by Elaine Weiss
After six months of letters back and forth, Catt presented White with an ultimatum: “Take your stand, fair and square, one side or the other.” White was torn, but this was not a time for sentimentality, it was a time for action: “In spite of every effort to curb my militant tendencies,” White explained to Catt, “my mind continues to revert to the suggestion of Abigail Adams to her John more than a hundred years ago, that the ladies might be constrained to foment a rebellion. Is a hundred years behind the times conservative enough?” Sue White made her choice: she joined the Woman’s Party.
Sue’s relations with her former Tennessee suffrage colleagues were still raw and awkward. This sort of alienation played out everywhere suffragists traded the respectability of the NAWSA for the outlaw mystique of the Woman’s Party, but the friction was even more intense in a place like Tennessee, where the movement was already splintered and grudges were nursed, with pleasure, for a long time.
Both NAWSA and the Woman’s Party set their sights on the same ratification goal, but they insisted on pursuing it in their own way: each conducted its own polling, lobbying, organizing, and publicity campaigns in every state. A very similar split had taken place in the British suffrage movement: followers of the confrontational Pankhursts adopted “militant” methods and broke from Millicent Fawcett’s more conservative organization. The American split mirrored this, with Mrs. Pankhurst’s students Alice Paul and Lucy Burns pulling away from Fawcett’s friend Carrie Catt and her NAWSA. But unlike the Pankhursts, whose forces attacked shops and office windows with hammers, planted small bombs in postboxes, and set fire to government property, Alice Paul was a pacifist Quaker, and the Woman’s Party was never violent and anything but “militant.” Hoisting a picket sign, chaining wrists to a fence, and burning paper was as violent as the party’s protests ever got.
This sort of strategic schism isn’t uncommon in social and political movements, especially when the struggle is long and success seems far from reach. Abolitionists fractured over the use of tactical violence as practiced by John Brown, just as Carrie Nation’s saloon-bashing hatchet divided temperance advocates. The labor movement was riven by the adoption by the Industrial Workers of the World—known as the Wobblies—of violent means and later, in the 1930s, by unions’ use of sit-down strikes. The mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement would undergo its own splintering over the wisdom of violent resistance, with younger activists wrestling for power with the resolutely nonviolent Martin Luther King, Jr. Later in the century, the confrontational playbook of ACT UP would divide the gay rights community, while in the early twenty-first century, the controversial methods of some environmental and animal rights activists would shake those campaigns. There’s always a tricky trade-off between the benefits of gaining attention from dramatic action and the risk of alienating the public and jeopardizing popular support. One thing seems certain: such painful rifts within protest movements appear to be essential components of the ecosystem of change.
That said, Sue White knew that competition could also have a nasty edge. White warned her party colleagues about Dudley, “who inclines to hydrophobia at the thought of the N.W.P.,” she explained, likening the reaction to a dire symptom of rabies. “Guard against the cunning of our sister-in-arms,” White cautioned, as Dudley “would do almost anything to discredit our efforts. These were the same women White would have to cooperate with in Nashville.
Sue White knew what needed to be done to win ratification in Tennessee; she had an instinctive feel for the political pulse of her state. She’d lived in Tennessee all her life, and her years of working in the courthouses and organizing for suffrage introduced her to many of the political players: she knew their backgrounds, their professional alliances, their historic rifts, their personal foibles, and their soft spots. She was a loyal Democrat, but she could get Republicans to confide in her. She considered herself a progressive but had a good rapport with the machine pols. White was from West Tennessee, but she could make the eastern mountain men in the legislature feel at ease. She had forged excellent relations with Tennessee’s junior senator Kenneth McKellar, a firm suffrage friend, and maintained valuable contacts with the staff of the profoundly antisuffrage senior senator John Knight Shields, one of the two stubborn senators who’d held up passage of the federal amendment in Congress for so long.
