CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Maud Wood Park and the Front Door Lobby

THERE ARE several ways to read the handbill “Seeing is Believing! Finish the Fight” distributed by the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1919. A pessimist might focus on how slow the progress had been: in the forty years after territorial Wyoming gave women the vote in 1869, only three states followed suit. An optimist could see it another way, marveling at the dramatic breakthroughs that occurred in the decade between 1909 and 1919. Even so, that optimist might have cause for concern in those black areas on the map to follow that covered large chunks of the South and most of the industrial Northeast. The woman suffrage movement had definitely gained strength, but it was still far from a truly national phenomenon.

NAWSA’s map encapsulated the challenge that suffragists faced in their final years. Where would they get the necessary votes to push it over the top? State suffrage referendums were still possible, but the New York State victory in 1917 notwithstanding, it wasn’t clear what more could be done in states like Massachusetts, Ohio, or New Jersey, which had recently voted down similar initiatives, or in southern states where there was scant prospect of success. That left a constitutional amendment, but to win approval in Congress meant dealing with the same political map, with large swaths of the country unsympathetic if not downright hostile to women’s cause. And after approval in Congress, the amendment would need to be ratified by thirty-six states, far more than currently allowed women to vote.

Yet the map held clues about the path to victory in the number of states where women enjoyed full suffrage, primary suffrage, or presidential suffrage. We don’t need to be reminded that close elections are often decided in the Electoral College, and by 1919, the states where women voted counted for 339 electoral votes. Elected officials in those states were beholden to women’s support, and politicians in states that hadn’t yet enfranchised women could see it coming. Mobilizing the actual and potential power of the women’s vote was critical to breaking the stalemate.

 

 

 

The last “don’t” was the one that Maud Wood Park dwelt on most in her pep talks with her loyal corps of suffrage workers. “If we can’t do any good, at least we must be sure that we don’t do any harm.”1

“Seeing is Believing! Finish the Fight!” handbill, 1919. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Suffrage lobbyists quickly absorbed other lessons as well. They always went in twos, because their presence was harder to ignore and because it was useful to have one designated as the talker and the other as backup. They learned never to go into the congressional office buildings after six o’clock because “we had heard rumors that in the evening offices were not always devoted to public business.” They became adept at cultivating elevator men, doorkeepers, and friendly secretaries who could help them track down members of Congress who were trying to make themselves scarce. One cardinal rule was to do everything possible to keep a man from taking a stand against the amendment, even if he was clearly not in favor of it. And if he later came on board? Never ask him why he changed his mind.2

The “front door lobby” was the “half-humorous, half-kindly” name one of the press-gallery journalists gave to NAWSA’s Congressional Committee in Washington because, he explained, they “never used backstairs methods.” At the height of the campaign, as many as twenty-five regular lobbyists lived at Suffrage House, the Congressional Committee’s combined office and living quarters on Rhode Island Avenue. They were backed up by the state congressional chairmen in the association’s forty-four state branches, as well as by ninety-five congressional aides who were available to light “backfires” to stir up constituent or press support in the cases of wavering members of Congress. Compared with the large staffs and bloated budgets at the disposal of more entrenched male lobbyists, NAWSA’s size and costs were minuscule. Almost all of the lobbying was done by volunteers.3

Keeping track of portfolios on 435 members of the House of Representatives and ninety-six senators was difficult and often tedious work. It lacked the glamour of marching in a suffrage parade, addressing an open-air meeting, or picketing the White House, but it was absolutely crucial to the long suffrage campaign’s success. “The lobbying route,” according to the historian Nancy Cott, “should be seen as pioneering in the modern mode of exerting political force—that is, interest group politics.” The methods the highly disciplined suffrage lobby employed therefore put the drive to win the vote at the forefront of twentieth-century political history—and the person who made it happen was a Boston-born, 1898 Radcliffe graduate named Maud Wood Park.4

