The Woman's Hour

by Elaine Weiss

  Before the police could reach her, White began reciting her statement of purpose: “We burn not the effigy of the President of a free people, but the leader of an autocratic party organization whose tyrannical power holds millions of women in political slavery,” she shouted as the police doused the urn and grabbed her arm. “I have long been what is known as a ‘Southern Democrat’ and the traditions of the democracy of Jefferson and Jackson are still strong in my heart,” she yelled as burly men in blue coats hustled her to one of the many waiting Black Maria patrol wagons. “The stronger because I feel that it is what we are fighting for now.

  “Mr. Wilson as the leader of his party, has forgotten, or else he never knew, the spirit of true democracy,” White screamed over the din of the commotion. “We feel that there is need of a determined protest of this sort; a protest which will shock Mr. Wilson and his followers into putting into action the principle that those who submit to authority shall have a voice in their government.” The last words were inaudible as Sue White was pushed into the patrol wagon.

  The scene turned chaotic, with policemen surging forward, spraying the women with the fire extinguishers, arresting as many of the protesters as they could capture, assisted in the chase by the loyal Boy Scouts. In the midst of the melee, Mrs. Havemeyer was assigned another task, one designed to get her arrested. Lucy Burns, in charge of the afternoon’s demonstration, handed Havemeyer bundles of paper to light with a match and throw into the urn.

  “Please, Miss Burns,” the police captain begged, “don’t let her do it. You know we don’t want to take her. Please don’t. . . .” The police felt queasy dragging off a grandmotherly protester. Havemeyer knew she must qualify for the “Prison Special” railroad tour by actually going to prison, so she kept throwing the bundles into the fire. Still the captain hesitated. “I believe I will have to kick him to keep in the game,” Havemeyer whispered to Burns, but finally the policeman placed a hand on Havemeyer’s shoulder, looped his arm through hers, and guided her to the Black Maria. In a caravan of patrol wagons and commandeered cars, Mrs. Havemeyer, Sue White, Lucy Burns, and thirty-six other party women were driven to the station house.

  The police seemed nervous about the mass arrest; the commander telephoned the White House and spoke to Joseph Tumulty, the president’s secretary. The women were held overnight in the police dormitory and arraigned the next afternoon. The charges were strange: for lighting a fire, for carrying wood to a fire, for incitement. Since burning the president in effigy wasn’t actually a crime, Sue White was charged with lighting combustibles on White House grounds; Havemeyer was found guilty of striking a match. The judge gave each woman a choice: a five-dollar fine or five days in jail. “Of course, no one thought of paying the fine,” Mrs. Havemeyer recalled proudly. The women were sentenced just at the hour the Senate was voting down the amendment.

  The Occoquan Workhouse was a decrepit, foul-smelling, vermin-infested jail, closed down a decade before as unfit to hold humans. The women entered dark, damp cells, each equipped with what Havemeyer described as “a disgusting closet, an iron support for a straw bed, one chair, and no light.” The bed straw was dirty, the sewage vapors nauseating, the cells bitter cold. Rats and cockroaches scurried on every surface. The women, hunger striking, didn’t touch the tins of soup or wormy bread set before them. Still, the conditions were better, and the sentences much shorter, than the six- and seven-month ordeals, often in solitary confinement, suffered by Alice Paul and other party women.

  Mrs. Havemeyer’s family in New York was horrified by the news that she was in jail, and they insisted she pay her fine, leave her comrades, and return home immediately. She resisted at first. They told her that the grandchildren were crying for her and her sister was deathly ill, how could she be so cruel? She sent word to Miss Paul, who gave her permission to pay her fine and leave; she still qualified for the “Prison Special.”

