WOMAN SUFFRAGE IN PRACTICE
In the year 1918 women were first granted complete suffrage by the great
State of New York. The result has not been such as to surprise any
thinking man, but it must have astonished the many credulous ones who
expected political progress and reform from the fair hands of women, for
it has been merely to strengthen the power of the bosses and political
rings everywhere throughout the state. In New York City, where the
dominant political machine is the Tammany Democratic organization, the
Tammany vote which in 1917 under manhood suffrage was 314,000 sprang in
1918 to 547,000 and the Tammany majority was increased by over 100,000,
reaching the high figure of 258,000. Fools build houses and wise men
live in them. The female suffrage edifice, so toilfully erected day by
day for the past fifty years by the feverish and ambitious hands of
shrill-voiced lady agitators, is now occupied by the Tammany Ring,
composed of hard-headed and experienced men. When they vacate the
premises it will be to give place to a rival machine. True, it is, that
women are now received into the political party fold; but as servants,
not as masters. There is a female organization attachment, but it is
strictly of the old orthodox Tammany brand; the vociferous new women are
sent to the rear, their voices must not be too loud, there is no place
in party ranks for skirted faddists, nor for women who want to lead in a
“cause” or “movement.” Silence and discipline are the rules in machine
organizations. Tammany and the New York Republican organization have had
published a list of female associate leaders for each assembly district,
about thirty-five in all. The names of great female uplifters, the
leaders, as they foolishly thought themselves, are absent from these
rolls, where may be read the names of those whose husbands and brothers
will carefully transmit to them the orders from headquarters. Thus ends
the pipe dream of the suffragette “leaders” that they would some day
walk in, and take possession of the comfortable seats of the mighty. The
arrogant conceit of a bunch of foolish women, who imagined themselves to
be all-conquering, has received its quietus, and let us be grateful
accordingly. Far better submit to the plunderings of the old rings, than
to suffer from the antics and Bolshevism of the socialist suffragette
combination.
Passing New York, where the evil results of woman suffrage are only just
beginning to show themselves, let us look at Colorado, where it was
adopted in 1892. In 1908 Helen Sumner went to that State to investigate
the results of fifteen years of female voting. She was favorable to the
cause and her inquisition was backed by women. The results were
published by her in a book where she plainly endeavors to be impartial,
notwithstanding her evident suffragette affiliations. In the hope of
learning something of the moral effect of the franchise, she made
thousands of inquiries, without eliciting anything favorable, except
that voting made women take more interest in politics than before. Miss
Sumner considered this an advantage and she puts it thus:
“Thousands vote; and to every one of these thousands the ballot means a
little broadening in the outlook, a little glimpse of wider interest
than pots and kettles, trivial scandal and bridge whist.” ... “A closer
companionship and understanding between men and women.”
And so the government of the country must be entrusted to people whose
chief interests in life are pots and kettles, scandal, and bridge whist.
“Poor things,” muses Miss Sumner, “they are so lonesome, and they take
no interest in cooking; let them vote, it will divert their minds.”
Apparently she has no pity for the poor men folk, who must pay in high
taxes and indigestion the price of this diversion. But why stop at this
point; the merely going to vote will only give a woman a temporary jolt,
scarcely equal to matching a ribbon at the store; why not give her
something more exciting; why not pass a law permitting all women to
practise medicine or to drive a locomotive, or to shoe horses? Only a
comparatively few would suffer, and it would give the dear women “a
little glimpse of wider interest.” Or to be fair to both sexes, why not
let schoolboys vote; they too might like interesting “glimpses”; and
they would thus become accustomed to talk politics with mamma and
sister; never mind the harm to the country, it is big and long
suffering. Now, when we consider that Miss Sumner is probably a very
superior woman, and that as this extract shows, she has no idea whatever
of the significance or dignity of the franchise, we may judge how far
her less developed sisters are from being qualified for the exercise of
the vote.
