The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXII: “An Element of Restoration and Harmony”

    The first of a dozen national women’s rights conventions was organized and summoned in 1850 at the behest of the aforementioned Lucy Stone – who had since become a fervent anti-slavery activist – and Pauline Kellogg Wright Davis (1813-1876), an educator and abolitionist from Western New York. Held in Worcester, Massachusetts, this inaugural gathering counted as many as one thousand attendees representing almost a dozen different states, at least one of whom came from as far away as California. The first resolution which the gathered delegates considered was that which would become the principal objective of the women’s rights movement as a whole – i.e., “To secure for [woman] political, legal, and social equality with man until her proper sphere is determined by what alone should determine it, her powers and capacities, strengthened and refined by an education in accordance with her nature” – while subsequent discussions sought to address such topics as women’s property rights, education, and employment. On the final evening, Stone rose to give a brief speech in which she summed up the intentions of herself and her closest supporters. “We want to be something more than the appendages of Society [,]” she said,

We want that Woman should be the coequal and help-meet of Man in all the interest and perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature and womanhood; we want that when she dies, it may not be written on her gravestone that she was the "relict" of somebody.

The aforementioned Susan B. Anthony – who did not attend this first convention but was kept abreast of the accomplishments of the burgeoning women’s rights movement by her activist parents – was later heard to remark that this declaration by Lucy Stone was what finally convinced her to join the movement herself.

    Subsequent conventions were held in 1851 (also in Worcester), 1852 (in Syracuse, NY), 1853 (in Cleveland, OH), 1854 (in Philadelphia, PA), 1855 (in Cincinnati, OH), and 1856, 1858, 1859, 1860, and 1866 (all in New York City, NY). The twelfth and last of their number was convened in 1869 in Washington, D.C., over twenty years after the first such meeting in Seneca Falls. Lucretia Mott – now in her 70s – and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – approaching that same decade herself – were once more in attendance, as was Susan B. Anthony, Congressmen-Elect John Menard (1838-1893), Kansas Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy (1816-1891), and pioneering surgeon – and the one and only female Medal of Honor recipient – Mary Edward Walker (1832-1919). During that gathering, reflecting back upon the experience of the recent war – and no doubt with her own efforts to secure the ratification of the 13^th Amendment at the front of her mind – Stanton memorably commented upon what then must have seemed to be the self-evident relationship between socio-political inequality and intractable civil strife. “If serfdom, peasantry, and slavery have shattered kingdoms, deluged continents with blood, scattered republics like dust before the wind, and rent our own Union asunder,” Cady asked of her audience, “What kind of a government, think you, American statesmen, you can build, with the mothers of the race crouching at your feet [?]” 

    The Civil War, as it happened, was something of a chaotic time for the women’s rights movement in America. On the one hand, because so many of the most prominent activists and organizers were also deeply enmeshed in the contemporary anti-slavery movement, many of them were inclined to shift their attention away from the goal of attaining the enfranchisement of American women and towards the cause of the final eradication of slavery. Stanton and Anthony in particular threw their combined energies wholeheartedly into forming the Women’s Loyal National League, an organization whose sole and stated purpose was to aid the passage of an amendment which would ban slavery in the United States. And while the result was an undeniable – indeed, one might say astounding – success, with the League securing some four hundred thousand signatures in favor of just such an amendment – which anti-slavery advocates in Congress then used to great effect in persuading certain of their wavering colleagues – the resulting shift in focus arguably deprived the women’s rights movement of much of the momentum it had been building over the course of the 1850s. No national women’s rights conventions were held at all between 1860 and 1866, recall, and only one more would be held thereafter.

    At the same time, however, the success of the Women’s Loyal National League arguably fed back into and inspired subsequent successes on the part of later women’s rights organizations. Though the 1850s had been a fairly momentous decade for the cause of women’s rights, there yet remained no permanent, national coordinating body whose sole purpose was advocating for female social and political emancipation. The aforementioned conventions had been organized on a largely ad-hoc basis by a fairly small number of women whose connections and resources were largely personal. The WLNL helped to change this by introducing its members to the manifest utility of formal organizing methods, helped create professional relationships between women across multiple states and regions, and readied the next generation of young activists for the more politically engaged endeavors that were to follow in the decades ahead. Indeed, it was in many ways the experience and the success of the WLNL that shifted the women’s rights movement in America from one which sought to appeal to the moral sensibilities of its target audience to one which made increasingly canny use of a variety of political techniques and resources. Before this shift could definitively take place, however, a little more chaos was yet in the offing.

    Formed in May of 1866, the American Equal Rights Association was born out of the eleventh Women’s Rights Convention for the purpose of effectively combining the efforts and resources of the contemporary anti-slavery and women’s rights movements. The desire of its leadership – which included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Frederick Douglas – was essentially to push for the enfranchisement of women and formerly-enslaved peoples as a single reform package with particular attention paid to the momentous political events then unfolding at both the state and federal levels. At that time, recall, the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress were in the process of redefining the nature of the relationship between citizenship and race in America. A constitutional amendment banning slavery had already been approved and ratified while another establishing universal citizenship was very much in the offing. Meanwhile, the various states of the so-called “Confederacy” were in the process of negotiating their reentry into the federal fold, the result of which was a tremendous opportunity for those who wished to advocate for further change. As long as Congress was prepared to actively redefine what it meant to be a citizen, and as long as some portion of the states would have no choice but to accede to Congress’s wishes, a well-organized campaign of lobbying might conceivably achieve a great deal. Such was the goal of the AERA: to capitalize on a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attain universal citizenship and universal suffrage in America.

    But while the AERA was the product of canny strategic thinking and possessed abundant material and political resources, it was unfortunately also immediately stricken by fairly serious internal divisions. At its first annual meeting in New York in May of 1867, for example, the discussion very quickly broke down into a kind of ranking of priorities. The likes of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton expressed a certain amount of trepidation at the idea that Black men in American might gain the right to vote before women. “Woman,” said Mott, “Had a right to be a little jealous of the addition of so large a number of men to the voting class, for the colored men would naturally throw all their strength upon the side of those opposed to woman's enfranchisement.” Stanton, meanwhile, when asked by Black abolitionist George T. Downing (1819-1903) if she would be willing to allow Black men to gain the franchise before women, answered, “I would say, no; I would not trust him with all my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are. I desire that we go into the kingdom together.” As callously racialized as this answer was, it did not stop other Black attendees from agreeing with Stanton. Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), a former slave herself who had become a renowned public speaker and activist in the 1840s and 1850s, notably remarked during this same discussion that, “If colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before [,]” while Frederick Douglass went so far as to admit that, “The race to which I belong have not generally taken the right ground on this question.”

    Not every woman agreed with Stanton and Mott, of course, and many white attendees also favored pursuing Black suffrage in preference to female suffrage. Massachusetts abolitionist Abby Kelly Foster, for one, argued that the need to secure the electoral franchise for Black men in America was significantly more urgent than the corresponding effort on behalf of white women. And Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) – brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) – opined that while universal suffrage should remain the AERA’s ultimate goal, its members should also refrain from turning aside the opportunity to secure Black suffrage alone, if possible. Very little, it seemed, was likely to be settled in the immediate, both because of these disagreements and because of the attention demanded by a certain event that was fast approaching. The following month, in June of 1867, a convention was to be summoned in New York for the purpose of revising that state’s constitution. And so, just as the leadership of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention had attempted in 1850, the AERA set in motion a plan based on the WLNL’s lobbying work in 1865 to secure the franchise in the Empire State for both its Black and female citizens. But while the members of the AERA, operating in dozens of different communities across the state, succeeded in gathering some twenty thousand signatures in favor of their proposal to grant women the right to vote and remove property qualifications on the franchise, the effort ultimately fizzled out in the midst of significant personal and ideological rancor.

    Horace Greeley (1811-1872), former Congressman and longtime publisher and editor of the New-York Tribune, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the movement for women’s rights and an ardent ally of the AERA leading into the New York Constitutional Convention of 1867. Being dominated by Republican delegates – and Greeley being a staple of New York Republican Party politics – he was also made chairman of the influential committee on suffrage, thus placing him in an ideal position to sway his fellow convention-goers from inside the proceedings while AERA activists circulated petitions among the general populace. The man was widely known as a champion of social reform, and so it doubtless seemed to those who considered him a friend and ally that his energy and his enthusiasm would be key to securing the victory that the AERA desired. Unfortunately, like many of his reformist contemporaries, Greeley had his own particular sense of what was most important in that historical moment. “This is a critical period for the Republican Party and the life of our Nation [,]” he reportedly declared to the doubtless nonplussed Stanton and Anthony, “I conjure you to remember that this is ‘the negro's hour,’ and your first duty now is to go through the State and plead his claims.” True to this sentiment, Greeley’s committee ultimately approved the removal of property qualifications on the franchise – the purpose of which had historically been to disqualify potential Black voters – and rejected any measures which would have allowed for women’s suffrage. When Stanton and Anthony responded poorly to this turn of events, Greeley first threatened and then proceeded to use his control over the Tribune to attack the women’s rights movement and its supporters, claiming that the “best women” he knew did not want to vote. When Stanton and Anthony countered by having the name of Greeley’s wife read aloud at the convention as having signed one of the AERA pro-suffrage petitions, the relationship between the organization and the Tribune’s publisher was effectively severed.

