Chapter 2
Walking the few blocks from her office to the GOP state headquarters in the Hotel Stowell again and again, Mrs. Arthur Willebrandt eventually earned the right to volunteer for the party, although she was given menial errands, not tasks befitting an experienced attorney and political operative.1 Even peripheral involvement at the GOP headquarters allowed Mabel Walker Willebrandt to cultivate relationships with leaders in politics, business, and law and to serve as a link between the party and politically active club women. Being a link in a chain involved, of course, holding on to two sides. The local party organization had accepted her, at least in part, because it needed its female volunteer to bring in the women’s vote for its slate of candidates. Unfortunately, the highest-profile contest in the election divided California Republicans. The California presidential primary in May pitted the state’s sitting U.S. senator, Hiram Johnson, against a political newcomer, Herbert Hoover.
Club women and progressives in general leaned in the direction of the candidate with a national reputation but an unknown political philosophy. Herbert Hoover was a hugely successful mining engineer and had won fame for organizing international relief efforts for the millions of starving Europeans displaced by the vast destruction of the Great War. Orphaned at the age of nine and raised primarily in Oregon, Hoover, armed with a degree in civil engineering from Stanford University and rare abilities to assess potentials in and manage ore extraction, had catapulted himself into the ranks of the fabulously wealthy. Onto such a biography many Americans, from both political parties, had grafted their own beliefs about Hoover, putting him in the sweet spot in American politics, that of a draftee for president by acclamation instead of a political candidate by desire. Having let his interest in the Republican nomination be known, Herbert Hoover had enjoyed moderate successes in the primaries as an Independent, showing strength among Democrats as well, in March and April. His decision to enter the California primary in May as a Republican represented an important strategic decision, reflecting his belief that voters desired a change from the policies of the Democrats.2
Mabel Willebrandt chose to back Senator Hiram Johnson in the primary. Senator Johnson had helped found the Progressive Party in 1912 and had run as Theodore Roosevelt’s vice presidential nominee in that election. The Roosevelt/Johnson ticket, a third-party insurgency, had endorsed women’s suffrage as well as a host of other reforms for which women’s clubs had organized, such as eliminating child labor, creating food safety standards, and establishing ballot measures—referendums, initiatives, and recalls—allowing voters redress. The Progressive Party had failed in the election, but the spirit survived in some areas of the country, especially in Los Angeles, and its standard-bearer was Hiram Johnson. In his years as governor (1910–1916), Johnson’s reforms had curtailed the influence of the lobbyists of the seemingly all-powerful Southern Pacific Railroad, among other improvements in the structure of California’s government, propelling him into the U.S. Senate in 1916. When Johnson offered himself as a presidential candidate in 1920, his strength was his national reputation and his belief in Progressivism as a political force. Although his campaign centered upon the denunciation of the League of Nations, Johnson had a strong domestic policy message: government had to improve the common good at the expense of the power of the captains of industry.
Her backing of Johnson placed Willebrandt at odds with many members of the women’s movement, who had not abandoned the ideals of world peace embodied in the League of Nations and the World Court as quickly as Senator Johnson.3 A leading activist, Katherine P. Edson, informed the senator that his attacks upon the league “would be fatal as far as the woman’s vote in California was concerned.” In addition, many club women were unimpressed with Hiram Johnson’s record on women’s issues. He had steered clear of the vote to ratify the antiliquor amendment and had appeared ambivalent toward efforts to win suffrage in California in 1911, but in serving as chairman of the Senate Committee on Suffrage, he had advanced the Nineteenth Amendment through the Senate on its way to ratification in the states.4 In many meetings of the organizations devoted to women’s rights and social justice to which she belonged, Willebrandt heard her friends commend Johnson for his commitment to the good-government side of Progressivism, while condemning him for his lack of leadership on moral issues, such as creating a public defender’s office, a women’s court, and a process to rehabilitate fallen women, and the revision of the community property law.
Choosing a side in the contest between Hoover and Johnson, therefore, represented no idle game. The traditional path to success for male attorneys had opened, slightly, for women. President Wilson’s administration had appointed to high office two prominent women who had campaigned for him. If her candidate won, there was a real possibility of advancement for Willebrandt. On the other hand, backing Johnson risked alienating important female political leaders.
