The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an organization formed on February 18, 1890, to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. It was created by the merger of two existing organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Its membership, which was about seven thousand at the time it was formed, eventually increased to two million, making it the largest voluntary organization in the nation. It played a pivotal role in the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which in 1920 guaranteed women's right to vote.
Susan B. Anthony, a long-time leader in the suffrage movement, was the dominant figure in the newly formed NAWSA. Carrie Chapman Catt, who became president after Anthony retired in 1900, implemented a strategy of recruiting wealthy members of the rapidly growing women's club movement, whose time, money and experience could help build the suffrage movement. Anna Howard Shaw's term in office, which began in 1904, saw strong growth in the organization's membership and public approval.
After the Senate decisively rejected the proposed women's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1887, the suffrage movement had concentrated most of its efforts on state suffrage campaigns. In 1910 Alice Paul joined the NAWSA and played a major role in reviving interest in the national amendment. After continuing conflicts with the NAWSA leadership over tactics, Paul created a rival organization, the National Woman's Party.
When Catt again became president in 1915, the NAWSA adopted her plan to centralize the organization, and work toward the suffrage amendment as its primary goal. This was done despite opposition from Southern members who believed that a federal amendment would erode states' rights. With its large membership and the increasing number of women voters in states where suffrage had already been achieved, the NAWSA began to operate more as a political pressure group than an educational group. It won additional sympathy for the suffrage cause by actively cooperating with the war effort during World War I. On February 14, 1920, several months prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the NAWSA transformed itself into the League of Women Voters, which is still active.
Background
The demand for women's suffrage in the United States was controversial even among women's rights activists in the early days of the movement. In 1848, a resolution in favor of women's right to vote was approved only after vigorous debate at the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. By the time of the National Women's Rights Conventions in the 1850s, the situation had changed, and women's suffrage had become a preeminent goal of the movement.[1] Three leaders of the women's movement during this period, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, played prominent roles in the creation of the NAWSA many years later.
In 1866, just after the American Civil War, the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention transformed itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), which worked for equal rights for both African Americans and white women, especially suffrage.[2] The AERA essentially collapsed in 1869, partly because of disagreement over the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which would enfranchise African American men. Leaders of the women's movement were dismayed that it would not also enfranchise women. Stanton and Anthony opposed its ratification unless it was accompanied by another amendment that would enfranchise women.[3] Stone supported the amendment. She believed that its ratification would spur politicians to support a similar amendment for women. She said that even though the right to vote was more important for women than for black men, "I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit."[4]
In May, 1869, two days after the acrimonious debates at what turned out to be the final AERA annual meeting, Anthony, Stanton and their allies formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In November 1869, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was formed by Lucy Stone, her husband Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe and their allies, many of whom had helped to create the New England Woman Suffrage Association a year earlier as part of the developing split.[5] The bitter rivalry between the two organizations created a partisan atmosphere that endured for decades.[6]
Even after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, differences between the two organizations remained. The AWSA worked almost exclusively for women's suffrage while the NWSA initially worked on a wide range of issues, including divorce reform and equal pay for women. The AWSA included both men and women among its leadership while the NWSA was led by women.[7] The AWSA worked for suffrage mostly at the state level while the NWSA worked more at the national level.[8] The AWSA cultivated an image of respectability while the NWSA sometimes used confrontational tactics. Anthony, for example, interrupted the official ceremonies at the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to present NWSA's Declaration of Rights for Women.[9] Anthony was arrested in 1872 for voting, which was still illegal for women, and was found guilty in a highly publicized trial.[10]
Progress toward women's suffrage was slow in the period after the split, but advancement in other areas strengthened the underpinnings of the movement. By 1890, tens of thousands of women were attending colleges and universities, up from zero a few decades earlier.[11] There was a decline in public support for the idea of "woman's sphere", the belief that a woman's place was in the home and that she should not be involved in politics. Laws that had allowed husbands to control their wives' activities had been significantly revised. There was a dramatic growth in all-female social reform organizations, such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest women's organization in the country. In a major boost for the suffrage movement, the WCTU endorsed women's suffrage in the late 1870s on the grounds that women needed the vote to protect their families from alcohol and other vices.[12]
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) with Susan B. Anthony
Anthony increasingly began to emphasize suffrage over other women's rights issues. Her aim was to unite the growing number of women's organizations in the demand for suffrage even if they did not support other women's rights issues. She and the NWSA also began placing less emphasis on confrontational actions and more on respectability. The NWSA was no longer seen as an organization that challenged traditional family arrangements by supporting, for example, what its opponents called "easy divorce". All this had the effect of moving it into closer alignment with the AWSA.[13] The Senate's rejection in 1887 of the proposed women's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution also brought the two organizations closer together. The NWSA had worked for years to convince Congress to bring the proposed amendment to a vote. After it was voted on and decisively rejected, the NWSA began to put less energy into campaigning at the federal level and more at the state level, as the AWSA was already doing.[14]
Stanton continued to promote all aspects of women's rights. She advocated a coalition of radical social reform groups, including Populists and Socialists, who would support women's suffrage as part of a joint list of demands.[15] In a letter to a friend, Stanton said the NWSA "has been growing politic and conservative for some time. Lucy [Stone] and Susan [Anthony] alike see suffrage only. They do not see woman's religious and social bondage, neither do the young women in either association, hence they may as well combine".[16] Stanton, however, had largely withdrawn from the day-to-day activity of the suffrage movement.[17] She spent much of her time with her daughter in England during this period.[18] Despite their different approaches, Stanton and Anthony remained friends and co-workers, continuing a collaboration that had begun in the early 1850s.
Stone devoted most of her life after the split to the Woman's Journal, a weekly newspaper she launched in 1870 to serve as voice of the AWSA.[19] By the 1880s, the Woman's Journal had broadened its coverage and was seen by many as the newspaper of the entire movement.[17]
The suffrage movement was attracting younger members who were impatient with the continuing division, seeing the obstacle more as a matter of personalities than principles. Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone, said, "When I began to work for a union, the elders were not keen for it, on either side, but the younger women on both sides were. Nothing really stood in the way except the unpleasant feelings engendered during the long separation".[20]
Merger of rival organizations
Several attempts had been made to bring the two sides together, but without success.[21] The situation changed in 1887 when Stone, who was approaching her 70th birthday and in declining health, began to seek ways of overcoming the split. In a letter to suffragist Antoinette Brown Blackwell, she suggested the creation of an umbrella organization of which the AWSA and the NWSA would become auxiliaries, but that idea did not gain supporters.[17] In November 1887, the AWSA annual meeting passed a resolution authorizing Stone to confer with Anthony about the possibility of a merger. The resolution said the differences between the two associations had "been largely removed by the adoption of common principles and methods."[22] Stone forwarded the resolution to Anthony along with an invitation to meet with her.
Anthony and Rachel Foster, a young leader of the NWSA, traveled to Boston in December 1887, to meet with Stone. Accompanying Stone at this meeting was her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, who also was an officer of the AWSA. Stanton, who was in England at the time, did not attend. The meeting explored several aspects of a possible merger, including the name of the new organization and its structure. Stone had second thoughts soon afterwards, telling a friend she wished they had never offered to unite, but the merger process slowly continued.[23]
An early public sign of improving relations between the two organizations occurred three months later at the founding congress of the International Council of Women, which the NWSA organized and hosted in Washington in conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. It received favorable publicity, and its delegates, who came from fifty-three women's organizations in nine countries, were invited to a reception at the White House. Representatives from the AWSA were invited to sit on the platform during the meetings along with representatives from the NWSA, signaling a new atmosphere of cooperation.[24]
The proposed merger did not generate significant controversy within the AWSA. The call to its annual meeting in 1887, the one that authorized Stone to explore the possibility of merger, did not even mention that this issue would be on the agenda. This proposal was treated in a routine manner during the meeting and was approved unanimously without debate.[21]
The situation was different within the NWSA, where there was strong opposition from Matilda Joslyn Gage, Olympia Brown and others.[25] Ida Husted Harper, Anthony's co-worker and biographer, said the NWSA meetings that dealt with this issue "were the most stormy in the history of the association."[26] Charging that Anthony had used underhanded tactics to thwart opposition to the merger, Gage formed a competing organization in 1890 called the Woman's National Liberal Union, but it did not develop a significant following.[27]
The AWSA and NWSA committees that negotiated the terms of merger signed a basis for agreement in January, 1889.[28] In February, Stone, Stanton, Anthony and other leaders of both organizations issued an "Open Letter to the Women of America" declaring their intention to work together.[29] When Anthony and Stone first discussed the possibility of merger in 1887, Stone had proposed that she, Stanton and Anthony should all decline the presidency of the united organization. Anthony initially agreed, but other NWSA members objected strongly. The basis for agreement did not include that stipulation.[28]
The AWSA initially was the larger of the two organizations,[30] but it had declined in strength during the 1880s.[31] The NWSA was perceived as the main representative of the suffrage movement, partly because of Anthony's ability to find dramatic ways of bringing suffrage to the nation's attention.[32] Anthony and Stanton had also published their massive History of Woman Suffrage, which placed them at the center of the movement's history and marginalized the role of Stone and the AWSA.[33] Stone's public visibility had declined significantly, contrasting sharply with the attention she had attracted in her younger days as a speaker on the national lecture circuit.[34]
Anthony was increasingly recognized as a person of political importance.[35] In 1890, prominent members of the House and Senate were among the two hundred people who attended her seventieth birthday celebration, a national event that took place in Washington three days before the convention that united the two suffrage organizations. Anthony and Stanton pointedly reaffirmed their friendship at this event, frustrating opponents of merger who had hoped to set them against one another.[31][36]
Founding convention
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was created on February 18, 1890, in Washington by a convention that merged the NWSA and the AWSA. The question of who would lead the new organization had been left to the convention delegates. Stone, from the AWSA, was too ill to attend this convention and was not a candidate.[37] Anthony and Stanton, both from the NWSA, each had supporters.
Lucy Stone
Henry Blackwell
Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell
The AWSA and NWSA executive committees met separately beforehand to discuss their choices for president of the united organization. At the AWSA meeting, Henry Blackwell, Stone's husband, said the NWSA had agreed to avoid mixing in side issues (the approach associated with Stanton) and to focus exclusively on suffrage (the approach of the AWSA and increasingly of Anthony). The executive committee recommended that AWSA delegates vote for Anthony. At the NWSA meeting, Anthony strongly urged its members not to vote for her but for Stanton, saying that a defeat of Stanton would be viewed as a repudiation of her role in the movement.[38]
Elections were held at the convention's opening. Stanton received 131 votes for president, Anthony received 90, and 2 votes were cast for other candidates. Anthony was elected vice president at large with 213 votes, with 9 votes for other candidates. Stone was unanimously elected chair of the executive committee.[39]
As president, Stanton delivered the convention's opening address. She urged the new organization to concern itself with a broad range of reforms, saying, "When any principle or question is up for discussion, let us seize on it and show its connection, whether nearly or remotely, with woman's disfranchisement."[40] She introduced controversial resolutions, including one that called for women to be included at all levels of leadership within religious organizations and one that described liberal divorce laws as a married woman's "door of escape from bondage."[41] Her speech had little lasting impact on the organization, however, because most of the younger suffragists did not agree with her approach.[42]
Stanton and Anthony presidencies
Susan B. Anthony and Alice Stone Blackwell signed NAWSA check, written by the group's treasurer Harriet Taylor Upton, payable to Rachel Foster Avery
Stanton's election as president was largely symbolic. Before the convention was over, she left for another extended stay with her daughter in England, leaving Anthony in charge.[43] Stanton retired from the presidency in 1892, after which Anthony was elected to the position that she had in practice been occupying all along.[44] Stone, who died in 1893, did not play a major role in the NAWSA.[45]
The movement's vigor declined in the years immediately after the merger.[46] The new organization was small, having only about 7000 dues-paying members in 1893.[47] It also suffered from organizational problems, not having a clear idea of, for example, how many local suffrage clubs there were or who their officers were.[48]
In 1893, NAWSA members May Wright Sewall, former chair of NWSA's executive committee, and Rachel Foster Avery, NAWSA's corresponding secretary, played key roles in the World's Congress of Representative Women at the World's Columbian Exposition, which was also known as the Chicago World's Fair. Sewall served as chair and Avery as secretary of the organizing committee for the women's congress.[49]
In 1893, the NAWSA voted over Anthony's objection to alternate the site of its annual conventions between Washington and other parts of the country. Anthony's pre-merger NWSA had always held its conventions in Washington to help maintain focus on a national suffrage amendment. Anthony said she feared, accurately as it turned out, that the NAWSA would engage in suffrage work at the state level at the expense of national work.[44] The NAWSA routinely allocated no funding at all for congressional work, which at this stage consisted only of one day of testimony before Congress each year.[50]
Woman's Bible
Stanton's radicalism did not sit well with the new organization. In 1895 she published The Woman's Bible, a controversial best-seller that attacked the use of the Bible to relegate women to an inferior status. Her opponents within the NAWSA reacted strongly. They felt that the book would harm the drive for women's suffrage. Rachel Foster Avery, the organization's corresponding secretary, sharply denounced Stanton's book in her annual report to the 1896 convention. The NAWSA voted to disavow any connection with the book despite Anthony's strong objection that such a move was unnecessary and hurtful.
The negative reaction to the book contributed to a sharp decline in Stanton's influence in the suffrage movement and to her increasing alienation from it.[51] She sent letters to each NAWSA convention, however, and Anthony insisted that they be read even when their topics were controversial.[52] Stanton died in 1902.
Southern strategy
The South had traditionally shown little interest in women's suffrage. When the proposed suffrage amendment to the Constitution was rejected by the Senate in 1887, it received no votes at all from southern senators.[53] This indicated a problem for the future because it was almost impossible for any amendment to be ratified by the required number of states without at least some support from the South.
In 1867, Henry Blackwell proposed a solution: convince southern political leaders that they could ensure white supremacy in their region by enfranchising educated women, who would predominantly be white. Blackwell presented his plan to politicians from Mississippi, who gave it serious consideration, a development that drew the interest of many suffragists. Blackwell's ally in this effort was Laura Clay, who convinced the NAWSA to launch a campaign in the South based on Blackwell's strategy. Clay was one of several southern NAWSA members who objected to the proposed national women's suffrage amendment on the grounds that it would impinge on states' rights.[54]
Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt traveled through the South en route to the NAWSA convention in Atlanta. Anthony asked her old friend Frederick Douglass, a former slave, not to attend the NAWSA convention in Atlanta in 1895, the first to be held in a southern city. Black NAWSA members were excluded from 1903 convention in the southern city of New Orleans. The NAWSA executive board issued a statement during the convention that said, "The doctrine of State's rights is recognized in the national body, and each auxiliary State association arranges its own affairs in accordance with its own ideas and in harmony with the customs of its own section."[55] As NAWSA turned its attention to a Constitutional Amendment, many Southern suffragists remained opposed because a federal amendment would enfranchise Black women. In response, in 1914, Kate Gordon founded the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, which opposed the 19th Amendment.
First Catt presidency
Carrie Chapman Catt joined the suffrage movement in Iowa in the mid-1880s. and soon became part of the leadership of the state suffrage association. Married to a wealthy engineer who encouraged her suffrage work, she was able to devote much of her energy to the movement. She led some smaller NAWSA committees, for example serving as Chairman of the Literature Committee in 1893 with the help of Mary Hutcheson Page, another active NAWSA member.[56] In 1895, she was placed in charge of NAWSA's Organizational Committee, where she raised money to put a team of fourteen organizers in the field. By 1899, suffrage organizations had been established in every state. When Anthony retired as NAWSA president in 1900, she chose Catt to succeed her.[57] Anthony remained an influential figure in the organization, however, until she died in 1906.