    The AERA’s next major campaign in Kansas would prove no more successful than the first. The citizens of the Sunflower State, as of the late spring and early summer of 1867, were about to cast their votes in two separate referenda, one of which, if approved, would grant the vote to Black men, and the other of which, if approved, would grant the vote to women. Naturally, the AERA leadership sought to promote the approval of both measures in an effort to make Kansas the first beachhead in their national struggle for universal suffrage. And in order to do so, they sought to make use of what was known as the Hovey Fund, a bequest of $50,000 made by a Boston merchant named Charles Fox Hovey (1807-1859) for the purpose of supporting both abolitionist causes and the American movement for women’s rights. The AERA had tapped the Hovey Fund during its ill-fated operation in New York, and naturally sought to do so once again in Kansas. As stipulated in Hovey’s will, what remained of the bequest was to be directed towards securing equal citizenship for American women once slavery was legally abolished in the United States. Since the ratification of the 13^th Amendment had accomplished exactly that in 1865, the likes of Stanton, Mott, and Anthony accordingly concluded that the remains of the Hovey Fund were theirs to do with as they say fit. Unfortunately, the fund’s administrator had other ideas. Though an early advocate of women’s rights and a longtime ally of Lucy Stone, Wendall Phillips (1811-1884) was even more devoted to the cause of Black civil rights, to the point that he did not consider the ratification of the 13^th Amendment to represent the final end of American slavery. On the contrary, he said, so long as the franchise was not applied equally regardless of race, no one could rightly claim that slavery had finally been abolished. In consequence of this uncompromising stance, Phillips opted not to allow any of the resources of the Hovey Fund to be channeled to the AERA during its organizing push in Kansas.

    The result, in the short term, was a dearth of necessary resources. Unable to raise adequate money themselves – in no small part because few jobs were then open to women – the AERA’s female organizers were unable to mobilize the same kind of field operation in Kansas that characterized their earlier effort in New York. In consequence, they were unable to exercise adequate influence over the local political scene and accordingly lost the initiative to a faction of the Kansas Republican Party whose stated position was to support the Black enfranchisement referendum while actively campaigning against suffrage for women. As the summer wore on and the AERA’s efforts began to collapse, hostility on the part of local Republicans accordingly began to mount. Writing to Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone rather bitterly observed at the time that, “The negroes are all against us. There has just now left us an ignorant black preacher named Twine, who is very confident that women ought not to vote. These men ought not to be allowed to vote before we do, because they will be just so much more dead weight to lift.” When Anthony and Stanton finally arrived in Kansas in September, with less than a month to go before the relevant measures went to a vote, the situation looked truly desperate. In consequence – and likely against their better judgment – the two of them made a decision out of purest desperation.

    Having made his fortune in the railway industry in Australia, Britain, and the United States, the aptly named George Francis Train (1829-1904) was as eccentric as he was wealthy and had a particular dislike for the Republican Party. By no means a Confederate sympathizer – indeed, he campaigned enthusiastically for Abraham Lincoln in the leadup to the Election of 1864 – Train was nevertheless an ardent Democrat and an unapologetic racist who desired nothing more in the late 1860s than to make the avowedly-progressive Republicans eat their own words. When it became known to him that the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were somewhat desperate for funding in consequence of the AERA’s flailing campaign in Kansas in the summer of 1867, he accordingly seized the opportunity to do exactly that. Though, as noted, Train had not the slightest regard for the intelligence or trustworthiness of America’s newly emancipated Black population, he was very much in favor of both temperance and women’s rights, and accordingly was willing to donate both his money and his time to what remained of the AERA’s efforts to see the women of Kansas gain the franchise. While Anthony spoke at rallies arguing that Black suffrage and female suffrage ought to have gone hand in hand as a matter of right, Train often followed her by advocating female suffrage as a means of allowing the white community to keep Black voters in check. Given the prior affiliations and expressed values of many of the AERA’s members, this kind of rhetoric on part Train’s did not land particularly well.

    Lucy Stone, for one, thought Train, “A lunatic, wild and ranting [,]” and deeply resented Stanton and Anthony’s decision to include her name in a letter publicly praising his efforts. Stone’s response, in the moment, was to lash out in anger, first accusing Anthony of misappropriating AERA funds and then moving to block payment of expenses for the work she had done in Kansas. As the campaign came to a close, however, and the dust began to settle on what had turned out to be a near-total debacle for the movement – with neither referendum having achieved success – the cleavages which had been exposed in the heat of desperation began to appear increasingly intractable. Whereas Stanton and Anthony believed that political and organizational independence were essential if the women’s movement was going to survive long enough to achieve its core objective – that being the establishment of female suffrage as soon as possible – Lucy Stone and her allies favored a continued alliance with both the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party. Forced by the disruptive presence of Train – who, as aforementioned, desired little else but to make the otherwise progressive Republicans look foolish by encouraging them to work at cross purposes with the women’s movement – to take accounting of their priorities, this latter faction within the AERA ultimately placed greater value on the material resources which the abolitionists and Republicans could provide. And in exchange for access to the same, Stone and her followers were willing to support such measures as would enfranchise Black men in advance of American women.

    This division, of course, would take some time to shake out completely. In the immediate, Anthony and Stanton chose to stand by George F. Train. His wealth and his enthusiasm had an undeniable appeal, with the former being of particular importance if the campaign for women’s rights was to finally part ways with the abolitionists. One of the first fruits of this renewed alliance was the founding of a women’s rights newspaper in 1868 under the provocative title The Revolution, paid for by Train and run by Anthony and Stanton. Intended to act as something of a clearinghouse for all news and information having to do with the cause of women’s rights, The Revolution featured articles and editorials by prominent female activists, reporting on employment discrimination and advancements in divorce law, transcriptions of speeches, and convention announcements, all couched in a tone of cultivated insouciance designed to shake its readers out of any sense of complacency. In practice, this desire to be forceful and provocative led the editors of The Revolution into more than a few testy exchanges with their contemporaries. When an article in the New York World expressed disdain for the forcefulness of the paper’s tone, for example, Stanton replied with characteristic causticness. “The World innocently asks us the question, why, like the Englishwomen, we do not sit still in our conventions, and get "first class men" to do the speaking?” she wrote. “We might, with equal propriety, ask the World's editorial staff why they do not lay down their pens and get first class men to edit their journal?” The purpose of such repartee, of course, was to demonstrate to any who yet doubted the faculties of American women that they were perfectly capable of standing toe-to-toe with their male counterparts. The Revolution was not the frivolous ladies’ supplement to a more serious publication, but rather a hard-hitting paper whose sharp-minded editors were the equal of any in the business.

    While this penchant for plain-spokenness generally served the editors of The Revolution well – inasmuch as it made clear to all and sundry that cause of women’s rights was a serious matter being fought for by serious and capable people – it did not necessarily mix all that harmoniously with the continued influence of George F. Train. Stanton and Anthony, as editors, were assuredly free to direct the paper in whatever manner they wished. Train contributed funding, as well as the occasional editorial on whatever subject had caught his interest, but for most of the existence of The Revolution, he was out of the country on business or indulging in one or another of his passions. But when one takes account of Train’s avowed opinions on race – and when one considers the sense of gratitude which Stanton and Anthony had cause to feel towards him – certain opinions published in The Revolution take on a particularly ugly aspect. During the debate over the 15^th Amendment, for example, as the measure was being debated and voted upon in the various states, Stanton penned an article in support of additional reforms which would grant the national franchise to women. But while her object was certainly a laudable one, her language was anything but. “American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement,” she wrote in April of 1869, “If you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters [...] demand that women too shall be represented in government.” Reprehensible though such a declaration most certainly was, it was in fact a significantly softened version of something Stanton had written months prior on the same subject. In the last week of December in 1868, she wrote that, “There is only one safe, sure way to build a government, and that is on the equality of all its citizens, male and female, black and white,” and that she accordingly rejected women being subject to the whims of, “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic.”

    Unsurprisingly, when the AERA met for the final time in May of 1869, many of its members were not on the best of terms. Not only had Stanton and Anthony alienated many of their compatriots by associating with the like of George F. Train and adopting deeply racialized language when discussing the pending ratification of the 15^th Amendment, but the pair had also made a point of publicly antagonizing the contemporary leadership of the otherwise sympathetic Republican Party and to associating with Democrats in an attempt to lobby their support for women’s suffrage. To that end, during the events of the 1868 Democratic National Convention, Anthony wrote a letter addressed to the convention-goers in which she sought to arouse fears of Black enfranchisement as a means of garnering support for women’s rights. “While the dominant party has with one hand lifted up two million black men and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship,” she thus declared, “With the other it has dethroned fifteen million white women—their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters—and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood.” Within the context of the AERA, this kind of language was not received particularly well. Abolitionist Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-1881), for one, thought the association with Train unforgivable, and accused Stanton and Anthony of supporting only “educated suffrage” rather than the organization’s stated goal of universal suffrage. Lucy Stone’s husband, Henry Blackwell (1825-1909), then attempted to calm the waters by insisting that the editors of The Revolution continued to be as dedicated to Black suffrage as anyone else then present, but too much damage had already been done.

    Frederick Douglass, for his part, was understandably moved to first voice his disappointment with Stanton’s aforementioned use of the epithet “Sambo,” and then to express his opposition to the pair’s continued insistence that Black and female suffrage be achieved together or not at all. “I do not see how anyone can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the negro [,]” he was reported to have said. “With us, the matter is a question of life and death, at least in fifteen States of the Union.” Anthony’s response mirrored the combative tone of The Revolution. “Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the negro [,]” she said, “But with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.” This exchange then promoted Lucy Stone to give voice to her own concerns. Though her previous disagreements with Anthony and Stanton were well-known and well-founded – and the ill will that resulted was not soon to be forgotten – in this instance she found herself agreeing with the pair. Addressing Douglass, she declared that, “Woman suffrage is more imperative than his own.” True, “There are no KuKlux Clans seeking the lives of women [,]” but children were still being taken from their mothers by, “Ku-Kluxers here in the North in the shape of men.” None of this was to say that Stone opposed the ratification of the 15^th Amendment in practice. On the contrary, she said, “I thank God for that XV. Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every State. I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit.” But all the same, she continued, “I believe that the safety of the government would be more promoted by the admission of woman as an element of restoration and harmony than the negro.”

