by Elaine Weiss
“I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them,” is how Stanton described their work together. Anthony would later teach Carrie Catt how to aim such missiles. In the 1850s, there was no official women’s rights organization and no feeling among activists that such a structure was even necessary—it might be too rigid and cumbersome. This was a time for broaching formerly taboo topics, discussing them privately in parlors and openly at conventions, engaging in debate with doubters, wrestling with contradictions, and forging an ideology. It was the period—to borrow a term from a much later women’s movement—of “consciousness raising.” Over the decade the circle of women widened steadily, though it did not extend to the women of the southern states, where the culture did not allow for such questioning of social roles and relationships. At the center were Elizabeth Stanton, the new movement’s philosopher; Lucretia Mott, its moral force; Lucy Stone, its voice; and Susan Anthony, its organizer.
But those who advocated women’s rights were still just a small segment of the larger, organized, more urgent push to abolish slavery, and as the nation veered toward a cataclysmic confrontation, there could be no doubt about priorities. During the Civil War—in a decision that presaged the one Carrie Catt would make six decades later when America entered the Great War—those who considered themselves “feminist abolitionists” reluctantly suspended their work for women’s rights and channeled their energies into the righteous crusade for emancipation and the preservation of the Union.
Many abolitionists, including Stanton and Mott, did not support Abraham Lincoln’s presidential candidacy in 1860, believing the Illinois senator was not sufficiently committed to the ideal of immediate emancipation for slaves; even after his election and the outbreak of war, ambivalence about Lincoln persisted. Abolitionists spent the Civil War years pressuring Lincoln to actually break the shackles of the slave. Even when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation, many abolition activists questioned the sincerity of his motives—was it truly an act of moral courage or just a wartime expediency to undermine Confederate morale?—and bemoaned the fact that the proclamation did not truly abolish slavery in America, only outlawed it in the rebellious states where it could hardly be enforced. What was needed was a surge of public pressure to push Lincoln and Congress to follow through with a comprehensive measure to abolish slavery completely and permanently by law, not just executive order. Better yet, by constitutional amendment. The abolitionists’ ally in the Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, asked for help in turning up the heat under Congress: Bring me visible proof of the will of the people, he told the abolitionists.
“Here then is work for you, Susan,” Henry Stanton wrote to his wife’s collaborator, urging her to join this effort, “put on your armor and go forth!” Elizabeth and Susan strapped on their shields and put out a call “To the Loyal Women of the Republic,” convening a meeting in May 1863 of the group called the Women’s National Loyal League. The goal: to muster an army of women into a massive grassroots effort to push for a stronger emancipation policy. This was a different sort of war work from anything women had ever been asked to do, a far cry from nursing or knitting or fund-raising fairs on behalf of soldiers. This was political work, organized agitation for a governmental solution to slavery, utilizing the one legal tool women possessed—the petition. Women did not have bullets, Susan Anthony reminded them, and they certainly did not have the ballot; but the “sacred right” to petition the government for redress of grievances was enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment, and it was not restricted to men. Now they aimed to use it, and on a larger scale than had ever been done before.
With Stanton and Anthony in charge, the Loyal League was infused with a strong feminist flavor, and at that first organizing meeting they inserted a controversial resolution: “There can never be true peace in this republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all Women are practically established.” As usual, there was an outcry from some attendees; even William Lloyd Garrison protested Stanton and Anthony’s transformation of the inaugural Women’s National Loyal League meeting into a “women’s rights convention.” One newspaper called the meeting a “witches sabbath.” But the resolution was passed.
