by Elaine Weiss
Betty Gram glimpsed the traitorous Seth Walker across the Hermitage lobby and headed over to challenge him: Was it true that he was going to violate his pledge to her and oppose ratification? she asked him. Walker appeared startled. People in the lobby turned to listen. Walker recovered his wits: “I’d let the old Capitol crumble and fall from the hill before I’d vote for ratification,” he said boastfully. “I’m going to do all I can to influence friends to vote No.”
Summoning her dramatic talents, Gram continued the interrogation: “What has brought about the change against the suffrage amendment in the house—the governor or the Louisville and Nashville Railroad?” she demanded loudly. “What kind of a crook are you anyway—a Roberts crook or an L&N crook?” Onlookers gasped.
“How dare you charge me with such a thing!” Walker bellowed. “That is an insult!”
Betty Gram only smiled. “Why, I am just asking you for information,” she replied in a tone of mock girlish innocence. Visibly shaken, Walker stormed off. It was a moment of sweet revenge. But it might be costly.
Reporters, scurrying around to cover the fast-breaking events, demanded Carrie Catt’s reaction to Seth Walker’s defection. The Chief stuck to her strategy script. You must not let the public sense weakness or the enemy smell fear; that was a lesson she’d learned long ago. She declared that her poll was unshaken: “When I came to Tennessee three weeks ago I announced that a majority of both Senate and House were pledged to vote for ratification. No development has overturned that majority,” she maintained. “I have absolute confidence in the integrity of the legislators of Tennessee and believe that they will stand by their pledges.”
Catt was daring the legislators to prove their integrity. But in the corridors and stairwells of the statehouse, and in the parlors and alcoves of the Hermitage, the Suffs were learning that those pledges were not so much standing firm as keeling over. With little else to occupy their time, quite a few legislators adjourned to the Jack Daniel’s Suite, the invitation-only speakeasy operating inside an eighth-floor room of the Hermitage, where hospitable hosts filled their glasses with forbidden liquors and filled their ears with persuasive arguments for why the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was bad for Tennessee.
Tennessee had been a “dry” state since 1909, at least on paper, and had enthusiastically ratified the national prohibition amendment in 1919. Many Suffs, and even some Antis, ardent prohibitionists themselves, asked why the law was not being enforced on the eighth floor of the Hermitage. “In Tennessee whiskey and legislation go hand in hand,” they were told, “especially when controversial questions are urged. This is the Tennessee way,” and Tennessee revered its traditions.
Nina Pinckard, the Southern Women’s Rejection League president, was standing under the graceful high arches of the Capitol’s second floor, engaged in intense discussion with a legislator, when a yellow-bedecked suffragist buzzed in from behind. “Don’t speak to her,” the Suff admonished the lawmaker, nodding dismissively toward Pinckard. “She’s in the pay of the liquor interests.”
Mrs. Pinckard, incensed by the slur, stared hard at the offending Suff, who’d already escaped down the corridor. Pinckard’s rosebud lips tightened and flattened into a grimace. This was how the suffragists worked, she fumed, by innuendo and personal offense—by lies. Seth Walker might find his honorable revenge on the floor of the house, but Pinckard intended to seek a suffragist comeuppance in the newspapers and in court. She would pursue charges of criminal libel and public slander against the offending suffragist, and she warned—in a large, boldfaced notice in the Tennessean—that any Suff who made similar accusations would be “prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
“Such false and malicious charges are an example of what woman suffrage means in action . . . ,” the Anti notice said, “cruel, unfair, dishonest, and unscrupulous attempts to blast the reputation of every courageous woman who dares to disagree with the politically ambitious fraction who demand ‘votes for women’ and ‘offices for women.’”
The Antis vociferously denied that any of their members had received “one cent from any liquor or brewery interest.” “This charge, ALWAYS CIRCULATED whenever the suffragists feel themselves BEATEN IN A FAIR FIGHT, is founded only on the malice or ignorance of little minds which assume the public can be fooled by repeated falsehoods.”
It was true that the Suffs repeatedly accused the “liquor interests”—brewers, distillers, bottlers, distributors, cork makers, hop and barley farmers, restaurateurs, and saloon keepers—of financing Anti activities in almost every state, as well as in Congress. But tracing the money, and the undercover political mischief, was extremely difficult, forcing Suffs to rely on mostly anecdotal evidence. They did uncover solid evidence that antisuffrage advertisements and resolutions were routinely circulated in saloons, often with a free drink as reward for signing an antisuffrage petition or voting “No” in a state referendum. Liquor industry workers were sent out as canvassers to warn nearby communities that their livelihood and well-being depended upon defeating woman suffrage. Liquor industry trade publications railed against suffrage. There were countless referendum election irregularities that Suffs felt could be laid at the feet of the liquor interests (and their suspicions were shared by many a governor, mayor, and representative), and liquor money undoubtedly changed hands in legislative halls; but there was little solid proof. It made sense that an entire industry, threatened with destruction by “dry” women voters, would work to protect itself. The problem was there were scant records; these were not transactions posted neatly in any ledger. So while the Suffs could competently connect the dots, they couldn’t really follow the money. Their claims could be denied. Even with the Jack Daniel’s Suite in full swing.
* * *
While Carrie Catt feigned calm confidence, a more honest hysteria gripped Sue White and her Woman’s Party comrades. Telephone and telegraph wires strung between the triangle of Nashville, Washington, and Ohio pulsed with bulletins of alarm.
Pollitzer’s before dawn telegram set Alice Paul on edge. The master micromanager was impatient with a lack of detailed information and frustrated by the limitations of commanding her forces at such a remove. But she couldn’t afford to leave Washington, not until enough money was raised to cover her expenses and keep things going in her absence. Every rich woman she’d tried to put the touch on was away on vacation. She was reduced to asking her board members to pass the hat at their posh summer colonies in Maine and Rhode Island. She kept putting off her departure for Nashville.
What was going on down there? Paul demanded of Sue White in a testy midmorning telegram, sent while White was in the statehouse gallery. “We find it impossible to give help on Tennessee from this end as we have no information about Democratic attitude,” Paul scolded. She demanded some basic info: Do we have a majority? Do you expect success? When will the measure come to a vote? Is there any evidence of Cox’s promised efforts on behalf of ratification?
“Please do not spare money on telegrams,” Paul chided White. Miss Sue was always carefully frugal, but that wasn’t the only reason she’d not sent better reports. She had zero time to write any cogent analysis, but she also didn’t know what to say. Tell Miss Paul that she’d lost control of the campaign? Explain that support for ratification was mysteriously evaporating—all on her watch? Not unlike Governor Roberts, White had been stalling for time, hoping to set things right before having to give a full accounting. Seth Walker had smashed her strategy, too.
The hottest gossip around Nashville on Tuesday was not the many rumors of defections and double crosses, or even the many elaborate conspiracy theories—though they were definitely swirling around—but Betty Gram’s fiery confrontation with Seth Walker earlier in the day. The “Militant Oregonian” had insulted the Speaker, Walker’s friends complained, questioned his integrity, and besmirched his honor. “Her language was offensive,” one newspaper reported, “and the aftermath is a s
how of deep offense at the suffragists by Mr. Walker’s friends, who are numerous in Nashville, both among the members and the residents.”
Gram must apologize, Walker’s friends insisted. Gram had no intention of apologizing.
“We are not going to be thrust aside easily,” she said defiantly. “Some sinister underground influence is at work here. We are entitled to know just who is changing a majority to a minority. I rely on Alice Paul to uncover the real reason for the backset of our hopes here,” Gram said. “If the liquor interests or the Louisville and Nashville railroad are responsible, she will find it out.”
Gram’s sisters in the Woman’s Party were quietly thrilled by her nervy tackle of Walker, and even Carrie Catt would have to admit that the youthful provocateur was simply saying aloud what Catt herself was thinking. But the Tennessee Suffs were mortified by Gram’s actions. This was just the kind of “unladylike” behavior that gave ammunition to the Antis, proving their predictions of the horrible “sex wars” that would attend suffrage and women’s entry into politics. The southern suffragists had methodically fought against this stereotype for years, and they didn’t have to wait long to feel the fallout: following his morning clash with Gram, Walker “began a vigorous opposition to ratification,” the newspapers reported, “while his friends are irate over the militant policy here as a result of the speaker’s defection.”
Tom Riddick, always admirably blunt, applauded Gram’s moxie and thought it might even do some good: “It will smoke out Seth Walker,” he said, “and tell those confounded women to stop their cackle.” It was assumed he meant the Antis.
By late Tuesday afternoon, when Alice Paul finally connected by telephone with her lieutenants in Nashville, they relayed the unfolding bad news: Seth Walker was working strenuously to peel away pledged votes. More legislators were suddenly altering their positions. “We are losing men right straight along.”
* * *
Thomas Riddick barged into Governor Roberts’s office and shut the door. Never a man to mince his words—he could slash a man to ribbons in the courtroom—Riddick told Roberts that suspicions about his sincerity and commitment were undermining the ratification campaign among legislators. People were saying that the governor was deliberately dragging his feet. The Suff women did not trust him, and Roberts’s own men were fomenting trouble. Riddick delivered an ultimatum: If ratification failed in the legislature, if Democrats were shamed, Roberts’s reelection was doomed. (This was, of course, the exact opposite of what Roberts was hearing from his advisers.)
Roberts protested, telling Riddick that he would be not only humiliated, but crushed, if ratification did not pass. He was in the ratification fight wholeheartedly, and in it to win. He vowed to bring pressure upon any straying friends and asked for the names of doubtful members, promising to go to work on them immediately.
While Riddick was browbeating the governor, almost a hundred Tennessee Suff women were conferring with about a dozen Democratic senators at the statehouse. (Quite a few invited senators decided not to show.) Responding to the furor over Betty Gram’s public shaming of Seth Walker, Charl Williams assured the senators that the Suffs had no intention of trying to dictate their actions, and she soothed them by saying that the women willingly placed their cause in the hands of the men, relying upon their sense of justice and fair play.