    Thus divided along lines of gender and race – with Stanton and Anthony on one side, the abolitionists on another, and Lucy Stone on a third – the AERA could quite simply no longer function. The aftermath of this final annual meeting accordingly gave rise to several distinct successor organizations intended to carry on in its stead at the behest of certain factions thereof. Not but two days thereafter, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Women Suffrage Association, the early membership of which was drawn in large part from the earlier Women’s Loyal National League and the Working Women’s Association, the latter of which had been formed in 1868 in the offices of The Revolution for the purpose of combining and mobilizing the resources of middle-class female wage workers. Several months later, in December of 1869, Lucy Stone then responded by establishing the American Woman Suffrage Association, effectively an enlargement of the New England Woman Suffrage Association which Stone had helped form in November of 1868. By February of 1870, of course, the ostensible cause of the split had been more or less laid to rest. With the ratification of the 15^th Amendment and the enshrining of Black political rights in the text of the Constitution, there no longer seemed to have been any cause for disagreement. Notwithstanding the efforts of Stanton and Anthony, Black men had indeed gained the vote before the nation’s female population. But while there now appeared to be no reason why abolitionists, reformist Republicans, and women’s rights activists should not pool their resources and form a united front for the cause of women’s suffrage, in reality the breach which the 15^th Amendment debate had opened was not to mended so quickly. Indeed, it would not be formally sealed for another twenty years.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXI: “The Great Work Before Us”

    One of the most significant results of the earliest stirrings of the women’s rights movement in America was inarguably the Seneca Falls Convention, held in the Western New York in the summer of 1848. Organized by local Quaker women and the aforementioned Elizabeth Cady Stanton, this gathering of notables – which included, among others, Lucretia Mott, temperance advocate and social reformer Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), scientist Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888), and anti-slavery activists Amy Post (1802-1889) and Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) – was in many ways a direct response to two countervailing trends then playing out in contemporary American society. On the one hand, as noted above, temperance organizations, abolitionist societies, and the emerging transcendentalist movement – among others – had all begun to provide American women in the 1830s and 1840s with some means of taking part in contemporary public life. And naturally, as women began to develop a sense of agency within these reform-minded spaces, they began to push against the boundaries that remained in place to limit the nature and latitude of their personal freedoms. To a large extent, the gathering at Seneca Falls was one of the most prominent early achievements in this particular line of action. Having asserted themselves within and through various reformist organizations and movements whose end goals were otherwise unconnected to the explicit cause of women’s rights, the women in question quite understandably sought to proceed to the next logical step in their quest for wider socio-political recognition by organizing specifically for the purpose of expanding and forwarding those selfsame rights.

    Another reason that a number of contemporary America’s most prominent female activists felt the need to publicly assert themselves entirely apart from the organizations and movements which had first allowed them some degree of political and social agency, of course, was that male chauvinism remained a stubbornly common feature of political pressure groups which were otherwise reform-minded and liberal. Certain abolitionists, like William Llyod Garrison (1805-1879), did make a point of encouraging female participation in the anti-slavery movement – to the point that, in December of 1837, he declared in his anti-slavery weekly The Liberator that he backed, “The rights of woman to their utmost extent” – but others were far more circumspect. Brothers Arthur (1786-1865) and Lewis Tappan (1788-1873), for example, split from Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 and formed their own American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in large part because they were uncomfortable with Garrison’s unflinching support of women’s rights and his insistence on unfettered female participation in the anti-slavery movement’s various efforts. The aforementioned World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in this same year, likewise made clear to the women in attendance that while their support for the cause of abolitionism was appreciated, the male-dominated leadership of most of the anti-slavery societies in the contemporary Anglo-American world were simply not willing to allow their female contemporaries to speak in public forums or generally participate as the equals of men. The Seneca Falls Convention was absolutely a direct response to the assertion of exactly this kind of double standard. Women like Stanton and Mott, having been led to believe that they were entitled to contribute as fully as they were able to the socio-political reform movements which aligned with their personal convictions, were not about to step back and stay quiet when it became clear that most of their male colleagues expected them to submit unquestioningly to male leadership. On the contrary, these kinds of reverses only encouraged them to seek new forums in which to make their voices heard.

    The gathering in Seneca Falls was exactly that kind of forum, and one which is made all the more remarkable by how quickly it came together and the comprehensiveness of its declared aims. Conceived in response to an informal conversation between Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Hunt (1812-1889), and several other women while Mott was in the area visiting a Haudenosaunee reservation in Cattaraugus County, the first session was convened slightly over one week following its announcement in local newspapers on July 11^th, 1848. Only women were invited to attend and to speak during the first day’s proceedings (July 19^th) and a list of grievances and resolution was prepared for the approbation of the assembled participants on the second and final day (July 20^th). Charged with drafting the bulk of this document, Stanton took inspiration from the text of the Declaration of Independence and – with the assistance of her lawyer husband, Henry Brewster Stanton (1805-1887) – included extracts from a number of contemporary laws which explicitly sought to curtail the social and economic rights of American women. But while the resulting Declaration of Sentiments was, for the most part, a fairly moderate document concerned primarily with the social and economic disabilities under which American women were then forced to labor, one resolution in particular proved to be something of a sticking point even for some of the men and women in attendance. Addressed, as were all of the resolutions, to “mankind” whose history was said to be one of, “Repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her [,]” the first of their number simply stated, as one of injuries in question, “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.”

    As Stanton was adding this particular accusation to the original draft of the Declaration, her husband, the aforementioned Henry Stanton, reportedly attempted to warn her off. Not only was her personally opposed to American women being granted the right to vote – a sentiment which, in fairness, put him in line with the vast majority of contemporary American men – but his own ambitions made him disinclined to be personally associated with such a radical position. Having been interested in seeking political office for a number of years, Mr. Stanton accordingly concluded – after failing to persuade his wife to excise the cited passage – that the best course of action would be for him to be some distance away from Seneca Falls when the conference actually took place. Not everyone who became aware of the extent of Stanton’s ambition reacted quite so cravenly, to be sure, but her husband’s read on the radical nature of the statement in question was nevertheless far from inaccurate. The most common critique was that any insistence on something as politically significant as the franchise would inevitably overshadow the more moderate resolutions which the document in question contained. The nation’s cohort of male legislators were not about to grant women the right to vote simply because they were asked to, and any attempt to push the issue was bound to create more problems than it would solve. Mott was of this opinion, though she undoubtedly agreed with Stanton in principle. “Why Lizzie,” she said in her characteristic Quaker speech, “Thee will make us ridiculous.” As the debate went on, however, one voice in particular rose in support of Stanton’s decision. Frederick Douglass, the only non-white person in attendance, stated in no uncertain terms that he could not possibly fight for the right of Black people in America to vote without also affirming the right of American women to do the same. “This denial of the right to participate in government,” he said, involved, “Not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice […] but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”

    This declaration on the part of Douglass, along with Stanton’s refusal to back down from her stated position, ultimately allowed the cited resolution to pass by a significant majority vote. And this was just as well, for the concluding statement which Stanton had also written was similarly radical in its character. “In view of [the] entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country,” it began,

Their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States. In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.

Let it be marked, before the present discussion proceeds any further, just how revolutionary this statement was and what it represents within the context of the women’s rights movement in the United States of America. In 1848, at a time when property qualifications on the electoral franchise had only ceased to be the norm over the course of the preceding decade, only about three million people out of a population of twenty million could vote, and neither women nor non-whites could cast ballots regardless of their citizenship status, the attendees of the Seneca Falls Convention were actively demanding that the governments of the United States grant women, “Immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens [.]” Not only was this a stunningly ambitious – one might also call it stunningly brave – act of political self-assertion, but its place on the timeline of the American movement for women’s rights further serves to drive home the manifest importance of the act itself. Only eight years prior, in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been denied the right to speak at an anti-slavery convention in London. Now, in 1848, at a convention in many ways organized in direct response to that earlier incident, these same women were demanding that they and their contemporaries be immediately granted the right to vote. Seventy-two years later, their demand would finally be met.

    Long before that great achievement, of course, would come decade upon decade of stubborn, patient work. First, in the mold of Seneca Falls, would follow a whole series of women’s rights conventions. The earliest among these was held at nearby Rochester less than one month later, organized by many of the same people and chaired by local anti-slavery activist Abigail Norton Bush (1810-1898). Though the Rochester convention covered many of the same issues as its predecessor had done at Seneca Falls – to the point of taking up and approving the same Declaration of Sentiments – it was nonetheless remarkable for both pointedly addressing the plight of local working women and for the attendance of a local couple, Massachusetts transplants Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Reformist Quakers, abolitionists, and close associates of Frederick Douglas, the Anthony’s second child, Susan, would soon become deeply involved in the women’s rights movement through her parent’s associations. Two years later, in Salem, Ohio, the first women’s rights convention to be organized on a statewide basis was then held under the leadership of Betsy Mix Cowles (1810-1876). With a remarkable attendance of fully five hundred people, the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention was the first in history to be simultaneously led and staffed exclusively by women, as well as the first to allow only women to vote and to speak. The gathering’s final act was also exceptionally noteworthy. In an attempt to take advantage of the fact a state convention was about to meet for the purpose of revising the Constitution of Ohio, the attendees drafted a memorial advising the delegates to codify women’s right to vote. “Believing that woman does not suffer alone,” the petition concluded,

When subject to oppressive and unequal laws, but that whatever affects injuriously her interests, is subversive of the highest good of the race, we earnestly request that in the New Constitution you are about to form for the state of Ohio, women should be secured, not only the right of suffrage, but all the political and legal rights that are guaranteed to men.

While the document ultimately produced by the constitutional convention and subsequently approved by the people of the Buckeye State did not heed this appeal to reason, the fact that the application was made at all is nonetheless worthy of note. Within two years of having organized the first gathering of its kind, and upon the first instance of women having complete control of the relevant agenda, the presiding officers of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention had attempted to make canny use of their local political calendar to achieve their desired goals. This would prove to be an extremely important model going forward.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXX: “Those Talents with Which Her Heavenly Father Has Entrusted Her”

     To those who are familiar with the history of social activism in the United States, the notion that the story of the 19^th Amendment very much mirrors that of the 18^th will come as no great surprise. The 19^th Amendment, of course, is that which prohibits denying the vote to American citizens on the basis of their gender. In full, it states 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” and furthermore that, “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The constituency which this measure was intended to target was the segment of the American population which then identified as female. By the time of the amendment’s passage through Congress in June of 1919 – and its subsequent ratification by the states in August of 1920 – American women had been denied the federal vote since the first national elections in 1789. Certain individual colonies had recognized their right to vote in local elections before the declaration of American independence, and the state of New Jersey would continue to do so until it’s first constitution was duly amended in 1807. But between 1807 and the wanning decades of the 19th century, no women who were citizens of the United States of America could legally cast a vote in any official, civic capacity.

