Susan B. Anthony Part 33

[377] Harper, _Anthony_, II, p. 712.

[378] During this visit the young sculptor, Adelaide Johnson, modeled busts of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton which later were chiseled in marble and were exhibited with the bust of Lucretia Mott at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. They are now in the Capitol in Washington.

[379] To Clarina Nichols. Harper, _Anthony_, II, p. 544. Miss Anthony wrote in her diary, Oct. 18, 1893, "Lucy Stone died this evening at her home--Dorchester, Ma.s.s. aged 75--I can but wonder if the spirit now sees things as it did 25 years ago!" The wound inflicted by Lucy's misunderstanding of her motives had never healed.

[380] _Ibid._, p. 727.

[381] Rachel Foster was married in 1888 to Cyrus Miller Avery.

[382] May Wright Sewall, Editor, _The World's Congress of Representative Women_ (Chicago, 1894), p. 464.

[383] Statement by Lucy E. Anthony, Una R. Winter Collection.

[384] Miss Anthony's diary, 1893, mentions visiting "dear Mrs.

c.o.o.nley" (Lydia Avery c.o.o.nley) in her beautiful, friendly home. May Wright Sewall, and devoted Emily Gross. Her sister Mary, Daniel, Merritt, and their families joined her at the Fair for a few weeks.

[385] Shaw, _The Story of a Pioneer_, pp. 205-207.

[386] Ms., Diary, Nov. 8, 1893.

LIQUOR INTERESTS ALERT FOREIGN-BORN VOTERS AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE

"I am in the midst of as severe a treadmill as I ever experienced, traveling from fifty to one hundred miles every day and speaking five or six nights a week,"[387] Susan wrote a friend in 1894, during the campaign to wrest woman suffrage from the New York const.i.tutional convention. She was now seventy-four years old. Political machines and financial interests were deeply intrenched in New York, and although two governors had recommended that women be represented in the const.i.tutional convention and a bill had been pa.s.sed making women eligible as delegates, neither Republicans nor Democrats had the slightest intention of allowing women to slip into men's stronghold.

It was obvious to Susan that without representation at the convention and without power to enforce their demands, women's only hope was an intensive educational campaign which she now directed with vigor.

Whenever she could, she conferred with Mrs. Stanton, whose judgment she valued, and there was zest in working together as they had during the previous const.i.tutional convention in 1867.

The women of New York were aroused as never before. Young able speakers went through the state, piling up signatures on their pet.i.tions, but they had few influential friends among the delegates.

Anti-suffragists were active, encouraged by Bishop Doane of the Protestant Episcopal church and Mrs. Lyman Abbott, whose name carried the prestige and influence of her husband's popular magazine, _The Outlook_.

With the election of Joseph Choate of New York as president of the convention, Susan knew that woman suffrage was doomed, for Choate had political aspirations and was not likely to let his sympathies for an unpopular cause jeopardize his chances of becoming governor. While he gave women every opportunity to be heard, at the same time he arranged for the defeat of woman suffrage by appointing men to consider the subject who were definitely opposed, and they submitted an adverse report. Here was a situation similar to that in 1867, when her one-time friend, Horace Greeley, had deserted women for political expediency.

"I am used to defeat every time and know how to pick up and push on for another attack," she wrote as she now turned her attention to Kansas.[388]

The Republicans in Kansas had sponsored school and munic.i.p.al suffrage for women and had pa.s.sed a woman suffrage amendment to be referred to the people in 1894. Yet they proved to be as great a disappointment to Susan as they were in 1867, when as a last resort she had been obliged to campaign with the Democrats and George Francis Train.

The population of Kansas had changed with the years, as immigrants from Europe had come into the state, and Susan was again confronted with the powerful opposition of foreign-born voters for whose support the political parties bargained. The liquor interests were also active, and the Republicans, who had brought prohibition to Kansas, now left the question discreetly alone, even making a deal with German Democrats for their votes by promising to ignore in their platform both prohibition and woman suffrage. Prohibition and woman suffrage were synonymous in the minds of voters, because women had generally voted for enforcement in munic.i.p.al elections, and no matter how hard Susan tried, she found it impossible to have woman suffrage considered on its own merits.

Watching the straws in the wind, she saw Republican supremacy seriously threatened by the new Populist party. Convinced that she could no longer count on help from Kansas Republicans, she turned to the Populist party, ignoring the pleas of Republican women who warned her she would hurt the cause by a.s.sociation with such a radical group.

