6

Love (Almost) in the Open

She loves me the same as I love her.

Harriet Speckart

We are just friends, bosom companions.

Marie Equi

Nothing inflames a new romance like disapproval or a forced separation. Marie Equi and Harriet Speckart endured both—the first from the suspicious, controlling Mrs. Speckart and the second by the disaster that struck San Francisco and the Bay Area. Through it all Equi’s and Speckart’s desire for each other deepened and their resolve to be together strengthened. As circumstances played out, disapproval of their commitment triggered a scandal rife with charges of sexual impropriety, attempted theft of an inheritance, and an eerie power wielded by Equi.

During their San Diego tryst in March 1906, Equi and Speckart devised a plan for the latter’s return to Portland. Speckart told her mother that she must seek treatment there for the tuberculosis and dropsy that her “Doc” had diagnosed. Their ruse worked except that Mrs. Speckart insisted on accompanying her daughter. The Speckarts had to wait out the embargo on passenger rail travel following the San Francisco calamity, but finally in mid-May, they traveled from San Diego to Portland where Equi and Speckart were reunited. Even then they found little peace. Mrs. Speckart continued to quarrel with her daughter, ostensibly over the inheritance. Below the surface roiled a bitter mother-daughter relationship entangled with Mrs. Speckart’s dismay and loathing of Harriet’s lesbian affections.1

Within weeks the dissension among the Speckarts—now including young Joseph Speckart as well—erupted into an unseemly affair splashed on the front page of the widely read Sunday Oregonian. “Quarrel Among Speckart Heirs, Family at Outs, Daughter Leaves Mother” the piece trumpeted. The lengthy account described a disputed inheritance, a daughter’s revolt against her mother and brother, and allegations that Dr. Marie Equi had manipulated the younger woman’s affections to plunder the family wealth. Oregonians sipped their morning coffees while poring over details of the Speckart troubles, the terms of the inheritance, and Mrs. Speckart’s attempt to keep her twenty-three-year-old daughter from receiving her fair share. The story may have titillated readers with the tale of a daughter’s defiance and of the supposed immoral persuasion, if not outright seduction, of a young, innocent woman by an older professional woman. The irony that Oregon’s recent heroine-to-the-rescue was now cast as a possibly degenerate gold digger could not have been lost on many readers.2

Harriet Speckart’s supposed vulnerability fit nicely with the prevailing notion that women, especially young women, needed protection from unhealthy influences. But her wealth placed her outside the stereotype of the usual target population. Most Progressives sought to assist or protect women adrift, the single girls and young women seeking employment in cities without benefit of family or husbands. A well-to-do woman like Speckart was expected to manage her own way. At the same time, her insistence on obtaining her inheritance and conducting her romantic life as she saw fit reflected the emergence of independent women who sought their rights to citizenship, including full standing in the judicial system.³

The Oregonian piece delivered a primer on the tangled affairs of the Speckarts. Harriet’s father, Adolph Speckart, had been a wealthy businessman and investor with part-ownership of breweries in Montana, Washington, and Oregon as well as mines in California, real estate, and an extensive portfolio of stocks and bonds. He died in 1893 in Butte, Montana, and left an estate of nearly $250,000 to his widow and their two children. Each was bequeathed one-third of the estate with Mrs. Speckart holding the children’s shares until they reached the age of majority (age eighteen in Montana for females). Although Mrs. Speckart was named executrix in her husband’s will, she never fully administered the estate. Whether her failure to do so resulted from procrastination, faulty legal advice, or outright fraud became a primary facet of the dispute. She certainly appeared negligent in not disbursing her children’s inheritances when they came of age, her daughter in 1901 and her son in 1905. Harriet, in fact, did not learn of the bequest until May 1906, and that belated disclosure especially angered her. By that time she and her brother were due an amount that would make them millionaires today.⁴

For readers of the Oregonian, a regional connection made the Speckart story even more engaging. Mrs. Speckart was related by marriage to the brewery titan Leopold Schmidt, who owned the Olympia Brewing Company of Tumwater, Washington, along with holdings in Oregon. With this in mind, Portlanders pondered Mrs. Speckart’s fear that her daughter would disregard family interests and squander her share of the estate. She was so concerned that she sought to become her daughter’s legal guardian to control her access to the funds. Speckart’s grievances were cast as those of a privileged young woman who chafed against the limits her mother set on her finances and social life. Joseph Speckart, it appeared, was concerned about his inheritance as well, but he chose to join forces with his mother. What pitted them against Speckart was her relationship with Equi.5

