by Elaine Weiss
Feeling cornered, Roberts announced that he would agree to call an extraordinary session of the legislature, but he wouldn’t say exactly when that session would meet. He was buying time, giving the matter his “grave consideration,” but if he thought the maneuver would buy him any peace, he was fooling himself. The White House went public with its “disappointment” in Roberts’s refusal to speedily call the special session, and the headline in the Nashville Tennessean read: ADMINISTRATION AGGRAVATED BY ROBERTS’ STAND.
The Democrats, still tied in knots in San Francisco, seemed to delight in using him as a punching bag—perhaps the only thing they could agree upon—insisting that he name a firm date for the special session so they might announce it at the convention and take credit for rounding up the thirty-sixth state. The Democrats were trying to improve their party’s image among potential women voters; Republicans had a much stronger record of supporting suffrage in Congress as well as in the states—Republican-led legislatures had delivered twenty-six of the thirty-five ratifications thus far. Many national suffrage leaders considered themselves Republican, as that party had championed progressive social and economic reforms. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Republican Party was considered the more liberal of the two major parties.
Both Democrats and Republicans had endorsed ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment at their conventions earlier that summer, and so had both state parties in Tennessee. All the gubernatorial candidates running in the state primary claimed to support the amendment, and Roberts’s Democratic challenger, Colonel Crabtree, warned that Roberts’s indecision was bad for the state: “Some Republican state will ratify and rob Tennessee of its chance for glory.” The Tennessee suffragists of both parties squawked at him to convene the legislature at once, to get the amendment ratified in time for them, and the women of other states, to vote in the summer primaries.
But women were not good for him, his campaign advisers reminded him. If the women could vote, they might well defeat him. Giving them the ballot would be like handing them a shotgun and inviting them to shoot. They no doubt remembered he’d campaigned for governor as an Anti and had equivocated on the partial suffrage bill; and then there were those rumors about an “other woman.” Keep them away from the primary and, ideally, away from the general election, his friends advised. Tennessee women could already vote for president and for mayors; they already had more than enough suffrage.
There were other reasons to be wary of giving women the vote in all elections, including state elections, his advisers warned: the state’s major corporate interests didn’t like the idea one bit. How could the railroads, just emerging from wartime federal control, successfully compete with the automobile and the truck, and recover all those state dollars being siphoned off into road building, if the legislators with whom they’d already curried favor were defeated by women voters who didn’t understand how things worked?
And how could the once profitable liquor industry, reeling under the new Volstead Act enforcing the federal Prohibition law, survive? They’d managed to keep going for a decade under the lax, wink-wink implementation of Tennessee’s own “dry” laws, but now federal agents were shooting to kill small- time moonshiners operating stills in the Tennessee hills. The big distillers had already moved out of state—Jack Daniel’s was operating out of Alabama and Missouri—pinching tax revenues from a lucrative business. The only hope for the industry was to finance the election of wetter congressmen and state legislators who might be able to dial back, or even wipe out, the punitive Prohibition enforcement laws. The problem with women voters was that they tended to support temperance and probably would not cast ballots for the types of lawmakers the industry needed.
And the manufacturers, especially the state’s cotton cloth mills and clothing makers, were also angry about woman suffrage. They were worried about reform-type women voters insisting upon labor laws that would limit the hours women could work, calling for equal pay and, worst of all, perhaps outlawing child labor. The entire cotton-manufacturing economy of the South was based upon the cheap labor of women and children: Was Governor Roberts willing to destroy it for the promise of a few women’s votes? And oh yes, Roberts’s advisers warned: all those Negro women who would suddenly be able to vote if Tennessee ratified the federal amendment—they were going to vote Republican!
Feeling cornered, on June 28 Roberts finally announced that the extraordinary session would convene on August 9, safely after his primary. The suffragists howled but had to accept it. He reminded them, not too subtly, that if he did not win renomination, the special session might not take place at all, in what would be his lame-duck misery. His friends in the legislature could hardly be expected to support ratification if he was defeated. To shield himself, he would name his own Ratification Committee, headed by a suffrage woman he could trust, Mrs. Kate Burch Warner, not the League of Women Voters leaders, Mrs. Kenny and Mrs. Milton, who were his active antagonists. Mrs. Kenny was Luke Lea’s little protégée, and Mrs. Milton’s husband, George, gleefully ripped Roberts apart in the pages of his Chattanooga News. He would not entrust the dangerous ratification campaign to his enemies.
Roberts was still on the road when Mrs. Catt arrived and was in no mood to placate the suffragists today; they were causing him nothing but headaches. He pulled on his jacket. The time had come to meet with Mrs. Catt. He knew what she wanted.
