Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Any impresario tempted to revive Melinda and Her Sisters would be repelled by its racist undertow, prevalent throughout the American suffrage movement at the time. Alva may have been a pioneer in including black women in the PEA but that did not stop her taking the opportunity to mount one kind of argument also to be found in the writings of Carrie Chapman Catt: ‘… all the blacks, the negros, they also are allowed their vote … and imbeciles,’ says Melinda to Mr Dooless. ‘By denying women the political right to vote and by allowing old black Joe that same right, you place old black Joe mentally and economically in a position superior to that of the late Mrs Dooless, your capable and very good wife.’37 Sadly, none of this seemed unusual comment to the audience and the press was captivated. Never had the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria witnessed ‘a more triumphal and brilliant affair’. ‘It proves once more that Mrs Belmont is full of original ideas,’38 said the New York Telegraph on 19 February 1916. The New York Sun attributed some of Melinda’s success to ‘Marie Dressler’s dress, and Miss Pam Day’s undress’.39 But other newspapers pointed out that anyone who picks out the cream of society’s debutantes, casts them as love-letters, sporting sisters, and castle dancers, and throws in a serendipitous Zeppelin raid over the Astoria for good measure was not only guaranteed success but positively deserved it.

  At a national level, however, the most pressing political issue was the Presidential election in 1916. ‘It was Mrs Belmont’s persistent desire that a women’s party be formed which would stand as a wedge between men’s political parties and force them to accept equal suffrage,’40 wrote Doris Stevens later. The CU formed itself into a ‘one-plank’ political party in Chicago in 1916 with the sole aim of persuading women voters in the suffrage states to use their votes to punish any political party that did not support a federal amendment. Alva’s instinctive flair for marketing led her to press an important change on the CU – its name. She was convinced that ‘Congressional Union’ was meaningless to most people, and urged the organisation to take the opportunity to rebrand itself as the Woman’s Party. In an interview with Amerlia Fry many years later, Alice Paul said the name change came about ‘because of this effort of Mrs Belmont to have something called the Woman’s Party. Then we thought, “The name seems to be generally accepted. People like it …” I remember Mrs Belmont was so pleased that we did it … and so full of interest, that she got up and pledged on the platform some tremendous sum of money.’41

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Alva suffered from high blood pressure, though the weak heart with which she threatened Consuelo in 1895 had held up amazingly well in the intervening years. In the summer of 1916 she was advised by doctors to take a rest. She chartered a yacht, the Seminole, to sail up the coast to Newport, and begged Doris Stevens to accompany her. Alva told Doris they both needed a break, but she had another motive. According to Doris Stevens, Alva ‘was not certain of some of the guests she had invited and that since she was taking Mr X along for the whole trip she must not be left with gaps on the boat when no other guests would be aboard. She said people might talk.’42 Mr X was J. Ralph Bloomer, a real estate agent thirty-years younger than Alva, whose name occasionally appeared in Town Topics, attached to a list of other young bachelors at minor social events. Alva probably met Ralph Bloomer on one of the occasions when she was trying to sell Brookholt, and he may also have advised her on the sale of Belcourt to Perry Belmont the previous year.

  Somewhere between 1916 and 1917, Alva, who was now sixty-three and increasingly deprived of close friendships by death and suffrage, fell in love with the much younger Ralph Bloomer. She was painfully aware that this love would never be requited, and that what she most wanted was truly unattainable. Her feeling for him was so strong that it worried Doris Stevens, who feared not only for Alva but for the cause, thinking that Ralph might lure Alva away from women’s suffrage. This did not happen, though he was still in evidence at Marble House a year later in 1917 and Alva was still miserable. ‘She talks to me freely of him’ Sara Bard Field wrote to Charles Erskine Scott Wood, and ‘searches the whole world for contemporary women who have married much younger men, drags out the illustration of Lady Churchill and George Cornwallis-West and when I say “Yes, but that didn’t last,” she responds “No, of course not. It was on a fleshly basis only but when she did divorce him he turned right around and married another woman older than Lady Churchill, Mrs Pat Campbell.” You can see she is doing what we all do – rationalising her impulse – or trying to.’43 When she finally met him, Sara Bard Field was surprised to find that she liked Mrs Belmont’s ‘young beau’ more than she expected. ‘I think he has some possibility,’ she wrote to Wood. ‘He is a clean-looking, clean-living chap, neither drinks or smokes (athletic influence while in Harvard) and with a wholesome love of the outdoor life and sports and especially flowers. He is sick of the insipid society women and perhaps he does find a lure in Mrs B’s vigorous mentality and uncompromising selfness.’44