Carrie Chapman Catt
One of Catt's first actions as president was to implement the "society plan," a campaign to recruit wealthy members of the rapidly growing women's club movement, whose time, money and experience could help build the suffrage movement. [58] Primarily composed of middle-class women, the targeted clubs often engaged in civic improvement projects. They generally avoided controversial issues, but women's suffrage increasingly found acceptance among their membership.[59] In 1914, suffrage was endorsed by the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the national body for the club movement.[47]
To make the suffrage movement more attractive to middle- and upper-class women, the NAWSA began to popularize a version of the movement's history that downplayed the earlier involvement of many of its members with such controversial issues as racial equality, divorce reform, working women's rights and critiques of organized religion. Stanton's role in the movement was obscured by this process, as were the roles of black and working women.[60] Anthony, who in her younger days was often treated as a dangerous fanatic, was given a grandmotherly image and honored as a "suffrage saint."[61]
Mural in U.S. Capitol featuring NAWSA leaders Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt at a 1917 suffrage parade, by Allyn Cox
The reform energy of the Progressive Era strengthened the suffrage movement during this period. Beginning around 1900, this broad movement began at the grassroots level with such goals as combating corruption in government, eliminating child labor, and protecting workers and consumers. Many of its participants saw women's suffrage as yet another progressive goal, and they believed that the addition of women to the electorate would help the movement achieve its other goals.[62]
Catt resigned her position after four years, partly because of her husband's declining health and partly to help organize the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which was created in Berlin in 1904 in coordination with the NAWSA and with Catt as president.[63]
Shaw presidency
In 1904, Anna Howard Shaw, another Anthony protégé, was elected president of the NAWSA, serving more years in that office than any other person. Shaw was an energetic worker and a talented orator. Her administrative and interpersonal skills did not match those that Catt would display during her second term in office, but the organization made striking gains under Shaw's leadership.[64][65]
Anna Howard Shaw
In 1906, southern NAWSA members formed the Southern Woman Suffrage Conference with Blackwell's encouragement. Although it had a frankly racist program, it asked for NAWSA's endorsement. Shaw refused, setting a limit on how far the organization was willing to go to accommodate southerners with overtly racist views. Shaw said the organization would not adopt policies that "advocated the exclusion of any race or class from the right of suffrage."[66][67]
In 1907, partly in reaction to NAWSA's "society plan", which was designed to appeal to upper-class women, Harriet Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, formed a competing organization called the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women.[68] Later known as the Women's Political Union, its membership was based on working women, both professional and industrial. Blatch had recently returned to the United States after several years in England, where she had worked with suffrage groups in the early phases of employing militant tactics as part of their campaign. The Equality League gained a following by engaging in activities that many members of the NAWSA initially considered too daring, such as suffrage parades and open air rallies.[69] Blatch said that when she joined the suffrage movement in the U.S., "The only method suggested for furthering the cause was the slow process of education. We were told to organize, organize, organize, to the end of educating, educating, educating public opinion."[70]
In 1908, the National College Equal Suffrage League was formed as an affiliate of the NAWSA. It had its origins in the College Equal Suffrage League, which was formed in Boston in 1900 at a time when there were relatively few college students in the NAWSA. It was established by Maud Wood Park, who later helped create similar groups in 30 states. Park later became a prominent leader of the NAWSA.[71][72]
By 1908, Catt was once again at the forefront of activity. She and her co-workers developed a detailed plan to unite the various suffrage associations in New York City (and later in the entire state) in an organization modeled on political machines like Tammany Hall. In 1909, they founded the Woman Suffrage Party (WSP) at a convention attended by over a thousand delegates and alternates. By 1910, the WSP had 20,000 members and a four-room headquarters. Shaw was not entirely comfortable with the independent initiatives of the WSP, but Catt and other of its leaders remained loyal to the NAWSA, its parent organization.[73]
In 1909, Frances Squires Potter, a NAWSA member from Chicago, proposed the creation of suffrage community centers called "political settlements." Reminiscent of the social settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago, their purpose was to educate the public about suffrage and the practical details of political activity at the local level. The political settlements established by the WSP included suffrage schools that provided training in public speaking to suffrage organizers.[74]
Public sentiment toward the suffrage movement improved dramatically during this period. Working for suffrage came to be seen as a respectable activity for middle-class women. By 1910, NAWSA membership had jumped to 117,000.[75] The NAWSA established its first permanent headquarters that year in New York City, previously having operated mainly out of the homes of its officers.[76] Maud Wood Park, who had been away in Europe for two years, received a letter that year from one of her co-workers in the College Equal Suffrage League who described the new atmosphere by saying, "the movement which when we got into it had about as much energy as a dying kitten, is now a big, virile, threatening thing" and is "actually fashionable now."[77]
The change in public sentiment was reflected in efforts to win suffrage at the state level. In 1896, only four states, all of them in the West, allowed women to vote. From 1896 to 1910, there were six state campaigns for suffrage, and they all failed. The tide began to turn in 1910 when suffrage was won in the state of Washington, followed by California in 1911, Oregon, Kansas and Arizona in 1912, and others afterwards.[78]
Program for NAWSA's 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington
In 1912, W. E. B. Du Bois, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), publicly challenged NAWSA's reluctance to accept black women. The NAWSA responded in a cordial way, inviting him to speak at its next convention and publishing his speech as a pamphlet.[79] Nonetheless the NAWSA continued to minimize the role of black suffragists. It accepted some black women as members and some black societies as auxiliaries, but its general practice was to turn such requests politely away.[80] This was partly because attitudes of racial superiority were the norm among white Americans of that era, and partly because the NAWSA believed it had little hope of achieving a national amendment without at least some support from southern states that practiced racial segregation.[81]
NAWSA's strategy at that point was to gain suffrage for women on a state-by-state basis until it achieved a critical mass of voters that could push through a suffrage amendment at the national level.[82] In 1913, the Southern States Woman Suffrage Committee was formed in an attempt to stop that process from moving past the state level. It was led by Kate Gordon, who had been the NAWSA's corresponding secretary from 1901 to 1909.[83] Gordon, who was from the southern state of Louisiana, supported women's suffrage, but opposed the idea of a federal suffrage amendment, charging that it would violate states' rights. She said that empowering federal authorities to enforce a constitutional right for women to vote in the South could lead to similar enforcement of the constitutional right of African Americans to vote there, a right that was being evaded, and, in her opinion, rightly so. Her committee was too small to seriously affect the NAWSA's direction, but her public condemnation of the proposed amendment, expressed in terms of vehement racism, deepened fissures within the organization.[84]
Despite the rapid growth in NAWSA membership, discontent with Shaw grew. Her tendency to overreact to those who differed with her had the effect of increasing organizational friction.[85] Several members resigned from executive board in 1910, and the board saw significant changes in its composition every year after that through 1915.[86]
In 1914, Senator John Shafroth introduced a federal amendment that would require state legislatures to put women's suffrage on the state ballot if eight percent of the voters signed a petition to that effect. The NAWSA endorsed the proposed amendment, whereupon the CU accused it of abandoning the drive for a national suffrage amendment. Amid confusion among the membership, delegates at the 1914 convention directed their dissatisfaction at Shaw.[87] Shaw had considered declining the presidency in 1914, but decided to run again. In 1915, she announced that she would not be running for reelection.[88]
Relocation to Warren, Ohio
For several years, Harriet Taylor Upton led the woman suffragist movement in Trumbull County, Ohio. In 1880, Upton's father was elected as a member of the United States Congress as a Republican from Ohio. This connection provided Upton the opportunity to meet Susan B. Anthony, who brought Upton into the suffragist movement.[89]
In 1894, Upton was elected as the NAWSA's treasurer. In addition, Upton served as president of the Ohio association of the national association, from 1899-1908 and 1911–1920. Upton helped relocate the national headquarters for the NAWSA to her home in Warren, Ohio, in 1903. According to the Tribune Chronicle, "it was only supposed to be a temporary move, but it lasted six years. Susan B. Anthony, noted leader of the women's movement, visited Warren many times, including a 1904 trip to attend a national women's rights meeting here."[90]
During this period, the nation's attention regarding women's rights was focused on Warren. The association's offices were located on the ground level of the Trumbull Court House, a building currently occupied by the Probate Court. While the headquarters left the Upton House around 1910, Warren remained active in the suffrage movement. The people of Warren were active in various programs of the national movement for years, until the 19th Amendment was ratified by a sufficient number of states, and authorized by President Wilson in 1920.[91]
In 1993, the Upton House joined the list of historic landmarks.[92]
Split in the movement
A serious challenge to the NAWSA leadership began to develop after a young activist named Alice Paul returned to the U.S. from England in 1910, where she had been part of the militant wing of the suffrage movement. She had been jailed there and had endured forced feedings after going on a hunger strike.[93] Joining the NAWSA, she became the person most responsible for reviving interest within the suffrage movement for a national amendment, which for years had been overshadowed by campaigns for suffrage at the state level.[14]
Alice Paul
From Shaw's point of view, the time was right for a renewed emphasis on a suffrage amendment. Gordon and Clay, the most persistent adversaries of a federal suffrage amendment within NAWSA, had been out-maneuvered by their opponents and no longer held national posts.[94] In 1912, Alice Paul was appointed chair of NAWSA's Congressional Committee and charged with reviving the drive for a women's suffrage amendment. In 1913, she and her coworker Lucy Burns organized the Woman Suffrage Procession, a suffrage parade in Washington on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as president. Onlookers who opposed the march turned the event into a near riot, which ended only when a cavalry unit of the army was brought in to restore order. Public outrage over the incident, which cost the chief of police his job, brought publicity to the movement and gave it fresh momentum.[93]
Paul troubled NAWSA leaders by arguing that because Democrats would not act to enfranchise women even though they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, the suffrage movement should work for the defeat of all Democrats regardless of an individual candidate's position on suffrage. NAWSA's policy was to follow the opposite approach, supporting any candidate who endorsed suffrage, regardless of political party.[95] In 1913, Paul and Burns formed the Congressional Union (CU) to work solely for a national amendment and sent organizers into states that already had NAWSA organizations. The relationship between the CU and the NAWSA became unclear and troubled over time.[96]
At the NAWSA convention in 1913, Paul and her allies demanded that the organization focus its efforts on a federal suffrage amendment. The convention instead empowered the executive board to limit the CU's ability to contravene NAWSA policies. After negotiations failed to resolve their differences, the NAWSA removed Paul as head of its Congressional Committee. By February, 1914, the NAWSA and the CU had effectively separated into two independent organizations.[96]
Blatch merged her Women's Political Union into the CU.[97] That organization in turn became the basis for the National Woman's Party (NWP), which Paul formed in 1916.[98] Once again there were two competing national women's suffrage organizations, but the result this time was something like a division of labor. The NAWSA burnished its image of respectability and engaged in highly organized lobbying at both the national and state levels. The smaller NWP also engaged in lobbying but became increasingly known for activities that were dramatic and confrontational, most often in the national capital.[99]
Second Catt presidency, 1915-1920
Helen Hamilton Gardener, Carrie Chapman Catt and Maud Wood Park (from left to right) on the balcony of Suffrage House, the Washington headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association
Carrie Chapman Catt, the NAWSA's previous president, was the obvious choice to replace Anna Howard Shaw, but Catt was leading the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, which was in the early stages of a crucial suffrage campaign in that state.[100] The prevailing belief in the NAWSA was that success in a large eastern state would be the tipping point for the national campaign.[101] New York was the largest state in the union, and victory there was a real possibility. Catt agreed to turn the New York work over to others and to accept the NAWSA presidency in December, 1915 on the condition that she could name her own executive board, which previously had always been elected by the annual convention. She appointed to the board women of independent means who could work for the movement full-time.[102]
Backed by an increased level of commitment and unity in the national office, Catt sent its officers into the field to assess the state of the organization and start the process of reorganizing it into a more centralized and efficient operation. Catt described the NAWSA as a camel with a hundred humps, each with a blind driver trying to lead the way. She provided a new sense of direction by sending out a stream of communications to state and local affiliates with policy directives, organizational initiatives and detailed plans of work.[102][103]
The NAWSA previously had devoted much of its effort to educating the public about suffrage, and it had made a significant impact. Women's suffrage had become a major national issue, and the NAWSA was in the process of becoming the nation's largest voluntary organization, with two million members.[104] Catt built on that foundation to convert the NAWSA into an organization that operated primarily as a political pressure group.[84]
1916
At an executive board meeting in March, 1916, Catt described the organization's dilemma by saying, "The Congressional Union is drawing off from the National Association those women who feel it is possible to work for suffrage by the Federal route only. Certain workers in the south are being antagonized because the National is continuing to work for the Federal Amendment. The combination has produced a great muddle".[105] Catt believed that NAWSA's policy of working primarily on state-by-state campaigns was nearing its limits. Some states appeared unlikely ever to approve women's suffrage, in some cases because state laws made constitutional revision extremely difficult, and in others, especially in the Deep South, because opposition was simply too strong.[106] Catt refocused the organization on a national suffrage amendment while continuing to conduct state campaigns where success was a realistic possibility.
When the conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties met in June, 1916, suffragists applied pressure to both. Catt was invited to express her views in a speech to the Republican convention in Chicago. An anti-suffragist spoke after Catt, and as she was telling the convention that women did not want to vote, a crowd of suffragists burst into the hall and filled the aisles. They were soaking wet, having marched in heavy rain for several blocks in a parade led by two elephants. When the flustered anti-suffragist concluded her remarks, the suffragists led a cheer for their cause. At the Democratic convention a week later in St. Louis, suffragists packed the galleries and made their views known during the debate on suffrage.[107]
Both party conventions endorsed women's suffrage but only at the state level, which meant that different states might implement it in different ways and in some cases not at all. Having expected more, Catt called an Emergency Convention, moving the date of the 1916 convention from December to September to begin organizing a renewed push for the federal amendment.[103] The convention initiated a strategic shift by adopting Catt's "Winning Plan". This plan mandated work toward the national suffrage amendment as the priority for the entire organization and authorized the creation of a professional lobbying team to support this goal in Washington. It authorized the executive board to specify a plan of work toward this goal for each state and to take over that work if the state organization refused to comply. It agreed to fund state suffrage campaigns only if they met strict requirements that were designed to eliminate efforts with little chance of succeeding.[108] Catt's plan included milestones for achieving a women's suffrage amendment by 1922.[109] Gordon, whose states' rights approach had been decisively defeated, exclaimed to a friend, "A well-oiled steam roller has ironed this convention flat!"[110]
President Wilson, whose attitude toward women's suffrage was evolving, spoke at the 1916 NAWSA convention. He had been considered an opponent of suffrage when he was governor of New Jersey, but in 1915 he announced that he was traveling from the White House back to his home state to vote in favor of it in New Jersey's state referendum. He spoke favorably of suffrage at the NAWSA convention but stopped short of supporting the suffrage amendment.[111] Charles Evans Hughes, his opponent in the presidential election that year, declined to speak at the convention, but he went farther than Wilson by endorsing the suffrage amendment.[112]
Carrie Chapman Catt (right) exiting the White House with Helen Hamilton Gardener
NAWSA's Congressional Committee had been in disarray ever since Alice Paul was removed from it in 1913. Catt reorganized the committee and appointed Maud Wood Park as its head in December, 1916. Park and her lieutenant Helen Hamilton Gardener created what became known as the "Front Door Lobby", so named by a journalist because it operated openly, avoiding the traditional lobbying methods of "backstairs" dealing. A headquarters for the lobbying effort was established in a dilapidated mansion known as Suffrage House. NAWSA lobbyists lodged there and coordinated their activities with daily conferences in its meeting rooms.[113]
In 1916 the NAWSA purchased the Woman's Journal from Alice Stone Blackwell. The newspaper had been established in 1870 by Blackwell's mother, Lucy Stone, and had served as the primary voice of the suffrage movement most of the time since then. It had significant limitations, however. It was a small operation, with Blackwell herself doing most of the work, and with much of its reporting centered on the eastern part of the country at a time when a national newspaper was needed.[114] After the transfer, it was renamed Woman Citizen and merged with The Woman Voter, the journal of the Woman Suffrage Party of New York City, and with National Suffrage News, the former journal of the NAWSA.[115] The newspaper's masthead declared itself to be the NAWSA's official organ.[114]
1917
In 1917 Catt received a bequest of $900,000 from Mrs. Frank (Miriam) Leslie to be used as she thought best for the women's suffrage movement. Catt allocated most of the funds to the NAWSA, with $400,000 applied toward upgrading the Woman Citizen.[116]
In January 1917, Alice Paul's NWP began picketing the White House with banners that demanded women's suffrage. The police eventually arrested over 200 of the Silent Sentinels, many of whom went on hunger strike after being imprisoned. The prison authorities force fed them, creating an uproar that fueled public debate on women's suffrage.[117]
When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, the NAWSA cooperated with the war effort. Shaw was appointed as head of the Women's Committee for the Council of National Defense, which was established by the federal government to coordinate resources for the war and to promote public morale. Catt and two other NAWSA members were appointed to its executive committee.[118] The NWP, by contrast, took no part in the war effort and charged that the NAWSA did so at the expense of suffrage work.[119]
In April 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana took her seat as the first woman in Congress, having previously served as lobbyist and field secretary for the NAWSA. Rankin voted against the declaration of war.[120]
In November 1917, the suffrage movement achieved a major victory when a referendum to enfranchise women passed by a large margin in New York, the most populous state in the country.[121] The powerful Tammany Hall political machine, which had previously opposed suffrage, took a neutral stance on this referendum, partly because the wives of several Tammany Hall leaders played prominent roles in the suffrage campaign.[122]
1918–19
The House passed the suffrage amendment for the first time in January, 1918, but the Senate delayed its debate on the measure until September. President Wilson took the unusual step of appearing before the Senate to speak on the issue, asking for passage of the amendment as a war measure. The Senate, however, defeated the measure by two votes.[123] The NAWSA launched a campaign to unseat four senators who had voted against the amendment, assembling a coalition of forces that included labor unions and prohibitionists. Two of those four senators were defeated in the federal elections in November.[124]
NAWSA held its Golden Jubilee Convention at the Statler Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri in March 1919. President Catt gave the opening address, in which she urged the delegates to create a league of women voters. A resolution was passed to form this league as a separate unit of NAWSA, with membership coming from states who allowed women to vote. The league was charged with achieving full suffrage and consideration of legislation that affected women in states where they were able to vote. On the last day of the convention, the Missouri senate passed legislation giving women the right to vote in presidential elections in Missouri and a resolution to submit a constitutional amendment for full suffrage. In June of that year, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed.[125]
Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment
After the elections, Wilson called a special session of Congress, which passed the suffrage amendment on June 4, 1919.[126] The struggle now passed to the state legislatures, three-fourths of which would need to ratify the amendment before it would become law.
