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Journal of Urban History 2018, Vol. 44(2) 123 –133

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Special Section Introduction

African American Urban Electoral Politics in the Age of Jim Crow

Lisa G. Materson1 and Joe William Trotter, Jr.2

Abstract This article reviews the literature on black politics in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that with notable exceptions, the expanding corpus of scholarship on black politics has largely focused on grassroots organizing and social movements, making electoral politics a secondary force in the history of African Americans. This critique of recent scholarship frames and introduces four articles in this special section that carry forward research on urban electoral politics as a central feature of black freedom struggles. By looking at the level of local urban party politics, this new work, this article asserts, challenges familiar narratives about the history of black electoral politics, including the steadfastness of black Republican loyalty before the Depression, the characterization of the black struggle against disfranchisement as a southern story, and the representation of black electoral leadership as middle class.

Keywords party politics, electoral politics, urban politics, disfranchisement, Obama, voting rights, grassroots activism, Republican, Democrat, voting realignment

When we began work on this special section of the Journal of Urban History, Barack Obama was in the midst of his second presidential administration. We viewed the administration of the first U.S. president of African descent as an opportune moment in the nation’s political history to bring together new scholarship on the history of African American urban electoral politics. During President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, leading news outlets like the New York Times ran numerous articles covering black electoral politics, from the Democratic primary battles over black votes to the upsurge in registrants and voters among disaffected black citizens.1 Both the 2008 and 2012 exit polls revealed that the majority of black voters, as well as urban voters, cast their ballots for Obama.2 The overlap between these two groups ensured that there was no doubt that black voters in America’s major cities went to the polls heavily in favor of Obama.

The political landscape has shifted considerably since we embarked on this project. The after- math of Obama’s presidency and the election of Donald J. Trump, however, represent an even more momentous time to address this history of black urban electoral politics during the era of

1University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA 2Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Corresponding Authors: Lisa G. Materson, University of California at Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA. Email: [email protected]

Joe William Trotter, Jr., Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Baker Hall 240, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

746134 JUHXXX10.1177/0096144217746134Journal of Urban HistoryMaterson and Trotter research-article2018

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Jim Crow white supremacy. Trump built his political career on the “birther” movement question- ing Obama’s U.S. citizenship. In his presidential campaign, Trump harnessed white working- class views that African Americans, undocumented immigrants, and other minorities unfairly benefited from social services funded by their rising taxes.3 His “Make America Great Again” slogan invoked images of Jim Crow-era uncontested white authority. Republican efforts to sup- press the votes of people of color expanded during the 2016 election season. African American voters overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s candidacy, creating, as historian Carol Anderson has described, a “firewall between a democracy continuing to evolve and one threatened by the cor- rosion of a Trump presidency.”4 This special section considers the partisan “firewalls” and rebel- lions of another era when black voters entered the electoral arena to contest the political currency of white supremacy.

Until the onset of the Civil War, most blacks had lived and labored as enslaved people on the plantations and farms of the rural South. Although a half million blacks claimed their free- dom before the Emancipation Proclamation, only five New England states offered black male citizens access to the franchise on the same terms that applied to white male voters.5 Following the Civil War, the enfranchisement of African American men through the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 seemed to signal a new era of black participation in electoral politics as a lever of full citizenship.

The rise of Jim Crow after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 aimed to upend black gains. In the face of legal, institutionalized racism, African American communities across the nation turned inward to develop internal organizations that would serve community needs, from youth and cultural clubs, to old-age homes, to employment training and placement programs. These largely middle-class-run institutions also attempted to impress upon the working poor whom they served “racial uplift” ideology’s code of “modest” behavior as a means of combatting white rac- ist stereotypes.6 Only the modern black freedom movement of the 1940s to the 1960s, with its successful drive for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, brought millions of disfranchised African Americans into the body politic as voters in the formal electoral process. Scholars soon produced a significant body of studies exploring the transformation of black politics during the early to mid-twentieth century. These studies reinforced but also moved well beyond earlier efforts to understand the African American encounter with early twentieth-century Euro-American domi- nated urban political machines.7

But a subsequent corpus of scholarship on black politics has largely focused on grassroots organizing and social movements, making electoral politics a secondary force in the history of the black freedom struggle. A great many studies on the years between Reconstruction and the Great Depression explore the contours of racial uplift and associational life, the black left and labor activism, and black internationalism.8 A larger number of works on grassroots activism in recent years examine the civil rights movement during the post-Depression years, analyzing the roles of women and gender in these movements, the northern and international contexts of this activism, and how black power competed with, intersected, and paralleled the modern civil rights movement.9 While many of these studies discuss the grassroots struggles to end black disfran- chisement and do, indeed, consider electoral politics, with few exceptions, African Americans’ involvement in party politics is not central to the important histories that they tell.10

The history of the battle for voting rights and the history of party politics, however, are two sides of the same coin. Urban community and migration studies produced between the 1960s and 1990s first showcased the richness of Jim Crow-era black electoral politics in cities, North and South.11 Scholars of black women’s history have brought further attention to the electoral arena as an integral part of the black freedom struggle.12 Their work helped correct an imbalance in the history of black politics that favors grassroots activism over electoral politics during the Jim Crow era. The articles in this special section of the Journal of Urban History carry forward the agenda that these scholars first mapped out. Recent shifts in the Black Lives Matter movement

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underscore the significance of addressing party politics, particularly women’s participation. Women activists not only spearheaded the emergence of the movement as a grassroots phenom- enon, they also led its reorientation toward the electoral arena in the months following Donald Trump’s election.13

This special section presents four case studies of African American electoral activism in leading U.S. cities between the 1880s and 1930s: Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Electoral politics did not disappear from the urban landscape during what historian Rayford Logan described as the “nadir” of African American political life between the end of Reconstruction and the early twentieth century.14 Alongside the inward turn to commu- nity institutions and “racial uplift,” partisan politics endured. Regardless of whether black urban voters supported Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, they turned to the electoral system during these years as a means of gaining access to government resources and full citizenship rights. At the national level, the story is familiar. Prior to the 1930s, the majority of black voters who were able to cast a ballot in presidential elections did so on behalf of the Republican can- didate. Black Republican voting at the national level was largely the result of the Republican Party’s historical commitment to black rights; it was the party of Abraham Lincoln, antislavery, and the Reconstruction Amendments.15 These national voting patterns, however, mask signifi- cant diversity of partisan expression at the local level in American cities. Local voting patterns frequently paralleled national trends, but not always.

These four articles in this volume by Millington Bergeson-Lockwood, Dennis Doster, Julie Davidow, and Mary-Elizabeth Murphy span the demographic transformation of black America from the 1880s, when a small percentage of African Americans lived in cities, to the 1930s, when African Americans were on the cusp of becoming a majority urban population.16 By looking at the level of local urban party politics, these articles frequently call into question familiar narra- tives about the history of black electoral politics during these years, including the steadfastness of black Republican loyalty before the Depression, the characterization of the black struggle against disfranchisement as a southern story, and the representation of black electoral leadership as middle class.

Republican Loyalty and Political Independence

These articles underscore the growth of black political insurgency within the Republican Party and defections to the Democratic Party well before the realignment of African American voters from the Republican to the Democratic Party during the late 1920s and 1930s. Black Republican loyalty prior to the 1930s was never unbending. Even at the national level, the history of black campaigning was marked by notable defections from the Republican Party. For example, in the 1912 presidential election, some prominent leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois encouraged black voters to favor Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson.17 In the early 1920s, prominent literary figure Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a former Republican stalwart, insisted that African American women use their voting rights, newly acquired through the Nineteenth Amendment, to lead African Americans out of the Republican Party and into the Democratic Party.18

We still do not know a great deal about this early history of defection from the Republican Party. By focusing on the local level of urban politics, Millington Bergeson-Lockwood’s and Dennis Doster’s articles not only complicate the traditional periodization of black abandonment of the Republican Party, pushing it back by a decade or more, but also offer important insights into the history of black independent politics. In city after city, the rejection of the Republican Party was connected to independent candidates and politics.