Park’s Radcliffe classmate (and fellow suffragist) Inez Haynes Irwin once said of her, “I was always admiring the length, breadth and height of her mind. It had great floor space.” By the time Park took over the Congressional Committee in late 1916, she had spent almost twenty years in the suffrage trenches. Her first suffrage encounter came during her student days, when a Radcliffe professor assigned an English paper on suffrage. Out of seventy students, Park was one of only two who supported it, composing this succinct affirmation: “I see no more reason for the men of my family to decide my political opinions and express them for me at the polls than to choose my hats and wear them, or my religious faith and occupy my seat at church.” Over the course of her career, Park gave hundreds of suffrage speeches, but she always felt that this brief undergraduate statement expressed her sentiments most clearly.5

Wishing to do something to promote the cause on campus, Park reached out to Alice Stone Blackwell, a local suffrage legend, who came to Radcliffe to speak. At first Park was concerned that the students “would think her a little queer” because of how she was dressed, but “that fear vanished completely during the first few minutes of her speech, which was so lucid and temperate that I knew at once the fastidious Harvard standards were being met.” In turn, Blackwell recruited the two Radcliffe students to join the suffrage movement. For the rest of her life, Park considered Alice Stone Blackwell her personal link to the suffrage cause. Repaying that debt was a prime reason Maud Wood Park took the lead in setting up the annuity for Blackwell when she faced impoverishment in the 1930s after a bad investment robbed her of her savings.6

In 1900, the twenty-nine-year-old Park became chair of the executive board of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, a position which Lucy Stone had held for many years and which was currently held by her daughter, who graciously stepped aside in favor of her new recruit. “With you as chairman, dear Mrs. Park,” wrote Alice Stone Blackwell, “I shall feel as if a strong young horse had come to help us drag the suffrage chariot out of the mudhole in which it seems to be stuck at present.” Soon after, Park joined with the Boston suffragists Mary Hutcheson Page and Pauline Agassiz Shaw to found the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government (BESAGG), a progressive group dedicated to both suffrage and civic reform. She also convened the first College Equal Suffrage League in Boston, with twenty-five charter members; in 1908, representatives from twelve of the fifteen states with college leagues came together to form the National College Equal Suffrage League under the leadership of Bryn Mawr president M. Carey Thomas. The following year Park and Mabel Caldwell Willard set off on an eighteen-month round-the-world tour with a special focus on the political and social situation of women. The trip was underwritten by Mary Hutcheson Page, who was already providing Park with a yearly stipend of $500 for her suffrage work. Park, who was not from an elite background despite her Radcliffe degree (her father was a police officer), could not afford to volunteer her time.7

Park’s ongoing financial struggles were closely linked to her marital situation, which was rather unusual. While she still was at Radcliffe—she was an older student who didn’t start college until she was twenty-three—she married a Boston architect named Charles Edward Park, but she kept the marriage secret until after her graduation. He died in 1904, and for the rest of her life, she was known as Mrs. Park. Four years later, she entered into a second marriage, this time to the theatrical agent Robert Freeman Palmer, which she also kept secret. Her reasoning this time was that she didn’t want to complicate plans for her upcoming round-the-world trip, plus she didn’t want to be known as his wife until his debts were paid. That didn’t happen for many years, and by then, they were used to the subterfuge. Even more to the point, “I realized that my kind of work could be better done by a supposed widow than by a woman known to be married and therefore suspected of neglecting her husband.” Only a few close friends knew of her second marriage, which lasted until Palmer’s death in 1928.8

When Carrie Chapman Catt was considering asking Park to come to Washington, DC to head up the Congressional Committee, she reached out to Alice Stone Blackwell for an assessment of Park’s work at the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and BESAGG. As Park told the story, Blackwell replied that she had “two drawbacks as a worker; I wouldn’t write letters and I couldn’t attend to the necessary publicity, but otherwise I was efficient.” She was efficient indeed, especially at tasks like “arranging meetings, increasing membership and directing continuous work,” all of which would be vital to her new position. Catt chose well. Without Maud Wood Park and her team of lobbyists stalking the “marble halls” in the nation’s capitol, the Nineteenth Amendment might never have cleared Congress.9