* * *
It was a short walk from the Governor’s Mansion to the Hotel Hermitage, and Governor Roberts intended to make it a very short visit. He had an early campaign whistle-stop scheduled in the morning. The guests were gone and Catherine Kenny had carefully excused herself to return home and avoid bumping into the governor. Carrie greeted Roberts at the door to her suite, cordially, with a smile and rather friendly manner, but she made it clear this was no sweet-tea social occasion. They adjourned to the little office set up next to her bedroom, to speak privately. She looked almost grandmotherly, with her smoothed and carefully pinned gray hair, but her eyes were intense, her mouth firm, like no grandmother he knew.
They were, in fact, two politicians making a deal. Governor Roberts wasn’t accustomed to negotiating political deals with ladies, it made him uncomfortable. And more malleable. Look, he told Mrs. Catt, as he had already written to her last week, how can you expect me to allow my political enemies to steer an official Ratification Committee: that is tantamount to suicide for me and defeat for you, he insisted. The Nineteenth Amendment cannot be ratified without the support of my political friends to steer it through the legislature, and they will not abide Mrs. Milton and her husband, and Mrs. Kenny and her friend Luke Lea, all of whom have been maliciously attacking me. Why not have them all simply work under the committee I created, under Mrs. Warner?
Kenny and Milton had already told her they would not work under Warner, they didn’t trust her political judgment or skill—it was the feuds again—so that solution was not going to fly. And Catt, as NAWSA president, could not let her Tennessee affiliate be snubbed and superseded.
Well then, Mrs. Catt offered, why not have several ratification committees, lots of committees, the more the merrier? All working toward the same goal, but not necessarily together. A Governor’s Committee, a Men’s Committee, a League of Women Voters Committee, a Democratic Committee, a Republican Committee. Greater involvement, less friction. Though coordinating them all would be a bear, she knew.
Politics was a game of fear and favors, and Catt decided this was the moment to spring both upon the governor: he could not afford to alienate his president, his party, and his Tennessee women any longer with this sort of procrastination and manipulation, she insisted. His rival in the primary, and the general election, would be able to take good advantage of it. His party, and his own career, would certainly suffer in the fall. And then she held out her most valuable piece of currency: she had done him a great favor today, she could tell him. She had convinced Luke Lea
to quash the rabid satire piece in the Nashville Tennessean. But the deal would hold only if Roberts agreed to remove the satire’s tempting target and accept the legitimacy of other ratification committees beyond his own. She had rescued the governor’s exposed hide, not to mention his fragile ego, from the fire. Now he owed her.
The additional ratification committees were suddenly acceptable to Governor Roberts. He bade Mrs. Catt good-bye and hurried out to catch his train.
Catt had seen clearly today that the Tennessee Suffs simply did not have the tactical know-how or breadth of experience to face a fortified opposition on multiple fronts. And she couldn’t allow Alice Paul and her Woman’s Party people—who would no doubt be coming into the state—to take any credit for winning Tennessee, should the Suffs somehow manage to pull it off. The Chief called the hotel switchboard to send a night telegram to NAWSA headquarters in New York:
Tennessee promising. Must stay indefinitely. Address Hermitage Hotel, Suite 309.
Chapter 7
The Blessing
WOODROW WILSON AWOKE agitated from another bad night of nightmares. In his bedroom, in the second-floor private quarters of the White House, his valet, Brooks, and his wife, Edith, helped him to dress, pulling a starched white shirt over his listless left arm.
Washington, like Nashville, was gripped by a heat wave and the air was already sultry, but Edith draped a shawl over her husband’s left side, so the visitors would not be able to see that he was paralyzed. She’d managed to keep the extent of his stroke secret for months, and there was no good reason for the men calling on him this morning to learn any more than they needed to know. She wheeled the president of the United States onto the south veranda.
Several blocks away, Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt tied Windsor knots onto their collars, determined to look their best even in this wilting weather when they met with President Wilson at the White House. They were seeking his blessing.
Woodrow Wilson wasn’t at all sure he wanted to bestow that blessing, even if it was just a formality, the patriarch of the Democratic Party laying hands upon his hopeful successors. Wilson didn’t want successors; he wanted a third term, and he’d even tried to get himself renominated at the party convention in San Francisco a few weeks before. Wilson’s doctor, his closest aides, and his wife knew this was delusional, that he was neither physically nor mentally capable of handling another campaign, much less another term, but they dared not confront him lest he plunge into an even deeper depression. The president who had just led his country through a world-shattering war was a very fragile man.
The strain of conducting the war was compounded by the stress of negotiating the peace at Paris, then intensified by the frustrations of trying to sell the Treaty of Versailles and his League of Nations concept to the American public, over the heads of what he called “the little group of willful men” in the Senate who stood in his way. He’d been confident that if the American people could be made to understand that joining the league would not relinquish the nation’s autonomy, but build the foundation for lasting peace, they would demand that Congress accept the treaty. Wilson insisted on going out on the road to convince the public himself, a grueling, monthlong cross-country rail tour with dozens of rallies and speeches. His doctor believed such a tour might kill him; Wilson was already suffering from fatigue, severe asthma, and occasional “cerebral incidents.” But Wilson insisted: as commander in chief he’d sent American doughboys into the trenches of Europe, promising them it was the War to End All Wars. He felt he must make good on his end of the bargain, make whatever sacrifice was necessary, even his health, to secure the treaty and prevent the world from sliding into war again.
