Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Harry Lehr, it seems, could not pass an opportunity to dress up as a woman.

  * His wife was said to budget $50,000 a year for sartorial mistakes.

  9

  Old tricks

  REGARDLESS OF THE SUCCESS of both Marble House meetings, Alva’s involvement in the American suffrage campaign soon caused problems. For the first time in her life Alva felt compelled to bow to the leadership of others and she found this very difficult. She firmly believed that a united front was vital. She never sought to displace or undermine the president of the National American, Anna Howard Shaw, and supported her for several years in the face of fierce criticism. This did not mean, however, that Alva instantly set aside a lifetime’s habit of vehement certainty about what needed to be done. She resolved some of these tensions, in the short term at least, by setting up her own campaigning group, the Political Equality Association (PEA) on 16 October 1909, working under the National American umbrella and sharing premises in the New York headquarters. But the arrangement was uneasy from the outset, and there was open speculation as to how long it could possibly last.

  Alva’s opening moves were looked on warmly by Anna Howard Shaw. Exposure to the English suffrage campaign had convinced Alva that the American struggle must broaden its social base. In August 1909 she had courted the aristocracy of Newport. In November an opportunity to enlist working-class support suddenly presented itself when female garment or ‘shirtwaist’ workers in New York’s Lower East Side went on strike against appalling pay and conditions. Many of the strikers were refugees from Russia and their difficulties in asserting their rights through the organisations such as the Ladies’ Shirtwaist Makers’ Union were compounded by poor English and the arrogance of male trades union leaders. Garment manufacturers responded to the strike by having many of the women arrested for picketing in spite of the fact that it was within the law. Police treatment of some of them was tantamount to sexual assault: younger women had their clothes torn, were dragged through the streets to the police station and subjected to ‘gross indignities’ and ‘improper proposals’.

  Such abuse of police power at the behest of garment manufacturers soon became as great an issue as the original causes of the strike. Alva swung all her energy and influence behind the shirtwaist strikers in a manner that had male trades union leaders and most of New York society gasping, and garment manufacturers begging her to see matters from their point of view. Alva paid no attention. In November 1909 she led a parade of strikers down the Bowery; she rented a 6,000-seat arena for a rally at the Hippodrome, where she arranged for the strikers to be addressed by Anna Howard Shaw; and she raised money by inviting women from the Shirtwaist Makers’ Union to the exclusive new female Colony Club to tell their stories, and to extract contributions. To the delight of New York’s press, who tracked her every move, Alva sat up in the all-night courts glaring at the magistrate while he heard the strikers’ cases, interrupting him in such an intimidating manner that they were all acquitted, bar one whose fine she paid. The experience confirmed Alva’s views about political priorities too, for she saw at first hand how unfairly working-class women were treated by the male judicial system. ‘We must have radical changes,’ she wrote. ‘And I cannot believe that they can be brought about until women are recognized on an equal footing with men.’1

  In early 1910 Alva took another step which caused uproar and demonstrated just how far she had stepped out of her society fortress in the space of a few months. Alva embraced the idea that white suffragist groups should affiliate with ‘coloured’ female suffrage, and encouraged black women to join her PEA, albeit in a separate grouping. This brought calumny down upon her head from all sides, with some calling her ‘an evil influence’.2 The Negro Men and Women League of the PEA was formed on 23 February 1910, greatly discomfiting many of the National American workers with whom the PEA shared offices. ‘With characteristic feminine disregard for logic, the social leader … would confer the ballot on Negro women at a period in American history when public opinion in the North has begun to doubt the wisdom of the Fifteenth Amendment,’ expostulated one newspaper.3 This was just the kind of reaction that Anna Howard Shaw had hoped for when she enlisted Alva. She wanted her money, certainly, but it is clear that she also wanted Alva’s social power and her celebrity value as Mother of the Duchess of Marlborough. Because Alva had taken care to keep her public profile and relationship with Consuelo well burnished during the years of her marriage to Oliver Belmont, almost any move she made now ensured a barrage of press attention. By October 1909 the World was calling her the ‘unofficial leader of the woman’s suffrage cause’.4

