Liberated Spirits Page 5
Wadsworth’s willingness to accept the verdicts on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments made a good impression at the convention and in some of the news reports. Most pundits believed a majority of the state agreed with Wadsworth’s opposition to Prohibition, but that included Democrats, a contingent he could not rely upon in the general election. As for suffrage, he had represented a vocal minority opposed to it, but as of late July, its ratification was taken for granted and it was no longer worth arguing about. Whether he should be punished was a question taken up by the New York Times, whose political reporter decided no. Already, the tactics of the ASL were breeding resentment, the group’s attacks upon Wads-worth viewed as out of touch and generally helpful to the senator, although not of great importance.15 As far as suffrage went, the Times reporter felt the time had come to let “bygones be bygones,” because the great debate had ended, for practical purposes.16 Since Wadsworth had represented a vocal and large minority, could women show “broad-mindedness, a spirit above political grudges, revenges, punishments?” The reporter reasoned that the even temperament of women, along with their higher moral code, which had been justifications for the Nineteenth Amendment’s passage, would serve them well in granting forgiveness to Wadsworth now. Henrietta Livermore urged the women’s state Republican executive committee to see themselves as the key to a Wadsworth victory, but she worried, “The greatest work of the campaign will be overcoming the inertia and indifference of those who have a vote.”17
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In the summer of 1920, the battle in California over Proposition 13, the Community Property Law, began to heat up, as each side strove to get its message into the newspapers and before voters. When quoted in the newspaper, most of the proponents, the club women, toed the new line—that this initiative was not about women’s equality, that Proposition 13 merely granted women limited testamentary rights while protecting a husband’s control of community property during his lifetime.18 Journalists, however, noted the issue caused “women to line up against men,” in what one reporter deemed a “Sex War.”19 In June, the Bankers Association, speaking for the opposition, asserted that “the reason and principle underlying our community property laws and justifying the control over and power to dispose of community property by the husband, is his legal and moral obligation to support the family. This obligation does not rest with the wife except in rare cases.”20 The husband’s control of community property therefore must be “undisputed.” The bankers were concerned that under a new definition of community property a wife preceding her husband in death would be able to dispense her half of the estate to her children or grandchildren, effecting the immediate withdrawal of half of the husband’s capital, forcing the estate into liquidation. While the bankers’ concern raised an ostensibly reasonable objection, its expression degenerated into arguments that such actions would destroy families, and held women accountable, as always, for preserving family bonds and security.21 As for the “Sex War,” one male estate specialist claimed, “Few women care to accept, or are qualified to assume, the responsibilities these proposed changes would impose . . .”22
To win over progressives and Republicans, the Women’s Legislative Council published a pamphlet coauthored by Mabel Walker Willebrandt. The pamphlet explained the issue in markedly dispassionate language, befitting the suspended law’s modest goal. It struck at the critics’ major claim first by conceding: “The husband is the business partner and has the right to manage and control it [the community property] during the existence of the marriage relation . . .” The change in the definition of community property would come into effect only upon the death of one of the spouses, allowing the wife to will her half of the joint estate to her children or grandchildren or her husband, but to no one else without her husband’s consent, while imposing a similar restraint on the husband. As to the effect upon a husband’s business when his wife passed away, Willebrandt’s legal training could be seen presenting the evidence. California was one of only eight states using the community property model, and the only state to completely deny wives testamentary rights. In none of these eight states, nor in the other forty, had the issue caused widespread problems in business. Suggesting an ulterior motive of the initiative’s opponents, the pamphlet pointed to the banking industry, particularly the trust departments and those companies deriving “a large part of their income from the handling of estates.” At present, these trust companies charged a fee on both the husband’s half and on the wife’s half, upon the death of the husband. The new law would prevent trust companies from charging a fee on the wife’s half of the property, a provision costing them half of their income from estates in probate. The current statute was, Mabel and her coauthors concluded, “backward.”23
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For all the talk of the Nineteenth Amendment at the state and national conventions, full ratification waited upon one more state to pass it and make it the law of the land. Tennessee seemed the best bet. The state’s governor, Albert Roberts, and James Cox, the Democratic presidential nominee, both wanted to claim the final victory for women’s suffrage. Cox’s willingness to support the amendment, with Rogers’ endorsement, urging the Tennessee legislature to pass it swiftly, forced the Republican nominee to get involved. Harding expressed his support of women’s suffrage to the chairman of Tennessee’s state party and Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the LWV and a leading suffragist organizer for more than thirty years, but he also equivocated when provided the opportunity, allowing that legislators should vote their consciences.24 He would not concede the voting power of the women’s movement to the Democrats or alienated conservative elements within his party to achieve victory in November. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee’s legislature voted in favor of the amendment, bringing to fruition a dream set in motion more than seventy years earlier.
