The Woman's Hour

by Elaine Weiss

  Sue White knew Havemeyer as a fellow traveler, literally: they had been arrested and imprisoned together, then spent a month traveling cross-country together on the “Prison Special” railroad tour in the winter of 1919. Slammed together in a “Black Maria” patrol wagon, held together in the cold, smelly, rat- and cockroach-infested jailhouse, and then living together in the cramped quarters of a Pullman train affords a certain sense of intimacy and camaraderie. Mrs. Havemeyer was a trouper, and as different as they were—the small-town Tennessee girl and the Fifth Avenue doyenne—White was heartened to have Mrs. Havemeyer by her side again.

  White and Havemeyer climbed the porch steps; White spoke first. She made it short, sweet, direct: My home, Tennessee, provides the opportunity for both political parties to help secure a thirty-sixth state. We look to you, Mr. Harding, to get all the state’s Republican legislators on board for ratification. White left the rhetorical flights of fancy to Mrs. Havemeyer; Havemeyer took off.

  “We need a thirty-sixth state, and it seems as if it were as impossible for us to attain it as it was for the children of Israel to enter the promised land,” Havemeyer said, pausing a beat to emphasize her first punch line. “We know Moses was slow, but when it comes to suffrage, I believe he would have to give the Republican Party time allowance. I have often wondered what would have happened if there had been picketers in Egypt. We know Pharaoh was visited by every plague under the sun, but history doesn’t relate whether picketers were among them.”

  She voiced a “deep-throated protest” against her “unenfranchised sisters being used as fodder for any political machine” and suggested that any woman not allowed to vote should refuse to pay her taxes. This was not a new concept; Susan Anthony advocated it, and Anna Howard Shaw actually practiced it—Shaw’s car was impounded for her tax protest—but coming from a woman of Mrs. Havemeyer’s tax bracket, it carried a punch. And if casually suggesting a tax revolt did not get the assembled Republicans’ attention, she knew what could: invoking the sacred name of the most venerated of all Republicans, Abraham Lincoln.

  “The great Lincoln would have said to you, ‘Men, these women have already thirty-five states to the good. Stop and think what a majority that is to be up against. Are you not foolish to resist the will of thirty-five states, instead of yielding the thirty-sixth one?’” She was warming up, finding her rhythm; the feathers on her hat bobbed and swayed.

  “Fifty-six years ago Abraham Lincoln also wished to pass an amendment. He, too, needed a thirty-sixth state. Did he say, ‘I have done enough’ or ‘I will request someone’ or ‘I will urge’ or ‘Ladies, don’t bother me, I have done all I could.’ No! He said, ‘I need another state and I am going to make one,’ and he did, and his amendment was ratified—and think of it, gentlemen, the Union lived on stronger and better for the brave act of a brave, just man.”

  Some of her listeners may have noticed that Mrs. Havemeyer jumbled the chronology of President Lincoln’s efforts to abolish slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment. While he did everything in his power, including overt bribery, to win passage of that amendment in the reluctant House of Representatives, he was dead by the time a final state was needed for ratification, in December 1865 (with thirty-six states in the Union at the time, only twenty-seven states were needed to ratify). But historical details were not the point of Mrs. Havemeyer’s performance: it was the spirit, the soul, of the story that mattered.

  “Senator Harding. will you not urge the men of the Republican Party to do as much for us today and get us that thirty-sixth state?” she implored, glancing at him, her voice rising, her arms outstretched.

  Harding leaned against a porch pillar and focused his gaze intently upon White and then Havemeyer as they spoke. He was always a good listener, one of his best political skills. He folded his arms, cocked his head slightly, appeared to be concentrating on every word. He was a distinguished-looking man, still considered very handsome. He had a fine aquiline nose, large expressive eyes, smooth skin, and perfectly clipped gray hair. He was a very attractive candidate, his advisers agreed; he looked presidential.