  It was a forlorn hope. Alva’s unrequited feelings for Ralph Bloomer in the summer of 1916 can be felt in the wistful undertone of a log she wrote for the benefit of those who joined the Seminole during the month-long trip. Apart from two days when he went ashore to visit relations (a visit which Alva revealingly describes as his ‘holiday’), he kept her company the entire time. As in the old days of the great yachting trips, other guests came and went. They included Doris Stevens and the Democrat Collector of the Port of New York, Dudley Field Malone, who was a leading male supporter of what had just become the Woman’s Party and was passionately in love with Doris Stevens. ‘I have passed through the market; she is still at the threshold, and yet it would seem we are both vague, unable to arrive at any conclusion,’45 wrote Alva.

  The trip was punctuated by unseasonable storms. According to the log, it was Alva and Ralph who sorted out difficulties, taking decisions with the yacht’s captain about how best to proceed. One night, a raging storm made it impossible for Alva to close her porthole, leaving her ‘lamenting my want of power’ for everyone was asleep. And then: ‘Oh joy! Ralph, who says he sleeps lightly – and I believe he does – comes to the rescue. I am to disappear and he is to close the storm out. Again, I envy masculine strength.’46 But this was as far as things went, leaving Alva quite unable to sleep and awake until dawn. ‘Those in harmony should never go,’ she wrote elsewhere in the log. ‘In conjugating the verb “to be” only the present tense should be used.’47

  It may have been her feelings for Ralph Bloomer that caused a striking sense of disorientation when Alva returned to Newport that summer. Arriving by an unusual route and in very different company she certainly saw its ‘imaginary importance’48 afresh. She did not open up Marble House that season, much to the annoyance of her friend Tessie Oelrichs, but stayed on the yacht, taking her guests to visit old friends and relations, including the Perry Belmonts at Belcourt. ‘This is not the place or hour to give the impressions of what Belcourt did for me,’ she wrote. ‘I will simply say, to show what one can do, I made myself believe I was not myself and all went well.’49

  Newport was as charming as ever and she was surrounded by friends, but to her, ‘Life seemed careless, bright and the people like so many butterflies.’50 After Tessie Oelrichs had given them all dinner Alva found Rosecliff ‘breathing of luxury, of what wealth can do, charming every sense, conducive to idleness, dulling perhaps, alas! our standard of – shall I say, duty?’51 Even when she watched society athlete Eleonara Sears play tennis, Alva felt uneasy at the sight of four rich women exhausting themselves in a game, while over the fence ‘two men plough and dig, and with the sweat of their brows eke out a meagre existence for themselves and perhaps others. What a dark farce it all is!’52

  Alva soon found herself grappling with more serious problems, however. The 1916 Presidential election was dominated by the issue of whether America should enter the war, and members of the Woman’s Party – far more of them than in 1914 – campaigned to the point of exhaustion for the Republican
candidate, Hughes, who had agreed to support a federal amendment for woman suffrage as part of his manifesto. In spite of their efforts, President Wilson was narrowly re-elected in the autumn of 1916. He continued to parry demands for votes for women, even when visited by a deputation on the death of Alva’s beautiful protégée Inez Milholland, who had campaigned despite ill health in 1916, and then collapsed on a suffrage platform gasping: ‘Mr President, how long must women wait for liberty?’, and died weeks later. Convinced that more confrontational action was now needed where politics had failed, Alice Paul thought up a new way of generating publicity for the cause. In January 1917 she became the first person in history to lead a picket to the White House. ‘We could wait no longer,’ wrote Doris Stevens. ‘Volunteers signed up for sentinel duty and the fight was on.’53

  The ‘militant’ wing of the American suffrage campaign, represented by the Woman’s Party, never came close to the violent and destructive acts of Mrs Pankhurst and the suffragettes in England. The White House pickets, which began in January 1917 were, by any standard, an extremely tame affair. Typically, a dozen women would stand in a line outside the White House, eight of them carrying purple, white and gold banners reading: ‘Mr President, what will you do for woman suffrage? How long must women wait for liberty?’ – Milholland’s last public words. This caused an enormous stir and triggered headlines describing the women as ‘unsexed’, ‘undesirable’ and ‘dangerous’. It all pleased Alva hugely – so much, in fact, that she immediately sent Alice Paul a cheque for $5,000.

