U.S. Suffragists Finally Won—But Things Dragged on In Switzerland

Alice Paul unveiled a banner in celebration.

Note:  Re-posted from the Today’s Almanac features on this blog one year ago today and February 7, 2011

On August 26, 1920 United States Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution which read in its entirety simply:

The right of citizens of the United  States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Women of the United States, after a struggle of 72 years, officially were granted the right to vote in all States and Territories of the union.  The certification by the Secretary was just the dot of the i.  When the Tennessee legislature approved the amendment by a slender one vote margin on June 9 becoming the decisive 36th state out of the then 48, the victory had essentially been won.

One by one the other recalcitrant dozen begrudgingly approved it later.  In the case of some Deep South states, much later indeed—Florida and South Carolina in 1969, Georgia and Louisiana in 1970, North Carolina in 1971, and good ol’ Mississippi held out until 1984.  No matter.  Like it or not the foot draggers, like every other state had to register and allow women to vote in the November 1920 election for offices on the local, state, and Federal level.  

The members of the mainstream National American Woman Suffrage Association led by veteran Suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt which had been pushing the amendment since 1916 and Alice Paul’s far more militant organization, the National Woman's Party, which had hectored the Wilson Administration with forbidden picketing of the White House and shamed it by undergoing brutal force feedings during prison hunger strikes, both celebrated the hard won victory.  

Come November one signer of the declaration of the seminal Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 lived to cast her ballot.  Millions of other women did likewise, but not as many as organizers had hoped.  Many women were still under the influence of a culture that had excluded them from public affairs, those in conservative states risked social ostracism if they showed up at the polls, some feared the opposition of their husbands, and others were simply unfamiliar with the formalities of registration and voting.  It actually took decades for women to participate in elections at levels comparable to men.

 

Today, however, women are more likely to vote than men in many states and as a group have demonstrably different values than men in deciding who to support.  The so-called Gender Gap has become a significant reality in American politics.

 

Today, let’s pop a cork in celebration of a great victory not only for women, but for human rights.

***

Ask most Americans about what they know about Switzerland and they will mention in no particular order cheese, pocket knives, watches, Alps, William Tell, banks, and neutrality.  The Swiss like to brag about their democratic government, fierce independence, and the armed neutrality behind the protective walls of the Alps, that has kept them pretty much out of European wars since the Napoleonic Era.   But those same conditions have led to a sometimes isolated and deeply conservative society.

That may be why Swiss women did not get the vote in Federal elections until February 7, 1971.  Voters approved a national referendum on the subject on that day by a majority of 621,109 (66%) yes to 323,882 (34%) no. They were the last women in Europe and among the last in the world to gain the franchise.  Some particularly conservative Cantons in largely German speaking eastern Switzerland continued to deny women a vote in Cantonal and local elections for years after.  One by one the seven hold-out Cantons revised their constitutions or held local referendums to extend the franchise.  The Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden stubbornly refused to change until 1990 when the Swiss Supreme Court finally ruled that the word citizen in the local constitution included women.

The Swiss Cantonal system has its roots as far back as the Middle Ages and the later short lived Helvetic Republic (1798-1802) and a later government forced on the country by the “mediation” of Napoleon.  In the post-Napoleonic era deep divisions between the three ethnic/linguistic areas of Switzerland—French in the west, Italian in the south, and German in the east and Protestant/Catholic tensions played out with the French cantons, home of rapidly advancing industrialization and the banking industry, demanding liberal governance and reforms and the deeply conservative German Catholics resisting.

After a brief civil war in 1847 in which liberal forces got the upper hand, a new Constitution modeled on the Federalism of the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1848 that created a Federation of 25 self-governing Cantons with considerable local authority (in 1979 a new Canton, Jura, was carved out of northern Bern.)

Agitation for women’s suffrage began as early as 1886.  It was strongly supported by the Trade Union movement and the Social Democratic Party.  But these left-wing proponents only hardened the opposition of both conservatives and nominal liberals who controlled the Cantonal governments.  The Catholic Church was a leading opponent and found strong support for its opposition among the largely rural eastern German districts.

