by Elaine Weiss
The Woman’s Party staff was filled with ambitious, impatient, and mostly single young women who could no longer tolerate their second-class citizenship, refused to wait, and were willing to make a fuss. Sue White felt at home among them.
* * *
The telegrams and letters urging Carrie Catt to hurry to Tennessee had begun arriving while she was tending her summer flower garden at Juniper Ledge, her house in the town of Briarcliff Manor, about thirty miles north of New York City. It had been such a welcome, if brief, time at home, after more than a year of crisscrossing the country overseeing the state ratification drives. She had just returned from a trip to Geneva, Switzerland, where she presided over the conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, of which she was also president, in its first meeting since the end of the war. It had been a humiliation: more than twenty nations had already granted the vote to women—including Germany! It was a national disgrace to have just fought a war to make the world safe for democracy and yet not allow half the citizens of America to participate in that democracy. As much as she disagreed, vehemently disagreed, with Alice Paul and the flamboyant tactics her Woman’s Party had employed during the war, Catt had to admit some of the slogans on their picket signs rang true: “Democracy Begins at Home.” Indeed.
Catt sailed home from Europe in the last days of June and was met at the dock with the news that Tennessee might come into play. She dispatched her young aide-de-camp, Marjorie Shuler, to Nashville to survey the situation. Marjorie helped with publicity efforts in the ratification states, was a quick study, and had learned to spot trouble. She’d been in Delaware in May, when the ratification fight took an unexpected bad turn after the Antis’ corporate friends swooped into Wilmington with money and gifts and threats. What had seemed like a sure thing had turned into a disastrous disappointment, not only a victory for the Antis, but a dangerous shift in the ratification momentum. The suffragists couldn’t allow that to happen again.
Scouting in Nashville, Marjorie met with the Tennessee suffrage leaders, talked to the politicians, read the newspapers, and listened to talk in the hotel lobbies. It was a hornet’s nest. The Tennessee suffragists were fractious; the legislature had a well-deserved reputation for susceptibility to bribery; Governor Albert Roberts was embroiled in a nasty primary fight to hold on to his job, and getting tangled in the politics of the amendment’s ratification was the last thing he wanted to do. He was being pressured by the White House and the national Democratic Party to call the legislature back into special session to deal with ratification, but he was holding up the amendment for political ransom: he would convene the legislature only after his primary and, presumably, only if he won.
All this dissension made organizing difficult and gave the Antis a ripe opportunity. Marjorie feared the same forces that had sunk the amendment in Delaware were poised to converge and torpedo ratification in Tennessee. “Advise Chief,” Shuler wired to NAWSA headquarters in New York, “political situation exactly like Delaware only worse. Regard outlook hopeless under present conditions.”
Catt had wanted nothing more than to stay at home at Juniper Ledge. She was tired, her deep-set blue eyes circled in dark, puffy rings. She was tormented by migraine headaches. She was sixty-one years old and had been fighting this battle for so long. She could still feel the sting of the very first time she had confronted the idea of woman suffrage (she hadn’t yet known it was a “Cause”) many years ago, sitting at her family’s kitchen table. Carrie Lane was a pigtailed Iowa farm girl then, bookish and inquisitive, with the earnest self-confidence of a child who knows she is clever. She devoured historical tomes while perched high in a swaying tree bough, taught herself anatomy by pickling rodents’ brains in her mother’s canning jars, and loved riding her horse to the one-room schoolhouse down the road. Carrie was hungry to learn how the world worked and to be part of it.
Lively political discussions were a dinner table staple in the Lane family; Carrie read the newspapers, she liked to chime in. But on Election Day 1872, with incumbent Ulysses Grant facing off against crusading newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, thirteen-year-old Carrie watched as her father and the farm’s hired men prepared to ride into town to vote, dressed in their Sunday best, while her smart, politically minded mother, an ardent Greeley supporter, remained in her house frock.
Shouldn’t she be getting ready to go with the other grown-ups? Carrie asked her mother. Wasn’t she going to vote for Greeley? Carrie’s father, her older brother, and the hired hands erupted in peals of laughter; worst of all, even her mother laughed. She still remembered the bewilderment and embarrassment, the hot tears welling up. Women couldn’t vote, only men, her father explained, didn’t she realize that? It was too important a civic duty to be left to women. Carrie grew angry: her mother knew as much about the candidates and the issues as her father, maybe even more. Her smirking brother Charles was no smarter than she was. The guffawing farmhands couldn’t even read! Carrie could hear the men still laughing in the wagon as they drove off toward town. She felt as if she’d been slapped.
She dedicated her life to changing the laws that barred women from voting. Now, here she was, a twice widowed woman, twice elected to the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her name was familiar in every American home and foreign capital, her comments appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers, and her notes to the White House were given prompt reply. She could demand audiences with kings, presidents, and senators, prime ministers, maharajas, and cigar-chomping mayors. She was the leader of a giant army: nearly two million women and men were members of the National Association’s local affiliates, millions more were supporters and sympathizers, and in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the women of dozens of nations were organizing and agitating under her guidance. She led them with soaring oratory and nuts-and-bolts directives, with emotional exhortation and legalistic logic—always leavened with a sprinkle of dry humor.