  The picketing continued for three months. President Wilson was mildly amused and would sometimes tip his hat to the suffrage ladies as he drove to the White House. On 6 April 1917, however, America joined the war against Germany and the suffrage movement as a whole came under pressure to act as Englishwomen had and declare a patriotic truce. The National American immediately offered its services to the government, but Alice Paul was determined to go on pressing for suffrage. The argument was summed up by a picket banner which read: ‘Tell the President that he cannot fight against liberty at home while he tells us to fight for liberty abroad.’ Alice Paul was also emboldened by events in England, where the new franchise bill was making its way through Parliament in wartime with few problems and would eventually lead to the passing of the Representation of the People Bill in February 1918, allowing most women over thirty to have the vote.

  Unlike many members of the Woman’s Party who were political radicals, Alva supported America’s entry into the war. This may have been one reason that, most uncharacteristically, she did not attend the ceremony during which the Woman’s Party became the National Woman’s Party (as it is still known) in Washington on 2 March 1917. If she disagreed with Alice Paul’s wartime picketing strategy in private, however, she supported her stand in public, and continued to offer financial support. This was not as straightforward as it had once been. Income tax of 7 per cent had been introduced in 1913, had risen to 15 per cent by September 1916 and would briefly rise to a top rate of 75 per cent before the end of the war; and war inflation would drive up the cost of building Beacon Towers; at the same time financing the National Woman’s Party (NWP) became much more difficult after 1917 because no-one wished to be associated with a ‘treasonable’ group.

  The summer of 1917 was a challenging time for the NWP. In June the administration began to clamp down on the picketers who were briefly imprisoned on a bogus charge of obstructing the traffic outside the White House. In July matters deteriorated sharply. A picket, which included Doris Stevens, was arrested and sent to the Occoquan Workhouse where they were stripped naked in front of each other, forced to wear prison clothes and denied the most basic sanitary items including lavatory paper. They were pardoned by the President after a few days of vociferous protest. For the rest of July and the first part of August 1917, the pickets resumed and for the time being, the arrests stopped.

  In the middle of August events in Washington suddenly moved into a different and much more violent phase. As the President continued to disregard the case for democracy at home, the NWP pickets took to taunting him with banners calling him ‘Kaiser’ and ‘Autocrat’. In the build up to military action that now gripped the country, soldiers and sailors roamed the streets of Washington tense with pre-war nerves and ready for a fight. In mid-August the ‘treasonable’ banners of these women provoked a furious reaction from one male mob who attacked the female demonstrators, knocked them to the ground and tore at their clothes. On the first occasion the police stood by and let them get on with it. During the second, on 16 August, they led the attack themselves. At least fifty women were arrested and sent to the workhouse, where black women prisoners were ordered to attack them by the warders; conditions were so filthy and degrading that a hunger strike was the only practical response.

  When Lucy Burns led a campaign inside the workhouse for treatment as political prisoners, she was sent to the district jail where treatment was so shocking that Dudley Field Malone resigned his government job in protest. In October, Alice Paul was also sent to the district jail for picketing where she led a hunger strike to which the response was force-feeding. When she refused to call off the hunger strike the authorities responded by attempting to have her certified, sending her to a psychiatric ward with other criminally insane inmates, and keeping her awake by shining electric lights in her eyes every few minutes. On 17 November, more pickets were arrested, including a frail seventy-three-year-old, Mrs Mary Nolan, who was sent to the workhouse and subjected to what was later known as the ‘Night of Terror’. On the orders of the warden, the suffragists were attacked by a group of men. Women picketers were manhandled, knocked to the ground, and denied water and all medical attention for their injuries, even when one of them had a heart attack. There was a huge protest outside the prison, and the prisoners were eventually released in late November after serving a writ of habeas corpus. The NWP was eventually vindicated when a federal court ruled that every arrest had been illegal under the First Amendment, and that the NWP picketers had been held in the workhouse illegally. Alva rushed to their defence, denouncing the soldiers and sailors who had attacked them. ‘It is grievous to hear that sailors, wearing the uniform of our nation, supposed at this very moment to be preparing for the fight for democracy, find nothing better to do than to knock down women likewise seeking democracy,’54 she raged.