Stanton became president and Anthony secretary of the Women’s National Loyal League and quickly built a structure and an elaborate outreach mechanism. League members wore breastpins bearing the image of a slave breaking out of his chains and the motto “In Emancipation Is National Unity.” Anthony, with her superb organizing skills, recruited more than two thousand women to take women’s emancipation petitions door-to-door, collecting the signatures of both women and men, white and black, and asking for a penny donation. Even children were encouraged to knock on doors to collect signatures and pennies and were rewarded with a badge. The petitions were forwarded to league headquarters in New York City, where they were recorded and tallied, the pages pasted together and rolled into giant scrolls (Elizabeth enlisted her children to help), packed into trunks, and mailed to Congress. There they became the star props in a grand bit of political theater.
On a February morning in 1864, two tall black men marched into the Senate chamber carrying sets of scrolls, the first installment of the league’s petitions, one hundred thousand signatures strong. They strode across the room and handed the scrolls to Senator Sumner, who stood to accept them with a dramatic flourish. He pronounced the petitions “the prayer of one hundred thousand” and used them to bolster his drive for a constitutional amendment forever abolishing slavery. In an extraordinary logistic feat, the Women’s National Loyal League would deliver Sumner a total of four hundred thousand signatures, which he presented in batches to Congress every few weeks over the next year. It was the largest petition drive in national history, an undeniable demonstration of public sentiment that is credited with helping to convince Lincoln and Congress to push through the Thirteenth Amendment.
Stanton and Anthony could take rightful pride in the role the Women’s National Loyal League played in realizing emancipation, but the lessons they learned from the process were even more valuable: they had just built and run the very first national woman’s political organization in the United States, a team of five thousand members working toward a single goal; and they had seen firsthand the power of organizing women for political action within a strong structure. They had demonstrated women’s patriotism, shown proof of their political abilities, and engaged a new and wider cadre of activists. The Loyal League was an ideal training ground for a movement that would usher in a new era of what Elizabeth called “True Democracy” as soon as the war was over.
Little wonder that Josephine Pearson’s Confederate family prayed that the “virus of Equal Rights”—for blacks or women—would not spread. They need not have worried. As the suffragists would sadly learn, the political will to enact True Democracy was feeble. Now, more than half a century later, the loyal Pearson daughter, Josephine, was confident that the political will for woman suffrage in Tennessee was still lacking—or, at the very least, could be stifled.
Chapter 5
Democracy at Home
WHILE NASHVILLE’S HOTEL HERMITAGE buzzed with activity on Sunday, a few blocks away at the quieter Hotel Tulane, Sue White unfolded a large map of Tennessee, draping it over the bed like a stiff, crinkled coverlet. She stared at the long horizontal expanse of her state, pennant shaped, with the southeast corner ripped off, fringed edges on its sides where the Smoky Mountains on the east and Mississippi River on the west formed jagged borders.
The three Grand Divisions were spelled out geologically on the map: the steep Appalachians of East Tennessee dropping down into the highlands and gorges of the Cumberland Plateau, then rolling into Middle Tennessee’s hills and valleys, and finally smoothing into the flat deltas of West Tennessee. The state was sliced into thirds by the Tennessee River as it took its long oxbow loop into, out of, and back into the territory; the Mississippi River flowed by Mem
phis, and the Cumberland River curved around Nashville. The rugged beauty of the state, the mountains and hidden hollers, the plunging valleys and lofty knobs, the rivers and creeks and caves—all were a big problem for Sue White right now.
The logistics were going to be tough. To cover ninety-seven counties—some with only dirt roads and no rail—and 132 members of the legislature, Sue estimated that a Woman’s Party campaign would require fifteen organizers: two in each of the major cities—Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis—another to shuttle between Bristol and Johnson City in the northeast, and six more assigned to the rural counties, plus a press director at Nashville headquarters. There was no way the tiny Tennessee branch of the Woman’s Party could afford such staffing. The National Woman’s Party itself could barely afford her modest paycheck of $100 a month. Ratification campaigns in the states had been harder and more expensive than expected, the party had drained its bank account, and checks issued by headquarters were bouncing left and right.
