Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party Brought the 19th Amendment to Ratification

 

  

Women's Equality is celebrated on August 26 in honor of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution for women's suffrage in 1920. 

Alice Paul, the Feminist and Suffragist whose steely nerves and militancy did much to finally secure passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was born in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey on January 11, 1885.  Her father was a wealthy and successful banker who raised his family at Paulsdale, a gentleman’s farm.  The family were devout Hicksite Quakers who lived simply, if comfortably and who valued social responsibility and gender equality.  Paul later credited her family and upbringing for the strength to dedicate her life to the cause of women’s equality.  She said that her mother taught her, “When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row.”

Growing up in this loving environment, Paul excelled at school both as a scholar and as an athlete, competing in basketball, baseball, and field hockey in addition to playing tennis on her home court, and becoming a fine horsewoman.

 

Paulsdale, the Paul family estate in New Jersey--comfortable but not ostentatious in keeping with their Quaker modesty and simplicity. 

In 1901 Paul entered Swarthmore College, the elite Quaker school which her maternal grandfather Judge William Parry helped to found with Lucretia Mott.  She studied under many of the leading female academics in the country.  The advice of mathematics professor Susan Cunningham became her lifelong motto, “Use thy gumption.” She was an outstanding student, elected the class poetess and a commencement speaker at graduation in 1905.

Upon graduation, Paul became a social worker at a New York City settlement house.  In 1907 she went to England to study advanced methods at the Woodbrooke Settlement in Birmingham.  While in the country she met 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, to raise public awareness. Although the press and establishment were outraged, the movement was building pressure for change in a way that years of genteel persuasion had not.  Paul enthusiastically joined the movement and was arrested several times.  On one occasion she boasted that she broke more than forty windows before she was pinched.  

 

Alice Paul on shipboard returning from Britain where she was schooled in the direct action militancy of the English Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst. 

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910 she was determined to introduce the British methods to the languishing American movement.  Although there had been some success in getting some states to extend the franchise to women, particularly in the West following the example of Wyoming, resistance in the East and South had ground progress to a halt.  As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and soon advanced to a leadership role.  Although the national organization remained 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.

In 1912 Paul, Lucy Burns and Crystal Eastman went to Washington.  Adopting the Pankhurst model, the trio organized a massive suffrage parade to correspond with the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.  The parade on March 3 down Pennsylvania Avenue was 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 thousands of women and a few men on parade.  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.  The subsequent national front-page publicity crowded out news of the inauguration and put suffrage squarely back at the center of the national debate.

 

Alice Paul always had a flair for the dramatic.  She knew that lovely Inez Millholland in her flowing robes atop a snow white horse would attract massive attention to her 1912 Washington, D.C. Suffrage Parade timed to upstage Woodrow Wilson's first inaugural.  Paul and other leaders rode their own horses behind Millholland and at the head of thousands of marching women and a few male supporters.  The parade was viciously attacked by mobs as police stood aside. 

Paul’s continued militancy in Washington soon put her at odds with the venerable leader of the NAWSA, Carrie Chapman Catt, who stood by her state-by-state strategy and had endorsed Wilson for President and was trying to woo Democrats to support suffrage.  Paul wanted to “hold the President accountable” for failing to press for action.  After working as a semi-autonomous affiliate of the NAWSA called the Congressional Union, the breach 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.)

The NWP began to organize regular Silent Sentinel protests at the gates of the White House holding signs harshly criticizing the President.  Wilson treated the protestors with bemusement at first, even tipping his hat to them as he passed by.  But the savagery of their attacks stung him.  He fully expected that when the U.S. entered the World War in 1917, the protests would end in a display of national unity.  

 

National Women's Party protesters at their daily vigil at the White House gates.  After the U.S. entered the Great War, President Wilson ordered the women arrested and jailed. 

They did not.  Paul stepped up the rhetoric, even referring to the President as Kaiser Wilson.  On several occasions Paul and her friends were physically attacked.  Wilson finally ordered the arrests of the women on charges of interfering with traffic.  They had to be hauled away physically, struggling the whole time.

