CHAPTER NINETEEN

Tennessee’s “Perfect 36”

ALICE PAUL was not included in Carrie Chapman Catt’s suffrage forest, but her fingerprints are all over the struggle. To say that Alice Paul was a polarizing figure is a wild understatement. To her devoted followers in the National Woman’s Party, she was practically a saint—Joan of Arc reincarnated, the most inspirational leader any feminist movement could ever want. The views of her opponents were just as extreme. In the words of a Dutch activist who clashed with Paul in the 1930s, “The opinion that 99% of all the people whom I have met and who have had to deal with Miss Paul” is “A. P. can ONLY lead!” In the suffrage veteran Doris Stevens’s telling phrase, “In order to work with Miss Paul, one has to surrender all.”¹

Some leaders build their followings by spellbinding oratory, but Alice Paul was never an especially charismatic public speaker, and she generally shunned the limelight. Paul’s greatest skill was her ability as a tactician and strategist. Lucy Burns, her co-conspirator from British suffrage days onward, captured her ability to work on both the macro and micro levels: “Her great assets, I should say, are her power to make plans on a national scale; and a supplemental power to see that it is done down to the postage stamp.”²

If she had been a man, she might have been a business tycoon or a college president, but she always preferred the world of women. As a leader—and she always had to be in charge—Paul crafted flexible, panther-like responses, almost counterinsurgencies, deploying different strategies as different situations demanded. She never repeated her tactics, and she kept upping the ante as needed. She was willing to take risks, and she never took her eyes off the prize. The veteran of repeated hunger strikes, she always seemed on the verge of collapse, but of course she never did, which in turn added to her mystique.

And she could sew. One of the most iconic images of Alice Paul is her unfurling a suffrage flag from the balcony of NWP headquarters. Each time a state approved woman suffrage, she would personally sew a ratification star on the flag. In this picture, it looks as though there are still at least five states to go. New Mexico, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Washington all ratified in February and March 1920, but then progress came to a halt. With the election of 1920 fast approaching, it all came down to Tennessee in August. One key to that victory was sitting at the table to the right of Alice Paul, holding the fabric steady: Tennessee’s own Sue Shelton White.

THE POPULAR APPEAL of Harry Burn’s story is easy to understand: a minor Republican legislator in Tennessee dramatically removes the antisuffrage red rose from his lapel and casts the deciding vote that puts the Nineteenth Amendment over the top. And what causes his sudden change of heart? Nothing less than a heartfelt appeal from his mother to follow Carrie Chapman Catt’s call to “put the RAT in ratification.” This is no urban legend. Harry Burn did indeed cast that vote, and his mother strongly lobbied him to do so. But reducing the final battle to such a simple story flattens out the political intrigues and machinations raging in Nashville those hot August days in 1920. The Tennessee suffragist Sue Shelton White was right in the thick of them and had been for the past eight years.³

“I come of good American stock. The blood of Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall flows in my veins. My father fought under Lee.”⁴ That is how Sue Shelton White, a proud southern Democrat, described her family’s background. Her carefully curated facts told only part of the story, however. The White family, like many other formerly well-to-do southern slave owners, had experienced financial difficulties since the Civil War. When Sue was born in Henderson, Tennessee in 1887, her father was serving as the local superintendent of schools and active in the Methodist ministry. After his death in 1893, when Sue was just six, her mother struggled to keep the family together. Southern white women were not supposed to work outside the home, so she cobbled together various ways to get by—selling pianos, giving voice lessons, and writing for the local newspaper. “I never classed my mother as a feminist,” her daughter later recalled, “but I suspect she was one. Life would have made her one in the end if she had not been in the beginning.” When Mary White died in 1901, fourteen-year-old Sue was looked after by an aunt.⁵

Sue Shelton White remembered a childhood in which both brothers and sisters shared the household chores, and gender distinctions were minimal. It soon became clear to her that unless she married, she would need to support herself. Being of an independent frame of mind and influenced by her mother’s feminism, this prospect did not daunt her and may in fact have been quite appealing. The most obvious path was to enter the teaching profession, and in 1904 she graduated from Georgie Robertson Christian College, a teacher training school which also offered courses in stenography. Forgoing teaching, she set her sights on the law. In 1907, she became a court reporter in Jackson, Tennessee and later a private secretary to one of the members of the Tennessee Supreme Court. Clearly loving her immersion in the legal world, she was frustrated by the barriers that she faced, such as being called “impractical” or “visionary” whenever she talked of studying law. (Not until 1923, while working in Washington, DC as a secretary to Senator Kenneth McKellar, would she finally get her law degree.) In the meantime, she was gaining valuable political contacts that she would soon put to good use. As Governor Thomas Clarke Rye later said, “Anyone who is a friend of Miss Sue’s, is a friend of ours.”⁶