Park arrived in Washington ready to implement the “Winning Plan” that Carrie Chapman Catt had laid out at NAWSA’s annual convention in September 1916 in Atlantic City. Park had been electrified by Catt’s presentation: “I felt like Moses on the mountain top after the Promised Land had been shown to him and he knew the long years of wandering in the Wilderness were soon to end. For the first time I saw our goal as possible of attainment in the near future.” Catt’s plan was twofold: to focus on passage of the national amendment while continuing legislative activity on a state-by-state basis. Why both? Because increasing the number of women voters in individual states put enormous pressure on their representatives in Washington to support the amendment. Unlike the National Woman’s Party’s concentration solely on passage of a federal amendment, Catt said forcefully, “We must do both and do them together.”10

When Maud Wood Park took over as head of the Congressional Committee, she had no legislative experience, so she gave herself a crash course in how Congress worked—or didn’t. She spent time in the galleries observing the speechifying and parliamentary procedures, trying to put names to the faces of the men (and woman—Jeannette Rankin had just been elected from Montana) she would need to convert. Much of the routine business was quite boring, and she passed the time by bestowing nicknames on the politicians—the Undertaker, Puss-in-Boots, the Floorwalker. Other times she kept herself awake by assembling a cast for a comic opera with players like the Bald Brigade, the Moustache Contingent, and the Young Things. Mainly, though, she was carefully laying the groundwork for a coordinated lobbying effort that would reach every member of Congress, guided by the multi-page “Directions for Lobbyists” which laid out step-by-step instructions on how to get the job done.

Park’s job was complicated by the April 1917 entry of the United States into World War I. “Overnight, it seemed, the shadow of the Great War fell upon Washington,” she recalled. Further complicating the suffragists’ mission, a so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement stipulated that Congress would take up no general legislation while war measures were under consideration; luckily congressional allies helped the suffragists find ways to work around that prohibition. There was never any question of suffragists abandoning their agenda in order to support the war. “Do both,” Carrie Chapman Catt said succinctly.11

Another complication was the competition from the National Woman’s Party, which continued its controversial policy of picketing the White House in spite of the declaration of war. There was no love lost between the two groups. “Nothing about our work was more unpleasant than the need of explaining that we did not agree as to method with other women working for the same end,” Park asserted. “Why don’t you women get together?” congressmen complained, conveniently forgetting that men hardly agreed on everything. Senator Reed Smoot from Utah, a conservative Mormon Republican who nevertheless was a suffrage supporter—“the only forward-looking movement that he was known to support,” Park observed—was especially disdainful of the NWP’s tactics: “Do they think United States senators are going to change their opinions and their votes because a parcel of women stand round the doors, holding banners? Who are they, anyway? Little young things, just out of school or old ladies who ought to be at home enjoying their grandchildren.” NAWSA lobbyists worked hard to earn their designation as “the sane suffragists.”12

They plotted their strategy carefully. In January 1918, the front door lobby won a huge victory when the House of Representatives passed the suffrage amendment by a vote of 274–136, with literally one vote to spare. One supporter who had broken his shoulder refused to have it set until after the vote had been taken; another interrupted the preparations for his wife’s funeral to cast his ballot. The morning after the vote, Carrie Chapman Catt reached out to NAWSA’s state congressional chairmen with a clarion call to mobilize pressure on the Senate, confidently predicting to Maud Wood Park that their task would be over in a month or two. Park was more cautious, realizing how difficult winning a two-thirds majority in the Senate would be. She suspected that she and her corps of lobbyists wouldn’t be leaving Washington anytime soon.

So the suffragists went back to work. In May they were still two votes short, but Woodrow Wilson’s recent declaration of support encouraged them to bring the measure up for debate on the senate floor. When it was clear that those votes were not forthcoming, the Democratic leadership abruptly cancelled the vote, a humiliating experience for the suffragists. After the fiasco, a furious Carrie Chapman Catt lost her temper with one of the floor managers, leaving Park with the task of making amends for the offense her hotheaded boss had caused. Later, she realized that the floor leader’s action had been motivated by his desire to help, not hinder, the amendment, but at the time it was a low blow.13