  While Anna Howard Shaw was pleased about this, some of her colleagues in the National American were less than thrilled. ‘Seemingly, there is a feeling that Mrs Belmont is getting more attention than is her due,’ said the Washington Times. ‘We would not for a moment suggest that it is a feeling akin to jealousy … [but] it all goes to show that if women do get the ballot, there will be interesting times for the woman who gets rather more limelight than her sisters.’5 Behind Alva’s back, some within the National American dismissed her interest as the passing fad of a rich dilettante while others saw her as a compulsive self-publicist who had simply found a new platform. Harriet Taylor Upton, an ally of Carrie Chapman Catt, thought that ‘last year Mrs Mackay was very generally noticed in the New York papers, and Mrs Belmont wanted to do the same thing’.6 Such conservative reaction missed a serious point. Extrapolating from her great society campaigns, Alva was certain that the American fight for the vote must now embrace publicity. ‘The American woman has been brought up to shun publicity, but we must forget our personal inclinations for the sake of a great cause,’ she said in 1910. ‘To be successful in any phase of politics one must give one’s life more or less to the public, and that is the lesson the American suffragist must learn.’7

  When Anna Howard Shaw publicly congratulated Alva on her extraordinary impact on press attention (the press office counted more than 3,000 articles between April 1909 and 1910, whereas they had previously considered themselves lucky to get a mention), the response of Carrie Chapman Catt, ex-president and key figure in the National American, revealed the depth of conservative resistance. ‘I know you think the number of articles in the press is an evidence of progress,’ she wrote. ‘I think we should make more progress if we had considerably less.’8 When Alva hired a lobbyist in Albany to campaign for New York State suffrage, Catt was even more furious, fulminating that: ‘If the legislators wish to pass it they will do so because of the wish of their women constituents, without the intervention of a paid worker.’ The use of a lobbyist in Albany was regarded as so unladylike that it caused Katherine Mackay to resign from the National American, a split which was then blamed on Anna Howard Shaw by those plotting against her leadership.9

  This kind of reaction caused Alva great frustration. Realising that she would make little progress through the National American leadership, she took matters into her own hands through the PEA. When the National American proved deaf to her pleas that campaigners should descend from the seventeenth floor of the New York building and connect with the masses, Alva started PEA ‘settlements’, or offices, all over the city including Harlem and the Bronx. (‘When men want successful recruiting, they do not hide their stations on the 17th floor,’ she wrote later.10) She argued that suffrage campaigners needed to create ‘centres of interest’ and a ‘demonstrative form of agitation’. To show what she meant she bought a separate building for a PEA assembly district branch at 140 East 34th Street, putting an experienced suffragist, Mary Donnelly, in charge.

  Away from the inhibitions of the National American, this became the focal point for early experiments in ‘demonstrative agitation’, much to the horror of male neighbours on both sides who put up cast-iron railings against suffrage contamination. On Valentine’s Day hundreds of heart-shaped balloons with a suffrage message attached were released into New York’s skies; at Christmas a Santa Cl
ausette ‘arrayed in bright red modified hobble skirt, red coat and red hood, all trimmed with white fur’11 handed out hundreds of free gifts to local children. Alva’s most original idea, however, was to open a self-service lunchroom which drew in all kinds of new supporters who were bombarded with propaganda over their mashed potatoes.

  Another underlying cause of tension with the National American leadership ran much deeper, however. From the moment that she witnessed the Pankhurst rally at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1909, it was clear that Alva was a natural militant while her colleagues in the National American emphatically were not. The first two articles in a clippings book which she started in 1909 go straight to this fault-line. On 19 June 1909 Alva was reported in the Washington Post as declaring: ‘We women of America are not one whit less determined than our martyred English cousins to enforce our right to the ballot … If we cannot gain our end quietly and peaceably we will gain it otherwise’; while in a second cutting Carrie Chapman Catt was reported in the World as denying that she was in any way a militant or even intended to hold a parade.12 ‘Mrs Belmont’s militant announcements in which she intimated that the suffrage fight must be won even if bloodshed be necessary has not been approved of by the more conservative members of the association …’ said the New York Evening Journal and quoted Ida Husted Harper: ‘When Mrs Belmont makes an announcement, she gives her personal views.’13

