by Elaine Weiss
Will you permit them entrance,
Women of this state?
Come, rally to our standard,
Come show your pride of race;
Beneath our unfurled banner,
Come take your rightful place.
Everyone understood who “They” were. The call to arms was printed in the state’s major newspapers, mailed to sympathizers, and distributed through clubs and churches. It reminded the citizens of Tennessee of the larger issues at stake in this ratification fight: the threat that the federal amendment posed to states’ rights, the dangerous precedent of Negro woman suffrage, and the frightening potential of racial equality. It asked Tennesseans everywhere to don red roses to show their support and to gather in Nashville beneath the Anti banner, the Stars and Bars that Nina Pinckard and Josephine Pearson had unfurled at the doors of their headquarters.
Those polished wood doors of Anti headquarters swung open at exactly five o’clock that Saturday afternoon for the welcoming reception. Josephine Pearson was a most gracious hostess, greeting her guests at the door while making sure the punch bowls were filled, the tea pitchers chilled, and the cookie trays replenished. Volunteer women from all the finest families in Nashville served as pourers and servers; the tables were beautifully appointed, and the room was decorated in the proper red floral hue. Nearly two hundred guests circulated around, chatting and quaffing, admiring the array of posters and broadsides, the assortment of informative brochures, and the museum exhibits.
There were, as promised, examples of the “force bills” that Congress could use to enforce the voting provisions of the Nineteenth Amendment, as well as, the Antis warned, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Congress had never yet exercised its power to protect black male voters from their blatant disenfranchisement in the southern states, but ratification might trigger a reassessment of that hands-off policy, the Anti materials warned, and “re-open the horrors of Reconstruction” when black men voted, and several even served in the Tennessee legislature. But the highlight of the exhibition was a dusty book, an 1895 first edition of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible. It was a thick and homely tome whose bland exterior belied its power to provoke.
The book was Stanton’s attempt to prove that the Bible, as interpreted by men and practiced by mainstream religions, had deliberately kept women in a subservient position, hindering their progress for millennia. Stanton had solicited contributions from women of different religious outlooks for this compendium of commentaries on Scripture with a feminist slant. She’d also invited suffrage leaders to contribute—including Carrie Catt—but most declined to participate in what they considered Mrs. Stanton’s folly. In the end, Stanton wrote the majority of the commentaries herself, in her signature biting and entertaining style. So Carrie Catt was flabbergasted to find her name listed as a member of the book’s “Revision Committee” when it was published; she’d never written a word for it.
The book had become a huge best seller in 1895 and a severe headache for the Suffs. It was, not surprisingly, denounced from the pulpit and in the press as the work of Satan. Stanton’s position as honorary president of NAWSA dragged the organization, against its will, into the squabble. The book’s more blasphemous statements—that the Bible was not the Divine Word of God, but the creation of men, and that prayers ought to be addressed to “an ideal Heavenly Mother”—offended devout suffragists as well and spooked potential members, hurting the National Association’s membership drives.
The younger women in the movement, including Catt, decided something must be done to limit the damage: at the next annual convention, they introduced a resolution denouncing The Woman’s Bible, disassociating NAWSA from Stanton’s book, and censuring its author. In addition, Catt insisted that her name be removed from subsequent editions. But the Antis had a first edition, and there it was, printed on the frontispiece of the volume in the ceremonial display. They labeled it “Mrs. Catt’s Bible.”
At the proper moment, Miss Pearson stepped onto a small raised platform to make the formal remarks of welcome. Her years as a teacher stood her in good stead now, as she effortlessly commanded her audience’s attention. She saluted the guests of honor, all the visiting Anti leaders who’d come to defend Tennessee and the Southland. She led an ovation for the legislators wearing the red rose. She introduced the speakers, offering testimonials and pep talks. It was one of the most exciting moments of her life.
Nina Pinckard, Charlotte Rowe, and Mary Kilbreth spoke for the women Antis, exhorting antisuffragists of all stripes to join hands in defeating the amendment. Senator Walter Cameron of Marion County, near Chattanooga, spoke for those legislators who felt that it would violate their oath of office to vote on ratification in the special session. He’d voted for limited suffrage in 1919, he explained, but he would not vote to ratify the amendment. This was just the sort of switch the Suffs feared. There was spirited applause.
Another senator stood apart from the crowd, surveying the scene, listening to the speeches with only desultory interest. Lon McFarland was a lawyer who represented Wilson County in Middle Tennessee. Tall and dapper, favoring white linen suits, Panama hats, and string ties, he had a reputation for a sharp tongue and hot temper. He wasn’t at all pleased about being dragged back to the statehouse in the middle of summer, and he didn’t like being badgered about where he stood on ratification. He’d voted for limited suffrage in 1919, even supported it on the senate floor with a little speech saying that a man “would trust a woman with his name and his honor and with the rearing of his children, and there was no good reason why he should not trust her with the ballot.” He was of two minds about this federal amendment. He could be persuaded by either side, but in any case, he wasn’t going to broadcast his intentions, and on his lapel he wore his own small bicolored rosebud, tinged with both red and yellow petals. He enjoyed the look of confusion on people’s faces when they saw it.
