The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXVIII: Weakened Waterfowl; or, The Duck Stays in the Picture

    The 20^th Amendment, much like the 16^th, is at the same time esoteric and of tremendous practical significance. The text, for one thing, is rather on the lengthy side. Divided into six sections, it establishes both the specific timetable by which the membership of the United States Congress and the President are to assume their respective offices as well as the procedures to be followed in the event that the office of President cannot be filled in the normal manner immediately following a national election. The first section accordingly affirms that, 

The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

The second section declares that, “The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January unless they shall by law appoint a different day.” Section three establishes that,

If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President-elect shall have died, the Vice President-elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President-elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President-elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice President-elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

The fourth section, meanwhile, asserts that,

The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.

The final two sections are more logistical than substantial, neither of which having much significance outside the moment of their drafting. One states that, “Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article [,]” while the other simply declares that the amendment proposal as a whole would expire in seven years if not ratified in the meantime.

    As aforementioned, this would seem to amount to little more than a quantity of bureaucratic minutiae. What does it matter, after all, when Congress meets after an election or when the president’s term of office specifically expires? So long as the events which need to take place do take place within a fairly reasonable timeframe, why should the Constitution need to regulate them as precisely as all that? The answer, it should come as no surprise, is that the alternative to such strict regulation proved itself in the past to be a source of conflict and consternation. Not so much conflict as to become the source of a national emergency, of course. The 20^th Amendment wasn’t ratified until 1933, almost one hundred and fifty years after the procedures which it sought to modify were originally adopted. But in that century and a half period, at infrequent but persistent intervals, situations arose which made it clearer and clearer to the American people that certain aspects of the administrative framework described by the text of the Constitution were frustratingly – perhaps even dangerously – flawed. 1933 was not witness to any especially distressing incident. The amendment was not ratified at that moment for any reason in particular, that is. The 20^th Amendment might therefore reasonably be thought of as a kind of administrative modification. It was not a particularly urgent thing – inasmuch as no one was likely to ride into office by campaigning on its passage – but it was very much a necessary thing, and one which has since ensured greater consistency and transparency on the part of the federal government and its various institutions and officers.

    What, then, was the problem that the 20^th Amendment was designed to solve? Well, first, it should be fairly evident in terms of both its structure and its content that the 20^th Amendment was intended to solve several problems at once. One was the sizeable gap that existed prior to its ratification between the date of a federal election and the swearing-in of the victorious officeholders. In accordance with the unamended text of Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, Congress is only required to meet once in every calendar year, specifically on the first Monday in December. This same section empowers Congress to set a different date if its members are so inclined, and the President also has the power to summon a special session at their leisure, but the Constitution is otherwise silent as the specific schedule which the federal government is entitled to keep. Notably, prior to 1933, there were also no regulations within the text of the Constitution mandating when the terms of either the President or the various members of Congress were supposed to either begin or end. When the Congress of the Confederation – that is, the version of Congress that existed under the auspices of the Articles of Confederation – met in September of 1788 to certify that the requisite number of states had voted to ratify the Constitution, its members decided to set March 4^th, 1789 as the date on which the new government would first meet and begin administering the country. Three years later, in 1792, Congress also set the date for all ensuing biennial federal elections – bearing in mind that the state of contemporary transportation and communication infrastructure made greater specificity practically untenable – at some point between the beginning of November and the first Wednesday in December.

    By the turn of the 19^th century, in consequence, the basic rhythm of the federal election cycle had more or less been set. As Congress had first met on March 4^th, 1789, and as every president since Washington – whose swearing-in was delayed by the inability of Congress to muster a quorum until April – had been inaugurated on that same day of the year, March 4^th accordingly became the single date upon which all federal terms both expired and began. Federal elections, meanwhile, were held every two years between November 1^st and December 1^st-7^th. The consequences of this timetable were many, the most persistent of which were twofold. First, it meant that every two years, following the scheduled national elections, a period of four months would elapse before the newly elected officials were sworn in. The result was an especially lengthy period during which either the membership of Congress, or the incumbent President, or both might conceivably be in the position of having just been defeated at the polls while still holding the reins of power. To put it mildly, the opportunities for mischief were many and profound. And as if this wasn’t troubling enough, the second quirk of this timetable, having to do with the manner in which it interacted with the aforementioned clause of Article I, Section 4, had the potential, in many ways, to create an even stranger set of outcomes.

    Recall that, according to the cited text of the Constitution, Congress is required to meet at least once in every calendar year on the first Monday in December. If Congress chose, prior to 1933, not to alter this date and decided – for whatever reason – not to meet more often than strictly required, the result was likely to be exceptionally problematic. If federal elections must happen at some point between November 1^st and December 7^th during the scheduled years, Congress must meet on the first Monday in December of every year, and new Congresses are only sworn in on the March 4^th following an election, then the incoming class of Representatives and Senators, having been voted in by the end of the first week of December but not required to take office until the middle of the following spring, might not actually meet officially until the following winter. Congress, as aforementioned, is empowered by the Constitution to set the date of its single mandated meeting, but in practice – until relatively recently – its members chose not to do so. Rather, they simply held to the schedule set by Article I, Section 4. That is, during off years they met in a long session in December while during elections years, in the same month, they held a comparatively brief “lame-duck” session. Any newly elected class of legislators, meanwhile – though due to take office on March 4^th – would not be required to convene – and so, in most cases, simply would not convene – until the proceeding December, over a year after they were elected.

    Each of these outcomes brings with them their own set of complications. If Congress, during an election year, chose to meet only on the one occasion mandated by the text of the Constitution, the result would necessarily have been a tremendous amount of wasted time during which, for all practical purposes, the United States would be without a functioning legislature. The lame-duck session would have met in December, transacted its business – which may well have included approving legislation to which its members knew full well their successors would object – and then adjourned for the year. The members of the incoming Congress would technically have taken their seats the following March, but they would not have been required to actually begin their work until December of that same year. This would seem to amount to a full twelve months during which essentially nothing was accomplished. Worse yet for the incoming legislators, it was a full year during which whatever laws their potentially bitter and vindictive predecessors approved would be permitted to stand. If the new Congress was required to meet in March, say, on the same day that its term began, little enough time might have passed for certain undesirable initiatives to be unwound before taking effect. But one would have difficulty imagining any manner of policy or law which, a full year after its implementation, would be particularly easy to repeal or replace. And yet, for whatever reason, this is exactly the dilemma which most every incoming Congress faced before the ratification of the 20^th Amendment in 1933.

    The fact that, also during an election year, the outgoing Congress and the incumbent President were permitted to remain in office for four months before their terms expired likewise had the potential to greatly complicate the transition from one partisan administration to the next. Consider, by way of example, the final months of the presidency of the unfortunate James Buchanan (1791-1868). While, pursuant to the results of the Election of 1860, more voters signaled their support for the policies of the Republican Party and its chosen standard-bearer, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), than the candidate put forward and duly supported by the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, John Cabell Breckinridge (1821-1875) – to the tune of over one million votes – lame-duck president Buchanan nevertheless persisted in undermining the position of the victorious Lincoln by refusing to declare that the United States was prepared to prevent the secession of any slave state by way of military force. Lincoln and his fellow Republicans had come to the conclusion that the disintegration of the union could not be permitted relatively soon after the first several Southern states began declaring their independence in December of 1860, but because Buchanan remained in office, they were unable to act on this conviction.

    Both men were of the opinion, it bears noting, that secession was illegal. But whereas Lincoln was inclined to mobilize federal military assets in order to put a stop to such illegality, Buchanan famously declared that he believed he had no moral or legal right to do so. Secession may well have been illegal, he stated accordingly in his last address to Congress on December 10^th, 1860, but it would also have been illegal for the federal government to functionally declare war on any of the states. And in any case, it was worth remembering that the cause of the conflict itself was the, “Intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States [.]” Unless Congress was thus prepared to, “Repeal their unconstitutional and obnoxious enactments [...] the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union.” Suffice it to say, these pronouncements on the part of an outgoing president did not help to alleviate the mounting crisis in the least. Not only were the various Northern states disinclined to countenance rebellion in the face of what they considered to be their perfectly reasonable opposition to the continued expansion of slavery, but the various Southern states did not take kindly to being told that their assertion of sovereignty represented an illegal act. In the ensuing months, as Buchanan continued to gesture vaguely towards peace while Lincoln and the Republicans sat powerless in the wings, the seceding Southern states were able to consolidate their position, seize federal assets, procure weapons, and make ready for war.

