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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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