Cantonal referenda failed repeatedly from the first vote in St. Gallen in 1912 to several conducted in the early 1950’s.  Finally in 1957 a referendum vote in Basel let women vote in local (municipal) elections only.  A renewed campaign by the Social Democratic Party, unions, and the tiny Communist Party got the issue put on a national referendum ballot in 1959.  Conservatives were open opponents.  Liberal parties declared their official neutrality and the left was isolated.  The referendum was crushed by a vote of 54,939 (67%) no to 323,727 (31%) yes.  Only three Francophone Cantons voted in favor.  The male voters in those eastern German Cantons rejected it by margins running up to 95% in Appenzell Innerrhoden.

The same year, to combat any resurrection of the issue the Federation of Swiss Women against Women's Right to Vote was formed to demand a continued separation of gender roles.  

As the winds of change blew through Europe in the 1960’s suffrage supporters resumed local campaigns.  Basel-City became the first German speaking Canton to approve a referendum in 1966 followed by Basel-Country two years later. 

Switzerland’s only Italian-majority Canton, Ticino voted in favor in 1969.

Meanwhile the Federal government was seeking gain entrance to the European Council which was contingent on the country signing the European Convention on Human Rights but it was prevented from doing so by the continued subjugation of the rights of women.  It’s announcement of its intention to move toward suffrage was met by a firestorm of protest on the right.

In 1968 as student and worker revolts swept Europe, the youth of Switzerland took to the streets and demanded, among other things, complete citizenship rights and votes for women. Which led, eventually, to the scheduled 1971 national referendum.

In October 1971, the first elections participated in by women sent 11 women to Parliament, 5.5% of the total members.

 

It took until 1985 for changes to the Swiss Constitution to pass which guaranteed women full citizenship rights within the State and equal rights with men within families.

The Greatest Press Hoax Ever Discounting Everything Said on Fox News

Almost a hundred years before Orson Welles soiled the knickers of radio listeners across the country with his broadcast of A War of the Worlds, a New York newspaper had many of its readers convinced that the world’s most famous astronomer had observed a civilization on the Moon through a powerful telescope.

On August 25, 1835 the New York Sun published the first of six articles which claimed that noted British astronomer Sir John Herschel made the observations through a powerful new telescope “of a new design.”  The telescope was so powerful that the scientist could allegedly observe and identify a number of species of animals including types of bison, goats, and giant tailless beavers that walked erect on their hind legs.  Most miraculous of all were the winged humanoids, dubbed Vespertilio-homo who built civilizations with great temples on the shoes of vast oceans.

All of this was made more credible by the claim that it was reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant who in turn referenced a report in The Edinburgh Journal of Science and accounts by Herschel’s traveling companion and amanuensis, Dr. Andrew Grant.  Herschel was real enough and his observations and naming of the moons of Saturn and Uranus had made him famous.  Dr. Grant, however, was entirely fictional.

According to the stories, observations came to an end when the telescope was left open and pointing in the direction of the Sun causing the lenses of the telescope to act as “burning lenses” which ignited a fire and burned down the observatory.

The Sun, a broadsheet aspiring to ascend to the first ranks of newspapers New York’s highly competitive circulation wars, was just two years old when the Moon stories first ran.  They were intended to build circulation, and they certainly did.  Some claim that the paper tripled its sales and that its numbers stayed strong enough after to push it to the front ranks.

The stories ran before science fiction had established itself as a popular literary genre.  All though there had been fantastical tales of trips to the moon by the real Cyrano de Bergerac and attributed to the Baron Von Munchausen, few Americans would have ever heard of them.  The inventions of Jules Verne, including his novel From the Earth to the Moon were decades in the future.  Edgar Allan Poe had published his story Hans Phaall—A Tale about a man who ascended to the Moon in a hot air balloon a few months earlier in the Southern Messenger, but it is unlikely to have made much of stir in the northern city.  A rival paper did reprint it in September in response to the success of the Sun series.

