Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  On the one hand, there is no doubt that Alva was genuinely proud of Consuelo’s work and wished to introduce her (and parade her) to like-minded distinguished women; on the other, she knew perfectly well that if she wanted to guarantee a good turn-out and maximum publicity for her own cause, the Duchess of Marlborough was an incomparable draw. Consuelo’s name was certainly most effective in recruiting distinguished speakers. ‘[My daughter] is intensely interested in the achievements of women in executive positions the world over,’64 Alva wrote to Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of Chicago schools, who immediately agreed to attend.

  Once she was sure that the chance to meet such women would definitely bring Consuelo to Newport, Alva set about using her asset to maximum advantage. Consuelo’s presence offered an outstanding opportunity to shore up Alva’s social position which was always close to being damaged by her much-publicised suffrage activities and her absences from Newport (she had missed the 1913 season completely while entertaining the Pankhursts in France). Alva now let it be known that she would be giving a Chinese ball in late July to celebrate a spectacular new Chinese tea house she had just built in the grounds; and that the ball would be given in honour of Consuelo. Those who wished to be invited, and to meet Consuelo, had little difficulty in working out that they stood a better chance if they signed up for the July rally for distinguished women too.

  Initially, Alva seems to have had some idea of combining the meeting of ‘great women’ with a rally for the CU, but even she appears to have been hesitant about manipulating prominent American women and Newport’s social elite into such an overt association with a rebel suffrage group. Instead she decided to open CU offices in Newport for the summer season and create an implicit relationship between the rally, Consuelo and support for suffrage militancy in the minds of the press and public. In practice, organising both a rally (under the auspices of the Political Equality Association) and a ball at Marble House was almost too much for Alva, with the result that she had little time to help with finding the CU offices in Newport as she had promised. This fell to Doris Stevens, a young CU organiser and activist, who would become another of Alva’s young suffragist protégées, and who ended up by feeling highly ambivalent about her. After a frantic search, Doris Stevens settled on premises near the Newport Casino before embarking on a ceaseless round of public speaking and fundraising to pay for the entire enterprise including her own salary.

  From the middle of June 1914, it was clear that Consuelo’s presence at the conference for social workers would turn it into an event that Newport society could only ignore at its peril. Her arrival in the US was trailed by a slew of newspapers, who frequently did Alva’s work for her by printing headlines such as: ‘Duchess of Marlborough Expected To Make Many Converts to Suffrage Here’, and calling Consuelo an ‘avowed militant’.65 The Duchess’s impending arrival was tracked from Boston to Philadelphia, but there was a difference of opinion about what Consuelo would be doing when she arrived. Alva’s press agent announced that the Duchess was on her way to Newport to support the cause and to address the meeting. Consuelo had given no such undertaking and had certainly not agreed to address the assembly on the subject of ‘Battling for the Ballot in England’,66 as reported in one newspaper. Indeed, in the one interview that Consuelo gave on board ship to the New York Herald on 27 June, she said that she would not be speaking at all; but even the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June did nothing to damp down intense press interest in her imminent appearance.

  As soon as she arrived in the States, Consuelo found herself trapped in a dilemma indelibly associated with Marble House. She was immediately caught between not wishing to embarrass her mother publicly and great reluctance to submit to Alva’s will – in this case, by endorsing militancy. Sensing a difference of opinion, the newspapers pounced. When asked by The New York Times what she thought of the ‘militant suffragists’ she replied: ‘I hardly dare express an opinion on the matter; it is rather dangerous,’ before going on to say: ‘But I may say that I am a suffragist, though not a militant.’ When asked whether she disapproved of English militancy, Consuelo reached for a slightly different formulation. ‘I won’t say that … It is for history to decide whether English militants are justified in their methods or not. It is impossible to compare English and American suffragists, the conditions are so different. The men of England are not so open-minded as those of the United States. They are more stubborn.’67

  The most accurate summary of Consuelo’s views probably appeared in The New York Times on 6 July when she was reported as saying: ‘Militancy will never win the ballot in England … If the methods of the Pankhursts and their followers are persisted in I cannot say what will be the result. The hostile papers, however, have greatly enlarged on the horrors of militancy. They have failed to give the conservative suffragists credit for victories won, and have used the acts of the militants to disparage the work of the so-called constitutional suffrage organisations.’68