Catt and the NAWSA executive board had been planning their work in support of the ratification effort since April 1918, over a year before Congress passed the amendment. Ratification committees had already been established in state capitals, each with its own budget and plan of work. Immediately after Congress passed the amendment, Suffrage House and the federal lobbying operation were shut down and resources were diverted to the ratification drive.[127] Catt had a sense of urgency, expecting a slowdown in reform energy after the war, which had ended seven months earlier. Many local suffrage societies had disbanded in states where women could already vote, making it more difficult to organize a quick ratification.[128]
Maud Wood Park
By the end of 1919, women effectively could vote for president in states that had a majority of electoral votes.[115] Political leaders who were convinced that women's suffrage was inevitable began to pressure local and national legislators to support it so their party could claim credit for it in future elections. The conventions of both the Democratic and Republican Parties endorsed the amendment in June, 1920.[129]
Former NAWSA members Kate Gordon and Laura Clay organized opposition to the amendment's ratification in the South. They had resigned from the NAWSA in the fall of 1918 at the executive board's request because of their public statements in opposition to a federal amendment.[130] Only three Southern or border states, Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee, ratified the 19th Amendment, with Tennessee being the crucial 36th state to ratify.
The Nineteenth Amendment, the women's suffrage amendment, became the law of the land on August 26, 1920, when it was certified by the United States Secretary of State.[131]
Transition into the League of Women Voters
Six months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the NAWSA held its last convention. That convention created the League of Women Voters as the NAWSA's successor on February 14, 1920, with Maud Wood Park, former head of the NAWSA's Congressional Committee, as its president.[132][133] The League of Women Voters was formed to help women play a larger part in public affairs as they won the right to vote. It was meant to help women exercise their right to vote. Before 1973 only women could join the league.
State Organizations working with the NAWSA
Alabama - Alabama Equal Suffrage Association.[134]
Arizona - Arizona Equal Suffrage Campaign Committee
Arkansas - Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association;[135] and, Political Equality League
Delaware - Delaware Equal Suffrage Association.[136][137]
Hawaii - National Women's Equal Suffrage Association of Hawai'i.[138]
Indiana - Women's Franchise League of Indiana
Kentucky - Kentucky Equal Rights Association
Maine - Maine Women's Suffrage Association.[139]
Nevada - Nevada Equal Franchise Society.[140]
New Mexico - Santa Fe chapter of NAWSA.[141]
North Dakota - North Dakota Votes for Women League.[142]
Texas - Texas Equal Suffrage Association.[143]
Virginia - Equal Suffrage League of Virginia
West Virginia - West Virginia Equal Suffrage Association
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As president, Wilson changed the nation's economic policies and led the United States into World War I in 1917. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism.
Wilson grew up in the American South, mainly in Augusta, Georgia, during the Civil War and Reconstruction. After earning a Ph.D. in history and political science from Johns Hopkins University, Wilson taught at various colleges before becoming the president of Princeton University and a spokesman for progressivism in higher education. As governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, Wilson broke with party bosses and won the passage of several progressive reforms. To win the presidential nomination he mobilized progressives and Southerners to his cause at the 1912 Democratic National Convention. Wilson defeated incumbent Republican William Howard Taft and third-party nominee Theodore Roosevelt to easily win the 1912 United States presidential election, becoming the first Southerner to do so since 1848. During his first year as president, Wilson authorized the widespread imposition of segregation inside the federal bureaucracy. His first term was largely devoted to pursuing passage of his progressive New Freedom domestic agenda. His first major priority was the Revenue Act of 1913, which lowered tariffs and began the modern income tax. Wilson also negotiated the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Federal Reserve System. Two major laws, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, were enacted to promote business competition and combat extreme corporate power.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the U.S. declared neutrality as Wilson tried to negotiate a peace between the Allied and Central Powers. He narrowly won re-election in the 1916 United States presidential election, boasting how he kept the nation out of wars in Europe and Mexico. In April 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in response to its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare that sank American merchant ships. Wilson nominally presided over war-time mobilization and left military matters to the generals. He instead concentrated on diplomacy, issuing the Fourteen Points that the Allies and Germany accepted as a basis for post-war peace. He wanted the off-year elections of 1918 to be a referendum endorsing his policies, but instead the Republicans took control of Congress. After the Allied victory in November 1918, Wilson went to Paris where he and the British and French leaders dominated the Paris Peace Conference. Wilson successfully advocated for the establishment of a multinational organization, the League of Nations. It was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles that he signed. Wilson had refused to bring any leading Republican into the Paris talks, and back home he rejected a Republican compromise that would have allowed the Senate to ratify the Versailles Treaty and join the League.
Wilson had intended to seek a third term in office but suffered a severe stroke in October 1919 that left him incapacitated. His wife and his doctor controlled Wilson, and no significant decisions were made. Meanwhile, his policies alienated German and Irish Democrats and the Republicans won a landslide in the 1920 presidential election. Scholars have generally ranked Wilson in the upper tier of U.S presidents, although he has been criticized for supporting racial segregation. His liberalism nevertheless lives on as a major factor in American foreign policy, and his vision of ethnic self-determination resonated globally.
Early life
Main article: Early life and academic career of Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born to a family of Scots-Irish and Scottish descent in Staunton, Virginia.[1] He was the third of four children and the first son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Jessie Janet Woodrow. Wilson's paternal grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1807, settling in Steubenville, Ohio. His grandfather James Wilson published a pro-tariff and anti-slavery newspaper, The Western Herald and Gazette.[2] Wilson's maternal grandfather, Reverend Thomas Woodrow, moved from Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, to Carlisle, Cumbria, England, before migrating to Chillicothe, Ohio, in the late 1830s.[3] Joseph met Jessie while she was attending a girl's academy in Steubenville, and the two married on June 7, 1849. Soon after the wedding, Joseph was ordained as a Presbyterian pastor and assigned to serve in Staunton.[4] Thomas was born in the Manse, a house of the Staunton First Presbyterian Church where Joseph served. Before he was two, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia.[5]
Wilson, c. mid-1870s
Wilson's earliest memory was of playing in his yard and standing near the front gate of the Augusta parsonage at the age of three, when he heard a passerby announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming.[5][6] Wilson was one of only two U.S. presidents to be a citizen of the Confederate States of America, the other being John Tyler. Wilson's family identified with the Southern United States and were staunch supporters of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.[7]
Wilson's father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) after it split from the Northern Presbyterians in 1861. He became minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, and the family lived there until 1870.[8] From 1870 to 1874, Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where his father was a theology professor at the Columbia Theological Seminary.[9] In 1873, Wilson became a communicant member of the Columbia First Presbyterian Church; he remained a member throughout his life.[10]
Wilson attended Davidson College in North Carolina for the 1873–74 school year but transferred as a freshman to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).[11] He studied political philosophy and history, joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and was active in the Whig literary and debating society.[12] He was also elected secretary of the school's football association, president of the school's baseball association, and managing editor of the student newspaper.[13] In the hotly contested presidential election of 1876, Wilson declared his support for the Democratic Party and its nominee, Samuel J. Tilden.[14] After graduating from Princeton in 1879,[15] Wilson attended the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was involved in the Virginia Glee Club and served as president of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society.[16] After poor health forced his withdrawal from the University of Virginia, he continued to study law on his own while living with his parents in Wilmington, North Carolina.[17] Wilson was admitted to the Georgia bar and made a brief attempt at establishing a law firm in Atlanta in 1882.[18] Though he found legal history and substantive jurisprudence interesting, he abhorred the day-to-day procedural aspects. After less than a year, he abandoned his legal practice to pursue the study of political science and history.[19]
Marriage and family
Ellen Wilson in 1912
In 1883, Wilson met and fell in love with Ellen Louise Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Savannah, Georgia.[20] He proposed marriage in September 1883; she accepted, but they agreed to postpone marriage while Wilson attended graduate school.[21] Ellen graduated from Art Students League of New York, worked in portraiture, and received a medal for one of her works from the Exposition Universelle (1878) in Paris.[22] She agreed to sacrifice further independent artistic pursuits in order to marry Wilson in 1885.[23] She learned German so that she could help translate works of political science that were relevant to Wilson's research.[24] Their first child, Margaret, was born in April 1886, and their second, Jessie, in August 1887.[25] Their third and final child, Eleanor, was born in October 1889.[26] In 1913, Jessie married Francis Bowes Sayre Sr., who later was High Commissioner to the Philippines.[27] In 1914, Eleanor married William Gibbs McAdoo, the Secretary of the Treasury under Wilson and later a senator for California.[28]
Academic career
Professor
In late 1883, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for doctoral studies.[29] Built on the Humboldtian model of higher education, Johns Hopkins was inspired particularly from Germany's historic Heidelberg University in that it was committed to research as a central part of its academic mission. Wilson studied history, political science, German, and other areas.[30] Wilson hoped to become a professor, writing that "a professorship was the only feasible place for me, the only place that would afford leisure for reading and for original work, the only strictly literary berth with an income attached."[31] Wilson spent much of his time at Johns Hopkins writing Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, which grew out of a series of essays in which he examined the workings of the federal government.[32] He received a Ph.D. in history and government from Johns Hopkins in 1886,[33] making him the only U.S. president who has possessed a Ph.D.[34] In early 1885, Houghton Mifflin published Congressional Government, which received a strong reception; one critic called it "the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the 'Federalist' papers."[35]
In 1885 to 1888, Wilson accepted a teaching position at Bryn Mawr College, a newly established women's college near Philadelphia.[36] Wilson taught ancient Greek and Roman history, American history, political science, and other subjects. There were only 42 students, nearly all of them too passive for his taste. M. Carey Thomas, the dean, was an aggressive feminist and Wilson was in a bitter dispute with the president about his contract. He left as soon as possible, and was not given a farewell.[37]
In 1888, Wilson left Bryn Mawr for Wesleyan University in Connecticut, an elite undergraduate college for men. He coached the football team, founded a debate team, and taught graduate courses in political economy and Western history.[38][39]
In February 1890, with the help of friends, Wilson was appointed by Princeton to the Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy, at an annual salary of $3,000 (equivalent to $90,478 in 2021).[40] He quickly gained a reputation as a compelling speaker.[41] In 1896, Francis Landey Patton announced that the College of New Jersey would henceforth be known as Princeton University; an ambitious program of expansion followed with the name change.[42] In the 1896 presidential election, Wilson rejected Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan as too far to the left. He supported the conservative "Gold Democrat" nominee, John M. Palmer.[43] Wilson's academic reputation continued to grow throughout the 1890s, and he turned down multiple positions elsewhere including at Johns Hopkins and the University of Virginia.[44]
Wilson published several works of history and political science and was a regular contributor to Political Science Quarterly. Wilson's textbook, The State, was widely used in American college courses until the 1920s.[45] In The State, Wilson wrote that governments could legitimately promote the general welfare "by forbidding child labor, by supervising the sanitary conditions of factories, by limiting the employment of women in occupations hurtful to their health, by instituting official tests of the purity or the quality of goods sold, by limiting the hours of labor in certain trades, [and] by a hundred and one limitations of the power of unscrupulous or heartless men to out-do the scrupulous and merciful in trade or industry."[46] He also wrote that charity efforts should be removed from the private domain and "made the imperative legal duty of the whole," a position which, according to historian Robert M. Saunders, seemed to indicate that Wilson "was laying the groundwork for the modern welfare state."[47] His third book, Division and Reunion (1893),[48] became a standard university textbook for teaching mid- and late-19th century U.S. history.[49]
President of Princeton University
See also: History of Princeton University § Woodrow Wilson
Wilson in 1902
Prospect House, Wilson's home on Princeton's campus
In June 1902, Princeton trustees promoted Professor Wilson to president, replacing Patton, whom the trustees perceived to be an inefficient administrator.[50] Wilson aspired, as he told alumni, "to transform thoughtless boys performing tasks into thinking men." He tried to raise admission standards and to replace the "gentleman's C" with serious study. To emphasize the development of expertise, Wilson instituted academic departments and a system of core requirements. Students were to meet in groups of six under the guidance of teaching assistants known as preceptors.[51][page needed] To fund these new programs, Wilson undertook an ambitious and successful fundraising campaign, convincing alumni such as Moses Taylor Pyne and philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie to donate to the school.[52] Wilson appointed the first Jew and the first Roman Catholic to the faculty, and helped liberate the board from domination by conservative Presbyterians.[53] He also worked to keep African Americans out of the school, even as other Ivy League schools were accepting small numbers of black people.[54][a]
Wilson's efforts to reform Princeton earned him national notoriety, but they also took a toll on his health.[56] In 1906, Wilson awoke to find himself blind in the left eye, the result of a blood clot and hypertension. Modern medical opinion surmises Wilson had had a stroke—he later was diagnosed, as his father had been, with hardening of the arteries. He began to exhibit his father's traits of impatience and intolerance, which would on occasion lead to errors of judgment.[57] When Wilson began vacationing in Bermuda in 1906, he met a socialite, Mary Hulbert Peck. According to biographer August Heckscher II, Wilson's friendship with Peck became the topic of frank discussion between Wilson and his wife, although Wilson historians have not conclusively established there was an affair.[58] Wilson also sent very personal letters to her,[59] which were later used against him by his adversaries.[60]
Having reorganized the school's curriculum and established the preceptorial system, Wilson next attempted to curtail the influence of social elites at Princeton by abolishing the upper-class eating clubs.[61] He proposed moving the students into colleges, also known as quadrangles, but Wilson's Quad Plan was met with fierce opposition from Princeton's alumni.[62] In October 1907, due to the intensity of alumni opposition, the Board of Trustees instructed Wilson to withdraw the Quad Plan.[63] Late in his tenure, Wilson had a confrontation with Andrew Fleming West, dean of the graduate school, and also West's ally ex-President Grover Cleveland, who was a trustee. Wilson wanted to integrate a proposed graduate school building into the campus core, while West preferred a more distant campus site. In 1909, Princeton's board accepted a gift made to the graduate school campaign subject to the graduate school being located off campus.[64]
Wilson became disenchanted with his job due to the resistance to his recommendations, and he began considering a run for office. Prior to the 1908 Democratic National Convention, Wilson dropped hints to some influential players in the Democratic Party of his interest in the ticket. While he had no real expectations of being placed on the ticket, he left instructions that he should not be offered the vice presidential nomination. Party regulars considered his ideas politically as well as geographically detached and fanciful, but the seeds had been sown.[65] In 1956, McGeorge Bundy described Wilson's contribution to Princeton: "Wilson was right in his conviction that Princeton must be more than a wonderfully pleasant and decent home for nice young men; it has been more ever since his time."[66]
Governor of New Jersey (1911–1913)
Governor Wilson, 1911
Results of the 1910 gubernatorial election in New Jersey. Wilson won the counties in blue.
