by Elaine Weiss
“Certain influences” had gotten to Seth Walker. The governor braced himself: How many other legislators would follow Walker into the Anti camp?
* * *
On Sunday night, with the opening of the special session just hours away, the Chief faced her nervous field commanders. Assembled in her Hermitage suite for an intense strategy and intelligence briefing were the directors of all the different ratification committees—the Democratic women, Republican women, the Men’s Committee, and the League of Women Voters. Anne Dudley, Harriet Upton, and Marjorie Shuler were there, too. Sue White was not.
White viewed her position in Nashville as the ambassador of an autonomous organization, a sovereign power, distinct from the workings of NAWSA. She would cooperate and coordinate with the National Association Suffs as necessary, but she would fly the Woman’s Party’s own flag and take direction only from Miss Paul. Even if she’d been invited to Mrs. Catt’s room for the briefing, she would have refused.
The Chief took charge, acting as the professor-cum-general. She assumed both roles naturally, from long practice, always the teacher. She’d long ago established training schools for suffrage organizers around the country, and that summer tens of thousands of women were reading her syndicated “Mrs. Catt’s Citizenship School” lessons in local newspapers, providing instructions on the workings of government and the democratic process, preparing women for the vote. Now she had to prepare her warriors to win the vote.
Catt reviewed the overall strategy: to maintain pressure on the presidential candidates and national parties, lean on state party leaders, keep close tabs on the legislators, and push for a quick ratification vote, while the delegates still remembered their pledges and before they could be enticed to change. “We are ready for a vote,” Catt had told reporters earlier in the evening. “Enough men have promised to vote for ratification to put it over and there is no necessity for delay.” The Antis, she understood, would be throwing every possible obstacle and motion to delay into the amendment’s path. “If the Tennessee solons stand by their pledges, ratification of the 19th Federal Amendment is certain,” Catt told the press. “I believe the favorable poll will stand.”
But the women gathered in Mrs. Catt’s room on Sunday night were, with reason, worried about that qualifier: if. The Tennessee Suffs had spent the weekend assiduously socializing, greeting the delegates at the train station, chatting up the politicos in the Hermitage lobby. They were hearing things—rumors, gossip, inside information—that disturbed them: about men changing their minds, planning to renege on their pledges, pledging both ways, or fixing to not vote at all. The reporters circulating around town were hearing these murmurs, too, and were writing cryptic allusions to “mysterious influences” and “certain vague, nameless forces.” These forces, the papers said, “are reputed to have the unlimited financial backing of certain interests, which are opposed on principle and through interest to woman suffrage.”
Anne Dudley did her best to neutralize all the dark, spooky rumors swirling around the city on Sunday, emphasizing her faith in the integrity of the Tennessee legislature: “Knowing its personnel as I do, and the high standard of the great majority of its members,” Dudley told reporters, “I feel no hesitancy in saying that in a question involving the national honor, as this question of political freedom for women undoubtedly does, they will vote aye.”
Pshaw! countered the Antis. “We know that pledges extracted under coercion and over-persuasion have no direct value,” Nina Pinckard told the Banner. “A man will sometimes pledge a woman, as he would marry her, just to get rid of her.”
On the eve of the legislature’s convening, Sue White was trying hard to project the image of a calm and courageous commander, someone unfazed by the heat of the fight, the model Woman’s Party warrior. But she struggled to hide her terror. White was staying in the Hermitage now, to be closer to the center of action, and from her room she wrote her daily round-up report and wired it to Miss Paul: “Speakers Walker and Todd will introduce resolution. . . . Republican Caucus called tomorrow, ten o’clock. . . . Nobody will say how bulk of Republicans will vote. . . . Some reports antis using money, and other reports that pledged men will not all show up. . . . If Republican caucus not favorable only desperate chance winning as Governor’s forces doing nothing.” The Suffs did not yet know of Seth Walker’s betrayal.