The Populists were generally regarded as the party of social unrest, of a regulated economy, and unsound money, and they were looked upon with suspicion. To many they represented a threat to the American free-enterprise system, and they were blamed for the labor troubles which had flared up in the b.l.o.o.d.y Homestead strike in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and in the Pullman strike, defying the powerful railroads. Susan was never afraid to side with the underdog, and she could well understand why western farmers, in the hope of relief, were eagerly flocking into the Populist party when their corn sold for ten cents a bushel and the products they bought were high-priced and their mortgage interest was never lower than 10 per cent.

To the Populist convention, she declared, "I have labored for women's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt for forty years and I have always said that for the party that endorsed it, whether Republican, Democratic, or Populist, I would wave my handkerchief."[389]

"We want more than the waving of your handkerchief, Miss Anthony,"

interrupted a delegate, who then asked her, "If the People's party put a woman suffrage plank in its platform, will you go before the voters of this state and tell them that because the People's party has espoused the cause of woman suffrage, it deserves the vote of every one who is a supporter of that cause?"

"I most certainly will," she replied, adding as the audience cheered her wildly, "for I would surely choose to ask votes for the party which stood for the principle of justice to women, though wrong on financial theories, rather than for the party which was sound on questions of money and tariff, and silent on the pending amendment to secure political equality to half of the people."

"I most certainly will" was the phrase which was remembered and was flashed through the country, and as a result, the Republican press and Susan's Republican friends harshly criticized her for taking her stand with the radicals.

Like all political parties, the Populists found it hard to comprehend justice for women, but after a four-hour debate, the convention endorsed the woman suffrage amendment, absolving, however, members who refused to support it. The rank and file rejoiced as if each and every one of them were heart and soul for the cause. They cheered, they waved their canes, they threw their hats high in the air, and then swarmed around Susan and Anna Shaw to shake their hands and welcome them into the Populist party.

With woman suffrage at last a political issue in Kansas, Susan left the field to her "girls." Her homecoming brought reporters to 17 Madison Street for the details about her alignment with the Populist party. "I didn't go over to the Populists," she told them. "I have been like a drowning man for a long time, waiting for someone to throw a plank in my direction. I didn't step on the whole platform, but just on the woman suffrage plank.... Here is a party in power which is likely to remain in power, and if it will give its endors.e.m.e.nt to our movement, we want it."[390]

This explanation, however, did not satisfy her critics, and as the Republican press circulated false stories about her enthusiasm for the Populist party, letters of protest poured in, among them one from Henry Blackwell. To him, she replied, "I shall not praise the Republicans of Kansas, or wish or work for their success, when I know by their own confessions to me that the rights of the women of their state have been traded by them in cold blood for the votes of the lager beer foreigners and whisky Democrats.... I never, in my whole forty years work, so utterly repudiated any set of politicians as I do those Republicans of Kansas.... I never was surer of my position that no self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her political rights."[391]

The contest in Kansas was close and bitter. Kansas women carried on an able campaign with the help of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. When Susan returned to the state in October, she not only found that the Democrats had entered the fight with an anti-suffrage plank but the Populists had noticeably lost ground since the Pullman strike riots, the court injunction against the strikers, and the arrest of Eugene V. Debs. Again this prairie state, from which she had hoped so much, refused to extend suffrage to women. Impulsively she recommended a little "Patrick Henryism" to the women of Kansas, suggesting that they fold their hands and refuse to help men run the churches, the charities, and the reform movements.[392]

California was the next state to demand Susan's attention. A Republican legislature had submitted a woman suffrage amendment to be voted on by the people in 1896, and the women of California asked for her help. She toured the state in the spring of 1895 with Anna Howard Shaw, and everywhere she won friends. The continuous travel and speaking, however, taxed her far more than she realized, and soon after her return to the East, she collapsed. As this news flashed over the wires, letters poured in from her friends, begging her to spare herself. Two of these letters were especially precious. One in bold vigorous script was from her good comrade, Parker Pillsbury, now eighty-six, who had been an unfailing help during the most difficult years of her career and whom she probably trusted more completely than any other man. The other from her dearest friend, Elizabeth Stanton, read, "I never realized how desolate the world would be to me without you until I heard of your sudden illness. Let me urge you with all the strength I have, and all the love I bear you, to stay at home and rest and save your precious self."[393]

She now realized that rest was imperative for a time, but it troubled her that people thought of her as old and ill, and she wrote Clara Colby never to mention anyone's illness in her _Woman's Tribune_, adding, "It is so dreadful to get public thought centered on one as ill--as I have had it the last two months."[394]

She had no intention of retiring from the field. She knew her own strength and that her life must be one of action. "I am able to endure the strain of daily traveling and lecturing at over three-score and ten," she observed, "mainly because I have always worked and loved work.... As machinery in motion lasts longer than when lying idle, so a body and soul in active exercise escapes the corroding rust of physical and mental laziness, which prematurely cuts off the life of so many women."[395]

Yet she did slow up a little, refusing an offer from the Slayton Lecture Bureau for a series of lectures at $100 a night, and she engaged a capable secretary, Emma B. Sweet, to help her with her tremendous correspondence. "Dear Rachel" had given her a typewriter, and now instead of dashing off letters at her desk late at night, she learned to dictate them to Mrs. Sweet at regular hours. As requests came in from newspapers and magazines for her comments on a wide variety of subjects, she answered those that made possible a word on the advancement of women.