    A lame-duck Congress could make itself the source of just as much mischief as a lame-duck president, of course. Consider, by way of example, the implication of such a lengthy period in office following an election in the context of a deadlocked presidential ballot. According to the terms of Article II, Section 1, the absence of a majority in the Electoral College on the part of one of the presidential candidates following an election would automatically trigger a contingent vote in the House of Representatives. The members of the same would then proceed to cast their votes, “The Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice.” At the present moment – that is to say, as of the middle of spring in 2022 – the Representatives who are entitled to take part in this contingent ballot are those who would have been chosen in the most recent election. Having been elected in November, they would have been sworn in already by the time it fell to them to help count the ballots of the Electoral College in early January and then participate, if necessary, in a tie-breaking election. Prior to 1933, however, it was the outgoing Congress that held this responsibility. Having been elected two years prior and with their terms set to lapse on March 4^th, these lame-duck Representatives were accordingly “on deck” to settle an Electoral College tie in the event that one emerged.

    Consider, for a moment, what this would mean in practice. Rather than allow the Representatives just chosen by the people to decide which of the presidential candidates, also just chosen by the people, should emerge victorious, the Constitution used to allow – prior to 1933 – the Representatives chosen two years prior to determine which of the selfsame nominees should take possession of the highest office in the land. If the purpose of democracy in the context of the American republic is to allow for a frequent resort to the people so that their lawmakers and their administrative officers reflect their desires and their biases as accurately as possible, this procedure would seem to be nothing short of a democratic mockery. The President, more than any other office in the whole of the federal government, is supposed to represent the American people in a very direct and immediate fashion. Not only do they possess a truly national mandate, but their election is highly contingent – if not absolutely contingent – on the direct and specific support of a majority of the American people. Allowing the House of Representatives to insert themselves into this relationship in the event of a tie in the Electoral College is a far from ideal solution to what history had since shown to be a substantially uncommon occurrence. But it is one which, if handled properly, would seem at the very least to be tolerable. The Electoral College already represents a layer of abstraction – arbitrary though it may be – between the American people and their chosen candidate for president, to the point that substituting another institution – in this case the House of Representatives – to perform essentially the same task would not seem to signify a wholesale abandonment of essential principles.

    Allowing the outgoing House to perform this essential task, by contrast, would seem to signify just such a species of perversion. Purposeless though the Electoral College might be – and indeed it is – its deficiencies are more mathematical than moral. As law and practice have made abundantly clear, delegates chosen to sit in this body are not in the least bit entitled to act contrary to the stated desires of those who elected them. What this means, in practice, is that Electors almost always vote according to the will of the people that they were chosen to represent. If they were elected as a Democrat, they cast their ballot for the Democratic candidate. And if they were elected as a Republican, they cast their ballot for the Republican candidate. It is, broadly speaking, a 1:1 relationship, and one which does reflect – if not always accurately – the will of the American people at the present moment in time. Allowing the outgoing House of Representatives to take on this same responsibility naturally dispenses with any such relationship between popular will and success in public office in favor of allowing resentment and petty animus be the order of the day.

    This is because the outgoing House of Representatives cannot ever claim to represent the American people at the present moment in time. What they represent has since ceased to exist. In two years, people have died, and moved, and come of age, and undergone any number of life-changing experiences, and the nature of each Representatives’ constituencies have accordingly been altered from what they were. Indeed, depending on the timing – in the event of a federal census and a round of redistricting – the districts they were chosen to represent might have entirely ceased to exist. What can they claim to speak for, then, these lame-duck lawmakers, other than the past? Other than a people who no longer exist? This is why House elections are held every two years, is it not? So that the House can speak for their constituents with some degree of accuracy? So that the House as a whole can accurately reflect the will of the American people as near to the present moment as possible? But of course, how often can the House really be expected to take over the task of electing a president? How likely is it, in point of fact, that the Electoral College will produce a deadlock? Is it really a problem, in short, if the Representatives of yesterday maintain the theoretical ability to choose the president of tomorrow? Well, yes, in fact, it is. History has shown us nothing less.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXVII: “Vote Suffrage and Don’t Keep Them in Doubt”

    Never the kind of people to let the grass grow under their feet, Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul both sprang into action mobilizing members of their respective organizations – the NAWSA and the NWP – as soon as news reached them that the Senate had voted to approve the women’s suffrage amendment in June of 1919. The first handful of states to acquiesce accordingly did so with remarkable swiftness, in part because their legislatures were at that moment already in session. Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example – none of which, incidentally, permitted women full access to the ballot – all certified their ratification on June 10^th, less than a week after the final vote in the Senate. This first cluster was then followed by a whole slew of states over the summer, with September 30^th marking Utah’s ratification as the seventeenth in total. A pause of several months then ensued, after which California (November 1^st), Maine (November 5^th), North Dakota (December 1^st), South Dakota (December 4^th), and Colorado (December 15^th) submitted their own ratifications. As the new year dawned, however, the arithmetic began to take on a rather alarming cast. Between June 1919 and January 1920, only three Southern states – Texas, Arkansas, and Kentucky – had voted to ratify the amendment while two more – Alabama and Georgia – had actually voted to reject it. Unless more Southern legislators could be swayed to the cause of suffrage, the amendment might have ended up indefinitely stalled, if not decisively defeated.

    As the aforementioned lobbying efforts continued, special legislative sessions were called, and further ratifications were secured, it became steadily clearer where the final battle would be waged. The Governor of Louisiana, Ruffin G. Pleasant (1871-1937), had apparently organized an anti-ratification alliance among his fellow Southerners, a tactic which seemed to bear fruit when Maryland also voted the measure down on February 24^th. While more affirmative votes followed, every Southern state yet to consider the issue became a source of considerable anxiety for the suffrage amendment’s backers. Oklahoma voted in favor on February 23^rd, followed by Republican-dominated West Virginia on March 10^th. The affirmative vote of the State of Washington on March 22^nd, 1920 then brought the total up to thirty-five. Only one more state was required to ratify the amendment for it to become a part of the Constitution. As spring gave way to summer, the fateful answer as to which state it would be finally presented itself. All the states in which women already possessed the right to vote had made their voices heard. Delaware had voted to reject the proposal while Connecticut and Vermont as yet remained uncertain. That left only Southern states, and only one of them seemed a reasonable prospect. After decades of work on the part of countless women and an intense year of lobbying by the activists of the NAWSA and the NWS, it had all come down to Tennessee.

    As early as July of 1919, many activists on both sides of the suffrage issue quite rightly concluded that the Volunteer State would prove to be a particularly intense battleground in the fight over the 19^th Amendment. Compared to Southern states like Texas or Georgia, both of which had exclusively elected Democratic governors since the end of Reconstruction, the voters of Tennessee did still occasionally elevate a Republican to the office of chief executive, having done so most recently in 1911. And while the sitting governor, Albert H. Roberts (1868-1946) was indeed a Democrat, he was also outwardly sympathetic to the prospect of women’s suffrage. He would have no direct part to play in the ratification debate, of course, his only responsibility being to sign the resulting ordinance in the event of a positive result. But the fact that the voters in Tennessee had most recently chosen a relatively progressive governor boded well. Not only that, but Tennessee was also home to some of the contemporary women’s rights movement’s most diligent and successful activists. Abby Crawford Milton (1881-1991), for example, was a trained lawyer who spent the earlier part of the century travelling back and forth across the length of the state delivering speeches and organizing local suffrage associations in countless rural communities. Sue Shelton White (1887-1943), meanwhile, served as editor of The Suffragist - being the Congressional Union’s weekly publication – took her turn on Pennsylvania Avenue as one of the Silent Sentinels, and then toured the country upon her release from jail as part of the railway-bound mobile protest known popularly as the “Prison Special.” And then, of course, there was Anne Dallas Dudley (1876-1955), founder of the Nashville Equal Suffrage League, President of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, and Vice-President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association whose lobbying efforts, circa 1919, had resulted in the Tennessee General Assembly’s passage of a bill allowing women to vote in both municipal and presidential elections.