Black independent politics, however, took several forms. In some cases, black independent poli- tics during this era is best characterized as nonalignment with any party. In others, independence entailed insurgency within the Republican Party through the support of breakaway independent

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candidates who were not endorsed by the regular party machinery. Bergeson-Lockwood’s and Doster’s articles highlight these two manifestations of independent politics. Still another type of independent politics to which some black voters turned, though not discussed in these contribu- tions, involved support for a third party. These differences in how African American voters engaged in independent politics are important not only because they demonstrate the diversity of black political expression, but also because they reveal the range of strategies that African Americans employed during the “nadir” to make the party system a responsive site for expressing citizenship rights and battling institutionalized racism. The strategy of the nonaligned independent was not the same as the independent Republican.

Bergeson-Lockwood documents the division of black male voters in Boston during the 1883 gubernatorial campaign between those who demanded Republican Party loyalty and a sizable and vocal group of black male leaders who insisted that black men in Boston should demonstrate their political independence by casting their ballot with the incumbent Democratic governor and former union general Benjamin Butler. A model of nonalignment politics, black supporters of Benjamin Butler’s gubernatorial candidacy in 1883 neither identified as Democrats nor advocated black allegiance to the Democratic Party beyond that specific elec- tion. They urged black male voters to act as independents at both the local and national levels by casting their ballots according to men and measures rather than parties, in the hopes that their defection from the Republican Party might push either major party to increase its com- mitment to black rights.

In his contribution, Doster points to a different model of black rebellion against the Republican Party—independents who remained identified as Republicans, but who ran campaigns without the support of the state’s regular Republican Party. Although Baltimore claimed a long history of black independent organizing, stretching back to the 1880s and 1890s with groups such as the Colored Republican Central Club and the Colored Citizens Committee of One Hundred, inde- pendence did not immediately translate into abandonment of Republican for Democratic candi- dates, as was the case in Boston. In the South, the Democratic Party’s strong Klan affiliation, mobilization for black disfranchisement, and use of extralegal violence against black voters dis- couraged black defection to the Democratic Party as a means of expressing disappointment with white Republicans. Rather, beginning in the 1880s, black Baltimoreans regularly opposed white Republicans running for municipal offices by backing their own independent candidates.

The strength of this black independent movement in Baltimore was on full display in 1920. Black Baltimoreans had helped to put the “regular” white Republican candidate for mayor into office in 1919 with the belief that as mayor, their candidate would use his office to appoint African Americans to the school board. When the mayor did not, a significant group of black Republicans not only criticized the mayor, but also rejected other local Republican Party candi- dates, starting with the party’s candidate for U.S. senator. They campaigned to put black, inde- pendent candidate William Ashbie Hawkins into the U.S. Senate. Although unsuccessful, black independent support for Hawkins’s candidacy strengthened the momentum of this independent revolt among Baltimore’s black voters, propelling it into the 1920s.

In their analyses of black insurgency within and against local Republican machinery, Bergeson-Lockwood’s and Doster’s articles also implicitly acknowledge the material benefits that black voters, like poor and working-class white voters, hoped to receive from expanding urban political machines, and, thus, counter the notion that black politics in the age of Jim Crow produced what later analysts would describe as a “hollow prize.”19 In Boston, black rejection of the Republican machine produced tangible results in the appointment of Massachusetts’s first black judge, George Ruffin. Furthermore, Doster’s case study of Baltimore shows that when politicians failed to recognize black support with concrete rewards in the form of local appoint- ments and jobs, black urban populations were willing to vote in open rebellion against regular Republican machines.