In 1912, Sue Shelton White embraced woman suffrage, a cause that came later to the South than elsewhere in the country. She helped found the Jackson League of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association and was soon promoted to recording secretary. Even when the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association split in two because of regional factionalism, White maintained cordial relations with both groups. Yet because the leadership of the southern suffrage movement was almost uniformly held by older, wealthy, socially elite white women—a status White did not enjoy as a self-supporting stenographer—she found herself shut out of the top positions, no matter how much energy and talent she brought to the cause. White was well aware of the limitations of her respectable but modest status. As she wrote to Carrie Chapman Catt about a fellow suffragist who was lobbying the Tennessee senator John Shields, “Mrs. Warner knows him quite well socially. I know him quite well also, but my acquaintance has been more political than social. There is sometimes a difference.”⁷

In these years, Sue Shelton White juggled the need to support herself with her time-consuming commitment to suffrage advocacy. With a wide range of contacts on the Tennessee political scene to draw on, she was a superb organizer. She was also an effective speaker, but one of her early suffrage exploits involved not speaking at all. In December 1916, Tennessee suffragists wanted to present a petition to the Farmer’s Institute convention in Nashville. When that request was denied, they stood silently on the main floor of the state capitol, holding suffrage signs and banners that the delegates had to walk by. White later thought this demonstration may have given Alice Paul the idea for the Silent Sentinels that started picketing the White House in January 1917.⁸

The onset of World War I in April 1917 affected Sue Shelton White’s suffrage career in ways that she had not anticipated. By that point, the National Woman’s Party had long broken from NAWSA, but it had only the faintest footprint in the South. Suffrage itself seemed such a radical idea that the NWP’s militance seemed over the top, and their strategy of targeting Democrats in the 1914 and 1916 elections as the party in power did not sit well in the solidly Democratic South. The NWP’s reputation got even worse when Alice Paul decided to continue picketing the White House after war was declared. Now, in addition to being militant and unladylike, suffragists were accused of being unpatriotic and un-American.

In 1917, the National Woman’s Party sent Maud Younger on a southern tour to build support for the Nineteenth Amendment—a hard sell in the states-rights South—and to recruit talent for the organization. So strong were the pro-war and antisuffrage sentiments in Tennessee that Younger found herself unable to secure speaking venues. Sue Shelton White was ashamed of her home state’s affront to free speech, and she offered to use her political capital on Younger’s behalf. As she later explained to Carrie Chapman Catt, “I was appealed to, to do the only thing and the least thing that I could do under the circumstances, which was simply to state that while I did not subscribe to the policy of the Woman’s Party and was not working with it, I did not regard either the party or Miss Younger as disloyal, pro-German, or un-American.”⁹

The NWP organizer Rebecca Hourwich Reyher later provided a much more vivid description of White’s role: “She got on the phone. She called the Mayor, and the Police Chief. She demanded that we be given the privilege of speaking, and that we have the protection we might need, and she guaranteed to stand behind us and anything we said on her word of honor. We were women asking for the vote, and there was nothing anyone could call unpatriotic in that.” Sue White was especially impressive on her home turf of Jackson, according to Reyher: “She spellbound the hostile audience. The rumblings stopped, the atmosphere became friendly; we hated to leave Jackson.” White temporarily closed down her stenography office to accompany them on the rest of their tour of Tennessee, “and everywhere, thanks to her the hostility vanished.” Reyher especially appreciated the gesture of support: “In those days Sue lived by what she earned, and her shutting up shop to help us was a real sacrifice.”¹⁰

Carrie Chapman Catt first learned that things might be amiss in Tennessee when she read an account of White’s efforts on behalf of Maud Younger in The Suffragist, the NWP weekly newspaper. (It is telling, but hardly surprising, that the president of NAWSA kept tabs on the NWP.) Alarmed, she contacted the president of the Tennessee suffrage association, fearful that White might be sharing NAWSA plans with their rivals. “No one can now carry water on both shoulders,” Catt asserted. She admitted the Woman’s Party was “doing some good work. But its chief stock in trade is to get our plans and try to frustrate them, and for that we can not stand.”¹¹

