by Elaine Weiss
Pierce was pledging the help of the black women of Tennessee to the white women of the state—proposing a working partnership to achieve their shared goals of social betterment. But Pierce’s demand for a square deal wasn’t just a vague, lofty notion, it wasn’t just a promise to follow white women’s instructions, it was solid and specific: “We want recognition in all forms of this government,” Pierce said. “We want a state vocational school, and a child welfare department of the state, and more room in state schools.”
The black and white suffragists of Tennessee had worked separately for many years—black Suffs weren’t allowed to join the white mainstream clubs—so this event was an exciting departure, an ambitious way to launch the new Tennessee League of Women Voters, which was the successor to the state’s national suffrage affiliate. (With the granting of limited suffrage, Tennessee became eligible to join the LWV.) Abby Milton and Catherine Kenny were elected to leadership positions of the league, and there was something thrilling to them about Pierce’s idea of women forging political deals—joining forces, white and black—for their community’s good. This was, they believed, perhaps naively, what woman suffrage in its purest, most idealistic form was all about; it was an example of what women’s participation in government might accomplish.
But Pierce was posing another question, urgent but unspoken, to her audience that morning: Will you, the white suffragists of Tennessee, stand by the black women of the state who want, who need, to vote? Will you stand up for us when black women, like black men, are threatened and assaulted at the polls? Will you allow us to use the vote that we, like you, have been fighting for so long? Those questions remained unanswered.
Now, in the first days of August, the Tennessee League of Women Voters was only ten weeks old, but it was being forced to mature quickly. No woman attending the inaugural convention could foresee that Tennessee might be the thirty-sixth state or that their league would be thrust into the national spotlight while still in its wobbly infancy. Abby Milton, as the league’s first president, accepted the challenge.
Milton saw her role in guiding the young league as her civic duty, and she took such obligations very seriously. Both George and Abby Milton felt strongly about public affairs, good government, and progressive policies. George was the publisher and editor of the Chattanooga News, a careful and fair-minded man; a “dry,” a Suff, and a progressive Democrat. He frequently locked editorial horns with his morning newspaper rival, Adolph Ochs’s Chattanooga Times, and with Edward Stahlman’s Nashville Banner. Abby’s quick mind and organizational talents enabled her to rise quickly in suffrage circles, first in Chattanooga and then to the presidency of the state suffrage organization, where she played a leading role in pushing through the limited suffrage bill in the legislature. Abby believed God had a plan for the world, and woman’s equality was just a neccessary amendment to that plan; she felt called to do her part.
While Carrie Catt was dictating her telegrams to Cox and Harding into the Miltons’ telephone, Abby was off in Johnson City, substituting for Mrs. Catt on the stage of a suffrage rally: an intimidating position for anyone. She summoned her courage and walked alone to the podium. When she returned home to Chattanooga, she found Carrie Catt directing the Tennessee campaign from the parlor couch. It was obvious that after barely one day of rest, Catt was going to jump back into the ruckus; there was no restraining her. Catt wouldn’t hear of canceling her speech to the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce, scheduled for the next day. She would go on as planned.
At noon on Wednesday, August 4, in the ballroom of the Hotel Patten, Catt was introduced by the mayor of the city, and among the audience of about two hundred men and women were many political notables. Abby Milton and Marjorie Shuler sat at the head table, which was festooned with suffrage-yellow flowers, their eyes anxiously fixed on Mrs. Catt as she rose to speak, but their worries about her health and stamina dissolved as she launched into her address. Catt spoke with an unfiltered fury that even Marjorie had never heard before.
“Here in Tennessee the suffrage battle is being fought by those who do not live in Tennessee,” Catt declared. She was referring not to herself, but to the men of the Constitutional League. “Their way is to put a few publicity-seeking women in the limelight, while they themselves work in stealth.” Catt presented her evidence, spinning her narrative like a detective story, turning her magnifying glass on the Constitutional League.
