by Elaine Weiss
On the night of the amendment’s proclamation, a devastated Josephine Pearson retired to her room “tired and heart-sick to have fallen a victim of Perfidy,” as she described it. Losing the ratification fight “embarrassed my self-respect, and also lost something of trust, never quite restored,” she confessed. She felt an emptiness, “a void,” such as she had never experienced in her life. “Lost Ideals! Not defeat, but disgrace for my native state and my country.”
The next afternoon, Carrie Catt went to the White House to personally thank Woodrow Wilson. Catt was stunned by Wilson’s appearance; she hadn’t seen the president since his stroke and wasn’t prepared for the sight of a shriveled man, his legs covered by a shawl, unable to rise to greet her. Edith Wilson stood by her husband’s chair. Catt thanked Wilson for all the help he’d provided in the ratification fight, especially his efforts in Tennessee, but she sensed the bitter sadness in Wilson, even as he was congratulating her: she’d successfully finished her fight for woman suffrage, but he would never be able to finish his for the League of Nations. Tears were streaming down Carrie Catt’s face as she departed the White House.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association held a jubilee celebration at Poli’s Theatre in downtown Washington that night. Alice Paul was not invited. She was on her way to New York to meet with Alva Belmont and the National Woman’s Party executive committee to make plans for the convention that would chart the future of the organization and decide whether it would form an independent women’s political party. Sue White intended to be at that meeting. This phase of White’s life, so exciting and exhausting, was over; what was next, she didn’t know. As Miss Paul said, winning the vote was only the first step, now the fight for women’s equal rights in all other facets of life must begin. White wanted to play a part in that next phase of the work.
Poli’s Theatre was filled to overflowing with giddy suffragists eager to hear celebratory speeches and tales from Tennessee. Relieved of having to hide and hold her tongue, Mrs. Catt blasted the corporate interests that tried to thwart ratification and belittled the religious and racial attitudes at the core of the Antis’ arguments against the amendment.
But while suffragists were celebrating the dawn of a new political era, an editorial writer for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper offered his readers a chilling, and prescient, view of the situation:
Woman’s Suffrage is now a fact. Candidate Harding and candidate Cox importuned the Tennessee legislature to join in the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but it was not until after the solons were assured that it would be as easy to disenfranchise Negro women as it has been to disenfranchise Negro men that they consented to lift the ban and permit the passage of the Suffrage measure. Under the “wide discretion” allowed the election officials in the state of Tennessee it has been a very easy matter to disqualify a male Negro applicant for certificate to vote. It will be just as easy to disqualify the female Negro applicant. And thus we take another step in the great work of making the world safe for democracy.
On Friday morning, August 27, Catt arrived home. When she reached New York’s Pennsylvania Station, hundreds of Suffs were waiting, and a band struck up “Hail, the Conquering Hero Comes” as the train sighed to a stop. Mollie Hay was the first to greet Catt on the platform when she stepped from the railcar, looking a bit pale, overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment. Mollie escorted Catt upstairs to the station’s palatial beaux arts waiting room, where New York governor Alfred Smith and a delegation of politicians were waiting to congratulate her. The Suffs of New York City presented Catt with an enormous bouquet of blue delphiniums (her favorite flower) and yellow chrysanthemums, tied with a suffrage-yellow satin ribbon inscribed: “To Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt from the Enfranchised Women of the United States.”
The triumphant procession began. Carrie, Harriet Upton, and Charl Williams rode in an open limousine decked out in suffrage colors while Mollie Hay and other national and state suffrage leaders marched in a guard of honor around the car. The parade was led by a troop of mounted police, a column of soldiers from the Seventy-First New York Infantry Regiment, and a military brass band. As the auto bearing the Tennessee victors swung into the parade line, a great cheer went up, and Mrs. Catt rose to her feet in the rear section of the car to acknowledge the ovation. She stood, tall and smiling, her hat slanted on her head, her left arm holding the gigantic arrangement of flowers, her right arm raised high, saluting the crowd. She seemed at once the victorious general and the beloved queen. This homecoming, she would later say, was the happiest moment of her life.
Hundreds of parading women wore their traditional marching clothes, white dresses with yellow sashes, and carried the banners of their local suffrage societies. Thousands of spectators on the sidewalks cheered and clapped, office workers leaned out the windows of the tall buildings lining the route to add their huzzahs, and the trumpets blared as Carrie Catt led the last suffrage parade.
* * *
Church bells rang all across the nation at noon on Saturday, August 28, in celebration of women’s enfranchisement. Mrs. Catt had instructed the League of Women Voters in every state to arrange a celebration of bells in their communities marking the historic occasion. Church and school bells pealed, factory and train whistles blew, firehouse sirens blared, and car horns were tooted in the state capitals, big cities, and little towns. In Philadelphia, bells were rung on Independence Square. The mayor of Chicago supplemented his order for municipal clamor with a request that at the strike of noon all men doff their hats in honor of the new women citizens.
