by Elaine Weiss
Through her hotel window, Catt could see the state Capitol, just two blocks away. The statehouse was built of huge blocks of local gray Bigsby limestone and enormous columns of East Tennessee marble that had been quarried and cut, transported and hauled, in the 1840s and 1850s, by prisoners and black slaves, under the supervision of stonemasons and the occasional overseer’s whip. It was a handsome building, at once imposing and delicate, graced with a tall cupola topped by a decorative finial. The Capitol building had been the despised Yankee headquarters through three years of Union occupation during the Civil War, fortified by a circle of cannons aimed at the restive city below. It was ironic that the Woman’s Hour might finally toll inside a building built by the sweat of slaves, occupied by Mr. Lincoln’s troops, where the marble railings were still pocked with bullet holes from the gunfight that erupted when the Tennessee legislature argued over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, state sovereignty, and the rights of citizens to vote.
Chapter 12
Cranking the Machine
I HAVE COME to help you win the 36th state,” Carrie Catt announced to her Tennessee troops with the crisp inflection of a command. Under the circumstances it was a supremely optimistic notion, but Catt always liked to view her glass as half full. She’d learned it was the only sane way to approach the seemingly impossible.
Everything the Cause had accomplished—every state won, every piece of legislation, every change of heart and shift in policy—was once considered utterly impossible. Until it wasn’t. The trick was to create a positive atmosphere, she believed, conjure your own climate of success, set an ambitious goal, and then build your own highway to reach it. “Roll up your sleeves, set your mind to making history, and wage such a fight for liberty that the whole world will respect our sex,” she’d exhorted again and again.
Make success seem natural, inexorable, she always told her suffrage workers. People, especially men, especially politicians, liked to be on the winning side. So hers was the “Winning Plan,” not just the “Workable Plan”; the Victory Convention, not simply the 1920 convention. Some called this premature boasting, others viewed it as hubris, but Catt considered it straightforward optimism. Optimism plus a plan—always a detailed plan—augmented by elbow grease would yield results.
Now was that time, to crank her political pressure machine—a multitiered engine designed to exert force downward from the White House, the presidential candidates, and national parties and upward from the people of Tennessee—all energies focused on squeezing the governor and men of the statehouse. She’d begun the action at the top, with Woodrow Wilson, Cox, and Harding; now she’d start the agitation from below and engage essential gears in the middle. The Chief took command and issued her first set of marching orders to the Tennessee League of Women Voters, sending them out into the field.
Mrs. Kenny’s poll of the legislature had too many gaps. Too many legislators had not responded or refused to reveal their inclinations. “That unheard from number can and may defeat the ratification,” she told the league women, who were all veterans of NAWSA. Those secretive solons needed to be tracked down and pinned down. Go find them, go knock on their doors, she ordered.
Gather a group of local women to visit each legislator, Catt instructed—the larger the deputation, the more impressed the delegate will be—and demand he sign the pledge to support ratification. Be prepared to confront negative responses: the Antis were already busy, they were on the ground trying to convince legislators to pledge against ratification, Catt warned her tender troopers. “They will lie, misrepresent and appeal to all the sordid motives they may find. . . . Please hasten now and report as fast as you can,” she implored. “We must ‘Trust in God, but keep our powder dry.’” Even the devoted pacifist had taken up military lingo.
State suffrage leaders Kate Warner and Abby Milton had finally returned from their travels, and Catt summoned them, as well as Catherine Kenny, to her room for briefings. They agreed that Tennessee’s friends of suffrage needed to be shaken awake from their summer stupor with a series of revival meetings across the state, starring the Chief. And Catt also needed to speak to the men, to the commercial-civic elite, that crucial middle layer of political influence. Abby Milton offered to escort Catt on the trip; Marjorie would join them. Those events were being arranged, and while Catt knew it was the absolute best way to spark enthusiasm and garner publicity, she wasn’t looking forward to ten days on the road in this roasting heat.