Let us consider for a moment what kind of “glimpses of interest and
companionship” the Colorado women get by going into politics. Miss
Sumner’s inquiries did not lead her to believe that woman’s morals were
injured, or her affairs neglected as a consequence of the mere act of
voting. Perhaps not; that large class of either very docile or shrewd
women, who march to the polls with husband or father, vote as he
directs, and quickly return with him, cannot be said to have suffered
much direct harm in the process; nor indeed on the other hand to have
got many “glimpses of wider interest.” And yet, what of the indirect
results? Is it degrading or not to act a lie publicly and solemnly, to
deliberately trifle with country and conscience, as one does by voting
for people of whom he knows nothing, and for legislation which he does
not thoroughly understand? Is it nothing to trifle with a weighty
obligation? When a citizen goes to the polls and votes, does he, or does
he not, in effect represent and declare, before God and his country,
that he has investigated the matter, and that his ballot represents his
solemn and true conviction? And if that declaration be false, if he has
no solemn or true conviction on the subject, is he, or is he not,
acting the part of a perjured rascal and traitor, and can his conscience
pass through that ordeal unscathed? Here is food for thought for many a
male voter and for nearly all the female voters.
Miss Sumner learned out there, some interesting particulars of the
“broadening in the outlook” and the new “companionship” which Colorado
women get from exercising the suffrage; and the experience must have
astonished some of the decent ones among them till they got used to it.
Her book fairly reeks with the tainted atmosphere of female corruption;
the whole woman’s movement there was steeped in moral filth. Here are
her own words (p. 258):
“Politics in Colorado are at least as corrupt as in other states,
and the woman of ideals who goes into political life for reform
soon finds, not merely that she is working in the mire, but that
she is _persona non grata_ with the habitual denizens of the mire
and with those persons who profit by its existence.”
Among the first fruits of woman suffrage in Colorado seems to have been
the development of a big batch of female criminals. In Arapahoe County
in 1900 there were 5284 fraudulent registrations of voters of which 3512
were men and 1772 women. Seventeen hundred female criminals in one
county! There must have been a considerable “broadening in the outlook”
for women theretofore accustomed to decent homes; and a “closer
companionship” with rogues, and understanding of their devices was no
doubt arrived at. In fact Colorado has been said to be the most corrupt
electorate in the United States. Of its effects there United States
Judge Hailett, a resident of the state, said, “if it were to be done
over again the people of Colorado would defeat woman suffrage by an
overwhelming majority.” It stands because politicians are cowards and
unscrupulous, and Colorado like other states is ruled by politicians. It
has increased political corruption in the state. In 1905 about thirty
men were sent to jail in Denver and fined, and in Pueblo there were 257
indictments, all for election frauds. It has not diminished political
rowdyism. In an article in the _Outlook_ in January 1906, Lawrence
Lewis, who studied the subject for several years in Colorado, says that
since woman suffrage went into effect, there has been a continuation of
the former frauds, drunkenness, fights and arrests for crimes. Referring
to the notorious election knaveries committed by both parties in
November 1904, the second year of female voting, he says:
“In Denver neither in November 1904 nor for twenty years has there
been an election that decent citizens of either party would
unhesitatingly assert was anywhere near on the square.”
He further says, that in the cities such as Denver, Pueblo, etc., a
great number of fallen women vote under the control of the bosses, often
under compulsion.
“It is safe to say that under ordinary conditions and under
ordinary police administration, ninety per cent of the fallen women
in our cities are compelled to register and to vote at least once
for the candidates favored by the police or sheriff officers. But
in ordinary times these women are also compelled to repeat.... A
former city detective or fine collector in Pueblo has been tried,
convicted and sentenced to a term of years in the penitentiary for
compelling an unfortunate woman to repeat her registration. He is
under further indictments for compelling the same woman to forge
fictitious names by the hundreds to district registration sheets,
all of which names were to be voted on election day by other fallen
women from whom the fellow collected fines.”
Other similar instances are given by the writer in this same article.
And he adds that:
“It would indeed appear that the average character of the actual
voting body has either remained unchanged or has been slightly
lowered as regards actual political intelligence and
discrimination.”
Also this:
“We have practically (in Colorado) all the forms of graft and
misgovernment found elsewhere. Woman’s suffrage seems to have been
neither a preventive, an alleviator, nor a cure for any of our
political ills.”