Materson and Trotter 127

Disfranchisement

While studies of white efforts to suppress the vote during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have usually focused on the urban and rural South, all of these articles acknowledge patterns of racially motivated disfranchisement as national phenomena.20 Julie Davidow moves this process to the core of her analysis, not only by shifting focus from the history of southern disfranchisement to the less well-studied history of black disfranchisement in the North, but also by exploring the links between different regional movements to eliminate the black vote.

Davidow shows that during the 1890s and early 1900s, white reformers in Philadelphia forged ties with white Southerners to establish arguments for black disfranchisement that often mirrored those made by southern white supremacists. Like white Southerners, white city reformers— many with Republican ties—used accusations of black Republican corruption to call for remov- ing black Philadelphians from the voter lists. Both northern white reformers and southern white Democrats coalesced around the notion of Republican Party corruption to make claims that African Americans were unfit to participate in the electorate. These sentiments, she also shows, were closely intertwined with assaults on the political rights of poor, working-class, and immi- grant whites.

Attacks on black men’s voting rights in Philadelphia met with a swift response from leading black Philadelphians, who raised the alarm about what they identified as creeping southern white supremacy in their city. Notably, though denied the right to vote because of her sex, black woman reformer Gertrude Mossell was one of the most trenchant voices in Philadelphia during these years, simultaneously cautioning black men against the misuse of their ballot, and raising the alarm about white reformers’ efforts to deny black men the ballot with charges of misconduct. As Mossell’s simultaneous critique of black male voters and strong rejection of the racism of white reformers suggests, the gender, class, and race politics surrounding these debates over black electoral participation were complex. W. E. B. Du Bois’s public ambivalence about black alle- giance to the Republican Party, as well as the frequent visits of Booker T. Washington, the era’s leading voice of black accommodation, to the city further complicated these debates, no doubt strengthening the hand of white reformers’ claims against African American voters to some extent, however unintentionally.

Gender- and Class-Inflected Electoral Activism

Women’s voices, especially among the working poor, are some of the most difficult to recover in the history of black electoral politics. This special section makes important headway here. The Fifteenth Amendment extended the vote to black men but not to black or white women. Although some states partially or fully enfranchised women residents by the 1890s, the vast majority of U.S. women citizens remained disfranchised until 1920, with the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment.21 Even then, Jim Crow legislation blocked voting rights for southern black women.22

Scholarship on African American women’s intersectional experiences with sex-based and race- based disfranchisement makes clear that gaining the vote was part of a much broader struggle for black equality that extended into the electoral arena. As Rosalyn Terborg-Penn has demonstrated, black women entered the battle for women’s suffrage, despite white suffragists’ racism, because they saw the vote as a mechanism for improving their lives and the lives of their communities.23 In her influential 1994 and 1997 articles, Elsa Barkley Brown turned attention to black women’s electoral work without the vote. She revealed that African American women in the Reconstruction South were heavily involved in Republican Party politics in their communities. Women attended party rallies, protected male relatives and neighbors from white violence at the polls, and demanded that enfranchised men use their individual ballots in the best interest of the entire community.24 Exploring how African American women participated in the party system with the franchise, other

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historians demonstrated that with voting rights—including partial voting rights prior to the Nineteenth Amendment—they engaged in a wide range of electoral campaigns at the local and national levels to forward antiracist agendas. In these studies, Chicago and New York have received the greatest attention.25

This special section carries forward the momentum of this scholarship to show that women vigorously defended black voting rights and pushed for greater tangible returns for black votes in multiple American cities—from Gertrude Mossell who condemned white disfranchising rhetoric in Philadelphia in 1900, to African American women in 1920s Baltimore who created their own independent organizations, to the Democratic campaign work of Elizabeth Hall McDuffie in the 1930s. As Mary-Elizabeth Murphy documents in her contribution, McDuffie, a White House domestic, Democratic campaigner for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and leader of the United Government Employees Union, Incorporated (UGE), harnessed these roles to push the federal government to recognize basic economic citizenship rights. Her demands for fair wages for domestic workers and black inclusion in New Deal programs demonstrate the class components of black women’s political activism.