But the bells and whistles were more muted in Tennessee. Abby Milton’s and Catherine Kenny’s pleas, on behalf of the Tennessee League of Women Voters, to every mayor in the state, were met with some resistance. In Chattanooga, the mayor instead asked his citizens to bow their heads at noon “in memory of the final passing of the principles for which our forefathers fought, the death of states’ rights, and the complete nullification of the Tennessee constitution.” The mayor of Tullahoma also balked, saying, “I cannot join with you in this jubilation over the violation of the constitution of Tennessee.” Indignation rallies continued to rage across Tennessee just at the hour when the bells were to ring on Saturday.
Even in Nashville, the mayor claimed to be too distracted by the city’s streetcar employees’ strike, which had turned violent, to issue a proclamation for bells on Saturday. “Local conditions” prevented Nashville from ringing and whistling, the Tennessean reported. Those conditions probably had less to do with the streetcar strike than with the inclinations of Davidson County’s delegation in the legislature, which had flipped to the Antis and stood solidly against ratification. So Nashville did not take part in the noisy nationwide festivities, and a chagrined Catherine Kenny could only suggest that at noon, when the bells were supposed to ring, local women pause in their work and bow their heads in a moment of silent prayer and thanksgiving.
Carrie Catt and Mollie Hay drove home to Juniper Ledge. Finally at ease in her own house, sitting at her own desk, overlooking her garden, Catt wrote a poignant charge to the women voters of the nation:
The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it!
The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!
Chapter 23
Election Day
ON NOVEMBER 2, 1920, American women did act—they voted. About ten million women went to the polls, just over a third of the eligible female electorate; nationwide, an estimated three women voted for every five voting men. Women voted in every state except Mississippi and Georgia, which, in an effort to
prevent black women from participating, refused to extend registration deadlines to allow women enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment to cast ballots.
In cities and towns women lined up at their local polling stations, and the mood was festive. Housewives voted on their way to the grocery store, office workers brought their lunch to eat while they waited in line, factory workers joined when they went off shift; rural women in the western states made their way to election sites through fierce snowstorms. Some mothers brought their babies in arms, and obliging policemen held the tots while mom filled out her ballot.
Carrie Catt and Mollie Hay cast their ballots at the polling place near their apartment in Manhattan. (Catt voted for Cox, Hay for Harding.) Alice Paul voted for the first time in her life near her hometown in New Jersey. The Tennessee Suffs voted in their home districts. At Hyde Park, Eleanor Roosevelt also voted for the first time, presumably for her husband and the Cox/FDR Democratic ticket. At the White House, Woodrow and Edith Wilson had already filled out absentee ballots and mailed them to Princeton, New Jersey. Mrs. Wilson amused suffrage veterans with her statement that she was now very pleased to be voting and very proud of her husband’s role in getting the Nineteenth Amendment passed. Alva Belmont refused to vote until she could cast a ballot for a woman president.
On Election Day morning, Josephine Pearson went to the Monteagle polling site to distribute Anti literature claiming the Nineteenth Amendment was illegal. The poll watchers were surprised to see her: You’re not going to vote, are you? they asked her. You fought it too long and too hard! they said admiringly. She declined to vote, but the men at the polls came up with an ingenious solution: “Tell us what you want voted and we’ll vote for you!” In every subsequent election, Josephine Pearson would instruct a friendly Monteagle man on how she wanted to vote so he could cast her ballot for her.
The turnout numbers were disappointing to the suffragists—two out of three women stayed home—and Carrie Catt was called upon to explain. It wasn’t due to lack of enthusiasm, she insisted. Registration difficulties in the states—with only ten weeks between ratification and the election—were partly to blame. Also, the act of voting was so new for most women; voting is a learned behavior, and women were only at the very beginning of the learning curve. Catt gave assurance that her League of Women Voters would help to educate and acclimate the female electorate. The Antis crowed that—just as they had always maintained—most women really didn’t want the vote.
The women who did vote helped to elect Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in a landslide. The weary nation—mired in economic doldrums and labor strikes, frightened by the rise of a radical political ideology in Russia, and shaken by a terrorist bombing in New York City’s financial district in September, which killed thirty-eight people on Wall Street—chose a bland president to calm its nerves. Americans eagerly embraced Harding’s promise of a “Return to Normalcy” as a retreat from the kinds of liberal policies that had brought disruptive social change. And his campaign platform of “America First” promised a withdrawal from international alliances and entanglements (especially the League of Nations). Fearful that the nation’s identity (white and Anglo-Saxon) was being undermined by massive immigration, and anxious that “undesirables” were invading American shores, Congress and the new administration would soon shut the nation’s borders to new immigrants. Americans picked a man who promised them strength and security, but whose character was weak and easily manipulated. Harding surrounded himself with cronies and opportunists who used the White House and its agencies to enrich themselves. Harding’s short and ignominious term (he died of a heart attack in his third year in office) was defined by scandal.