During the past few weeks, she’d watched with some delight as Governor Roberts squirmed under pressure from the White House and the national Democrats, who forced him to finally call the special session. Even now, she didn’t quite trust him to carry through on the promise. She’d already tried, and failed, to convince him to convene the session in early July, so that the federal amendment might be ratified in time for Tennessee women to vote in the state primary elections on August 5. A speedier ratification would also allow the women of eighteen other states holding primary elections during the summer to vote. Roberts refused. White knew Roberts feared women might deny him the nomination if they could vote in the primary. The national Democrats didn’t push him on the date, as the politicos in those other states were also wary of unleashing the unpredictable “woman vote” in their primaries. So Roberts set the opening of the special session for August 9: after his primary and, there was no doubt, only if he won the primary. If he didn’t win, all promises were off.
Roberts really didn’t want women voting, she knew that. If given the chance, women voters might well drum him out of office in the general election, even if he held on in the primary. The suffragists had a long memory of his years as an Anti, and even Anti women were hearing those whispers about his very pretty and highly paid private secretary.
His cronies, his “advisers,” were dead set against woman suffrage, and they were probably busy designing ways to kill ratification in the legislature without leaving fingerprints—if it even reached the legislature. White reported to party headquarters that just before Roberts was forced to set the date for convening the legislature, the governor’s campaign manager was asked when the special session might be called. He replied: “I hope never.”
Both Democrats and Republicans—the presidential candidates, the party people at their conventions—were talking a good game now, but the truth of their campaign promises remained to be seen. White understood the basis of all this sweet talk as election season drew close:
“So all the political leaders should be in a more or less amorous mood as they face the inevitable influence of women upon their destinies,” she’d quipped to one of her party colleagues. That didn’t mean that those men wouldn’t try their darnedest to postpone the inevitable as long as possible.
Some people seemed to think that just because the Tennessee legislature had agreed to the limited (presidential and municipal) suffrage measure last year, and the governor, very reluctantly, had signed it into law, the legislature would merrily go along with ratification of the federal amendment. Mrs. Catt’s Suffs in Tennessee were touting this scenario, and to Sue’s mind it was nothing more than wishful, and risky, thinking. The limited suffrage measure passed the legislature by the skin of its teeth, even though it didn’t face any states’ rights objections or fears of Washington oversight. The federal amendment carried all that baggage, which would certainly cost votes. The East Tennessee Republicans who had supported the partial suffrage bill were probably not going to be so obliging this time around, lest ratification be fashioned into a feather in the Democrats’ cap for the fall elections. And then there was the issue of the state constitution and the legality of the legislature ratifying: some legislators were moaning that they would be violating their oath of office if they took up ratification, no matter what the Tennessee Supreme Court said. It was a convenient excuse to duck ratification altogether, but it might still be potent, and it might still hurt.
Chapter 6
The Governor’s Quandary
IN THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION at the foot of Capitol Hill, Albert Houston Roberts punched his arm into hi
s rumpled linen jacket and wrapped a too-short tie around his neck. He was expected at Mrs. Catt’s room at the Hermitage; he did not have time for this. He’d come in on a late train last night, after delivering three sweat-soaked campaign speeches on Saturday, and awoke to face a fresh crisis. The firefighters in Memphis were on strike. Another strike.
The postwar labor unrest roiling the rest of the nation hit Tennessee, too. Though the unions and the Wobblies weren’t as strong here as in other states, they still managed to cause trouble. Roberts had already faced a shoe-manufacturing strike in Nashville and a street railway workers’ strike in Knoxville. He’d clamped down quickly—you couldn’t let them think the governor was a weakling—calling up the Tennessee National Guard and creating a state police force to squelch strikers. He tried to swing public opinion against strikers, mobs, and all others who wanted to hurt the state’s reputation and economy by encouraging citizen “Law and Order Leagues.” The labor people were furious with him, denounced him for “setting the classes against the masses,” and were out for revenge.
