by Elaine Weiss
“I am exceedingly glad to learn that you are in Tennessee seeking to consummate the ratification of the equal suffrage amendment,” Harding said. “If any of the Republican members of the Tennessee Assembly should ask my opinion as to their course, I would cordially recommend an immediate favorable action.”
Harding’s statement, such as it was, went out to the newspapers, and Catt took some small pleasure in the press’s mention that Harding’s statement to her “stole a march” on the Woman’s Party’s plans to confront him at his notification ceremony the next day. Stealth always trumped screaming, Catt believed. But the oddly passive tone of the statement only confirmed Catt’s suspicions about Harding. While on the surface the message seemed positive, it clearly revealed his reluctance to lift a finger for ratification in Tennessee or anywhere else. “If they should ask me” and “cordially recommend” were rather pathetic commands from the man who wanted to be commander in chief.
As to his exceeding gladness that she was in Nashville, Catt realized it probably meant that Harding was simply relieved that she was not camped on his doorstep in Marion, ready to make a scene. But Alice Paul and Sue White were.
Chapter 9
Front Porch
WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING had a very fine front porch. It sat on a limestone block base surmounted by a handsome white balustrade with pairs of Ionic-capitaled columns rising up, giving it that classical-revival look. It was all-American, midwestern solid, forthright, strong. From that porch Warren Harding intended to catapult himself into the White House.
He had no plans to go out on the stump, wear himself down crisscrossing the nation, plead for votes from sooty train cabooses and rickety platforms. He could just stay at home, sleep in his own bed every night, let the voters come to him. They’d see him in his comfortable, natural habitat, his own hometown of Marion, Ohio, and understand and admire him all the more. A Front Porch campaign. It had worked for those other Ohio Republican presidential candidates, James Garfield in 1880 and William McKinley in 1896, and Harding was sure it would work for him. It lent an aura of “above the fray” statesmanship and calm electoral confidence. It also protected him from unwelcome scrutiny. The nation would come to Marion—to his porch.
This Thursday, July 22, was the official start of the campaign, Notification Day, when the Republican Party came to its chosen candidate’s home to complete the nomination process. A fixture of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century presidential campaigns, Notification Day was a strange mixture of political wedding, coronation, homecoming parade, and Fourth of July celebration.
Marion had never experienced anything quite like this, but it was thrilled. A Marion Civic Association was hastily formed to prep the town for its moment in the spotlight. Every store—almost every store—downtown was dressed up in red, white, and blue bunting. Every house had a photo of Harding in the front window. Hundreds of local men and women were deputized as official greeters and hostesses. Enough food to provide two meals for all the visitors was on hand, with restaurant pantries bulging and thirty quarters of beef roasting on spits on the high school playing field. Dozens of special chartered trains were headed to the Marion station, loaded with Republican legislators and dignitaries; thousands more spectators would pour in on trains and in automobiles. Between fifty and one hundred thousand visitors were expected in Marion for Notification Day. Among those expected, with some degree of dread, was Alice Paul and a troop of her Woman’s Party “militants.”
Republicans enjoyed the picketers when they were protesting against Wilson and the Democrats these past years but were horrified when the women turned fire on their party convention in June. Convention delegates complained of being unable to enter the Chicago Coliseum without passing a gauntlet of stubborn suffragettes, who assaulted them with signs and slogans and accusatory glares. The “militants” had unfurled a banner over the balcony of the convention center reading: “Why Does the Republican Woman’s Party Block Suffrage? We Do Not Want Planks. We Demand the 36th State.” Woman’s Party picketers were not welcome in Marion, certainly not at this grand celebration of Warren Harding, native son. But Harding’s advisers knew that Paul must be handled carefully or things could get ugly.
Alice Paul and her women had come chasing after Harding as soon as he won the nomination, cornering him in Washington when he was having his first meetings with campaign officials. That’s when he told them that he would not attempt to force any state to ratify the federal suffrage amendment, and he would not push the Connecticut or Vermont Republican governors. “I could not with propriety attempt to force any chief executive to hasten action in violation of his own sense of duty,” he told the women come to plead with him.