    By the time Governor Roberts called a special session of the Tennessee legislature on August 9^th, 1920, the pro-suffrage camp had accordingly already established itself in the area surrounding the state capitol in Nashville. Over the course of the next nine days, the state house and the state senate debated rigorously – and sometimes rancorously – the pros and cons of the female franchise, with pro-suffrage lobbyists attempting to keep the conversation focused on the moral dimension of continuing to deny American women the vote while anti-suffrage activists tried to keep the question of race at front and center. The arguments of this latter faction – let by lecturer Josephine Pearson (1868-1944) and Anne Ector Pleasant (1878-1934), the former First Lady of Louisiana – were particularly pernicious, mainly as they sought to invoke fears of racial equality. With the passage of a women’s suffrage amendment, the “antis” asserted, the federal government would be empowered to more closely monitor the voting practices of the states so as to ensure their proper compliance. And doubtless, at the same time that federal authorities sought to protect and promote the female franchise, they would also seek to nullify any remaining barriers to Black participation in electoral politics. Indeed, theses selfsame activists firmly avowed, the female franchise amendment wasn’t designed, first and foremost, to permit women to vote at all. Rather, it was nothing more than a suitably disguised means of once more allowing federal power to interfere in the internal affairs of the various states.

    Fortunately for American women, these arguments fell short of their intended mark. One day after first convening on August 12^th to discuss the prospects of the women’s suffrage amendment, the Tennessee State Senate voted 24-5 to approve its ratification. By the time the State House took up the same question on August 18^th, lobbying efforts on both sides had accordingly intensified and the amendment’s opponents began to panic. House Speak Seth Walker attempted to table the relevant resolution no less than twice, failing both times by a split margin of 48-48. Then, when the amendment was then put to a vote for a third time, one of the Representatives unexpectedly changed his position. The man in question, Republican Harry T. Burn (1895-1977), had initially intended to vote in favor of the amendment, only changing his mind when it was made clear to him the degree to which his constituents were opposed to the prospect of women’s suffrage. As luck would have it, however, on that fateful August 18^th, Burn had received a letter from his beloved mother urging him to do otherwise. A college-educated teacher, Febb Ensminger Burn (1873-1945) – arguably one of the great unsung political actors in the history of the United States – instructed her son with a mixture of firmness and good humor to,

Vote for Suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt […] I’ve been watching to see how you stood but have not seen anything yet [...] Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. ‘Thomas Catt’ with her "Rats." Is she the one that put rat in ratification, Ha!

Having evidently determined, after initially holding firm to his earlier conviction, to follow his mother’s advice after all, Burn voted, in the third instance, in favor of ratification. By a margin of 50-49, the resolution was accordingly approved.

    In the short term, at least, the result was pandemonium. Speaker Walker, in desperation, called for a motion to reconsider, though he knew full well that the numbers were not on his side. Then, in the ensuing confusion, thirty-seven delegates fled the House chamber and boarded a train for nearby Decatur, Alabama, their intention being to prevent a quorum and thus stall the amendment’s final certification. As luck would have it, however, the plot ultimately failed. Too few House members had decided to skip town. When a quorum call was issued, the response came back in the affirmative. There were, in fact, enough lawmakers present for the motion to reconsider to proceed. In celebration, as the votes were tallied, the various suffrage activists who were present in the chamber took up the seats of the still-absent members. When the last vote was counted, and the margin of 50-49 reaffirmed, a bell was rung and a cheer went up. American women had just won the right to vote across the whole of the country. Governor Roberts thereafter signed the certificate of ratification and sent in on to the office of Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby (1869-1950), who received it on August 26^th. That same day, pursuant to Tennessee’s status as the thirty-sixth and final state needed to vote in favor of ratification, Colby then formally proclaimed that the women’s suffrage amendment – thereafter to be known as the 19^th Amendment – had become a part of the United States Constitution.

    That this final victory had been achieved as a result of almost a century of effort on the part of American women should in no way detract from its overall significance. On the contrary, the fact that, over the course of nearly one hundred years, countless women worked tirelessly to achieve something which the great majority of them did not live long enough to witness would seem to make the eventual ratification of the 19^th Amendment all the more impressive. Women who had no legal independence, no political power, and often very little in the way of personal resources nonetheless poured their passion and their energy into seeking after something which they knew to be their right but which they had essentially no means to simply take. Against thousands of years of ingrained patriarchal attitudes and further centuries on top of that of institutional barriers, they held firm, and they organized, and they lobbied. This, in many ways, is what makes the story of the 19^th Amendment such an impressive one. Unlike the Reconstruction Amendments – which were very much the product of a bloody and destructive war that left many Americans feeling as though slavery needed to be abolished and its supporters needed to be punished – the 19^th Amendment was the result of nothing more and nothing less than an extremely lengthy and successful campaign of personal and political persuasion. It was not ratified in response to some catastrophic internal conflict whose horrific consequences prompted uncommonly swift and decisive action, but rather as a result of the patient and persistent efforts of women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Alive Paul. They, and many others like them, convinced their fellow Americans that recognizing the rightful existence of the female franchise was the only way that the United States could hope to live up to its own self-proclaimed values of liberty, equality, and justice. And while, over the course of the many decades of this struggle, some amount of cooperation from institutional sources was both necessary and forthcoming, it nevertheless cannot be denied that the 19^th Amendment was first and foremost the product of popular priorities backed by popular agitation.

    This is, of course, perfectly in keeping with the premise that initially prompted the present line of discussion. That is – if one can remember so far back – that the ratification of the 17^th Amendment, by shifting responsibility for the election of United States Senators away from the legislatures of the various states and into the hands of the voters living therein, brought about a concomitant change in the nature and quality of the constitutional amendments adopted thereafter. The history of the 18^th Amendment demonstrates this well enough. As of 1917, it was true, it made a certain amount of political sense for a majority in both houses of Congress to support a constitutional amendment banning the sale of alcohol. Not only did both of the dominant political parties possess prominent “dry” factions – the members of which would have loved nothing more than to be able to publicly support a policy that was guaranteed to play well with their constituents – but the shift in national production priorities brought on by America’s recent entry into WWI would undeniably have benefitted from the closing off of the alcohol market to domestic grain producers. That being said, the very existence of these “dry” factions within the dominant political parties of the era had less to do with political expediency than the grassroots efforts of many thousands of concerned individuals. Were it not for decades of temperance activism on the parts of countless men and women across the whole of the United States and across the length of the 19^th century, there would surely not have been any impetus on the part of the membership of Congress to pursue a constitutional amendment banning alcohol sales at the beginning of the 20^th century.

    The story of the 19^th Amendment, broadly speaking, follows this same basic pattern. While it was very much the case that when President Wilson finally came out in favor of the same it was with the intention of rallying support for his fellow Democrats and helping them maintain control of Congress, the fact that this appeared to be a viable tactic at all was very much owing to the work of several generations of women’s suffrage activists. According to Wilson’s political calculus, the fifteen states that then recognized the right of women to vote were a potential source of partisan support in the event that he himself came out in favor of a national suffrage amendment. By establishing the proposition that a vote for the Democrats would in turn be a vote in favor of extending the female franchise nationwide, the President aimed for his party to sweep those states and thus reaffirm its control of Congress. But had it not been for the work of thousands of women working in those same states across multiple decades – from Anna Elizabeth Dickinson in Wyoming in the late 1860s to Jennette Rankin in Montana in 1914 – there would not have been this untapped constituency upon with Wilson could potentially draw. Women did not force Congress to consider an amendment to the Constitution recognizing their right to the ballot in 1919, nor did they force the sitting president to recommend the same. But what they did do, little by little over many decades, was make it harder and harder for the federal government to persist in ignoring the issue of women’s suffrage. One rally at a time, one state at a time, these female crusaders picked and won their battles, persuading, convincing, cajoling, and lobbying until it no longer became possible for local powerbrokers to deny that women were indeed entitled to cast a ballot on the same basis as any man. And then, when the right moment came, and having built up a critical mass of popular support, these same crusaders pushed for that final victory that had been their goal from the very start. American women, in essence, established the conditions for their own victory. They made the 19^th Amendment a possibility, and then they made it a reality.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXVI: “Are We Alone to Refuse to Learn the Lesson?”