So readers had no cultural understanding of these fantastic stories about space.  They were regularly exposed to claims of scientific discoveries and the inventions that were a staple of the period.  Many were quite legitimate as major advances in many fields were being made regularly.  Others were patently false.  The latter category included the claims of Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, Professor of Astronomy at Munich University who had claimed he had seen evidence of civilization on the Moon and The Rev. Thomas Dick a/k/a The Christian Philosopher who claimed that the whole Solar System was populated by humanoid beings including over 400 million supposedly residing on the Moon.  Even men as sophisticated as Ralph Waldo Emerson fell under the spell of Dick’s claims.

It was, after all the dawn of the era of great hoaxes.  Phineas T. Barnum was just getting his career off of the ground exhibiting an elderly Black woman as allegedly George Washington’s nurse.

Several weeks after the publication of the series, denials by Herschel were printed in other newspapers exposing the hoax.  But The Sun never retracted the story or issued an apology for running it.

The author of the series has never been positively identified, however most scholars of the period are fairly certain it was Cambridge educated Sun reporter Richard A. Locke.   He never admitted to being responsible.  Some other names have been floated as possible accomplices, or perhaps sources for Locke, but these have also turned out to be dead ends.

Theodore Parker Shook Up Unitarianism and Paid Dearly For It

Note:  Adapted from a Today’s Almanac entry on this blog January 4, 2011. 

Theodore Parker was born on August 24, 1810 in Lexington, Massachusetts.  His large family had deep roots in New England.  His grandfather was the Captain Parker who had commanded the militia on Lexington Green in the opening skirmish of the American Revolution.

He was scholarly and devout, but lost both parents and his seven of his nine siblings by the time he was 27, mostly to that scourge of the era consumption (tuberculosis.)  The loss confirmed his rejection of Calvinist orthodoxy.

As a youth he was unable to afford tuition at Harvard, so he read the entire curriculum on his own.  He dallied as a school master and toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer before he settled on becoming a minister.  After mastering Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, theology, church history, and biblical studies on his own, Harvard Divinity School admitted him even without an undergraduate degree in 1834.

After graduating, Parker married and was ordained by the small West Roxbury congregation.  The light duty of a small congregation allowed Parker time to study more on his own.  With his introduction to German historical Biblical criticism, his views began to evolve away from the generally accepted Unitarian theology. First, he began to question the historical validity of miracles in the Old Testament.  That lead to questions about Christ’s miracles and a new view that Jesus was simply more divinely inspired than most men—although divine inspiration was open to all—and that his teachings were great not because they came from God, but because their authority was based on “truth.”  By the end of the decade his written speculations along these lines were beginning to cause ripples.

Parker naturally fell in with the emerging Transcendentalists.  He attended early meetings of the Club and was soon contributing to their seminal journal The Dial.  Like others in the group he was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  After the scandal of Emerson’s Divinity School Address, which he heard in person, he was drawn into the controversy that arose after Unitarian traditionalist Andrews Norton launched his furious assault on Emerson’s “infidelity.”  He soon published his own defense of Transcendental liberalism in the guise of commentary by a “member in the pews.”  The pamphlet, The Previous Question, cemented Parkers reputation as a leading voice of a new movement.

In May of 1841 Parker summed up his evolving views in an ordination sermon delivered in South Boston.  A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity is now considered a foundational document of the evolving Unitarian faith.  But at the time it caused a scandal.  Most Boston area preachers believed Parker had abandoned Christianity altogether. He became the target an informal boycott of pulpit exchanges. While his Roxbury parish loyal stood by him, Parker went on the offensive with well attended lectures in Boson, which he collected and published as A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion in the spring of 1842. Soon the informal boycott of pulpit exchanges led to an 1843 attempt to force Parker to resign from the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers, whose members were all Unitarians.   He steadfastly refused to do so and accused his colleagues of trying to impose a creed.