By January 1910, Wilson had drawn the attention of James Smith Jr. and George Brinton McClellan Harvey, two leaders of New Jersey's Democratic Party, as a potential candidate in the upcoming gubernatorial election.[67] Having lost the last five gubernatorial elections, New Jersey Democratic leaders decided to throw their support behind Wilson, an untested and unconventional candidate. Party leaders believed that Wilson's academic reputation made him the ideal spokesman against trusts and corruption, but they also hoped his inexperience in governing would make him easy to influence.[68] Wilson agreed to accept the nomination if "it came to me unsought, unanimously, and without pledges to anybody about anything."[69]
At the state party convention, the bosses marshaled their forces and won the nomination for Wilson. He submitted his letter of resignation to Princeton on October 20.[70] Wilson's campaign focused on his promise to be independent of party bosses. He quickly shed his professorial style for more emboldened speechmaking and presented himself as a full-fledged progressive.[71] Though Republican William Howard Taft had carried New Jersey in the 1908 presidential election by more than 82,000 votes, Wilson soundly defeated Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivian M. Lewis by a margin of more than 65,000 votes.[72] Democrats also took control of the general assembly in the 1910 elections, though the state senate remained in Republican hands.[73] After winning the election, Wilson appointed Joseph Patrick Tumulty as his private secretary, a position he held throughout Wilson's political career.[73]
Wilson began formulating his reformist agenda, intending to ignore the demands of his party machinery. Smith asked Wilson to endorse his bid for the U.S. Senate, but Wilson refused and instead endorsed Smith's opponent James Edgar Martine, who had won the Democratic primary. Martine's victory in the Senate election helped Wilson position himself as an independent force in the New Jersey Democratic Party.[74] By the time Wilson took office, New Jersey had gained a reputation for public corruption; the state was known as the "Mother of Trusts" because it allowed companies like Standard Oil to escape the antitrust laws of other states.[75] Wilson and his allies quickly won passage of the Geran bill, which undercut the power of the political bosses by requiring primaries for all elective offices and party officials. A corrupt practices law and a workmen's compensation statute that Wilson supported won passage shortly thereafter.[76] For his success in passing these laws during the first months of his gubernatorial term, Wilson won national and bipartisan recognition as a reformer and a leader of the Progressive movement.[77]
Republicans took control of the state assembly in early 1912, and Wilson spent much of the rest of his tenure vetoing bills.[78] Nonetheless, he won passage of laws that restricted labor by women and children and increased standards for factory working conditions.[79] A new State Board of Education was set up "with the power to conduct inspections and enforce standards, regulate districts' borrowing authority, and require special classes for students with handicaps."[80] Before leaving office Wilson oversaw the establishment of free dental clinics and enacted a "comprehensive and scientific" poor law. Trained nursing was standardized, while contract labor in all reformatories and prisons was abolished and an indeterminate sentence act passed.[81] A law was introduced that compelled all railroad companies "to pay their employees twice monthly," while regulation of the working hours, health, safety, employment, and age of people employed in mercantile establishments was carried out.[82] Shortly before leaving office, Wilson signed a series of antitrust laws known as the "Seven Sisters," as well as another law that removed the power to select juries from local sheriffs.[83]
Presidential election of 1912
Main article: 1912 United States presidential election
Democratic nomination
Main articles: 1912 Democratic Party presidential primaries and 1912 Democratic National Convention
Wilson became a prominent 1912 presidential contender immediately upon his election as Governor of New Jersey in 1910, and his clashes with state party bosses enhanced his reputation with the rising Progressive movement.[84] In addition to progressives, Wilson enjoyed the support of Princeton alumni such as Cyrus McCormick and Southerners such as Walter Hines Page, who believed that Wilson's status as a transplanted Southerner gave him broad appeal.[85] Though Wilson's shift to the left won the admiration of many, it also created enemies such as George Brinton McClellan Harvey, a former Wilson supporter who had close ties to Wall Street.[86] In July 1911, Wilson brought William Gibbs McAdoo and "Colonel" Edward M. House in to manage the campaign.[87] Prior to the 1912 Democratic National Convention, Wilson made a special effort to win the approval of three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, whose followers had largely dominated the Democratic Party since the 1896 presidential election.[88]
Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri was viewed by many as the front-runner for the nomination, while House Majority Leader Oscar Underwood of Alabama also loomed as a challenger. Clark found support among the Bryan wing of the party, while Underwood appealed to the conservative Bourbon Democrats, especially in the South.[89] In the 1912 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Clark won several of the early contests, but Wilson finished strong with victories in Texas, the Northeast, and the Midwest.[90] On the first presidential ballot of the Democratic convention, Clark won a plurality of delegates; his support continued to grow after the New York Tammany Hall machine swung behind him on the tenth ballot.[91] Tammany's support backfired for Clark, as Bryan announced that he would not support any candidate that had Tammany's backing, and Clark began losing delegates on subsequent ballots.[92] Wilson gained the support of Roger Charles Sullivan and Thomas Taggart by promising the vice presidency to Governor Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana.[93] and several Southern delegations shifted their support from Underwood to Wilson. Wilson finally won two-thirds of the vote on the convention's 46th ballot, and Marshall became Wilson's running mate.[94]
General election
1912 electoral vote map
In the 1912 general election, Wilson faced two major opponents: one-term Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, and former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who ran a third party campaign as the "Bull Moose" Party nominee. The fourth candidate was Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party. Roosevelt had broken with his former party at the 1912 Republican National Convention after Taft narrowly won re-nomination, and the split in the Republican Party made Democrats hopeful that they could win the presidency for the first time since the 1892 presidential election.[95]
Roosevelt emerged as Wilson's main challenger, and Wilson and Roosevelt largely campaigned against each other despite sharing similarly progressive platforms that called for an interventionist central government.[96] Wilson directed campaign finance chairman Henry Morgenthau not to accept contributions from corporations and to prioritize smaller donations from the widest possible quarters of the public.[97] During the election campaign, Wilson asserted that it was the task of government "to make those adjustments of life which will put every man in a position to claim his normal rights as a living, human being."[98] With the help of legal scholar Louis Brandeis, he developed his New Freedom platform, focusing especially on breaking up trusts and lowering tariff rates.[99] Brandeis and Wilson rejected Roosevelt's proposal to establish a powerful bureaucracy charged with regulating large corporations, instead favoring the break-up of large corporations in order to create a level economic playing field.[100]
Wilson engaged in a spirited campaign, criss-crossing the country to deliver numerous speeches.[101] Ultimately, he took 42 percent of the popular vote and 435 of the 531 electoral votes.[102] Roosevelt won most of the remaining electoral votes and 27.4 percent of the popular vote, one of the strongest third party performances in U.S. history. Taft won 23.2 percent of the popular vote but just 8 electoral votes, while Debs won 6 percent of the popular vote. In the concurrent congressional elections, Democrats retained control of the House and won a majority in the Senate.[103] Wilson's victory made him the first Southerner to win a presidential election since the Civil War, the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland left office in 1897,[104] and the first president to hold a Ph.D.[105]
Presidency (1913–1921)
Main article: Presidency of Woodrow Wilson
For a chronological guide, see Timeline of the Woodrow Wilson presidency.
Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet (1918)
After the election, Wilson chose William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State, and Bryan offered advice on the remaining members of Wilson's cabinet.[106] William Gibbs McAdoo, a prominent Wilson supporter who married Wilson's daughter in 1914, became Secretary of the Treasury, and James Clark McReynolds, who had successfully prosecuted several prominent antitrust cases, was chosen as Attorney General.[107] Publisher Josephus Daniels, a party loyalist and prominent white supremacist from North Carolina,[108] was chosen to be Secretary of the Navy, while young New York attorney Franklin D. Roosevelt became Assistant Secretary of the Navy.[109] Wilson's chief of staff ("secretary") was Joseph Patrick Tumulty, who acted as a political buffer and intermediary with the press.[110] The most important foreign policy adviser and confidant was "Colonel" Edward M. House; Berg writes that, "in access and influence, [House] outranked everybody in Wilson's Cabinet."[111]
New Freedom domestic agenda
Wilson giving his first State of the Union address; the first time since 1801 that such an address was made in person before a joint session of Congress,[112] this initiated the modern trend with regards to the State of the Union address.[113]
Wilson introduced a comprehensive program of domestic legislation at the outset of his administration, something no president had ever done before.[114] He announced four major domestic priorities: the conservation of natural resources, banking reform, tariff reduction, and better access to raw materials for farmers by breaking up Western mining trusts.[115] Wilson introduced these proposals in April 1913 in a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress, becoming the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person.[116] Wilson's first two years in office largely focused on the his domestic agenda. With trouble with Mexico and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, foreign affairs increasingly dominated his presidency.[117]
Tariff and tax legislation
Democrats had long seen high tariff rates as equivalent to unfair taxes on consumers, and tariff reduction was their first priority.[118] He argued that the system of high tariffs "cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests."[119] By late May 1913, House Majority Leader Oscar Underwood had passed a bill in the House that cut the average tariff rate by 10 percent and imposed a tax on personal income above $4,000.[120] Underwood's bill represented the largest downward revision of the tariff since the Civil War. It aggressively cut rates for raw materials, goods deemed to be "necessities," and products produced domestically by trusts, but it retained higher tariff rates for luxury goods.[121]
Nevertheless, the passage of the tariff bill in the Senate was a challenge. Some Southern and Western Democrats wanted the continued protection of their wool and sugar industries, and Democrats had a narrower majority in the upper house.[118] Wilson met extensively with Democratic senators and appealed directly to the people through the press. After weeks of hearings and debate, Wilson and Secretary of State Bryan managed to unite Senate Democrats behind the bill.[120] The Senate voted 44 to 37 in favor of the bill, with only one Democrat voting against it and only one Republican voting for it. Wilson signed the Revenue Act of 1913 (called the Underwood Tariff) into law on October 3, 1913.[120] The Revenue Act of 1913 reduced tariffs and replaced the lost revenue with a federal income tax of one percent on incomes above $3,000, affecting the richest three percent of the population.[122] The policies of the Wilson administration had a durable impact on the composition of government revenue, which now primarily came from taxation rather than tariffs.[123]
Federal Reserve System
Map of Federal Reserve Districts–black circles, Federal Reserve Banks–black squares, District branches–red circles and Washington HQ–star/black circle
See also: History of the Federal Reserve System
Wilson did not wait to complete the Revenue Act of 1913 before proceeding to the next item on his agenda—banking. By the time Wilson took office, countries like Britain and Germany had established government-run central banks, but the United States had not had a central bank since the Bank War of the 1830s.[124] In the aftermath of the nationwide financial crisis in 1907, there was general agreement to create some sort of central banking system to provide a more elastic currency and to coordinate responses to financial panics. Wilson sought a middle ground between progressives such as Bryan and conservative Republicans like Nelson Aldrich, who, as chairman of the National Monetary Commission, had put forward a plan for a central bank that would give private financial interests a large degree of control over the monetary system.[125] Wilson declared that the banking system must be "public not private, [and] must be vested in the government itself so that the banks must be the instruments, not the masters, of business."[126]
Democrats crafted a compromise plan in which private banks would control twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, but a controlling interest in the system was placed in a central board filled with presidential appointees. Wilson convinced Democrats on the left that the new plan met their demands.[127] Finally the Senate voted 54–34 to approve the Federal Reserve Act.[128] The new system began operations in 1915, and it played a key role in financing the Allied and American war efforts in World War I.[129]
Antitrust legislation
See also: History of United States antitrust law
In a 1913 cartoon, Wilson primes the economic pump with tariff, currency and antitrust laws
Having passed major legislation lowering the tariff and reforming the banking structure, Wilson next sought antitrust legislation to enhance the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.[130] The Sherman Antitrust Act barred any "contract, combination...or conspiracy, in restraint of trade," but had proved ineffective in preventing the rise of large business combinations known as trusts.[131] An elite group of businessmen dominated the boards of major banks and railroads, and they used their power to prevent competition by new companies.[132] With Wilson's support, Congressman Henry Clayton, Jr. introduced a bill that would ban several anti-competitive practices such as discriminatory pricing, tying, exclusive dealing, and interlocking directorates.[133]
As the difficulty of banning all anti-competitive practices via legislation became clear, Wilson came to back legislation that would create a new agency, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to investigate antitrust violations and enforce antitrust laws independently of the Justice Department. With bipartisan support, Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which incorporated Wilson's ideas regarding the FTC.[134] One month after signing the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, which built on the Sherman Act by defining and banning several anti-competitive practices.[135]
Labor and agriculture
See also: Labor history of the United States
Official presidential portrait of Woodrow Wilson (1913)
Wilson thought a child labor law would probably be unconstitutional but reversed himself in 1916 with a close election approaching. In 1916, after intense campaigns by the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) and the National Consumers League, the Congress passed the Keating–Owen Act, making it illegal to ship goods in interstate commerce if they were made in factories employing children under specified ages. Southern Democrats were opposed but did not filibuster. Wilson endorsed the bill at the last minute under pressure from party leaders who stressed how popular the idea was, especially among the emerging class of women voters. He told Democratic Congressmen they needed to pass this law and also a workman's compensation law to satisfy the national progressive movement and to win the 1916 election against a reunited GOP. It was the first federal child labor law. However, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918). Congress then passed a law taxing businesses that used child labor, but that was struck down by the Supreme Court in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture (1923). Child labor was finally ended in the 1930s.[136] He approved the goal of upgrading the harsh working conditions for merchant sailors and signed LaFollette's Seamen's Act of 1915.[137]
Wilson called on the Labor Department to mediate conflicts between labor and management. In 1914, Wilson dispatched soldiers to help bring an end to the Colorado Coalfield War, one of the deadliest labor disputes in American history.[138] In 1916 he pushed Congress to enact the eight-hour work day for railroad workers, which ended a major strike. It was "the boldest intervention in labor relations that any president had yet attempted."[139]
Wilson disliked the excessive government involvement in the Federal Farm Loan Act, which created twelve regional banks empowered to provide low-interest loans to farmers. Nevertheless, he needed the farm vote to survive the upcoming 1916 election, so he signed it.[140]
Territories and immigration
See also: History of immigration to the United States
Wilson embraced the long-standing Democratic policy against owning colonies, and he worked for the gradual autonomy and ultimate independence of the Philippines, which had been acquired in 1898. Wilson increased self-governance on the islands by granting Filipinos greater control over the Philippine Legislature. The Jones Act of 1916 committed the United States to the eventual independence of the Philippines; independence took place in 1946.[141] In 1916, Wilson purchased by treaty the Danish West Indies, renamed as the United States Virgin Islands.[142]
Immigration from Europe declined significantly once World War I began and Wilson paid little attention to the issue during his presidency.[143] However, he looked favorably upon the "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe, and twice vetoed laws passed by Congress intended to restrict their entry, though the later veto was overridden.[144]
Judicial appointments
Main article: Woodrow Wilson Supreme Court candidates
For a more comprehensive list, see List of federal judges appointed by Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson nominated three men to the United States Supreme Court, all of whom were confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In 1914, Wilson nominated sitting Attorney General James Clark McReynolds. Despite his credentials as an ardent trust buster,[145] McReynolds became a staple of the court's conservative bloc until his retirement in 1941.[146] According to Berg, Wilson considered appointing McReynolds one of his biggest mistakes in office.[147] In 1916, Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Court, setting off a major debate in the Senate over Brandeis's progressive ideology and his religion; Brandeis was the first Jewish nominee to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, Wilson was able to convince Senate Democrats to vote to confirm Brandeis who served on the court until 1939. In contrast to McReynolds, Brandeis became one of the court's leading progressive voices.[148] When a second vacancy arose in 1916, Wilson appointed progressive lawyer John Hessin Clarke. Clarke was confirmed by the Senate and served on the Court until retiring in 1922.[149]
First-term foreign policy
Main article: Foreign policy of the Woodrow Wilson administration
Latin America
See also: United States involvement in the Mexican Revolution and Banana Wars
Uncle Sam entering Mexico in 1916 to punish Pancho Villa. Uncle Sam says "I've had about enough of this."
Wilson sought to move away from the foreign policy of his predecessors, which he viewed as imperialistic, and he rejected Taft's Dollar Diplomacy.[150] Nonetheless, he frequently intervened in Latin American affairs, saying in 1913: "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men."[151] The 1914 Bryan–Chamorro Treaty converted Nicaragua into a de facto protectorate, and the U.S. stationed soldiers there throughout Wilson's presidency. The Wilson administration sent troops to occupy the Dominican Republic and intervene in Haiti, and Wilson also authorized military interventions in Cuba, Panama, and Honduras.[152]
Wilson took office during the Mexican Revolution, which had begun in 1911 after liberals overthrew the military dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Shortly before Wilson took office, conservatives retook power through a coup led by Victoriano Huerta.[153] Wilson rejected the legitimacy of Huerta's "government of butchers" and demanded Mexico hold democratic elections.[154] After Huerta arrested U.S. Navy personnel who had accidentally landed in a restricted zone near the northern port town of Tampico, Wilson dispatched the Navy to occupy the Mexican city of Veracruz. A strong backlash against the American intervention among Mexicans of all political affiliations convinced Wilson to abandon his plans to expand the U.S. military intervention, but the intervention nonetheless helped convince Huerta to flee from the country.[155] A group led by Venustiano Carranza established control over a significant proportion of Mexico, and Wilson recognized Carranza's government in October 1915.[156]
Carranza continued to face various opponents within Mexico, including Pancho Villa, whom Wilson had earlier described as "a sort of Robin Hood."[156] In early 1916, Pancho Villa raided the village of Columbus, New Mexico, killing or wounding dozens of Americans and causing an enormous nationwide American demand for his punishment. Wilson ordered General John J. Pershing and 4,000 troops across the border to capture Villa. By April, Pershing's forces had broken up and dispersed Villa's bands, but Villa remained on the loose and Pershing continued his pursuit deep into Mexico. Carranza then pivoted against the Americans and accused them of a punitive invasion, leading to several incidents that nearly led to war. Tensions subsided after Mexico agreed to release several American prisoners, and bilateral negotiations began under the auspices of the Mexican-American Joint High Commission. Eager to withdraw from Mexico due to tensions in Europe, Wilson ordered Pershing to withdraw, and the last American soldiers left in February 1917.[157]
Neutrality in World War I
Wilson and "Jingo", the American War Dog. The editorial cartoon ridicules jingoes baying for war.