Downstairs, in the Hermitage lobby, a strange sort of beauty pageant was under way. Anti headquarters had been alerted that the prettiest young Suffs were being deployed to mingle with the legislators in the lobby, and they were, as one reporter put it, “clad in the daintiest creations of the modiste and evidently making an impression.” Alarmed, the Antis summoned a bevy of their own comely supporters, “all dressed and dolled to the limits of present-day fashions,” to counter the Suffs’ onslaught of pulchritude. Legislators certainly did not mind being caught in this middle, cajoled by cute representatives of both sides, and the Hermitage lobby was a smoky paradise for the uncommitted lawmaker.
The meeting in Mrs. Catt’s room continued, as she delved into the details of the battle plan. Each woman would be assigned to track certain legislators. The local women who had gone out into the field to pledge the delegates of their districts would continue to ride herd on them. Leaders of the various ratification committees would act as liaisons to the men who answered to their constituency. And only Tennessee women were to lobby the legislators, attend sessions in the galleries, or even set foot in the statehouse. The Suffs under Catt’s command agreed that they would present a 100 percent Tennessee-pure face in the Capitol; only those who possessed the proper Volunteer State pedigree and spoke with the correct regional drawl would be placed in the front lines. Mrs. Catt and Mrs. Upton agreed to remain in the background, “consulting specialists,” as they were called. They would not venture to the statehouse at all, lest their presence be distracting and play into the Antis’ hands.
Sue White’s plan was very different. As a native daughter, she would be right out there on the firing line, on the floor of the chambers, but she also needed Pollitzer and Gram and Flanagan to guard their assigned men, whether they were Tennesseans or not. And Miss Paul, when she arrived, would definitely want to lead the charge in the statehouse herself. If Paul’s presence inflamed the situation, so be it, White thought, but Miss Paul must come.
“Wish greatly you were here,” White pleaded with Paul, “and if situation not more favorable after Republican caucus would insist on your coming to take hold if possible.”
The strategy session in Catt’s room ran long and late. The apprehensive suffragists went to bed after midnight, but few could sleep; they were kept awake by singing. All through the night the warbling voices of drunken legislators, some wearing red roses, some yellow, floated through the Hermitage hallways. The men had been enjoying themselves on the eighth floor of the hotel, where Anti lobbyists were pouring free Tennessee whiskey and old bourbon—including the local favorite, Jack Daniel’s “in the raw”—in what came to be dubbed the Jack Daniel’s Suite.
Chapter 17
In Justice to Womanhood
ON MONDAY MORNING, Anita Pollitzer and Catherine Flanagan herded the East Tennessee Republican delegation into Nashville. They hopped off the Knoxville special express train ahead of their flock and silently counted straw boater-hatted heads as the men filed out of the railroad car. They made sure no one slipped away.
Besides the contingent of East Division legislators, the women had rounded up an impressive collection of Republican political elders, including Alf Taylor, the newly minted gubernatorial nominee; Jesse Littleton, his defeated opponent; Congressman J. William Taylor; and former Tennessee governor Ben Hooper, who’d long been a friend of the Tennessee Suffs. Pollitzer was flashing her most beguiling smile as reporters approached her and her group on the platform. Brushing off the dust and cinders of the locomotive smoke and the fatigue of the journey, she looked remarkably fresh and fas
hionable in her flower-patterned organdy dress and her black hat trimmed with cornflowers. The reporters marveled at her entourage of heavyweight Republicans and she couldn’t suppress her delight.
“These gentlemen, who do not belong to the legislature, came with us to help put suffrage over,” she said, gesturing toward Hooper, Taylor, and Littleton with a grin. “They were a little shy of us when we first appeared in the mountains to solicit their aid, but now they eat out of our hands. They are suffragists.”
