northern politicians wary of increasing this black influence by giving black women the vote in their precincts. Somewhat ironically, this made Josephine Pearson’s racist rationales for quashing the Nineteenth Amendment—so carefully calibrated to southern sensibilities—much more palatable and powerful in certain sections of the North.
Pearson wasn’t concerned with sympathetic northerners; she concentrated on rousing her sister and brother Tennesseans. She’d already sent out a letter to sympathetic Tennessee women around the state, appealing for their “active moral backing” to fight the “deadly principles” embedded in the Nineteenth Amendment: surrender of state sovereignty, Negro woman suffrage, and race equality. And she’d taken the lead with a mailing to every Tennessee Anti, man and woman, urging them to insist that their state legislators uphold their oath of office, and the honor of Tennessee, by rejecting ratification.
“The fate of white civilization in the South may hang on a few votes either way, and YOUR action may be the deciding influence with YOUR representatives,” Pearson wrote with her customary fondness for capital-letter emphasis, “so please let your neighbors and your representatives know WHERE YOU stand in this great battle for State Rights, Honor, and the safety of Southern civilization.”
Chapter 11
The Woman’s Hour
AS SOON AS she arrived in Nashville, President General Nina Pinckard of the Southern Women’s Rejection League sent her calling card to Carrie Catt. It took the form of an open letter, addressed to Catt, printed on the editorial page of the Chattanooga Times, and laced with a potent strain of political venom.
“Southern women abhor political combat for their sex,” Pinckard opened. “That is one of the reasons they deeply oppose the campaign of your organization to plunge women into perpetual political turmoil. We have no desire to make your campaign unpleasant,” she continued, and then proceeded to make it as unpleasant as possible.
“You are quoted in a morning newspaper as saying: ‘There is nothing in the past quarter of a century that would be so indicative of the traditions of the old South as would the ratification of this amendment,’” Pinckard wrote, referring to Catt’s attempt to compliment the region’s historic sense of honor. Mrs. Pinckard of Alabama was not accepting the compliment.
“In view of this remarkable statement I must ask you what your association meant when it passed a formal resolution, printed in The Crisis, official Negro organ, ‘That all American men or women, white or black, shall share equally in the privileges of democracy.’”
Mrs. Pinckard was just warming up: “Again, what did you mean when in a signed article in the same issue of that official organ, you wrote: ‘Suffrage democracy knows no bias of race, color, creed or sex’?” Such statements obviously had no place in the traditions of the old or new South, Pinckard made quite clear. “In Tennessee, as you know,” she continued, “ratification cannot be accomplished without the violation of legislators’ solemn oath. Do you dare intimate, however indirectly, that the commission of perjury by public officers is indicative of the traditions of the old South?”
Mrs. Catt read on: “We intend to be as courteous to you as possible in any political campaign, but we must demand that the truth, whole truth, nothing but the truth be stated in this matter of life or death to our beloved Southland.” The Times framed Pinckard’s letter with its own editorial commentary, warning that Catt was summoning “a formidable lobby of Amazonian fighters” to Tennessee “who know the game.”
Catt finished Pinckard’s diatribe. “Pure buncombe” was what she thought of it, but she would have to respond, she couldn’t let it pass. She didn’t mind the personal tone or the insinuations; she was accustomed to serving as the Antis’ punching bag. The oath matter was an Anti canard, but she knew it would need to be vigorously refuted. The mental vision of her very proper, well-corseted Suff matrons as spear-brandishing, one-bare-breasted Amazon warriors was deliciously ridiculous. But she always winced when that certain other issue made its debut.
Anyone could have seen it coming. Catt knew the Antis would play what in future political confrontations would be called “the race card.” She’d warned the Tennessee Suffs at the outset, before she’d even set foot in Nashville: “The ‘nigger questio
n’ will be put forth in ways to arouse the greatest possible prejudice,” she’d told them. Race had always been part of the picture; it bedeviled the suffrage movement much as it haunted so many aspects of American social and political life. The two civil rights movements born, as siblings, out of abolitionism—one dedicated to achieving full equality for black citizens, the other for women—had a tense, ambivalent relationship.
At the close of the Civil War, Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, Lucy Stone, and their fellow suffragists believed that universal suffrage, for black men and for all women, was just around the corner. In retrospect, they were naive in thinking that women’s war work—in the Sanitary Commission, in the hospitals, in the Loyal League—would be rewarded with the franchise. Whether Abraham Lincoln would have ever supported a move as radical as giving women the ballot is doubtful and became a moot question after his assassination. His successor, the Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson (who had been a slaveholder but remained loyal to the Union), certainly had no such inclinations. And the suffragists’ Republican friends in Congress had more pressing problems after the war’s end.
Republican leaders complained that President Andrew Johnson was revealing his southern sympathies with his lenient approach to reconstructing the rebellious states and pardoning their confederate leaders, and this was undermining the spirit and letter of emancipation. Before the close of 1865, the Tennessee legislature was deliberating “Black Codes” to restrict the freedom and movement of the freed slaves, reducing the Negro to a kind of serfdom; other southern states would soon follow with their own Black Codes. Violence against freed blacks was spreading, and in Tennessee a new paramilitary group sprang up composed of ex-Confederate soldiers who dressed in white robes and hoods, riding under the banner of the Ku Klux Klan. Spasms of white mob violence erupted in Memphis and New Orleans, with scores of black citizens killed. Alarmed by the deteriorating situation, abolitionists urged their Republican allies in Congress to do something to offer protective rights for the black population as quickly as possible, enforced on the federal level. Drafts of a new constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth, began to circulate, one meant to secure equal protection, due process, and civil and voting rights to “all persons.”