The charges themselves were not serious, but Paul and others refused to pay fines or cooperate in any way.  They were jailed.  When let out they returned and were arrested again.  Eventually they were sent to a prison in Virginia, the Occoquan Workhouse.  Conditions were harsh and the women were abused and beaten.  In protest Paul led a hunger strike.  As the women grew weaker from the strike, they were ordered to be force fed raw eggs though a tube physically shoved down the struggling their throats. Several elderly and frail protestors were seriously injured in this way.  Paul remained defiant and she was placed in an asylum as authorities sought to have her declared insane.

But several of the women had high social connections, including the spouse of a Congressman.  Word of their brutal treatment began to leak out.  Public sympathy began to swing to the defiant women and against the Wilson administration.  Exasperated, Wilson finally declared his 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.

 

 Lucy Burns, Paul's closest friend and accomplice in custody at the brutal Occoquan Workhouse where the NWP prisoners were abused and force fed.

Upon release from prison, Paul stepped up lobbying efforts on behalf of the amendment.  Both Houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919.  Then the battle moved to ratification by state legislatures.  The state-by-state struggle long 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 kindness, and Paul threatening disruption and defiance. 

It proceeded, all things considered, with astonishing speed. On August 19, 1920 Tennessee passed the Amendment by one vote, 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.

 

 Alice Paul toasts the triumphant banner draped at National Women's Party Headquarters in Washington after the final ratification of the 19th Amendment.

The achievement of the long-sought goal actually perplexed women’s organizations.  Many did not know what they should do.  The NAWSA dissolved.  Many of its leaders went on to found the League of Women Voters.  Others shifted their attention to other social causes.

Paul remained determined to achieve complete social equality.  For her, the franchise was just one step.  Many states still had discriminatory property laws, marriage still made women virtual chattel of their husbands, and women’s employment opportunities and wages everywhere lagged men.

In 1923 on the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, Paul announced that she would be working for a new constitutional amendment called the Lucretia Mott Amendment.   Drafted by Paul, the amendment read:

Section 1. Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

The amendment would soon become better known simply as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).  Paul would spend the rest of her life trying to win its support and passage.  By the late 1940’s both Republicans and Democrats endorsed the amendment in their platforms and several states had adopted it.  But progress stalled until a new generation of feminists took up the struggle in the 1970’s.

After the victory in 1923 Paul went on to earn three law degrees from Washington University and American University.  She travelled extensively in Latin America and Europe promoting the cause of women’s equality everywhere.  In 1938 she settled in Geneva, Switzerland where she founded the World Woman’s Party (WWP), which tried to advance women’s rights through the League of Nations.  

 

 Paul was author and life long champion of the Equal Rights Amendment.  The quote comes from a psychiatrist's evaluation notes when she was jailed for her White House protests.

She returned to the U.S. in 1941.  In the post war years, she used her experience with the WWP and the League of Nations to support the inclusion of gender equality in the United Nations Charter and backed the establishment of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Paul led a coalition that won approval—some say by convincing some Southern law makers to support an amendment in hopes of killing the whole bill—of the inclusion women in the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would have greater and farther reaching consequences for equality than any action since the adoption of the 19th Amendment.

 

Alice Paul at her home and former NWP Headquarters Belmont House in Washington in 1972.  She never stopped campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. 

Paul never married.  He work was her life.  From 1929 her primary residence was the house on Capitol Hill that her wealthy friend Alva Belmont bought years earlier as the headquarters of the NWP.  Today it is preserved as the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, dedicated to Paul, and the U.S. women’s suffrage and equal-rights movements.

After suffering a disabling stroke in 1974, Paul eventually moved to the Quaker Greenleaf Extension Home in Moorestown Township, New Jersey, near her family home of Paulsdale.  She died there at the age of 92 on July 9, 1977.

In 1985 the Alice Paul Institute was formed to preserve Paulsdale and establish it as a women’s heritage and leadership center.

Despite her many accomplishments, Paul’s memory faded.  Public awareness centered on the first generation of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Caddy Stanton.  Paul’s aggressiveness—and her embarrassment to the memory of Woodrow Wilson, who had unjustifiably been canonized as a liberal saint primarily for his support of the League of Nations—caused her to be written out of many popular accounts of the fight for suffrage.  Her reputation got a big boost with the 2004 HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels starring Hillary Swank as Paul.  The film is still regularly shown and has become a staple of women’s history classes and projects.