Too many legislators were holding back, as if they were waiting for orders, or blandishments, before committing. The pledges already in hand were being carefully card-indexed by Catherine Kenny and her league workers, using NAWSA’s proven system. At New York headquarters, file cabinets bulged with folders for every congressman and senator (they’d been compiled at Suffrage House in Washington over the years) as well as governors and key state legislators, detailing their political and personal lives. The cards recorded his background, character, and temperament; data on his political, business, social, and religious affiliations; a record of his votes and stands on woman suffrage and other public issues. There was also a confidential memo on any known scandals or indiscretions in his closet, his friends and enemies, his vulnerable spots. The Woman’s Party maintained an even more detailed dossier system at their headquarters. The Antis railed against the indexing system, claiming it was, variously, an invasion of privacy, a diabolical blackmailing scheme, or, given its efficiency, an un-American tool inspired by Germany. Catt took their denunciations as proof that the system worked.
Esther Ogden arrived in Nashville, hand-delivering Governor Cox’s message of support to Catt. Ogden was a shrewd, detail-oriented Suff, whom Catt had put in charge of the Woman Suffrage Publishing Company, which pumped out tens of thousands of pieces of informational literature a year (including the ever-changing versions of the Suffrage Map), published The Woman Citizen, and was readying the final volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. Now Ogden offered Catt an unvarnished report from the temporary center of the political universe—Ohio. Cox was earnest, Ogden assured Catt; whether he could be effective was a different question.
* * *
Carrie Catt believed that evolution drives an upward arc. In her own lifetime she’d witnessed the progress of societal attitudes toward woman suffrage, the large cultural shifts that provided an opening for distinct victories, the accumulation of those small victories making change seem more natural.
Aunt Susan used to say that she could sense those shifts, mark suffrage’s social and political progress, by what types of objects were thrown at her when she spoke on a stage or soapbox. The rotten eggs of the early days evolved into simply raw eggs, a big improvement. The rotten tomatoes transformed into more benign vegetal projectiles, the verbal assaults grew less vulgar, the physical threats less ominous. And then there was Aunt Susan’s favorite liminal moment, when Buffalo Bill Cody saluted her—and, by extension, the Cause—on horseback at his Wild West show.
It was at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair where a grand Woman’s Building showcased the accomplishments of women around the globe and the World’s Congress of Representative Women of All Lands brought together five hundred delegates from twenty-seven countries to discuss a wide range of topics; suffrage was definitely on the agenda. The weeklong congress drew almost 150,000 spectators, and Anthony and Stanton gave speeches to very large, enthusiastic audiences. “We did a whizzing business,” Catt noted with pleasure as the Suffs handed out reams of literature.
Anthony was so fascinated by the magnificent White City, and so delighted by public response to suffrage talks, that she stayed the whole summer. She gave more speeches, but just her presence on the grounds was a walking advertisement for the Cause; her face had become the personification of the movement. Crowds gathered around and cheered her on the pathways; audiences applauded her; even if she wasn’t speaking, they wanted her to stand up and take a bow. She was a celebrity. After so many years of
ridicule and rebuke, she enjoyed it mightily. And the ideas of woman suffrage seemed to have emerged from the realm of freakish and frightening into popular conversation.
Buffalo Bill’s show, starring that amazing lady sharpshooter Annie Oakley, was the entertainment hit of the fair, and Cody invited Anthony to be his guest in a ringside box. Cody made his entrance astride his horse, racing full tilt around the sawdust arena, waving his hat as the band played; he galloped straight for Anthony, wearing her trademark red silk shawl, clapping in the front row. He pulled up the reins, whipped off his cowboy hat, and gave her a grand salute. The crowd cheered and gave her an ovation; she stood, bowed, and waved her handkerchief in thanks.
