In 1909, however, both mother and daughter’s views on the suffrage issue appeared to be identical and watchful commentators assumed that Consuelo was behind Alva’s ‘conversion’. ‘Everybody says’ remarked Town Topics, ‘that Mrs Belmont’s daughter the Duchess of Marlborough (we all know who her daughter is, but it tickles Mrs Belmont to see it in cold type) is responsible for instilling these suffragist ideas into her head. Consuelo is wrapped up in similar movements in England.’62 The New York Mail and Express put it slightly differently. ‘The influence of her daughter, the Duchess of Marlborough, is understood to have contributed to this marvellous change in her mother from the aristocrat to the socialist, for the daughter’s chief interest in London is now centred on the great social problems of the British metropolis. She is continually ministering to the wants of the poor and helping by every means in her power to uplift the lower classes’.63
Common cause between mother and daughter, however, masked the beginnings of a profound disagreement about tactics and priorities. While Consuelo saw female involvement in philanthropy as a dress rehearsal for the time when women would have the vote and become full citizens, Alva argued that good citizenship was impossible without the vote and that a fundamental right was being withheld, a difference in approach that would eventually cause considerable tension both with Consuelo and the leaders of the American woman’s suffrage movement.
Alva’s decision to fight for women’s suffrage rather than apply herself to philanthropy is open to a number of different interpretations. One is simply a matter of temperament. Throughout her life, she had been drawn to a fight, and she relished a big battle as a way of distracting herself from grief. There were also those in society who maintained that her thirst for publicity was so great that she simply embraced the suffrage cause to keep herself in the public eye once her life was changed by widowhood, a suspicion later entertained by some of those within the suffrage movement itself. Such evidence as there is, however, suggests that Alva took a considerable time to make up her mind before she became seriously involved, and that she spoke the truth when she said she had been an instinctive feminist all her life.
Harry Lehr’s comment that: ‘The dear Old Warrior has got something to fight for at last’64 was only part of the story. In her later attempts at autobiography she may have endeavoured to make her feminism seem more credible, but there is evidence of Alva’s feminist instincts well before 1909, including Oliver’s gift of the Joan of Arc statue, and Town Topics accurately reporting in 1906 that Alva wanted a career for Consuelo when she married her off to the Duke of Marlborough. Elizabeth Drexel Lehr commented that when Alva took up the women’s suffrage movement as a cause, ‘none of her friends were very much surprised. They remembered that Alva had always been a fighter, that she had always championed her own sex, taken the woman’s part in any discussion.’65
The American woman’s suffrage campaign had, by the time Alva joined it in March 1909, stagnated to the point of torpor. The energy of the first phase of the movement, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which started with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, had fizzled out amid bitter disagreements about tactics. One camp favoured securing voting rights for women by way of a federal amendment. By 1908 all serious attempts to push this through had come to a standstill. The second approach was to tackle the issue of female franchise state by state. Wyoming and Utah enacted women suffrage provisions in 1869 and 1870, followed by Colorado in 1893. The most recent state to follow suit had been Idaho and there had been no further progress in the previous twelve years.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), or ‘National American’, was the only campaigning organisation still active, but it was bedevilled by weak leadership and an amateur approach to political campaigning. Its headquarters were in Warren, Ohio because its treasurer happened to live there. Some key supporters of the National American, particularly Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriet Stanton Blatch, were already deeply frustrated by the time Alva joined. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American, now sought to make the best use of her formidable new recruit. She was hoping for a substantial injection of funds and in an effort to encourage Alva’s interest she asked her to act as a delegate to an International Woman Suffrage Alliance Convention in London in April 1909.
Alva was exasperated to find, however, that the general tenor of the conference was placidity and conservatism. Fired up by her new interest, she decided to investigate the working methods of the highly active English suffrage campaign while she was in London. What she found in April 1909 was a British movement broadly divided into two camps. The larger camp was represented by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and was committed to securing votes for women through constitutional methods – an approach similar to that of the National American and supported by Consuelo. A far smaller camp numerically, but one with a high public profile, was represented by a splinter group led by the Pankhursts, whose Woman’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) had split from the main organisation in 1903, frustrated by slow progress and impatience with the failure of the constitutional approach. This group had been nicknamed ‘the suffragettes’ by a journalist in 1906, a name which came to be synonymous with the militant suffragism of the WSPU.