  During the lull between the first arrests in July and mob attacks in August, Alva went to Newport for the summer season, where she was joined by Sara Bard Field who had agreed to help her write her memoirs. Sara Bard Field was a poet, a radical, a feminist and a campaigner for social reform – an area in which she first became interested while married to a Baptist minister by whom she had two children. She had been a paid organiser for the campaign that won suffrage for Oregon in 1912 and sprang to prominence as one of the leaders of the great transcontinental suffrage petition in 1915. By the standards of the day, her private life was highly unconventional. She divorced her husband in 1914 around the time she met and fell in love with the poet and writer Charles Erskine Scott Wood. In an interview with Amerlia R. Fry in the 1970s, Sara Bard Field thought she had first come to Alva’s attention at a meeting in New York in 1916: ‘I evidently spoke with a kind of fervour that Mrs Belmont approved of and had herself. I would call it, perhaps, in her case vehemence. She couldn’t do anything by halves, it was always all the way or nothing.’55 When Doris Stevens suggested she would be a suitable person to ghost Alva’s memoirs, it was Sara Bard Field who hesitated and Alva who was determined. ‘She seems gluttenous [sic] to get at my spirit and have it here, just as she buys gowns and jewels,’56 wrote Field to Wood.

  Sara Bard Field accepted the job because she needed the money. It was agreed that she would travel to Newport, where she stayed for almost a month, lodging at a boarding house on Coggeshall Avenue. A routine began to emerge: Alva would call for her after shopping in the morning or would send a car; after lunch at Marble House, Alva would talk and
reminisce for two or three hours. ‘She is not at all embarrassed with me. I take copious notes. I interrupt with a hundred questions. If she is alighting some point of vital interest I urge on her memory by suggestion and interrogation,’57 Field wrote to Wood. Later in the day, Sara Bard Field would type up her notes and begin to divide the material into chapters ‘dashed off while in the spirit and color of her own recitals’.58 Sometimes Alva’s phrases and observations were transcribed verbatim. At other times Sara Bard Field clarified and rewrote what Alva had said. ‘She is often so vague I have to define all her ideas myself and I hope to god she will stand for some of the things I have interpolated. Of course this is her life not mine and I have no right to put my views into her mouth unless she subscribes to them and makes them her own.’59 As a socialist, Sara Bard Field was particularly fascinated by what Alva said about Joseph Choate’s attempts to dissuade her from divorce on the grounds that the rich must not break ranks; and by Alva’s observations on marriage in general and Consuelo’s marriage in particular. ‘Well the chapter on Consuela’s [sic] marriage was some job! It made a discussion of the old lady’s reasons for furthering such a marriage necessary and she certainly does put it over in fine shape,’ she wrote to Wood on 24 August 1917.

  Sara Bard Field hated the luxury with which she was surrounded at Marble House. Indeed she hated the whole of Newport in 1917. It was filled with ‘soldiers and sailors about to kill and be killed’, and the lifestyle of the very rich revolted her. The soldiers and sailors stank in the summer heat, but attempts by Alva to engage society women and generals’ wives in a campaign to give each serviceman a change of underwear met with no success. ‘These mindless creatures of inherited wealth or of private riches live their lives of selfish indulgence and unvirtuous sloth,’60 Sara Bard Field wrote to Wood. ‘No wonder the Goths sacked Rome when Rome had been reduced to such as these.’61 Alva’s disgust at the insipidity and passivity of Newport’s society women seems initially to have misled Sara Bard Field who was naive enough to think she might be able to convert her employer to socialism. ‘I have sworn to the gods to try to help this dominant, fearless old lady to see the light – more light than she now sees,’62 she wrote in one letter. This turned out to be rather more difficult than she imagined and she was soon forced to conclude that ‘once she made her mind up about anything there was no power on earth that could convince her about anything’.63