    As the 1910s wore one, the slow trickle of support for women’s suffrage at the state level that had characterized the years of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in the United States gradually took on the aspect of something more like a deluge. In Arizona in 1912 – the same year that the Copper State joined the union – decades of organization and lobbying efforts by first the NWSA and then the NAWSA finally paid off in the form of a ballot initiative seeking to embed women’s suffrage in the state’s newly-minted constitution. Initially, NAWSA activists, led by Laura Gregg Cannon (1869-1945), attempted to convince the assembled delegates at the Arizona Constitutional Convention in October of 1910 to include female suffrage in the prospective state’s foundational charter, but this effort was ultimately shot down by convention president George W. P. Hunt (1859-1934) for fear that Congress would refuse to admit any state that allowed women to vote. Two years later, however, with statehood having been achieved and Hunt now serving in the office of governor, the time seemed ripe for another pro-suffrage campaign. A first attempt to make use of the regular legislative process failed – if only just – for lack of institutional support. But the next effort, led by longtime activist and Arizona resident Frances Munds (1866-1948), resulted in a successful drive for signatures over the scorching summer of 1912 and the placement of a suffrage referendum on the ballot that coming November. The NAWSA sent personnel and funds to help with the resulting publicity work, which included speeches, rallies, leaflets, buttons, and endorsements on the part of local labor unions and presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). And the final result, on November 5^th, was a victory for the supporters of women’s suffrage, 13,442 to 6,202.

    That same year in Kansas – site of the AERA’s disastrous lobbying campaign of 1867 – the third attempt by local and out-of-state activists to see the Sunflower State grant women the right to vote was also met with success. Though a statewide referendum to that effect had just been held and defeated as recently as 1894, 1912 nevertheless witnessed another tremendous rallying of energy and resources, culminating ultimately in a pro-suffrage resolution being introduced by state judge Granville Pearl Aikman (1858-1923) during the Republican State Convention, the resulting affirmation by the assembled delegates of that resolution, and the consequent formation of an alliance between pro-suffrage activists and the state’s dominant political party. The following year, in the far-flung Alaska Territory – formed out of the unorganized Alaska District only in August of 1912 – the efforts of the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to advocate for women’s suffrage as an aid to the banning of liquor sales likewise resulted in a victory for the cause of reform. Led in large part by local social crusader Cornelia Templeton Hatcher (1867-1953), Alaskan women drew up petitions and solicited signatures, lobbied and gained the support of the Western Federation of Miners and the Daily Alaska Dispatch, and succeeded in placing the suffrage issue at the top of the territorial legislature’s agenda at its first ever meeting in January of 1913. Pursuant to a few rounds of voting and the signature of the territorial governor, a bill enfranchising Alaskan women accordingly became law on March 21^st, 1913.

    The wave of change continued into 1914, with Nevada and Montana both granting women the right to vote that year. In the former state, building upon decades of work by the likes of Laura de Force Gordon (1838-1907) and Emily Pitts Stevens (1844-1906), the Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage League and the NAWSA, the Nevada Equal Franchise Society – formed in 1911 – distributed tens of thousands of pro-suffrage pamphlets, solicited the support of labor unions and local political organizations, and in 1913 secured the placement of a female suffrage referendum on the electoral calendar for the following November. In the leadup to the resulting vote, NEFS president Anne Henrietta Martin (1875-1951) engaged in a marathon cross-state lobbying tour, travelling three thousand miles to visit ranchers and silver miners for the purpose of taking their political temperature and persuading them to support women’s suffrage. These efforts – which apparently enamored Martin to many of the state’s hard-scrabble inhabitants – along with assistance and funding provided by the NAWSA, culminated in a victory on November 3^rd by a margin of 10,936 to 7,257. At that same time – indeed, on the same day – the voters of Montana likewise backed a constitutional amendment enacting women’s suffrage. In the case of the Treasure State, much of the relevant effort was undertaken by Jeanette Rankin (1880-1973) and Maggie Smith Hathaway (1867-1955), both of whom later become among that selfsame jurisdiction’s first female public officials. Rankin, in her capacity as president of the Montana Women’s Suffrage Association and national field secretary of the NAWSA, gave speeches before the state legislature – the first ever woman to do so – organized a pro-suffrage presentation for the 1914 Montana State Fair, led a massive pro-suffrage parade through downtown Helena, and ensured that the relevant ballots, once cast, were counted under the supervision of NAWSA-back lawyers. Hathaway, meanwhile, undertook a whirlwind tour of the state in an effort to drum up grassroots support, besting Anne Martin’s total distance tally by over fifteen hundred miles. Ultimately, when the votes were tallied, women’s suffrage once again triumphed by a margin of 41,302 to 37,588.

    By 1917, with the United States having just entered WWI, a great deal had changed for the cause of women’s suffrage since the beginning of the century. In 1900, only four states – Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho – recognized the right of women citizens to vote. Seventeen years later, that number had more than doubled to ten states – with the additions of Washington, California, Kansas, Arizona, Nevada, and Montana – and one territory – Alaska – while in the intervening years a number of significant firsts had taken place. On August 27^th, 1908, the first suffrage march in the history of the United States was held in Oakland California. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party became the first national party in American history to endorse women’s suffrage as part of its official platform. In 1913, former NAWSA activist and leader of the breakaway Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage Alice Paul (1885-1977) organized the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington D.C. to coincide with the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), resulting in between five thousand and ten thousand women proceeding down Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3^rd amidst local opposition and famously lackluster police protection. And in 1916, Jeanette Rankin was elected by the people of Montana as the nation’s first female member of the House of Representatives. In spite of all of this pro-suffrage activity, however, the prospects for a federal constitutional amendment remained markedly dim. The proposal first introduced in 1879 by California Senator Augustus A. Sargent was still a going concerned – having been reintroduced at some point during every subsequent session of Congress – but hardly anyone was inclined to take it seriously any longer. The women’s rights movement had thus far been making its most significant strides in the states, and doubtless many observers had come to assume that this was the only viable path forward. As is so often the case, however, the pressures of war as felt on the homefront would soon change what seemed possible.

    The most immediate shift – and doubtless the most visible as well – was the necessary entry of American women into new realms of public life. With many thousands of men being mobilized to fight on the battlefronts of Western Europe, a domestic labor shortage was in the offing unless as many women stepped up to take their place in vital industries. In consequence – and backed by federal recruitment drives – American women were subsequently hired in unprecedented numbers to work in munitions factories and vehicle plants and even began replacing absent men as municipal transportation conductors, postal workers, police officers, firefighters, and office clerks. And at the same time, in keeping with the needs of the war effort directly, women volunteered in droves for public service positions as ambulance drivers, nurses, and relief workers. From the perspective of the NAWSA, these developments represented an unexpected boon. Under the continued leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, the organization not only decided to formally support the American war effort – a position which did not sit well with its members who were pacifists – but it held up the resulting explosion of female employment as validation of its stated position. Clearly, Catt took to asserting, regardless of what any of the opponents of female suffrage had ever said to the contrary, American women were entirely sensible of the obligations inherent to the concept of citizenship and entirely willing and able to discharge them when called upon. Why, then, if women were willing to make sacrifices on behalf of their country, should that same country have continued to refuse them the rewards that they were due?