World War I broke out in July 1914, pitting the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and later Bulgaria) against the Allied Powers (Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and several other countries). The war fell into a long stalemate with very high casualties on the Western Front in France. Both sides rejected offers by Wilson and House to mediate an end the conflict.[158] From 1914 until early 1917, Wilson's primary foreign policy objectives were to keep the United States out of the war in Europe and to broker a peace agreement.[159] He insisted that all U.S. government actions be neutral, stating that Americans "must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another."[160] As a neutral power, the U.S. insisted on its right to trade with both sides. However the powerful British Royal Navy imposed a blockade of Germany. To appease Washington, London agreed to continue purchasing certain major American commodities such as cotton at pre-war prices, and in the event an American merchant vessel was caught with contraband, the Royal Navy was under orders to buy the entire cargo and release the vessel.[161] Wilson passively accepted this situation.[162]
In response to the British blockade, Germany launched a submarine campaign against merchant vessels in the seas surrounding the British Isles.[163] In early 1915, the Germans sank three American ships; Wilson took the view, based on some reasonable evidence, that these incidents were accidental, and a settlement of claims could be postponed until the end of the war.[164] In May 1915, a German submarine torpedoed the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 passengers, including 128 American citizens.[165] Wilson publicly responded by saying, "there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right".[166] Wilson demanded that the German government "take immediate steps to prevent the recurrence" of incidents like the sinking of the Lusitania. In response, Bryan, who believed that Wilson had placed the defense of American trade rights above neutrality, resigned from the Cabinet.[167] In March 1916, the SS Sussex, an unarmed ferry under the French flag, was torpedoed in the English Channel and four Americans were counted among the dead. Wilson extracted from Germany a pledge to constrain submarine warfare to the rules of cruiser warfare, which represented a major diplomatic concession.[168]
Interventionists, led by Theodore Roosevelt, wanted war with Germany and attacked Wilson's refusal to build up the army in anticipation of war.[169] After the sinking of the Lusitania and the resignation of Bryan, Wilson publicly committed himself to what became known as the "preparedness movement", and began to build up the army and the navy.[170] In June 1916, Congress passed the National Defense Act of 1916, which established the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and expanded the National Guard.[171] Later in the year, Congress passed the Naval Act of 1916, which provided for a major expansion of the navy.[172]
Remarriage
The Wilson family
The health of Wilson's wife, Ellen, declined after he entered office, and doctors diagnosed her with Bright's disease in July 1914.[173] She died on August 6, 1914.[174] Wilson was deeply affected by the loss, falling into depression.[175] On March 18, 1915, Wilson met Edith Bolling Galt at a White House tea.[176] Galt was a widow and jeweler who was also from the South. After several meetings, Wilson fell in love with her, and he proposed marriage to her in May 1915. Galt initially rebuffed him, but Wilson was undeterred and continued the courtship.[177] Edith gradually warmed to the relationship, and they became engaged in September 1915.[178] They were married on December 18, 1915. Wilson joined John Tyler and Grover Cleveland as the only presidents to marry while in office.[179]
Presidential election of 1916
Main article: 1916 United States presidential election
Wilson accepts the Democratic Party nomination, 1916
Wilson was renominated at the 1916 Democratic National Convention without opposition.[180] In an effort to win progressive voters, Wilson called for legislation providing for an eight-hour day and six-day workweek, health and safety measures, the prohibition of child labor, and safeguards for female workers. He also favored a minimum wage for all work performed by and for the federal government.[181] The Democrats also campaigned on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," and warned that a Republican victory would mean war with Germany.[182] Hoping to reunify the progressive and conservative wings of the party, the 1916 Republican National Convention nominated Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes for president; as a justice he had been totally out of politics in 1912. Though Republicans attacked Wilson's foreign policy on various grounds, domestic affairs generally dominated the campaign. Republicans campaigned against Wilson's New Freedom policies, especially tariff reduction, the new income taxes, and the Adamson Act, which they derided as "class legislation."[183]
1916 electoral vote map
The election was close and the outcome was in doubt with Hughes ahead in the East, and Wilson in the South and West. The decision came down to California. On November 10, California certified that Wilson had won the state by 3,806 votes, giving him a majority of the electoral vote. Nationally, Wilson won 277 electoral votes and 49.2 percent of the popular vote, while Hughes won 254 electoral votes and 46.1 percent of the popular vote.[184] Wilson was able to win by picking up many votes that had gone to Roosevelt or Debs in 1912.[185] He swept the Solid South and won all but a handful of Western states, while Hughes won most of the Northeastern and Midwestern states.[186] Wilson's re-election made him the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson (in 1832) to win two consecutive terms. The Democrats kept control of Congress.[187]
Entering the war
Main article: American entry into World War I
Further information: United States in World War I and Foreign policy of the Woodrow Wilson administration
In January 1917, the Germans initiated a new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against ships in the seas around the British Isles. German leaders knew that the policy would likely provoke U.S. entrance into the war, but they hoped to defeat the Allied Powers before the U.S. could fully mobilize.[188] In late February, the U.S. public learned of the Zimmermann Telegram, a secret diplomatic communication in which Germany sought to convince Mexico to join it in a war against the United States.[189] After a series of attacks on American ships, Wilson held a Cabinet meeting on March 20; all Cabinet members agreed that the time had come for the United States to enter the war.[190] The Cabinet members believed that Germany was engaged in a commercial war against the United States, and that the United States had to respond with a formal declaration of war.[191]
On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, arguing that Germany was engaged in "nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States." He requested a military draft to raise the army, increased taxes to pay for military expenses, loans to Allied governments, and increased industrial and agricultural production.[192] He stated, "we have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion... no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and freedom of the nations can make them."[193] The declaration of war by the United States against Germany passed Congress with strong bipartisan majorities on April 6, 1917.[194] The United States later declared war against Austria-Hungary in December 1917.[195]
With the U.S. entrance into the war, Wilson and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker launched an expansion of the army, with the goal of creating a 300,000-member Regular Army, a 440,000-member National Guard, and a 500,000-member conscripted force known as the "National Army." Despite some resistance to conscription and to the commitment of American soldiers abroad, large majorities of both houses of Congress voted to impose conscription with the Selective Service Act of 1917. Seeking to avoid the draft riots of the Civil War, the bill established local draft boards that were charged with determining who should be drafted. By the end of the war, nearly 3 million men had been drafted.[196] The navy also saw tremendous expansion, and Allied shipping losses dropped substantially due to U.S. contributions and a new emphasis on the convoy system.[197]
Map of the great powers and their empires in 1914
The Fourteen Points
Main article: Fourteen Points
Wilson sought the establishment of "an organized common peace" that would help prevent future conflicts. In this goal, he was opposed not just by the Central Powers, but also the other Allied Powers, who, to various degrees, sought to win concessions and to impose a punitive peace agreement on the Central Powers.[198] On January 8, 1918, Wilson delivered a speech, known as the Fourteen Points, wherein he articulated his administration's long term war objectives. Wilson called for the establishment of an association of nations to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all nations—a League of Nations.[199] Other points included the evacuation of occupied territory, the establishment of an independent Poland, and self-determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.[200]
Course of the war
Under the command of General Pershing, the American Expeditionary Forces first arrived in France in mid-1917.[201] Wilson and Pershing rejected the British and French proposal that American soldiers integrate into existing Allied units, giving the United States more freedom of action but requiring for the creation of new organizations and supply chains.[202] Russia exited the war after signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, allowing Germany to shift soldiers from the Eastern Front of the war.[203] Hoping to break Allied lines before American soldiers could arrive in full force, the Germans launched the Spring Offensive on the Western Front. Both sides suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties as the Germans forced back the British and French, but Germany was unable to capture the French capital of Paris.[204] There were only 175,000 American soldiers in Europe at the end of 1917, but by mid-1918 10,000 Americans were arriving in Europe per day.[203] With American forces having joined in the fight, the Allies defeated Germany in the Battle of Belleau Wood and the Battle of Château-Thierry. Beginning in August, the Allies launched the Hundred Days Offensive, pushing back the exhausted German army.[205] Meanwhile, French and British leaders convinced Wilson to send a few thousand American soldiers to join the Allied intervention in Russia, which was in the midst of a civil war between the Communist Bolsheviks and the White movement.[206]
By the end of September 1918, the German leadership no longer believed it could win the war, and Kaiser Wilhelm II appointed a new government led by Prince Maximilian of Baden.[207] Baden immediately sought an armistice with Wilson, with the Fourteen Points to serve as the basis of the German surrender.[208] House procured agreement to the armistice from France and Britain, but only after threatening to conclude a unilateral armistice without them.[209] Germany and the Allied Powers brought an end to the fighting with the signing of the Armistice of 11 November 1918.[210] Austria-Hungary had signed the Armistice of Villa Giusti eight days earlier, while the Ottoman Empire had signed the Armistice of Mudros in October. By the end of the war, 116,000 American servicemen had died, and another 200,000 had been wounded.[211]
Home front
Main article: United States home front during World War I
Liberty Loan drive in front of City Hall, New Orleans. On City Hall is a banner reading "Food will win the war—don't waste it".
Women workers in ordnance shops, Pennsylvania, 1918
With the American entrance into World War I in April 1917, Wilson became a war-time president. The War Industries Board, headed by Bernard Baruch, was established to set U.S. war manufacturing policies and goals. Future President Herbert Hoover led the Food Administration; the Federal Fuel Administration, run by Harry Augustus Garfield, introduced daylight saving time and rationed fuel supplies; William McAdoo was in charge of war bond efforts; Vance C. McCormick headed the War Trade Board. These men, known collectively as the "war cabinet", met weekly with Wilson.[212] Because he was heavily focused on foreign policy during World War I, Wilson delegated a large degree of authority over the home front to his subordinates.[213] In the midst of the war, the federal budget soared from $1 billion in fiscal year 1916 to $19 billion in fiscal year 1919.[214] In addition to spending on its own military build-up, Wall Street in 1914–1916 and the Treasury in 1917–1918 provided large loans to the Allied countries, thus financing the war effort of Britain and France.[215]
Seeking to avoid the high levels of inflation that had accompanied the heavy borrowing of the American Civil War, the Wilson administration raised taxes during the war.[216] The War Revenue Act of 1917 and the Revenue Act of 1918 raised the top tax rate to 77 percent, greatly increased the number of Americans paying the income tax, and levied an excess profits tax on businesses and individuals.[217] Despite these tax acts, the United States was forced to borrow heavily to finance the war effort. Treasury Secretary McAdoo authorized the issuing of low-interest war bonds and, to attract investors, made interest on the bonds tax-free. The bonds proved so popular among investors that many borrowed money in order to buy more bonds. The purchase of bonds, along with other war-time pressures, resulted in rising inflation, though this inflation was partly matched by rising wages and profits.[214]
To shape public opinion, Wilson in 1917 established the first modern propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed by George Creel.[218]
Wilson called on voters in the 1918 off-year elections to elect Democrats as an endorsement of his policies. However the Republicans won over alienated German-Americans and took control.[219] Wilson refused to coordinate or compromise with the new leaders of House and Senate—Senator Henry Cabot Lodge became his nemesis.[220]
In November 1919, Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, began to target anarchists, Industrial Workers of the World members, and other antiwar groups in what became known as the Palmer Raids. Thousands were arrested for incitement to violence, espionage, or sedition. Wilson by that point was incapacitated and was not told what was happening.[221]
Aftermath of World War I
Further information: Foreign policy of the Woodrow Wilson administration
Several new European states were established at the Paris Peace Conference.
Paris Peace Conference
Main articles: Aftermath of World War I and Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920)
The "Big Four" at the Paris Peace Conference on 27 May 1919, following the end of World War I. Wilson is standing next to Georges Clemenceau at right.
After the signing of the armistice, Wilson traveled to Europe to lead the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, thereby becoming the first incumbent president to travel to Europe.[222] Although Republicans now controlled Congress, Wilson shut them out. Senate Republicans and even some Senate Democrats complained about their lack of representation in the delegation. It consisted of Wilson, Colonel House,[b] Secretary of State Robert Lansing, General Tasker H. Bliss, and diplomat Henry White was the only Republican, and he was not an active partisan.[224] Save for a two-week return to the United States, Wilson remained in Europe for six months, where he focused on reaching a peace treaty to formally end the war. Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando made up the "Big Four", the Allied leaders with the most influence at the Paris Peace Conference.[225] Wilson had an illness during the conference, and some experts believe the Spanish flu was the cause.[226]
Unlike other Allied leaders, Wilson did not seek territorial gains or material concessions from the Central Powers. His chief goal was the establishment of the League of Nations, which he saw as the "keystone of the whole programme".[227] Wilson himself presided over the committee that drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations.[228] The covenant bound members to respect freedom of religion, treat racial minorities fairly, and peacefully settle disputes through organizations like the Permanent Court of International Justice. Article X of the League Covenant required all nations to defend League members against external aggression.[229] Japan proposed that the conference endorse a racial equality clause; Wilson was indifferent to the issue, but acceded to strong opposition from Australia and Britain.[230] The Covenant of the League of Nations was incorporated into the conference's Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war with Germany, and into other peace treaties.[231]
An Italian tribute to Woodrow Wilson - vast throngs in Milan gather to welcome the distinguished visitor
Aside from the establishment the League of Nations and solidifying a lasting world peace, Wilson's other main goal at the Paris Peace Conference was that self-determination be the primary basis used for drawing new international borders.[232] However, in pursuit of his League of Nations, Wilson conceded several points to the other powers present at the conference. Germany was required to permanently cede territory, pay war reparations, relinquish all of her overseas colonies and dependencies and submit to military occupation in the Rhineland. Additionally, a clause in the treaty specifically named Germany as responsible for the war. Wilson agreed to allowing the Allied European powers and Japan to essentially expand their empires by establishing de facto colonies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia out the former German and Ottoman Empires; these territorial awards to the victorious countries were thinly disguised as "League of Nations mandates". The Japanese acquisition of German interests in the Shandong Peninsula of China proved especially unpopular, as it undercut Wilson's promise of self-government. Wilson's hopes for achieving self-determination saw some success when the conference recognized multiple new and independent states created in Eastern Europe, including Albania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia.[232][233][234]
The conference finished negotiations in May 1919, at which point the new leaders of republican Germany viewed the treaty for the first time. Some German leaders favored repudiating the peace due to the harshness of the terms, though ultimately Germany signed the treaty on June 28, 1919.[235] Wilson was unable to convince the other Allied powers, France in particular, to temper the harshness of the settlement being leveled at the defeated Central Powers, especially Germany.[citation needed] For his efforts towards creating a lasting world peace, Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize.[236]
Ratification debate and defeat
Wilson returning from the Versailles Peace Conference on USS George Washington, as she steamed up New York Harbor on 8 July 1919; the Weimar National Assembly in Germany formally ratified the Treaty the next day by a margin of 209 to 116[237]
Ratification of the Treaty of Versailles required the support of two-thirds of the Senate, a difficult proposition given that Republicans held a narrow majority in the Senate after the 1918 U.S. elections.[238] Republicans were outraged by Wilson's failure to discuss the war or its aftermath with them, and an intensely partisan battle developed in the Senate. Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge supported a version of the treaty that required Wilson to compromise. Wilson refused.[238] Some Republicans, including former President Taft and former Secretary of State Elihu Root, favored ratification of the treaty with some modifications, and their public support gave Wilson some chance of winning the treaty's ratification.[238]
The debate over the treaty centered around a debate over the American role in the world community in the post-war era, and senators fell into three main groups. The first group, consisting of most Democrats, favored the treaty.[238] Fourteen senators, mostly Republicans, were known as the "irreconcilables" as they completely opposed U.S. entrance into the League of Nations. Some of these irreconcilables opposed the treaty for its failure to emphasize decolonization and disarmament, while others feared surrendering American freedom of action to an international organization.[239] The remaining group of senators, known as "reservationists", accepted the idea of the League but sought varying degrees of change to ensure the protection of American sovereignty and the right of Congress to decide on going to war.[239]
Article X of the League Covenant, which sought to create a system of collective security by requiring League members to protect one another against external aggression, seemed to force the U.S. to join in any war the League decided upon.[240] Wilson consistently refused to compromise, partly due to concerns about having to re-open negotiations with the other treaty signatories.[241] When Lodge was on the verge of building a two-thirds majority to ratify the Treaty with ten reservations, Wilson forced his supporters to vote Nay on March 19, 1920, thereby closing the issue. Cooper says that "nearly every League advocate" went along with Lodge, but their efforts "failed solely because Wilson admittedly rejected all reservations proposed in the Senate."[242] Thomas A. Bailey calls Wilson's action "the supreme act of infanticide".[243] He adds: "The treaty was slain in the house of its friends rather than in the house of its enemies. In the final analysis it was not the two-thirds rule, or the 'irreconcilables,' or Lodge, or the 'strong' and 'mild' reservationists, but Wilson and his docile following who delivered the fatal stab."[244]
Health collapses
To bolster public support for ratification, Wilson barnstormed the Western states, but he returned to the White House in late September due to health problems.[245] On October 2, 1919, Wilson suffered a serious stroke, leaving him paralyzed on his left side, and with only partial vision in the right eye.[246][247] He was confined to bed for weeks and sequestered from everyone except his wife and his physician, Dr. Cary Grayson.[248] Dr. Bert E. Park, a neurosurgeon who examined Wilson's medical records after his death, writes that Wilson's illness affected his personality in various ways, making him prone to "disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment."[249] Anxious to help the president recover, Tumulty, Grayson, and the First Lady determined what documents the president read and who was allowed to communicate with him. For her influence in the administration, some have described Edith Wilson as "the first female President of the United States."[250] Link states that by November 1919, Wilson's "recovery was only partial at best. His mind remained relatively clear; but he was physically enfeebled, and the disease had wrecked his emotional constitution and aggravated all his more unfortunate personal traits.[251]
Throughout late 1919, Wilson's inner circle concealed the severity of his health issues.[252] By February 1920, the president's true condition was publicly known. Many expressed qualms about Wilson's fitness for the presidency at a time when the League fight was reaching a climax, and domestic issues such as strikes, unemployment, inflation and the threat of Communism were ablaze. In mid-March 1920, Lodge and his Republicans formed a coalition with the pro-treaty Democrats to pass a treaty with reservations, but Wilson rejected this compromise and enough Democrats followed his lead to defeat ratification.[253] No one close to Wilson was willing to certify, as required by the Constitution, his "inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office."[254] Though some members of Congress encouraged Vice President Marshall to assert his claim to the presidency, Marshall never attempted to replace Wilson.[255] Wilson's lengthy period of incapacity while serving as president was nearly unprecedented; of the previous presidents, only James Garfield had been in a similar situation, but Garfield retained greater control of his mental faculties and faced relatively few pressing issues.[256]
Demobilization
When the war ended the Wilson Administration dismantled the wartime boards and regulatory agencies.[257] Demobilization was chaotic and at times violent; four million soldiers were sent home with little money and few benefits. In 1919, strikes in major industries broke out, disrupting the economy.[258] The country experienced further turbulence as a series of race riots broke out in the summer of 1919.[259] In 1920, the economy plunged into a severe economic depression,[260] unemployment rose to 12 percent, and the price of agricultural products sharply declined.[261]
Red Scare and Palmer Raids
June 3, 1919, Newspapers of the 1919 bombings
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and similar attempts in Germany and Hungary, many Americans feared the possibility of terrorism in the United States. Such concerns were inflamed by the bombings in April 1919 when anarchists mailed 38 bombs to prominent Americans; one person was killed but most packages were intercepted. Nine more mail bombs were sent in June; injuring several people.[262] Fresh fears combined with a patriotic national mood sparking the "First Red Scare" in 1919. Attorney General Palmer from November 1919 to January 1920 launched the Palmer Raids to suppress radical organizations. Over 10,000 people were arrested and 556 aliens were deported, including Emma Goldman.[263] Palmer's activities met resistance from the courts and some senior administration officials. No one told Wilson what Palmer was doing.[264][265] Later in 1920 the Wall Street bombing on September 16, killed 40 and injured hundreds in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil up to that point. Anarchists took credit and promised more violence to come; they escaped capture.[266]
Prohibition and women's suffrage
Prohibition developed as an unstoppable reform during the war, but the Wilson administration played only a minor role.[267] The Eighteenth Amendment passed Congress and was ratified by the states in 1919. In October 1919, Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, legislation designed to enforce Prohibition, but his veto was overridden by Congress.[268][269]
Wilson personally opposed women's suffrage in 1911 because he believed women lacked the public experience needed to be good voters. The actual evidence of how women voters behaved in the western states changed his mind, and he came to feel they could indeed be good voters. He did not speak publicly on the issue except to echo the Democratic Party position that suffrage was a state matter, primarily because of strong opposition in the white South to Black voting rights.[270]
In a 1918 speech before Congress, Wilson for the first time backed a national right to vote: "We have made partners of the women in this war....Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?"[271] The House passed a constitutional amendment providing for women's suffrage nationwide, but this stalled in the Senate. Wilson continually pressured the Senate to vote for the amendment, telling senators that its ratification was vital to winning the war.[272] The Senate finally approved it in June 1919, and the requisite number of states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920.[273]
1920 election
Further information: 1920 United States presidential election
Republican nominee Warren G. Harding defeated Democratic nominee James Cox in the 1920 election.