    The result, as with prohibition, was a decades-long campaign of political activism principally organized and led by American women. These woman – of different social classes, education levels, ethnic communities, and professions – formed pressure groups and held conferences, published literature and took part in marches, pursued legal remedies and faced arrest, all in the name of securing recognition of one of the fundamental rights which they knew to be theirs as American citizens. It was a long fight, taking place – as it did – over the course of almost a century. And while the movement for women’s suffrage certainly experienced its share of setbacks, its supporters also made tremendous headway at times, especially when one takes into account the essentialist nature of gender politics in the 19^th century United States. Piece by piece, state by state, the right of women to vote in local elections was recognized and enforced. And alliances were formed between women’s rights crusaders and abolitionists and between women’s rights crusaders and temperance activists, the result of which was a kind of grand coalition of socio-political reformers whose influence over domestic politics in the second half of the 1800s was truly something to behold. And in the end, of course – if we consider 1920 to be the end of this particular story – these efforts were met with success. Momentum built upon momentum, victories were notched out one after the other, and an amendment was finally approved by Congress which set right a wrong for which there could be no possible justification.

    As aforementioned, the story of how this all happened is really rather a long one. But it started, more or less, sometime in the late 18^th century, arguably in response and in parallel to the works of British writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Not every woman in the contemporary English-speaking world responded favorably to what was printed in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), to be sure. In reply to Wollstonecraft’s assertion that historically deficient education rather than some innate intellectual incapacity was what held women back from being able to fully participate in public life, fellow writer and poet Hannah Moore (1745-1833) famously sought to reaffirm that, “To be unstable and capricious is but too characteristic of our sex.” Moore’s contemporaries, the classicist Elizabeth Clark (1717-1806) and the essayist and literary critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), had similar things to say on the subject, with Barbauld even going so far as to spar with Wollstonecraft through her poems for a period of several years. But while A Vindication would remain substantially controversial for the first half of the 19^th century for its relative social and cultural radicalism – a quality perhaps best embodied by its author’s contention that women should endeavor not to be controlled by their emotions or desires – Wollstonecraft nevertheless managed to positively influence the thinking of a number of women in the British literary scene. Novelist Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), for example, while she made a point of distancing herself from Wollstonecraft on the surface – to the point of including an unflattering caricature in her most famous work, Belinda (1801) – nevertheless showed her agreement with Wollstonecraft’s ideals in the way that she wrote her various female characters. And Edgeworth’s fellow novelist, Jane Austen (1775-1817), likewise demonstrated a sense of accord with the ideas first rendered in A Vindication in her portrayal of her female protagonists as intelligent, sensible, and possessed of an agency all their own.

    The reception which Wollstonecraft received across the Atlantic in the United States of America was sadly much aligned with that which she suffered in her native Britain. Most male writers pilloried her, most female writers turned her into an object of ridicule, and those who agreed with her mostly kept quiet. The ideas expressed in A Vindication were so horrifying, it seemed, that even nodding in their direction was seen as a form of social suicide. Substantially stultifying as this reaction was to the cause which Wollstonecraft had endeavored to advance, however, some small numbers of American women were not to be intimidated so easily. Both Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), two of the 19^th century’s most prominent American campaigners for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, discovered upon their meeting at an anti-slavery conference in London in 1840 that they had both read Wollstonecraft and that her ideas formed the core of their respective reformist ambitions. Two years prior, Southern-socialite-turned-Quaker-abolitionist Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) began writing a series of letters for a Massachusetts newspaper called The Spectator in which, among other things, she radically avowed that

God created us equal;–he created us free agents;–he is our Lawgiver, our King, and our Judge, and to him alone is woman bound to be in subjection, and to him alone is she accountable for the use of those talents with which her Heavenly Father has entrusted her. 

The following year, in 1839, journalist and translator Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) began publishing her own series of essays in a transcendentalist magazine called The Dial which would later be collected and published under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). The thrust of this work – also strongly echoing Wollstonecraft – was essentially that mankind’s tendency to hold back women was in fact holding mankind back from achieving its fullest potential. These women were relatively few, to be sure, and the positions which they staked out were often met with open hostility from men and other women alike. But their very existence was a portent of things to come. Notwithstanding the social forces with which it would be forced to contend – and the length of the journey which lay before it at this early juncture – the women’s rights movement in America was beginning to take shape.

    Of note at this formative moment, of course, is that early efforts to secure the rights of women in America most often coalesced within and alongside other campaigns for some manner of socio-political reform. Abolitionist societies, for example, were generally more welcoming of female participation than most other civil society groups in the contemporary United States, though their inclusion into such spaces was not always entirely frictionless. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as aforementioned, first met within the context of an anti-slavery conference in London, having been dispatched to the gathering as representatives of their local abolitionist societies. The pair were deeply insulted, however, when the majority of their male counterparts voted to bar women from speaking and then proceeded to instruct them to seat themselves apart from the rest of the assembled delegates. Similarly, Margaret Fuller’s ability to have her views on the need for equality among the sexes published in the late 1830s and early 1840s was facilitated by the fact that she had been made the editor of The Dial by its publisher, philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emmerson (1803-1882). Transcendentalism being a system of belief in which the individual is held up as a fundamental aspect of a divine concept known as the “Over-soul,” Emmerson and his supporters were accordingly far more likely to regard women like Fuller as being possessed of intellect and inspiration – and far more likely to give them opportunities to express themselves – than would most of their fellow Americans.

    The contemporary temperance movement also provided American women with a unique opportunity to make their voices heard. As discussed in the previous entry in this series, one of the most successful prohibitionist organizations of the 19^th century was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874 and led during the height of its influence in the 1880s and 1890s by a retired educator named Frances Willard (1839-1898). With Willard at the helm, the WCTU staked out a place for itself in the contemporary public discourse by describing its mission in explicitly pious and domestic language. Prohibition, these women said, was not about stopping anyone from exercising their rights, but rather sought to promote peaceful family life, childhood education, safe streets, and Christian forbearance. Naturally, since the furtherance of these goals would require the eradication of legal drink, Willard and the WCTU also sought to influence the domestic legislative process at the state and federal level, pushing for such laws as they felt would serve their ends and stand up to scrutiny. And naturally, since many men were bound to object to such efforts – on the unspoken but widely understood grounds that they liked to have a drink now and then and didn’t see why they should have to stop – Willard came to further support the enfranchisement of American women. Her goal, she wrote in 1879, was “To secure for all women above the age of twenty-one years the ballot as one means for the protection of their homes from the devastation caused by the legalized traffic in strong drink.” Willard’s personal feelings on the matter, as it happened, were somewhat broader in scope. Like Sarah Grimké, she held that men and women were fundamentally equal before God, social conventions to the contrary thus running counter to his divine will. As God had placed husbands and wives in a position of equal leadership within the context of the Christian family, she thus wrote in 1890, so too did God place, “Male and female side by side throughout his realm of law.”

    The net result of these various developments – the ridicule of prominent women’s rights literature, the creation of spaces for women in certain social and political reform organizations, and the emergence of a small number of prominent female speakers and writers on the margins of spaces otherwise dominant by men – was the gradual coalescence of the first generation of women’s rights organizations and activists in the United States of America. There were still many obstacles in the way of mass mobilization, of course. Public speaking, for example, would remain a space only tenuously open to women well into the 1850s. Lucy Stone (1818-1893), one of the founders of the American Woman Suffrage Association, famously challenged the customs upheld by the faculty at Oberlin College which denied selected female students the right to read aloud their graduation essays on the same basis as their male contemporaries. In spite of – or perhaps because of – having organized an unofficial women’s debating club and successfully petitioning her professors – at least for a time – to take part in debates during her coeducational rhetoric classes, Stone was refused the opportunity to take part in the aforementioned reading upon her own graduation in 1847. Though chosen to write an essay for the occasion, she turned down the honor on the basis that to do otherwise would signal support for the principle that women ought to have been denied, “The privilege of being co-laborers with men in any sphere to which their ability makes them adequate.”

    Women were also hampered in their ability to organize and to disseminate their ideas at this early juncture in their fight for political agency by contemporary laws which pointedly failed to recognize their possession of legal personhood. In many states, once a woman married, her legal identity became subsumed into that of her husband, making it next to impossible for married women to rent convention halls or contract printers to produce pamphlets without the permission of their spouses. Gradually, over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, these laws did begin to disappear, though the cause had little to do with granting women’s rights campaigners the freedom of action their deserved. The Panic of 1837 brought about any number of personal bankruptcies, particularly in the American South, and many state legislators responded to the resulting dissolution of family wealth – brought about, in many cases, by men who made poor use of the dowries granted to them by their in-laws – by passing such acts as would allow married women to own property. The result, while far from ideal – such laws rarely permitted women to dispose of their property without the written consent of their husband – did at least have useful side effects. Increasingly recognized as distinct individuals under the law, women were now able to begin taking the practical steps necessary to start creating local and national organizations for the purpose of advancing women’s rights in America.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXIX: “Forming a Better Public Sentiment”

    Having discussed the character of the various amendments to the Constitution that were approved by Congress and ratified prior to that which mandated the popular election of United States Senators, it now remains to explore the nature of all those amendments which have been made to the Constitution since that time. The purpose of such an examination, of course, is to establish whether the ratification of the 17^th Amendment – which, as aforementioned, shifted the power of electing Senators from the state legislatures to the general population – has had any significant effect on the character of those that followed. If any such effect can be detected, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the ratification of the 17^th Amendment has meaningfully altered how the United States Senate functions. And if no such effect is in evidence, it would seem equally sensible to infer that the provisions of the cited amendment have left the Senate largely unchanged. So far, based on a study of the first sixteen amendments, it would appear as though most of the initiatives which gave rise to the same were either of a largely institutional nature – in that they were proposed at the behest of elected officials in response to some development within the political or legal institutions of the United States of America – or contained some admixture of both institutional and popular priorities – in that they were the product of popular agitation as translated through the actions of state legislators and U.S. Senators. So far – near as this writer can determine – all of the aforementioned sixteen amendments would seem to fall into one or the other of these categories, with the 17^th itself sitting quite firmly in the latter. So what, then, of the nine that have followed? Has the ratification of the 17^th Amendment wrought a significant alteration to the kinds of amendments that have followed in its footsteps?  