With the 1918 off-year elections looming, the suffragists geared up for another attempt in September. “Mrs. Catt has been here for weeks,” the Woman Citizen reported. “Mrs. Park is always here.” Five days of debate began on September 26, with much pontificating, especially on the antisuffrage side. Catt couldn’t bear to sit in the gallery listening to the debate, so she decamped back to Suffrage House. When it became clear that no minds were being changed, Catt appealed to President Woodrow Wilson to address the Senate, with the hope that he could personally change enough votes for it to pass. Wilson gave one of the most impassioned speeches he ever delivered on the subject, calling the suffrage amendment “vital to the winning of the war.” If only the vote had been taken then, they might have prevailed, Park later thought. But when the matter came to a vote the next day, Wilson had not changed a single mind, and the amendment went down to defeat, 62–34. Park’s response? “We’ve got to act like merry sunshine no matter what we think for we can’t afford to have any one know that we feel beaten.” Anna Howard Shaw took revenge by inserting this dig in her speeches: “When I sit in the gallery of the Senate and look down on the senators,” she would begin, then pause and add: “and I don’t have to sit in the gallery to look down on them.”14

By this point, there wasn’t much more lobbying that could be done to convince recalcitrant opponents, so the suffragists concluded they would need to change the composition of the Senate. With just five weeks until the November 1918 election, they targeted the Republican senator John W. Weeks of Massachusetts and the Democratic senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, helping to defeat both of them in the midst of the terrible influenza epidemic gripping the country. With the Republicans poised to take control of both the Senate and the House when the sixty-sixth Congress convened in March 1919, the suffragists pushed for one more vote while the Democratic-controlled sixty-fifth Congress was still in session. Once again, they came up two votes short.

Now that a new Congress was convening, the suffragists had to start all over again. Luckily, the momentum had begun to shift—the successful 1917 New York State referendum proved a huge turning point. The measure galloped through the House, picking up supporters in direct relation to the increasing number of states where women had full or partial suffrage. On May 10, 1919, it passed the House by a vote of 304–90, “the ayes … tumbling in so fast and close together that I could hardly set them down,” Park remembered.15

Prospects in the Senate were still guarded. Suffragists had experienced such bad luck with supporters dying in office that Maud Wood Park “dreaded to look at the morning paper for fear that one of our friends in the Senate had died during the night.”16 During the two agonizing days of debate, “when victory was within our grasp, I completely lost the self-control with which I had sat through the previous debates,” Park admitted, emitting “murmurs of angry impatience” during the final antisuffrage speeches. With the support of sixty-six senators, on June 4, 1919, more than two and a half years after Maud Wood Park took over as congressional chair, the suffrage amendment finally passed.17

When it came time to parse the reasons for victory, Park repeatedly emphasized the key insight of Carrie Chapman Catt’s winning plan: that increasing numbers of enfranchised women would put pressure on Congress. While some commentators linked the victory to women’s participation in the war effort, Park did not believe any votes were swayed by that issue. She could not point to a single case where Woodrow Wilson’s intervention had made the difference, either, although victory would have been difficult if not impossible without the president’s change in heart. Never one to gloat or make grandiose claims, she even downplayed the role of the front door lobby: “Much as I like to think that we had our part in the successful outcome, I am sure that no member of that lobby failed to recognize that without the backing of the women at work in the states, our best efforts would have been futile.” And she adamantly deflected attention away from her own role, keeping very much in the background and letting Carrie Chapman Catt bask in the public limelight.18

Maud Wood Park was too modest. When a final tally comes down to a few votes, the role of lobbyists takes on heightened importance. Senator Henry Hollis of New Hampshire made that point directly to Park: “The narrow margin of two votes gives you a right to feel that you personally are a tremendous factor in the final result. If the margin had been large, no one could have claimed much credit. But those two votes certainly represent the result of your individual efforts.” Especially significant was Park’s ability to work with members of both parties. Throughout her years of service to the suffrage campaign, Maud Wood Park had remained scrupulously non-partisan, a stance she would maintain when she became the first president of the National League of Women Voters in 1920. “Perhaps God knew which party Mrs. Park favored,” observed one Washington insider, “but if so, He hasn’t told anybody in Washington.”19

Carrie Chapman Catt was not in the gallery when the final senate vote was taken. After witnessing the defeat the previous fall, she vowed never again to listen to a congressional suffrage debate, and she kept her word. Besides, she was too busy preparing the campaign for ratification. The long hard haul was not over yet.

Alice Paul sews a star on the suffrage flag while members of the National Woman’s Party look on. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.