Despite his medical incapacity, Wilson wanted to run for a third term. While the 1920 Democratic National Convention strongly endorsed Wilson's policies, Democratic leaders refused, nominating instead a ticket consisting of Governor James M. Cox and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.[274] The Republicans centered their campaign around opposition to Wilson's policies, with Senator Warren G. Harding promising a "return to normalcy". Wilson largely stayed out of the campaign, although he endorsed Cox and continued to advocate for U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Harding won a landslide, winning over 60% of the popular vote and every state outside of the South.[275] Wilson met with Harding for tea on his last day in office, March 3, 1921. Due to his health, Wilson was unable to attend the inauguration.[276]
On December 10, 1920, Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize "for his role as founder of the League of Nations".[277][278] Wilson became the second sitting United States president after Theodore Roosevelt to become a Nobel Peace Laureate.[279]
Final years and death (1921–1924)
The final resting place of Woodrow Wilson at the Washington National Cathedral
After the end of his second term in 1921, Wilson and his wife moved from the White House to a town house in the Kalorama section of Washington, D.C.[280] He continued to follow politics as President Harding and the Republican Congress repudiated membership in the League of Nations, cut taxes, and raised tariffs.[281] In 1921, Wilson opened a law practice with former Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. Wilson showed up the first day but never returned, and the practice was closed by the end of 1922. Wilson tried writing, and he produced a few short essays after enormous effort; they "marked a sad finish to a formerly great literary career."[282] He declined to write memoirs, but frequently met with Ray Stannard Baker, who wrote a three-volume biography of Wilson that was published in 1922.[283] In August 1923, Wilson attended the funeral of his successor, Warren Harding.[284] On November 10, 1923, Wilson made his last national address, delivering a short Armistice Day radio speech from the library of his home.[285][286]
Wilson's health did not markedly improve after leaving office,[287] declining rapidly in January 1924. Woodrow Wilson died on February 3, 1924, at the age of 67.[288] He was interred in Washington National Cathedral, being the only president whose final resting place lies within the nation's capital.[289]
Race relations
Further information: Woodrow Wilson and race
"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great clan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country."
Quotation from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People as reproduced in the film The Birth of a Nation.
Wilson was born and raised in the South by parents who were committed supporters of both slavery and the Confederacy. Academically, Wilson was an apologist for slavery and the Redeemers, and one of the foremost promoters of the Lost Cause mythology.[290] Wilson was the first Southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor in 1848 and the only former subject of the Confederacy. Wilson's election was celebrated by southern segregationists. At Princeton, Wilson actively dissuaded the admission of African-Americans as students.[291] Several historians have spotlighted consistent examples in the public record of Wilson's overtly racist policies and the inclusion of segregationists in his Cabinet.[292][293][294] Other sources say Wilson defended segregation as "a rational, scientific policy" in private and describe him as a man who "loved to tell racist jokes about black Americans."[295][296]
During Wilson's presidency, D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first motion picture to be screened in the White House.[297] Though he was not initially critical of the movie, Wilson distanced himself from it as public backlash mounted and eventually released a statement condemning the film's message while denying he had been aware of it prior to the screening.[298][299]
Segregating the federal bureaucracy
By the 1910s, African-Americans had become effectively shut out of elected office. Obtaining an executive appointment to a position within the federal bureaucracy was usually the only option for African-American statesmen. According to Berg, Wilson continued to appoint African-Americans to positions that had traditionally been filled by black people, overcoming opposition from many southern senators. Oswald Garrison Villard, who later became an opponent of his, initially thought that Wilson was not a bigot and supported progress for black people, and he was frustrated by southern opposition in the Senate, to which Wilson capitulated. In a conversation with Wilson, journalist John Palmer Gavit came to the realization that opposition to those views "would certainly precipitate a conflict which would put a complete stop to any legislative program."[300][301] Since the end of Reconstruction, both parties recognized certain appointments as unofficially reserved for qualified African-Americans. Wilson appointed a total of nine African-Americans to prominent positions in the federal bureaucracy, eight of whom were Republican carry-overs. For comparison, William Howard Taft was met with disdain and outrage from Republicans of both races for appointing thirty-one black officeholders, a record low for a Republican president. Upon taking office, Wilson fired all but two of the seventeen black supervisors in the federal bureaucracy appointed by Taft.[302][303]
Since 1863, the U.S. mission to Haiti and Santo Domingo was almost always led by an African-American diplomat regardless of what party the sitting president belonged to; Wilson ended this half-century-old tradition but continued to appoint black diplomats like George Washington Buckner,[304][305] as well as Joseph L. Johnson,[306][307] to head the mission to Liberia.[308] Since the end of Reconstruction, the federal bureaucracy had been possibly the only career path where African-Americans could experience some measure of equality,[309] and was the life blood and foundation of the black middle-class.[310] Wilson's administration escalated the discriminatory hiring policies and segregation of government offices that had begun under Theodore Roosevelt and continued under Taft.[311] In Wilson's first month in office, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson urged the president to establish segregated government offices.[312] Wilson did not adopt Burleson's proposal but allowed Cabinet Secretaries discretion to segregate their respective departments.[313] By the end of 1913, many departments, including the Navy, Treasury, and Post Office, had segregated work spaces, restrooms, and cafeterias.[312] Many agencies used segregation as a pretext to adopt a whites-only employment policy, claiming they lacked facilities for black workers. In these instances, African-Americans employed prior to the Wilson administration were either offered early retirement, transferred, or simply fired.[314]
Racial discrimination in federal hiring increased further when after 1914, the United States Civil Service Commission instituted a new policy requiring job applicants to submit a personal photo with their application.[315] As a federal enclave, Washington, D.C., had long offered African-Americans greater opportunities for employment and less glaring discrimination. In 1919, black veterans returning home to D.C. were shocked to discover Jim Crow laws had set in, many could not go back to the jobs they held prior to the war or even enter the same building they used to work in due to the color of their skin. Booker T. Washington described the situation: "I had never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time."[316]
African-Americans in the armed forces
World War I draft card, the lower left corner to be removed by men of African background to help keep the military segregated
Further information: Racial segregation in the United States Armed Forces
While segregation had been present in the Army prior to Wilson, its severity increased significantly under his election. During Wilson's first term, the Army and Navy refused to commission new black officers.[317] Black officers already serving experienced increased discrimination and were often forced out or discharged on dubious grounds.[318] Following the entry of the U.S. into World War I, the War Department drafted hundreds of thousands of black people into the Army, and draftees were paid equally regardless of race. Commissioning of African-Americans officers resumed but units remained segregated and most all-black units were led by white officers.[319][page needed]
Unlike the Army, the U.S. Navy was never formally segregated. Following Wilson's appointment of Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, a system of Jim Crow was swiftly implemented; with ships, training facilities, restrooms, and cafeterias all becoming segregated.[312] While Daniels significantly expanded opportunities for advancement and training available to white sailors, by the time the U.S. entered World War I, African-American sailors had been relegated almost entirely to mess and custodial duties, often assigned to act as servants for white officers.[320]
Response to racial violence
Political cartoon published in New York Evening Mail about the East St. Louis riots of 1917. Original caption reads "Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?"
In response to the demand for industrial labor, the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South surged in 1917 and 1918. This migration sparked race riots, including the East St. Louis riots of 1917. In response to these riots, but only after much public outcry, Wilson asked Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory if the federal government could intervene to "check these disgraceful outrages". On the advice of Gregory, Wilson did not take direct action against the riots.[321] In 1918, Wilson spoke out against lynching in the United States, stating: "I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of mob or gives it any sort of continence is no true son of this great democracy but its betrayer, and ... [discredits] her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of rights."[322] In 1919, another series of race riots occurred in Chicago, Omaha, and two dozen other major cities in the North. The federal government did not become involved, just as it had not become involved previously.[323]
Legacy
Historical reputation
1934 $100,000 gold certificate depicting Wilson
Stamps memorializing Wilson
Wilson is generally ranked by historians and political scientists as an above average president.[324] In the view of some historians, Wilson, more than any of his predecessors, took steps towards the creation of a strong federal government that would protect ordinary citizens against the overwhelming power of large corporations.[325] He is generally regarded as a key figure in the establishment of modern American liberalism, and a strong influence on future presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.[324] Cooper argues that in terms of impact and ambition, only the New Deal and the Great Society rival the domestic accomplishments of Wilson's presidency.[326] Many of Wilson's accomplishments, including the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the graduated income tax, and labor laws, continued to influence the United States long after Wilson's death.[324]
Many conservatives have attacked Wilson for his role in expanding the federal government.[327][328] In 2018, conservative columnist George Will wrote in The Washington Post that Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson were the "progenitors of today's imperial presidency".[329] Wilson's idealistic foreign policy, which came to be known as Wilsonianism, also cast a long shadow over American foreign policy, and Wilson's League of Nations influenced the development of the United Nations.[324] Saladin Ambar writes that Wilson was "the first statesman of world stature to speak out not only against European imperialism but against the newer form of economic domination sometimes described as 'informal imperialism.'"[330]
Notwithstanding his accomplishments in office, Wilson has received criticism for his record on race relations and civil liberties, for his interventions in Latin America, and for his failure to win ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.[331][330] Despite his southern roots and record at Princeton, Wilson became the first Democrat to receive widespread support from the African-American community in a presidential election.[332] Wilson's African-American supporters, many of whom had crossed party lines to vote for him in 1912, found themselves bitterly disappointed by the Wilson presidency, his decision to allow the imposition of Jim Crow within the federal bureaucracy in particular.[312]
Ross Kennedy writes that Wilson's support of segregation complied with predominant public opinion.[333] A. Scott Berg argues Wilson accepted segregation as part of a policy to "promote racial progress... by shocking the social system as little as possible."[334] The ultimate result of this policy was unprecedented levels of segregation within the federal bureaucracy and far fewer opportunities for employment and promotion being open to African-Americans than before.[335] Historian Kendrick Clements argues "Wilson had none of the crude, vicious racism of James K. Vardaman or Benjamin R. Tillman, but he was insensitive to African-American feelings and aspirations."[336] A 2021 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that Wilson's segregation of the civil service increased the black-white earnings gap by 3.4–6.9 percentage points, as existing black civil servants were driven to lower-paid positions. Black civil servants who were exposed to Wilson's segregationist policies experienced a relative decline in home ownership rates, with suggestive evidence of lasting adverse effects for the descendants of those black civil servants.[337] In the wake of the Charleston church shooting, some individuals demanded the removal of Wilson's name from institutions affiliated with Princeton due to his stance on race.[338][339]
Memorials
For a more comprehensive list, see List of memorials to Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson Monument in Prague
The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library is located in Staunton, Virginia. The Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home in Augusta, Georgia, and the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, D.C., are National Historic Landmarks. The Thomas Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home in Columbia, South Carolina is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Shadow Lawn, the Summer White House for Wilson during his term in office, became part of Monmouth University in 1956. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1985. Prospect House, Wilson's residence during part of his tenure at Princeton, is also a National Historic Landmark. Wilson's presidential papers and his personal library are at the Library of Congress.[340]
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., is named for Wilson, and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton was named for Wilson until Princeton's Board of Trustees voted to remove Wilson's name in 2020.[341] The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation is a non-profit that provides grants for teaching fellowships. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation was established to honor Wilson's legacy but was terminated in 1993. One of Princeton's six residential colleges was originally named Wilson College.[341] Numerous schools, including several high schools, bear Wilson's name. Several streets, including the Rambla Presidente Wilson in Montevideo, Uruguay, have been named for Wilson. The USS Woodrow Wilson, a Lafayette-class submarine, was named for Wilson. Other things named for Wilson include the Woodrow Wilson Bridge between Prince George's County, Maryland and Virginia, and the Palais Wilson, which serves as the temporary headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva until 2023 at the end of leasing.[342] Monuments to Wilson include the Woodrow Wilson Monument in Prague.[343]
Popular culture
In 1944, 20th Century Fox released Wilson, a biopic about the 28th President. Starring Alexander Knox and directed by Henry King, Wilson is considered an "idealistic" portrayal of the title character. The movie was a personal passion project of studio president and famed producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who was a deep admirer of Wilson. The movie received mostly praise from critics and Wilson supporters,[344][345][346] and scored ten Academy Awards nominations, winning five.[347] Despite its popularity amongst elites, Wilson was a box-office bomb, incurring an almost $2 million loss for the studio.[348] The movie's failure is said to have had a deep and long lasting impact on Zanuck and no attempt has been made by any major studio since to create a motion picture based around the life of Wilson.[347]
The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits the United States and its states from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex, in effect recognizing the right of women to a vote. The amendment was the culmination of a decades-long movement for women's suffrage in the United States, at both the state and national levels, and was part of the worldwide movement towards women's suffrage and part of the wider women's rights movement. The first women's suffrage amendment was introduced in Congress in 1878. However, a suffrage amendment did not pass the House of Representatives until May 21, 1919, which was quickly followed by the Senate, on June 4, 1919. It was then submitted to the states for ratification, achieving the requisite 36 ratifications to secure adoption, and thereby go into effect, on August 18, 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment's adoption was certified on August 26, 1920.
Before 1776, women had a vote in several of the colonies in what would become the United States, but by 1807 every state constitution had denied women even limited suffrage. Organizations supporting women's rights became more active in the mid-19th century and, in 1848, the Seneca Falls convention adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, which called for equality between the sexes and included a resolution urging women to secure the vote. Pro-suffrage organizations used a variety of tactics including legal arguments that relied on existing amendments. After those arguments were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, suffrage organizations, with activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, called for a new constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the same right to vote possessed by men.