On the reasons for her decision, Willebrandt kept her own counsel, leaving no direct statement for posterity. However, while Senator Hiram Johnson’s record on women’s issues may have been checkered, he was a proven commodity, having won his campaigns for governor and for the Senate by wide margins. Whether he won his state’s presidential nomination or not, the old curmudgeon would remain California’s senior senator, his dour face ready to unleash a stream of vituperation upon any who dared disagree with him. While Herbert Hoover had filed the requisite forms to put together a campaign committee, had informed the world he was a Californian, and had stockpiled a formidable campaign fund, the famous engineer had little at stake—if he won the primary, he was expected to blow into the Republican National Convention that summer claiming to be a viable compromise choice in a year featuring six contenders for the Grand Old Party’s nomination. If he failed, little would be lost. Hoover made it a race, though. He and Johnson spent tens of thousands of dollars in Southern California, an area much more progressive than the north, where the power of San Francisco’s pro-business elite, which had once ruled the state, faded as Los Angeles’ population grew by leaps and bounds.
The winds of change blew Mabel Walker Willebrandt’s way in May, when Senator Johnson glided to a comfortable win over Herbert Hoover in the Republican primary. Papering over the widening rift between conservatives and progressives in the GOP, Johnson insisted his victory had been a referendum on the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, and he positioned himself for the Republican nomination by attracting conservative, and predominantly male, Republicans, who opposed Wilson’s diplomacy. Neither Johnson nor Hoover had once mentioned Prohibition.5
In mid-May, the chairman of the New York Republican state committee announced the names of those who would serve on the executive committee overseeing the fall campaign. Balanced between male and female, the committee included Mrs. Sabin and her friend Mrs. Henrietta Livermore. Seeking party loyalty over personal biases, Pauline hosted leaders of several prominent women’s groups, none more important than Mary Garrett Hay, who served as president of the Women’s City Club of New York and probably had registered more women in the state than anyone else.6 Despite her enmity for James Wadsworth, Miss Hay pledged her party loyalty. Days later, the state chairman announced that Senator Wadsworth would head the state’s delegation to the Republican National Convention.
In early June, at a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Pauline Sabin had the pleasure of announcing that “the New York City women members of the Ways and Means Committee of the Republican Party is the first to complete its quota of money to be raised for campaign purposes this year.” She stressed “the fact that we have completed our quota before the convention begins proves that the women are giving for the party and not for the election of any particular candidate,” an effective way of endorsing the party’s choices while sidestepping the growing gender divide within her party.7
The following day, Friday, June 4, she departed for the Republican Convention in Chicago; she was listed officially as an alternate delegate but known to have secured a voting position, and had talked her Charlie into traveling with her.8 The couple decided to spare Mr. Sabin, a lifelong Democrat, the ebullient partisanship filling the train cars of the “GOP convention special” leaving the following day and chartered to bring New York’s thundering herd of conventioneers to Chicago. Those 255 delegates and alternates gathered at New York’s Grand Central Station for their two o’clock train, cheered by a crowd of friends and supporters. All seemed in a festive mood as reporters sought to capture one moment in a new age. “Scorning wardrobe trunks, hat boxes and all the other paraphernalia usually considered indispensable by women travelers,” as one reporter explained it, “the seventy-five women took only suitcases,” making light of the ladies’ choice, missing the significance of their action in a society where rich women were expected to change outfits four to six times daily. For the inquisitive reporters, the seventy-five female delegates had a message. They were not going as women, or asking for any special treatment or designated cars; they were going as “Republican voters,” expecting to mingle with their male counterparts during the long trip. Declaring the day of “petticoat politics” over, the women explained that they “want no distinction made between them as voters and their husbands, and fathers and brothers and sweethearts who have been voting for years.” Their slogan, “Not what we can get, but what we can give,” to which all of them had pledged, was inscribed on their banners and emblems, “and also on their hearts.”9 The reporter assured his readers, though, that despite their protestations to the contrary, women like Henrietta Livermore could never be imagined “looking like proverbial ‘frumps,’ no matter what sincere resolutions they had made,” a twist on the popular perception of politically active women as matrons of morality with all the style of a spinster. With the final stragglers, mostly the main leadership, climbing aboard as the whistle blew and the conductor bellowed, “All aboard!” the next step forward in the republic’s history started west.