    These questions lead us, of course, to the provisions and the story of the 18^th Amendment, which was declared ratified by the appropriate number of states on January 16^th, 1919. Not only is this addition to the text of the Constitution noteworthy in being the first to follow the aforementioned 17^th – making it the first amendment produced in part by a Senate whose members were all the product of popular election – but it is also, so far, the only amendment to have subsequently been repealed. The reason for this, of course, has to do with the terms and provisions thereof. The text of the amendment, which is divided into three parts, declares the following:

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

The third section, from a legal standpoint, would seem to be interesting enough. Never before had an amendment included qualifying text specifying a date beyond which, if the required number of states had not voted to ratify the same, further ratifications would be of no effect. But it was obviously the first section which marked the real significance of the measure at hand. With the ratification of the 18^th Amendment – which, as noted above, occurred in January of 1919 – it thereafter became not just illegal but unconstitutional to manufacture, sell, or transport alcohol “for beverage purposes” within, into, or out of the United States. 

    In order to understand how and why the United States Congress would grant their approval to such a drastic proposal – as well as how and why the various state legislatures would subsequently provide their support – one naturally needs to enter into a discussion of the activities of the American Temperance movement in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and the degree to which the legal probation of alcoholic beverages had become an object of popular agitation in the late 1910s. In its earliest incarnation, as of the late 18^th century, Temperance in the United States mainly constituted a kind of social advocacy campaign whereby concerned individuals – doctors and clergymen, in the main – attempted to persuade their fellow Americans of the physically and spiritually deleterious effects of alcohol consumption. The movement started small, mostly taking the form of local or state-level organizations whose aim was to influence both the habits and laws of their local communities, but by the middle of the 1820s the effort had started to pick up steam. In 1826, the American Temperance Society was formed in Boston, Massachusetts, the stated purpose of which was to become the primary national organization advocating for voluntary abstinence from alcoholic beverages. Within five years, the ATS encompassed over two thousand local chapters and over one hundred and fifty thousand members; within ten years, these figures rose to eight thousand and over one and a quarter million, respectively. At first, the Society’s aim was to promote moderation on an individual level, with each of its members pledging to refrain from consuming alcohol other than beer or wine. In time, however, the more hardline element within the various local chapter came to dominate the national discussion, with wholesale prohibition becoming the ultimate goal of the ATS by the end of the 1830s.

    As far as this overriding objective was concerned, the American Temperance Society and its supporters did enjoy their share of success. The state of Maine in particular proved to be fertile ground for prohibitionist sentiment, evidenced by the passage of the so-called “Fifteen Gallon Law” in 1838 – the terms of which prohibited the sale of spiritous beverages in quantities less than that amount, thereby outlawing small-scale commercial transactions – and then a statewide ban on all alcohol sales in 1851. These victories were quickly replicated in the various other states wherein the ATS held significant sway over the local political culture. Rhode Island passed its own “Maine Law” in 1852, followed by Vermont in 1853, Connecticut in 1854, and Delaware, Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire, all in 1855. In many cases, these prohibitory laws met with significant challenges on their way to implementation. In Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, for example, state courts responded to lawmakers’ initial efforts by declaring the relevant laws to be unconstitutional, forcing the various texts to be rewritten and re-submitted for legislative approval. And in Connecticut and New York, uncooperative governors forced prohibition to become an election issue, though in both cases the result was the elevation of a pro-temperance replacement. Enforcement also turned into something of a perpetual headache, and the ATS still had virtually zero penetration into the socio-political sphere of the American South. But victory, all the same, was victory. By the end of the 1850s, prohibition had established itself as one of the premier domestic policy issues on the contemporary American political stage.

    The Civil War, unsurprisingly, threw this situation into almost complete disarray. Not only did the abolition of slavery – which had alternately competed with and made cause with prohibition for the attention and support of the Northern middle class – come to monopolize the domestic policy agendas of Northern governments and Northern statesmen, but the need to fund the war effort led to the simultaneous repeal of prohibition laws and the imposition of excise taxes on liquor sales at both the state and federal levels. By the conflict’s end in 1865, virtually every prewar prohibition law had since been rendered defunct while the attention and energy of social reformers had shifted focus to issues like woman’s suffrage and Mormon polygamy. In time, however, the prohibition movement did recover, thanks in large part to the efforts of female organizers and activists. The creation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874 in particular would seem to mark the starting point in the second phase of prohibitionist activism in the history of the United States. Seeking to appeal to the moral sentiments of the American public through what was intended to be a specifically female and domestic perspective, the WCTU promoted abstinence from alcohol as being paramount to the cohesion and the happiness of the American family. The organization’s second president, teacher Frances Willard (1839-1898), explained its goals thusly in 1883. The purpose of the WCTU, she wrote, was, “Educating the young, forming a better public sentiment, reforming the drinking classes, transforming by the power of Divine grace those who are enslaved by alcohol, and removing the dram-shop from our streets by law.”    

    Thanks to the tireless advocacy of temperance campaigners like Frances Willard, a number of states began enacting new prohibitory laws over the course of the 1880s. Kansas went further than most, going so far as to ban the sale of alcohol by way of constitutional amendment in November of 1880. This was followed by a legal ban in Iowa in 1882 and the entrance of North Dakota and South Dakota into the union as officially dry states in 1889. In 1887, the Supreme Court also ruled in Mugler v. Kansas – in which the defendant, Peter Mugler, claimed relief for having been convicted of a crime for operating a brewery in central Kansas – that the Sunflower State’s constitutional ban on the sale of alcohol was entirely consistent with the various liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the due process protections of the 14^th Amendment. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911) tellingly commented – in a seeming admission of the effectiveness of the WCTU’s efforts – that,

We cannot shut out of view the fact, within the knowledge of all, that the public health, the public morals, and the public safety, may be endangered by the general use of intoxicating drinks; nor the fact established by statistics accessible to every one, that the idleness, disorder, pauperism and crime existing in the country, are, in some degree […] traceable to this evil.

When the Mugler verdict still didn’t put an end to the existence of breweries and saloons in the supposedly dry state of Kansas, another female activist emerged on the scene whose persistence and clarity of vision was every bit the equal of the likes of Frances Willard, though her preferred method of spreading the message of prohibition could not have been more different.

    Once describing herself as, “A bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus [and] barking at what He doesn't like [,]” Caroline Amelia Moore (1846-1911), known after her second marriage in 1874 as Carry Nation, was an early member of the WCTU in northern Kansas whose brazenness in advocating for the prohibition of alcohol made her a figure of national notoriety and celebration within the span of her own lifetime. Initially content to “serenade” local saloon patrons with a barrage of hymns as they attempted to drink, Nation claimed to have arrived at a place of distinct dissatisfaction with her own lack of effectiveness and received a supposed message from God in the summer of 1900. “Go to Kiowa,” is what she claimed to have been told, with the accompanying encouragement, “I’ll stand by you.” Two days later, having traveled to Dobson’s Saloon in the town of Kiowa, Kansas, Nation proceeded to smash ever liquor bottle she could find with the armful of rocks that she had collected along the way. Thus began a one-woman campaign of vandalism and property destruction that would soon make Carrie Nation a household name. Arrested some thirty times between 1900 and 1910 for what she referred to as her “hatchetations” – so called because a hatchet soon became her implement of choice – Nation paid her own legal fees by giving lectures and selling merchandise. She also took to expressing her views in the form of two separate publications: The Smasher’s Mail, a biweekly newsletter, and The Hatchet, a regular newspaper. Near the end of her life, as the first decade of the 20^th century was drawing to a close, she even began to appear on vaudeville stages in the United States and music hall stages across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom, though more in the guise of a preacher than an entertainer. By the time of her passing in 1911, she had well and truly become a genuine national phenomenon, applauded as much by temperance activists as she was actively loathed by bartenders.

    Without necessarily attributing all of the temperance movement’s success during the era in question to the singular actions of Carrie Nation, it is nonetheless worth noting that the number of states which embraced prohibition increased markedly during the height of her one-woman anti-liquor crusade over the course of the 1900s. Oklahoma, for example, became a dry state in 1907, followed by Georgia and Mississippi in 1908 and North Carolina and Tennessee in 1909. Nation’s aggressive behavior undeniably caught the attention of the contemporary American public and helped drive temperance back to the forefront of the nation’s political and social discourse. But where Carrie Nation left off – being but one woman with limited energy and resources – the Anti-Saloon League arguably picked up. Formed in Ohio in 1893 by a former lawyer named Howard Hyde Russell (1855-1946), the League was far more bureaucratic than the WCTU or the ATS had ever been, with a hierarchical structure and an emphasis on organizational methods native to the world of business. It was also exceptionally pietistic in its tone, thanks in large part to the influence of the League’s most famous leader, Wayne Wheeler (1869-1927). Possessed of both a deep-seated hatred of alcohol and a natural talent for lobbying, Wheeler made exceptionally skillful use of contemporary publicity methods to convince state and federal politicians that prohibition enjoyed far greater popular support than an actual survey of the voters might have shown. In particular, the League established a long and fruitful relationship with a private agency called the Southern Publicity Association, one of whose largest and most lucrative clients was the resurrected Ku Klux Klan. The resulting three-way dynamic, between the League, the SPA, and the Klan, proved exceptionally influential, particularly in Southern states and in parts of the rural North. As the Klan came to publicly endorse the efforts of the League and its leadership, so the League become a vocal defender of the Klan and its activities. Within the context of the pre-WWI American South, this made for a very potent combination.