By the late 19th century, new states and territories, particularly in the West, began to grant women the right to vote. In 1878, a suffrage proposal that would eventually become the Nineteenth Amendment was introduced to Congress, but was rejected in 1887. In the 1890s, suffrage organizations focused on a national amendment while still working at state and local levels. Lucy Burns and Alice Paul emerged as important leaders whose different strategies helped move the Nineteenth Amendment forward. Entry of the United States into World War I helped to shift public perception of women's suffrage. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, supported the war effort, making the case that women should be rewarded with enfranchisement for their patriotic wartime service. The National Woman's Party staged marches, demonstrations, and hunger strikes while pointing out the contradictions of fighting abroad for democracy while limiting it at home by denying women the right to vote. The work of both organizations swayed public opinion, prompting President Woodrow Wilson to announce his support of the suffrage amendment in 1918. It passed in 1919 and was adopted in 1920, withstanding two legal challenges, Leser v. Garnett and Fairchild v. Hughes.
The Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women in time for the 1920 U.S. presidential election, but the powerful women's voting bloc that many politicians feared failed to fully materialize until decades later. Additionally, the Nineteenth Amendment failed to fully enfranchise African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American women (see § Limitations). Shortly after the amendment's adoption, Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party began work on the Equal Rights Amendment, which they believed was a necessary additional step towards equality.
Text
The Nineteenth Amendment in the National Archives
The Nineteenth Amendment provides:
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.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[1]
Background
Early woman suffrage efforts (1776–1865)
Main article: Women's suffrage in the United States
Text of the small ad that attracted a diverse meeting of women and men at the first Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, during July 1848
The United States Constitution, adopted in 1789, left the boundaries of suffrage undefined. The only directly elected body created under the original Constitution was the U.S. House of Representatives, for which voter qualifications were explicitly delegated to the individual states.[note 1] While women had the right to vote in several of the pre-revolutionary colonies in what would become the United States, after 1776, with the exception of New Jersey, all states adopted constitutions that denied voting rights to women. New Jersey's constitution initially granted suffrage to property-holding residents, including single and married women, but the state rescinded women's voting rights in 1807 and did not restore them until New Jersey ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.[3]
While scattered movements and organizations dedicated to women's rights existed previously, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York is traditionally held as the start of the American women's rights movement. Attended by nearly 300 women and men, the convention was designed to "discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women", and culminated in the adoption of the Declaration of Sentiments.[4] Signed by 68 women and 32 men, the ninth of the document's twelve resolved clauses reads, "Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise."[5] Conveners Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became key early leaders in the U.S. women's suffrage movement, often referred to at the time as the "woman suffrage movement".[6][page needed][7] Mott's support of women's suffrage stemmed from a summer spent with the Seneca Nation, one of the six tribes in the Iroquois Confederacy, where women had significant political power, including the right to choose and remove chiefs and veto acts of war.[8]
Activism addressing federal women's suffrage was minimal during the Civil War. In 1865, at the conclusion of the war, a "Petition for Universal Suffrage", signed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, among others, called for a national constitutional amendment to "prohibit the several states from disenfranchising any of their citizens on the ground of sex".[9] The campaign was the first national petition drive to feature woman suffrage among its demands.[10] While suffrage bills were introduced into many state legislatures during this period, they were generally disregarded and few came to a vote.[11]
Reconstruction Amendments and woman suffrage (1865–1877)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) with Susan B. Anthony
The women's suffrage movement, delayed by the American Civil War, resumed activities during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). Two rival suffrage organizations formed in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone.[12][13] The NWSA's main effort was lobbying Congress for a women's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The AWSA generally focused on a long-term effort of state campaigns to achieve women's suffrage on a state-by-state basis.[14]
During the Reconstruction era, women's rights leaders advocated for inclusion of universal suffrage as a civil right in the Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments). Some unsuccessfully argued that the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denying voting rights "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude",[15] implied suffrage for women.[16] Despite their efforts, these amendments did not enfranchise women.[12][17] Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly discriminated between men and women by only penalizing states which deprived adult male citizens of the vote.[note 2]
The NWSA attempted several unsuccessful court challenges in the mid-1870s.[19] Their legal argument, known as the "New Departure" strategy, contended that the Fourteenth Amendment (granting universal citizenship) and Fifteenth Amendment (granting the vote irrespective of race) together guaranteed voting rights to women.[20] The U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument. In Bradwell v. Illinois[21] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Supreme Court of Illinois's refusal to grant Myra Bradwell a license to practice law was not a violation of the U.S. Constitution and refused to extend federal authority in support of women's citizenship rights.[note 3] In Minor v. Happersett[23] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not provide voting rights to U.S. citizens; it only guaranteed additional protection of privileges to citizens who already had them. If a state constitution limited suffrage to male citizens of the United States, then women in that state did not have voting rights.[22] After U.S. Supreme Court decisions between 1873 and 1875 denied voting rights to women in connection with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, suffrage groups shifted their efforts to advocating for a new constitutional amendment.[20]
Continued settlement of the western frontier, along with the establishment of territorial constitutions, allowed the women's suffrage issue to be raised as the western territories progressed toward statehood. Through the activism of suffrage organizations and independent political parties, women's suffrage was included in the constitutions of Wyoming Territory (1869) and Utah Territory (1870).[17][24] Women's suffrage in Utah was revoked in 1887, when Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887 that also prohibited polygamy; it was not restored in Utah until it achieved statehood in 1896.[13][24]
Post-Reconstruction (1878–1910)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton before the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections. New York Daily Graphic, January 16, 1878, p. 501
Existing state legislatures in the West, as well as those east of the Mississippi River, began to consider suffrage bills in the 1870s and 1880s. Several held voter referendums, but they were unsuccessful[19] until the suffrage movement was revived in the 1890s. Full women's suffrage continued in Wyoming after it became a state in 1890. Colorado granted partial voting rights that allowed women to vote in school board elections in 1893 and Idaho granted women suffrage in 1896. Beginning with Washington in 1910, seven more western states passed women's suffrage legislation, including California in 1911, Oregon, Arizona, and Kansas in 1912, Alaska Territory in 1913, and Montana and Nevada in 1914. All states that were successful in securing full voting rights for women before 1920 were located in the West.[13][25]
A federal amendment intended to grant women the right to vote was introduced in the U.S. Senate for the first time in 1878 by Aaron A. Sargent, a Senator from California who was a women's suffrage advocate.[26] Stanton and other women testified before the Senate in support of the amendment.[27] The proposal sat in a committee until it was considered by the full Senate and rejected in a 16-to-34 vote in 1887.[28] An amendment proposed in 1888 in the U.S. House of Representatives called for limited suffrage for women who were spinsters or widows who owned property.[29]
By the 1890s, suffrage leaders began to recognize the need to broaden their base of support to achieve success in passing suffrage legislation at the national, state, and local levels. While western women, state suffrage organizations, and the AWSA concentrated on securing women's voting rights for specific states, efforts at the national level persisted through a strategy of congressional testimony, petitioning, and lobbying.[30][31] After the AWSA and NWSA merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the group directed its efforts to win state-level support for suffrage.[32] Suffragists had to campaign publicly for the vote in order to convince male voters, state legislators, and members of Congress that American women wanted to be enfranchised and that women voters would benefit American society. Suffrage supporters also had to convince American women, many of whom were indifferent to the issue, that suffrage was something they wanted. Apathy among women was an ongoing obstacle that the suffragists had to overcome through organized grassroots efforts.[33] Despite the suffragists' efforts, no state granted women suffrage between 1896 and 1910, and the NAWSA shifted its focus toward passage of a national constitutional amendment.[32] Suffragists also continued to press for the right to vote in individual states and territories while retaining the goal of federal recognition.[28]
African-American woman suffrage efforts
Main article: African-American women's suffrage movement
Suffragist and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell
Thousands of African-American women were active in the suffrage movement, addressing issues of race, gender, and class, as well as enfranchisement,[34] often through the church but eventually through organizations devoted to specific causes.[35] While white women sought the vote to gain an equal voice in the political process, African-American women often sought the vote as a means of racial uplift and as a way to effect change in the post-Reconstruction era.[36][37] Notable African-American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett advocated for suffrage in tandem with civil rights for African-Americans.[34]
As early as 1866, in Philadelphia, Margaretta Forten and Harriet Forten Purvis helped to found the Philadelphia Suffrage Association; Purvis would go on to serve on the executive committee of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an organization that supported suffrage for women and for African-American men.[38] A national movement in support of suffrage for African-American women began in earnest with the rise of the black women's club movement.[36] In 1896, club women belonging to various organizations promoting women's suffrage met in Washington, D.C. to form the National Association of Colored Women, of which Frances E.W. Harper, Josephine St. Pierre, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells Barnett were founding members.[39] Led by Mary Church Terrell, it was the largest federation of African-American women's clubs in the nation.[36] After 1914 it became the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.[40]
Nannie Helen Burroughs holding a Woman's National Baptist Convention banner
When the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised African-American men, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony abandoned the AERA, which supported universal suffrage, to found the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, saying black men should not receive the vote before white women.[38] In response, African-American suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and others joined the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported suffrage for women and for black men. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the second African-American woman to receive a degree from Howard University Law School, joined the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1878 when she delivered their convention's keynote address.[41] Tensions between African-American and white suffragists persisted, even after the NWSA and AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.[38] By the early 1900s, white suffragists often adopted strategies designed to appease the Southern states at the expense of African-American women.[42][43][page needed] At conventions in 1901 and 1903, in Atlanta and New Orleans, NAWSA prevented African Americans from attending. At the 1911 national NAWSA conference, Martha Gruening asked the organization to formally denounce white supremacy. NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw refused, saying she was "in favor of colored people voting", but did not want to alienate others in the suffrage movement.[44] Even NAWSA's more radical Congressional Committee, which would become the National Woman's Party, failed African-American women, most visibly by refusing to allow them to march in the nation's first suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. While the NAWSA directed Paul not to exclude African-American participants, 72 hours before the parade African-American women were directed to the back of the parade; Ida B. Wells defied these instructions and joined the Illinois unit, prompting telegrams of support.[44]
Mary B. Talbert, a leader in both the NACW and NAACP, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, an educator and activist, contributed to an issue of the Crisis, published by W. E. B. Du Bois in August 1915.[44] They wrote passionately about African-American women's need for the vote. Burroughs, asked what women could do with the ballot, responded pointedly: "What can she do without it?"[44]
Proposal and ratification
A new focus on a federal amendment
Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, organized the "Winning Plan" that helped secure passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
In 1900, Carrie Chapman Catt succeeded Susan B. Anthony as the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Catt revitalized NAWSA, turning the focus of the organization to the passage of the federal amendment while simultaneously supporting women who wanted to pressure their states to pass suffrage legislation. The strategy, which she later called "The Winning Plan", had several goals: women in states that had already granted presidential suffrage (the right to vote for the President) would focus on passing a federal suffrage amendment; women who believed they could influence their state legislatures would focus on amending their state constitutions and Southern states would focus on gaining primary suffrage (the right to vote in state primaries).[45] Simultaneously, the NAWSA worked to elect congressmen who supported suffrage for women.[42] By 1915, NAWSA was a large, powerful organization, with 44 state chapters and more than two million members.[45]
In a break with NAWSA, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage in 1913 to pressure the federal government to take legislative action. One of their first acts was to organize a women's suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. The procession of more than 5,000 participants, the first of its kind, attracted a crowd of an estimated 500,000, as well as national media attention, but Wilson took no immediate action. In March 1917, the Congressional Union joined with Women's Party of Western Voters to form the National Woman's Party (NWP), whose aggressive tactics included staging more radical acts of civil disobedience and controversial demonstrations to draw more attention to the women's suffrage issue.[46]
Woman suffrage and World War I patriotism
"Silent Sentinels" begin a 2+1⁄2-year campaign in front of the White House (1917).
When World War I started in 1914, women in eight states had already won the right to vote, but support for a federal amendment was still tepid. The war provided a new urgency to the fight for the vote. When the U.S. entered World War I, Catt made the controversial decision to support the war effort, despite the widespread pacifist sentiment of many of her colleagues and supporters.[47] As women joined the labor force to replace men serving in the military and took visible positions as nurses, relief workers, and ambulance drivers[48] to support the war effort, NAWSA organizers argued that women's sacrifices made them deserving of the vote. By contrast, the NWP used the war to point out the contradictions of fighting for democracy abroad while restricting it at home.[42] In 1917, the NWP began picketing the White House to bring attention to the cause of women's suffrage.
In 1914 the constitutional amendment proposed by Sargent, which was nicknamed the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment", was once again considered by the Senate, where it was again rejected.[28] In April 1917 the "Anthony Amendment", which eventually became the Nineteenth Amendment, was reintroduced in the House and Senate. Picketing NWP members, nicknamed the "Silent Sentinels", continued their protests on the sidewalks outside the White House. On July 4, 1917, police arrested 168 of the protesters, who were sent to prison in Lorton, Virginia. Some of these women, including Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, went on hunger strikes; some were force-fed while others were otherwise harshly treated by prison guards. The release of the women a few months later was largely due to increasing public pressure.[46]
Final congressional challenges
Nina Allender political cartoon aimed at President Wilson published in The Suffragist on October 3, 1917
In 1918, President Wilson faced a difficult midterm election and would have to confront the issue of women's suffrage directly.[42] Fifteen states had extended equal voting rights to women and, by this time, the President fully supported the federal amendment.[49][50] A proposal brought before the House in January 1918 passed by only one vote. The vote was then carried into the Senate where Wilson made an appeal on the Senate floor, an unprecedented action at the time.[51] In a short speech, the President tied women's right to vote directly to the war, asking, "Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?"[42] On September 30, 1918, the proposal fell two votes short of passage, prompting the NWP to direct campaigning against senators who had voted against the amendment.[50]
Between January 1918 and June 1919, the House and Senate voted on the federal amendment five times.[42][51][52] Each vote was extremely close and Southern Democrats continued to oppose giving women the vote.[51] Suffragists pressured President Wilson to call a special session of Congress and he agreed to schedule one for May 19, 1919. On May 21, 1919, the amendment passed the House 304 to 89, with 42 votes more than was necessary.[53] On June 4, 1919, it was brought before the Senate and, after Southern Democrats abandoned a filibuster,[42] 36 Republican Senators were joined by 20 Democrats to pass the amendment with 56 yeas, 25 nays, and 14 not voting. The final vote tally was:[54]
20 Democrats Yea
17 Democrats Nay
9 Democrats Not voting/abstained
36 Republicans Yea
8 Republicans Nay
5 Republicans Not voting/abstained
Ratification
Highest level of women's suffrage laws just before adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment:[55][56]
Full suffrage
Presidential suffrage
Primary suffrage
Municipal suffrage
School, bond, or tax suffrage
Municipal suffrage in some cities
Primary suffrage in some cities
No suffrage
Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul immediately mobilized members of the NAWSA and NWP to pressure states to ratify the amendment. Within a few days, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan did so, their legislatures being in session. It is arguable which State was considered first to ratify the amendment. While Illinois's legislature passed the legislation an hour prior to Wisconsin, Wisconsin's delegate, David James, arrived earlier and was presented with a statement establishing Wisconsin as the first to ratify.[57] By August 2, fourteen states had approved ratification, and by the end of 1919 twenty-two had ratified the amendment.[53] In other states support proved more difficult to secure. Much of the opposition to the amendment came from Southern Democrats; only two former Confederate states (Texas and Arkansas) and three border states voted for ratification,[42] with Kentucky and West Virginia not doing so until 1920. Alabama and Georgia were the first states to defeat ratification. The governor of Louisiana worked to organize 13 states to resist ratifying the amendment. The Maryland legislature refused to ratify the amendment and attempted to prevent other states from doing so. Carrie Catt began appealing to Western governors, encouraging them to act swiftly. By the end of 1919, a total of 22 states had ratified the amendment.[53]
"The Big Issue At The Polls" (Judge, Oct 25, 1919)
Resistance to ratification took many forms: anti-suffragists continued to say the amendment would never be approved by the November 1920 elections and that special sessions were a waste of time and effort. Other opponents to ratification filed lawsuits requiring the federal amendment to be approved by state referendums. By June 1920, after intense lobbying by both the NAWSA and the NWP, the amendment was ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures.[53] Ratification would be determined by Tennessee. In the middle of July 1919, both opponents and supporters of the Anthony Amendment arrived in Nashville to lobby the General Assembly. Carrie Catt, representing the NAWSA, worked with state suffragist leaders, including Anne Dallas Dudley and Abby Crawford Milton. Sue Shelton White, a Tennessee native who had participated in protests at the White House and toured with the Prison Special, represented the NWP.[58] Opposing them were the "Antis", in particular, Josephine Pearson, state president of the Southern Women's Rejection League of the Susan. B. Anthony Amendment, who had served as dean and chair of philosophy at Christian College in Columbia.[43][page needed] Pearson was assisted by Anne Pleasant, president of the Louisiana Women's Rejection League and the wife of a former Louisiana governor. Especially in the South, the question of women's suffrage was closely tied to issues of race.[59] While both white and black women worked toward women's suffrage, some white suffragists tried to appease southern states by arguing that votes for women could counter the black vote, strengthening white supremacy.[42] For the anti-suffragists in the south (the "Antis"), the federal amendment was viewed as a "Force Bill", one that Congress could use to enforce voting provisions not only for women, but for African-American men who were still effectively disenfranchised even after passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Carrie Catt warned suffrage leaders in Tennessee that the "Anti-Suffs" would rely on "lies, innuendoes, and near truths", raising the issue of race as a powerful factor in their arguments.[43][page needed]
Headquarters of the anti-suffragist National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage
Prior to the start of the General Assembly session on August 9, both supporters and opponents had lobbied members of the Tennessee Senate and House of Representatives. Though the Democratic governor of Tennessee, Albert H. Roberts, supported ratification, most lawmakers were still undecided. Anti-suffragists targeted members, meeting their trains as they arrived in Nashville to make their case. When the General Assembly convened on August 9, both supporters and opponents set up stations outside of chambers, handing out yellow roses to suffrage supporters and red roses to the "Antis". On August 12, the legislature held hearings on the suffrage proposal; the next day the Senate voted 24–5 in favor of ratification. As the House prepared to take up the issue of ratification on August 18, lobbying intensified.[58] House Speaker Seth M. Walker attempted to table the ratification resolution, but was defeated twice with a vote of 48–48. The vote on the resolution would be close. Representative Harry Burn, a Republican, had voted to table the resolution both times. When the vote was held again, Burn voted yes. The 24-year-old said he supported women's suffrage as a "moral right", but had voted against it because he believed his constituents opposed it. In the final minutes before the vote, he received a note from his mother, urging him to vote yes. Rumors immediately circulated that Burn and other lawmakers had been bribed, but newspaper reporters found no evidence of this.[58]
The same day ratification passed in the General Assembly, Speaker Walker filed a motion to reconsider. When it became clear he did not have enough votes to carry the motion, representatives opposing suffrage boarded a train, fleeing Nashville for Decatur, Alabama to block the House from taking action on the reconsideration motion by preventing a quorum. Thirty-seven legislators fled to Decatur, issuing a statement that ratifying the amendment would violate their oath to defend the state constitution.[58] The ploy failed. Speaker Walker was unable to muster any additional votes in the allotted time. When the House reconvened to take the final procedural steps that would reaffirm ratification, Tennessee suffragists seized an opportunity to taunt the missing Anti delegates by sitting at their empty desks. When ratification was finally confirmed, a suffragist on the floor of the House rang a miniature Liberty Bell.[43][page needed]
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly approved the Nineteenth Amendment, with 50 of 99 members of the Tennessee House of Representatives voting yes.[49][60] This provided the final ratification necessary to add the amendment to the Constitution,[61] making the United States the twenty-seventh country in the world to give women the right to vote.[13] Upon signing the ratification certificate, the Governor of Tennessee sent it by registered mail to the U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, whose office received it at 4:00 a.m. on August 26, 1920. Once certified as correct, Colby signed the Proclamation of the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the presence of his secretary only.[62]
Legal challenges
19th Amendment Voting Badge-Harding Coolidge Ticket 1920.png
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the amendment's validity in Leser v. Garnett.[90][91] Maryland citizens Mary D. Randolph, "'a colored female citizen' of 331 West Biddle Street",[92] and Cecilia Street Waters, "a white woman, of 824 North Eutaw Street",[92] applied for and were granted registration as qualified Baltimore voters on October 12, 1920. To have their names removed from the list of qualified voters, Oscar Leser and others brought suit against the two women on the sole grounds that they were women, arguing that they were not eligible to vote because the Constitution of Maryland limited suffrage to men[93] and the Maryland legislature had refused to vote to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Two months before, on August 26, 1920, the federal government had proclaimed the amendment incorporated into the Constitution.[91]
Leser said the amendment "destroyed State autonomy" because it increased Maryland's electorate without the state's consent. The Supreme Court answered that the Nineteenth Amendment had similar wording to the Fifteenth Amendment, which had expanded state electorates without regard to race for more than fifty years by that time despite rejection by six states (including Maryland).[91][94] Leser further argued that the state constitutions in some ratifying states did not allow their legislatures to ratify. The court replied that state ratification was a federal function granted under Article V of the U.S. Constitution and not subject to a state constitution's limitations. Finally, those bringing suit asserted the Nineteenth Amendment was not adopted because Tennessee and West Virginia violated their own rules of procedure. The court ruled that the point was moot because Connecticut and Vermont had subsequently ratified the amendment, providing a sufficient number of state ratifications to adopt the Nineteenth Amendment even without Tennessee and West Virginia. The court also ruled that Tennessee's and West Virginia's certifications of their state ratifications was binding and had been duly authenticated by their respective secretaries of state.[95] As a result of the court's ruling, Randolph and Waters were permitted to become registered voters in Baltimore.[91]
Another challenge to the Nineteenth Amendment's adoption was dismissed by the Supreme Court in Fairchild v. Hughes,[96][97] because the party bringing the suit, Charles S. Fairchild, came from a state that already allowed women to vote and so Fairchild lacked standing.