McDuffie personally bridged the predominantly middle-class world of prominent black women campaigners, and the working-class world of the women domestics whom she repre- sented in the UGE. In her analysis of McDuffie as a link among multiple political spaces that were typically separated by race and class, Murphy offers a window into the electoral politics of working-class women domestics. She leaves no doubt that the personal testimony of black Democrats during the 1930s contributed to the voting realignment. Murphy shows that McDuffie was a particularly compelling voice precisely because as a domestic in the White House, McDuffie was a mirror to the working-class constituency she frequently addressed when can- vassing. McDuffie’s commitment to the Democratic Party, however, was not uncritical. Although she vigorously campaigned for Roosevelt in 1936, praising the benefits of the New Deal for African Americans, she also turned to political spaces outside of the electoral arena to protest New Deal programs that excluded domestic workers.

Future Directions

By pointing to the tenuous nature of black support for the Democratic Party in the years between Roosevelt’s 1932 election and his 1936 reelection, Mary-Elizabeth Murphy reminds us that black support for the Republican Party endured deep into the 1930s. Murphy’s attention to the late 1930s and 1940s points to the chronological possibilities for future research. While reaching back into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in mapping out the history of urban electoral politics, historians will no doubt also find the post-Depression period fruitful for researching the role of local urban party politics in conservative and liberal traditions in the age of Jim Crow. Leah Wright Rigueur’s 2015 study The Loneliness of the Black Republican filled a critical void here by charting African American engagement with the Republican Party from the voting realignment of the 1930s to the rise of Ronald Reagan. With its focus on national figures, there is still more work to be done on the history of black Republican politics after the realign- ment at the local level.26 Turning to the liberal tradition, if voting rights and party politics are two sides of the same coin, it makes sense also to extend the significant attention that historians have paid the grassroots battles for black voting rights in the post-Depression years to the realm of party politics. This would mean expanding research on, for instance, local black involvement in party politics in southern cities in the years immediately following the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.27

There is still much new ground to break in both the pre- and post-Depression years, in terms of investigating previously neglected cities and exploring the archival collections of women and black working-class organizations with questions about political parties in mind. Scholars should

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also return to sources and cities previously examined in community studies produced between the 1960s and 1990s with historical tools developed in recent decades, such as gender and cul- tural studies analysis.

Using these historical tools will entail not only further work on women’s political activism, but also critical analyses of the relationship between partisan politics and the historical con- struction of gendered identities and rhetorics among African American communities. We already know, for example, that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle-class African American women employed tropes of black men misusing the ballot to justify their own political leadership and make claims about both partisan loyalty and independence.28 How did this trope of black male political participation transform later in the twentieth century? What other tropes about black manhood populated the economy of partisan rhetoric? How did they manifest in diverse urban settings and among political actors who divided along the lines of party, class, and/or gender? Answering such questions by applying cultural and gender history’s insights on the construction of manhood and masculinity to the partisan history of black urban communities will reveal how gendered rhetoric has shaped voter participation and mobilization and vice versa.

These exciting new paths for future research on black urban electoral politics during the Jim Crow era overlap thematically and analytically with other rich sites of inquiry. These include further work on radical traditions and party politics, northern battles over black disfranchisement, black independent and third-party politics, and multiple biographies of key figures in urban poli- tics. Equally and perhaps most important, this volume suggests possibilities for fresh new research on the connection between party politics and the ongoing African American quest for economic citizenship.