It was one of those moments when Anthony felt that things changed, attitudes shifted. It wasn’t just the respect and affection shown to her at the Wild West show, it was the audiences at the fair, the way they listened respectfully and didn’t jeer. It was the way the press suddenly treated her differently. Catt noticed the change, too: “The cartoonists had pictured Miss Anthony for years with a dress hanging in uneven scallops and carrying a large umbrella,” she explained. “Other suffragists were made to look like escapers from the insane asylums. Anti-suffragists were good-looking, fashionably dressed, highly respectable women. Now the cartoonists changed their clothes. Miss Anthony never carried her umbrella in a cartoon after 1893.”
“Failure is impossible,” was Anthony’s parting exhortation to her followers, and Carrie Catt accepted this as not simply an upbeat motto, but a working philosophy. There would be many failures, but failures must be transformed into valuable lessons.
From the time of their first bitter referendum defeat in Kansas in 1867 to this moment in Nashville in 1920, the suffragists undertook 480 petition and lobbying drives to get state legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks in their platforms; and 56 state referendum campaigns, trying to convince male voters to grant them the vote. Most of these campaigns were unsuccessful, and nineteen sessions of Congress rebuffed their efforts for a federal amendment. But always, the Suffs tried again.
When Catt lost the first suffrage referendum in New York in 1915 (after orchestrating 10,300 rallies, distributing 7.5 million leaflets, parading down Fifth Avenue with forty thousand marchers before more than a million spectators), she and Mollie watched the returns from headquarters, saw the tears in the eyes of their faithful workers. “How long will it delay your fight, Carrie?” Anna Shaw had asked her that night. “Only until we can get a little sleep. Our campaign will be on again tomorrow morning,” Catt replied. Suffrage had not been defeated, she insisted, only postponed. They learned from their mistakes and tried again: “Victory in ’17!” was their new motto. On election night 1917, Carrie and Mollie watched as the building that housed The New York Times—whose editorial pages opposed suffrage with every pica inch of type it could muster—flashed its rooftop white spotlight to signal that the referendum had passed, New York women had won the vote. It was another of those moments when Catt could feel the shift, in both popular opinion and political consequence. Winning New York, the nation’s most populous state, caught the attention of every politician, from President Wilson on down, and turned the tide for the federal amendment.
If things looked iffy in Tennessee, Catt would never admit it in public. She would be resolutely, defiantly, optimistic. Hope was a powerful motivational tool. But privately, she was worried.
All around Tennessee, suffragists were roaming the countryside, hunting down the legislators who’d not yet responded, many of whom lived in remote areas of the state. Some deputations traveled by train to tiny depots to find the village home of their delegates; others were carried in wagons as far as the road would go, finishing the journey to an isolated farmstead on foot, their dresses trailing in the dust or mud. Still others set off on the state’s rutted mountain roads to confront their reluctant representatives. They were drenched by rainstorms, chased by watchdogs, and stranded by flat tires, but they found their men.
* * *
On the second floor of the Commercial Club of Nashville, in the handsomely draped dining room, the Kiwanis Club held its luncheon meetings, and the guest speaker at this hastily called special event on Friday, July 23, was Mrs. Catt. She entered the inner sanctum of Nashville’s business world with the brisk air of an experienced executive. This was her debut public performance in the Tennessee campaign, and she needed to make a strong impression.
The Kiwanis Club men were the friends and colleagues, partners and clients, fishing buddies and poker chums, of the men who made decisions in this town and in the statehouse. She had to convince them that it was in their interest to support ratification of the federal amendment. It was the perfect place to try out her approach: the lines of logic, the persuasive arguments, the bits of color she’d use on the stump around Tennessee.
Her primary goal was to refute the contention, being circulated by the Antis, that any legislator who voted for ratification would be abrogating the state constitution and violating his oath of office to protect that constitution, no matter what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled. She needed to smash that specious argument with the solid hammer of legal reasoning before it became accepted as fact.