  When Sue White and the others were released after their five-day sentence and hunger strike, she returned, weak and wobbly, to party headquarters on Lafayette Square and was confined to bed. It was a brief convalescence. The next day she was on her feet to receive her prison pin in a little ceremony. Every woman who was “jailed for freedom”—there were almost 150 of them by then—was decorated with a distinguished service pin by Miss Paul. She’d been awarded one by Mrs. Pankhurst in England, after she’d endured her first imprisonment for suffrage activities there, and she carried on the tradition in the Woman’s Party. The pin was a miniature of a jail door, modeled on the doors of Holloway Prison in London, gridded by little silver bars, draped with a chain of tiny links, secured by a diminutive heart-shaped lock. It was so precise a replica that even the door’s hinges and bolts, the lock’s keyhole, and the narrow slit in the bars for passing food to the prisoner were distinct. No diamond could ever mean more to Sue White.

  The pin marked Sue’s total break with the moderate Tennessee suffragists. Condemnation of the effigy burning was swift and ferocious. Speaking for NAWSA, Mollie Hay slammed the Woman’s Party stunt, saying it “makes us question whether they want the success of the amendment or publicity for the organization,” and she denounced the party as “the I.W.W. of the suffrage movement,” tarring it with the brush of the radical, violent, and mostly despised Industrial Workers of the World.

  Carrie Catt also lashed out: “If the women of America are betrayed, it will not be by the president. A vote for the amendment is a vote for what the president wants. A vote against the amendment is a vote for what the Woman’s Party wants.”

  More punishing still was the contempt of White’s Tennessee suffrage colleagues: joining the Alice Paul group was one thing; symbolically incinerating the president—a southerner, a Democrat—was quite another. It was unpatriotic and perhaps even treasonous. And with a bill to win partial suffrage for Tennessee women pending in the legislature in the winter of 1919, the mainstream Tennessee Suffs deeply resented the damage that Miss Sue’s inflammatory indulgences might inflict on their campaign.

  A few weeks later, when that suffrage bill was being debated in the statehouse, Sue White’s name and her notorious act were invoked time and again by those opposed to woman suffrage. Legislators advocating the bill on the floor took pains to note that White did not in any way represent the sentiment of Tennessee suffragists. She became the symbol of hysterical suffrage zealotry. She didn’t care.

  White believed she was a true daughter of Susan B. Anthony, who had understood the power of direct action to bring attention to injustice. When Miss Anthony cast her defiant ballot in the election of 1872, and when she disrupted the official Fourth of July ceremonies at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia by barging up to the podium and presenting her “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States”—she knew she wasn’t being polite. When she climbed onto that bandstand in front of Independence Hall and read the angry declaration and its list of grievances aloud to a startled audience, Miss Anthony was most definitely defying the rules of ladylike society. The Woman’s Party was heir to Anthony’s indomitable spirit, Sue White was convinced; it kept the flame of her honorable, nonviolent militancy burning bright.

  And there was that other Susan, her namesake, her aunt, who had also taught her to take a stand, even if it was not a public stand, if it was only an act of principle. Her own aunt Susan had broken the law, defied society and her father, by secretly teaching the family’s slaves to read. Aunt Susan had been a clandestine abolitionist, Sue learned years later, when her elderly relative confessed it all to her. And her aunt also admitted she’d always admired Susan Anthony for her outspoken support for abolition. Her aunt’s revelation was all slightly shocking to young Sue, but galvanizing. It was a small action, a private defiance, but it made a deep impression on Sue and guided her in moments of decision.

  She knew it was a risk to wear her prison pin in Tennessee, but she would wear it, brazenly, proudly, every day.

  * *
*

  Anita Pollitzer was only twenty-five years old, but she was already a seasoned veteran of the suffrage wars. She could drop into a new territory, scan the terrain quickly, and map its political contours effortlessly, much the way a quick-sketch artist can draw the basic shapes and lines of a scene, capturing the essence of the whole. Pollitzer’s powers of political observation were enhanced by her own artistic training.

  Pollitzer was an artist who’d traded her brushes and charcoals for the picket poles and train tickets of a Woman’s Party crusader. Unlike many women who joined the movement, Pollitzer enjoyed the support of her family, who encouraged her work; she was no rebel to them. She was the adored youngest daughter of a prosperous Charleston cotton merchant family, pillars of the city’s thriving Jewish community. The Pollitzers’ parlor on fashionable Pitt Street was filled with music and art, and very often it was also filled with meetings on progressive social and political themes, especially women’s rights. Anita’s two older sisters were both active suffragists. Anita grew up assuming that working for the Cause was a natural thing for a proper young woman to do.

