by G. J. Meyer
Westward expansion, meanwhile, was bringing into the union new states without the cultural and political traditions of the South or the Northeast. This had dramatically positive consequences for the suffrage movement, divided though it was. Wyoming enfranchised women in 1869, even before becoming a state. Utah did so in 1870, Colorado in 1893, and Idaho in 1896. Washington, California, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona all followed. Wisconsin remained the only state east of the Mississippi to allow women to vote until 1893, when Illinois approved woman suffrage. But momentum was building everywhere. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had declared its support as early as the 1870s, the Grange (a fading but still-influential national association of farmers) in 1885, the American Federation of Labor five years after that.
But the South was immovably opposed. Southern mill and factory owners and planters feared that women voters would interfere with the free use of child labor, and their wives and daughters had always been taught that politics was no place for ladies. White southerners saw no advantage in doubling the number of blacks who were constitutionally entitled to vote even if they were rarely allowed to do so, and black males were surprisingly unsupportive of voting rights for their women. Meanwhile the women of the West and Midwest, regions that tended to vote Republican but were not the exclusive property of either party, displayed a readiness to blame not just the Bourbon South but the Democratic Party as a whole for blocking a constitutional amendment. Everywhere but in the South, Democrats had reason to be worried.
Whether to amend the Constitution or convert one state at a time became the key question. In 1872 Susan B. Anthony, a founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association and destined to become the movement’s most legendary figure, was arrested for the crime of voting in Rochester, New York. This led to a series of court cases in which female plaintiffs pointed to the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted the prerogatives of citizenship to all persons (not male persons) born in the United States, as so clearly giving women the right to vote that nothing further should be required. In 1875 the Supreme Court rejected this argument, ruling that the Constitution “does not confer the right of citizenship on anyone.” Many activists became convinced that an amendment was going to be essential after all.
In 1890 the National and American suffrage associations set their differences aside and merged, once again displaying their lack of deftness with nomenclature by declaring themselves the National American Woman Suffrage Association—NAWSA. Official Washington, unimpressed, saw no reason to consider a constitutional amendment. Attention shifted back to the one avenue where progress was possible, the winning of the franchise state by individual state. Many Americans were unsettled on the question, finding it difficult to defend the status quo but wary of what seemed a deeply radical change. The New York Times, once a tepid supporter of the suffragists, reversed itself in 1912, warning editorially that if women got the vote, they might go so far as to “serve on juries and elect themselves to executive offices and judgeships.” The leaders of Tammany Hall and other political machines had more practical fears: that if women could vote, they might prove less manageable than their fathers, brothers, and sons.
Until the chance to become governor of New Jersey turned him into a crusading progressive, Woodrow Wilson had been a true son of the Old South where voting rights were concerned. As an undergraduate, he had written that “universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country,” suggesting (the year being 1876) that allowing even all white males to vote was a hazardous innovation. He changed little as he matured, declaring in 1911, when he was electrifying the nation with his New Jersey reform program, that he remained opposed to woman suffrage. He said it would make no difference politically and do grave harm to the family.
The pressures that came with the presidency did start a process of change in Wilson, but it was a slow one. By 1913 he was claiming to have no opinion on the suffrage question. In 1915 he announced that he was voting for it in New Jersey (where it was the subject of an initiative that failed) but refused to urge Democrats to support it in Congress. Women should be given the vote, he was now saying, by the states rather than through a constitutional amendment.
In January 1915 the amendment on woman suffrage was again put to a vote in the House of Representatives. It was resoundingly defeated, in a way that intensified pressure on the White House. Democrats voted against it 170 to 85, while the Republicans supported it 81 to 34. (The six representatives from the Progressive Party also voted yes.) Democratic congressmen from the West were shocked by the fury of their female constituents. The Republicans were satisfied to remain on the sidelines and observe the agonies of the party in power.
Only an insensate president could have ignored such developments. At the 1916 Democratic convention, Wilson saw to it that woman suffrage was included in the party platform, but without endorsement of an amendment. Being a half measure, this did not infuriate the South, but it also did not come close to satisfying the voting women of the West or those suffragists of all regions who were tired of waiting for action.
In the aftermath of the convention, a group called the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage turned itself into the National Woman’s Party. It declared itself opposed to the reelection of President Wilson along with all Democratic congressmen who had failed to support the amendment. Its membership was younger and more militant than NAWSA’s, and saw no point in being loyal to a Democratic Party that refused to use its control of the White House and both houses of Congress to advance the suffrage amendment.