Only about one-third of the Colorado women actually vote, and a great
many of them flatly and indignantly refuse to do so. Referring to an
election in Colorado, 1910, Miss Seawell says:
“At the election in May, 1910, the sale of women’s votes was open
and shameless. At each of the 211 voting precincts in Denver, there
were four women working in the interests of the saloon-keepers.
These women had previously visited the headquarters of the
saloon-keepers and openly accepted each a ten dollar bill for her
services. In this and other ways Mr. Barry says he saw about
$17,000 paid to women voters, who apparently made no effort to
conceal it, as indeed it would have been useless.... Such wholesale
corruption has probably never been approximated in any city in the
United States.”
Robert H. Fuller says that:
“Some of the worst election frauds ever perpetrated in this country
marked the Colorado election of 1904. The character and average
intelligence of the voting population, as a whole, have not
improved in the states where women vote; there has been no
improvement in the fitness or capacity of the elected public
officials.” (_Government by the People._)
Miss Seawell says that in the election case of _Bonynge_ vs. _Shafroth_,
in the First Congressional District of Colorado, containing the City of
Denver (_Second Session of the Fifty-eighth Congress, H. R. report_ No.
2705), it appeared that out of 9000 ballots in the boxes there were 6000
fraudulent ones which had been prepared by three men and by one woman.
One woman poll clerk voted three times; forgeries were committed by the
women; two women arranged to have a fight started so as to distract the
attention of the watchers at the polls, while a third woman stuffed the
ballot-boxes. Because of this exposure, Shafroth resigned.
Moral stimulus there certainly could be none in contact with this fraud
organization which goes by the name of politics in Colorado. Of mental
stimulus and “broadening in the outlook” thus to be miraculously
achieved by the mere process of selecting one out of two scamps for
public office, Miss Sumner was reluctantly compelled to admit, that
after all in actual result she found but little. Few people were able to
give her any clear reason why they favored woman suffrage nor why they
opposed it. It seems likely that all the mental stimulus the Colorado
women ever got by entering the mire of politics, they could have
obtained at less expense to their delicacy and good manners, by taking
part in church fairs, golfing, gardening, playing base-ball, walking,
lawn tennis, singing schools, literary societies, spelling bees,
horseback riding or dancing. And if some of the precious creatures must
at any rate be kept amused while the rest of us work, it would be less
expensive to the state to provide these amusements at state charge than
to permit them to divert their minds by playing with our national
welfare, and using poor old Uncle Sam as the object on which to try
their various experiments in political quackery.
Glancing over the New York _Evening Post_ of August 27, 1919, the writer
was interested to read that a young lady politician, convicted in 1916
of a murder during a political quarrel at Thompson Falls, the victim
being one Thomas, also a politician, had been paroled from the Montana
State Penitentiary. It is reassuring to know that a suffragette
murderess actually risks three years confinement (softened no doubt by
sympathy) in Montana, the first woman suffrage state, and the one who
gave us our first lady “congressman.”
The plain truth is, that the entry of women into politics has brought no
promise to the American people of any practical help in any of their
real problems. The whole movement bears the stamp of crudeness and
mediocrity. Its ideals and operations have been low and its leaders
lacking in every quality of greatness. Part of its success is no doubt
due to the love of novelty, and the inability in most minds to
distinguish what is really progress from what is merely blind or foolish
experiment. To many superficial people there is a fascination attached
to everything which smacks of revolution; because in the past an
occasional revolt has been justified, they think it is heroic and noble
to take part in any political rumpus. But nothing either noble or heroic
was ever in or behind the woman suffrage movement, or has ever come out
of it. The really great political agitations have all produced something
worth while, in orators, leaders or authorship; see, for example, the
chronicles of the American Revolution or the abolition movement; even
the French Revolution, in its compass from Rousseau to Napoleon, evolved
some greatness to offset the mass of rubbish and infamy which it vomited
forth. Its political incapables though unfit for any good constructive
work were at least able to talk and write with effect; they drew
attractive political pictures and proposals, and could promise and
speculate in a way to arouse interest. Not so the suffragists. Among
political agitators they stand supreme for dullness and stupidity.