After 1903 the Pankhurst’s WSPU evolved a series of highly publicised tactics which began with ‘mild militancy’ – heckling Liberal politicians, hiding in rooftops and disrupting political meetings and holding rallies. By 1909, however, WSPU tactics were characterised by an undertow of violence and the English campaign was far more divided than in 1908. Widespread criticism of the Pankhursts simply piqued Alva’s interest. ‘I was curious to hear these women whom all the public – men, press and “society” abused,’ she said, so she took a box for a WSPU rally at the Royal Albert Hall in April 1909 to observe them in action for herself. ‘Already the strong hand of a “Liberal” government was endeavouring to suppress these impatient and unreasonable women’ and she had trouble finding anyone to go with her. ‘I invited my daughter, the Duchess of Marlborough, to accompany me. Though a suffragist, she refused. Some friends were importuned. My invitation did not prove popular. Just as I was resigned to going alone, I found two women brave enough to accompany me.’66
In her box at the Albert Hall that evening, Alva was mesmerised by what she saw. ‘It was as if millions of atoms were being hurled towards a solution. It was as if a hitherto unheard cry was becoming articulate.’ For the first time, she understood that the fight for the vote was far more than a campaign for full citizenship – it was a fight for ‘the eternal world-old demand for justice and liberty’. ‘I longed to throw myself into this turbulent tide and to feel myself strengthened by the substance of the whole’ she wrote later. ‘What a revelation! I could not believe my eyes. Such electric fervour I had never seen nor felt in all my experience … The speakers, most of whom had served prison terms for asking questions in public meetings, or attempting to hold street meetings and various other “heinous crimes” took the platform amidst tumultuous applause … I was exalted.’ What astonished her most was ‘the astounding grasp of things political which the speakers showed. Their minds were vigorous, alert, imaginative … they already perceived what we in America only realized seven years later – that the battle must be fought in the political arena.’67
It was another of the defining moments in Alva’s life. She returned to the States with a clear vision of what needed to be done. Just as she had once seen the Vanderbilts as Medicis, and Consuelo as an English duchess after the visit to Government House in Calcutta, she was now gripped by a new vision for the American women’s suffrage campaign, one which drew on the lessons she had brought home from the Pankhursts but which also tallied with her experience as a leader of society. Since the finances of the National American were in a parlous state, Anna Howard Shaw and her colleagues had little alternative but to listen.
The first step, Alva argued, was to raise the visibility of the American suffrage campaign, an observation that came directly from her experience as society leader. What the organisation needed was ‘commanding headquarters’, a large, high-profile building that would be visible to press and public – a political equivalent to 660 Fifth Avenue. The National American should move from Warren, Ohio where no-one could see it, and establish itself in New York city like every other political party. Here, it should stop behaving like a parlour sect with meetings in the Martha Washington Hotel where tea was served to the same inward-looking group of fifteen women every time. Her suggestion was debated and agreed (much to the fury of the Ohio-based treasurer who liked working from home) and on 19 July 1909, Alva leased the seventeenth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue near 42nd Street, for which she would pay the rent for two years. As important, she undertook to pay the costs of a press bureau run by Ida Husted Harper, including salaries for three workers. The move, and her financial support for the Press Bureau had an impact almost immediately – sales of National American literature increased from around $1,200 in the Warren, Ohio years to around $13,000 in the first year in the New York headquarters.68
Alva had also noticed the extent to which the English campaign was a broad social coalition, successfully drawing on support from all classes including the aristocracy. Feeling that the social elite was one branch of society that she could deliver to the American campaign, Alva now set to work. ‘Newport was the ideal place from which to begin. The social and summer-publicity centre of the nation. So in the summer of 1909 we undertook to introduce suffrage for the American women to the men and women of wealth who have the leisure to think of current problems.’ For much of her marriage to Oliver, Alva had mothballed Marble House, using it only for its superior laundry facilities and allowing her son Willie K. Jr and his wife to occupy it during the Newport season when it suited them. In the summer of 1909 Newport society was agog at the news that Alva would be opening up Marble House once again to raise funds for the suffrage movement. ‘“Shades of Allah! Suffrage in Newport! Not a person will attend! A ticklish time for Mrs Belmont! Will she fail?” And so on ran the comments of the press and the male wise-acres in their comfortable gentleman’s clubs,’69 wrote Alva later.
Mrs Belmont did not fail. In 1909, she organised two highly successful suffrage meetings at Marble House towards the end of the Newport season, at the end of August, though the first received rather more press attention than the second partly because of its celebrity guests. The first meeting took place on Tuesday 24 August 1909. Alva successfully prevailed on her old friends Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, Tessie Oelrichs and Harry Lehr to attend, knowing that their presence would ensure that the rest of the ton followed like lambs. She also secured the presence of the venerable Julia Ward Howe, year-round Newport resident, author of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and a longstanding champion of women’s rights – the only survivor of the pioneering suffragist group that met at Seneca Falls in 1848.
The suffrage flag with its four stars for the four suffrage states flew over Marble House, while Elizabeth Lehr and Miss Lily Oelrichs acted as guides to the house which could be toured for $5. Strange juxtapositions were immediately leapt upon by the delighted press: ‘Society Meets Suffrage at Mrs Belmont’s Marble Houses in Newport’ shrieked one headline, ‘Harry Lehr and Mrs Howe under the same roof!’70 The newspaper also maintained that visiting suffragists were so overawed by the ‘Louis XIV magnificence’ that they almost forgot about the cause as they wandered round and gazed in wonder.