“Some weeks ago from New York came emissaries of this group, to organize a men’s Constitutional League in Tennessee, and they seem to be finding men willing to play into their hands,” she charged. “They do not appear to be behind the opposition, but when they send to Cox and Harding messages to ‘leave Tennessee alone’ you may know it is this little band of determined New York reactionaries who are behind it.” Reporters covering the event scribbled furiously in their notebooks, smiling to themselves as they recorded Catt’s colorful castigations.
“These are the same New York people who call women ‘skirts’ and cry loudly that ‘woman’s place is in the home,’” Catt fumed. “The opponents of suffrage are trying to fool the people of Tennessee about the state constitution,” she contended. “All the Antis are getting behind the ‘constitutional objection.’” Catt was speaking without notes, taking off from her usual stump speech, inserting little rhetorical firecrackers, and she was getting a bit carried away.
“You can fool the people of Tennessee, but you can’t fool posterity,” she insisted. “If you won’t consider the suffrage amendment, the action of the legislature will pass into history as a testimonial to the stupidity of Tennessee.” Marjorie and Abby Milton could only wince at this insulting swipe, so out of character for the diplomatic Catt. “You may think you are right, but posterity will laugh.” It was as if all the tension and anger Catt had felt during the past several weeks, the bitter frustration she’d kept bottled up, were now bubbling out.
“Go to see your representatives and senators, and set them right!” she exhorted. “Let them understand that if they want to claim that their oaths prevent their considering suffrage, they do so in response to the wish and will of reactionaries, woman haters, who hope to keep women disenfranchised forever!”
The Antis in Nashville were both outraged and elated by Mrs. Catt’s remarks. They resented her gibes about “outsiders” and “New York reactionaries” invading and manipulating Tennessee—who was she, a New Yorker herself, to point a finger?—but they took Catt’s febrile rants as proof that the Suffs felt themselves slipping, losing their grip. They were not wrong in this assessment.
Josephine Pearson took special delight in Mrs. Catt’s tirade and used the nib of her fountain pen to puncture it. She had the fine hand of a teacher, her penmanship curvy and clear, her turns of phrase vivid, and her punctuation florid. Pearson was partial to exclamation points: they expressed her emphatic belief in the verities, her unshakable confidence in the absolute truths, in the Word of God, and in the great philosophers of man.
“Can anything more outside in its influences than Mrs. Catt—an alien in blood and in sentiment to every Southern instinct and inheritance—have ever come to Tennessee?” she asked Cox incredulously. The Anti leaders and Constitutional League lawyers from New York and other places were not outsiders, she protested, they were invited, honored guests: “That we, opposing Ratification in Tennessee, have and may employ every available ability, both state and national, to defeat the Federal Amendment that bears the name Susan B. Anthony—who was an organizer and propagator of Abolition—out of which Female suffrage is an unmistakable historical child—we do not deny but proclaim!”
Woman suffrage was an “infectious germ” foreign to the South, Pearson told Cox, and “Federal control of Southern elections” was a Republican plot originating with the likes of Thaddeus Stevens and Frederick Douglass. No self-respecting Democrat should have any part in such a ploy, Pearson insisted, not if he hoped to win southern votes.
She advised Cox to ignore Mrs. Catt’s “hysterical” pleas for his help and to take Catt’s SOS calls as proof that public sentiment in Tennessee was opposed to the amendment, and ratification would naturally fail without his intervention. Though Pearson might be exaggerating the strength of popular opposition to ratification, she had a salient point: the Suffs were obviously fearful that ratification in Tennessee was impossible without strong, coercive pressure from both national parties; they couldn’t trust the strength of their own forces to achieve victory. “Why then,” she asked Cox, “should a distinguished Democratic candidate lend his efforts to pulling burnt suffrage chestnuts out of a Southern fire?”
While Pearson penned her letter to Cox at the Hermitage, two blocks away at Woman’s Party headquarters Sue White wrote asking for help. Handling the entire state campaign with only three organizers was too much. White expected Miss Paul to arrive in Nashville within the next few days, but in the meantime, Paul promised reinforcements. She was sending two staffers from headquarters to handle publicity and another to raise money.
“The situation in Tennessee is serious but the situation of our treasury is more serious still,” Emma Wold, Paul’s secretary at party headquarters, wrote to a member that same week. “Miss Paul asks me to write you to see if you can not raise some money. . . .”