  Misrepresentation of her views was compounded by misreporting throughout her stay. One interviewer suggested that Consuelo believed that rich women needed the vote to protect themselves from spendthrift sons-in-law – a piece of nonsense that drew a vigorous letter of protest to the editor from Alva afterwards. Consuelo was also alleged to have said: ‘I cannot say what will happen if the Pankhursts and their kind continue their present tactics. But the Englishmen who cried “Let Them Die!” deserve death themselves for voicing so inhuman a thought,’69 – a gloss on her views that she strenuously denied the following day in The New York Times. Consuelo’s more immediate problem was that she had learnt that her mother was desperate that she should make some kind of speech in order to secure maximum publicity and ensure the success of the event. It is quite possible that Alva repeated a familiar tactic by telling the press that Consuelo would be speaking before she arrived and then making Consuelo feel she would humiliate her mother if she refused. In the end Consuelo surrendered, but only with considerable reluctance.

  When the rally finally took place on 8 July, it was a triumph of adroit manoeuvring by Alva. Although this rally was purportedly a meeting of women involved in social welfare issues, the whole town of Newport gave itself over to the suffrage cause for the day. Suffrage colours ‘flew from Ruth Law’s aeroplane 1,000 feet in the air, fluttered in front of the Casino during the gayest period of the day, decorated shop windows along Bellevue Avenue, stood out before the deep green of many a fashionable front yard and even found vantage ground on some of the hundred or more yachts here for the regatta of the Eastern Yacht Club and the trials of the cup defenders’,70 wrote the New York Herald. The crowds started to assemble outside Marble House about 1 p.m. although the gates were only opened at 2.30. As they entered, a military band from Fort Adams played and young PEA workers distributed suffrage literature, pencils and fans – favours, in fact, but ones that could not have been anticipated in 1895. Once again, visitors could pay $5 to see the house, though the price of admission to the grounds and the new Chinese Tea House had gone up to $2.

  Many observers later commented on the mix of women at the 1914 rally and expressed amazement at the polite manner in which they listened to each other. On the platform there were women from politics (Helen Ring Robinson, a Colorado State senator), the justice system (Chicago Juvenile Court judge Mary M. Bartelme), education (Ella Flagg Young), philanthropy (Maud Billington Booth of the Volunteers of America), reform (Florence Kelly of the National Consumer’s League); and in a great coup for Alva, a representative of labour in Rose Schneiderman of the National Women’s Trades Union League. Consuelo was presented by Alva as ‘the worthy daughter of her mother’, which may not have entirely pleased Consuelo but certainly reinforced the link between Mrs Belmont and the Duchess of Marlborough in the unlikely event that anyone was ignorant of the connection.

  The 500 visitors included many representatives of high society – the ever-loyal Mamie Fish and Tessie Oelrichs, but Harrimans, Kern
ochans, Burdens, Warrens, Pells, Howlands and Perrys too. They sat politely through speeches defending the rights of Colorado miners, a particularly emotive subject in the wake of the Ludlow massacre of miners and their families; an attack on New York’s judges for spending $18 million on a marble courthouse while the poorest women in New York wrapped their legs in newspapers to keep warm; and a blistering attack on rich industrialists from the socialist Rose Schneiderman who denounced ‘an industrial system that throws women on the scrap heap when they are worn out’.71

  The crowd reserved its warmest support for Consuelo who negotiated her way through a difficult situation by speaking first of her work with prisoners’ wives, and then about the campaign for a decent municipal standard for lodgings for women. While the greater part of Consuelo’s speech focussed on these initiatives, she finished with a concession to her mother by explicitly connecting these ventures with the fight for the vote. ‘It is in order to obtain reforms such as these that women are asking for the vote,’ she said. ‘Those of us who are engaged in any form of social service realize that without legislation, individual and voluntary work can accomplish but little and must necessarily be sporadic. I therefore close by wishing those of you who have labored strenuously in many fields bearing the torch of civilization and progress before us, a speedy and a successful ending to the great work of women’s enfranchisement which you have undertaken.’72