With this new research at hand, historians will be in a position to write new synthetic histories of black urban electoral politics. Such a project is not merely academic. The ties between party politics and voting rights endure. Felon disfranchisement, part of the race-based mass incarcera- tion sanctions that Michelle Alexander powerfully analyzes as the “New Jim Crow,” has shaped the outcome of several close elections since the 1980s.29 The 2013 Shelby vs. Holder Supreme Court decision that declared unconstitutional a key protection against state disfranchising mea- sures in the 1965 Voting Rights Act enabled the suppression of the votes from people of color that plagued the 2016 election.30 Extending scholars’ attention toward African Americans’ campaigns to obtain voting rights to the closely linked history of their involvement in party politics is, thus, part of a larger project in U.S. history of understanding the connections between partisan culture and practices, on one hand, and the ongoing expansion and contraction of the polity, on the other.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub- lication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. The vast majority of these articles appeared in 2008 during Obama’s first run for the presidency. A few examples from the New York Times in 2008 include the following: Shaila Dewan, “Old Loyalties vs. New Passions Splits South’s Black Democrats,” New York Times, January 18, 2008; Peter Applebome, “The Tightrope of Promising a Genuine Transformation,” New York Times, February 10, 2008; Andrew Jacobs, “Black Ohioans Backing Clinton Feel the Pressure to Switch,” New York Times, February 28, 2008; Marcus Mabry, “Many Blacks Find Hope and Joy in an Unexpected Breakthrough,” New York Times, June 5, 2008; Matt Bai, “What Would a Black President Mean for Black Politics? Post-Race,”

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New York Times Magazine, August 10, 2008, 34-41, 50, 54-55; Susan Saulny, “Obama-Inspired Black Voters Find Politics Is for Them, Too,” New York Times, November 2, 2008. While less prevalent when compared with 2008, examples of articles covering black electoral politics in 2012 include the follow- ing: Susan Saulny, “Less Zeal for Obama in a Vital Group of Voters,” New York Times, October 10, 2012; and Susan Saulny, “With Less Time for Voting, Black Churches Redouble Their Efforts,” New York Times, October 29, 2012.

2. “Exit Polls,” New York Times, November 5, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/results/ president/exit-polls.html?mcubz=0; “President Exit Polls,” New York Times, 2012, http://elections. nytimes.com/2012/results/president/exit-polls.

3. The role of white workers has gained increasing attention in academic and popular discussions of elec- toral politics and the future of U.S. democracy. Although many white workers need government-funded services to make ends meet in the current global economy, they resolutely reject the expansion of public support for social welfare programs. Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 20-23; Arlie R. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), 3-23; Michael Zweig, “White Working-Class Voters and the Future of Progressive Politics,” New Labor Forum Blog, May 11, 2017; Tyler Stovall, “Race, Class, and History in the Trump Era,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the AHA, May 2017, quote from Stovall.

4. Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 148-51, 162-70.

5. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 55, 87-88. For a succinct summary of black political history and historiography, see Sharon D. Wright and Minion K. C. Morrison, “The African American Political Experience,” in The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert Weems (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 189-215.

6. Influential works examining the history of racial uplift and racial destiny politics during these years include Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

7. See Martin Kilson, “Political Change in the Negro Ghetto, 1900-1940s,” in Key Issues in the Afro- American Experience, ed. Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel M. Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 167-92; and Wright and Morrison, “The African American Political Experience,” 193-98.

8. Studies on the black left and black internationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920-1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

9. The proliferation of studies on what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls “the long civil rights movement” are too numerous to mention here. For a synthetic overview of this literature and debates about new research approaches, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233-63; Jeanne Theoharis, “Black Freedom Studies: Re-imagining and Redefining the Fundamentals,” History Compass 4/2 (2006):

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348-67, doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00318.x; Sudiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporary and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (Spring 2007): 265-88; and Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (December 2009): 751-76. For examples of recent treatments of black electoral politics at the national and local levels, respectively, see Steven F. Lawson’s Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941 (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015); and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

10. For a recent exception to this trend, see Jeffrey Helgeson, Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Helgeson emphasizes how black Chicagoans “creatively adapted their community-build- ing” and grassroots efforts from the Great Depression and World War II to “the making of an indepen- dent black electoral politics that triumphed in the election of Mayor Harold Washington” in the early 1980s (13). Examining years after the Jim Crow-era focus of this special section, recent work on the black power movement, it is important to note, has also documented electoral campaigns in the late 1960s and 1970s. For example, see Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), chaps. 6-7; Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), chap. 6.