Winning the vote
From picketing the White House to tilling the soil, suffragettes made the war their springboard to victory.
Division became most painful, where these women were concerned, when it emerged along class rather than regional or party lines. The most genteel of the suffragists agreed with the proudly antisuffrage Edith Galt Wilson that their radical counterparts were “detestable”—“disgusting creatures.” Some of the most prominent of them exploited prejudice against blacks, white ethnic groups, and recent immigrants in the promotion of their cause. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, long one of the pillars of the movement, used a snobbish nativism to appeal to the kinds of women of whom she approved. “American women of wealth, education, virtue, and refinement,” she pronounced, “if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, African, Germans, and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters, demand that women, too, shall be represented in government.”
NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt took a similar line. “Every slacker has a vote,” she warned. “Every newly made citizen will have a vote. Every pro-German who can not be trusted with any kind of military or war service will have a vote. Every peace-at-any-price man, every conscientious objector, and even the alien enemy will have a vote.” She pointed to the danger of sending a million American men to Europe and not replacing them in the voting booth with “the loyal votes of the women they have left at home.”
NAWSA supported the Wilson administration unreservedly, even as the president edged ever closer to intervention in the war. It did so largely out of genuine patriotic fervor. But Catt, who had originally opposed intervention, came to believe that continued opposition could only damage the suffragist cause. The administration also had the firm support of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America, sponsored by the American Federation of Labor and surreptitiously financed by the government via the Committee on Public Information. At the most conservative extreme was the new National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, organized by upper-class and middle-class women and active in a number of states. It warned that giving women the vote would “destroy the family and increase the number of socialist-leaning voters.”
The results of the 1916 election amounted to total failure for the National Woman’s Party. With Wilson still in the White House and the Democrats still in control of both houses of Congress, the party’s leaders decided that the only way to keep th
eir campaign alive was to make a major nuisance of themselves. They began picketing the White House and pledged to go on doing so as long as necessary.
As long as necessary turned out to be a year and a half, and to involve more than a thousand women, many of them university-educated and from well-known, exceptionally respectable families. It achieved both its goals—maximum visibility and maximum annoyance—in large part because it aroused such a strongly negative response. The president observed—more accurately than he understood—that they seemed “bent on making their cause as obnoxious as possible.” The picketers were attacked physically by soldiers, sailors, and civilians, and every such incident made headlines. They were arrested for unlawful assembly and blocking the sidewalk, treated with brutish roughness by the police, and sentenced to months in Washington’s workhouse. The result was always the same: more headlines.
When the jailed picketers demanded to be treated as political prisoners and went on a hunger strike, they were force-fed through tubes jammed down their throats. Other inmates staged an uprising in their support. The party’s young leader, Alice Paul, was given a month in solitary confinement followed by a week in a ward for the insane. The more harshly they were treated, the more sympathy they aroused. Finally Wilson had to concede that this was a more formidable opposition than the socialists or the Wobblies. He pardoned the jailed suffragists, but they foiled him by refusing to be released. When they finally returned to the picket line, they publicly burned copies of speeches in which Wilson had spoken of liberty and burned the president himself in effigy.
The whole thing had become a prolonged and damaging ordeal for the president and the Democrats, and September brought what might have been the deciding blow. A man Wilson regarded as a friend, the reform Democrat Dudley Field Malone, announced that he was quitting as collector of the Port of New York because of the administration’s failure to do anything about a constitutional amendment. The president met with him, but Malone was adamant. He explained that he had campaigned for Wilson in the West in 1916, promising women that the president, once reelected, would support their cause in every possible way. In light of the administration’s continued inaction, Malone said, honor required him to give up his job. Wilson confessed to feeling hurt.
Most likely it was the plight of the western Democrats, and the resulting danger for the national party, that broke the president’s resistance at last. When it was decided that in January 1918 there would be another House vote on the suffrage amendment, Wilson wasted no time in declaring himself to be in favor. He said approval was both just and necessary for the war effort, so that he would be advising the Democrats to vote yes.
Chapter 15
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The Law of Selfishness
THE WILSON ADMINISTRATION’S takeover of the entire national railway system, with its three thousand companies and four hundred thousand miles of track and unnumbered terminals and warehouses and communication facilities, opened a new chapter in the history of American business. It gave urgency to the question, already a generation old in 1917, of whether business was going to dominate government or vice versa, or some kind of balance could be found. A number of ironies would come to the surface in its wake—deep and portentous ironies such as the eagerness of more than a few businesses to submit to government control so long as the rewards were attractive enough.