In early September 1919, Wilson and his wife set off on the presidential railroad car, the Mayflower, on their own mission to sell the treaty to America. Wilson tipped his straw boater hat in parades, gave speeches defending the league in armories, coliseums, and fairgrounds across the nation. Between stops he spoke to cheering crowds from the back of the Mayflower’s bunting-festooned caboose. But Wilson suffered blinding headaches and breathing attacks almost every night; he was trembling and coughing. His physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, also on board, grew alarmed.
Three weeks out, in late September, as the tour steered east, steaming through Colorado on its homeward journey, the president seemed confused: tripping on a step, pausing in the middle of his speech, jumbling his words. The pain in his head worsened in the night, en route to Wichita, and by morning his left leg and arm had gone numb. Dr. Grayson finally intervened: the rest of the tour must be canceled. The Mayflower rushed back to Washington.
Three nights later Wilson suffered a second, more severe, cerebral embolism in the White House, where Edith found him unconscious on the bathroom floor. He was carried to the Lincoln bed, where “he looked dead,” recalled one close aide. The doctors were not sure he could pull through. He was paralyzed on his left side, with that side of his face drooping, and his vision and swallowing were impaired. He could still speak, though indistinctly, more like a mumble. His mental functions were not permanently injured, but his psychological state became unsteady, his moods volatile.
Since that night in early October 1919, the president of the United States had remained an invalid, but Edith Wilson had taken unprecedented—and possibly unconstitutional—steps to keep that reality a secret. Wilson’s own vice president and cabinet secretaries were kept in the dark about his condition. Press inquiries were rebuffed; Congress was left uninformed. Wild rumors spread, fanned by the White House’s obsessive secrecy. The president was simply recovering from “nervous exhaustion,” according to Dr. Grayson’s evasive bulletins.
The consulting doctors had told Edith Wilson that any mental strain, any of the usual hard decisions required of a president, would be like “turning a knife in an open wound” in her husband’s weakened condition, undermining any chance for recovery. Her husband’s recovery was her singular concern, so she devised a system to keep the White House functioning under her command, or “stewardship,” as she later dubbed it.
Edith, together with Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, and Dr. Grayson, became the president’s guardians and gatekeepers, and Edith, married to Wilson for only four years, became his surrogate. She read every official report, document, and item of correspondence—foreign, domestic, even top secret—and decided whether her husband should be bothered with it or not. If she deemed the matter worthy of his attention, she presented her own précis of it to him, reading her summary out loud and interpreting his response. She devised a set of form letters to notify governmental officials of the president’s desired outcomes. Edith was not a complete novice in this sort of sensitive work: during the war she had helped decipher coded military communiqués for her husband, and he confided in her on many policy matters. But as she filtered the world for the president, protecting and isolating him, she assumed what some have called “the bedside presidency.”
Edith knew that Woodrow was still depressed about losing out to James Cox for the presidential nomination earlier in July, and there was great trepidation in the White House this morning about how the president would react to Cox’s visit.
Democratic candidate James Cox had dashed to Washington directly from his conference with Sue White and Alice Paul in Ohio. He took the midnight train from Columbus and was very pleased upon his arrival in D.C. to read the extensive newspaper coverage of that meeting in the morning papers. As an old newspaperman himself (he’d been a reporter, editor, and publisher), he was impressed by the Woman’s Party’s ability to generate press attention: COX PROMISES TO HELP OBTAIN EQUAL SUFFRAGE and COX PROMISES AID TO SUFFS, the headlines announced.
“I give to you without any reservation the assurance that my time, my strength, and my influence will be dedicated to your cause,” the papers reported his telling the suffragists, “with a view to procuring a fa
vorable result in Tennessee.” He promised to do “everything in my power” to see the federal amendment through.
Perhaps he’d been a bit effusive—“I find nothing in Holy Writ or elsewhere which shows the Almighty ever gave man the right to say that he could vote and women could not”—and gone a bit far in promising to appoint more women to high government positions. But he had a decent record on suffrage in Ohio, even if he stuck to a middle ground, leaning toward the Suffs when it suited him while able to make the Antis think he had an open mind. But many suffragists were still wary of him: there were rumors of corruption, a nasty divorce, and he was “thoroughly wet,” making Suffs fear that he was in thrall to the liquor interests who were bankrolling the skirmishes against ratification in the states. Cox’s enthusiastic response to Paul’s delegation was his attempt to allay those fears.
He certainly wasn’t exaggerating his desire for a Democratic state such as Tennessee to clinch ratification, allowing him to take credit for it during the upcoming campaign. He knew he’d need women’s votes as he struggled to overcome Woodrow Wilson’s, and the Democratic Party’s, disfavor with the war-weary, and even peace-wary, American public.