 

Allan Pinkerton— The Spy Master, Original Private Eye, and Union Buster

 

                 Allan Pinkerton in 1861 as he gained fame a Lincoln's protector and secret agent.

Allan Pinkerton, America’s first detective and the founder of the security company that still bears his name was born on August 25, 1819 in Glasgow, Scotland.  Admired as a hero by some, he was despised by generations of workers as a union buster and scab herder. 

Pinkerton started as a class conscious working man.  The son of a duty disabled policeman, he apprenticed as a cooper and participated in the Chartist movement to obtain the franchise for working men and other political reforms.  Chartist “riots” were violently suppressed by troops in many cities. 

Newly married and deeply disappointed by the failure to achieve the vote, Pinkerton decided to immigrate to the Canada at the age of 23 in 1842.  He and his wife were shipwrecked off Nova Scotia and came ashore penniless with only the clothes on their back.  A friend tipped him off to a job at a Chicago brewery.  He worked at his trade there for five years before relocating to rural Dundee, Illinois nearly fifty miles northwest of the city. 

He apparently wanted to go into business providing oak wood from the abundant local woodlots to the brewery but reportedly accidentally stumbled on a ring of counterfeiters, which he reported to local authorities.  In those days when each bank issued their own paper notes, counterfeiting was a common crime.  Several well organized gangs found the remote farmsteads of recently settled Kane and McHenry Counties—good places to set up operations far away from police but close enough to the city to get their bad paper quickly into circulation. 

Pinkerton began using disguises, false identities and other tricks to track down counterfeiting gangs.  He was appointed a part time deputy sheriff and later began to work on contract for the banks whose notes were being counterfeited.  Pinkerton thought he had found a niche and a home. 

But he also supported the Underground Railway which used the rural area as a transportation path for the same reasons as it was chosen by the crooks.  His known abolitionist sentiments led to a crushing electoral defeat in a run for local office. 

But his daring exploits chasing counterfeiters had been picked up in the popular press.  He packed up his new reputation and returned to Chicago where he hired himself out as a freelance detective.  Among his customers were the Treasury Department in the pursuit of more counterfeiters and the Cook County Sheriff, who hired him to locate two girls who had been kidnapped and taken to Michigan.  He found the girls and shot one of the captors, making headlines for his daring do. 

The Sheriff hired him as a full time detective—the first such officer in any Illinois police agency.  He also continued to take private clients on the side. 

 

                            Pinkerton's "seeing eye" became one of America's first and most recognizable company logos. 

In 1855 he formed his own private agency, the North-Western Police Agency, soon to become The Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Its famous logo was an All Seeing Eye with the motto “We never sleep”—thus the origin of the term private eye.  Pinkerton quickly built a large operation with many operatives who were trained in surveillance and under-cover operations.  He demanded his operatives keep detailed records of their cases and on all known criminals they encountered.  He kept the records, including descriptions, aliases, known associates, and modes of operation of hundreds of criminals.  He even became the first to use photographs to identify suspects.  No other private enforcement agency and few public ones had anything like the manpower or sophistication of Pinkerton’s operations.

 Among the frequent customers of the new agency were the railroads, which is how Pinkerton came to the attention of a railroad lawyer and politician, named Abraham Lincoln.  Pinkerton’s steadfast support of the Republican Party didn’t hurt either.  Lincoln tapped Pinkerton to assist his personal friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon for security as he made his way from Illinois to Washington for his inauguration.  Pinkerton operatives uncovered a plot by Confederate sympathizers to kill Lincoln as he changed trains in Baltimore and allegedly foiled the attempt by sneaking the lanky Lincoln through town disguised as an old woman.  

 

Pinkerton, rear with Lincoln's friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon with the goatee escorted President elect Lincoln on his perilous journey by train for the 1861 inauguration. 

As the Civil War erupted, Lincoln learned to his chagrin that the Army had no real intelligence service.  He tapped Pinkerton to become the first head of the new Intelligence Service, forerunner of the U.S. Secret Service.  Pinkerton deployed his operatives behind the lines, often disguised as Confederate soldiers and employed various tipsters.  He personally went on some missions in enemy territory using the name Major E.J. Allen.  He was very close to another old acquaintance from the Illinois Central Railroad, General George McClellan. 