“It’s the same old bunk,” sputtered one Woman’s Party member from Texas, who considered herself a good Republican, after the meeting with Harding. Another accused Republicans of “chicanery, false promises, and dilatory tactics” and warned that women were getting so fed up with both parties that a third party, a real woman’s political party, was not an idle threat. Harding further antagonized the suffragists when, under pressure from his party, he began making some half-hearted, perhaps duplicitous, efforts to bring the Connecticut and Vermont governors into line. He kept promising the Suffs that he’d soon have “good news” to report about special sessions in those states, but the good news never came. Republican operatives reassured the suffragists that the delay was really just a publicity ploy to make it seem as though Harding were negotiating furiously, solving a difficult diplomatic problem—being very presidential—but success was definite. Then, just a few days before Notification Day, a Hartford newspaper asked Harding if he would advise Connecticut governor Marcus Holcomb to call a special session: “I answer no,” Harding replied. Alice Paul loudly announced that there would be pickets in Marion on Notification Day. And they would stay all summer if necessary.
The last thing Republicans wanted was a wire service photo showing suffrage women being forcibly turned away from the launch of the presidential campaign. Negotiations began: Harding’s handlers offered the Woman’s Party delegation a handshake and photo opportunity with the candidate; Alice Paul rejected that. Harding’s staff then suggested that the suffragists join the parade marching by the front porch, but no chanting or hostile demonstrations. Paul said no again and gave the signal for the picket signs to be assembled. Finally a compromise was struck: two party representatives would be allowed to address short statements to Harding on the front porch, but only if Paul called off the picketing. Somewhat reluctantly, Paul agreed.
Warren and Florence Harding had been married in the parlor of the green-shingled, Queen Anne–style beauty he built on Mt. Vernon Avenue for his bride in 1891. He was only twenty-six years old, but already a successful newspaper publisher. He grew up nearby, in the small town of Caledonia, went to a local college, and at age nineteen chipped in with two buddies to buy a bankrupt newspaper, the Marion Pebble. He signaled his intentions to make the paper something larger, and more profitable, by renaming it the Marion Star. Florence Kling was thirty, daughter of the richest man in Marion, who also owned the town’s rival newspaper. She was a gifted pianist and had a good head for business, better than Warren’s, and she became the Star’s business manager, boosting circulation and profits. Warren was happiest in the press room, setting type and composing pages with the printers, or at lunch at the Commercial Club, making the Star, and himself, a pillar of the community. Florence was ambitious for her husband and was not at all displeased when he entered politics: first state senator, then lieutenant governor, than a failed bid to be governor of Ohio in 1910, but a successful run for the U.S. Senate in 1914. Florence helped Warren with his speeches, his press releases, his political maneuvers, his wardrobe. Warren didn’t make much of an impression in the Senate; he missed almost half of the roll call votes and ducked out when many of the most controversial issues were being debated. But by lying low, he didn’t make enemies and di
d make friends; he was always well liked, if not enormously respected. He watched how the political winds blew and sailed with them. When the Nineteenth Amendment seemed inevitable, he voted for it, which pleased Florence, as she was a keen suffragist.
* * *
The ceremonies began as soon as the sun came up, with the Harding Marching Band, composed of neighbors, friends, and town boosters, noisily arriving at the Harding home for a flag raising. Harding came onto the porch to greet the early morning revelers, climbed down the steps, and pulled on the ropes of the flagpole to raise the Stars and Stripes, and for the next seven hours the happy, noisy outpouring continued: bands and glee clubs; Republican groups from around the country, wearing top hats, capes, and costumes; brigades of scouts and soldiers, farmers and printers (the Marion Star gave its staff a half holiday). Harding was most delighted by the musical greeting of his old bandmates from Caledonia, with whom he’d played the trombone long ago; the men made a valiant effort to fit into their old uniforms and coax melodies from their ancient instruments in his honor.