The female delegates from other parts of the country resembled those of New York. The women had come, wrote one perceptive female reporter, “believing that they were about to write a fresh page in American history.” Yet their situation was hardly conducive to bold strokes: none of the delegates down on the floor had ever been a delegate before; three-fourths knew little of practical politics; only 10 percent had attended a previous national convention; “and nine-nine per cent. [sic] of them had brought to the convention not only zeal for their party and their particular candidate but a superb vision of what they, as members of their party, could contribute to the great task of re-establishing confidence and contentment in a nation more or less disrupted by war.”10
The national committee stayed at the Congress Plaza Hotel, where the New York State Committee had two parlors reserved for their own use. None of the members could say how long they would be in Chicago; they would be released only after a nominee was selected and the convention adjourned. The New York delegation was full of disagreement, and the discussion sessions in their two parlors seemingly never ended. Senator Wadsworth, appointed chairman of the delegation, instructed his delegates to vote unanimously for Dr. Nicholas Butler, president of Columbia University and his dear friend. But the delegates were not interested in wasting a vote on a candidate who had no chance of winning, however much they respected Butler personally. Remaining loyal to the leadership fit Pauline Sabin’s political proclivities, a tendency sure to establish an alliance with the senator. She and Jim Wadsworth surely began to address each other by their first names in the course of the feverish discussions, if they had not done so already.
On the eve of the convention’s opening, the Supreme Court rendered its decision on the State of New Jersey’s challenge to Prohibition, rejecting the state’s contention that the Eighteenth Amendment was unconstitutional because it had not been ratified properly by several states, enacted statutory regulations that the Constitution had reserved for states, and sought to restrict personal behavior. Without comment, the court proclaimed it constitutional, ending any future challenges on the question. Elihu Root, one of the nation’s preeminent attorneys, a public servant of great distinction and a guest at Pauline Sabin’s first wedding, had failed. Doubtless, Root’s close partnership with Wadsworth would have produced a tele- gram informing the senator of the ruling, effectively ending any discussion of Prohibition at the convention.
The delegates arrived at the Chicago Coliseum, the castellated entrance on Wabash Avenue welcoming the throngs, on the morning of Tuesday, June 8; all were determined to make their respective votes count.11 According to one observer, the women participants fell into a few classifications. A few came “because it was the fashionable thing to do.” The overwhelming majority of women fell between two groups, one wearing campaign buttons of rival presidential candidates and enjoying the hospitality extended at each of the candidates’ hotels, the other wearing their hearts on their sleeves. The second group wanted to contribute, asking for meetings, conferences, and directions from their leaders on how to solve the problems of their communities, only to find there were no provisions for such engagement. The top brass were closeted away, cutting the deals, determining the future of the party. The women chosen to serve on the committee of one hundred, appointed by Chairman Hays months earlier, felt the sting of disillusionment most keenly, for their mandate had been to serve as advisors, a task for which they had prepared with care, yet they had no one to advise. As a member of this group, Pauline Sabin could only have been enraged at being patronized, ignored, and insulted. The committee held two meetings, the upshot being a request that the Republican National Committee increase its executive committee from ten to fifteen members—seven men, seven women, and Chairman Will Hays—and to give a leadership position, such as the vice chairmanship, to a woman.12
Chairman Hays took the podium to welcome the party faithful, and his confident pronouncements into the microphone echoed through the vast reaches of the hall bedecked with flags and bunting. Delegates held placards but not their tongues, the constant murmur pushing each successive speaker to shout louder as the first order of business, agreeing on the planks of the party platform, began. Over the next three days, resolutions were made and the intent of the party’s leadership, solidly conservative, seemed to peek through the generalities used to express them. Senate Republicans were not going to approve anything remotely resembling the League of Nations, which they believed would compromise the country’s independence, but party leaders agreed to stand “for agreement among nations to preserve the peace of the world,” balancing the competing interests within the party and a noisy antiwar movement, led predominantly by women, within the nation.
Having dispensed with the burning issue in foreign policy, the party produced a domestic agenda reflecting the values of the conservatives, a set of planks under the heading of ending “executive autocracy and restoring to the people their constitutional government.” The Wilson administration “has used legislation passed to meet the emergency of war to continue its arbitrary and inquisitional control over the life of the people in the time of peace, and to carry confusion into industrial life” just as society and business sought to rebound from sacrifices necessitated by the Great War.13 The burdensome oversight and intrusion into business by the federal government was detailed, the resulting planks calling for cutting taxes and regulations, unequivocally conservative positions.
