Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (54 page)

Why should we wait?

Margaret Sanger, the greatest pioneer and proponent of the American birth control movement, was born in Corning, New York. She became a public health nurse and was convinced by the poverty she saw that contraception was a necessary step in social equality. In 1915, she was indicted for sending birth control information through the mail and then for operating a birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. After her first arrest, Sanger fled the country and returned when the case was dismissed. She was arrested a second time in 1916 and jailed for thirty days. She later became a founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Who were the suffragists?

Women in America always endured plenty of suffering. What they lacked was “suffrage” (from the Latin
suffragium
for “vote”).

American women as far back as Abigail Adams—who admonished her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” when he went off to declare independence—had consistently pressed for voting rights, but just as consistently had been shut out. It was not for lack of trying. But women were fighting against the enormous odds of church, Constitution, an all-male power structure that held fast to its reins, and many of their own who believed in a woman’s divinely ordained, second-place role.

But in the nineteenth century, more women were pressed to work, and they showed the first signs of strength. In the 1860 Lynn, Massachusetts, shoe worker strike, many of the 10,000 workers who marched in protest were women. (At the time in Lynn, women made $1 per week against the $3 per week paid to men.) Women were also a strong force in the abolitionist movement, with Harriet Beecher Stowe attracting the most prominence. But even in a so-called freedom movement, women were accorded second-rate status.

To many male abolitionists, the “moral” imperative to free black men and give them the vote carried much greater weight than the somewhat blasphemous notion of equality of the sexes. In fact, it was the exclusion of women from an abolitionist gathering that sparked the first formal organization for women’s rights. The birth of the women’s movement in America dates to July 19, 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Lucretia Mott (1793–1880) called for a women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York, after they had been told to sit in the balcony at a London antislavery meeting. Of the major abolitionist figures, only William Lloyd Garrison supported equality for women. Even Frederick Douglass, while sympathetic to women’s rights, clearly thought it secondary in importance to the end of slavery. The abolitionist movement did produce two of the most remarkable women of the era in Harriet Tubman (see p. 200), the escaped slave who became an Underground Railroad “conductor” and later a Union spy during the Civil War, and Sojourner Truth, a charismatic black spiritual leader and prominent spokeswoman for the rights of women.

With the Civil War’s end, abolition lost its steam as a moral issue and women pressed to be included under the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended the vote to black males. But again women had to wait as politicians told them that the freed slaves took priority, a stand with which some women of the day agreed, creating a split in the feminist movement over goals and tactics. Hardliners followed Elizabeth Cady Stanton into the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA); moderates willing to wait for black male suffrage started the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), leaving a rift that lasted twenty years. (The two wings of the women’s movement reunited in 1890 in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA, with Stanton as its first president.)

Much of the political energy absorbed by abolition was shifted to the temperance movement after the war. Groups like the WCTU, whose greatest strength lay in the West, proved to women that they had organizational strength. Amelia Bloomer (1818–94) didn’t invent the pantaloons that bore her name, but she popularized them in her newspaper,
The Lily
, a journal preaching temperance as well as equality.

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), called “the Napoleon of women’s rights,” came from the same Quaker-abolitionist-temperance background as Stanton, and the two women became friends and powerful allies, founding the NWSA together. A forceful and tireless organizer and lobbyist, she pushed for local reforms in her home state of New York while continuing to urge the vote for women at the national level. But by the turn of the century, Anthony’s position fell from favor. Women shifted tactics, concentrating on winning the vote state by state, a strategy that succeeded in Idaho and Colorado, where grassroots organizations won the vote for women. After 1910, a few more western states relented, and the movement gained new momentum.

At about the same time, the suffragists took a new direction, borrowed from their British counterparts. The British “suffragettes” (as opposed to the commonly used American term “suffragist”) had been using far more radical means to win the vote. Led by Emmeline Pank hurst, British suffragettes chained themselves to buildings, invaded Parliament, blew up mailboxes, and burned buildings. Imprisoned for these actions, the women called themselves “political prisoners” and went on hunger strikes that were met with force-feedings. The cruelty of this official response was significant in attracting public sympathy for the suffragette cause.

These militant tactics were brought back to America by women who had marched with the British. Alice Paul (1885–1977) was another Quaker-raised woman who studied in England and had joined the Pankhurst-led demonstrations in London. At the 1913 inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, who opposed the vote for women, Paul organized a demonstration of 10,000. Her strategy was to hold the party in power—the Democrats in this case—responsible for denying women the vote. By this time, several million women could vote in various states, and Republicans saw, as they had in winning the black vote in Grant’s time, that there might be a political advantage in accepting universal suffrage.

President Wilson’s views were also dictated by politics. He needed to hold on to the support of the Democratic South. That meant opposing women’s voting. Southern Democrats were successfully keeping black men from voting; they certainly didn’t want to worry about black women as well. Ironically, Wilson’s wife, Edith Galt, proved how capable women could be at running things. During the period when Wilson was immobilized by a stroke in 1919, she literally took over the powers of the presidency, making presidential-level decisions for her invalid husband.

After Wilson’s 1916 reelection, in which women in some states had voted against him two to one, the protest was taken to Wilson’s doorstep as women began to picket around the clock outside the White House. Eventually imprisoned, Paul and others imitated the British tactic of hunger strikes. Again, sympathies turned in favor of the women. After their convictions were overturned, the militant suffragists returned to their White House protests.