In the doorway of the house leading to the porch, Albert Lasker watched the festivities. This was the opening act in his plan to shape and sell Warren Harding to the American people. Lasker was an accomplished Chicago advertising man, known for his clever campaigns for canned pork and beans, California oranges, and Quaker puffed cereal (“Shot from Guns”). Now his product was a middle-aged marshmallow of a man from small-town America—you had to work with what you were given—who needed to project strength, calm, and security, with a dash of pizzazz. This front porch was a brilliant stage, and Lasker was lining up a cavalcade of high-wattage celebrities to visit, and endorse, Harding here: movie stars, sports legends, Broadway and vaudeville luminaries—Al Jolson was writing a Harding song and would sing it on the porch. The press were going to love it. Lasker was going to give Americans the president they wanted, and he’d tell them why they wanted Harding.
A few blocks away, Sue White slipped a purple, white, and gold sash over her white dress. She’d just begun launching the Nashville campaign when she received a telegram from Miss Paul, asking her to return to Ohio to take part in the Harding deputation. She was reluctant at first—she had a thousand details to attend to in Nashville—but when Miss Paul gave a command, or even a request, there was no refusing.
White’s train from Nashville had arrived in Columbus on Wednesday, just in time for her to dash to the afternoon meeting of the Executive Committee of the Republican National Committee (RNC) at the Deshler Hotel, where she made the case for a concerted Republican Party effort to get every Tennessee Republican legislator on board for ratification.
Early the next morning, White, along with Woman’s Party staff organizer Anita Pollitzer and board member Louisine Havemeyer of New York, made the sixty-mile trip straight north from Columbus to Marion for Notification Day. It was like old times. Pollitzer was White’s close friend, a fellow southerner (from South Carolina), and a seasoned field worker who’d worked shoulder to shoulder with her in many of the toughest ratification skirmishes. They had an easy understanding, a sisterly bond, an unspoken trust; they could make each other laugh. White was very glad that Pollitzer would soon be joining her in Tennessee.
Miss Paul was already in Marion, micromanaging, as usual, every detail of the event. Her tiny body was in constant motion, her dark eyes intense. She never raised her voice but gave firm, precise, some thought imperious, commands; her authority was unquestioned among her followers. Her power was the quiet, ferocious force of moral certainty. Miss Paul never asked her Woman’s Party troops to do anything she would not be willing to do herself. She was no armchair general who sent her soldiers into peril while she directed from safety behind the lines. Paul was a true leader, White often marveled, always with her women, in the front line of every assault. And, more than any of them, suffering the consequences.
It was hard, even for Sue White and the other party activists, to understand how this slight, pale, shy, and seemingly frail woman could not only mount the barricades, but endure the torture she’d been subjected to by the authorities, the police, and the White House. Physical and mental torture. The many imprisonments, the solitary confinement, the hunger strikes and forced feedings: strapped to a table, tubes rammed down her nose, lacerating her throat. And then the ultimate degradation, the attempt to undermine her leadership: the claim that she was insane. They sent psychiatrists to examine Paul and threatened to commit her to St. Elizabeths mental hospital. She was perfectly sane, of course, and the doctors had to admit they could find nothing at all wrong with her mind. She emerged with her spirit unbroken, but the imprisonments had had an effect. Everyone at headquarters could see Miss Paul was, even now, a few years later, still prone to periods of illness, pain, depression, and exhaustion. But she was unwilling to slow down. Certainly not now.
Miss Paul was darting among the two hundred Woman’s Party marchers, women from fifteen states lining up for the parade. The trunks of regalia, filled with sashes and flags and banners, were unlocked and thrown open. Tall, polished wood poles were fitted with the party’s purple, white, and gold fabric gonfalons.