Looking at their literature one is immediately struck by its cheapness,
by its utter lack of noble and patriotic sentiments, by the lack of
appeal to broad and elevating motives. We have had thousands of
suffragist speeches, and tons of printed literature, and after all, what
have they or what has their movement offered to the nation or to the
world? Nothing, absolutely nothing. The movement has not produced one
idea worthy of the consideration of a well-educated and sensible man; it
has apparently been motived by vanity, love of notoriety and power, and
characterized by hysteria; the proposals advanced have been pilfered
from socialists and other fanatics; the oratory and literature of the
suffragists is characterized by flippant insincerity and
unscrupulousness; progressive legislation in which they had no
perceptible part is boldly claimed as their work; their leaders often
display dense ignorance of the political history of the country, and a
sad lack of capacity to understand sound political principles or to
sympathize with anything beyond the popular smartness of the hour. The
personnel of their leaders has been commonplace and uninteresting. Some
of them have been sincere fanatics; most of them are political
adventuresses. Dr. C. L. Dana says of the movement: “It is adopted as a
kind of religion, a holy cult of self and sex, expressed by a passion to
get what they want. There is no program, no promise, only ecstatic
assertions that they ought to have it and must have it, and of the
wonders that will follow its possession.... Measured by fair rules of
intelligence testing, I should say that the average zealot in the cause
has about the mental age of eleven.” (_Letter to Miss Chittenden._)
During the war with Germany the patriotism of many of the leaders was
doubtful, and their associates suspicious. And during the progress of
the whole agitation, there has been no suggestion of any effort to be
made by those women or their followers to stop political graft or
corruption, or to raise the standard of politics or of legislation. They
have had the vote at two annual elections in the great state of New
York; what do they offer there? Nothing. Who are their standard bearers
and who has benefited by their vote? The most notorious boss and the
most noted and powerful political machine in the world.
The strongest proof, however, of the utter unworthiness of the cause of
female suffrage and the meanness of its motives is furnished by the
public declarations of its female advocates. Many of these addresses are
flavored with half contemptuous, half vicious and altogether impudent
and vile sneers at men, and assertions of masculine inferiority, which
could not have been readily displayed but by those familiar with
households whose men habitually receive at home but scant respect. Those
scoffs at men are accompanied by a great show of half hysterical, all
gushing, admiration for the mystic excellences of contemporary women,
and of contempt for those of the last generation; in fact these female
reform leaders usually assume a top-lofty attitude of disdain for our
ancestors generally, their work and their ideals. Each of them is of
course filled with wonder at her own superior wisdom. One cannot help
suspecting that most of this display of crudity and egotism is due to
the fact that much of the suffragist work was done by newly fledged
graduates of female colleges, where uppish young women, largely of the
type who dislike home duties, or sometimes it is feared work of any
kind, are sent by their parents either to get rid of them for a while,
or because it is the thing to do, or to fit them for teaching. As from
the college president down, nothing of actual life is known, or ever was
known, within the college walls, where everything needed, buildings,
endowments, salaries, books, instruments and sustenance, is provided by
someone else, one can readily imagine the quality of the stuff expounded
in these places under the pretence of instruction in sociology, politics
and economics, and greedily swallowed by the extremely silly and
conceited undergraduates. On leaving college, the best or most fortunate
of these girls, aided by good luck or guided by wise parents, go to work
at some useful occupation, and begin to get real lessons in life
followed usually by still higher instruction as wives and mothers later
on. Of the lazy, rattle-brained, and otherwise good for nothing, a
certain percentage find their way every year into the field of female
suffrage agitation. Some scraps of knowledge they have picked up in the
class-room, the value of which they enormously exaggerate in their own
minds, and give themselves intellectual airs in consequence. Many of
them lack sense or judgment sufficient to enable them to appreciate the
immense importance of the business world, the great mental capacity
required in dealing with problems of commerce, manufacturing and
finance, and feel a certain contempt for business people who take no
part in the literary and artistic patter of the day, or who lack taste
for trashy new poetry and rubbishy modern novels. The participation of
this class in the “movement” is prompted partly by morbid desire to
associate with men; and partly by vanity and a longing for notoriety,
and for opportunity to display their own imagined powers. Fools, being
afraid of no social or political problems, walk in where angels fear to
tread; and it is no unusual thing to see charming and prudent women
reduced to meek silence by these female blatherskites, with their
irrelevant harangues about primitive men, cave dwellers, man-made law,
dual-sexed insects and female spiders who devour their mates. If the
reader doubts that such have been of the class of female suffrage
deliverances it will be because he has been fortunate enough not to have
heard many of them.