It was rumoured by one newspaper that most of the tickets had been bought by architecture students, but queues of suffragists and society ladies formed early as well as a ‘mixed crowd’ of artists and other summer residents anxious to have a glimpse of such a famous establishment. Those less intensely interested in architectural history or who knew the house already confined themselves to the garden and were charged $1, where they listened to the orchestra from the Newport Casino. A tent was erected for the speeches at the rear of the garden in the shade of plane trees. Alva (still nervous about public speaking) opened proceedings with a very short speech introducing Julia Ward Howe who received a five-minute standing ovation, before delivering a speech which not everyone could hear on account of her frailty. The main address was given on the suffrage campaign by Dr Anna Howard Shaw. She spoke for an hour and finished by saying: ‘The aid socially, financially and educationally of such women as Mrs Belmont has been a positive gain to the cause. But we as women suffragists are appealing to all classes. Women of all classes are joining our cause in England.’ And by way of co-opting support from the absent Consuelo added: ‘The Duchess of Marlborough holds the same view as her American mother here’ which was not strictly true but offered reassurance to worried society persons.71
The second meeting took place on 28 August. In spite of Town Topics’ dismissive description of it as a ‘complete frost’, this drew a crowd even larger than the five hundred or so who had appeared at the first meeting. Many came from out of town, and some from as far away as Philadelphia to hear an address from Professor Charles Zueblin, Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, in the presence of the Governor of Rhode Island.
What was actually said on both occasions, however, was generally considered to be rather less important than Mrs Belmont’s audacity in holding suffrage meetings in Newport in the first place. One thing was clear: As Town Topics put it: ‘Mrs Ollie Belmont is thoroughly launched on the suffragette sea and is one of the most militant mariners of the fleet’72 and this in itself was enough to focus national attention on ‘the cause’. ‘It was admitted that she has caused gossip on all sides not in Newport alone but throughout the country. That this gossip will have an excellent effect no one who is interested in the great question has any doubt,’73 wrote the World. ‘Newport has capitulated to an idea,’ wrote the Evening Sun. ‘Woman suffrage has usurped as topic of talk the place of piffle and pink teas.’74 Even the London Spectator remarked shortly afterwards that though the American woman of means ‘appears to have no function in life except the dismal one of providing herself with perpetual amusement’ there was now ‘a type of woman of wealth who needs to get out of herself and her circle of luxury and income spending by identifying herself and her fortune with some popular cause; and the woman’s suffrage movement, judging by developments within a year, bids fair to enlist not a few women who will be able to finance the propaganda in a generous way’.75
This did not mean that Newport society was universally delighted by the rallies. ‘Mrs Belmont has become almost scandalously democratic for she hobnobs with people these days who in the past she would never have condescended to look upon,’76 said Town Topics. ‘The avenue was lined for a mile with automobiles … the sorry nag of the station livery team standing next to the $15,000 touring car of the millionaire,’77 said the World. This was Newport society’s objection. ‘Why let loose a horde of fanatics on the stronghold of your friends? Said everyone,’78 wrote Elizabeth Lehr. Harold Vanderbilt (who was now twenty-five) was also said to be outraged. Although Alva wanted him to introduce the speakers, he ‘resisted violently’, according to Elizabeth Lehr, and hid indoors. The other person who was deeply unhappy was Azar. Chimpanzees were one thing, suffragists quite another. ‘Poor Azar’s consternation was boundless as hundreds of women from New York, Boston, Chicago – every part of the country, swarmed into the house that had earned the reputation of being one of the most exclusive in Newport, and wandered in the garden in groups of three and four. Women in shirtwaists, their jackets hanging over their arms, women carrying umbrellas and paper bags. Man-hating College women with screwed-back hair and thin-lipped determined faces; old countrywomen red-cheeked and homely, giggling shop girls. Azar had never seen such guests … It was too much for him!’79
While most of Newport society refused to be converted, the majority were still too afraid of Alva to do much more than grumble. Most Newport summ
er residents did not wish to cross her since there was an ever-present danger that she would stop inviting them to parties. As one newspaper remarked: ‘The advocates of woman’s suffrage have made a shrewd move in associating “votes for women” with visiting lists,’80 and she was helped by the support of her friends. Mrs Stuyvesant Fish would only remark to reporters that she ‘loved novelty’ while Harry Lehr confined public criticism to the hideous yellow of the suffragist buttons. In private, however, he could not resist a prank. After the rally at Marble House was over, Alva discovered that her suffrage banner bearing four white stars had been stolen. A week or so later, she was dining at the Elisha Dyers’ in Newport when an unexpected guest was announced in the form of Carrie Chapman Catt, a leading figure in the National American – already on record as resenting Alva’s interference in the movement. Everyone turned round in amazement as ‘a lady of noble proportions, majestically draped in blue with a flowing court train whose four white stars on a blue ground’ walked into the room. ‘Mrs Belmont’s eyes fell on it. She gave a cry of astonishment: “Why it’s Harry Lehr! And you were the culprit who stole my banner!”’81
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Page 35