Running on empty was certainly not a new condition for the Woman’s Party—it was chronically short on funds—but the expenses of the long ratification campaign had sucked the party deep into the red. All the while she was supervising the Tennessee campaign from Washington, Paul continued begging for money. “Need for money for Tennessee suffrage campaign urgent. Asking every state to contrib $100. Can you raise $100 in your state?” Paul wired to all her state chairwomen. She made special appeals to her wealthiest donors, going back to the wells she’d tapped countless times before; Mrs. Havemeyer sent a $400 check. Paul pleaded with her well-heeled supporters to solicit funds from their neighbors at the posh summer colonies. She even asked Sue White, Anita Pollitzer, and Betty Gram to hustle money while they canvassed in Tennessee. By the early days of August, the Woman’s Party treasury was down to $10 and the bills were pouring in.
Paul was a brazen and guileless fund-raiser; she was known to ask anyone, at any time, for money. She didn’t enjoy doing it, but she felt that, like going to prison, begging for money was a necessary discomfort for the Cause. She didn’t wheedle, she didn’t demand, she just asked directly, with the single-minded intensity with which she pursued all of her goals. She was hard to refuse; donors often gave more than they intended, simply because in her sincerity she made them believe or made them feel guilty. No one was safe in an elevator, or in a taxi, or even in a private box at Carnegie Hall, if Alice Paul had you alone and in her fund-raising sights. How she kept the party afloat at all was miraculous. There were the small donors—the elderly woman sending a dollar bill or two, the nurse sending five dollars of her salary, the child mailing a dime—and the more substantial checks from wealthier patrons. And then there was Mrs. Belmont.
Alva Erskine Vanderbilt Belmont was perhaps the American suffrage movement’s most flamboyant benefactor. Born on the Erskine family’s cotton plantation in Mobile, Alabama, she married into high New York and Newport society when she took the hand of a Vanderbilt scion; years later, her divorce became one of the great tabloid stories of the Gilded Age. Her settlement made her a very wealthy divorcée. She quickly remarried into another society family, the Belmonts, but when she was widowed in 1908 she decided to devote herself, and her money, to the woman suffrage cause.
Although she bankrolled NAWSA at first, providing the money for their New York headquarters office, and she funded Harriot Stanton Blatch’s Women’s Political Union to draw more working-class women into the movement, Belmont found the pace of progress too slow. She came to see a more direct path to the franchise in the philosophy of Emmeline Pankhurst. The difference between conservative American suffragists and the new breed of British “militants,” Pankhurst told Belmont, was: “You talk. We act.”
Belmont wanted to act and saw Mrs. Pankhurst’s ideas manifest themselves in America in the actions of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. So when Paul and Burns split off from NAWSA to form the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, and later the National Woman’s Party, Belmont shifted her largesse to the new group, where her money could have more impact and she could have more clout. Belmont became the Woman’s Party’s primary financial backer. Alice Paul understood that while this generosity provided security, it also came with strings attached: Mrs. Belmont liked to have a strong say in the organizations she supported, and she was used to having her way. Paul was willing to accept the bargain and manage the difficult balance, and even though all policy decisions required Belmont’s stamp of approval, Paul was able to keep the headstrong and prickly Belmont engaged while restraining her from taking over. It wasn’t easy. In any case, even Mrs. Belmont’s donations couldn’t float the entire ship, so Paul was forced to plead for money constantly.
In contrast, Mrs. Catt had no such money worries. To Sue White’s mind, and to the other Woman’s Party staff, it seemed so unfair. Mrs. Catt had money to spare and no need to kowtow to any imperious benefactress. Catt was so lucky: her fairy godmother was conveniently dead.
How all this came to be certainly had the trappings of a fairy tale—or a dime novel.
In the fall of 1914, Catt was dining with Mollie and another friend in their Manhattan apartment when she was summoned to the telephone. Catt returned to the dining table flushed and stunned: “I am an heiress,” she announced. The phone call was from an attorney; Catt had been named the major beneficiary in the will of one of the richest women in the nation, a woman she’d barely even met.