Later in 1843 Parker and his wife briefly escaped the growing controversy by making a European tour, during which time he began to mull social inequality and the nature of Democracy.  When he returned he began to infuse his sermons with topics of social reform as well as theological radicalism.  Whether the topic was temperance, the rights of workers, or the evils of slavery this new “rabble rousing” only increased hostility against him by his peers.

In 1844 John Sargeant, employed by the Beneficial Fraternity to preach at a missionary chapel for immigrants, exchanged pulpits with Parker and was reprimanded by the Ben Frat board.  He resigned in protest.  Less than a month later, in December, it was Parkers turn by rotation among all of the members to preach the weekly Thursday Lecture sponsored by the Ministerial association at First Church.  Parker delivered a blunt rebuke of Unitarian orthodoxy, The Relation of Jesus to His Age and the Ages.  The association transferred management of the lecture series to First Church so that Parker would never again be called to speak by rotation.

In January of 1845 James Freeman Clarke, one of the most esteemed Boston ministers and a theological opponent of Parker, decided that his fellows had gone too far in trying to impose conformity and invited Parker to exchange.  Fourteen of the leading families of The Church of the Redeemer resigned in protest, putting Clarke’s ministry in peril.  It would be the last time any Boston minister extended an invitation to exchange.

But Parker’s radicalism did have supporters in the pews in Boston.  They rented Melodeon Theater to house weekly worship service in 1845.  The rest of the year he preached in the Theater on Sunday morning and in Roxbury that afternoon.  By December the group decided to form an independent congregation and call Parker. 

On January 4, 1846 Theodore Parker was installed as the minister of the 28th Congregational Society of Boston, a congregation created for the sole purpose of providing a platform for the maverick, outcast Unitarian and fiery abolitionist in the heart of the Hub of the Universe.  The distinguished Unitarian ministers of Boston were outraged.  Probably even more so when they learned that he broke with precedent and preached his own instillation sermon, The True Idea of a Christian Church—which could only be interpreted as an in-your-face challenge to their moral authority.

Although the core group of three hundred or so supporters who underwrote the new congregation were largely Unitarians, the new congregation was not considered a Unitarian Church, but a Free Church open to all and unbound by any dogma.   Soon upward of 1000 people were regularly attending Parker’s Sunday sermons and Wednesday evening lectures on social, political, and scientific issues.  When that venue became too crowded, services were moved to the Boston Music Hall and attendance doubled.  

Parker could be considered the first pastor of a mega church.  And like the leaders of modern mega churches, he used every medium at his disposal to spread his radical gospel.  Although banned from the Unitarian press, he published articles regularly in both Boston and national periodicals and edited his own periodical, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review.  His sermons were collected and published in popular collections and he regularly churned out books on theological, moral, and reform issues.  When he was not speaking from his own pulpit, he lectured widely.  By the 1850’s he was one of the most famous men in America, adored by his followers and cordially hated by his enemies.

If the local Unitarian worthies thought that Parker was trouble before, his prominent new pulpit only provided him with opportunities to go even further, particularly on social justice issues.  Parker espoused a new American industrial democracy which he proclaimed was “of all the people, by all the people, for all the people”—a phrase latter borrowed by Abraham Lincoln who had read several collections of Parker’s sermons.  To this end advocated numerous social reforms including free public education, penal reform, and support for the emerging Women’s Rights movement.  But his greatest attention was turned to the mortal flaw that kept industrial democracy form truly flourishing—slavery.

He had already denounced the Mexican War as an attempt to expand slavery and led Boston opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  He was a minister at large to the Black community for the Abolitionists and as chair of their Vigilance Committee arranged for support and abetted the escape of fugitives.  He personally harbored at least two in his own home.  In 1855 he was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for conspiracy to violate the Fugitive Slave Act.  Although his popular support in Boston led to the eventual dismissal of the charges, he was branded an enemy of the South and worked with a pistol on his desk to defend himself from constant threats on his life.