During her years in the movement she’d seen slow—agonizingly slow—progress. On the wall of her office at NAWSA headquarters, as well as on the wall of Alice Paul’s Woman’s Party offices in Washington, hung a large “Suffrage Map” of the United States, with different colors and patterns marking the types of suffrage available to women in each state. (States hold the power to make their own election laws, unless superseded by federal law.) The map looked like a crazy quilt of dots, stripes, and crosshatches designating the states where women enjoyed full suffrage, able to vote in all elections and primaries, and where they could vote only in certain types of elections, such as school board or municipal or presidential. State politicians seemed more amenable to granting this kind of “limited” suffrage, as they could be confident that women would have no say in state policy decisions or patronage. Colored in black on the map were the states where there was still no franchise for women at all and little chance there ever would be. The federal amendment was the only way to equalize the map, paint it all in a radiant full-suffrage design.
She was a firm believer in evolution, in both biological and social realms; her faith in it kept her optimistic, confident of progress. Now it was her job to carry its glorious prospect to Tennessee. For Carrie Catt, woman suffrage was not simply a political goal; it was nothing less than the next logical step in the moral evolution of humankind.
* * *
Union Station was the pride of Nashville: a flying-buttressed, castle-grand monument to the capital city’s energy and commerce; a gray limestone temple dedicated to the power of the railroad industry in Tennessee. But for Josephine Pearson, pulling into Union Station was like entering the large, very large, house of family friends; indeed, the man who envisioned and built the station, Major Eugene Castner Lewis, was something of a godfather to Josephine. The likeness of Louise Lewis, one of the major’s four daughters (all of whom were Josephine’s good friends), loomed above the whole station, emerging from the south wall in the form of a classicall
y berobed, bas-relief figure of Miss Nashville.
Pearson was born just three years after the Confederacy’s fall, in the fraught time of Reconstruction, when Tennesseans felt punished and humiliated. She was spoon-fed horror tales of the Civil War, laced with nostalgia for the Lost Cause: a potent combination that made a deep impression. This federal amendment, with its demand that Tennessee sacrifice its honor and traditions, submit once again to Washington’s yoke, hearkened back to those times, stirring bitter memories. It must be repulsed. Tennesseans must not allow Nashville to be besieged by Yankees once again; it must not allow carpetbaggers from the North to further rend the South’s social fabric. Mrs. Catt might come to Tennessee with her northern lady troops and her regalia and fancy weapons, but the Feminist Peril would be halted here. As Josephine Pearson saw it, this was a fight for the soul of Tennessee, it was a “Holy War.”
Pearson was a patriot and a civic-minded woman, active in the Monteagle Ladies Club, her local Methodist church, and her chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She did her bit for the Red Cross during the war and advocated for economic development through better roads as chairwoman of the Cumberland division of the Dixie Highway Association ladies’ auxiliary. She believed in duty. And so Josephine Pearson suspended her teaching career to give all her time to antisuffrage work, mortgaging her property and taking boarders into the old house in Monteagle to make ends meet.
* * *
While her train approached the Nashville station, Sue White had time to reflect upon the meeting a day earlier in Columbus with the Democratic presidential candidate, Governor Cox. It had gone rather well, she thought. With the threat of Woman’s Party picketers outside his door ready to pounce, he was most conciliatory, issuing a strong pro-suffrage statement to the press and promising to do all he could to line up Governor Roberts and all the Tennessee Democrats behind the ratification drive.
Satisfied for the moment with Cox’s professed intentions, Alice Paul and her Ohio troops were now turning their fire toward the Republican candidate, Senator Harding, who expected to officially accept his party’s nomination from the front porch of his home in Marion the following week. The Woman’s Party would be there to greet him.
Now, however, Sue White was needed in Nashville to launch the party’s campaign in Tennessee. She had already scoped out the situation and it did not present a pretty picture. She had given Miss Paul her candid assessment in a long letter: “The more I look into the Tennessee situation, the more I realize that we face a terrific fight,” she told Paul. “The anti suffragists have already begun work, appealing, as they always do in Southern campaigns, to deeply seated prejudices and pouring vitriol into old wounds.” Unless suffragists committed themselves fully and fought “relentlessly,” she warned, Tennessee was in danger of being lost. And perhaps, with it, the amendment.
Now it was going to be Sue White’s job to run that relentless campaign. She had never been fully in charge of a state campaign before, and it gave her a bit of a shiver to think of the challenges that lay ahead. She knew full well that the Woman’s Party could not do it alone; in truth, there were not that many members of the Woman’s Party in Tennessee. The state’s mainstream suffrage leaders were appalled by the party’s tactics, and the average Tennessean still considered the party’s picketing and protest actions during the war unpatriotic. To accomplish the all-important goal of ratification, Sue White understood that she was going to have to forge some sort of working relationship with her erstwhile state suffrage colleagues. It might be awkward, but White was willing to swallow a slice of humble pie for the sake of the Cause.