Effects
c. 1920
A Ladies Home Journal ad targeted female votes for 1920 presidential election.
Women's voting behavior
Adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women in time for the 1920 U.S. presidential election.[98] Many legislators feared that a powerful women's bloc would emerge in American politics. This fear led to the passage of such laws as the Sheppard–Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which expanded maternity care during the 1920s.[99] Newly enfranchised women and women's groups prioritized a reform agenda rather than party loyalty and their first goal was the Sheppard-Towner Act. It was the first federal social security law and made a dramatic difference before it was allowed to lapse in 1929.[100] Other efforts at the federal level in the early 1920s that related to women labor and women's citizenship rights included the establishment of a Women's Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1920 and passage of the Cable Act in 1922.[101] After the U.S. presidential election in 1924, politicians realized the women's bloc they had feared did not actually exist and they did not need to cater to what they considered as "women's issues" after all.[102] The eventual appearance of an American women's voting bloc has been tracked to various dates, depending on the source, from the 1950s[103] to 1970.[104] Around 1980, a nationwide gender gap in voting had emerged, with women usually favoring the Democratic candidate in presidential elections.[105]
According to political scientists J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, few women turned out to vote in the first national elections after the Nineteenth Amendment gave them the right to do so. In 1920, 36 percent of eligible women voted (compared with 68 percent of men). The low turnout among women was partly due to other barriers to voting, such as literacy tests, long residency requirements, and poll taxes. Inexperience with voting and persistent beliefs that voting was inappropriate for women may also have kept turnout low. The participation gap was lowest between men and women in swing states at the time, in states that had closer races such as Missouri and Kentucky, and where barriers to voting were lower.[106][107] By 1960, women were turning out to vote in presidential elections in greater numbers than men and a trend of higher female voting engagement has continued into 2018.[108]
Limitations
See also: Women's poll tax repeal movement
African-American women
African-Americans had gained the right to vote, but for 75 percent of them it was granted in name only, as state constitutions kept them from exercising that right.[36] Prior to the passage of the amendment, Southern politicians held firm in their convictions not to allow African-American women to vote.[109] They had to fight to secure not only their own right to vote, but the right of African-American men as well.[110]
Three million women south of the Mason–Dixon line remained disfranchised after the passage of the amendment.[109][111] Election officials regularly obstructed access to the ballot box.[112] As newly enfranchised African-American women attempted to register, officials increased the use of methods that Brent Staples, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, described as fraud, intimidation, poll taxes, and state violence.[113] In 1926, a group of women attempting to register in Birmingham, Alabama were beaten by officials.[114] Incidents such as this, threats of violence and job losses, and legalized prejudicial practices blocked women of color from voting.[115] These practices continued until the Twenty-fourth Amendment was adopted in 1962, whereby the states were prohibited from making voting conditional on poll or other taxes, paving the way to more reforms with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
African-Americans continued to face barriers preventing them from exercising their vote until the civil rights movement arose in the 1950s and 1960s, which posited voting rights as civil rights.[109][114] Nearly a thousand civil rights workers converged on the South to support voting rights as part of Freedom Summer, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches brought further participation and support. However, state officials continued to refuse registration until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.[112][115] For the first time, states were forbidden from imposing discriminatory restrictions on voting eligibility, and mechanisms were placed allowing the federal government to enforce its provisions.[114]
Other minority groups
Native Americans were granted citizenship by an Act of Congress in 1924,[116] but state policies prohibited them from voting. In 1948, a suit brought by World War II veteran Miguel Trujillo resulted in Native Americans gaining the right to vote in New Mexico and Arizona,[117] but some states continued to bar them from voting until 1957.[114]
Poll taxes and literacy tests kept Latina women from voting. In Puerto Rico, for example, women did not receive the right to vote until 1929, but was limited to literate women until 1935.[118] Further, the 1975 extensions of the Voting Rights Act included requiring bilingual ballots and voting materials in certain regions, making it easier for Latina women to vote.[114][115]
National immigration laws prevented Asians from gaining citizenship until 1952.[46][114][115]
Other limitations
After adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, women still faced political limitations. Women had to lobby their state legislators, bring lawsuits, and engage in letter-writing campaigns to earn the right to sit on juries. In California, women won the right to serve on juries four years after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In Colorado, it took 33 years. Women continue to face obstacles when running for elective offices, and the Equal Rights Amendment, which would grant women equal rights under the law, has yet to be passed.[119][120][121][122]
Legacy
League of Women Voters
In 1920, about six months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Emma Smith DeVoe and Carrie Chapman Catt agreed to merge the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Council of Women Voters to help newly enfranchised women exercise their responsibilities as voters. Originally only women could join the league, but in 1973 the charter was modified to include men. Today, the League of Women Voters operates at the local, state, and national level, with over 1,000 local and 50 state leagues, and one territory league in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Some critics and historians question whether creating an organization dedicated to political education rather than political action made sense in the first few years after ratification, suggesting that the League of Women Voters diverted the energy of activists.[43][page needed]
Equal Rights Amendment
Main article: Equal Rights Amendment
Alice Paul and the NWP did not believe the Nineteenth Amendment would be enough to ensure men and women were treated equally, and in 1921 the NWP announced plans to campaign for another amendment which would guarantee equal rights not limited to voting. The first draft of the Equal Rights Amendment, written by Paul and Crystal Eastman and first named "the Lucretia Mott Amendment", stated: "No political, civil, or legal disabilities or inequalities on account of sex or on account of marriage, unless applying equally to both sexes, shall exist within the United States or any territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof."[123] Senator Charles Curtis brought it to Congress that year, but it did not make it to the floor for a vote. It was introduced in every congressional session from 1921 to 1971, usually not making it out of committee.[124]
The amendment did not have the full support of women's rights activists, and was opposed by Carrie Catt and the League of Women Voters. Whereas the NWP believed in total equality, even if that meant sacrificing benefits given to women through protective legislation, some groups like the Women's Joint Congressional Committee and the Women's Bureau believed the loss of benefits relating to safety regulations, working conditions, lunch breaks, maternity provisions, and other labor protections would outweigh what would be gained. Labor leaders like Alice Hamilton and Mary Anderson argued that it would set their efforts back and make sacrifices of what progress they had made.[125][126] In response to these concerns, a provision known as "the Hayden rider" was added to the ERA to retain special labor protections for women, and passed the Senate in 1950 and 1953, but failed in the House. In 1958, President Eisenhower called on Congress to pass the amendment, but the Hayden rider was controversial, meeting with opposition from the NWP and others who felt it undermined its original purpose.[127][128]
The growing, productive women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s renewed support for the amendment. U.S. Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan reintroduced it in 1971, leading to its approval by the House of Representatives that year. After it passed in the Senate on March 22, 1972, it went to state legislatures for ratification. Congress originally set a deadline of March 22, 1979, by which point at least 38 states needed to ratify the amendment. It reached 35 by 1977, with broad bipartisan support including both major political parties and Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. However, when Phyllis Schlafly mobilized conservative women in opposition, four states rescinded their ratification, although whether a state may do so is disputed.[129] The amendment did not reach the necessary 38 states by the deadline.[43][page needed] President Carter signed a controversial extension of the deadline to 1982, but that time saw no additional ratifications.
In the 1990s, ERA supporters resumed efforts for ratification, arguing that the pre-deadline ratifications still applied, that the deadline itself can be lifted, and that only three states were needed. Whether the amendment is still before the states for ratification remains disputed, but in 2014 both Virginia and Illinois state senates voted to ratify, although both were blocked in the house chambers. In 2017, 45 years after the amendment was originally submitted to states, the Nevada legislature became the first to ratify it following expiration of the deadlines. Illinois lawmakers followed in 2018.[129] Another attempt in Virginia passed the Assembly but was defeated on the state senate floor by one vote.[130] The most recent effort to remove the deadline was in early 2019, with proposed legislation from Jackie Speier, accumulating 188 co-sponsors and pending in Congress as of August 2019.[131]
Commemorations
"The Portrait Monument" (originally "Woman's Movement") by sculptor Adelaide Johnson, in the Capitol rotunda
A 7+1⁄2-ton marble slab from a Carrara, Italy, quarry carved into statue called the "Portrait Monument"[132] (originally known as the "Woman's Movement")[133] by sculptor Adelaide Johnson was unveiled at the Capitol rotunda on February 15, 1921, six months after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, on the 101st anniversary of Susan B. Anthony's birth, and during the National Woman's Party's first post-ratification national convention in Washington, D.C.[132] The Party presented it as a gift "from the women of the U.S." The monument is installed in the Capitol rotunda and features busts of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. More than fifty women's groups with delegates from every state were represented at the dedication ceremony in 1921 that was presided over by Jane Addams. After the ceremony, the statue was moved temporarily to the Capitol crypt, where it stood for less than a month until Johnson discovered that an inscription stenciled in gold lettering on the back of the monument had been removed. The inscription read, in part: "Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen declares herself an entity to be reckoned. Spiritually, the woman movement ... represents the emancipation of womanhood. The release of the feminine principal in humanity, the moral integration of human evolution come to rescue torn and struggling humanity from its savage self."[132] Congress denied passage of several bills to move the statue, whose place in the crypt also held brooms and mops. In 1963, the crypt was cleaned for an exhibition of several statues including this one, which had been dubbed "The Women in the Bathtub". In 1995 on the 75th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, women's groups renewed congressional interest in the monument and on May 14, 1997, the statue was finally returned to the rotunda.[134]
On August 26, 2016, a monument commemorating Tennessee's role in providing the required 36th state ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was unveiled in Centennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee.[135] The memorial, erected by the Tennessee Suffrage Monument, Inc.[136] and created by Alan LeQuire, features likenesses of suffragists who were particularly involved in securing Tennessee's ratification: Carrie Chapman Catt; Anne Dallas Dudley; Abby Crawford Milton; Juno Frankie Pierce; and Sue Shelton White.[43][page needed][137] In June 2018, the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, unveiled another sculpture by LeQuire, this one depicting 24-year-old freshman state representative Harry T. Burn and his mother. Representative Burn, at the urging of his mother, cast the deciding vote on August 18, 1920, making Tennessee the final state needed for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.[138]
In 2018, Utah launched a campaign called Better Days 2020 to "popularize Utah women's history". One of its first projects was the unveiling on the Salt Lake City capitol steps of the design for a license plate in recognition of women's suffrage. The commemorative license plate would be available for new or existing car registrations in the state. The year 2020 marks the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, as well as the 150th anniversary of the first women voting in Utah, which was the first state in the nation where women cast a ballot.[139]
An annual celebration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, known as Women's Equality Day, began on August 26, 1973.[140] There usually is heightened attention and news media coverage during momentous anniversaries such as the 75th (1995) and 100th (2020), as well as in 2016 because of the presidential election.[141] For the amendment's centennial, several organizations announced large events or exhibits, including the National Constitution Center and National Archives and Records Administration.[16][142]
On the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, President Donald Trump posthumously pardoned Susan B. Anthony.[143]
Popular culture
See also: Women's suffrage in film
Lucy Burns (left, while in jail) and Alice Paul (right) of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage were subjects of the film Iron Jawed Angels.
The Nineteenth Amendment has been featured in a number of songs, films, and television programs. The 1976 song "Sufferin' Till Suffrage" from Schoolhouse Rock!, performed by Essra Mohawk and written by Bob Dorough and Tom Yohe, states, in part, "Not a woman here could vote, no matter what age, Then the Nineteenth Amendment struck down that restrictive rule ... Yes the Nineteenth Amendment Struck down that restrictive rule."[144][145] In 2018, various recording artists released an album called 27: The Most Perfect Album, featuring songs inspired by the 27 amendments to the U.S. Constitution; Dolly Parton's song inspired by the Nineteenth Amendment is called "A Woman's Right".[146][147]
One Woman, One Vote is a 1995 PBS documentary narrated by actor Susan Sarandon chronicling the Seneca Falls Convention through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.[148][149] Another documentary was released in 1999 by filmmaker Ken Burns, Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony. It used archival footage and commentary by actors Ann Dowd, Julie Harris, Sally Kellerman and Amy Madigan.[150][151] In 2013, John Green, the best-selling author of The Fault in Our Stars, produced a video entitled Women in the 19th Century: Crash Course US History #31, providing an overview of the women's movement leading to the Nineteenth Amendment.[152][153]
The 2004 drama Iron Jawed Angels depicting suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, played by actors Hilary Swank and Frances O'Connor, respectively, as they help secure the Nineteenth Amendment.[154][155] In August 2018, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Academy Award-winning director/producer Steven Spielberg announced plans to make a television series based on Elaine Weiss's best-selling book, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.[156][157]