He was now in league with the fieriest of abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison.  With the outbreak of guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery and Free Soil partisans in Kansas, Parker raised money to buy weapons for the Free State militias, including a arming a firebrand named John Brown.  When Brown came to Boston to plead for support for a plan to foment a slave rebellion he was one of the secret committee that helped finance and arm Brown’s failed Happer’s Ferry Raid in October 1859.  Parker was one of the few to publicly support Brown, penning John Brown's Expedition Reviewed a public letter defending Brown's actions and the right of slaves to kill their masters.

By that time Parker was exhausted.  His always fragile health had begun to deteriorate two years early.  The strain of his tireless abolitionist efforts and a packed schedule of preaching and lecturing had taken a toll.  The tuberculosis that had killed so many in his family was wracking his body.  He had to give up preaching in January 1859.  He and his wife sought relief with a cruise to the Caribbean during which time he wrote a long autobiographical letter and final confession of faith to his former congregation which was published as Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister.

The old establishment was not prepared to forgive or forget.  Knowing Parker was critically ill and likely dying, the 1859 annual meeting of the Harvard Divinity School Alumni Association rejected a motion to extend personal sympathy for his suffering.  

Parker and his wife continued on their journey to Europe.  On 10 May 10, 1860 Parker died in Florence, Italy.  He was buried in the Strangers Cemetery, the final resting place of stranded, exiled, or expatriate Protestants.  The Boston Ministerial Association declined to send condolences to the widow.

As much as Parker was despised by the old guard, he was already lionized by a whole younger generation of ministers who would go on to lead Unitarianism in the later 19th Century.  His theology broadly trumped a more conventional Christianity and he was held to be the model of prophetic ministry.

In the modern Unitarian Universalist Association, with its heavy emphasis on social justice, he has become an even more canonical figure.  Lately, as a minority movement has emerged that wishes to tone down “political” action and emphasizes congregational autonomy and “enriched spiritual content,” Parker has begun to be criticized for his disruptive, un-collegial behavior, his willingness to defy the law and endorse violence, and surprisingly for one of Unitarianism’s deepest theological pioneers, for a lack of spirituality. 

One suspects that these biting gnats will do no serious damage to the reputation of the man who inspired Martin Luther King with his words, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

The Lights Go Out "On Broadway"— Jerry Leiber Dead at 78

One half of a songwriting duo that changed American music died yesterday.  If you think that this is an exaggeration, try erasing the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller from rhythm and blues, formative rock and roll, and blues tinged pop.  You can’t do it.  The hole would be too big.  Whole genres might collapse.

Leiber died yesterday at the age of 78.

Raised in Baltimore in a Jewish family, Jerry Leiber was fascinated with Black music from an early age.  He later said, “I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.”

He found himself finishing High School in alien Los Angeles in 1950 when he met Mike Stoller, a freshman at Los Angeles City College who played piano and shared Leiber’s passion for Black music.  The two teamed up and were soon spending hours collaborating on songs.  Stoller mainly wrote the music and Leiber, with his ear for Black street talk, handled the lyrics, but their collaboration was so tight that both dabbled in the other’s area and often could not recall or tell who contributed what to a song.

Their first work was hard core blues.  Within months of beginning their collaboration blues shouter Johnny Witherspoon became the first to record one of their songs, Real Ugly Woman.  Their first hit was Hard Times which made the R&B Charts in 1952 for Charlie Brown.  The same year they wrote K.C. Lovin’ for Little Willie Littlefield, a song that would later become a rock and roll hit for Wilbert Harrison under a new name—Kansas City.

In 1953 they penned Hound Dog for Big Mama Thornton, one of the last of the barrel house blues belters.  Three years latter a relatively unknown Memphis singer named Elvis Presley would cover the song.  It would explode into his first break-out hit and become a cultural phenomenon.  Leiber was resentful that Pressley had tinkered with the lyrics and believed the song meant to be a bitter scold to a lazy gigolo had become a novelty song that people seemed to think was actually about a dog.  None the less, as he observed, “…the fact that it sold more than seven million copies took the sting out of what seemed to be a capricious change of lyrics.”