Mrs. Speckart complained to the Oregonian that Equi had “alienated the affections” of Harriet so much that her daughter no longer cared about her family. She admitted to resenting her daughter’s new emotional attachment, and she had told others at their hotel that “the friendship must cease.” These same residents reported that Speckart had become “great chums” with Equi, Dr. Mary Ellen Parker, and Mrs. Marie Daggett, a friend of theirs who worked for the Multnomah County Juvenile Court. The four women were said to have formed “a clique which could not be broken up.” The Oregonian tiptoed around the implications of the close bond between Equi and Speckart, but follow-up stories and reports in other papers portrayed Equi as a predator wielding an unhealthy psychological sway over the younger woman.⁶

The Oregonian story highlighted a supposed brawl between Equi and Joseph Speckart that followed an argument between the Speckart siblings over a cache of letters from Equi that Joseph had grabbed from his sister. Speckart became distraught when her brother refused to return the correspondence, and she telephoned Equi for help. When Equi arrived at the family’s apartment, she flew into a rage, according to the newspaper, when Joseph refused to release the letters. Equi reportedly threatened his life and shook him by the throat. He broke free and escaped out the window and onto a fire escape. Mrs. Speckart tried to intervene, but Equi reportedly pushed her into a chair. The article concluded with Speckart departing The Hill altogether and leaving the city with the three other members of the clique for a weekend at Seaside, the Oregon coast resort. The Speckart affair continued to play out in the Portland dailies in the days ahead, but the Sunday scandal piece set the first impressions of what became a drawn-out battle.7

News of the Speckarts’ feud and Equi’s role in it carried beyond Oregon’s borders with features in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Morning Olympian in Olympia, Washington. In the latter account, Mrs. Speckart’s attorney said the letters in question revealed attempts to grasp control of the Speckart wealth. The San Francisco Call forged into new territory with its front-page screamer, “Heiress Victim of Hypnotist, Rich Oregon Girl Is in Power of Woman Physician.” The article reminded readers of Equi’s role in the Oregon relief mission to the city, and then claimed she had threatened suicide after her “peculiar relations” with Speckart were exposed.⁸

Equi refuted the accusations after her stay at the coast. “Yes, I read all that stuff in the papers,” she told a reporter, “but didn’t pay any attention to it. It is nonsense. The charges are so ridiculous that I don’t care to discuss them seriously.” But she added that Speckart had never been a patient of hers and that she had only befriended her after learning she was being mistreated by her family. She scoffed at the suggestion that her letters revealed a criminal intent to acquire the family’s wealth. “They cannot show a line in which the girl asked for money for me, nor in which I asked the girl for money,” she said. “I pay my own bills and do not need any Speckart money to help me along.” Mary Ellen Parker confirmed Equi’s story, “Why, neither Dr. Equi nor I want Miss Speckart’s money.” When they met the young woman, she said, “We didn’t know whether she was worth five cents or $500,000.”⁹

Parker offered her own explanation of Speckart’s attraction to Equi. “The girl took a particular liking to Dr. Equi because the latter was so buoyant and joyful and strong. You know how a strong person impresses one who is weak physically. The girl has been so hedged about and suppressed by her mother that she has become timid and needed a good, strong friend to sustain her inner troubles.” Parker recognized, of course, the infatuation between the two women, but she deflected attention from their intimate relations to a more practical association and highlighted Equi’s good intentions.10

Equi dismissed the alleged skirmish with the Speckarts. She said she had solicited the help of the district attorney once she received Harriet’s call and then waited at the Speckarts’ room for the police. She claimed they threatened her, but she denied attacking Harriet’s mother or brother. The actual events are uncertain, yet Equi seldom took insult or accusation calmly.

The police arrived and retrieved the letters from Joseph, and later the district attorney returned them to Equi. “How ridiculous to claim that there was evidence of any incriminating character in those letters,” Equi told a reporter. “If there had been any, don’t you think District Attorney Manning would have indicted me, instead of turning the letters over to me? Bosh and nonsense.”¹¹

Equi’s letters to Speckart may not have been incriminating, but they brimmed with endearments and intimacies, according to a Portland Evening Telegram report. An unattributed source to the paper suggested the letters “burn with a love as fervid as the billet-doux of any Don Juan.” Equi had ample opportunity to indulge in passionate flourishes—Joseph Speckart later reported that she had written more than one hundred letters to his sister during the four months they were apart.¹²

Equi was astute to engage the district attorney and request police assistance as a means to secure the letters. She effectively cleared her name by claiming an official review of what she had written. Yet more rumors and allegations flew. One suggested Equi promised the district attorney to not see or correspond with Speckart again, and that she instead concealed letters in books at the public library for Speckart to retrieve. Equi had to have found the whole affair infuriating and threatening to her privacy and reputation. The actual content of her letters to Speckart are not known, but she may very well have expressed her fervent love and sexual desire for her. She had every reason to keep them from public view. But the skirmish over her correspondence served as prelude for the legal battle to come. With the letters secured, Equi recast her relationship in more socially acceptable terms. “She has come to me with her troubles,” she told a reporter, “and we have been very much together since the trouble began.” She said, “We are just friends, bosom companions.” In fact, Equi had begun the longest intimate relationship of her life.¹³