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Oddly enough, the California Republican Party held its convention in September, well after the national convention and a scant two months before the general election. Male members of the state committee took the opportunity to dislodge some of the prominent club women: those who had become too controversial, too radical in their thinking, for a party swerving toward its conservative side.25 The leadership looked past the prominent suffragists and Prohibitionists, the women who had for decades torn at the barriers delimiting the lives of women, and chose Mabel Willebrandt for the state committee. Certainly, her relative youth, which meant she’d missed controversial battles, helped, as did her impressive academic accomplishments, and her membership in many important women’s clubs. By keeping her head down and her rhetoric cool, Willebrandt had taken another step forward, gaining the chance to mingle with some of the most influential men in her party, such as Frank Doherty, a Los Angeles attorney and a key ally of Senator Hiram Johnson. She had become the female voice of the Republican Party in Los Angeles.
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August was the season for American aristocrats to travel abroad, but the Sabins would have to miss this year. Pauline’s steady work and party loyalty leading into the Saratoga Springs convention resulted in her selection as the campaign committee’s treasurer, an appropriate position for the vice chairman of the New York City Republican Ways and Means Committee. In addition, she was campaign manager for the nominee for state comptroller.26 Sabin’s organizations, the Women’s Division of the New York County Republican Committee and the Women’s Executive Committee of the Republican State Committee, planned to host the party’s nominee for governor, Nathan Miller, twice before the election, just weeks away. The offer was quickly extended to all the GOP candidates, but most could not make it. James Wadsworth, hoping to shore up some measure of support from women, made sure he did, and both he and Miller were warmly greeted. Much of the discussion, including the reading of a telegram from Warren Harding, focused on President Wilson’s postwar policies, which Harding chara
cterized as “a real menace to the American republic in the centralization of Government . . .”27 Such themes united Republicans, male and female, in common cause. Afterward, Henrietta Livermore issued a statement declaring that many of the Republican women who had opposed Wadsworth had dropped their campaign against him in light of his overwhelming victory in the primary. “Policies, laws and reforms rank first and the person to accomplish them second,” she said, and Republican policies benefited women more than those proposed by the Democrats.28
Wadsworth’s detractors managed to cut into his vote total, but not enough to make a difference. He won handily on Election Day, riding a wave of Republican victories that carried the White House, the Senate, and the New York governor’s office, where Nathan Miller unseated Al Smith. A reporter for the New York Times noted that Miller, who advocated for rigid enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, received fewer votes than Wadsworth, a vocal opponent of Prohibition; this suggested that Miller’s stance tainted him with urban voters more than Wadsworth’s positions on Prohibition and suffrage did with women.29 If so, it confirmed the danger of assuming that women cared more about women’s issues than about the viability of their parties and candidates.
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In Los Angeles, female activists took heart in the great political victory of the suffrage movement as they looked to the next horizon: the community property law. By one estimate, there were thirty-seven speeches describing all of the referendums given at fourteen women’s clubs the week of October 17 alone. Willebrandt spoke at five club meetings that week in favor of the community property bill, while retired judges and others, all men, took the opposing view.30 Willebrandt focused on facts, reading letters from attorneys who worked in the seven states with laws similar to Proposition 13, offering evidence that the law was functioning properly. She must have noticed, however, the absence of many club women, most especially the members of the WCTU.
One of the main reasons the women of the WCTU had advocated for total Prohibition was an economic one. Leaders of the WCTU wrote incessantly of their desire to “protect women and children” from the economic insecurity resulting when working men drank away their week’s pay. Cutting off the sources of beer, wine, and rum would ensure workers would come home after work, their paychecks in their pockets, ready and able to fulfill their duties as fathers and husbands. The deeply religious women who wore the white ribbon of membership in the WCTU wanted to restore this ideal family structure, not advocate radical solutions such as divorcing deadbeat husbands or creating career tracks for young women. The WCTU’s initial support of the community property law had likely been won by family-friendly statements like “When the wife keeps the home in order, rears the children and attends to their needs, economizes, and manages to conduct the family, she just as truly earns the community property as the husband.”31 However, as the depth of the change contained in Proposition 13 and the unequivocal hostility of the business community toward it became clear, the WCTU backed away from it.
On November 2, the voters of California overwhelmingly rejected the Community Property Law.32 The law would remain as before, denying a wife any legal authority, as one debater phrased it at the time, “to make any provision for her children” upon her death.33 Several organizations within the California Federation of Women’s Groups, including the Women’s Legislative Council, had much larger memberships than the WCTU, but the council, clearly, had failed to convince women, and enough progressive men, of the law’s benefits.