McFarland was not impressed with what he heard. As he strolled out of the party, the senator from the bluegrass horse country of central Tennessee was overheard to say: “That bunch of fillies was the longest on pedigree and the shortest on looks that I ever saw.”
The Suffs stayed for the most part in their rooms, occasionally sending spies into the lobby who noticed one curious thing: as the evening wore on there was a steady exodus of men, wearing both red and yellow roses, from the Hermitage lobby, through the brass doors of the elevators, and up to the eighth floor. And they didn’t come down. The Suffs were mystified.
* * *
Early on Sunday morning, August 8, aides to Governor Roberts bounded up the steps of the Capitol building for a scheduled strategy session with house Speaker Seth Walker. Roberts had appointed his young and progressive superintendent of public instruction, Albert Williams, to coordinate the administration’s ratification efforts in the legislature. Williams, whose father had once been mayor of Nashville, supported woman suffrage for both idealistic and, as he called it, selfish reasons: in his experience, women cared more deeply about the education of their children, and if women could vote, they would likely make education a priority and force the state legislature to appropriate more money for schools. That was good for the children, good for the state, and also good for Williams’s education department.
Williams eagerly accepted this tricky assignment from his boss, who, since winning the primary three days ago, seemed more enthusiastic about getting the federal amendment approved. It wasn’t exactly a spiritual awakening, more of a political reckoning: Roberts realized that while he might have won the primary, his rival had won a goodly proportion of votes, the state Democrats were still fractured, and Republican Alf Taylor had made a strong showing. If he had any hope of winning the general election, he would need the support of the national Democratic Party and candidate Cox, and that meant proving to them that he was willing to put his own skin in the game to secure ratification, for the good of the party. Realis
tically, he also wanted the votes of Tennessee women, should the amendment go through, and he would gladly accept their electoral gratitude for championing their enfranchisement.
His closest advisers were still vehemently against ratification, arguing that his support for it was tantamount to political suicide. He would incur the wrath of not only the rabid states’ rights and Bible-thumping folks, they screamed at him, but also powerful corporate interests, both within and out of the state, which viewed woman suffrage as a wrench thrown into the economic engines propelling the New South.
Roberts listened to his advisers’ objections. Admittedly, they had some solid points, but he overruled them. Roberts knew what he had to do; he had to ram this ratification thing through the legislature. His protégé Seth Walker would carry the ball in the house, Andrew Todd would guide it through the senate, and Albert Williams would make sure it made it over the finish line. He had his team.
With the special session slated to open the next morning, Albert Williams had requested a meeting with Seth Walker to analyze the latest poll of the house: see where the various delegates stood, who might cause trouble, who needed convincing. In the last session, Walker, the governor’s close ally, had adroitly maneuvered the administration’s legislation, even the most contentious bills, smoothly through the chamber. He was a whiz at such things. And Walker was on board for ratification: he’d joined the Men’s Ratification Committee, pledged to vote aye, and accepted the invitation to introduce the ratification resolution in the house, lending the prestige of the Speakership to the effort. Now the game plan needed to be perfected before the opening tomorrow, even if it was Sunday morning and everybody should be in church.
Williams and his deputies sat in the executive offices in the east wing of the Capitol building, going over the delegate lists, shooting the breeze, waiting for Walker to show. Walker was late. They waited for an hour and more. Finally, Walker marched in, flushed, agitated. He’d had a “change of conviction,” he announced to a startled Williams. He’d decided to oppose ratification. And the governor was courting political disaster if he continued to support it.
With that, Seth Walker turned on his heel and walked out the door.
* * *
On Sunday afternoon, a caravan of forty shiny touring automobiles drove from the Hotel Hermitage out to Washington Hall, Mr. and Mrs. George Washington’s country estate outside Nashville. The society pages of the newspapers called it a highlight of the summer social season. If women of refinement must be plunged, against their will, into the muck of politics, Queenie Washington and her hospitality committee believed, they should at least endeavor to retain the feminine social graces; an elegant garden party for the Antis was the proper thing to do.
The Washingtons’ grand house was decorated with fragrant flowers from their garden, and the buffet table was graced by a bouquet of pink roses in a silver bowl. Among the guests sipping tea on the porch or strolling on the manicured lawns were many prominent Nashville ladies and gentlemen: sympathetic lawyers and businessmen, willing legislators, and all the distinguished Anti guests from out of state. Freshly arrived from Lexington was Laura Clay, whose charm and witticisms made her a popular conversation companion, and Kate Gordon, just off the train from New Orleans, both sporting red roses. They were the women Carrie Catt most dreaded encountering.
They were once her sisters in arms. Clay still treasured a photograph of herself standing together with Aunt Susan and the other “nieces” outside their mentor’s Rochester home in 1900. The young women—including Clay, Carrie Catt, Harriet Upton, and Anna Shaw—NAWSA’s new executive board, were poised to take over from Anthony, to lead the movement into its next phase. At the moment that photo was taken, Clay had already given almost twenty years of her life to the Cause and would devote nearly another two decades beyond. Her presence at the Anti garden party was a painful coda to a distinguished suffrage career.