Charges and denials proliferated throughout the following week. At one point Leopold Schmidt, the brewery magnate, hired the Thiele Detective Service to uncover anything derogatory or criminal about Equi that might be used against her. After an exhaustive search, the operatives discovered nothing of merit.14

In light of the scandal, much of the praise and renown for Equi’s courage and generosity in the San Francisco relief mission probably faded. If nothing else, Portlanders were confronted with a more nuanced impression of her that would become more pronounced in the years ahead. From a larger perspective, the scandal exploited public fears of what might befall a woman like Speckart who asserted her independence. The dispute also rattled the sensibilities of those who wanted to protect the social order, one in which daughters did not threaten or malign their mothers or get swept away in forbidden romances.

The Speckart sensation became the second widely published account of a lesbian relationship in Oregon, and, perhaps, in the Pacific Northwest, with Equi’s companionship with Bessie Holcomb being the first. Both incidents occurred within a larger context of a perceived injustice or threat, but it was the prospect of intimacy between two women that appeared to propel and lodge the stories into public discourse. Each occasion involved respectable and professional women who could not be dismissed as unfortunate lower-class immigrants or unsavory types from disreputable districts. Equi’s intimate affairs—thrust into public view—forced Portlanders to recognize that same-sex relations prevailed at all levels of society.

The Speckart Affair, as it came to be known, distracted the public from the woman suffrage measure about to be decided by Oregon’s male voters in the June election. Other suffragists might have regretted that the controversy embroiled two independent women just as the campaign tried to assuage fears of women’s changing roles in society. But NAWSA leaders could sympathize with Equi’s circumstances given their own domestic arrangements. Anna Howard Shaw, the current president, Carrie Chapman Catt, the former president, Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and Alice Stone Blackwell, the editor of Woman’s Journal—all engaged in romantic and sexual relations with lesbian lovers. They, however, managed to keep their intimate affairs out of the papers.¹⁵

In some quarters, suffragists were regularly taunted as aggressive, short-haired, mannish women who did not like men. Few suffrage leaders directly challenged the lesbian slurs, but they often tried to avoid looking the part, being careful how they dressed and presented themselves. Oregon’s suffrage leader, Abigail Scott Duniway, took it upon herself to counter the depiction of suffragists as unsexed women bent on wielding power and triggering a war between the sexes. Presumably she wanted to assure male voters that suffragists did indeed like and love men but she used a homophobic assault to do it.16

In 1899, Duniway delivered a stormy talk at the annual suffrage convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She proclaimed, “Show me a woman who doesn’t like men, and I will show you a sour-souled, vinegar-visaged specimen of unfortunate femininity, who owes the world an apology for living in it at all.” Warming to her subject, she added, “The very best thing she could do for her country . . . would be to steal away and die, in the company of the man who doesn’t like women.” Duniway’s antipathy for NAWSA leaders—many of them lesbians who opposed her political strategies—perhaps fueled her vitriolic remarks. Her speech was not filed away in convention proceedings, seldom to be seen again. She included it in her autobiography, Pathbreaking, published in 1914. At some point Equi probably learned of Duniway’s sentiments and her reaction is not known, but the remarks reflected the disapproval and disdain that Equi and other lesbians encountered even among their allies.¹⁷

Oregon’s campaign had already stalled during the mobilization for earthquake relief, and afterward it struggled to regain momentum. By mid-May 1906, suffragists no longer beamed with confidence as they tried to persuade and argue their way to victory. The Oregon Equal Suffrage Association, the group that Equi aligned herself with, railed against upper-class women who poured money into opposition efforts. These antisuffragists rejected the notion that women voters would improve politics, government, and society. A wealthy and influential cadre of them feared losing the special place they believed most women enjoyed. They objected to the prospect of being burdened by voting, jury duty, and the expectation of holding office. And they questioned whether lower-class women, if granted the vote, would defer to the better judgment of the elite.¹⁸

Suffragists worried as well that the liquor interests—the brewers and liquor store operators—would once again swing Oregon’s voters against them. With good reason, the liquor men feared enfranchised women would usher in an era of prohibition. Suffrage leaders struggled to finesse the prohibition issue, and the prospect, or threat, of outlawing alcohol complicated their efforts in Oregon. They contended with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as well as Progressives who supported adoption of prohibition. The issue provided no safe haven—suffragists figured they would alienate potential supporters no matter what position they took. In truth, many suffragists considered alcohol control a lesser concern.¹⁹