  Although at this stage Alva was aligning herself with the militancy of the British WSPU, she was not yet in favour of the destruction of property or attacks on politicians which she thought inappropriate to the American situation. But she deeply admired the English militants’ embrace of visibility and their flair for publicity; and she felt strongly that ruling out non-constitutional tactics put the women’s campaign at an immediate disadvantage. She was also deeply irritated by the National American’s insistence that the issue of votes for women was an ethical one, best resolved by not antagonising men. ‘Nowhere could we find this noble example set by [men] of not “antagonizing” their enemies,’ she wrote later.14

  Until 1912 Alva remained publicly ambivalent on the question of militant action in the interests of unity. When asked by a reporter from the New York Sun whether she would object to being called a suffragette she replied: ‘I should not, if I could claim the title, but it is usually applied to the radicals whereas I am a conservative.’15 Set against this, she was always publicly supportive of the Pankhursts themselves. She particularly admired Mrs Pankhurst whom she described as a ‘strong, defiant, erect and liberty loving leader of the women of the world … a flaming torch which lighted my way’.16 During Emmeline Pankhurst’s visit to the USA on a speaking tour in October 1909, Alva struggled to persuade the National American to honour her with a reception in New York, though on this occasion she won the battle and paid for the flowers. ‘I took every minute I could spare to share the company and inspiration of this remarkable woman-leader,’ she wrote. ‘I agreed with Mrs Pankhurst when she said to me: “With your conservative suffragists in America suffrage is still an ethical principle. With us it is a political principle. You talk. We act.”’17

  In June 1910 Alva made a trip to England to stay with Consuelo at Sunderland House, ostensibly for a rest after a very busy year. She took lessons in public speaking, and, in an episode which might have appealed to P. G. Wodehouse, practised by giving an after-dinner speech on suffrage to Consuelo’s guests who included Mr and Mrs Higgins, Lord Rocksavage, the Hon Miles Ponsonby, Alva’s old friend Mrs Leeds, and Consuelo’s mother-in-law Lady Blandford.18 Alva’s presence in London that summer meant that she could observe the passage of the Conciliation Bill through Parliament, and she attended debates in the House of Commons with Consuelo, Anna Howard Shaw, and Millicent Fawcett, leader of the English NUWSS.

  Had this bill succeeded, it would have granted a limited form of women’s suffrage in England and could reasonably have been hailed as a victory by both the constitutional and militant camps. There were high hopes for its success; but Alva was there to see it defeated by one of the more disgraceful pieces of political chicanery of the early twentieth century. It passed its second reading with a huge majority in the House of Commons but Prime Minister Asquith, a committed anti-suffragist, was determined to block it in spite of this result. As bad, David Lloyd George who had always publicly spoken (and voted) in its favour, realised that the proposed extension of the franchise would hand an electoral advantage to the Conservative Unionists. Between them, they succeeded in having the bill referred to a committee of the whole house, denying it parliamentary time to complete its passage and thus ‘torpedoing’ it.

  Although this would eventually cost the Liberal government dear, the reaction at the time was outrage – and a sharp division between the two camps of the English suffrage movement. The constitutionalist NUWSS – and the Liberal government – blamed the failure of the bill on an upsurge of militancy by the suffragettes as they realised the bill was going to fail. The WSPU argued that the bill’s failure demonstrated the extent to which ‘constitutional’ non-militant methods were simply no use, and embarked on a campaign of militancy which would become steadily more violent. At this fork in the road, Anna Howard Shaw took the NUWSS position and Alva sided with the Pankhursts. Unable to contain her disappointment, she gave an interview to the Daily Mirror at Sunderland House in which she was quoted as saying that she approved of everything the militants had done; chivalry was humbug; women should own property jointly with men; women should have equal rights over children; and that they should be compensated for housework which was only regarded as degrading because it was free.19 Both Alva and Anna Howard Shaw joined a protest rally of over 500,000 in Hyde Park where their presence under the United States’ suffrage banner made headline news in the American press.