  Watching this scene from behind, in the deep recesses of the covered porch, was Will Hays, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Hays, an expert political tactician, was working for a new boss now, the new presidential candidate, and what he’d learned in the past month was that Senator Harding had a different type of “woman problem” than just mollifying the suffragists. Harding seemed to have trouble keeping his pants fly buttoned. And Hays had to deal with it.

  Hays had already expended a fair amount of energy making sure the press did not get wind of his candidate’s very messy extramarital entanglements, which would certainly not go over well with any new women voters. When Harding was asked by the Republican leadership at the Chicago convention if there were any embarrassing skeletons in his closet that might pose problems in a presidential campaign, he thought about it for a few minutes, then answered, “No.” That proved to be quite untruthful. There was the baby, and there was the blackmail.

  The baby was safely tucked away, with her mother, in a small apartment in Chicago. The mother was Nan Britton, who as a Marion schoolgirl developed an inexplicable but unshakable crush on Harding. When she was twenty and he fifty-one, she became his “bride” in a Manhattan hotel room. Their daughter was now nine months old, though Harding had not yet bothered to see her.

  At the same time, Harding was being blackmailed by his longtime paramour, Carrie Fulton Phillips. They’d been carrying on a torrid affair for fifteen years. Carrie and Jim Phillips, who owned a big department store in downtown Marion, were neighbors and good friends of the Hardings. Carrie Phillips was beautiful and vivacious, and when she and Warren weren’t together they carried on a steamy correspondence; he wrote erotic love poems to her. Florence knew all about it. She’d opened one of their letters back in 1911. She’d considered divorce but decided to simply stand pat and hold it over Warren’s head when necessary: a rising politician needed to display a stable home life. Florence had invested in Warren, and she wanted a return on that investment.

  So Warren and Carrie Phillips carried on. But when Carrie learned about Nan Britton (there were other women, too, including his Senate secretary), she felt betrayed, and in the spring of 1920 she threatened to expose their affair unless he made it worth her while not to squeal. Harding offered to pay her $5,000 a year, but she wanted much more. He tried to convince her that the only way he could pay her more was to be nominated for president, opening new doors of economic opportunity. She wasn’t impressed and planned to sell his love letters to the highest bidder. Only after Harding won the nomination did he fess up to the Republican leadership and reveal his dangerous predicament.

  Will Hays had to clean up the mess. Hays brought both Carrie and Jim Phillips (she’d told her husband everything) to Washington and struck a deal: the Republican National Committee would pay the couple $25,000 to go to Japan and China—to the other side of the world, beyond the reach of the press—during the presidential campaign and also give them $2,000 each month to guarantee their silence. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips packed their bags and were now safely absent from Marion. But alone among the town’s buildings, only the Uhler-Phillips department store was unadorned by celebratory bunting.

  * * *

  As Mrs. Havemeyer concluded her speech, Harding stepped forward to face the audience. He could see that a parade traffic jam had developed on the far reaches of the lawn, with impatient bands and marchers eager to make their way to the porch but blocked by the stationary suffragists. Time to move the Suffs on, which was just fine with him.

  “To what these ladies have said I wish to reply, very briefly, that the consideration of suffrage and woman’s participation in politics contemplates her taking her part equally and fully with the men of this Republic,” he intoned as the sashed women surrounding the porch leaned in, eager to hear his response over the din of the bands. Bu
t there was no real response. He gave them their first taste of the reason Harding would forever be linked to the word “bloviate.”

  “Therefore, since I am speaking to all the citizenship of America in a formal manner this afternoon, if I may be allowed to state to America, and to you, and to all citizens quite alike, my position on the questions you have asked me, that, I promise you I will do.” Wait till my official acceptance speech this afternoon, he told them. They waited.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, the notification ceremony began, staged at Garfield Park on the edge of town, in the open-walled Chautauqua pavilion, which could hold two thousand people under its crossbeam roof. That wasn’t enough room for this big event, so two thousand more chairs were crammed in. It’s estimated that another thirty thousand people listened from the grounds outside.