    Alice Paul, whose Congressional Union had since reformed itself into the even more militant National Women’s Party, posed essentially the same question, but more bluntly. If, as the propaganda materials being published by the federal government insisted, the present war was being fought to stave of the threat represented by autocratic Germany and make the world safe for democracy and freedom, why was that same government insistent on restricting the freedom of American women at home? Why was it so important that France should be free if American women weren’t also going to be extended the same privilege? Paul and the NWP had already helped organize what came to be known as the “Silent Sentinel” protests at the beginning of 1917 – during which, for a period of 2 ½ years, some two thousand women took turns standing vigil outside the White House grounds while holding pro-suffrage signs and banners – and the rapid expansion of the female workforce only seemed to make clearer the necessity of these kinds of public campaigns. In April of 1917, at around the same time that Congress formally declared war on the German Empire, the female suffrage amendment was introduced once again. Then, on July 4^th, 1917 – in a kind of grim parody of a celebration – police arrested over one hundred and sixty of the NWP protestors, sending most of them to a prison in nearby Lorton, Virginia. Alice Paul was among them, and she subsequently staged a hunger strike that resulted in physical abuse and force-feeding. Regardless of this setback, the White House protest continued, and over the course of the next year and a half, matters slowly came to a head.

    1918, as it turned out, was a challenging year for the administration of Woodrow Wilson. His own continuation in office had been secured in the hard-fought and hard-won Election of 1916, it was true, but the mid-term elections that were set to follow looked to present their own set of challenges. The Democrats had only just maintained their control over the House in 1916 by forging an ad-hoc alliance with what remained of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and it seemed likely – baring some careful politicking by Wilson – that the Republicans would emerge victorious following the next scheduled national poll. With New York, Oklahoma, and South Dakota having all granted their female inhabitants the right to vote at various points over the course of 1917, the number of states in which women’s suffrage was now the law of the land had accordingly risen to a full fifteen. Bearing this fact in mind – and having doubtless been at least mildly influenced by the presence of female protestors outside his place of resident since the previous January – President Wilson accordingly began considering throwing his support behind what had since become known – after its now-departed chief supporter – as the Anthony Amendment at some point in the early weeks of 1918. As luck would have it, at around that same time, the aforementioned amendment proposal was approved in the House by a single vote. Conscious of the support which his party might win in the aforementioned states if it suddenly threw its weight behind a constitutional amendment guaranteeing female suffrage, Wilson accordingly took the unprecedented step of requesting the opportunity to address the Senate.

    The subsequent oration, delivered on September 30^th, 1918, demonstrated not only the political canniness of Woodrow Wilson but also the extent to which the rhetoric of organizations like the NAWSA and the NWP had exerted exactly the desired effect. “Through many, many channels,” the President began by observing,

I have been made aware what the plain, struggling, workaday folk are thinking upon whom the chief terror and suffering of this tragic war falls […] they think, in their logical simplicity, that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them. If we reject measures like this, in ignorance or defiance of what a new age has brought forth, of what they have seen but we have not, they will cease to believe in us; they will cease to follow or to trust us. They have seen their own governments accept this interpretation of democracy—seen old governments like that of Great Britain, which did not profess to be democratic, promise readily and as of course this justice to women, though they had long before refused it, the strange revelations of this war having made many things new and plain, to governments as well as to peoples.

Are we alone to refuse to learn the lesson? Are we alone to ask and take the utmost that our women can give—service and sacrifice of every kind—and still say we do not see what title that gives them to stand by our sides in the guidance of the affairs of their nation and ours? We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?

Thus phrased by Wilson – and thus influenced, no doubt, by the assertions of women like Alice Paul – the decision of whether to grant women suffrage on a nation-wide basis ceased to be question of intellectual or emotional suitability and instead became one of moral and civilizational rectitude. If nations which did not come anywhere near to valuing the concept of liberty as much as the United States claimed to nonetheless freely granted their female citizens the right to vote – as Great Britain indeed had done in February of 1918 – what did that say about the purported nobility of the American experiment in self-government? Why, indeed, should the American people have continued to trust a government which relied on the sacrifices of American women while still refusing them this fundamental privilege?

    As Wilson continued to speak, it likewise became clear that he had also heard and come to agree with the arguments put forward by the likes of Carries Chapman Catt. Catt, as aforementioned, had taken to drawing particular attention to the efforts which American women had been exerting on behalf of the war effort and to asking, in turn, why they were still being denied the vote. In his speech to the Senate in September of 1918, the President seemed to grab hold of this theme and run with it, positioning the female franchise as not only a just reward for valuable work done but a way to strengthen the American war effort as a whole. “The women of America [,]” he said,

Are too noble and too intelligent and too devoted to be slackers whether you give or withhold this thing that is mere justice; but I know the magic it will work in their thoughts and spirits if you give it them. I propose it as I would propose to admit soldiers to the suffrage, the men fighting in the field for our liberties and the liberties of the world, were they excluded. The tasks of the women lie at the very heart of the war, and I know how much stronger that heart will beat if you do this just thing and show our women that you trust them as much as you in fact and of necessity depend upon them.

    Evidently – and whether he would admit to it or not – the rhetoric then being deployed by several different segments of the contemporary women’s rights movement had managed to penetrate even the notoriously disciplined mind of one of the most cerebral chief executives that the American republic has ever seen. Here was Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton University history professor and a man whose intellect was a common source of awe and respect, saying to the Senate what Alice Paul or Carrie Chapmen Catt would almost certainly have said in his place. This is no slight to Wilson; his eloquence and insight are quite beyond reproach. But it would seem a bridge too far to make the claim that his feelings on women’s suffrage only happened to coincide exactly with those of its principal contemporary advocates. Indeed, it seems more likely that Catt and Paul had both hit their mark, and that the President of the United States had been successfully persuaded to offer his full-throated support to the realization of the female franchise.

    Wilson’s support for the measure, it must be said, did not necessarily speed the proposed amendment through Congress and on to a rapid ratification in the states. Between January of 1918 and the date of the President’s speech, the House and the Senate had already voted several times on the proposal, and they would do so again several more times before they were entirely finished. Wilson’s fellow Southern Democrats were the most persistent source of obstruction. This was notwithstanding the efforts of certain NAWSA activists, like Laura Clay (1849-1941), who had tried to woo Southern statesmen earlier in the century by arguing that the votes of white women could be counted on to counterbalance the political power of the South’s Black community. Ultimately, the tide began to shift in earnest only after the Election of 1918 robbed the Democratic Party of its majority in the Senate and placed the Republicans in control. The GOP had long been the more sympathetic of the two to the basic principle of women’s suffrage and the recent emergence and reabsorption – between 1912 and 1918 – of the Roosevelt-led Progressive Party served only to deepen this supportive attitude. The proposed amendment was still not home free, of course, simply for the 66^th Congress having assembled. There was still the matter of a potential Democratic filibuster. A filibuster which, to surely no one’s surprise, the Democrats absolutely attempted when Congress was called into a special session in the late spring of 1919. Fortunately, regardless of the efforts of men like Kentucky Senator J.C. Beckham (1869-1940) and South Carolina Senator Ellison D. Smith (1864-1944) – the latter of whom infamously declared of the women’s suffrage amendment that, “Here is exactly the identical same amendment applied to the other half of the Negro race. The southern man who votes for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment votes to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment” – this, too, was overcome. In the final vote, held on June 4^th, 1919, the Senate backed the proposal by a margin of 56-25. Now, as ever, it was up to the states.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXV: Marching as to War

    At the same time that the National Woman Suffrage Association – led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony – continued to push for bold, decisive action at the federal level – a strategy which undeniably laid the groundwork for the eventual passage of the 19^th Amendment – the American Woman Suffrage Association, under Lucy Stone, worked just as actively in the states to notch out one piecemeal victory after another. In the long run, this approach found its greatest success in the largely unsettled and often volatile West, in large part because the region’s malleable political climate. In places like Washington, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana – all of which, as of the late 1860s, were territories rather than states – executive power was vested in governors appointed by the sitting President of the United States while the members of the local legislature were popularly elected. In many cases, this resulted in a good deal of friction, particularly when the lawmakers and the aforementioned governor were each of them members of rival political parties. Working in combination with this volatile state of affairs was the understandably tense socio-political mood that prevailed for most of the period immediately following the Civil War – during which many Democrats sought to limit the effectiveness of the various Reconstruction Amendments while most Republicans sought to solidify their dominant electoral position – and the practical concerns of frontier residents eager to see their meager settlements grow and thrive. Within this specific context, the cause of women’s suffrage was able to find allies and achieve successes which would have been possible nowhere else in the contemporary United States.