    The other major socio-political force which fed into and buttressed the efforts of prohibition activists in the leadup to the passage of the 18^th Amendment in 1917 was, unsurprisingly, the same wave of progressivism that had made the 17^th Amendment possible. The reasons for this alliance were at once complex and eminently foreseeable. For one thing, advocates of progressive policies tended to be fixated on the concepts of social uplift and purification; they believed that sensible, scientific measures could be put in place that would purge American society of its spiritually, economically, and politically deleterious aspects. The prohibition of alcoholic beverages fitted very neatly into this worldview by purporting to encourage moral behavior, responsible citizenship, and individual accountability. Progressive economists argued that banning the sale of alcohol would reduce binge drinking among industrial workers and result in less lost productivity due to Monday morning hangovers. Progressive eugenicists asserted that the consumption of alcohol damaged the so-called “germ-plasm,” the result of which would be the eventual degeneration of the Anglo-Saxon race. And progressive political crusaders avowed that the saloon and the whiskey bottle formed the central recruiting devices of the corrupt political machines that effectively controlled many of the country’s largest urban areas. Indeed, the banning of alcohol sales, from the contemporary progressive point of view, seemed poised to solve most of the socio-economic issues which the most influential voices of the era had purported to identify. That the notion also fitted well with the self-conscious religiosity of the increasingly powerful American middle classes certainly helped matters along as well.

    By the time the United States Congress approved the final text of what would become the 18^th Amendment on August 1^st, 1917, the number of states possessed of prohibition laws of their own had increased yet again since the last spate witnessed at the end of the previous decade. West Virginia joined the fold in 1914, followed by Alabama and South Carolina in 1915, Idaho, Colorado, Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia in 1916, and Nebraska on the first day of May in 1917. In some cases, these jurisdictions totally banned the sale of alcohol, either by legislation or an amendment to the state constitution. In others, they merely allowed for the sale and manufacture of alcohol to be banned on a county or municipal basis. But combined, along with all of the other prohibitory measures that had been implemented in the states since the end of the Civil War, they ensured that more than half of American lived in a “dry” precinct of some description by the middle of the 1910s. Granted, prohibition never seemed to rise to the position of being a major campaign issue during any of the federal electoral contests held throughout this era. During the Election of 1916, for example – the last one to be held before the passage of the 18^th Amendment – neither the Democratic incumbent, Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), nor his Republican challenger, Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), took a strong position on the matter, no doubt in large part because both parties contained prominent “wet” and “dry” factions. By the time that the 65^th Congress finally met in the early spring of 1917, however, the deck had definitely been stacked in favor of the national contingent of “dries.” In all, one hundred and forty of the one hundred and eighty-four Democrats then serving in Congress were avowedly in favor of prohibition, as were one hundred and thirty-eight of the two hundred Republicans. All that was needed, it seemed, was for someone to make the proposal.

    So it came to pass, on August 1^st, 1917, that the United States Senate voted in favor of a resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution banning the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcoholic beverages for the subsequent approval of the various state assemblies. The final tally, in this instance, was 65 to 20, with each party providing ample majority support. The House of Representatives then proceeded to take up the measure, passing a revised resolution on December 17^th by a vote of 282 to 128. The Senate voted to approve this revision the very next day, with the result being that an amendment enforcing national prohibition was officially handed over to the states for ratification on December 18^th, 1917. Despite this relatively frictionless opening act, however, it does bear noting that the concept of national prohibition was not wholeheartedly or universally embraced by every sitting member of Congress. Notwithstanding the members of the House and the Senate who registered their disapproval by voting against the relevant resolutions, the proposal that passed regardless of these objections contained within it two “carve-outs” on behalf of those who remained somewhat wary of prohibition as a concept. First, unlike with any of the seventeen amendment that had been approved by Congress up to that point, the prohibition amendment contained language which would ensure that if the requisite number of states – circa 1917, thirty-six out of forty-eight – had not ratified the proposal by seven years to the day of its passage through Congress, the measure would be declared a failure. And second, in another novel move, the text of this same proposal declared that the terms thereof would become operative one year to the day after its successful ratification by the states.

    The purpose of the first of these caveats would not seem to be all that obvious. Why, for the first time in the history of the Constitution, did this particular group of lawmakers decide that this particular amendment proposal should include, in its text, an expiry date? What was it that this group of lawmakers was hoping to achieve? The answer, quite simply, is that they were hoping the proposal would fail. Not all of them felt this way, of course. As aforementioned, by the time the 65^th Congress convened in March of 1917, the majority of both parties’ congressional representation were avowed supporters of legal prohibition. But there remained significant factions in both party caucuses – over one hundred and twenty lawmakers in all, split more or less evenly between the Democrats and the Republicans – who were avowedly against any such measures and who would have preferred that the whole enterprise simply go up in smoke. Given that they were steeply outnumbered in both houses of Congress, of course, this was not a particularly likely outcome. And given the aforementioned degree of influence wielded by organizations like the Anti-Saloon League in certain parts of the country, many other lawmakers who might perhaps have voted against the proposal feared for their political lives if it became known that they had “wet” leanings. But if they could not defeat the proposal directly, these outnumbered Senators and Congressmen could always attempt to ensure that the ratification process took place according to a timeline of their own design. They might not have been able to thwart the forces of prohibition in Congress, but perhaps such resistance could be successfully mounted in the states. According to this kind of strategy, the “wets” wouldn’t even have to defeat the amendment by way of a sufficient number of negative votes. All they would have to do is draw the process out beyond seven years. So long as no more than thirty-five states voted to ratify by December 18^th, 1924, the prohibition amendment would be declared void and of no effect.

    The significance of the second cited caveat is comparatively quite clear. Why would the framers of the 18^th Amendment have included a stipulation ensuring that the provisions of the same did not come into force until one year had passed following its successful ratification? Enthusiastic as some of the nation’s prohibition campaigners were for alcohol to completely disappear from American public and private life, it would have been difficult for all but the most diehard enemies of drink to deny that such a drastic alteration to domestic buying patterns might carry with it certain negative consequences. The sudden cessation of the manufacture, transportation, and sale of any and all alcoholic beverages, in short, was bound to exert a powerfully negative effect on the American economy. Breweries and distilleries employing countless thousands of people would be forced to shut down, saloons, taverns, and bar would have to either close or change their business model, and any number of longshoremen and teamsters would be forced to cope with a significant loss of work. For better or worse, alcohol was the lynchpin of several very productive industries, and the shock caused by its disappearance would not be lightly felt. That is, unless the financial interests concerned were giving sufficient time to make the necessary preparations. If the nation’s distillers had a full year to transition to producing alcohol for medical or industrial purposes – both of which the relevant amendment did not stand to prevent – perhaps they might be able to keep most of their workforces employed. The same might be said of the nation’s tavern-keepers, who would certainly benefit from a little time to sort out what kind of future they might pursue in a world without alcohol. And so too would those who earned their daily bread by loading, transporting, and unloading the stuff. It may indeed have been the case that national prohibition was a done deal, but at least the resulting blow to the economy could be softened somewhat by building in a kind of grace period.

    As it actually played out, of course, this grace period was very much needed. The seven-year deadline turned out to have no measurable effect, with the 36^th state –i.e., Nebraska – ratifying the amendment just over a year after its passage through Congress. As certified by Secretary of State Frank L. Polk (1871-1943), January 16^th, 1919 thus marked the date that the 18^th Amendment became part of the Constitution. By the end of the year – after an apparently more vigorous debate than that which accompanied the amendment itself – Congress passed the Volstead Act (1919), the purpose of which was to legally define the term “intoxicating liquors,” to provide the federal government with the necessary tools to enforce the probation of the same, and to ensure that the manufacture of alcohol for medical and industrial purposes was properly regulated and protected. And then, at last, on January 17^th, 1920, the provisions of the 18^th Amendment were finally enforced. For the better part of the next fifteen years, beverages containing more than 0.5% alcohol by volume would be illegal in the whole of the United States of America. People could still drink the stuff, of course. Neither the amendment nor its enforcing legislation made personal consumption a crime. And over the course of the next decade, many people would still drink it. But whenever they bought it, or sold it, or transported it, or gave it away, they would be guilty of a federal crime. The result? Well, that’s another story entirely…

    For the purpose of the present discussion, what matters is the degree to which the 18^th Amendment was clearly the product of popular agitation rather than institutional machination. Banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of spiritous beverages did not stand to have any direct effect upon the character or function of either the American federal government or the various state governments. Congress, in drafting and approving it, was not attempting to address a vital deficiency in the basic framework of American republicanism, and nor were its members seeking after more advantageous political outcomes by way of the same. There was no institutional advantage to be gained, in short, by ensuring that the United States became a dry country at the dawn of the 1920s. On the contrary, the only reason to pursue such an objective was to secure the continued support of the tremendous number of voters who loudly favored it. Prohibition – as explained at length above – was the long-term goal of a several waves of social activism that flourished, floundered, and flourished again over the course of the 19^th century. Its principal supporters, at first, were mostly doctors and clergymen whose interest, as stated at the time, was in saving lives and saving souls. But over time, by way of organization, and in the midst of victories and setbacks alike, the movement to ban drink became a hugely powerful political force.