Earlier in the week, the Tennessee Bar Association muddied the waters by deciding that they would not recommend that the governor include ratification of the federal amendment in his agenda for the special session, as they thought that a ratification vote would be of questionable legality. Catt fumed: Can’t they read the law? She’d telephoned NAWSA’s legal counsel, former U.S. Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes, in despair. He chuckled. Most lawyers don’t know how to read the U.S. Constitution, he told her. Sometimes it was convenient to be ignorant.
After a flattering introduction, Catt rose to take the lectern. It was an hour past noon and the thermometer had already passed the ninety-degree mark. The ceiling fan paddles spun fast, making a low whirring sound, circulating the sweet, musky scent of tobacco smoke around the room. Reporters from the Tennessean and the Banner opened their notebooks and poised their pens. Seated at a table in the audience, Major Edward Bushrod Stahlman, publisher of the Banner, turned in his chair to listen.
Stahlman had limped into the dining room to take his seat, announcing his arrival with the thump of his ornate walking stick. He was a true self-made man: he’d arrived as a ten-year-old immigrant boy from Germany, begun work as a cart driver for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and made his way up to vice president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and then to commissioner of the Southern Railway and Steamship Association. Railroads built the city of Nashville, and he was a railroad man. He became a highly persuasive lobbyist for L&N interests in statehouses around the South; some hinted that his persuasive powers were enhanced by an open wallet.
When the L&N was threatened by unfavorable legislation in the Tennessee General Assembly, Stahlman bought a newspaper to serve as a platform for pro-industry opinions. He pumped new life into the Nashville Banner, and it prospered as he enjoyed broadening the paper’s political opinions and his own clout. He left the railroad to become a full-time publisher and helped to establish the Associated Press news syndicate. He was still a good friend of the L&N, and railroad interests continued to wield clout in the halls of the Tennessee legislature.
Though he’d never served in the military—“Major” was just an honorific—Stahlman was a proud American, despite what his enemies said, and a dedicated Nashville citizen: he served a term as an alderman, took a seat on the Tennessee State Board of Education, cared about his adopted city. He was a man who valued loyalty: he was loyal to his friends and employees and equally devoted to crushing his enemies. He didn’t mind having enemies; all important men made enemies, it was a mark of power. He counted mayors, governors, and senators among those who did not like him or did not like his newspaper, which was one and
the same. He was the Banner. He could make or break a Tennessee candidate or cause with his little finger.
His feud with Luke Lea began years ago as a friendly rivalry between competing newspapers. But when the Tennessean took to attacking the railroads, especially the L&N, claiming they, together with the liquor industry, owned the legislature and effectively ran the state, a sharp edge entered the relationship. Then Lea carried this crusade with him to Washington, where he initiated Senate hearings to investigate the railroad “trusts” with the aim of regulating them more stringently.
Stahlman used the Banner to lash back at Lea and used his political leverage to help oust Lea from his Senate seat. For the first time, thanks to the Seventeenth Amendment, the people would elect their U.S. senators in the 1914 elections, and Stahlman backed a congressman from Memphis, Kenneth McKellar, to run against Lea in the Democratic primary. McKellar won, Lea was booted out. And then the feud turned ugly.
Stahlman was an unapologetic “wet” man, which put him on another collision course with the ultra-“dry” Lea over Prohibition laws. Stahlman also refused to jump on the war bandwagon and used the Banner’s editorial pages to argue against entry into the European conflict. For this he paid a terrible price. The Tennessean launched a witch hunt against Stahlman, calling him “a Hun by birth, a Hun at heart, a Hun with all his evil and devilish characteristics.”
Lea used his Washington contacts to spur a Justice Department investigation of Stahlman’s citizenship and loyalty while the Tennessean beat the drum for Stahlman to be classified as an enemy alien under the Wilson administration’s draconian alien, sedition, and espionage laws, punishing anyone who disparaged, or even questioned, the war. Stahlman defended himself by switching the Banner’s editorial page toward supporting America in the war, and he became a leader in selling Liberty War Bonds. Meanwhile, the Tennessean continued to publish editorial cartoons portraying Stahlman in a German uniform.