Governor Albert Roberts was punished at the polls for his efforts to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Angry Anti Democrats helped to defeat Roberts as Tennessee broke from the Solid South and, for the first time since Reconstruction, voted Republican. The Tennessee suffragists campaigned hard for Roberts, in gratitude for his help, and were mortified by his defeat. Carrie Catt wrote a personal note of condolence to Roberts; this was not the electoral “reward” she’d promised to suffrage’s brave friends.
The Suffs were also disappointed by the reelection of several congressional antisuffrage stalwarts: Senators Wadsworth of New York, Brandegee of Connecticut, Penrose in Pennsylvania, and Moses in New Hampshire were all returned to their seats, despite the vociferous opposition of woman suffrage veterans. The Antis, grasping their newly endowed ballots, took credit for helping to return these men to office.
Harry Burn was reelected to the Tennessee legislature by the citizens of Niota.
On that same Election Day, American democracy was disgraced by a series of shameful incidents unfolding across the country. In Boston, first-time black women voters received phony notices from a fake state “Election Commission” warning them that they faced fines of $500 and prison if they gave “false statements” when registering to vote. And all through the southern states, black women were intimidated, harassed, or physically barred from registering and voting. In South Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan assisted in keeping black women from the polls, according to reports sent to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; accounts from Richmond, Virginia, and other cities told a similar story.
The most horrific incidents played out in Florida. In the town of Lake City, during voter registration, a black Republican club leader, who’d led classes instructing black women in his district how to fill out a ballot, was hauled out of his bed in the middle of the night, a noose tied around his neck. He was driven to the outskirts of town, where his abductors prepared to lynch him. He escaped, but the electoral violence continued. An estimated four thousand black women and men were denied their ballots in Jacksonville, and hostility toward black women voting ran so hot in parts of Florida that state troops were on call to guard polling places. The national secretary of the NAACP, fearful that the all-white state guard would not protect black voters vigorously enough, made a formal request to the U.S. Justice Department to deploy federal troops to dangerous precincts on Election Day. His request was denied.
The worst violence was in Ocoee, near Orlando, where the Ku Klux Klan warned black women, and men, not to attempt to vote. Those who defied the order faced bloody retribution: as many as fifty black men and women died in the spasm of Election Day mob violence, with several men lynched and a woman burned to death as the white mob set fire to twenty-five homes and two churches in the black section of town.
After the election, NAACP officers testified before Congress, bringing documentary evidence of the violent suppression of black women’s and men’s vote in the southern states. A veteran white suffragist, Mary Ovington, begged her suffrage comrades to help: “We must not rest until we have freed the black as well as white of our sex,” she implored. “Will you not show us how to make the 19th Amendment the democratic reality that it purports to be?” It is a race issue, not a woman’s issue, insisted Alice Paul in refusing to allow her National Woman’s Party to take a stand on black women’s disenfranchisement. With rare exceptions, white suffragists, satisfied that they finally possessed the vote, ignored the plight of their black sisters for almost the next half century.
The enforcement provision of the Nineteenth Amendment, which should have protected black women voters, was never used. Neither were the enforcement articles of the Fourteenth Amendment, providing for loss of a state’s congressional representation in proportion to the number of citizens denied voting rights. To this day, Congress has never utilized these constitutional powers to punish states for systemic voting rights violations. The federal government averted its eyes from the blatant and violent suppression of black voters for decades; it was not until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that black citizens had proper recourse for violations of their voting rights through the Department of Justice.
But in a familiar historical dynamic, those voting rights, once consid
ered secure, continue to be threatened and eroded by states’ imposition of barriers: restrictive registration requirements, onerous voter ID laws, limitation of flexible early voting opportunities, and inadequate polling place resources in black, Hispanic, and other minority neighborhoods. Pernicious and unfounded allegations of “voter fraud” are used to justify such impediments.
The Voting Rights Act itself was weakened by a 2013 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the act’s most effective enforcement tool, Section 5, requiring jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to seek federal approval before making any changes to voting rules. Voter suppression, not only in the southern states, but in districts with minority populations within many other states all around the country, remains a pressing problem. Access to the vote is still manipulated for partisan political advantage, and true universal suffrage remains an elusive goal.
The rallying cries of “states’ rights” that sounded through Nashville in the summer of 1920 continued to reverberate throughout the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In its basic form, “states’ rights” simply reflects the historic conundrum of federalism, the tension between a central authority and a union of autonomous states. But in its most bellicose manifestation, it led to the Civil War, and since then it has been invoked to resist federal involvement in a variety of important and contentious issues, including federal protection of civil rights. The states’ rights rationale formed the backbone of southern states’ resistance not only to black citizens voting, but also to the desegregation of schools, colleges, and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today, states’ rights plays a significant role in policy issues, ranging from gun control to reproductive rights, environmental regulations to gender equality protections, land-use policies to health care to educational standards, as states push back against federal mandates and supervision. Women’s health and reproductive rights, once thought secured nationwide at the federal level, are, at this writing, once again being restricted by numerous states.