Clay was the great gardener of southern suffrage, planting and nurturing suffrage societies in many states; she led the Kentucky suffragists for nearly a quarter of a century and became the leading southern voice within the executive council of the NAWSA. Gordon was a New Orleans public health activist who believed women’s voice in government was the key to societal betterment. Both women were convinced that the South would accept woman suffrage only if it could be aligned with the region’s larger political goals: regaining state sovereignty and retaining white social and political hegemony. The votes of white women could secure these goals.
Clay and Gordon urged NAWSA to adopt a “southern strategy” in promoting state-based woman suffrage, where local custom would determine how the franchise was achieved and implemented; if they chose to be racist, that was their decision. Catt, in her first term as president, acquiesced to this program in hopes of keeping the peace and softening the South for suffrage work. But in subsequent years, when Clay and Gordon (and several other southern suffragists) insisted that explicit white-women-only clauses be added to any suffrage proposals, the National Association, regaining a modicum of its moral fiber, rejected their policy demands. In response, Gordon and Clay created the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference in 1913, promoting woman suffrage “as a solution to the race problem” with the franchise bestowed only by the states and only upon white women.
A secret sponsor of their new group was Alabama-born Alva Belmont, who wrote a big check and an encouraging note: she understood the “peculiar conditions” of her homeland and believed Clay and Gordon’s approach might work in wringing woman suffrage from Dixie statehouses. Ironically, at the very same time, Belmont was also bankrolling Alice Paul’s upstart Congressional Union; she was financing a state-suffrage-only approach with one hand and a federal-amendment-only goal with the other. Whatever might work. But the Southern Conference didn’t last long.
When hope, and work, for the federal amendment was revived in 1916, Clay and Gordon were dismayed. They wanted the ballot, but they wanted it their way. On the day the U.S. Senate finally passed the amendment in June 1919, Clay resigned from both the National Association and the Kentucky suffrage organizations, and she and Gordon turned their energies toward thwarting ratification. Six weeks before, in June, they’d joined forces to fight ratification in Louisiana, where their awkward alliance with die-hard Antis, the ones who hated the idea of women voting at all, proved successful, even if distasteful. That same alliance was now assembled in Tennessee, and they were all sipping lemonade together on Mrs. Washington’s lawn.
Queenie Washington stood on the top step of her porch to thank her guests for coming. This was an exciting time, she told them, and, at last, the Antis were poised for victory. And, she said, smiling, she had more happy news: the Southern Women’s Rejection League had just received a cable from Governor Cox granting them a meeting! Following the garden party, she and Mary Kilbreth, as well as Nina Pinckard and a small delegation, would be boarding the night train to Dayton and meeting with Cox the following day. They would convince him to throw his weight toward defeating ratification!
Before the party ended, Mrs. Washington assembled a group of Rejection League women and their guests for a family portrait, posed on the porch steps of Washington Hall. Josephine Pearson was given a place of honor in the front row, alongside Nina Pinckard and Mary Kilbreth, near Laura Clay and Kate Gordon. Men in summer suits stood among the throng of women, and some of the more daring younger ladies sat perched, cross-legged, on the porch’s stone parapet.
They all looked very happy. The most exciting news—that of Seth Walker’s defection to their side—was not yet public and couldn’t be celebrated at the garden party. But there were surely a few guests who knew all about it and had good reason to smile for the camera.
* * *
In the moments following Seth Walker’s stunning reversal and abrupt departure from the Capitol, Albert Williams and his staff seemed shell-shocked. They slowly gathered their wits and phoned the governo
r at home. Roberts and Williams spent the rest of the day figuring out what to do, how to respond, how to control the damage. They tried to reach Walker, to reason with him, but his mind was set. Whatever—or whoever—had caused Walker to so suddenly change his “conviction” wasn’t clear, and without a firm grasp of the rationale, the governor didn’t have much leverage to threaten or force him back into line.
Roberts and Williams knew they had to keep a lid on all this, keep it from circulating around town, and certainly keep it from the press as long as possible. It was embarrassing, a demonstration that the governor was not in control of his allies, much less the legislature; it was a sign of his weakness. How could he explain this to Cox or to President Wilson? He needed time to think things through, to come up with an alternate plan. But this had to be the worst time and the worst place—a city crawling with political operatives and journalists—to try to keep a secret.
By evening, the governor’s efforts to win back Seth Walker had come to naught and his normally scowling face—he rarely smiled—took on a look of abject dismay. His anxiety soaked through the words of the telegram he sent that night to Charl Ormond Williams, the Memphis schools’ superintendent who’d recently been named vice chair of the DNC’s Executive Committee. Charl Williams was in Dayton (she’d attended Cox’s acceptance speech on Saturday) and was about to depart for Nashville to help in the ratification fight. Before she stepped onto the train, Roberts asked her to deliver an urgent message to Cox:
Suffrage situation very critical. Amendment will fail unless every possible effort is made to adopt it. Powerful organizations actively fighting it. It seems that the whole fight has centered here, and I suggest that you apprise Gov. Cox of the critical situation and of the necessity for doing everything possible. Certain influences here are making the fight very difficult.