  Harding wrote the speech in longhand, in pencil, and even made the galley corrections for the printed edition himself, sitting down to a linotype machine in the offices of the Star. The crowd in the pavilion stood on their chairs, cheering wildly, waving Harding flags, as the candidate was escorted to the stage by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who would officiate at the ceremonies. Lodge, whose antipathy toward woman suffrage and the federal amendment was surpassed only by his enmity for Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations—and he had managed to block both in the Senate chamber for long stretches—made the official “notification” to Harding of his nomination.

  Harding then accepted, in what was for him a relatively short and shapely speech. He already had a reputation for platitudinous orations, light on substance and specifics (“wet sponges,” in the inimitable words of journalist H. L. Mencken). Harding’s speech that afternoon did have a sort of windy grandeur to it, as he urged a “return to normalcy” in national life and an isolationist “America first” posture in the world. He delivered it in the slow, ponderous cadences he preferred, conferring a synthetic gravitas to his words. Toward the end, as his collar grew damp with sweat in the sweltering pavilion, Harding finally came to his comments on woman suffrage.

  “The womanhood of America, always its glory, its inspiration and the potent, uplifting force in its social and spiritual development, is about to be enfranchised. . . . By party edict, by my recorded vote, by personal conviction, I am committed to this measure of justice. It is my earnest hope, my sincere desire, that the one needed State vote be quickly recorded in the affirmative of the right of equal suffrage and that the vote of every citizen shall be cast and counted in the approaching election.”

  Always eager to please, and not offend, Harding even tried to soothe the nation’s Antis: “And to the great number of noble women who have opposed in conviction this tremendous change in the ancient relation of the sexes as applied to government, I venture to plead that they will accept the full responsibility of enlarged citizenship and give to the best in the Republic their suffrage and support.”

  It sounded fine, it sounded sincere, but it said nothing about any firm commitment to securing that “one needed State.”

  Alice Paul made her displeasure known quickly to reporters: “If Sen. Harding refuses to live up to the suffrage plank and contents himself merely with ‘earnestly hoping’ and ‘sincerely desiring,’ how can he expect the country to take seriously the other planks in his platform?

  “If Sen. Harding will use his full power, as a leader of his party, in behalf of enfranchisement of women, he can secure such a Republican vote in favor of ratification in Tennessee. Only by action and not by the expression of polite interest will women be satisfied.”

  Paul threatened to follow Harding wherever he went during the campaign, should he ever venture off his front porch, pressing the suffragists’ demands. When a reporter asked whether picketing against Harding would be “indulged in” at Marion or elsewhere, the reply was: “That remains to be seen.”

  The Antis, now assembling in Nashville, saw only glad tidings in the hesitant words of Senator Harding. They had good reason to believe Harding would do nothing to displease them.

  Chapter 10

  Home and Heaven

  CHARLOTTE ROWE, FIELD SECRETARY of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, swept into Tennessee during this third week of July, making her customary loud entrance.

  “They call us the Home, Heaven and Mother crowd in derision,” she trumpeted to reporters in Chattanooga, alluding to the suffragists’ favorite depiction of the Antis’ bedrock rationales. “But we are determined to prevent women from descending to the political level of men, which if accomplished, will cheapen women and draw them into the mire of politics.”

  Miss Rowe herself was a highly skilled and well-paid political operative, working deep in the “mire” for over a decade, though she seemed none the worse for the toxic exposure. She was very fashionably dressed, with a knot of auburn hair tied low onto her neck, a broad-brimmed hat framing her narrow, thin-lipped face. She was a New Yorker in her late thirties with a quick wit, agile mind, and exceedingly sharp tongue. Rowe was the Antis’ most astute and aggressive speaker, a roving pugilist itching to verbally box with the best of the Suffs, anytime, anywhere.