Bicycling had come into vogue and women as well as men were taking it up, some women even riding their bicycles in short skirts or bloomers.

What did she think of this? "If women ride the bicycle or climb mountains," she replied, "they should don a costume which will permit them the use of their legs." Of bicycling she said, "I think it has done more to emanc.i.p.ate woman than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood."[396]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ida Husted Harper]

Susan returned to California in February 1896. Through the generosity and interest of two young Rochester friends, her Unitarian minister, William C. Gannett, and his wife, Mary Gannett, she was able to take her secretary with her. Making her home in San Francisco with her devoted friend, Ellen Sargent, she at once began to plan speaking tours for herself and her "girls," many of whom, including her niece Lucy, had come West to help her. She appealed successfully to Frances Willard to transfer the national W.C.T.U. convention to another state, for she was determined to keep the issue of prohibition out of the California campaign.

With the press more than friendly and several San Francisco dailies running woman suffrage departments, she realized the importance of keeping newspapers fed with readable factual material and enlisted the aid of a young journalist, Ida Husted Harper, whom she had met in 1878 while lecturing in Terre Haute, Indiana, and who was in California that winter. When the San Francisco _Examiner_, William Randolph Hearst's powerful Democratic paper, offered Susan a column on the editorial page if she would write it and sign it, she dictated her thoughts to Mrs. Harper, who smoothed them out for the column, helping her as Mrs. Stanton had in the past, for writing was still a great hardship. Grateful to Mrs. Harper, she sang her praises: "The moment I give the idea--the point--she formulates it into a good sentence--while I should have to haggle over it half an hour."[397]

California women had won suffrage planks from Republicans, Populists, and Prohibitionists, and the prospects looked bright. Rich women came to their aid, Mrs. Leland Stanford, with her railroad fortune, furnishing pa.s.ses for all the speakers and organizers, and Mrs. Phoebe Hearst contributing $1,000 to their campaign. What warmed Susan's heart, however, was the spirit of the rank and file, the seamstresses and washerwomen, paying their two-dollar pledges in twenty-five-cent installments, the poorly clad women bringing in fifty cents or a dollar which they had saved by going without tea, and the women who had worked all day at their jobs, stopping at headquarters for a package of circulars to fold and address at night. The working women of California made it plain that they wanted to vote.

Susan insisted upon carrying out what she called her "wild goose chase" over the state.[398] People crowded to hear her at farmers'

picnics in the mountains, in schoolhouses in small towns, and in poolrooms where chalked up on the blackboard she often found "Welcome Susan B. Anthony." She was at home everywhere and ready for anything.

The men liked her short matter-of-fact speeches and her flashes of wit. Her hopes were high that the friendly people she met would not fail to vote justice to women.

She grew apprehensive, however, when the newspapers, pressured by their advertisers, one by one began to ignore woman suffrage. The Liquor Dealers' League had been sending letters to hotel owners, grocers, and druggists, as well as to saloons, warning that votes for women would mean prohibition and would threaten their livelihood. Word was spread that if women voted not one gla.s.s of beer would be sold in San Francisco. As in Kansas, liquor interests had persuaded naturalized Irish, Germans, and Swedes to oppose woman suffrage, so now in California, they appealed to the Chinese.

On election day Susan was in San Francisco with Anna Howard Shaw and Ellen Sargent, watching and anxiously waiting for the returns. Telling the story of those last tense hours when women's fate hung in the balance, Anna Howard Shaw reported, "I shall always remember the picture of Miss Anthony and the wife of Senator Sargent wandering around the polls arm in arm at eleven o'clock at night, their tired faces taking on lines of deeper depression with every minute, for the count was against us.... When the final counts came in, we found that we had won the state from the north down to Oakland and from the south up to San Francisco; but there was not sufficient majority to overcome the adverse votes of San Francisco and Oakland. In San Francisco the saloon element and the most aristocratic section ... made an equal showing against us.... Every Chinese vote was against us."[399]

In spite of defeat in California, Susan had the joy of marking up two more states for woman suffrage in 1896. Utah was granted statehood with a woman suffrage provision in its const.i.tution and Idaho's favorable vote, though contested in the courts, was upheld by the State Supreme Court. Now women in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah were voters.

FOOTNOTES: