Patsy Cline Was Country Musicas Greatest Thrush

Early in her career Patsy Cline worked in cowgirl outfits that her mother designed and hand made.

There may not be a Don McLean song to commemorate the occasion, but sixty-three years ago, March 5, 1963, was surely another day the music died.  On that day a small plane carrying Patsy Cline and fellow Grand Ol’ Opry stars Cowboy Copas and Hankshaw Hawkins went down on the way home to Nashville from a Kansas City benefit.  The three stars and two others were killed in the crash in remote woods near Camden, Tennessee.  

Learning that the plane was missing in the area friends from Nashville joined in the frantic search.  The crash site was discovered by Roger Miller, one of the many young artists Cline mentored. 

                                Roger Miller, overcome by grief, at the crash site he discovered.  Hankshaw Hawkins's guitar strap and a boot lie at his feet.

Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Virginia in 1932 to a sixteen-year-old seamstress and her blacksmith husband, she was performing in local talent shows and clubs by her mid-teens.  During a short-lived marriage to Gerald Cline in the early ‘50’s she began performing as Patsy Cline. 

Cline was soon being featured on a local Washington, DC TV program along another rising young country star, Jimmy Dean and signed a contract with Four Star Records.  She enjoyed middling success recording, at the label’s insistence, material not suited for her rich voice and emotional delivery.  Still, she was getting enough attention to be invited to occasionally appear on the Opry. 

In 1957 she competed on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, one of the most popular shows on television.  Godfrey insisted that she abandon the cowgirl outfits her mother made for a sophisticated cocktail dress.  She sang her recently recorded Walkin’ After Midnight and won the competition handily.  The song was released as a single and soared to the top of the country music and pop charts.  Cline regularly appeared on Godfrey’s radio show and became a featured performer on the Ozark Jubilee on ABC. 

                                    Patsy on her 1957 wedding day to Charlie Dick.

Cline was touring regularly and was a fast-rising star when she married Charlie Dick.  Despite rumors of abuse, she always called Dick the “Love of my life.”  Together they had two children, Randy and Julie, who her mother helped raise while she was on tour.  After her death Dick dedicated much of the rest of his life to preserving Patsy’s memory.

With a new manager Cline was finally released from her restrictive Four Star contract and signed with Decca in 1960.  She enjoyed country and pop success with a string of hits that featured full orchestration and elaborate production values, the so-called Nashville Sound.  Her first Decca record I Fall to Pieces set the standard for the new sound. 

By 1961 Cline became a member of the Opry and was soon one of its biggest stars.  She befriended and mentored many artists, especially women like Lorretta Lynn, Dottie West, and Barbara Mandrel.  But she could also hang out with male performers matching beers and dirty jokes.  Incredibly generous, she often supported struggling performers, even bringing them into her home.  Cline was the best loved woman in Nashville. 

Her high ride almost ended in a near fatal car crash in 1961 in which she was thrown through the windshield.  Dottie West rushed to the scene and cradled her injured friend picking glass out of her hair.  Cline declined treatment in the hospital until the other driver was cared for.  That driver died, and the delay may have made Cline’s injuries worse.  She suffered a broken hip, several broken ribs, and a deep, long gash on her forehead. 

After her auto accident in 1961, Cline's appearance dramatically changed as she used wigs and heavy makeup to cover a serious scar on her forehead.

The rest of her life she had to hide the scar under wigs and heavy make-up.  Ever the trooper, she returned to touring while still on crutches. 

Her recording of young songwriter Willie Nelson’s Crazy became the biggest hit of her career.  Cline became the first woman in country music to have her own show at Carnage Hall.  She also sang at the Hollywood Bowl and headlined her own show in Las Vegas. 

Patsy Cline was only 30 years old when she died.  As so often happens after the tragic early death of a star she has since become a cultural icon.

                                              Jessica Lang earned an Oscar nod for Best Actress for her portrayal of Cline in Sweet Dreams.

Cline was featured in at least two notable feature films and two made-for-TV movies. In 1980 she was played by Beverly D’Angelo in the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter.  Five years later she got her own biopic, Sweet Dreams, staring Jessica Lang and Ed Harris as her husband Charlie Dick.  The film was criticized for putting Cline’s career on the back burner instead of focusing on the melodrama around her tempestuous marriage.  None-the-less Lang garnered an Academy Award Nomination for her star turn.as co-produced by Lynn’s and Cline’s daughter, Julie Fudge.

Cline was also prominently featured in Ken Burn’s epic PBS series Country Music.

On the stage, the 1985 off-Broadway two person play Always...Patsy Cline based on the friendship and correspondence of the star with a Houston fan has become a staple of regional and 

In 1995 Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story, a film about the life and career of Cline’s friend Dottie West played on CBS with Tere Myers as Patsy.  Yet another take on the relationship with Lynn, Patsy & Loretta was 2019 Lifetime flick with Broadway star Megan Hilty as Cline.  Directed by the Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri the film a staple of regional and dinner theater productions.  A 1991 production, A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline is a straightforward account of Cline's career featuring many of her most famous songs.  It is also regularly staged.

                                       Cline was the first woman solo artist to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1971.

To this day no one sings a song with emotional intensity of the girl from Winchester.

 

The Washington Women’s Suffrage Procession of 1913 Unleashed New Militancy

The stunning program cover for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington.

Note—This has become an annual post because it is much requested.  It is also a timely reminder of the importance of bold action.

The giant Women’s March on Washington and sister marches across the country that greeted Donald Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017 and they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done even larger marches a year later were seismic events that brought a broad, united, new intersessional feminism to the forefront of American social and political life after years on the defense as hard-fought gains once thought secure were under attack at every level.

Mass demonstrations no matter how large, critics maintained, had lost their power as the media lost interest in them and the public became bored.  Huge anti-war demonstrations that broke all records were barely covered by the press and had no discernible effect on curtailing a vastly unpopular war in Congress or in the Bush administration and only moderately moved the needle during the Obama years when painfully slow withdrawals of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were matched by a brutal escalation of bombing and drone attacks not only in those two countries but across the region. 

The Women's March on Washington was a rough welcome to Trump and a game changer for the feminist movement.

Instead, the media became fixated with a shiny new object—the tiny but colorful Tea Party movement.  Events drawing a few dozen in silly hats waving "Don’t Tread on Me" flags, and toting misspelled homemade signs received lead coverage night after night on network and cable TV news. Part of it was the sheer novelty of a right wing “grassroots” movement.  Traditional conservatives were at first dismissive and doubtful, but a hand-full of deep pocket millionaires saw potential and pumped unlimited money into the movement, created faux grassroots national organizations to “lead it,” and soon used it to capture the Republican Party for their oligarchical aims.  Within what seemed like a blink of an eye they were in control of dozens of state governments, Congress, and the Presidency and seemed capable of completely remaking America with no effective opposition.

But there were signs of restiveness and resistance—the Occupy Movement which spread like wildfire, the up-from-the-streets youth-led Black Lives Matter movement, the May Day Immigration Rights marches and the rise of the Dreamers, the New Civil Rights movement represented by Moral Mondays.  But it was the Women’s Marches, perhaps because they included so many middle-class White women, that finally recaptured the media and nation’s attention. 

To its credit the Women’s March movement has, not always smoothly, taken pains to broaden its leadership and representation and to stand for an intersessional struggle that includes not just traditional feminist objectives like preserving abortion rights, removing obstacles to social and professional advancement, the Equal Rights Amendment, and election of women, but in support of Women of Color, immigrants and refugees, Muslims and other minority religions, the LBGTQ+ communities, Native Americans, the disabled, the labor movement, and environmentalists.  It was a perfect process, and serious divisions remain over issues like electoral politics, particularly endorsement of Democrats, and levels of street militancy, but it was a game changer.

One 113 years ago today, another march of women in Washington, in some ways quite different, marked a radical turning point in the long struggle for women’s suffrage and became a spiritual ancestor of today’s movements.

Alice Paul was inspired by the militant campaigns of the British Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst seen under arrest in the right foreground and her daughter Christabel in custody behind her.

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were uppity women.  Worse they were angry, uppity women.  They were more youthful than the dowagers whose decades’ long drive for women’s suffrage had been noble, but fruitless.  Paul had been in England and was impressed with how Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, leaders of a new militant suffrage movement which was making a sensation by using direct action tactics such as publicly heckling politicians, window smashing, and rock throwing raising the profile of the cause there.

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910 she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and soon advanced to a leadership role.  Although the national organization was committed to a state-by-state strategy as its top priority, Paul was made Chair of the Congressional Committee with the responsibility of lobbying for Federal action.  Carrie Chapman Catt, the formidable leader of the NAWSA, did not have much faith in Paul or her project, but was probably glad to have the gadfly out her hair in New York where she was carefully planning an elaborate political effort to win state approval of the Vote by referendum.

Carrie Chapman Catt of New York was the formidable head of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.  She would split with Alice Paul over strategy and style and the two were sometimes bitter rivals.  Their two-pronged suffrage campaign, moderate and radical, actually complimented each other and help rapidly move to the goal.  But when the 19th Amendment was ratified, it was the moderate Catt, not the bur-under-the-saddle Paul who was invited to the Wilson White House.

By 1912 Paul and Burns set up shop in the Capitol as a semi-autonomous affiliate of the NAWSA called the Congressional Union.  

In the Presidential election that year, Catt broke ranks with many older suffragists who were traditionally Republican, and endorsed Woodrow Wilson, a distinguished academic and supposedly a new breed of progressive Democrat, in the hopes that he would swing his party behind suffrage.

Paul, however, did not want to wait for a painfully slow lobbing process to nudge the new Chief Executive in the right direction.  She declared her intention to “hold his feet to the fire” from the very beginning with a huge Suffrage demonstration on the eve of his inauguration.

Don’t imagine a modern march on Washington with mobs of somewhat disorganized marchers in pink pussy caps carrying banners, signs, and puppets in a mass throng on the Capitol’s wide avenues.  Paul’s Woman Suffrage Procession was planned out with military precision, the thousands of women marchers were arrayed in designated units, marching abreast.  Most units wore white, the symbol of purity and adopted color of the suffrage movement.   The procession would be led by equestrians and floats with women as various allegorical figures broke up the ranks of marchers.  An elaborate program was printed, and a proper parade permit was obtained from local authorities.

Wilson arrived by train from his New Jersey home on Monday, March 3, 1913, the day before his inauguration.  As the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to break the grip of Republican dominance and as a man of known Southern roots and sympathies, he likely expected a whoopsie-do reception in the culturally Southern city.  Instead, only a handful of dignitaries, politicians, and the press were at hand.  Everybody else in town seems to have been lining Pennsylvania Avenue.

No wonder, for Paul had put on a dazzling show led by the beautiful blonde lawyer and activist Inez Milholland astride a white horse in flowing Greek robes.  Behind her, Paul and her friends, also on horseback, led 8,000 marchers, almost all women, and on parade.

An estimated half a million onlookers crowded the route including cheering supporters, the idly curious, a lot of very, very angry men.

Mobs of men swarm and menace an ambulance trying to transport injured marchers as police stood by.  It took Army troops to restore order and allow the parade to finish.  Despite the violence, maybe because of it, Paul knew the Procession was a triumph.

The procession was quickly attacked by mobs of men along the route, throwing rocks and battering participants with clubs and fists as the police stood by without intervening.  Retaining as much courage and dignity as they could muster, the marchers continued on their route while running a virtual gauntlet.  Before the rear of the march reached its destination some hastily mobilized troops from Fort Myer arrived to provide some protection.  Over 800 marchers, almost all women, were injured in the attacks.

Reaction to the parade and the attacks threatened to overwhelm news of the Presidential inauguration the next day, much to the annoyance of Wilson.  And to the delight of Paul who regarded the operation as successful in every way. She was sure that public outrage would lead to greater support for the cause.

A subsequent investigation held the police derelict in their duty for failing to protect the lawful demonstration and the District of Columbia Police Chief was fired.

In New York Catt was less than thrilled and feared the bold confrontation would alienate male supporters critical for her state-by-state campaign.  None-the-less, Catt staged her own giant parade down Fifth Avenue in May as the kick-off for her ballot initiative plan.  A fifth the marchers in her parade were men.

The breach over militancy and confrontation between Catt and Paul became irreparable in 1914 and Paul’s group severed ties with the national organization.  Two years later they reorganized as the National Women’s Party (NWP.)

                     Alice Paul and her Federal strategy was big news in the New York Times. 

They continued to press Wilson for action with daily picketing at the White House.  When the picketing continued even after the country entered the Great War in Europe, Wilson had Paul and dozens of her associates and supporters arrested, jailed, and force-fed during hunger strikes.  When word got out about the abuse, Wilson was embarrassed yet again. Exasperated, Wilson finally declared support of a Federal Constitutional Amendment for women’s suffrage as a “war measure” and in recognition of the contribution of women to the effort.  He made no mention of Paul or the NWP, but no one doubted that their stubborn militancy had forced his hand.

Both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919.  Then the battle moved to ratification by state legislatures and the state-by-state struggle advocated by Catt was back on.  The NAWSA and NWP played a kind of “good cop/bad cop” tag team on state legislatures with Catt’s group wooing them with compliments and charm, and Paul threatening disruption and defiance.

Alice Paul raises a grape juice toast to the banner that she and members of the National Women's Party sewed by hand to hang on their Washington, D.C. headquarters building in celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment just over 7 years after the Suffrage Procession--a remarkably swift victory.

It proceeded, all things considered, with astonishing speed. On August 19, 1920, Tennessee passed the Amendment by one vote in the legislature, securing the necessary support to become a part of the Constitution.  When the Secretary of State certified the adoption on August 26, Paul and her cohorts proudly unfolded a banner on the NWP headquarters building in Washington and toasted the event—with grape juice, of course.

Electing His Fraudulency Rutherford B. Hayes--Not the Only Popular Vote Loser

In the Presidential election of 1876 Democrat Samuel Tilden, right, won the popular vote but Republican Rutherford B, Hayes wound up in the White House anyway.

There have been plenty of screwy Presidential elections, none more embarrassing than when the winner of the popular vote somehow doesn’t end up with his feet up on a desk in the White House.  It has happened more often than you probably suspect.  Five times in fact.  Six for those who believe Richard J. Daley stole more votes for John F. Kennedy in Chicago than Republican bosses stole downstate.

In 1824 John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson by a slim 44,804 votes nationwide but won when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives and a third candidate, Henry Clay, swung his votes to Adams.  Then Adams then appointed Clay Secretary of State.  This pissed off Jackson who raged against a corrupt bargain and went on to create the modern Democratic Party to whip the New Englander’s ass in the next election.

In 1888 Benjamin Harrison deprived Grover Cleveland of a second consecutive term despite losing by 95,713 popular votes.  Four years later the Democrat was back in office, the only man ever to serve two non-consecutive terms until Donald Trump.

George W. Bush waltzed into office thanks to those Florida hanging chads, and a stupefying corrupt decision of the Supreme Court.

Trump's loss to Joe Biden in 2000 set of a round of comparisons to the 1888 election.

Then in 2016 a former reality show host with an inflated reputation as billionaire business genius lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but was able to claim an Electoral College landslide due to the unfair quirks of that system of electing chief executives.  Four years later he clearly lost to Joe Biden, refused to accept the outcome, made wild and easily refutable claims of election fraud, encouraged the coup attempt seizure of the Capitol, and barely survived two impeachment votes.  Despite all of that he managed to squeeze by Biden in the 2024 rematch.

But the most famous minority president was Rutherford B. Hayes.

On March 2, 1877 Hayes became the first person selected for the Presidency by a Bi-Partisan Commission. 

Hayes won the Republican nomination only after the leading candidate James G. Blaine failed in six ballots to win the majority of delegates at the party convention.  A bland non-entity picked because “he offended no one,” Hayes went into the election an underdog to Democrat Samuel Tilden. 

And indeed, Tilden carried the popular vote by a not insignificant 250,000 vote lead out of 8.5 million ballots cast.  Other presidents were elected by more slender margins.  But in the Electoral College, Tilden came up just one vote shy with the results from four states—Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon still contested. 

If the Electoral votes of the three states from the old Confederacy were counted for the Democrats, Tilden would be an easy victor.  Fearing civil unrest if the election was determined by the Republican controlled House of Representatives, Congress decided to appoint the Bi-Partisan Commission to decide the contested electoral votes.

Despite losing the popular vote, Hays won the Electoral College by a scant one vote after a controversial Bi-Partisan Commission awarded the disputed votes of South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon to the Republican.

The commission was to be composed of 7 Republican, 7 Democrats and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the supposedly independent David Davis in whom both parties had confidence.  But before the Commission could act, Davis resigned his seat on the Court and on the Commission to take a Senate seat from Illinois.  Another Justice, a Republican, replaced him on the Commission.  The Commission then voted along party lines 8-7 to award all of the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. 

Senator James Garfield and Southern Democrats, however, worked out an agreement to prevent trouble.  Hayes would withdraw the last Federal troops from the South, end Reconstruction, and appoint at least one Southerner to his Cabinet. By prematurely ending protection for Black voters and office holders in the South, this bargain ushered in the Jim Crow Era, rigid segregation, and disenfranchisement of freed Blacks.

The deal embittered Democrats, especially Northerners who got nothing out of it and the evolving big city, working class machine voters who understandably called the new president His Fraudulency.

                                                            Staunchly Republican Harper's Weekly portrayed the outcome this way.

Although the onset of open class war with the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and continuing fierce Indian warfare in the West provided plenty of national excitement, Hayes’s single term reign in Washington marked by inaction on the hottest political issue of the day—Civil Service Reform and turning a blind eye to rising White terrorism in the South.  He is best remembered now as the first of the long beard Presidents and because his devout teetotaling wife, Lemonade Lucy, gave stupefyingly dull dry dinners and receptions.  

Garfield got the Republican nomination next time around.  We all know how well that turned out. 

Frances Perkins Rose from Do Gooder to Real Power as Secretary of Labor

                                            Frances Perkins--Madam Secretary. 

On March 4, 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt, the day of his first inauguration, nominated Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor.  She was the first woman elevated to cabinet rank.  If anyone was expecting a docile figurehead, they were in for a big surprise.  Not only was she a key player in the New Deal and an indispensable backer of a wide range of labor reforms, she held down the job for twelve years through FDR’s first three terms despite efforts to unseat her.

Born into a respectable Republican and Congregationalist New England family in 1880, she was radicalized by exposure to the yawning class divide while attending Mt. Holyoke College where she read Jacob Riis’s expose of slum conditions and attended lectures by leading reformers and labor advocates, especially Florence Kelley of the National Consumer’s League.  Graduating in 1902 she tried her hand at teaching science in urban schools while volunteering at settlement houses. 

                                             Perkins as a student at Mt. Holyoke.

But by 1909 she was ready to give up teaching for a career in social services and advocacy.  She moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University then joined her mentor Florence Kelley by serving as Secretary for the New York State Consumer’s League where she successfully led lobbing efforts to get the Legislature to limit the work week for women and children to 54 hours.  She also took up active support of the Suffrage movement.

In 1911 she personally witnessed women leaping to their deaths from the upper floors of the building at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, an event that would steel her determination to guarantee safe working conditions.  Where she had previously relied on legislation alone, she increasingly saw the need for workers to organize in their own defense and supported the work of Ladies Garment Workers leader Rose Schneiderman and others.  She even joined the Socialist Party, where she advocated gradual reform rather than revolutionary action. 

                                                The young reformer and New York civil servant.

In 1912 she supported Woodrow Wilson over Eugene V. Debs believing that the Democrat would more effectively advance labor’s cause.  She was wrong, but in the long run was one of the people most responsible for seeing that the planks of the 1912 Socialist platform were finally enacted under another Democrat.

She briefly retired from public life to marry economist Paul Wilson and to give birth to a daughter.  But Wilson suffered a breakdown and Perkins returned to work as the family breadwinner.

In 1919 she joined the administration of New York Governor Al Smith as the first woman on the state Industrial Commission.  By 1926 she was Chair of the Commission.  In 1929 Governor Roosevelt appointed her to head the state Labor Department.  She pushed through another round of reduction of hours for women and children to 48, stepped up factory safety inspection, and lobbied for minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws.

Roosevelt took her with him to Washington.  As Labor Secretary she helped craft and get the Wagner Act through Congress, which finally guaranteed workers the right to organize labor unions on the job and engage in collective bargaining. 

Perkins, one of the chief architects, witnessed FDR sign the Social Security Act into law.

The Fair Labor Standards Act embodied her long-cherished dreams for a minimum wage and a standard 40-hour work week for both women and men.  She chaired the administration’s Committee on Economic Security which drafted the legislation embodied in the Social Security Act of 1935.

As the labor battles for representation in the basic industries intensified through the Depression, Perkins stood relentlessly on the side of working people to organize and resisted traditional calls to use Federal force and troops to suppress strikes.  She held firm against intervention in the 1934 San Francisco General Strike.

Conservatives and business interests put her in their cross hairs and in 1939 the House Un-American Activities Committee drew up a bill of impeachment against her for refusing to deport Harry Bridges, the Australian-born West Coast Longshoremen’s leader who was a key figure in the General Strike.  The impeachment attempt fizzled from lack of evidence and Perkins continued to serve until 1945 when she resigned to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Organization (ILO) conference in Paris.

                                         The Secretary of Labor on a coal mine safety inspection.

She concluded her public service when President Harry Truman appointed her to the Civil Service Commission.  With the return of Republicans to power in 1953 she took a professorship at Cornel University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Perkins died at age 85 in her beloved New York City in 1965.

Although revered by labor and feminists, Perkins remains a reviled figure on the right.  In 2011 hyper reactionary Maine Governor Paul LePage tried to have a labor mural featuring Frances Perkins (center panel) from the State Department of Labor because it is too pro-labor and offended some business owners.

The Labor Department Building war re-named for Perkins on April 10, 1980—the 100th anniversary of her birth with President Jimmy Carter presiding over the ceremony.  On the same day the Postal Service issued a new 15-cent stamp bearing her likeness.