The women, all dressed in white, donned their tricolored sashes, hoisted the poles, stretched out the banners, and stepped to the beat of the brass band assigned to lead them. They marched in a long single line through the streets of Marion, with every state’s name held high on a vertical cloth pennant striped in the Woman’s Party colors. Leading the processional was a giant banner, stretching almost the entire width of the street, carried on each end by distinguished suffrage veterans, including Lizzie Crozier French of Knoxville, who managed to be a member in good standing of both NAWSA and the Woman’s Party. It was a rather wordy pronouncement to carry around, it certainly could have been punchier, but it managed to get its message across:
The Republican platform endorses ratification of suffrage. The first test of the platform will come when the Tennessee legislature meets in August. Will the Republicans carry out their platform by giving a unanimous Republican vote in Tennessee for suffrage?
When the first line of suffragists reached the edge of the front porch, those behind fanned out to form a semicircle, many rows deep, facing the Hardings. They set down the base of their poles onto the lawn but held them upright, so the banners were still aloft and very visible. The Woman’s Party representatives walked up the porch steps to be introduced to Senator and Mrs. Harding. Alice Paul had chosen her two speakers for the occasion with care: women who could speak cogently, colorfully, and loudly. Sue White would represent Tennessee and the aspirations to make it the thirty-sixth state; Louisine Havemeyer, of New York, would speak for the women who already had the vote and intended to use it against Warren Harding if he didn’t shape up.
Miss Paul had begged Havemeyer to travel to Marion for this event, even though she knew the overnight trip in a bumpy sleeper train car would be uncomfortable and tiring for the plucky, sixty-five-year-old grandmother. Havemeyer was the Woman’s Party’s most popular speaker—vivid, funny, disarming—she charmed audiences and had a big, booming voice that could carry in the open air. She knew how to make a sharp point, embellished by erudite asides and curlicues of wit. She was the extremely wealthy widow of Henry Osborne Havemeyer, the “Sugar King,” whose family owned the American Sugar Refining Company, which controlled virtually all sugar supplies in the nation. She and Harry had enjoyed collecting art, and with the advice of Louisine’s close friend Mary Cassatt, the American painter, they assembled one of the world’s great collections. They commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to design the furniture and stained glass windows for their Fifth Avenue mansion. Harry Havemeyer was a resolute suffrage supporter, encouraging his wife to sign petitions and get involved. When Harry died in 1907, Louisine plunged more deeply into suffrage activities, displaying a taste for the more radical strain of the movement. She joined, and helped bankroll, the short-lived Women’s Political Union of H
arriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, which tried to recruit more working-class women into the movement. When Blatch joined forces with Alice Paul’s Congressional Union, and then the National Woman’s Party, Havemeyer threw her allegiance, and her checkbook, there.
Havemeyer and Blatch were partners in the bruising 1915 New York state suffrage referendum contest, working parallel to Carrie Catt and Mollie Hay’s campaign apparatus, and Havemeyer overcame her fear of public speaking to deliver dozens of impassioned speeches from the back of her landaulet touring car. Havemeyer also raised money for the campaign by selling tickets to a gallery exhibit of her art collection, convincing Mary Cassatt to contribute a few paintings to be auctioned. Blatch and Havemeyer also concocted some of the great suffrage publicity stunts and wonderfully wacky props that drew crowds and newsreel coverage: the traveling Suffrage Torch and the electrified Ship of State.
So it was Havemeyer who appeared in those newsreels, wearing her “Votes for Women” sash, overcoming seasickness to balance on the deck of a ship bobbing in the middle of the Hudson River, leaning over the rail to hand her Suffrage Torch to New Jersey suffrage comrades in another boat. And it was Havemeyer holding aloft her Ship of State, a Mayflower-like model she designed, decorated by tiny light bulbs, which she would flick on dramatically at a pivotal moment in her speech. (Men and boys were particularly fascinated by this electric wonder, and since men were the ones voting in the suffrage referendum, they were an important audience to hold.) And it was Havemeyer who famously appeared in nighttime suffrage parades wearing light bulbs strung on her body, a battery strapped onto her back, the walking embodiment of a woman-piloted Ship of State.