  Afterwards, society women helped to sell tea and cakes, while the distinguished women on the platform passed warm comments about each other for the benefit of reporters. Senator Helen Ring Robinson told journalists that Consuelo impressed her as ‘a woman of unusual quality of mind and heart’ who struck ‘a high spiritual note’.73 Doris Stevens was impressed too, writing to Alice Paul that Mrs Belmont had been a superb chairman and that ‘even the Dutchess [sic] was charming and made a most finished speech’.74 This did not mean that coverage was universally polite. The Ohio Star was pleased to see that no-one on the platform had been experimenting with the hunger-strike business. The Boston American thought that the entrance charge was steep. The New York Call was irate at the way Rose Schneiderman was upstaged by Consuelo: ‘Never mind Rose of the brave heart … How can you expect to be mentioned by America’s plutocracy-truckling press on the same page as a dainty duchess, who is sweetly ready to do everything for the poor, except get off their backs?’75

  There was something in this, for as Alva well knew, the American press still suspended its collective critical faculties when confronted with Consuelo. Her presence as ‘the scintillating star of suffragettes’ was reported the length and breadth of America, from California, to Louisiana to the states of the Mid-West. ‘While the meeting would undoubtedly have been memorable in any case, it will probably be longest remembered by the women who attended because of the slim tall figure of the Duchess with her uplifted hand, as if she were fastening some mythical glove … she still has the power that draws – the desire to meet and talk with her – that she had when she married the Duke,’76 gushed one reporter.

  Almost every press photograph featured either the Duchess or the Chinese Tea House in accounts of the rally, a point not lost on Town Topics a few days later when it reported on ‘a regular orgy of equal franchise’. ‘One must give Mrs Belmont all the credit due for knowing how to stage a play. I would not say that she built the now famous Chinese pagoda and imported the Duchess of Marlborough as special features in her fight for the ballot, but as accessories to last week’s conclave they were undoubtedly invaluable.’ As Alva’s guests left the rally, they had showered her with congratulations. In the two-faced world of Newport society, however, all was not as it seemed. ‘I regret to say that many of them were tempered by the feelings of one gracious dame who, after, almost weeping in the excess of her admiration, remarked as she waited for her motor to take her away: “Well what do you expect? Alva Smith simply must be doing something to keep her before the public”.’77

  As far as Alva was concerned, however, there was more work to be done with her duchess daughter. The day after the rally, with much of the press corps still in Newport, she turned her attention to the opening ceremony of the CU’s summer headquarters at 128 Bellevue Avenue. Until this point Consuelo had managed to steer a careful path between embarrassing her mother and her great reluctance to be drawn on the issue of militancy. That afternoon she was outmanoeuvred. Doris Stevens had asked her to attend, and as soon as Consuelo promised to come she immediately lined up a Pathé camera ‘to get her as she comes into headquarters’.78 In fairness to Doris Stevens, both she and Consuelo seem to have been hoodwinked by Alva, for it later transpired that Doris Stevens was quite unaware of Consuelo’s resistance to militancy, while Consuelo was unclear about the CU’s support for the Pankhursts. In front of a horde of reporters and photographers, and probably out of politeness, Consuelo contributed $50 – and appeared to be joining up.

  This endorsement was misinterpreted by a wildly excited Doris Stevens who immediately wrote to Alice Paul that they had secured Consuelo as a CU member. This gave Alice Paul a bright idea: Consuelo might like to lead a delegation to President Wilson while she was still in America. She wrote to Alva saying that it would be ‘a wonderful way of again focusing the eyes of the country upon the President’s refusal to help’.79 She enclosed a copy of this letter to Doris, adding: ‘I hope and pray that we can carry through this plan of having the Duchess go to the President. Will you not present it to her in as favourable a light as possible, if the opportunity offers?’80