    Women in particular came to play a important role in the mainstreaming of the campaign to close down the nation’s dram shops and breweries. By combining a species of middle-class Protestant piety with appeals to domestic tranquility – and throwing in, on occasion, a little militant sermonizing – organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were able to resurrect the anti-liquor crusade after its ignoble death during the chaos of the Civil War and sustain it until the likes of the politically canny Anti-Saloon League could take over the struggle at the beginning of the 20^th century. Thereafter, by way of an extremely effective campaign of public relations, sufficient support for prohibition was gathered as to make a constitutional amendment more or less inevitable. Was it to the benefit of the federal government, the state governments, or any of the officers of the same to support such an outcome at any point during this process? Not particularly. Individual statesmen, to be sure, had cause to be in favor of banning drink. As their constituents came to favor it, it made political sense for them to follow suit. But prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol was not the answer to any particular institutional problem. It would not have adjusted some aspect of the Constitution which time and practice had exposed as faulty. It would not have facilitated the growth of an expanded vision of American republicanism. And it certainly wouldn’t have helped to redefine the nature of citizenship in such a way as to essentially transform the basic premise of the American experiment. All that it would do was satisfy the moral and spiritual prejudices of a certain portion of the American population. It was what the people wanted, in short, and so it was that their representatives gave it to them.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXVIII: “Indispensable to the Nation's Life”

    The 16^th Amendment would seem to among the most commonly overlooked of its brethren. It was the final amendment to be drafted before the state legislatures lost their access to the drafting process itself, which makes it highly significant to the discussion currently underway in these pages. But its object is not what one might particularly call thrilling. The text of it reads, in full:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Again, hardly thrilling. Indeed, quite mundane. And yet, the 16^th Amendment has proven to be exceptionally consequential. It is a product of its era, to be sure, being the brainchild of populism and imperialism in more or less equal measure. But beyond its particular historical significance, it also inarguably forms the cornerstone of the funding regime underpinning the modern American republic. Without the ability to collect taxes on personal incomes “without regard to any census or enumeration,” the United States Government would not be able to borrow the increasingly large sums of money which have come to constitute one of its primary sources of revenue and it would accordingly have been unable to fund most of the initiatives it has undertaken over the course of the last century. Without the 16^th Amendment, in short, the American republic would be but a shadow of the global power which the modern world has come to know. Say about this what you will – whether you believe a globally dominant United States is good for the world or not – but the historical significance of the thing would seem next to impossible to deny. Bearing this in mind, it would accordingly appear to be a line of inquiry worth pursuing precisely how the amendment itself came about. Who favored it, and why, and what did they ultimately hope to achieve?

    In order to answer these questions – and in order to satisfy the broader purpose of the inquiry currently underway – we must return once more to the so-called “Progressive Era” of American politics. Or rather, we must return to the Progressive Era…eventually. The amendment itself, after all, was approved by Congress in the summer of 1909 and was ratified by the requisite number of states at the beginning of 1913. But the story of how the whole initiative came about actually extends back at least as early as the 1860s. During the Civil War, it seems, in order to fund what would soon prove to be a truly gargantuan war effort, Congress passed the first of what would soon become several federal Revenue Acts. Introduced at various points between 1861 and 1865, these acts initially levied and then increased the first federal income tax in the history of the American republic, the proceeds of which would at their height account for approximately one-fifth of the annual federal revenue. Intended to compensate for increased personal investment in stocks as opposed to property – the latter of which the federal government had been freely taxing for decades – the levy took the form of a simple flax tax – three percent, initially – on personal incomes in excess of eight hundred dollars. As an emergency measure needed to see the nation through a disastrous and unprecedented war, the American people were evidently willing to tolerate such an intrusion into their personal financial affairs. And at length, by way of the Springer v. United States decision in 1881, the Supreme Court came around to acknowledging the measure as being in keeping with the Constitution. But none of this meant that income tax was going to continue to be collected indefinitely. By the time the Revenue Act of 1864 came time to be renewed in the early 1870s, Congress declined to do so on the grounds that such levies were no longer necessary. The war was over, the state of emergency had passed, and there just didn’t seem to be any cause for the federal government to continue collecting more than the standard mix of tariffs and property taxes.

    Enter, twenty years later, the administration of Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), the first Democrat elected to the office of President since 1856. Cleveland and his allies had made a general lowering of tariffs a major campaign promise during the leadup to the Election of 1892, and once in office proceeded to follow through on their pledge with the drafting of a major tariff bill in 1894. As the intended reduction in taxes upon raw materials would have also, in isolation, resulted in a reduction in federal revenues, however, certain among the Democrats who then controlled Congress sought to compensate by additionally levying a relatively modest federal income tax. This would constitute the first federal income tax in two decades, it was true, and the first ever to be collected outside of a period of national emergency. But in practical terms, on a per capita basis, it was substantially less onerous than its Civil War-era predecessors. Applying only to incomes in excess of four thousand dollars – and including dividends, gifts, and inheritances – the federal government would collect a mere two percent for itself. Not every Democrat within the contemporary party caucus was necessarily in favor of this attempt to balance the federal books, it bears noting. Indeed, many of them were far more concerned with simply lowering the tariffs and were willing to tolerate the corresponding tax increases – foisted upon them by populist Congressmen William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) and Benton McMillin (1845-1933) – only because they suspected that the Supreme Court would strike them down. This, as it happened, is just what the Supreme Court ultimately did.

    Following the passage of the resulting Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act in 1894 – so named for its co-sponsors, Congressman William Wilson (1843-1900) and Senator Arthur Gorman (1839-1906) – a New York-based bank called the Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company determined to comply with the act on behalf of its various shareholders. Not only were the bank’s directors intent on delivering the applicable percentages to the Department of the Treasury, but they also intended to provide to this same body the names of every individual whose income was thus being taxed. Among these individuals, a man named Charles Pollack then raised an objection. Though he owned, in total, only ten shares in the bank, he did not want them unilaterally disposing of any portion of his income. Accordingly, he brought suit. And while his case was initially dismissed when it found its way into the federal circuit courts, Pollack then appealed to the Supreme Court, which delivered its ruling in the spring of 1895. The substance of the opinion, as written by Chief Justice Melville Fuller (1833-1910), was that while taxes on incomes alone were perfectly permissible under the terms of the Constitution – in keeping with the Court’s aforementioned Springer v. United States decision – taxes on incomes derived from dividends, rents, or interest decidedly were not. The reason for this, as Chief Justice Fuller explained it, was that an income derived from the ownership of a type of property – be it a piece of land, a building, or a share of stock – could not be legally separated from the property itself. Income derived from property, after all, was but an extension of whatever value that the property in question may have held. Taxes on property income were therefore tantamount to direct taxes, which, according to Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, “Shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers [.]” While all other types of incomes could be taxed in the form of an excise, therefore, incomes derived from property had to be treated like property. The relevant portion of the Wilson-Gorman Act was therefore null and void.

    The Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company (1895) decision did not turn out to be a particularly popular one among large swaths of the contemporary American political class. Indeed, at a time when members of both parties were increasingly concerned with things like inefficiency, waste, corruption, wealth inequality, and the rise of corporate monopolies, Chief Justice Fuller’s ruling that the primary incomes of some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens were practically immune from taxation did not land very well at all. The Democratic Party, for one, had become increasingly intertwined with the contemporary populist movement, the primary supporters of which were agrarian westerners who felt that an overreliance on tariffs would only end up punishing poor farmers and laborers. The industrialized East was where most of the nation’s wealth was concentrated, and yet it was the comparatively impoverished South and West where people would end up sacrificing a larger portion of their incomes in paying taxes on the goods they needed to survive. The Democrats accordingly made a meal out of the Pollack ruling, going so far as to include a federal income tax plank in their platform leading up to the Election of 1896 and choosing the aforementioned William Jennings Bryan as their nominee for President.

    Many progressive Republicans were also mightily displeased at the outcome of the Pollack case, though the nature of their disapproval had its roots in a different source. Whereas populist Democrats were concerned primarily with wealth inequality, Republicans like Robert La Follette (1855-1925), Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), and Norris Brown (1863-1960) saw the era’s increasingly large and powerful corporations as representing the single greatest threat to the prosperity of the American citizen. So long as these entities were permitted to continue growing unchecked, these men avowed, they would eventually form monopolies which no force on Earth could counter and whose primary victims would be the consumers forced to pay whatever rates their corporate overlords set. By disallowing the taxation of things like dividends and interest – absent a practically unworkable scheme of state-by-state apportionment – Pollack effectively helped to aid this process along by allowing corporations to drain more wealth out of the country than they could ever pay back in tariffs. But while Republican lawyers and statesmen began notching out victories in the states against various species of corporation – see La Follette’s battles with the railroads during his tenure as Governor of Wisconsin and Roosevelt’s support for the Ford Franchise-Tax Bill (1899) as Governor of New York – similar success at the federal level continued to elude them in the wake of the Pollack ruling. As long as Chief Justice Fuller’s decision was still the last word on taxing property incomes, there seemed to be no point in even broaching the subject in Congress.

    Events finally took a significant turn in favor of reform in the spring of 1909 following the inauguration as President of Republican William Howard Taft (1857-1930). In a special message to Congress in July of that year, Taft drew attention to the Pollack decision, what he perceived to be its negative impact on domestic tax policy, and the need for some manner of remediation. “The decision of the Supreme Court in the income-tax cases,” he notably declared,

Deprived the National Government of a power which, by reason of previous decisions of the court, it was generally supposed that Government had. It is undoubtedly a power the National Government ought to have. It might be indispensable to the nation's life in great crises. Although I have not considered a constitutional amendment as necessary to the exercise of certain phases of this power, a mature consideration has satisfied me that an amendment is the only proper course for its establishment to its full extent. I therefore recommend to the Congress that both Houses, by a two-thirds vote, shall propose an amendment to the Constitution conferring the power to levy an income tax upon the National Government without apportionment among the States in proportion to population.

Unsurprisingly, this call for an income tax amendment by the leader of their party roused many progressive Republicans to begin pursuing exactly that. Ultimately, it was the aforementioned Senator Brown who succeeded in drafting the requested reform. But its successful passage through Congress was only made possible by a major split then threatening to tear the Republican Party apart.