The train arrived and White mounted the steps from the platform into Union Station’s glass-ceilinged main hall. On the far side of the hall was a bas-relief replica of the 1900 Limited train pulled by a Bully 108 locomotive, the pride of the L&N line, seeming to burst through the wall. On another wall was the grand station clock, guarded by the figures of Time and Progress, with Mr. Progress gripping a railroad wheel to his chest. All around her, draped over each of the station’s archways, were the angels of Tennessee commerce, twenty carved winged maidens each holding an important state resource or product in her outstretched hands: a sheaf of barley, boll of cotton, lump of coal, ingot of ore, cornucopia of fruit, and flask of whiskey, good Tennessee bourbon, all the products the railroad carried to market to make the state great and prosperous. As she hurried through the station, Sue White must have realized she was surrounded by the symbolic renderings of the powerful interests—railroads, liquor, and manufacturing—that would soon be arrayed against her and her Cause.
* * *
Carrie Catt braced herself as her train pulled into the station at about half-past eight that Saturday evening. A comb would be a good idea, her hair was probably a fright, her careful center part off-kilter. There would certainly be reporters at the station, and she had better prepare something clever to say. She noticed that reporters these days enjoyed getting quotes from Alice Paul; she provided them with florid, perfectly sensational material, a far cry from Carrie’s own carefully modulated statements. It galled Catt no end.
She had not modulated her own statements to her Tennessee suffrage leaders; during the past two weeks she’d mailed them stern, pointed letters of instruction and admonition. They were very fine and capable women, but she warned them: they had to set aside their silly rivalries and pull together, presenting an “absolute, united, optimistic front turned toward the enemy.” And they had better get ready for an ugly fight: “The Anti-Suffs will flood Tennessee with the most outrageous literature it has ever been your lot to read,” she told them, drawing from her experience in the other southern states. “It will contain outright lies, innuendoes, and near truths, which are more damaging than lies. It will be extremely harmful, and the ‘nigger question’ will be put forth in the ways to arouse the greatest possible prejudice.” The race issue always reared its ugly head in the South.
“Whatever you do or whatever you think, allow me to urge you not to underestimate the power of the opposition which will be applied to the thirty-sixth state.”
Catt shared her deep misgivings with Anne Dudley, the Nashville suffrage leader to whom she felt closest, in a chillingly candid evaluation of the situation, written just four days before she boarded the train for Nashville: “At this time, I do not believe that there is a ghost of a chance of ratification in Tennessee.”
When Catt stepped off the train, Marjorie Shuler was there on the platform to greet her along with Catherine Kenny, a seasoned Nashville suffrage veteran who was shepherding the ratification effort for Catt’s new League of Women Voters. They had a redcap take Mrs. Catt’s little travel bag up the long flight of stairs from the platforms into the Union Station main hall, and as they made their way up the steps, they briefed Mrs. Catt on what awaited. The reporters were there, the press swarming Mrs. Catt as she entered the grand hall. “I’ve come to look over the situation,” she pronounced rather breezily. She would be staying no longer than a few days.
“All the states consider Tennessee the queen of the Southern states and the leader in all progressive matters,” Catt told the reporters. “Suffrage supporters feel certain that Tennessee will rise to the occasion and use its decisive vote for the women. The eyes of the country and the world are centered here at Nashville.” Carrie Catt was demonstrating that confident, optimistic attitude that she’d urged the suffrage women of Tennessee to adopt. Whether she believed it or not.
* * *
The Hotel Hermitage in Nashville was a much grander place than Josephine Pearson might normally have chosen. When she registered at the desk she requested the cheapest room and, she added, a room far away from Mrs. Carrie Catt. Her room was stifling, and she was not accustomed to Nashville summer heat; it was nothing like the cool mountain night air in Monteagle. But she came up with an ingenious solution.
Miss Pearson sat naked in the bathtub, cold water trickli
ng onto her toes, a candlestick telephone in her hands, and began her work. She gripped the telephone shaft and spoke into the daffodil-shaped mouthpiece: “Line me up with New York,” she directed the switchboard operator. Upon completing one call, she went on to the next; she had a long list. “Put me through to Boston.”
She had orders to relay. She had forces to mobilize, and so into the night she sat. “Connect me to Mobile.” From the depths of her moist refuge, Josephine Pearson called her allies around the country, those who stood ready to provide the resources required for this fight to defend American civilization. Into the telephone she sounded the alarm: Mrs. Catt is here. Send help. We are under attack.
Chapter 2
Lay of the Land
IN THE MORNING, on the third floor of the Hotel Hermitage, Carrie Catt clipped her pince-nez eyeglasses onto her lacy blouse and prepared to survey the battleground terrain. It was a minefield, that was certain.
Nashville was one of the few American cities she’d not visited on a tour or campaign, but she had traveled to other parts of Tennessee. The first trip was with Susan Anthony in their 1895 swing (it might be better described as a trudge) through the southern states, trying to drum up interest in votes for women. They made their way through five states in four weeks, rallying, educating, and organizing clubs. They preached the suffrage gospel in cities and small towns, but the South was hard ground for sowing suffrage seeds, the social and political culture unyielding. To save money, they stayed in the homes of host suffragists, and Catt often had to share a bed with Aunt Susan, who was, thankfully, quite thin.