    In the Wyoming Territory, for example – which had been sectioned off from the existing Dakota Territory only in 1868 – conflict between the Republican governor appointed by the Grant Administration, one John Allen Campbell (1835-1880), and the Democratic majority in the territorial legislature produced exactly this kind of outcome. Local lawmakers, on the one hand, were willing to embrace just about any policy initiative that would serve to increase the white settler population of the territory, leading them ultimately to the proposition of female suffrage. If women could be drawn to the Wyoming Territory on the promise of being able to vote in local elections, they reasoned, this would not only help alleviate the significant gender imbalance that was presently threatening to choke off local population growth, but it would also create an entire voting block – i.e., women – whose gratitude to the Democratic Party would more than likely translate itself into consistent electoral support. And on the other hand, in the face of a Republican governor who was similarly intent on enforcing the various provisions of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments as a means of encouraging Black settlement in the territory and solidifying Republican Party control, Democratic legislators also hoped to embarrass Campbell by forcing this prominent member of the nation’s dominant “progressive” party to veto the enfranchisement of Wyoming women. This latter outcome would have fewer long-term benefits, to be sure, but the notion of being able to publicly “out-moralize” the territory’s chief executive was not entirely without value. In the end, however, Campbell declined to take the bait. The women’s suffrage bill was approved by the territorial legislature by a margin of seven votes to four in early December of 1869. Several days later, after presumably thinking the matter over, Governor Campbell signed it into law. The women of the Wyoming Territory thereby became the first in the United States to gain the right to vote since New Jersey’s brief experiment with the practice ended in 1807.

    At around this same time in neighboring Utah, a similar mix of circumstances produced a very similar outcome. Formed in 1850 in response to the statehood petitions of Latter-Day Saint settlers in the Great Basis region of the American Southwest, Utah was principally inhabited by these same religious dissenters, primarily Democratic in its local political character, and administered by a Republican chief executive appointed by the Grant Administration. Unlike in Wyoming, however, where the primary practical concern of local lawmakers seemed to be remedying the regional gender imbalance as a way of increasing the territorial population, the Latter-Day Saints who functionally controlled the levers of power in Utah were instead intent on addressing what might fairly be characterized as a lingering issue with their sect’s public image. Polygamy, at that time, was a fairly common practice among adherents to the Latter-Day Saints movement, but one which persistently aroused the horror of contemporary middle-class America. Not only had the practice helped to prevent the self-proclaimed State of Deseret from being admitted to the union in 1849, but its continued existence within the subsequent Utah Territory led to a great deal of mutual distrust over the course of the 1850s, culminating in the undeclared military conflict popularly known as the Utah War between March of 1857 and July of 1858. By the 1860s, the relationship between Utah’s Latter-Day Saints and the United States Government had settled into a tense but tolerable stalemate, with local officials grudgingly adhering to federal mandates and federal officials refraining from antagonizing the local Latter-Day Saints community. Polygamy, however, remained a persistent source of tension, particularly as it negatively colored the popular image of the Latter-Day Saints movement in the eyes of the American population at large.

    In 1869, therefore, at a time when certain members of Congress were openly advocating for more stringent enforcement of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act (1862) – the effect of which would have been far greater federal oversight of Latter-Day Saint-controlled Utah – the lawmakers then sitting in the territorial legislature did not need to think very hard or very long before locating the relevant friction point. To the Saints who formed the political elite in the territory, and who controlled most local offices, polygamy was a sacrament of their church left to them by its founder, Joseph Smith (1805-1844). To submit to a federal ban on the same would therefore have been tantamount to accepting the denial of their religious freedom. To the national leadership of the two dominant political parties, however, the practice of “plural marriage” was little more than barbarism. Degrading to women and counter to Christian ethics, such a practice could not possibly be allowed to continue. In an effort to break through this apparent impasse, men like William Henry Hooper (1813-1882), the Utah Territory’s Delegate to the United States Congress, accordingly hit upon the idea of passing such legislation as would grant women the right to vote. For the most part, this was intended to function as a kind of public relations campaign. As Hooper put it, the Utah legislators’ explicit intention was, “To convince the country how utterly without foundation the popular assertions were concerning the women of the Territory [.]” Pursuant to several weeks of discussion on the matter over the course of the opening months of 1870, the Utah Legislature ultimately approved the relevant suffrage bill and it became law on February 12^th. Two days later, the first female resident of Utah cast a ballot in a municipal election. In August, thousands more followed suit in that year’s general election.

    In neither of these cases, it must be said, did the NWSA or the AWSA participate directly. In Wyoming, a number of local female activists did endeavor to promote the passage of the aforementioned suffrage bill, including Redalia Bates (1844-1943), future wife of Utopian Socialist Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), and noted orator and lecturer Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932), but only on an individual basis. And in Utah, Anthony and Stanton became interested in the local campaign for women’s suffrage only after the relevant bill had been approved by the territorial legislature. The pair first arrived in the region in the summer of 1871 with the stated purpose of observing the progress of Utah’s “suffrage experiment” and ultimately ended up alienating their female hosts by delivering condescending lectures on “proper” social values in the realms of marriage and childrearing. Uninvolved though they may have been in the success of these history-making initiatives, however, the memberships of the NWSA and the AWSA did not stay uninvolved for very long. Likely encouraged by what they witnessed in the frontier West, members of both of the major national women’s rights organizations began to play  larger and larger roles in state suffrage campaigns over the course of the 1870s and 1880s, culminating in a major turning point for the movement at the dawn of the 1890s.

    In the Washington Territory, women’s suffrage became a perennial topic of political agitation over the course of the 1870s and 1880s in large part due to the persistent efforts of the NWSA and its local affiliates. First, a bill granting women the franchise was passed in 1883, only to be overturned in 1887. A second bill accomplishing the same thing was passed a year later in 1888, but this was once again overturned. In 1889, in parallel to the territory’s pending admission to the union, the Washington Women’s Suffrage Association this time worked to organize a statewide referendum, the purpose of which was to ensure that Washington formally entered the United States of America with its male and female inhabitants possessed of the same rights and privileges. Unfortunately, albeit unsurprisingly, this effort likewise ended in failure. Events in Colorado followed a broadly similar tack, with women’s suffrage organizations first attempting to make a play for female enfranchisement during the constitutional convention which preceded the territory’s transition to full-fledged statehood in 1876. This initial effort also failed – with delegates voting 24-8 against including a women’s suffrage clause in the Centennial State’s constitution – but a guarantee was nevertheless extracted from the assembled convention that a female franchise referendum would be held in 1877. In the leadup to this momentous event, rivals Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone both travelled to the state to give lectures and drum up the vote while pioneering physician Alida Avery (1833-1908) was chosen as the new president of the local NWSA affiliate. When the vote was ultimately held, however, and the ballots were finally tallied, the same result presented itself as it had the previous year.

    In the face of these failures – and in consequence of the narrowing gap between their two approaches to political activism – the NWSA and the AWSA began talk of merging beginning in the late 1880s. Dividing the resources of the women’s suffrage movement had clearly accomplished very little in the way of tangible gains since the late 1860s, and with the NWSA having more or less sworn off the kind of high-risk, high-reward tactics it favored in the early years of its existence, the time seemed right to reunify the two most powerful organizations within the American movement for women’s rights. In large part, this came about due to the efforts of one Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), daughter of AWSA founder Lucy Stone and a prominent activist in her own right. In 1887, Blackwell proposed a joint meeting of the NWSA and the AWSA during which their respective leaderships agreed to the terms of their eventual merger. Internal conflicts delayed the final realization of this agreement until the beginning of 1890, but thereafter, the dueling organizations formally ceased to exist. In their place, the National American Woman Suffrage Association – or NAWSA – was founded. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was named its first president, Lucy Stone became chair of its executive committee, and Susan B. Anthony took up the post of vice-president.