Alice Paul seized upon White’s discouraging analysis of Tennessee as an opportunity—Miss Paul was a wizard at that sort of alchemy—and turned the report into a fund-raising tool. She mailed copies to every Woman’s Party member and possible friend around the country, distributed it to the press, and announced an emergency Tennessee campaign drive to raise $20,000 for the ratification fight. One dollar from twenty thousand women who wanted to secure political liberty for their sex could do it, or a nice fat check from the Woman’s Party’s fairy godmother, Alva Belmont, but Miss Paul had not yet managed to pry open Mrs. Belmont’s purse. Paul followed up with urgent telegrams to her best donors:
“Beg you to give largest sum you can spare in this emergency. Opportunity to win this last state will not come back if we lose it now.” White had no idea if enough dollar bills tucked into envelopes would roll in through the mail at headquarters to enable her to execute a proper campaign in Tennessee; she would just have to work with what she had. She was used to hardscrabble.
It wasn’t just money that was scarce, it was woman power. The National Woman’s Party, which had split off from the NAWSA in 1913 (it was called the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage then) did not have a robust presence in the state. Lizzie Crozier French in Knoxville and Lulu Colyar Reese in Memphis were suffrage stalwarts who had crossed over the line to join the Woman’s Party, but there weren’t too many others. Back in April, Sue had tried to boost party membership with an impassioned call to arms addressed “To the Suffragists of Tennessee”—virtually all of whom were members of NAWSA—warning them that if they’d been “misled” by Mrs. Catt’s organization into believing that ratification was secure, that it was time for a victory party and celebration, they were dead wrong.
“This is a time for work and not a time for rejoicing,” she admonished, giving a jab to NAWSA’s premature victory convention in Chicago several weeks before, when the thirty-fifth state had been gained and the thirty-sixth probably seemed imminent. “And if any of us have laid down our arms in the thick of battle for the purpose of rejoicing in a victory not yet won—or to partake in other work”—that was a poke at Mrs. Catt’s new hobbyhorse, the League of Women Voters—“in the name of High Heaven and the Pioneers, let us once more put on our armor and strive to hold the line against the concentrated attack of our ancient enemies.” The Woman’s Party was still fighting. She’d enclosed a membership card, asked for twenty-five cents dues and perhaps a small contribution. The response was underwhelming. The party had a bad reputation in Tennessee. White knew this only too well.
Everything about the National Woman’s Party irritated southern sensibilities, even among ardent suffragists: its federal amendment doctrine, its fierce opposition to President Wilson and the Democrats, and especially its combative, distinctly unladylike style. These had also bothered White at first, and she’d publicly criticized the party’s tactics. But then the war came and made everything more complicated.
When America entered the war in April 1917, Sue White dutifully followed the policy Mrs. Catt prescribed for all good suffragists, placing war work alongside suffrage work. She believed, as did Mrs. Catt, that suffragists could best prove to the public and to Congress their good citizenship, their patriotism, and how much they deserved the vote by pledging themselves to national service. White maintained her active role in the National Association’s Tennessee branch while also joining the state chapter of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense and used the organizational skills she’d learned in suffrage work to register fifty thousand Tennessee women—white and black women—for duties supporting the war.
Alice Paul and her Woman’s Party, however, refused to support American involvement in the European conflict or participate in the home front war effort. For them there was only one issue: suffrage. They picketed the White House, confronting the government that sent sons to die for democracy in Europe while denying their mothers and sisters and wives the rights of democracy at home. In Tennessee, as in many parts of the country, Alice Paul and her protesting ladies were branded unpatriotic, even traitors.
White did not support the picketing, but she tried to understand the logic behind the tactic. “I see a determination—at any cost—to show the inconsistency of men and agencies who declare war for the right of Europeans to have a voice in their own governments, while turning a deaf ear to the right of American women to have voice in their own government,” she reasoned. White continued her volunteer war work as well as her suffrage work, remaining in the fold of Catt’s NAWSA, and was secure in her conviction that America was doing what was right in the war, defending democracy. Until the Woman’s Party came to Tennessee and tested the bounds of democracy at home.
Maud Younger, a Woman’s Party star speaker and organizer, arrived in Tennessee in November 1917 as part of a tour through the South to explain the party’s position on the war and the role of the picketing protesters. The first stop on the tour was Memphis, but no public hall would allow Younger to speak, branding her “disloyal, pro-German, and un-American.” White’s sense of justice was aroused, and she went to Memphis to try to defuse the matter, defending Younger and the Woman’s Party, calling the allegations against them “base political slander.” Still, she could not convince any meeting hall in Memphis to allow Younger to speak. Sue was appalled: “I saw with my own eyes a situation which was enough to alarm any one who holds American ideals dear.”
Those ideals were being compromised around the country, as the Wilson government stoked a shrill patriotic hysteria, useful for pumping up support for an unpopular war. Newspapers were shut down, pacifist professors fired from universities, war skeptics thrown into prison, and German Americans accused of disloyalty under enhanced alien and sedition laws. “I determined then that if the same thing occurred throughout the state,” White explained, “I would have to join the pickets at the White House gates, not so much for equal suffrage as for freedom of speech.”
In Jackson, where White lived and worked, antagonism toward the Woman’s Party’s picketing was so “hot and sharp,” and threats of violence so loud, that the mayor threatened to call off Younger’s lecture in the local schoolhouse. White called the mayor, called the chief of police, convinced them that the Woman’s Party meeting must go on and the visitors given whatever protection necessary. Miss Sue’s word was golden in Jackson, and the lecture went ahead, but the scene was tense, and two burly sheriff’s deputies walked up and down the aisle of the auditorium, watching for trouble.
White continued on tour with Younger and the Woman’s Party group for another five days, closing up her stenography office (her only source of income), using her political contacts to ease their way, acting as a sort of moral bodyguard. Even if you do not agree with their methods, she insisted, the Woman’s Party had the right to speak. This was America, after all.
When White returned home to Jackson, she was stunned to find herself the target of a barrage of host
ility from, of all people, her sister suffragists. Her attackers included Anne Dallas Dudley, her friend and fellow officer in the state suffrage association, who lambasted her for cozying up to the enemy in wartime: the enemy in this case being not Germany, but the Woman’s Party. Dudley slammed White in the pages of the Nashville Tennessean, and an accompanying editorial took White to task; the Memphis papers reported similar denunciations. Words such as “disloyalty” and “un-American” were used to describe White. Dudley and other Tennessee suffragists were anxious that the antiwar actions of the Woman’s Party (which they considered a renegade suffrage group) not tar the entire suffrage movement in the public mind. White’s friends resented the slurs aimed at her, but she refused to be baited: “I prefer to presume that my loyalty to my country is above reproach.”
Shortly after, White received a shocking message from the Chief herself, Mrs. Carrie Catt, all the way from New York. Catt had read an editorial in the Woman’s Party organ, The Suffragist, about White’s “cooperation” with the Woman’s Party emissaries in Tennessee. Catt jumped to the conclusion that White may have done more than just smooth the way for their talks; she accused White of being a turncoat and possibly a spy, suspected of revealing NAWSA strategy secrets to the Alice Paul crowd.
Miss Sue was insulted by the accusations, but not angry; that was not her way. She wrote her own calmly reasoned letter to Mrs. Catt, explaining that she had assisted the Woman’s Party on its tour in an effort to uphold democracy and free speech, something all suffragists should cherish. Growing bolder, White also expressed her frustration with the National Association’s abandonment of Tennessee and the southern states in the “Winning Plan” strategy, Catt’s dual-track effort to pressure Congress to pass the federal amendment by achieving suffrage victories in pivotal states—all of them northern states. The Woman’s Party was at least trying to “wake up” and organize in the South, White noted; NAWSA seemed to have given up.