Now the firemen in Memphis had walked off the job, demanding better pay. Nashville and Knoxville sent some of their men to take up the hoses, but they were being met with a rash of arson fires, false alarms, and some violence. The Memphis mayor was in a panic, reporting that the situation in the city was “extremely grave,” and he begged for more militia troops. Roberts was sending them in. And all these women could think about was their suffrage amendment.
Roberts hadn’t had it easy since his term began just nineteen months before. No sooner had he taken his oath than the Spanish flu ripped through the state on a second swing. Then, with the war and its lucrative contracts ended, the war industry plants, such as the DuPont gunpowder plant in Nashville that at its peak employed twenty thousand men and women, closed down, throwing thousands of people out of work—just as inflation ramped up. The returning troops couldn’t find jobs and resented the black men who had taken their jobs; and the black men who had served in the military returned expecting better jobs as a proper reward. It made for friction. Race riots tore through Knoxville in the summer of 1919: white mobs marauding through the black precincts, burning and looting, storming a jail to lynch a black man. Roberts called out the Tennessee National Guard, but they couldn’t control the violence and sided with the white rioters, shooting machine guns into the black crowds; about forty people, mostly blacks, were killed. In the tense atmosphere, the Ku Klux Klan was finding eager new recruits and enjoying a resurgence.
Roberts’s first act as governor was to certify Tennessee’s ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition. It had gone into effect earlier in 1920, and the heavy-handed federal raids were riling up people. Tennessee had been officially “dry” since 1909, but it had its own ways of handling it, and everyone sort of understood the rules; Memphis and Nashville simply ignored them and remained happily, defiantly “wet.” Roberts didn’t like the federal agents snooping around, arresting and shooting people, but it was out of his hands.
Roberts was short, with a small paunch around his belly, big ears, bushy brows, and an unruly forelock curl that he attempted to plaster down each morning. He vaguely resembled the popular humorist Will Rogers, except he wasn’t good at telling jokes and rarely cracked a smile in public. He was a serious, earnest man with a milquetoast personality: a teacher turned lawyer, a circuit-riding judge turned hapless politician. He had good intentions, but he couldn’t execute his ideas smoothly or get people to understand. He did not seem to have a gift for politics. He did seem to have an uncanny gift for attracting political enemies.
Roberts thought of himself as a progressive politician, and he wanted Tennessee to make strides, lead the South. What the state needed was better education and better roads, paid for by fairer taxes. Everyone nodded in agreement, but no one wanted to pay. He set about overhauling the antiquated tax code and caught hell on all sides. He tried to push through road-building bills and earned the enmity of the railroad owners, who correctly saw automobiles as competition. Tennessee ranked toward the very bottom of the states when it came to literacy, and Roberts wanted to change that by extending mandatory schooling to the eighth grade and improving teacher training. He expected to win some applause for this, but the clapping wasn’t loud enough to drown out the boos from the manufacturers who thought children should be working, not wasting time in school.
Roberts was unpopular, and his enemies smelled blood. He could accept the animosity of those who opposed the policy changes he’d made, but he got riled by the naked opportunism of those in his own party who wanted to derail his career for their personal advantage. Luke Lea wanted him out of contention down the road: that was the reason the Tennessean and Lea’s people were pounding him. They put up a candidate to run against him in the primary, the former mayor of Chattanooga, Colonel William Crabtree, just for spite. And they began this despicable rumor campaign about his private secretary, about how she was “disreputable” just because she was pretty. She was very well qualified, and besides, it was none of their business. Albert Roberts was in a desperate fight to hold on to his job and perhaps his marriage.