    Accordingly reenergized, the activists of the NAWSA refocused their attention on Colorado over the course of the next several years, in large part piggybacking off the efforts of local journalists like Ellis Meredith (1865-1955) and Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833-1926). Churchill in particular had been instrumental in keeping the crusade for women’s suffrage alive in Colorado over the course of the 1880s, not the least of which by founding and editing a popular weekly newspaper known after 1882 as the Queen Bee. By unflinchingly and unceasingly supporting the cause of women’s suffrage, Churchill kept the issue from ever completely losing public attention and provided the NAWSA and its affiliates with a viable platform and a set of resources which would both soon prove invaluable. Indeed, notwithstanding the fact that the last major campaign for the female franchise in Colorado had ended in defeat some sixteen years prior in 1877, a second referendum found its way onto the electoral calendar in the spring of 1893. Though its passage through the state legislature was more than a little tumultuous – and though the local NAWSA affiliate had less than thirty dollars to its name at the time – the announcement of the pending vote was greeted with widespread enthusiasm and a generous outpouring of support. The aforementioned Ellis Meredith appealed to the national leadership of the NAWSA for support, which said leadership answered by soliciting donations from around the country. Women’s clubs throughout the state sprang into action handing out leaflets and organizing rallies, and Meredith’s fellow journalist Minnie Reynolds (1865-1936) convinced three-quarters of the state’s newspaper editors to publish pro-suffrage materials. When the vote was finally held in November and the ballots finally tallied, the result was the reverse of what it had been in 1877. With a turnout of fifty-five percent, the referendum passed by margin of 35,798 to 29,451. The women of Colorado had successfully gained the right to vote.     

    Notwithstanding this impressive turnaround, the fortunes of the women’s rights movement in America were decidedly uneven for the next several years. In Idaho, on the one hand, the same kind of energetic and well-organized support for female suffrage led to the passage of an amendment to the state’s constitution granting women the right to vote only three years later in 1896. Unfortunately, this – along with the aforementioned referendum in Colorado – would prove to be the high point of the female suffrage campaign for the remainder of the century as disagreements between Anthony and Stanton and the rest of the NAWSA began to sap the organization’s strength. Anthony, for one, wanted to refocus the movement’s energies on a women’s suffrage amendment, specifically by mandating that every national meeting be held in Washington, D.C. so that the various assembled delegates could bring their collective pressure to bear. The general membership, however, strongly disagreed with this approach and ended up voting to continue shifting the site of the NAWSA’s annual convention so as to build on the successful campaigns that had thus far been waged in the states. Stanton, meanwhile, in collaboration with a committee of twenty-six other women, published the first volume of the provocatively titled Women’s Bible in 1895, the express intention of which was to decouple the Christian liturgy from its customary use as a justification for male dominance in Western society. Willingly courting controversy – indeed, Stanton remarked during a European sojourn at the beginning of the decade that, “I am in the sunset of life, and I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear” – the book sold exceptionally well, though it ultimately resulting in Stanton’s exile from any continued position of leadership. So scandalized was the comparatively conservative majority of the NAWSA’s membership that they voted to actively denounce the work. Stanton would never again wield her accustomed influence over the American movement for women’s rights.

    Fortunately, at around the same time that these very public disagreements were threatening to once again tear the movement for women’s rights apart just as it was beginning to build up a degree of political momentum, a woman named Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) was in the process of rebuilding the NAWSA along much more effective lines. A protégé of both Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony, Catt became chair of the NAWSA’s organizing committee in 1895 and proceeded to reorient the flagging movement towards a series of clearly stated and achievable goals. Then, in 1900 when Anthony finally decided to retire from her position as President of the NAWSA – an office which she had in turn inherited when Stanton retired several years earlier – Catt was the person she tapped to be her successor. The result of was a further consolidation of the NAWSA’s resources and the beginnings of the process which would ultimately bring about the ratification of the 19^th Amendment.

    One of Catt’s major innovations in this direction was her successful attempt to make women’s suffrage a common topic of conversation in the various women’s social clubs that had sprung up across the country over the course of the late 19^th century. Focused mostly on literary activities or self-improvement, these grassroots organizations eventually evolved into civic activist associations whose philosophical foundation was that the supposedly superior moral sensibilities of the feminine gender made them especially well suited to addressing the various ills of American life. Seeking to gain influence within this existing structure of activism, Catt accordingly made a point of courting and recruiting some of the wealthiest members of the nation’s various women’s clubs for the purpose of harnessing their resources and turning their influence to political advantage. The results were exceptionally impressive. Before 1900, the rule of thumb in most of the clubs was to avoid addressing explicitly political issues so as not to risk alienating either potential members or the general public. By 1914, however – thanks to Catt’s studious efforts – the General Federation of Women's Clubs had officially endorsed the cause of women’s suffrage. The movement for female enfranchisement could thereafter claim a presence in town and cities across the nation.

    At the same time that Catt was building the foundation of what would later prove to be a groundswell of national support for women’s suffrage, efforts continued in the various states to secure the female franchise on a piecemeal basis. In the State of Washington, for example, the repeated reverses of the 1880s finally gave way – thanks largely to the efforts of Emma Smith DeVoe (1848-1927) – to the successful passage of a constitutional amendment enfranchising local women in 1910. And while a similar measure that had been put to the voters of California in 1896 had gone down to failure – the same year, in fact, as the successful campaign in Idaho – women’s suffrage once again appeared on the ballot in the Golden State in October of 1911. In the intervening years, activists like Mary Simpson Sperry (1833-1921), Mary McHenry Keith (1855-1947), and the aforementioned Ellen Clark Sargent (1826-1911) had organized rallies, penned editorials, and lobbied state politicians, while the likes of Lydia Flood Jackson (1862-1963) had rallied the state’s Black women’s clubs to the cause of suffrage and Maria Guadalupe Evangelina de Lopez (1881-1977) both led the College Equal Suffrage League and become the suffrage movement’s primary spokesperson among the state’s Spanish-speaking communities. By the time of the second referendum, the stage had accordingly been set for victory. In the resulting campaign, local activists continued this tradition of energetic advocacy by passing out some three million pages of pro-suffrage literature and approximately ninety thousand pro-suffrage buttons. In the end, to the tune of some 3,500 votes – most of which were concentrated in the rural north of the state – the ballot proposition was passed, granting California women the right to vote. The following year, in 1912, Oregon followed suit, thanks principally to the efforts of newspaper editor and longtime activist Abigail Scott Duniway (1834-1915). Little by little, a sense of momentum was building. The wave was cresting; the passage of the 19^th Amendment was drawing near.   

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXIV: “Liable to All its Obligations, or to None”

    Notwithstanding its rather ignominious conclusion – free news coverage aside – United States v. Susan B. Anthony was not where the New Departure strategy ultimately met its end. In fact, it was Virginia Minor herself, the originator of the plan, who ended up seeing it through to its conclusion. Like Anthony had done in New York, Minor set out to vote in her home state of Missouri in the forthcoming Election of 1872. But whereas Anthony got as far convincing the attending officials to allow her to register and then doing so again when it came time to vote, Minor ran up against the expected roadblock at only the first step in the process. When she tried to register to vote on October 15^th, the presiding officer – a man named Reese Happersett – denied her the privilege based on the fact that she was a woman. Keeping to the plan, Minor and her husband then proceeded to sue Happersett on the grounds that his actions – and, in turn, the relevant provisions of the state constitution – stood in direct violation of the 14^th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Citizenship, the Minors asserted, was meaningless without a concomitant right to the franchise. And since the 14^th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof [,]” then it stood to reason that any women who were also citizens must likewise be possessed of the right to vote. The resulting case was eventually added to the docket of the Supreme Court of Missouri and was finally heard in March of 1873.