Part of the success of the woman suffrage agitation is due to the use of
money. Just as the accumulations of the rich are often poured by their
sons into channels of profligate folly, so by their widows and daughters
they are often turned into ditches of political folly. In countries like
England and the United States, where large and small fortunes are
constantly being accumulated by hard-working men, and large portions
thereof bequeathed to female relatives, there will always be found a
certain proportion of the latter who lack the wisdom to properly use
their surplus cash; some waste it shamefully; some lose it to sharpers;
some bestow it upon worthless and sham benevolences; some squander it to
gain notoriety. One can scarcely imagine any “cause” or “movement” so
absurd that, people cannot be found to believe in it, or to pretend to
do so, and to subscribe to it if properly approached and tempted by
visions of celebrity. For the woman suffrage agitation sums aggregating
very considerable have been thus secured in England and America. With
this cash a number of poorer women can be employed to do propaganda work
and to perpetrate acts of lawlessness. In England they assaulted cabinet
officials and others; they used dynamite, they smashed windows, they
broke up public meetings by violence, they practised rowdyism and
blackguardism, they attempted even murder. Here, they have allied
themselves with anarchists and socialists, enemies of the republic; they
have lawlessly interrupted public meetings; they publicly affronted the
President at the Arlington Hotel on April 15th, 1910, a thing never
before done in the history of the country; and they subsequently
insulted another President, by picketing the White House in an offensive
manner for weeks together. They justify this by saying that they were in
earnest, and ready to suffer for the cause; and the same has been said
by other fanatical criminals. Their course has been such as would have
discredited even a good cause in any field but that of politics, where
vile and dastardly methods are customary and considered appropriate.
Up to a few years ago the politicians were accustomed to ridicule the
woman suffrage agitation, and for years made it a standing joke at the
various state capitols; thus it was formerly the well known practice of
the New York state legislators to deceive and humbug the woman suffrage
managers by passing one of their measures in one house, with the
understanding that it would be defeated in the other. But as soon as the
movement began to make real headway, the politicians began to favor it,
seeing the chance of advantage to themselves from that course. The only
opinion those gentry fear or respect is that backed by organized force
or easy money. The suffragists organized and raised immense amounts of
cash; their opponents failed to do either and almost ignored the
movement. Now, reasoned the politicians, should the suffrage proposals
fail nothing will be lost by having supported them; and should they
succeed we will have a still more credulous, corrupt and easily managed
constituency than before, and may hope for the gratitude and friendship
of the suffrage leaders. And now that in sixteen states women have the
vote, the politicians on both sides strongly favor woman suffrage, and
are one and all ready to swear everlasting devotion to the cause of
woman. The presidential aspirants dare no longer oppose it. So that
judging the future by the past, the cause of woman suffrage has a fair
chance of winning in all or most of the states of the Union. It
certainly will do so unless there be a strong organized effort to defeat
its progress, of which at present no signs are visible. In the political
world the most powerful forces are money and fanaticism. The effect of
money is familiar to us all every day. The effect of fanaticism is
equally familiar to readers of history. It produced the Mohammedan
Empire, the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, and assisted in the
downfall of Spain; it furthered the Mormon political sway; the violent
abolition of slavery; the prohibition movement; the woman suffrage
agitation and Bolshevism. That female suffrage is the last important
step in the downward march of the American democracy is the belief of
the writer of this book. If at this point the reaction does not begin,
the democratic régime in this country is doomed to final failure, and
even to possible overthrow at the hands of red radicalism.