The consensus in the years following the Civil War, as giant corporations arose and the nation became an economic colossus, was that government should promote growth but otherwise not meddle. The young Woodrow Wilson shared this view, but by the 1890s he was beginning to share also, to some extent, the spreading concern about the extent to which “trusts” were taking control not only of key markets but of the government as well, and bending it to their purposes.
Between the outbreak of the war in Europe and America’s entry into it, people worried about how intervention might lead to further entanglement of government and business. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels would later quote President Wilson as saying that “if we enter this war the great interests which control steel, oil, shipping, munitions factories, mines, will of necessity become dominant factors, and when the war is over the government will be in their hands. We have been trying, and succeeding to a large extent, to unhorse government by privilege. If we go into this great war all we have gained will be lost, and neither you nor I will live long enough to see our country wrested from the control of monopoly.”
These words bring to mind the forebodings about civil liberties that Wilson was reported to have confided to journalist Frank Cobb before asking Congress to declare war. To whatever extent they were sincerely felt—and assuming, of course, that the president said them—they were soon subsumed under the challenge first of saving the Allies from collapse, then of mustering the resources to defeat Germany. The same Wilson who became the greatest suppressor of free speech in American history moved with almost equal speed to create a wartime regime that was, to a significant extent, of, for, and by the economy’s richest and most powerful players.
Of the need for action there could be no doubt. Quite apart from the immense task of creating an army and moving it to Europe, there were the shocking revelations of just how badly the war was going for the Allies in the spring of 1917, and how desperately they needed help. The picture continued to darken as the year went on—so much so that when the Allies’ newly formed Supreme War Council met at the end of November, its first major decision was to stand on the defensive in 1918, putting all hopes of winning the war in abeyance until the American Expeditionary Force was ready for action. By then it was no longer possible to count upon Russia for anything; the Kerensky government was tottering, its armies in disorder. France’s armies were in a convalescent state after their outbreaks of mutiny and not capable of offensive operations. The Italians had recently taken to their heels in the face of the Germans’ Caporetto offensive; three hundred thousand of Rome’s soldiers chose surrender over flight. The Third Battle of Ypres (the repetitiveness of Great War battle names shows just how static the Western Front remained) would soon be ending in the nightmare of Passchendaele, having moved a small section of front forward four and a half miles at the cost of a quarter of a million casualties.
The French mutinies gave new force to a question that haunted all the governments engaged in the conflict: how long could they depend upon their fighting men to endure the carnage? The threat of mass refusal was brought home to the British in July 1917, when Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon (not of German ancestry, but given his name by a mother who loved Wagnerian opera) issued a statement that he titled “Finished with the War, A Soldier’s Declaration”:
I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be obtainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
This was awkward for the British government on a number of grounds. Sassoon was
a Cambridge University man, scion of a wealthy family, and an established, respected poet. Worse, he had not only seen much action on the Western Front but had won the nickname Mad Jack there with his extravagantly reckless bravery; a year before issuing his statement, he received the Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry.” He could not be accused of attempting to avoid further danger, because at the time he issued his statement he was under orders to take up new duties training military cadets at home. Worst of all, his declaration called attention to the question of what Britain and her allies wanted to accomplish in the war and why none of them were willing to give an answer. Sassoon wanted to be court-martialed, so that such questions might receive a public airing. The War Ministry, to avoid any such thing, declared him a victim of shell shock (neurasthenia was the technical term) and sent him to a mental hospital in Scotland, as far from London as possible.
The war was not entirely without bright spots. None was more important than adoption of the convoy system in transatlantic shipping. This involved assembling groups of merchantmen and sending them across the ocean in groups under the protection of warships and, where possible, aircraft. Initially the British Admiralty rejected the idea as self-evidently foolish. It required all the ships in a convoy to move at the speed of the slowest, rather than setting out on their own to outrun the submarines. Even after Lloyd George’s war cabinet recommended trying it, the Royal Navy delayed.
The Admiralty changed its mind when the successes of unrestricted submarine warfare became undeniable. By April 1917 the U-boats, operating mainly off the southern coasts of England and Ireland, were sinking merchant ships at a rate that, if sustained, could force Britain to give up the war. Convoys were approved at the end of April, the first set forth from North America days later, and the effect was startling. Sinkings immediately plummeted, falling in May to little more than a third of the April total. Thereafter the monthly tally would never reach even May’s level. Sinkings of U-boats, by contrast, began to rise. Eventually they would reach such an unsustainable level that most German submarine operations were transferred to the Mediterranean.