The national suffrage organization worried that an Oregon victory was slipping away, and they rushed more organizers and speakers to the state. Anna Howard Shaw, NAWSA’s president, returned to the state determined to jumpstart the stalled campaign and help Oregon lead other West Coast states into suffrage. Following her return from quake-damaged San Francisco, attorney Gail Laughlin solicited support from labor organizations and from Oregon’s Socialist Party to turn out the working-class vote. Her outreach was especially important since NAWSA generally treated working-class voters and immigrants as a low priority.20

Equi was new to suffrage politics, but she garnered attention as an up-and-coming professional woman with Progressive instincts. The newspapers occasionally noted her contributions and leadership, but mostly her work in this, her first political endeavor, was similar to that of hundreds of other Oregon women who toiled in the campaign. Speckart, however, was much impressed with her companion’s efforts. She wrote to an aunt that her Doc worked on the woman question nonstop “with all her might.”²¹

“The women of the world have their eyes on Oregon,” suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell told a reporter in May 1906, but on Election Day the men of Oregon gave them reason to look away. Suffrage lost by more than ten thousand votes out of eighty-four thousand cast. Portland and Multnomah County, with the highest populations in the state, soundly defeated the measure, and all Willamette Valley counties, except Lane County, the home of the University of Oregon, rejected suffrage as well. The loss proved a devastating setback for Oregon’s right-to-vote advocates, and the outcome shadowed them for years.²²

Members of NAWSA blamed the liquor trade and fears of prohibition for the suffrage loss. They dodged other factors, such as their lackluster appeal to laborers antagonized by corporate exploitation. And they weren’t eager to acknowledge that their media-intensive hurrah campaign had met the same fate as Abigail Scott Duniway’s earlier, quieter tactics. Duniway, for her part, castigated the nationals for their noisy demonstrations that she felt had doomed Oregon’s chances. Yet the experience in other western states that won the vote prior to 1906—Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896—suggested that a vigorous upfront campaign with work by local suffrage clubs, collaboration with political parties, and public meetings stood the best chance of victory in the West. From an historical perspective, the conflict over suffrage strategy anticipated the era of modern marketing and communications in political campaigns.²³

By early June 1906, the Speckart dispute had devolved into seemingly endless litigation. Equi stood by Harriet throughout that summer, accompanying her to court hearings in Portland and Olympia, until she received word that her own mother had become ill with a critical kidney condition.24

Fourteen years earlier, Equi had despaired of making a life for herself in New Bedford, but she returned as a well-educated, professional woman whose relief work in San Francisco had earned her accolades from governors, mayors, and generals. Her circumstances had shifted considerably compared to those of siblings, most of whom remained in their hometown with their families. Of her three brothers, one worked as a carpenter, another as a glasscutter, and the youngest as an operator at one of the textile mills. Her three sisters were married with children and managed their households. Her parents still lived in their Tremont Street home in the working-class neighborhood where she had spent her teenage years, and her father continued to work as a mason. Changes in the old whaling city were more dramatic. The population had swelled by 50 percent to a total of eighty thousand with more than 40 percent of residents foreign-born. The Irish still held the lead overall, but the number of Portuguese arrivals had soared. Italian-born immigrants, now at close to 350, finally edged up to one percent of the population. Portuguese and Cape Verdean men held onto the vestiges of whale fishery, but smokestacks from more than a dozen new textile mills cluttered the shores of the Acushnet River. Much of the workforce now looked to the mills for their livelihoods. Much more than Portland or San Francisco, New Bedford had acquired the look, the smell, and the culture of a heavily industrialized city.^{25 26}

Equi cared for her mother for six months until, in February 1907, Sarah Equi died at age fifty-eight. The family gathered for a memorial Mass at their parish church followed by a burial at St. Mary’s Catholic cemetery, the traditional burial ground for the Irish of New Bedford. Shortly thereafter, Equi returned to Oregon.²⁷

Back in Portland, Equi appeared to have taken in stride any fallout from the Speckart affair. If anything she was more assertive about her relationship with Speckart.

In June 1907, with the city bedecked everywhere with roses, she and Speckart participated in Portland’s biggest celebration of the year: the first Rose Carnival and Fiesta. The day before the parade, local gardeners donated tens of thousands of roses to decorate floats in the official festival colors—pink, rose, and green. On Saturday, June 22, a few scattering clouds gave way to sunshine for the grand floral parade.

Equi and Speckart, dressed in their finery, joined hundreds of other Portlanders who competed for awards in the parade. They took their position in the category of “Carriage and Pair”—a four-wheeled carriage pulled by two horses—with two other entries. They rode a loop through the downtown, all the time enjoying the cheers of more than one hundred thousand onlookers thronged on the sidewalks. Later that day the judges announced winners among the various entries and awarded Equi and Speckart second place and a fifty-dollar prize. What better outcome for their day together—and their public display of companionship—than recognition and applause?28