  Anita went north to Teachers College of Columbia University in New York City to study art and education. She took painting classes at the Art Students League and became good friends with a moody but talented classmate named Georgia O’Keeffe. They were very different personalities—Pollitzer optimistic and ebullient, O’Keeffe sullen and self-absorbed—but they shared a love of art and a thirst for all things modern and bold. They hung out at photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, where they had their first exposure to the paintings of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and John Marin. When O’Keeffe left New York for a succession of unsatisfying teaching jobs, Pollitzer kept her connected to the New York City art world with long newsy letters, art magazines, and poems for inspiration. O’Keeffe replied with introspective notes and packages of her latest drawings and paintings. When Pollitzer opened her college mailbox in early 1916 to find a particularly striking set of O’Keeffe charcoal drawings, she disobeyed her friend’s instructions to keep them private and went downtown to show them to Stieglitz, and he was impressed. “At last, a woman on paper,” he famously exclaimed, and began displaying O’Keeffe’s work in his gallery and promoting her talent; Stieglitz and O’Keeffe would later marry. Pollitzer changed the course of O’Keeffe’s life and career, but she chose a totally different path for herself.

  At home in Charleston on her summer vacations, Pollitzer joined her sisters in suffrage work, helping to proselytize and organize. She did everything from drawing recruitment posters to selling lemonade to debating Antis on the street. In New York, she wore a cap and gown to march with the collegiate contingent in the great October 1915 suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue, writing excitedly to O’Keeffe about the “tremendous affair” with tens of thousands of participants. When her sisters grew frustrated with NAWSA’s slow pace of suffrage progress in the South, they signed on with the Woman’s Party and its more aggressive agenda, and Anita joined them in that camp. Soon after Pollitzer graduated from college in 1916, she moved to Washington to work for the party.

  She was a “Silent Sentinel” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in the fall of 1918, holding a banner protesting the Senate’s refusal to act on the federal amendment: “America Enters the Peace Conference with Unclean Hands for Democracy Is Denied to Her People.” She and her fellow picketers were treated roughly by the police: knocked down, shaken, dragged down the Senate steps. It only stiffened her resolve. Though she’d been arrested, she never served time, so she didn’t own a prison pin.

  When the ratification campaign began, Miss Paul frequently sent Pollitzer to Capitol Hill to convince a reluctant congressman or senator to apply pressure on his state’s governor or legislature to ratify. She did her homework before approaching her assigned prey; she sweetly asked pointed questions. She was a good listener and had a brilliant smile. But she learned not to trust any politician’s promise of aid: she stood over his shoulder while he telephoned or wired his colleagues back home, making sure the task was accomplished in her presence. The petite Pollitzer might appear an ingenue, but gullibility was not one of her traits, and gumption was.

  Alice Paul recognized her potential and dispatched her to organize and lobby in the states—Wyoming, Florida, Virginia, and more—where she mastered the art of persistent persuasion. Pollitzer loved the work: it was like being a soldier, spy, and agitator all rolled into one. Her job was to find things out and shake things up. She often worked in a team with Sue White, Betty Gram, or Catherine Flanagan, and she was tickled to think they’d now be reunited for the big push in Tennessee. She was ready.

  Her first stop was Chattanooga, where she was to meet with former U.S. senator Newell Sanders, a loyal suffragist whose confidence Pollitzer was eager to gain. Sanders was a courtly gentleman, seventy years old, with soft, droopy eyes, who might be taken for a kindly country minister. He was actually a shrewd businessman and canny politician, respected throughout the state. He sat Pollitzer down at his kitchen table, his wife puttering nearby, and spent the entire afternoon giving his guest a crash course in Tennessee Republican politics. He explained the different factions, the splits, the feuds, the issues, the bosses, and who gave orders to whom. She listened attentively, fixing her gray eyes upon him, scribbling in a notebook on her lap.