  A few days later, Alice Paul received a short note from Alva explaining that it would be impossible for Consuelo to take part in the delegation since she was leaving for England on 1 August. Undeterred, Alice Paul came up with an alternative plan. ‘We were indeed disappointed to learn from your letter, received today, that the Duchess of Marlborough could not take part in the deputation to the President. If you think the plan of having another deputation a good one and if your daughter would be at all interested in it, would it be possible for her to come sometime during the latter part of July?’81 Alva, who may have thought that she could bring Consuelo round to the idea given enough time, was finally forced to explain the true position to Doris Stevens. Consuelo had never spoken on a suffrage platform in her life and she had been most reluctant to speak at the Marble House rally at all. ‘Her mother by the way says she is not at all in sympathy with the militant movement,’ wrote Doris Stevens to Alice Paul. ‘Obviously my judgement … was in error. Her mother of course is way ahead of her in suffrage spirit.’82

  Before she returned to England, Consuelo was obliged to assist Alva with one more task, reminiscent of the summer of 1895. This was to help Alva bolster her social position by association with her daughter’s aristocratic standing. Newport’s summer residents fell over each other to entertain the Duchess of Marlborough in much the same way as they had once competed to entertain the 9th Duke. She even had a dance named after her by two professional dancers from New York (the ‘Consuelo’ was eventually performed for her during a small party at Marble House). Her sister-in-law, Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, gave a dinner at the Clam Bake Club, and Mrs Stuyvesant Fish announced that she would be giving a ball in her honour.

  The high point of the 1914 Newport summer season, however, was Alva’s own Chinese ball, held on 24 July to celebrate the opening of her new Chinese tea house, though even this social event enjoyed its share of controversy. This time, it was the men of Newport society who rebelled, not at the suffrage associations with Marble House, but at having to dress up as Chinamen. The problem was a) the Chinese pigtail and b) the effort of changing. News of the revolt even reached the Chicago Record: ‘Too much of a change,’ they said, ‘to get one’s self up like an oriental after an arduous day, beginning in tennis flannels and running the gamut of bathing suits, afternoon dress and evening clothes of any description,’83 though when Newport’s women responded with cries of ‘Don’t be a crow!’ they surrendered as one and duly appeared
at Marble House, pigtails and all. Suffrage colours faded out of the shop windows on Bellevue Avenue and Chinese embroideries faded in. ‘The only wonder to me is that the streets are not hung with yellow flags emblazoned with red dragons and that squads of [Chinese] are not selling chop suey and chow mein at the entrance to the Casino,’84 said Town Topics, whose correspondent spent an enjoyable afternoon following Mrs Stuyvesant Fish up and down Bellevue Avenue as she tried to find something Chinese to wear. Her companions screeched ‘Mamie, you do look a fright’ at every turn, so it was ‘a trying as well as a trying-on day’.

  Alva’s Chinese ball on 25 July was preceded by a Chinese dinner given by Mrs Stuyvesant Fish for 100 guests that almost upstaged it. Her house was decorated to represent a summer temple in Peking and it was said that some of the objets had been looted during the Boxer rebellion. In the main hall of the house the Emperor Keon Lung, who reigned in 1700, was seated on a throne and the guests saluted him as they passed. A standard bearer, a giant Manchu general, gave a greeting in Chinese to each guest on arrival. (‘The house itself was ugly. It needed these things,’85 said Alva.)

  Feeling that her Chinese Tea House was the main attraction of the ball that followed, Alva confined herself to illuminating it and the rest of the garden with small electric lights and Chinese lanterns. Characteristically, Alva came dressed as the Dowager-Empress of China. Consuelo, rather daringly, wore a tunic and trousers as ‘Lady Chang’, consort of a Ming dynasty emperor, an outfit said to have been sent from China. Half way through the night, the Chinese lanterns in the house flickered out and the ball was plunged into darkness. One woman guest immediately detected an anti-suffrage plot, but most guests thought it was a deliberate ploy, intended to throw the illuminations in the garden into bolder relief – until Alva erupted into one of her rages. ‘She could not be seen, but she could be heard, for she lost her temper completely and all the veneer of good breeding dropped from her … She poured her ire on everybody from the scullions in the kitchen to the flunkies in their black smalls, like a veritable suffragette fury,’86 according to Town Topics. Terrified engineers from the local lighting company quickly appeared; the lanterns flickered on again; and Alva’s secretary handed out reports that the ball was a triumph to waiting reporters, which is exactly how it was reported the following day.