  The Suffs despised her but also had to give her a grudging degree of respect. If she weren’t so hideously misguided, they thought, she might have been an excellent advocate for the Cause. Rowe was their most talented and tenacious adversary; they had been dueling with her publicly for years. They first encountered her around 1911 in New York, in dazzling speeches, legislative hearing testimony, and debates all around the city and state. She was only in her twenties then, and the antisuffragists had just begun organizing, but she relished tangling with the veteran and venerated Suffs, daring them to debate her.

  When the federal amendment moved out of its long dormancy in Congress in 1913, Rowe was there in Washington to testify against the amendment in committee hearings; and in the final, protracted stages in the House and Senate, she moved to the nation’s capital to be at the center of the action. As soon as the amendment was passed by Congress, Rowe set off on an investigative tour of all the major southern cities, meeting with local Anti groups and sympathetic legislators, gauging their appetite for a furious fight against ratification. During the past year she seemed to be everywhere, in all the most contentious ratification states. Since spring she’d scored an impressive string of victories, and now she displayed a gunslinger’s steely confidence. “Miss Rowe earned her spurs in Delaware,” was the way one admiring Tennessee newspaper reporter described her, and she’d recently put another pair of notches on her ratification-slayer belt in Georgia and Louisiana. Now she was taking aim at Tennessee.

  Rowe was in Chattanooga en route to Nashville, in the vanguard of national Anti leaders riding into Tennessee like the cavalry—no, like the American Expeditionary Forces—to defend a besieged strategic outpost, bringing fresh supplies and firepower to beat back an enemy assault. Since the war, Rowe and her Anti compatriots had adopted many military metaphors and allusions, to stir emotion. They postured themselves as the brave defenders of liberty and morality fighting the despotic Suffs, who, not unlike the Huns, were intent on destroying the foundations of American civilization. They likened their campaign to halt ratification of the federal amendment to the bloody, yearlong Battle of Verdun on the western front, in which almost a million men were killed contesting a patch of French soil. The Antis took as their campaign motto the Verdun rallying cry of the French staring down the German advance: “They Shall Not Pass!”

  The Antis themselves were an odd coalition held together by the centripetal force of fear: fear of the political, economic, and social disruptions that equal suffrage might bring, not just at the polls and in the halls of government, but in the factory, the kitchen, and the bedroom. Standing under the Anti umbrella were men of the cloth and women of the club, corporate titans and black and immigrant workingmen, political bosses and university professors, united only by their dread of yet anothe
r element of upheaval. The nation had experienced many convulsive changes in the past fifty years, and woman suffrage threatened one more undesirable upset. Charlotte Rowe knew how to appeal to every constituency.

  Though Rowe was an oppressively familiar figure to the Suffs, she remained a fascinating, infuriating enigma to them. She wasn’t cut from the usual Anti cloth; she wasn’t the daughter or wife of a conservative minister, rich banker, lawyer, or industrialist, as were so many who joined the antisuffrage movement. Nor was she a wealthy, cosseted, bridge-playing lady of leisure, as the Suffs liked to portray Antis, who cared more about preserving the privileges of her class than taking on the responsibilities of full citizenship. (To be fair, many Anti women were active in social reform and philanthropic projects, which they considered apolitical and acceptable.)

  Rowe also wasn’t a religious zealot, who feared eternal damnation if she set foot in a polling booth. She wasn’t even a mother, though she waxed sentimental about the sacred role of motherhood and home as “the altar of human affection and the shrine of man’s desire” placed in jeopardy by woman suffrage. With the advent of suffrage, Rowe warned, women were going to tear off their aprons, jump into the polling booth—and the working world—and never come back.

  Rowe styled herself, very cleverly, as the realization of an ideal: a modern, single working woman (as neither a wife nor mother, she was free to assume this role) whose femininity was never in doubt. She dressed the part, favoring sleek-fitting business dresses with modestly plunging V-neck collars, hemlines swinging midway between her ankles and her knees, and the latest slim, pointy leather pumps. She was the modern woman who didn’t need, or want, the vote. She lived out of a suitcase, traveling from city to city, clubhouse to statehouse, a professional politico striking deals, exerting pressure, and lobbying for the right of other women to stay at home.