    Taft’s message, it bears noting, had been delivered at a time when his party both held the majority in both houses of Congress and was also in the midst of a rather punishing debate about federal tariffs. Progressive Republicans like Senators Norris and La Follette were for their part favor of lowering most tariffs, as were populist Democrats from the South and West. Tariffs, they all agreed, disproportionally impacted the poorest members of American society while raising far less in federal revenues than other kinds of taxes might. Conservative Republicans, meanwhile, held protectionism to be a core tenet of the Republican Party gospel. As explained by men like Nelson Aldrich (1841-1915), majority leader and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, tariffs protected the profits of American business, ensured high wages for industrial workers, and prevented American farmers from being undercut by foreign competition. In the immediate, given this division, there did not seem to be much hope for compromise. When Republican Congressmen Sereno Payne (1843-1914) put forth an initial proposal that would have seen tariffs lowered across the board, Senator Aldrich offered a counterproposal that would have lowered fewer tariffs and actively increased several more. Progressives then responded with a proposal straight out of Taft’s address. It was the duty of the those who aimed to lower federal tariffs, he said, in light of what he described as the “rapidly increasing deficit […] to arrange the duty so as to secure an adequate income, and […] that if it was not possible to do so by import duties, new kinds of taxation must be adopted [.]” A tax on inheritances was Taft’s first choice, but as this seemed to be something of a non-starter with Senate Republicans, he was instead inclined to suggest, “An amendment to the tariff bill imposing upon all corporations and joint stock companies for profit […] an excise tax measured by 2 per cent on the net income of such corporations.” Not only would this serve as, “An excise tax upon the privilege of doing business as an artificial entity” but it was calculated to, “Bring into the Treasury of the United States not less than $25,000,000.” With a newly inaugurated President thus urging them on, progressive Republicans accordingly inserted just such an amendment into the tariff bill.

    It was at this point that Senator Aldrich attempted a little slight-of-hand. With the Republican caucus thus split and his leadership in the Senate under threat, he decided to offer his progressive opponents something on the order of a trade. In exchange for their support of his version of the tariff bill – with included more increases than decreases as well as a tax on corporate incomes – he was willing to throw his own weight behind the draft income tax amendment that Senator Brown was attempting to promote. In actual fact, he was not in favor of any such alteration to the Constitution. Like many Conservative Republicans, Aldrich was too much of a friend to big business to believe taxing their dividends to be in the least bit desirable. But what the Senator from Rhode Island was betting on was that the amendment would never be ratified. He could stomach – and would stomach – an excise tax on corporate incomes, but he would only vote for Senator Brown’s beloved amendment because he believed it was doomed to failure. On July 12^th, 1909, this wager was put to the test, with a unanimous affirmation in the Senate and a vote of 318-14 in the House The progressive Republicans came around, conservative Republicans held firm, populist Democrats jumped at the opportunity, and protectionist Democrats voted their interest. Nearly everyone, it seemed, had got what they wanted. Now it fell to the states to prove Senator Aldrich right or wrong.

    Obviously, given that the 16^th Amendment is what it is, Senator Aldrich was wrong. Not only were state legislatures in the South and West already inclined to support any such measures as would obviate the need for the punishing federal tariffs which their primarily agrarian inhabitants actively struggled to pay, but a sharp rise in commodity prices that had begun in the late 1890s also primed states in the Midwest and even the Northeast to respond favorably as well. In addition, there also existed an increasingly influential segment of the Republican Party inclined to view an undifferentiated federal income tax as an essential ingredient in the national program that they envisioned. Described by faction leader and former President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech in 1910 as the “New Nationalism,” this program included the creation of a national health service, social insurance, farm relief, and worker’s compensation, all of which was to be accompanied by a general strengthening of the American military with an emphasis on protecting the American merchant fleet. Absent some means of funding such measures, of course, any one of them might have proven to be ruinously expensive. In consequence, Roosevelt Republicans were also strongly in favor of a robust regime of inheritance taxes and federal income taxes by which their vision of a new America for the 20^th century might be placed on a stable footing. In light of the support increasingly enjoyed by the likes of Roosevelt – whose popularity grew in proportion as that of his hand-picked successor, Taft, waned – the only group left inclined to vote against ratifying Senator Brown’s amendment were diehard conservative Republicans like Senator Aldrich and his supporters. And as 1909 progressed through to 1913, this faction’s influence steadily evaporated.

    The actual progress of ratification makes for a rather interesting tale. In the first year after the amendment’s approval, from August of 1909 to August of 1910, only nine states saw their way clear to providing their affirmation. But among that small number were exactly the states one would expect to find at this early stage: Alabama, Kentucky, South Carolina, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Maryland, Georgia, and Texas. All but Illinois were located in the South, and all were primarily agrarian in terms of their economy. In light of their aforementioned antipathy towards the continued imposition of federal tariffs, their support for a federal income tax was more or less a given. The next stage in the ratification process took place between January of 1911 and July of that same year, during which time no fewer than twenty-two states added their own affirmations to the record. Among these twenty-two were seven from the West – Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, California, Nevada, and Colorado – ten from the Midwest – Ohio, Indiana, South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin – three from the South – North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – and one – New York – from the Northeast. Again, most of the enthusiasm seemed to come from regions of the country most likely – due to the nature of the local economy – to favor a shift from taxes on commodities to taxes on incomes, with only one state from the region which benefitted from a reliance on tariffs chiming in at the very end.

    The next five states to ratify the amendment were also something of a mixed bag. There was Arizona, in the Southwest, which had only just become a state and was dominated by the Democratic Party; Minnesota, in the Midwest, which was deeply agrarian in its politics; Louisiana, in the South, about which much the same could be said; West Virginia, in the Southeast, where the mining industry was king; and Delaware, in the Northeast, which was the odd man out. Delaware being the 36^th state to vote in favor of ratification, the process was officially completed on February 3^rd, 1913. Over the next several months, the states that followed were similarly telling. New Mexico and Wyoming were very much western states, the former of which had only acceded to the union in January of 1912, and New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were all firmly in the Northeast. Connecticut and Rhode Island, it bears noting, each voted to reject the amendment, while the state of Pennsylvania never bothered to even consider it. Given that all of these Northeastern states benefited from a reliance on federal tariffs over federal excises, such a result was rather to be expected.

    All the same, it is interesting to note that Roosevelt’s native New York, though home to some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country, opted to ratify the amendment relatively early in the process, and that the state which carried the amendment across the line, Delaware, was also located in the Northeast. These two ratifications – along with those of New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire – would seem to speak to the degree to which the tax debate in Congress which had given rise to both the Payne-Aldrich Tariff and the 16^th Amendment succeeded in fracturing the contemporary Republican Party. Whereas, under the leadership of President William McKinley in the late 1890s, Republicans had been so supportive of protectionism that they approved the Dingley Tariff (1897), one of the highest and longest lasting in the history of the United States, the influence of William Howard Taft proved insufficient to either assuage the progressives in his party or elicit compromise on the part of the conservatives. Indeed, his stewardship of the party proved so divisive – or else the tensions which McKinley had managed to keep at a low simmer could no longer be prevented from finally boiling over – that the Republican National Convention, held in the summer of 1912, quickly devolved into a series of complaints and recriminations on the part of the progressive wing of the party and saw Taft ultimately gain the nomination and Roosevelt decide to bolt. The subsequent formation of the Progressive Party under Roosevelt’s leadership in turn resulted in the incumbent Taft finishing in third place in the Election of 1912, Roosevelt finishing in second, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson coming in first.

    But this is all rather beside the point, fascinating though it may be in its own right. What matters, under the circumstances, is what the proposal, approval, and successful ratification of the 16^th Amendment says about its fundamental character. Was it mainly a popular initiative, an institutional reform, or something in between? In light of both the nature of the policy which the amendment sought to empower and the political machinations which resulted in its ultimate approval by Congress, the latter of these characterizations would seem to be the most apt. There can be no denying, circa 1909, that the concept of a federal income tax had more than its share of popular support. As aforementioned, farmers and laborers in the South, West, and Midwest increasingly struggled under the weight of federal tariffs over the course of the 1890s and 1900s whose burden Northeastern industrialists were able to shoulder with relative ease. Senators representing the former regions accordingly had every reason – inasmuch as the legislators who appointed them had every reason – to support such measures as would offer relief to their constituents by shifting the nation’s tax burden to those most able to pay it.

    All that being said, the story of precisely how the 16^th Amendment made it out of Congress in the first place – and the pace and cadence of its eventual ratification – speak to an a substantially different line of causation. Senator Norris Brown, the initial sponsor of the amendment, no doubt acted when and how he did because he felt he had the backing of the newly inaugurated President Taft and because he believed that Taft broadly shared his progressive political principles. And Senator Nelson Aldrich, whose support inarguably made the amendment’s approval possible, most assuredly acted as he did only in order to allay a major division in his party and to secure the passage of his preferred version of the tariff bill then under discussion in Congress. That his strategy failed on both counts would seem to be a testament both to the depth of the cleavage then tearing the Republican Party apart and to the degree to which a federal income tax represented a policy with national appeal. To no small extent, it must be said, state legislatures acted as they did during the ratification process because the members thereof understood that providing tax relief to the constituents was bound to pay electoral dividends. But there was also doubtless a significant degree of party politicking wrapped up in which states voted, and when, and how.

    The ratification of the 16^th Amendment, recall, took place at the same time as the two major parties were readying themselves to take part in the Election of 1912. And in terms of the Republicans in particular, it took place over a period that witnessed their continued splintering and final division into two parties. In consequence, while Republican state legislators were then in the midst of considering the aforementioned amendment, they were also simultaneously undertaking to hold primaries and assign delegates for the purpose of choosing their party’s eventual nominee for President. Given that Roosevelt’s New Nationalism program – discussed above – held up the imposition of federal income taxes as key to its eventual success, and given that President Taft received most of his support from regions of the country where conservative Republicans on the model of Senator Aldrich held sway, it would seem fairly reasonable to assume that either ratifying or rejecting the amendment in question became a part of how the various state Republican parties – where said parties were in control of the state legislature – asserted their factional standing as the Election of 1912 drew ever closer. Were these Republicans legislators entirely unmoved by the financial travails of their constituents or their own desire for reelection? Of course not. But with a presidential contest in the offing and their party in the process of a very messy ideological realignment, the Republicans who then controlled the various state assemblies had things to consider beyond simply pleasing the voters. The 16^th Amendment, therefore, like so many of its predecessors, would seem best characterized as the product of both popular and institutional support.