When White learned that aspersions were being cast on her loyalty, she wrote a lengthy reply to Catt. Clearly upset that Catt had shared her unfounded suspicions behind her back, she recounted the Maud Younger saga in great detail—“You now have before you a full confession”—stressing that the issue of free speech was paramount in her intercession. But she also got in a few digs about NAWSA’s disinterest in organizing southern states, which stood in stark contrast to the NWP’s recognition of “the need of waking up the South.” More broadly, White tried very hard to appeal to a sense of larger solidarity for the cause. Even when there were disagreements about tactics and strategies, she felt that much common ground remained. Carrie Chapman Catt would have none of this. “This is the point in which women everywhere must take a big view and try to consider all the data before making up their minds.” She asked White to “take your stand fair and square, one side or the other.”¹²

Meanwhile, Alice Paul recognized that she had a hot prospect in Tennessee. White had not been ready to jump ship in November—she was “still ‘too good a Democrat,’ too well grounded in my faith in the President’s ultimate purpose, to take my stand at that time with the women who were in the front line trenches of the fight”—but she was finally ready to make the break five months later. She accepted a position as the Tennessee chairman of the National Woman’s Party, finding opportunities for influence and power in the upstart NWP that her lack of social status and southern roots denied her in NAWSA. In 1919, after Alice Paul offered her a position as the editor of The Suffragist, she moved to Washington, DC.¹³

As 1919 dawned, suffragists in both camps were increasingly discouraged at the stalled amendment in the Senate. Once again, the National Woman’s Party stepped up its militance, and this time Sue Shelton White was fully on board. On February 9, she took part in a demonstration where an “effigy” of President Woodrow Wilson was burned in Lafayette Park, an act that risked being labeled as treason when repressive wartime restrictions on free speech remained in force despite the armistice the previous November. White personally read their dramatic manifesto: “We burn not the effigy of the President of a free people, but the leader of an autocratic party organization whose tyrannical power holds millions of women in political slavery.” (The protesters actually burned a Lou Rogers cartoon of Woodrow Wilson so it would catch fire quickly. Still, the protest troubled African American suffragists, who found it far too closely resembled the heinous practice of lynching.) Alice Paul looked on, admiring their bravery: “I saw Sue White at the urn—the flames flashed. She gave me a nod; I knew the deed was done.” White was quickly arrested and, along with more than two dozen NWP protestors, spent five days in jail, where she promptly went on a hunger strike. When she was released, she was personally awarded her prison pin by Alice Paul, just as Hazel Hunkins had earned hers a few months earlier.¹⁴

Just days after her release White embarked on a cross-country whistle-stop tour on the “Prison Special.” On February 15, 1919, twenty-six women who had been imprisoned since the arrests started in summer 1917 boarded a railroad car they christened “Democracy Limited.” They carried a message “from the prison to the people” in a last-ditch effort to change votes before the Senate adjourned. With public attention focused on Woodrow Wilson’s peace negotiations in Paris, the National Woman’s Party wanted to remind the country of “the lawless and brutal length to which the Administration has gone to suppress the lawful agitation for suffrage.” What better way to make both of those points than to appear on platforms in replicas of their prison garb—“all ‘jail birds’ and proud of it,” White recalled. Once again, Alice Paul had upped the ante.¹⁵

Sue Shelton White remembered the Prison Special tour as an exhilarating but exhausting experience, but she never doubted that it was worth it: “Twenty-five nights on the same sleeper, with the same fellow passengers, going through the same routine at stops, practically the same food (always chicken, at luncheons), snatching a cup of coffee at a lunch counter in the early morning, the everlasting photographers, parades, pilgrimages to mayors’ offices for the keys to cities, open air meetings, indoor mass meetings snatching spare moments to get shoes polished, handkerchieves washed, clothes pressed,—all the miserable worry of traveling.” When the tour finally ended, they parted “friends with each other, and with the consciousness that each had done what she could and that it all had been worth while.”¹⁶

Ironically, the Prison Special tour coincided with the end of militant action by the National Woman’s Party. As did NAWSA’s front door lobby, the NWP recognized that nothing could happen until Congress passed the amendment. It finally did so in June, after intense lobbying by both sides. Then all energy turned to the ratification campaign. The enmity between the NWP and NAWSA was as strong as ever—it would continue to play out in postsuffrage politics well into the 1940s—but in this final stage, the similarities between the two groups’ approaches were far more salient than their differences. Both focused on traditional lobbying and the mobilization of public opinion to win over state legislators. Of course, neither side would admit to any common ground, so the battle for ratification went forward on separate but parallel tracks.¹⁷

Sue Shelton White’s unswerving loyalty to the cause of suffrage, her keen political instincts, and her ability to rise above factional disputes were put to good use in the successful ratification fight in Tennessee. Finding what NAWSA called “the perfect 36”—a reference to the number of states needed to ratify as well as to the ideal female figure—had proven harder than expected, and Tennessee offered probably the last chance to accomplish this goal in time for women to vote in the 1920 election.