The woman was Miriam Follin Peacock Squier Leslie Wilde, Baroness de Bazus, the most admired businesswoman of her day and a gossip column celebrity who wore scandal like a personal fashion statement. Miriam Leslie crafted her own version of the American success saga, with a feminist twist: an ambitious girl from New Orleans, born with neither wealth nor social standing, who by dint of talent, grit, and abundant charm managed to climb the economic, professional, and societal ladders of New York City to become a media mogul of the late nineteenth century. She made her ascent with ruthless calculation and with panache.
She began her career onstage in a dance act with the notorious Lola Montez, managed to enter the circle of America’s intellectual elite with her marriage to a distinguished anthropologist and diplomat, then subsequently took up a blue pencil as editor of popular women’s magazines. She became an arbiter of taste and fashion, manners and mores, for American women, yet her private life was splendidly messy: she married four times, her lovers were numerous, her affairs—rumored and real—widely reported.
After dumping her second husband for her boss, the publisher Frank Leslie, whose eponymous Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper brought a new kind of “sensational” journalism to America, Miriam seized the helm of the Leslie media empire when Frank died suddenly in 1880. She quickly rescued the faltering enterprise, nimbly reshaping the company, and soon she was among the nation’s highest-paid executives, with a yearly salary of more than $100,000. She oversaw four hundred employees, and more than half a million subscribers read her publications each month. She evolved into that rare creature: a woman in charge of a large corporation and in full control of her own financial and personal affairs. The modern American woman indeed: the kind the Antis had nightmares about.
Miriam Leslie never joined the suffrage vanguard, but she did quietly support the movement with modest donations, good publicity in her periodicals, and occasionally the use of her office building for suffrage receptions. Carrie Catt had met her just a few times at these events, and they engaged in some conversation, but nothing more. So no one was more shocked than Catt when the phone call came from Mrs. Leslie’s attorney in the fall of 1914, notifying her that the baroness (she’d m
ade up the title and bestowed it on herself) had directed her estate to be given personally to Catt, with the instruction that it be used to “further the cause of woman suffrage.”
The estate was valued at $2 million, an immense sum in 1914, equivalent to more than $50 million today. But it would take almost three years of furious legal wrestling for Catt to secure the bequest, as every distant relative and friend laid claim to the estate and tried to make the case that Mrs. Leslie was insane—what else could explain giving away her fortune to the suffrage movement? While Catt was taking control of the National and launching her “Winning Plan,” she was forced to spend hundreds of hours in probate court hearings and attorney conferences, as well as countless sleepless nights, in her effort to win the Leslie estate. Finally, in early 1917, the court ruled to uphold the will, though almost half of the estate had been spent on legal fees and settlements.
Some of the bequest was in the form of jewels—Mrs. Leslie had a weakness for glittering gems—and a trunk full of them was brought to Catt’s office at NAWSA headquarters on Madison Avenue. The trunk lid was opened, revealing a tangle of diamond necklaces and ruby earrings, emerald brooches and sapphire pins. Catt’s staff gathered around the treasure chest and she motioned to them to come touch the jewels, touch the legacy of the woman who was buying the future for them. For a magical half hour the suffrage soldiers played dress-up, sashaying between the office desks in bejeweled splendor. One of the staffers picked up a diamond-studded tiara from the pile and placed it on the silver curls of Carrie Catt’s head, crowning the Chief. After a while Catt clapped her hands and signaled for the jewels to be returned to the case; it was closed and latched and immediately sent off to be sold.
Catt used the Leslie money to finance the 1917 New York suffrage referendum campaign and her “Winning Plan,” building a stronger central command base in New York and opening Suffrage House in Washington to lobby for the federal amendment. She established the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission, which supported the Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education, a sophisticated publicity and publication department, with a press bureau pumping out news articles distributed nationwide, the Woman Citizen magazine, thousands of pamphlets and educational materials, and the History of Woman Suffrage volumes. The Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission was also underwriting the costs of NAWSA’s ratification campaign and the formation of the new League of Women Voters.