  Pollitzer had a knack for getting powerful men to talk freely. The startling combination of a vivacious brunette who could knowledgeably talk shop with an old pol, and seemed delighted to do so for hours at a time, enchanted more than a few flinty backroom characters, turning them into valuable informants. And when she was working in the southern states, it certainly didn’t hurt that Pollitzer spoke with the honeyed accent of a Charleston girl.

  Sanders briefed her on which Republicans she needed to reach, which men might try to dodge her, which might cause trouble. The first man to tackle was Jesse Littleton, Sanders told her, the former mayor of Chattanooga, now running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Littleton was a “wet,” an attorney representing liquor interests, and he had power over a significant Republican faction; he was a kingpin. A few hours later, Pollitzer was facing Jesse Littleton in his Chattanooga office. Pollitzer took an instant dislike to Littleton. “He is a slick, Cox-like politician, only he wears white and weighs 300 lbs!” she reported to Paul. “He appears to be friendly,” Pollitzer concluded, “but his face does such queer things when I pin him down.”

  Pollitzer was now on a train from Chattanooga to Athens, chugging along the ridges of the Appalachian foothills, to find Tennessee Senate Republican floor leader Herschel Candler, who’d voted “No” on limited woman suffrage last year. “We must make effort to get Candler, as he leads men,” she wrote to Alice Paul. “He will hurt us unless he can be convinced.” First she was going to see Candler’s friends in his hometown of Athens; then, if possible, Candler himself; then Candler’s protégé, Harry Burn, a Republican representative from the town of Niota. Down the political food chain. It was the only way.

  As her train approached Athens, Pollitzer dashed off the last of her letter to Paul and, like Sue White, complained about Carrie Catt’s claims of a ratification majority, scribbling her own expression of outrage: “The papers are full of Mrs. Catt,” she wrote. “Today she comes out saying we have ‘more than majority pledged in both houses’—and I had, before I took train, to see my men to explain we haven’t—and they had to work.”

  Mrs. Catt was pouring cold water on the fire Anita Pollitzer was trying so hard to kindle under the East Tennessee Republicans, giving them too easy an excuse to sit back and twiddle their thumbs. Catt was a menace, Pollitzer was convinced, complicating an already difficult mission. “The Republicans are not going to be easy,” she wrote to Miss Paul, underlining the words ‘not’ and ‘easy’ in bold strokes.

  Pollitzer’s colleague Hayden Rector, who was handling the Woman’s Party’s neg
otiations with both the Cox and the Harding camps in Ohio, was also livid when she saw the front-page headlines heralding Catt’s claim of victory in Tennessee. “We must not have all our work and efforts brought to nothing like this,” Rector told Alice Paul, excoriating Catt. “Her determination to end the fight in people’s minds is simply satanic.”

  Chapter 14

  Fieldwork

  THE DOG DAYS of summer, when July melts into August, was, in any normal Tennessee year, a quiet and restful time, when the pace of life slowed. But this was no ordinary summer. An abnormally hot-weather frenzy gripped the state as the intersecting trajectories of multiple political campaigns and suffrage missions etched zigzagging, crisscrossing, overlapping, and parallel trails across the map.

  Carrie Catt was traveling eastward from Memphis to Knoxville to Chattanooga. Sue White was spiraling around Nashville, making quick trips into nearby towns to snag important legislators. Josephine Pearson was shuttling between the Hotel Hermitage and various planning meetings around Nashville, while Nina Pinckard zipped into the offices of prominent Tennessee attorneys, and Charlotte Rowe ventured to other cities to stoke Anti sentiment. Governor Roberts and his rivals (there were at least five other gubernatorial hopefuls) and their surrogates were snaking through every county. Dozens of candidates running for vacant seats in the legislature were campaigning in their districts, accompanied by their supporters. The League of Women Voters members were still combing the countryside, climbing up hills and plunging down into hollers to pledge laggard legislators. Woman’s Party organizers were embedded in all three Grand Divisions, chasing after the regions’ legislators and politicians. With just ten days until the state primary, which might determine the fate of ratification in Tennessee, everyone was in motion.