For several weeks in August, practically everyone descended on the state capital. Carrie Chapman Catt was in town, but she mainly holed up at a hotel supervising her legions of NAWSA lobbyists. Alice Paul was in close contact with her NWP lieutenants by telegraph and telephone from Washington, DC. Tennessee contributed its own seasoned suffragists to the cause, as did both political parties. Right in the thick of things was Sue Shelton White, officially on the NWP team but playing a critical role navigating this chaotic scene. Because of her political contacts and her insider’s knowledge of how things worked, White was in a unique position to affect the outcome. To keep her spirits up, she wore her prison pin every day, even though she realized its association with militance might be off-putting to some of the local politicians she was trying to sway.

Unlike Maud Wood Park’s painstaking “front door” lobbying, which literally stretched over entire congressional sessions, the Tennessee ratification campaign unfolded at breakneck speed, evoking far “more excitement and agitation than the long fight in Congress.” First the Tennessee governor had to be convinced that it was constitutional to call a special legislative session. Drawing on her legal expertise, White played a key role in overcoming his objections. That hurdle cleared, the legislators dutifully if reluctantly returned to Nashville to consider the amendment, not at all keen, in those days before air-conditioning, to return to work in the summer heat, but resigned to fulfilling their civic duty. For or against, they literally had a chance to participate in making history.¹⁸

On August 9, 1920, White opened a temporary National Woman’s Party headquarters in Nashville, and it was flat out for the next two weeks. As always, the NWP was strapped for cash, so White could only count on a small team comprised of Anita Pollitzer, Betty Gram, and Charlotte Flanagan. Gram recalled working day and night together “against a formidable opposition—a lobby of wealthy anti-suffragists, ostentatious liquor interests, and clandestine railroad executives.” (It wasn’t all work, though: she also remembered White treating her to the best watermelon she ever tasted in her life.) Telegrams flew back and forth to Alice Paul at Belmont House in Washington, DC, and lobbyists roamed the corridors of the statehouse. As to Sue Shelton White herself, “she worked at white heat, directing the lobbyists day by day, hour by hour, so that every moment they knew where the legislation stood in the Legislature.” With so many outsiders flooding the state capital, pro- and anti-, “her contacts, her good judgment, and her fire accomplished wonders.”¹⁹ Activists at the time and historians ever since have singled out White “for her skillful coordination of suffragists of all factions.” Betty Gram concluded dramatically, “I think it can be said that the date of victory might have been delayed many years but for her brilliant strategy.”²⁰

The amendment breezed through the Tennessee Senate on August 13 by a margin of 25–4, but prospects were much dimmer in the House, especially because House Speaker Seth Walker was firmly against ratification. A master parliamentarian, he repeatedly used delaying tactics to try to undermine still shaky support for the amendment. With legislators increasingly restless to go home, however, he was forced to bring the issue to a vote on August 18. At that point, both suffragists and antis knew it was a dead heat. Walker’s motion to table the question indefinitely resulted in a 48–48 tie, not enough to cause the motion to pass, but certainly a bad omen for the final vote.

So now the official vote on the amendment began. Moving alphabetically, the results mirrored the earlier voting breakdown on the motion to table—until the roll call got to Harry Burn. It was at this point that he dramatically laid aside his red rose and changed his vote to “aye.” Even so, this did not guarantee victory for the suffragists, and the roll call continued through the alphabet. When it got to Banks Turner, a legislator who had been allied with the state’s pro-ratification governor but who had earlier voted with the antis, he asked to be counted as not voting, and the tally ended once again in a 48–48 tie. When those results were announced, Turner stepped forward and asked to be counted in favor, making the final tally 49–48.

Even with these two changes of heart, the amendment still might have gone down to defeat, because it lacked a clear constitutional majority of fifty votes in a ninety-nine member lower chamber. Where did the final vote come from? Ironically, it came from House Speaker Seth Walker, who changed his vote to yes so that he could immediately move for a reconsideration. His plan was to delay the proceedings once again, in the hopes of convincing a single legislator to flip his vote and kill the amendment. That scheme failed, as did a last-minute injunction holding up certification of the vote. Not until six days later, on August 24, was the vote officially certified, and not until two days after that did the official documentation arrive in Washington, DC, making August 26 the date usually associated with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Finally, Alice Paul could sew the last suffrage star on her flag and unfurl it out the window at NWP headquarters. The century-long struggle to win the vote for women was over, but not so the quest for women’s equality. One hundred years later, the struggle continues.