  Convinced now that the American campaign had to become more ‘political’ and less ‘preachment and propaganda’, Alva returned to America deeply frustrated by the refusal of Shaw and Catt to change tactics in spite of what had just happened in England. For the time being, however, she bit her tongue in the interests of unity and turned away briefly from suffrage politics to another initiative of her own: an agricultural school for young women – or ‘farmerettes’ as they were quickly dubbed by gentlemen of the press. Once again, this project could not be accused of lacking ambition. The idea, which drew heavily on an anti-urban, arts-and-crafts strain in contemporary thought, was to take a handful of young women factory workers and give them basic agricultural training on Alva’s estate farm at Brookholt. It was envisaged that some might then wish to become landscape gardeners while others would band together to buy small farms sold to them by Mrs Belmont.

  The very notion sent sub-editors across America into paroxysms of delight, particularly when they saw the first illustrations of the initial intake – sixteen fresh-faced girls clad in broad-brimmed hats and blue bloomer suits specially designed for them by Alva. ‘City Girls Make Dainty Farmers in Mrs Belmont’s Newest Eden’ shouted the New York City Mail on 13 May 1911, while the Los Angeles Record admired the ‘Wan City Girls Turned Into Healthy Happy Maud Mullers on Adamless Farm’.20

  At the start, all went well. The PEA lunchroom was the lucky recipient of the first crop of the agricultural school’s ‘vegetablettes’, as the New York City Tribune called them, which then became a propaganda tool unique in the history of suffrage campaigning. ‘Everybody who visited the headquarters was presented with a suffrage radish with “Votes for Women” stamped around its middle in yellow letters,’21 wrote a Tribune reporter who happened to be there for his lunch. This demonstrated quick thinking on the part of the lunchroom organisers for the radishes were ‘perfectly aldermanic’ in size. ‘Some of them measured ten inches round, and if they were a trifle pithy inside the suffragettes who ate them didn’t mind. They said suffrage vegetables ought to have plenty of pith to match suffrage arguments.’ (Some suffrage rhubarb which came with the consignment was also unusually large but was made into p
ies for that day’s lunch.)

  Aldermanic radishes, however, turned out to be the least of the agricultural school’s problems. By June, press reports were suggesting that some farmerettes found the Adamless life unsatisfactory. ‘The suffragettes point out with pride that a farm run by women can be beautifully conducted, but after that what?’22 Some of the girls were from good homes and were horrified at having to do their own housework. Others were resentful that promised tennis parties never materialised. According to one account, the superintendent marched out, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.

  It is perhaps not surprising that towards the end of 1911 Alva, now in her late fifties, was beginning to feel thoroughly overextended. She had been extraordinarily active, by anyone’s standards, and she had given herself little time to come to terms with Oliver’s death. On top of the breakdown of discipline among the ‘farmerettes’, Mary Donnelly upset her deeply by excluding eight black people from the PEA lunchroom. The historian Peter Geidel also suggests that her various initiatives may have been more of a drain on her financial resources than she cared to admit. In quick succession she foreclosed on a mortgage to Hempstead Hospital run by women; closed all the PEA settlements scattered across New York; and shut down Brookholt Agricultural College almost as quickly as she had opened it, much to the fury of some students who claimed that they were only just finding their feet.

  In the face of this rationalisation, and the continued refusal of Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw to retract their outright condemnation of militancy, Alva decided to concentrate her activities in one PEA building, in a manner she could directly control. Increasingly aggravated by the internal politics of the National American, by Catt’s attempts to undermine Shaw’s presidency and by the organisation’s timidity, Alva did not offer to renew the lease for their joint headquarters in 1911. (‘You see she is a spoiled rich woman,’ wrote Harriet Taylor Upton to Catt when she heard the news.23) She selected a new building at 15 East 41st Street and although she offered the National American space in her new PEA headquarters, it was not accepted.