The team would go on to work with Presley, who also was rooted in a love of Black Music, on several songs, most notably the ballad Loving You, King Creole, and Jail House Rock, the themes of Presley’s films.

In three short years the team was established enough to form their own label, Sparks Records.  They began to specialize in music for doo wop inspired Black vocal groups like The Robins who recorded Riot in Cell Block #9 and Smokey Joe’s Cafe. They were branching out from song writing to producing.  In doing so they did even more to shape the emerging sound.

Atlantic Records bought their label and gave them an unprecedented deal that also gave them the right to produce artists on other labels making them the among first independent producers.  For The Coasters Leiber crafted novelty lyrics that struck home with a growing white audience including Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, Along Came Jones, and Poison Ivy.  The last song was not so innocent as it sounded—it was a song about getting the clap.  The song writing duo penned a total of 24 songs on the R&B or rock and roll charts for the group.

The Drifters, another top group with a rotating cast of singers also befitted from Leiber and Stoller’s work.  It was also the beginning of a fruitful relationship with Ben E. Nelson, later on known as Ben E. King.  Hits included On the Boardwalk, Spanish Harlem, and Stand By Me on which they collaborated with King.  As producers for the The Drifters, they made a breakthrough when they added strings and lush orchestration to There Goes my Baby by King, Lover Patterson and George Treadwell.  The song was an enormous hit and influenced the emerging genre of soul music, a smooth and sophisticated update of R&B.  A young musician named Phil Spector worked with Leiber and Stoller in the recording sessions and was influenced by it in his development of his wall of sound.  Save the Last Dance for Me by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman developed the sound even more. 

During these years with Atlantic records the songwriting team also worked with Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman’s former vocalist who had carved a niche as a jazzy, blues infused chanteuse. Is That All There Is? with its minor key and shifting, slow rhythm displayed a sophistication that surprised many.  Lee also introduced I am a Woman which was destined to become a feminist anthem.

Leiber and Stoller left Atlantic in the early sixties for a period at United Artists where they wrote and produced Love Potion #9 for The Clovers.  Then they started yet another label, Red Bird Records, where they concentrated on writing for and producing the girl groups who were topping the charts.  Their first effort was Chapel of Love for The Dixie Cups written by Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.  The Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack also streaked to #1 and introduced a whole new spate of dead teenager songs.  Eleven of the 30 songs they produced on Red Bird reached the charts.

After a falling out with business partners at Red Bird, they sold their interest to concentrate on independent writing and producing.  But the British Invasion was changing music and Leiber and Stoller’s R&B based sound was harder to sell.  They continued to produce hits with Jay and the Americans, often using R&B songs intended for Ben E. King or other artists.  The pairs last big hit was in 1975 with Smack in the Middle With You by Stealers Wheel, with a sound meant to mirror Bob Dylan’s electric period.

Despite falling off the charts the duo never stopped writing and continued to produce, including an albums for Elkie Brooks that sold well in Europe and album cuts for solo albums by Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald.

A new generation was introduced to the music of Leiber and Stoller in 1995 when the revue Smokey Joe's Café opened on Broadway.  The show featured 39 of the duo’s songs.  Set a record as the longest running review in Broadway history, closing after 2,036 performances.  Touring countries sold out theaters across the country and the show opened in London 1n 1996. The show was nominated for several Tony Awards and the original cast album not only sold briskly, it won a Grammy.

As their contributions to American music were recognized, Leiber and Stoller were showered with honors in their later years including induction into both the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and dozens of awards and citations.

In 2009 were credited with writer David Ritz on Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography published by Simon and Schuster.

When Leiber died yesterday of heart failure, Peter Stoller, Mike’s son wrote on the Leiber & Stoller web page, “…[Jerry] would have said, “Let’s break out the booze, and have a ball…”