Bearing witness to the low membership and influence of the WCTU and like-minded organizations, the voters of Los Angeles rejected a local ordinance directing law enforcement agencies to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment. Statewide, voters also defeated the Harris Act, legislation to force California to implement the Volstead Act. Only one year earlier, they had voted for the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment; the success of the Drys was proving ephemeral. A total proscription of all alcoholic beverages, what people called “bone dry,” was not what Angelenos wanted, nor did the citizens in San Francisco, Oakland, or the state capital, Sacramento. The legality of Prohibition, the wisdom behind it, and the ability to enforce it were becoming contentious issues. The author of the Los Angeles ordinance, Dr. D. M. Gandier, opined that full public acceptance of Prohibition would take a generation of successful enforcement to create, a life span sure to be filled with controversy.34
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Just days after the election, Sabin, Livermore, and the other members of the Republican Women’s State Executive Committee met to plan next steps. They decided to hold a victory dinner in December and invite Republican women from across the state.35 The New York women were not the only ones looking ahead. The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) was established at a meeting on November 22, 1920, in Washington, D.C. Representatives of the League of Women Voters, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Council of Women, the Women’s Trade Union League, the WCTU, the Congress of Mothers, the PTA, and the National Consumers League attended the meeting and agreed to be part of the new organization. Maud Wood Park, prominent in the League of Women Voters, was selected as chairwoman of the WJCC.36 The coalition of so many groups gave the appearance of a united front, regardless of party affiliation, a sharp contrast to Sabin’s efforts to work within the Republican Party framework.
She was soon called upon, in mid-December, to speak on behalf of Republican women, when the Lord’s Day Alliance, a group of unknown origin and composition, announced its plan to oppose the showing of motion pictures on Sundays, an extension of blue laws often favored by defenders of the family. Interestingly, the opponents of blue laws included a diverse mix: Al Smith, Catholic organizations, the Motion Picture Theatrical Association, the president of the Women’s Republican Association of New York, and Pauline Sabin. Sabin declared, “I am heartily opposed to any legislation that will deprive the public of a wholesome entertainment on Sunday. It is very logical that the Motion Picture Theatrical Association should champion the cause of the people in this respect. I sincerely indorse [sic] them in this fight.”37 Her statement seemed in opposition to the family values she typically espoused, but it actually made perfect sense: the Lord’s Day Alliance was launching a broader effort to have the federal government censor motion pictures, a level of intrusion Sabin’s conservative leanings could not abide. The censorship call soon faded from the news, but recognition of her willingness to hold firm on Republican values rather than being baited into taking the “women’s” position raised her profile, again.
On December 15, she held another gathering at her home, this time with the governor-elect, Nathan L. Miller, and state party chairman George A. Glynn in attendance, along with other members of the state committee, to present Henrietta Livermore with a silver tray in honor of “her leadership . . . fairness, [and] her loyalty to . . . the cause of Republicanism.” Miller “promised to women full cooperation in all state political enterprises [and] urged them to visit Albany often to give him the benefit of their suggestions and advice.”38
Sabin’s and Livermore’s efforts to firmly secure a place for women in the Republican Party specifically, and in national politics generally, reached an apex that winter in the establishment of the Women’s National Republican Club (WNRC) on February 17, 1921.* Taking inspiration from the LWV, the WNRC was created as a place where women could learn about the issues of the day. Although the club’s political bent was evident in its title, and its location on Thirty-ninth Street was not far from the party’s headquarters, the group eschewed any formal or legal connection to the GOP machine.39 Yet its stated purpose must also have been a reaction to the direction the women’s movement was taking, especially the initiatives being run through the WJCC.
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Mabel Walker Willebrandt had several victories to celebrate, not least her appointment to the California State Rep
ublican Central Committee. Where she had once been rebuffed as a volunteer, she now met with prominent politicians, barristers, and power brokers—all male—within her party. A Republican had won the White House; another had joined Senator Johnson as a U.S. senator from California. Her ascendance was occurring at an auspicious moment in history. Yet from her place on the central committee, she would have perceived her party’s lurching away from Progressivism as a definite concern.
At her desk and lost in thought one afternoon, she was brought back to the moment by the ringing of her telephone. She lifted the receiver and instantly recognized the irritable, staccato voice of one of the judges in whose courtroom she had often worked. “I just wanted to tell you I think I’ve been all wrong about you women. You’re much better on juries and in court than I thought you would be.” Willebrandt managed to maintain her hold on the phone and withhold a burst of laughter. “You women lawyers have some sort of society, haven’t you?” he continued. “Well, I will come to your next meeting. Yes, I should like to meet ’em all and tell them what I have just told you.”40 Perhaps, she allowed herself to think, changes were happening faster than she realized.
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By March, Harry Daugherty, longtime political advisor of the new president, Warren Harding, had received from the newly elected and entirely unprepared chief executive his reward for his years of stewarding the “empty suit” to ever higher levels of office. His prize: the post of attorney general, despite emphatic advice from nearly everyone Harding spoke to about Daugherty, all of them urging him to place his old friend in a position better suited to his abilities.