Betty Gram puffed into Union Station on Monday morning, too, on board the overnight train carrying the Memphis and Shelby County delegation. Hers was an equally impressive constellation of West Tennessee Democrats, which included the mayor of Memphis, Rowlett Paine; Thomas Riddick, elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives specifically to help lead ratification efforts; and Joe Hanover, who had easily regained his house seat. Charl Williams and a large League of Women Voters group were also on the train, and the Memphis region’s broad enthusiasm for ratification, encouraged by Mr. Crump, was displayed by the assortment of men’s civic club representatives aboard. The Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, American Legion, and Memphis City Club had all passed resolutions supporting ratification and sent delegates to lobby in Nashville.
U.S. senator Kenneth McKellar had already arrived in the city and immediately conferred with Carrie Catt. Her observations: The state Democrats seemed weak-kneed, the governor’s strength puny, and Cox ineffectual. And she was hearing more rumors about the governor’s men trying to sabotage the amendment. McKellar had better break out his whip to get his party men in line, she advised. She had no illusions about how political muscle was flexed. “I am here to do what I can for ratification and believe we will win,” McKellar assured reporters after his consult with Catt. “There is an overwhelming sentiment in Tennessee for suffrage.”
All through the weekend, porters had been cleaning and polishing, mopping floors and dusting desks, sweeping out the cobwebs of months of adjournment. Early on Monday, women took over the chores of readying the Capitol, both Suffs and Antis decorating the corridors with their own colors and regalia. The Capitol corridors looked more like a frenzied bazaar than any august halls of government, filled with vendors hawking their political wares. The Suffs tacked yellow bunting and banners to the walls and railings. The Antis lugged boxes of artificial red roses up the grand marble staircase, intended for the lapels of willing legislators and other sympathizers.
Mrs. Edwin Forbes, a stately, white-haired Boston Brahmin from the Massachusetts Anti organization, spent the morning poised with a red rose and pin, ready to pounce on every man who entered the building. As she attempted each conquest, she would point to the banner hanging on the wall above her head, a fabric rendition of the Southern Women’s Rejection League motto: “We serve that our states may live, and living, preserve the Union.”
Such a spectacle of women in the Capitol had never been seen before, and while some legislators were annoyed by the commotion, and others appeared befuddled, quite a few seemed to like it just fine. NATION WATCHES SOLONS; SOLONS WATCHING LADIES, was the headline in the day’s Memphis News-Scimitar, and the reporter noted that “the eyes of legislators are upon the ladies, because they are fearful in wrath, and because some of them really are fair to look upon.” The suffrage women who had canvassed the delegates in their home districts were assigned to watch over them in Nashville, and the diligent women tagged after their representatives at every turn. “The legislators are having the time of their gay young lives,” the News-Scimitar writer observed. “They like to be lobbied with and everything. There are types of feminine lobbyists with argument, looks, and style to suit the most fastidious solon from the rural districts of the commonwealth.”
At ten o’clock, the Republicans gathered for their caucus in a Hotel Hermitage meeting room. Herschel Candler, as state senate caucus chairman, presided, and he sat impassively as seven state party leaders took turns putting the ratification issue squarely to the members, with varying degrees of ardor and candor. Ben Hooper, who boasted of being the first southern governor to request his state legislature give women the vote, back in 1915, led off the series of presentations, followed by a string of East Tennessee party luminaries.
There were solid, practical reasons for Republicans to back ratification, they all emphasized. The party’s minority position in the legislature could be worked to advantage: if the seven state senate Republicans and twenty-seven party members in the house voted together as a bloc, they had the power to swing the vote in each chamber, wresting credit from the splintered Democrats and turning Tennessee into a Republican suffrage victory. Good for the fall elections. At this point, Harriet Upton, ambassador from the Republican National Committee, read aloud the telegram she had received from Harding the night before, his version of a pep talk:
“You may say for me to Republican members of the General Assembly of Tennessee, that it will be highly pleasing to have the Republicans of that state play their full and becoming part in consummating the constitutional grant of women suffrage.” Upton managed to read Harding’s overripe prose with a straight face. “It is no longer a question of policy; it is a matter of Republican contribution to a grant of suffrage to which our party is committed and for which our party is in the main responsible.”