    The issue at hand, alleged Francis Minor and his associates in their brief to the court, was that, notwithstanding the relevant clause of the Missouri Constitution which explicitly restricted the franchise to, “Every free white male citizen of the United States, who shall have attained to the age of twenty-one years, and who shall have resided in this state one year before an election,” the right to vote, “Is a privilege of citizenship, within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.” Expanding upon this initial declaration, Minor went on to question the implications of Happersett’s refusal to register his wife Virginia, particularly in the context of the legal relationship between the federal government and those of the various states. “A limitation not found [in the Constitution,]” he wrote,

Nor authorized by that instrument, cannot be legally exercised by any lesser or inferior jurisdiction. The subject of suffrage, (or the qualifications of electors, as-the Constitution terms it) is simply remitted to the States by the Constitution, to be regulated by them; not to limit or restrict the right of suffrage, but to carry the same fully into effect. There can be no division of citizenship, either of its rights or its duties. There can be no half-way citizenship. Woman, as a citizen of the United States, is entitled to all the benefits of that position, and liable to all its obligations, or to none.

The validity of such an argument, of course, turned very much upon the truth of Minor’s initial assertion. Namely, that the franchise, “Is a privilege of citizenship, within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.” If it was, then fact that the Missouri Constitution seemed to take that same right away from one half of its citizen population was indeed extremely troubling. Was the Show Me State purporting to create different classes of citizenship in defiance of the 14^th Amendment? Francis and Virginia Minor would most definitely have answered in the affirmative, but this would only have been natural. Having placed their confidence in the regenerative power of the 14^th Amendment, they were confident that the United States Constitution was the true wellspring from which female suffrage might at length be made to flow.

    There was, of course, another side to the argument in question. That being, predictably, the side adopted by the court itself. In common with the defendant’s unadorned defense that the 14^th Amendment did not apply to the case that was at that moment being tried, Justice Henry M. Vories (1810-1876) ruled that the formal connection which the Minors claimed existed between legal citizenship and the electoral franchise under the terms of the Constitution quite simply did not exist. “That the different States of the Union had a right,” he declared,

Previous to the adoption of what is known as the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to limit the right to vote at election by their Constitutions and laws to the male sex, I think cannot at this day be questioned. The (I may say) universal construction of the Constitution of the United States on this subject, and the almost universal practice of all of the States in reference to this subject, from the adoption of the Constitution to the present time, ought to be sufficient to prevent the necessity of an investigation of this subject now. There are certainly some questions that the courts of the country have a right to consider as settled, and that question I think is one of them.

As to the 14^th Amendment in specific, Vories was similarly circumspect. “When we take into consideration the history of the times, in which this amendment was originated,” he continued,

And the circumstances, which in the view of its originators, produced its necessity, we will have but little trouble it seems to me to give it its proper interpretation […] It was to compel the former slave States to give […] freedmen the right of suffrage, and to give them all of the rights of other citizens of the respective States, and thus make them “equal with other citizens before the law.” There could have been no other intention to abridge the power of the States to limit the right of suffrage to the male inhabitants […] it was not intended that females, or persons under the age of twenty-one years, should have the right of suffrage conferred on them.

That, as far as the state of Missouri was concerned, was evidently that.

    Naturally, the Minor’s then appealed their case again, this time to the Supreme Court of the United States. When the case was finally argued on February 9^th, 1875, Francis Minor and his compatriots made the same arguments as they had in Missouri. The Constitution guaranteed citizens the right to vote, they asserted, which entitlement no state had the authority to permanently restrict. And once again, when the case was decided on March 29^th, the court sided decisively with the State of Missouri. Minor, of course, was undoubtedly a citizen. As Chief Justice Morrison Waite (1816-1888) affirmed, there could be no doubt of this fact under even the narrowest definition. But as to the inclusion of the franchise within the “privileges or immunities of citizens” guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment, the Court was not nearly so generous. Since the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, Waite asserted, the various states had been made chiefly responsible for defining and regulating the franchise within their respective jurisdictions. And in the course of the nearly two centuries that had elapsed since that time, different states had applied different qualifications at different times to the essential privilege of the ballot.

    In New Hampshire, for example, at the time that the Constitution was adopted, only, “Every male inhabitant of each town and parish with town privileges, and places unincorporated in the State, of twenty-one years of age and upwards, excepting paupers and persons excused from paying taxes at their own request” was qualified to vote. Just so, at this same time in Pennsylvania, the franchise was restricted to only those, “Freeman of the age of twenty-one years, having resided in the State two years next before the election, and within that time paid a State or county tax which shall have been assessed at least six months before the election [,]” while in Maryland, “All freemen above twenty-one years of age having a freehold of fifty acres of land in the county in which they offer to vote and residing therein, and all freemen having property in the State above the value of thirty pounds current money, and having resided in the county in which they offer to vote one whole year next preceding the election” were similarly entitled. As the Supreme Court had never been given cause to call into question the validity of any such restrictions – some of which, when active, denied the franchise to the majority of the citizen inhabitants of the relevant state – it accordingly seemed obvious to Justice Waite that the states were well within their rights to deny the franchise to whomever they wished and for whatever reason, the Constitution of the United States having little to say on the matter. “In this condition of the law in respect to suffrage in the several States [,]” he concluded accordingly,

It cannot for a moment be doubted that if it had been intended to make all citizens of the United States voters, the framers of the Constitution would not have left it to implication. So important a change in the condition of citizenship as it actually existed, if intended, would have been expressly declared.

    Furthermore, Waite went on to say, there was the very existence of the 15^th Amendment to consider. Said amendment, as previously discussed, affirmed that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” If the right to vote, as the Minors avowed, was a privilege inherent to citizenship, and if the 14^th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to all those, “Born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof [,]” then what purpose was the 15^th Amendment intended to serve? Why should Congress have gone to the trouble of drafting, debating, and approving it – and the states have gone to the troubling of ratifying it – if the thing that it was expressly created to protect had but recently been affirmed? “Nothing is more evident than that the greater must include the less,” Waite observed of the apparent fallacy, “And if all were already protected why go through with the form of amending the Constitution to protect a part?” No, the justice continued, the ability to vote was indeed far from an inextricable quality of citizenship. Not only, in the past, had many states chosen to restrict the franchise based on the possession of personal property or the payment of taxes without in any way calling into question the citizenship of those affected, but a number of states, as of 1875, went so far as to extend the vote to those who had thus far only declared their intention to become citizens. Such was the case in Minor’s home state of Missouri, he noted, as well as in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas. If some citizens could thus be barred from exercising the franchise, and some non-citizens could be granted the right to the same, all without invoking the scrutiny of the courts, then what more was there to say? “Certainly,” Waite concluded, “If the courts can consider any question settled, this is one.”

    Thus was the New Departure strategy definitively laid to rest. Anthony, Stanton, and the NWSA thereafter abandoned the idea that the text of the Constitution already held the key to women’s suffrage and rededicated themselves to the eventual ratification of a female suffrage amendment. To that end, Anthony waisted little time in enlisting the aid of California Republican Senator Aaron A. Sargent (1827-1887), husband of NWSA member Ellen Clark Sargent (1826-1911), in introducing a twenty-eight-word proposal on the floor of Congress in January of 1878. It read, in full – and in conscious emulation of the 15^th Amendment – that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Nothing became of this initiative in the near term, of course. Sargent retired the following year without the measure gaining any momentum. But every year thereafter for the next four decades, the leadership of the women’s rights movement would find someone in Congress to reintroduce the proposal. The intention, to be sure, was not simply to wear down the opposition by way of patience and persistence. Unless the likes of the NWSA also committed itself to pursuing other projects in other areas, the continued presence in Congress of a proposed amendment for women’s suffrage would mean very little more than that the cause for which it was fighting was not completely and utterly hopeless. But by always pursuing and obtaining the cooperation of some handful of Congressmen and Senators, the partisans of the women’s rights movement in America ensured that they were always possessed of certain useful resources. The late 1870s may not have been the moment for an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing women the right to vote, but as long as organizations like the NWSA kept up the practice of soliciting support for just that, they would always be prepared when the momentous day finally came. And in the meantime, while Anthony, Stanton, and their allies continued to cherish their formal independence from the necessarily male-dominated arena of partisan politics, it certainly didn’t hurt for their organization to maintain good relations with members of the dominant political parties.