If this smacked a bit too much of the type of female “soft suasion” historically favored by those opposed to woman suffrage, and if it echoed the Antis’ willingness to put decision making in the hands of men, or if it brought to mind the classic image of the southern woman on her pedestal protected by her adoring menfolk, Charl Williams calculated that it was a necessary accommodation. It might not jibe with Mrs. Catt’s admonition that a political man motivated by justice was an imaginary animal, but it was not, Miss Williams would insist, a capitulation. If it eased the minds of the senators and smoothed the path toward ratification, it was a worthwhile compromise.
By evening, Seth Walker had constructed a sturdy rationale for his revised ratification stance: “I have become convinced that it is my duty to my state and to my constituents to oppose this thing,” he explained to a sympathetic reporter. “There is no question in my mind that a large majority of the people, both men and women in Tennessee, are against universal suffrage from principles, or are violently opposed to action through a federal amendment.
“The cities, no doubt, would vote for suffrage, but by no great majority, while the rural sections, which predominate in Tennessee, I know are strong against this ratification.” Walker was relaxed and expansive with the reporter for the Anti standard, the Chattanooga Times, feeling well satisfied with the day’s accomplishments.
“The method is wrong from every angle as I view it, especially from the standpoint of the South,” Walker explained. “Tennessee has it in its power now to thrust upon every other state, whether agreeable to the people thereof or not, equal suffrage, and to enfranchise all elements of women. It is too much power to be wielded by a single state, especially since the present representatives have not been instructed in any way regarding it.” Whether he consciously recognized it or not, Walker had just articulated, in vivid summary, every argument the Antis were advancing in Nashville.
Walker said he realized that his patron, the governor, was favorable to ratification and stood ready to push its passage through the legislature, but, Walker hinted, Roberts was only following orders from Democratic bigwigs. “I believe his stand is due to a sense of duty to the national party organization, which seems determined that Tennessee shall ratify,” Walker claimed, making Roberts appear to be both a victim and a puppet. “My action is entirely independent, and there is no break between myself and the governor.” This statement was also no favor to Roberts, making it seem as if a little matter such as betrayal of the suffragists and defeat of the amendment was no reason for discord between good buddies. It was just politics. “I think he will accord me full credit for acting as my own conscience dictates,” Walker said of Roberts, “if I am placed in the position of refusing to vote as he may possibly ask me.”
While Walker was giving fair warning to the governor—don’t ask me to relent—and celebrating the purity of his own conscience, he did not attempt to explain the suddenness of his “change of conviction,” nor did he bother to mention his legal work for railroad interests. He especially avoided any reference to whispers that a lucrative railroad position had been dangled before him as reward for his opposition to ratification.
Seth Walker was making Tennessee’s junior U.S. senator Kenneth McKellar’s job much harder, but McKellar kept at it all evening and into the night. He set up an office in his room at the Hermitage, loosened his tie, scrutinized the handwritten list he’d made containing the names of uncommitted or wavering senate Democrats, and summoned each man to his room, one by one. What he said to them, what he promised them, how he threatened them, we do not know. He probably brandished both carrots and sticks, offered both sugar and vinegar, but by late Tuesday night he could announce that fifteen Democratic senators had committed to voting for ratification. They made that promise to his face, gave him their solemn word; he would remember any man who reneged.
While McKellar was twisting arms in his Hermitage room, Judge Joseph Higgins, president of the Tennessee Constitutional League, was warning legislators that they dared not ratify the amendment. Should they be tempted to bow to suffragist pressure to ratify, Higgins explained, his organization “would be constrained to go into the courts and inhibit the Secretary of State from certifying the amendment.” It was no idle threat—the league lawyers were already drafting the injunction papers—and it was a powerful one, promising both parties a disastrous fall of electoral chaos, putting the results of all contests, including presidential, into question.
Following the day’s long string of fraught phone calls from Nashville, Alice Paul sent Abby Baker to see Cox again. Do something! she implo
red. Cox had sent another anodyne message to the Tennessee legislators through Charl Williams, and his efforts appeared lackluster at best. In her visit, Baker discovered one reason why: “Cox appears worried,” Baker reported confidentially to Paul. His aides were telling him that “women will double the Republican vote in Ohio and cause loss of state.” The first wave of the Great Migration of southern black families into Ohio during the war had augmented the Republican voter rolls, and the votes of black women could only exacerbate the Democrats’ problems in the state. Perhaps it was best not to push Tennessee, his aides were urging. Cox did, however, promise Baker that if Governor Roberts persisted in refusing to telephone him, he would call Roberts himself and demand a frank and detailed report.
Alice Paul had had enough. On Tuesday night she issued a blistering statement: “The majority for ratification of the suffrage amendment in the Tennessee Legislature has disappeared,” she howled. Speaker Seth Walker’s desertion was highlighted.
“The change in the Tennessee situation can be traced to one thing only—the failure of Governor Cox and Governor Roberts of Tennessee to put sufficient force behind their public pleas for ratification to insure a favorable action,” she accused. “Defeat of the amendment in Tennessee would be a deliberate defeat.”
Paul bitterly challenged Cox and Roberts, as she had Woodrow Wilson and so many other waffling politicians: Deeds, not words.