Mrs. Maude Wood Park, president of the League of Women Voters, was allowed to address the committee of resolutions and to insert planks into the party platform,14 including making “the woman’s bureau in the Department of Labor” permanent, and addressing one of women’s biggest political objectives by declaring “the Republican party stands for a Federal child labor law and for its rigid enforcement.” Other requests included appropriations to continue the campaign against the spread of social diseases and for education in sex hygiene.
The Committee of Resolutions inserted every plank the LWV submitted, except the three it wanted most: support for the Shep- pard-Towner Bill, a federal program for maternity and infant care; federal aid for reducing illiteracy; and regulation of the marketing and distribution of food. The conservative leadership opened the door to more legislation put forward by the women’s movement by recognizing that the twelve million wage-earning women “have special problems of employment” and demanding, among other things, “federal legislation to limit the hours of employment for women,” “equal pay for equal work” for those employed by the federal government, and, more ambiguously, the promise of “an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice.” With that seemingly benign recognition of women’s right to equality in the workplace, the party had inadvertently stepped into a deeply buried schism in the women’s movement in particular, and in the labor movement in general. The party’s assertion that “the federal jurisdiction over social problems is limited” would not suffice to contain all the ambitions it had set loose.15 The federal government’s latest and most extensive intrusion into the autonomy of the states, Prohibition, went unmentioned at the convention in Chicago, the home of gangster Al Capone.
On the morning of Friday, June 11, the conventioneers were treated to the speeches of party leaders nominating the various presidential candidates, the bloviating measured in hours, an unfortunate tendency given the withering heat. Unlike the men, women gave short speeches. After one leading contender’s name and qualifications had been put forward, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, sister of the recently deceased Theodore Roosevelt, delivered the seconding speech as red and green feathers floated down from the rafters of the barnlike arena. Her presentation offered such a welcome change that, as one female journalist wrote, “all the Presidential candidates were thereafter desirous of having women speak for them. Mrs. James W. Morrison, who seconded Herbert Hoover’s nomination, was the old fashioned motherly type.” She held the attention even of those well to the back, the chatter and clatter dying away. “It was difficult to believe . . . that she was the type of woman who had marshaled 8000 women in a suffrage parade in Washington and had worked effectively for suffrage for years, at the same time rearing a fine family of five children.”16 The speaker who rose to nominate the senator from Ohio kept his remarks blessedly short and had a bit of fun, leaning over the podium to holler directly at the delegates on the floor, “Say, boys—and girls, too—why not nominate Warren Harding?” The improvisation tickled the audience’s fancy, causing a stir as conventioneers “rose and cheered and began to march in the aisles, saying ‘that’s right we are all boys and girls, the girls are in politics now, too.’”17
The first ballots were cast that afternoon, a great moment for all the female delegates. Over the course of four ballots, the candidacy of Senator Hiram Johnson failed to catch fire, but he and Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler remained in the running, the latter having no reason to thank the New York delegation, which splintered to other candidates “before a shot was fired,” as the Republican committeeman from New York conceded.18 The party’s front-runners split votes over several ballots, their supporters unwilling to yield to one another. As the convention adjourned for the evening, it was clear that a compromise candidate would be required if the first ballot of the following morning failed to produce a clear majority.19
That night, a group of Republican senators met in the Blackstone Hotel, away from the party’s headquarters, and chose Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, then presented their choice to Chairman Hays and other key leaders in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Given Senator Wadsworth’s prominence as head of the New York delegation, the largest in attendance and the greatest prize to secure, word of the compromise candidate must have passed like wildfire to the New York caucus held at nine fifteen a.m. Saturday.20 In the first few ballots of the morning, the conventioneers proved obstreperous, unready to kowtow, although Dr. Butler conceded early and released the delegates pledged to him, but by the end of the ninth vote, everyone in the bleachers knew the tenth would be the finale. Wads-worth pushed his New York delegation to fall into line as he switched horses, producing a convincing tally for the GOP nominee, Senator Warren Harding.
During the course of the convention, the realities of the party machine demolished the ideals of the women’s movement. They accepted the presidential nominee, grudgingly, his selection less offensive than the “steam roller on which the party machine rode him [Harding] straight over the other candidates . . . On that last day, the wheels ground into their very souls.” The women would vote the ticket, but the zeal, the desire to put their shoulders to the wheel, was gone. As the New York Times put it, “They left for home dazed, benumbed. Their future performances for the party hang in the balance.”21 Their party had not recognized the voice of the people in choosing its nominee, much less given the female attendees a meaningful role in the proceedings. The whole process seemed a sham.