Whatever their personal feelings or constitutional qualms, Hooper and the others told the Republicans, uniting for ratification was simply a smart move in an election year. It would put Alf Taylor in good position to defeat Roberts in November, too. When the ratification pitches were completed, Herschel Candler glanced around the room. “You have heard those in favor, is there anyone opposed?” he asked. No one responded. Candler himself made no arguments, but his colleagues knew very well where he stood.
Harry Burn sat toward the back, just listened, and did not speak. He admired Herschel Candler as an excellent lawyer and a judicious man, and Burn was reading law under Candler’s tutelage. A young, ambitious East Tennessee fellow could not find a better model or mentor than Herschel Candler, and Burn found the older man (Candler was just forty) to be unfailingly generous. Burn was probably impressed with the way Candler was handling this awkward meeting, too, using dry chill instead of expressive heat to shape the result.
The party leaders had come into the meeting aiming to nail down a unified Republican bloc to ratify, or at least a majority to pledge, but noting Candler’s stony silence and the distinct lack of enthusiasm in the room, they backed off. The latest poll of the legislature’s thirty-four Republicans counted thirteen supporting ratification, ten standing against it, and eleven still noncommittal, and few minds seemed to have been changed by this morning’s meeting. It was obvious that more work, more vigorous prodding, was needed. Rather than risk a negative result, the Republican leaders adjourned. They had failed.
Anita Pollitzer was crestfallen. This was just the scenario she and Sue White had feared; there were evidently forces strong enough to embolden the Antis in the Republican delegation. Without the Republicans, there was no hope for a coalition ratification majority. A telegram swiftly went out to Alice Paul in Washington: “Please come at once, we need you badly.”
While the Republicans were caucusing in the Hermitage, the Tennessee suffragists were attempting a unity conclave in the executive wing of the statehouse with Governor Roberts and his deputy Albert Williams. The governor laid out the situation: all the different ratification committees the Democratic suffragists had created were confusing to the legislators and allowed the men to shade their ratification stances depending upon which group they were answering. There needed to be a single, unified, Democratic Suff woman voice. Enough of tribal factionalism, the governor implored. Carrie Catt could only nod in exasperated agreement.
The rifts and rivalries she thought had been suppressed were back. Before the primary election, while the Roberts and anti-Roberts groups were still at loggerheads, she’d forced the heads of ea
ch ratification committee to sign a public letter forswearing any political partisanship and affirming their dedication to the single goal of ratification. Little good that had done.
Now that the primary was decided, and the Roberts camp victorious, the governor’s allies were keen to extract some revenge on the Luke Lea–affiliated Suffs who’d plotted to defeat him. They were unwilling to deal with Abby Milton or Catherine Kenny on ratification matters any longer. A more neutral, acceptable woman must be found, the Roberts allies insisted, ideally someone who hadn’t been tangled in the internecine suffrage feuds of the past or the fisticuffs of the primary. That someone, the meeting agreed, was Memphis schools superintendent Charl Williams. She was the newly anointed vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and an ally of Boss Crump. Williams was named director of a new Democratic women’s steering committee. Catt was glad for the gesture of unity, and she was told that Williams was an able administrator and conciliator, but Williams’s inexperience in high-level, high-stakes legislative maneuvering made Catt a bit nervous.
Governor Roberts was pleased by the spirit of cooperation, and he promised the women he’d do everything in his power to win ratification. He just didn’t tell them that Seth Walker had deserted them, double-crossed him, and made the whole ratification business much more difficult. It was up to Walker, damn him, to tell them that himself. Walker was no longer under Governor Roberts’s power.
* * *
Shortly past noon Andrew Todd rapped his gavel, calling the Tennessee Senate into extraordinary session. At the same time, on the south side of the Capitol, Seth Walker pounded his gavel, bringing the House of Representatives to order. The chaplains offered prayers, and the clerks called the roll. There were quite a few empty desks, names called with no response of “Present,” but a bare quorum was counted in each chamber, so the business of the day could begin.