In 1918, Paul’s political tactics paid off as a Republican Congress was elected. Among them was Montana’s Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973), the first woman elected to Congress. Rankin’s first act was to introduce a constitutional suffrage amendment on the House floor. The amendment was approved by a one-vote margin. It took the Senate another eighteen months to pass it, and in June 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification. Now fearful of the women’s vote in the approaching presidential election, Wilson shifted to support of the measure. One year later, on August 26, 1920, Tennessee delivered the last needed vote, and the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution. It stated simply that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

It took more than 130 years, but “We, the People” finally included the half of the country that had been kept out the longest.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

H
.
L
. MENCKEN,
famed writer for the
Baltimore Sun
, describing the scene in Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes Monkey Trial (July 14, 1925):

It was nearly eleven o’clock—an immensely late hour for those latitudes—but the whole town was still gathered in the courthouse yard, listening to the disputes of theologians. The Scopes trial had brought them in from all directions. There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing that he was the Bible champion of the world. There was a Seventh Day Adventist arguing that [defense attorney] Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads described in Revelation XIII, and that the end of the world was at hand. There was an ancient who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian. There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place. There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic hymns. There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a gaping crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus. The real religion was not present.

Mencken had been dispatched to cover what was then the “trial of the century.” Schoolteacher John T. Scopes had been charged with illegally teaching the Darwinian theory of evolution. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, the most prominent defense attorney of the day. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, the Populist leader. Scopes was found guilty and paid a $100 fine. (The trial is the source of the play and later film
Inherit the Wind
.)

What was the scandal over Teapot Dome?

As one century ended and another began under a cloud of corporate scandals and questions about government regulation of business, one thing is for certain. Enron is as American as apple pie. There is nothing new under the sun, and cases of corporate corruption, with government officials receiving handsome payoffs, crop up like weeds in America’s history. In the nineteenth century, there had been fixing of gold prices, scandals in the Grant administration, topped by the Crédit Mobilier scandal (see p. 267). In the 1920s, the corruption would flower again, threatening a genial Republican president who liked to leave his hands off business.

Tired of the war and eight years of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a weary nation welcomed the noncontroversial Warren G. Harding, a small-town, self-made businessman with matinee-idol good looks. Opposed by James M. Cox—who ran with Wilson’s young assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt—Harding and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, the governor of Massachusetts, easily won in a low-turnout election. (Socialist Eugene V. Debs garnered 3.5 percent of the vote.) Harding was popular, but by many accounts, may have been the laziest man ever elected president.

Harding’s was a classic Republican administration. Tax cuts. Help for big business. An America-first foreign policy that rejected Wilson’s League of Nations and set up stiff tariffs to protect American industry.

But his administration would also soon be dogged by what came to be called the Harding scandals. The first of these involved the siphoning of millions of dollars allocated for Veterans Administration hospitals. In another seamy episode, Harding’s attorney general Harry Daugherty was implicated in fraud related to the return of German assets seized during the war, and avoided conviction only by invoking the Fifth Amendment.

But the most famous of the Harding scandals involved a place called Teapot Dome. Two federal oil reserves—one in Elk Hills, California, and the other in Teapot Dome, Wyoming—were marked for the future use of the U.S. Navy. But the interior secretary, Albert B. Fall, contrived to have these lands turned over to his department. He then sold off drilling leases to private developers in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks in the form of cash, stock, and cattle. In August 1923, as this scandal was being uncovered by a Senate investigation, Harding suffered a fatal heart attack—misdiagnosed by an incompetent surgeon general as food poisoning—while in San Francisco on his way home from a trip to Alaska. Interior Secretary Fall was later convicted for accepting a bribe, thereby achieving the distinction of becoming the first cabinet officer in American history to go to jail.

Calvin Coolidge, untainted by the scandals, took Harding’s place and handily won reelection in 1924.

Did Henry Ford invent the automobile?

Autos and airplanes. The prosperity of the twenties was due in large part to a shift from the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution, symbolized by the railroads, to a twentieth-century revolution in technology. The invention and widespread commercial development of both the automobile and the airplane defined that shift. And during this period, both industries were defined by two American icons, Henry Ford and Charles A. Lindbergh. In their day, both men were revered. History has not been so kind.

Henry Ford (1864–1947) did not invent the automobile or the assembly line. But his perfected versions of them made him one of the richest and most powerful men in America. The son of an Irish immigrant farmer, Ford had a mechanical inclination. In 1890, he went to work for the Edison company in Detroit and built his first gasoline-driven car there. Europeans had taken the lead in the development of the automobile, and the Duryea brothers of Massachusetts were the American pioneers. Ford borrowed from their ideas, envisioning the auto as a cheap box on wheels with a simple engine, and brought out his first Model T in 1909. In a year he sold almost 11,000 of them.

But Ford envisioned a car for the masses. When Ford and his engineers introduced the moving assembly line, an idea proposed in a 1911 book by Frederick W. Taylor, the mass-produced Model T revolutionized the auto industry. The efficiency of the assembly line cut the price tag on the Model T from $950 in 1908 to under $300. By 1914, Ford Motors turned out 248,000 Model Ts, almost half of all autos produced, at the rate of one every 24 seconds. Realizing enormous profits, Ford made headlines by paying his workers $5 per day, almost double the going rate. Ford himself was clearing up to $25,000 per day. Paying his workers more money was Ford’s only way to keep them from quitting the monotonous, dehumanizing assembly line. He also realized that it was one way to enable his workers to buy Fords.