On top of all this came the Nineteenth Amendment. Roberts had hoped the amendment circus would never roll into town. His dream to dodge the whole mess at first seemed a sure thing: the Tennessee Constitution prohibited a sitting legislature from acting on a federal constitutional amendment; the legislature had to be elected after the amendment was passed by Congress and brought to the states for ratification. This provision was to ensure that constituents would know where their legislators stood on that amendment and could take their stance into consideration in the next election. The provision was placed into the state constitution in 1870, after the Reconstruction legislature and a radical Republican governor had rammed through ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment—giving black men civil rights and due process while disenfranchising the sons of the Confederacy—over the objection of the people, the white people, of the state. Tennessee did not want a repeat of that.
So the present legislature, the Sixty-First General Assembly, elected in 1918, was legally prohibited from acting on the Nineteenth Amendment. Roberts was greatly relieved. As he’d told Mrs. Catt in June 1919, when the ratification process first began and she pressed him to act: Sorry, he simply couldn’t call an extraordinary session to ratify, his hands were tied. Exactly a year later, he clung to the same excuse when a delegation of Tennessee suffragists marched into his office to convince him to call a special session.
Then the U.S. Supreme Court pulled the rug out from under him. On June 1, 1920, the court ruled that the process for ratifying a federal constitutional amendment could not be impeded by any state law or action. Ohio law provided for a popular referendum after legislative ratification of any federal amendment, but the Supreme Court held that this could not stand: the ratification process was clearly spelled out in the federal Constitution, which said it was to be done by the state legislature. That took precedence over state law.
Roberts’s careful avoidance of the Nineteenth Amendment ended abruptly, on June 23, with a telegram from the White House: “It would be a real service to the Party and to the nation if it is possible for you under the peculiar provisions of your State Constitution having in mind the recent decision of the Supreme Court in the Ohio case to call a special session of the legislature of Tennessee to consider the suffrage amendment. Allow me to urge this very earnestly. Woodrow Wilson.”
Roberts was certain that his hero, fellow southerner Woodrow Wilson, would not have written this of his own accord; it must have been drafted under pressure from the suffragists, who were salivating at the notion that Tennessee might be in play for ratification. They’d managed to stick their hat pins into the president. Roberts was right about that.
To fortify his request, President Wilson also asked the U.S. Department of Justice for an opinion on the applicability of the Supreme Court ruling
to Tennessee. Luckily, thought Roberts, Acting Attorney General William L. Frierson (holding down the fort while his boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was away in San Francisco trying to get himself nominated for president) was a good Tennessean who would surely respect the sanctity of his home state’s constitution.
Frierson produced an opinion that did not please Governor Roberts: the Supreme Court ruling did indeed apply to Tennessee: “If the people of a State through their Constitution can delay action on an amendment until after an election, there is no reason why they cannot delay it until after two elections or five elections,” Frierson held, and this ran counter to the federal Constitution’s clear amending procedure. The current Tennessee legislature was free to vote on the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Governor Roberts lost his good excuse.
Now Roberts was squeezed all around. The Tennessee suffragists screamed for him to immediately call a special session of the legislature. The Democrats at their convention in San Francisco adopted a special platform plank—pointed right at him—demanding that he convene the legislature and achieve ratification quickly. He was pelted with telegrams and phone calls from all the party top brass, from all the prospective presidential candidates (there must have been two dozen of them), and, most painfully, from his own Tennessee delegation, men and women, at the convention.
The president, the man he’d once called his Moses, was urging him, very earnestly, to jump off a cliff. Roberts’s advisers and friends counseled, just as earnestly: Don’t do it. The federal amendment, they warned, is a hydra-headed monster capable of swallowing you and your career. People won’t read the legal opinions, they’ll just remember that Governor Roberts was willing to go along with the idea that the Tennessee Constitution plays second fiddle to Washington’s Constitution. Don’t mess with the Antis; many of whom were his friends and supporters. If he did call a special session, they threatened to undermine his bid for renomination in the primary, leave him stranded. So Roberts did the safest thing he could think of: he stalled. But he was undercut by the state attorney general’s opinion, stating that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling applied to Tennessee and there was no longer any legal barrier to calling a special session.