Unfortunately, Pinkerton consistently overestimated the size of opposing Confederate forces by as much two times their actual numbers.  That caused the cautious McClellan to avoid battle with the main Confederate forces when possible while demanding ever more men and arms for the President.  Military historians agree now that had McClellan moved his vastly larger and better equipped army more quickly and with greater determination to follow up on successes, the war could have been significantly shorter.  

 

Pinkerton on horseback in George McClellan's headquarters provided disastrous over-estimates of Confederate numbers and strength which caused the cautious commanding general from taking decisive action. 

Eventually Lincoln grew tired of both McClellan’s dithering and Pinkerton’s exaggerations.  Pinkerton left the Service after 1862, but his agency continued to contract with the government for numerous intelligence operations throughout the rest of the war. 

In post-war years Pinkerton’s agencies pursued gangs of bank and train robbers, most notoriously Missouri outlaws Frank and Jesse James.  The Pinkerton Agency got a public black eye when its men threw a bomb killing a child and blowing the arm off the James boys’ stepmother.  After an operative who got a job working on an adjacent farm was discovered and killed, Pinkerton withdrew from the case.  He considered it the biggest failure of his career. 

 

Pinkerton range detectives like these played a bloody roll in range wars between Western cattle barons and small ranchers and homesteaders accused of rustling cattle. 

Soon rapid post war industrialization led to growing labor unrest.  Pinkerton, the former Chartist, had no trouble enlisting his men as strike breakers and spies against unions.  One of the most famous early examples was the infiltration of the Molly McGuires, a secret organization of Irish miners in the Pennsylvania anthracite coal fields by Irish-born operative James McParland.  Identities of Molly leaders and members were passed to local employers who employed vigilantes, who may or may not have included other Pinkerton men, to ambush and kill them and their families.  McParland’s testimony in court also led to the execution of six men and the destruction of the Molly McGuires.  

 

 Pinkerton detective James McParland infiltrated the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal fields sending several to the gallows.  He had a long career with the agency and years later arranged for Big Bill Haywood and Charles Moyers of the Western Federation of Miners to be kidnapped from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho on bogus charges of planting a bomb that killed a former governor.

McParland was rewarded with rapid promotion through the company ranks and specialized in labor cases.  Twenty years later he kidnapped Big Bill Haywood, Charles Moyers and other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners from Colorado and took them on a sealed train to Idaho where they were put on trial for the bombing murder of a former governor.  

 

                                    Pinkerton in a Harper's Weekly illustration shortly before his death. 

Pinkerton died in Chicago on July 1, 1884 at the age of 64.  He fell on the pavement and bit his tongue.  It became infected and he died in agony.

 By that time a huge amount of his company’s business was anti-union activity.  Company agents were involved in the gun battle with striking steel workers during the Homestead Strike of 1891, suppressing the Pullman Strike of 1894, and in the infamous Ludlow Massacre of 1914 to list only a few of the most infamous cases. 

The agency also was hired by foreign governments to suppress local radicals, most famously by Spain to work against nationalists in Cuba who included the abolition of slavery as one of their top goals.

Dashiell Hammett became a young Pinkerton operative before World War I and became so disillusioned by the anti-union work he was called on to do, including work that may have led up to the lynching of Industrial Workers of the Word (IWW) organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana, that the famous creator of hard-boiled detective fiction dedicated much of the rest of his life to supporting radical causes.  

 

 Dashiell Hammett, the inventor of tough guy detective fiction based his character the Continental Op on his experience as a labor spy in Butte, Montana.  He may have been involved in investigations that lead to the lynching of legendary IWW organizer Frank Little.  The bitter experience made him a life-long radical.

In the 1930’s a Senate Committee led by Wisconsin Progressive/Republican Robert M. La Follette, Jr. investigated the Pinkerton Agency for its systematic use of spies to infiltrate labor unions.  To this day Pinkerton is a curse word to unionists and the company is still used to protect scabs and harass picket lines. 

In 1999 the Pinkerton Agency and was acquired by the Swedish based international security firm Securitas AB.  It merged with its chief rival, the William J. Burns Detective Agency, in 2001.  Today it operates as an American subsidy of the Swedish firm under the name Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations.  And the work goes on.