11. For a discussion of the transformation of these community studies, see Kenneth Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996); Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert Weems, eds., The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), chaps. 1 and 2; Joe W. Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Tera W. Hunter, eds., The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Era to the Present (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2004); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter, eds., African American Urban History Since World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 203-19; and Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

12. We discuss in greater detail these works on African American women’s political activism below. 13. See Bryan Tarnowski, “Black Lives Matter Shifts from Protests to Policy under Trump,” Washington

Post, May 4, 2017; Brandon E. Patterson, “How the Black Lives Matter Movement Is Mobilizing Against Trump,” Washington Post, February 7, 2017.

14. Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: De Capo Press, 1997).

15. Richard Sherman traces black loyalty to the Republican Party in national politics in The Republican Party and Black America: From McKinley to Hoover, 1896-1933 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973). Classic treatments of the voting realignment at the national level include Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (1979; repr., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).

16. Joe William Trotter, Jr., Earl Lewis, and Tera Hunter, “Introduction: Connecting African American Urban History, Social Science Research, and Policy Debates,” in The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr., Earl Lewis, and Tera Hunter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1-2.

17. Sherman, Republican Party and Black America, 109-11. 18. See the introduction and chaps. 3 and 4 of Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black

Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), for an analysis of Dunbar-Nelson’s insistence that African American women lead black voters into the Democratic Party.

132 Journal of Urban History 44(2)

19. H. Paul Friesema, “Black Control of Central Cities: The Hollow Prize,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (March 1969): 75-79; Neil Kraus and Todd Swanstrom, “Minority Mayors and the Hollow-Prize Problem,” Political Science and Politics 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 99-105, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/1350317.

20. For a recent synthetic treatment of disfranchisement in the South, see Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

21. For a more detailed list of these dates of women’s full and partial enfranchisement prior to the Nineteenth Amendment, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 399-402. White women in New Jersey voted even earlier for several years. See Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (1992): 159-93.

22. Liette Gidlow, “Resistance after Ratification: The Nineteenth Amendment, African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disfranchisement after 1920,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, eds., Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street, 2017) accessed through UC Davis Library https://www.library.ucdavis.edu/ August 15, 2017.

23. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) served as a critical intervention in the history of the suffrage movement, which until that point had primarily examined white women’s suffrage activism.

24. Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (1994): 107-46; Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865- 1880,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon with Bettye Collier- Thomas, John H. Bracey, Arlene Voski Avakian, and Joyce Avrech Berkman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 66-99.

25. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “In Politics to Stay: Black Women Leaders and Party Politics in the 1920s,” in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 199-220; Wanda A. Hendricks, Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race; Julie A. Gallagher, Black Women and Politics in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). Other studies that discuss black women’s electoral activism include Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896- 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003); and Nikki Brown, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). In part, this interest in party politics was tied to a historiographical trend among U.S. women’s and gender historians who were analyzing the continuities and disjunctures between the struggle for voting rights and women’s entrance into formal party politics. See, for example, Nancy F. Cott, “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics before and after 1920,” in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 153-76; Paula Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York, 1870-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Melanie Susan Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854-1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

26. Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

27. For earlier work in this area, see, for example, Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

28. For a discussion of African American women’s rhetoric about black male voters in making leadership and partisan claims, see White, Too Heavy a Load and Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race.

Materson and Trotter 133

29. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 155-56.

30. Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al. (2013); Eric H. Holder Jr., “A Breakthrough in the Discussion around Voting Restrictions,” Huffington Post, October 10, 2014, http://www.huff- ingtonpost.com/eric-h-holder-jr/gao-voting-restriction-report_b_5965014.html; Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), see chap. 10; Anderson, White Rage, 163-68; Matthew Murillo, “Did Voter Suppression Win President Trump the Election? The Decimation of the Voting Rights Act and the Importance of Section 5,” University of San Francisco Law Review 51 (2017): 608.

Author Biographies

Lisa G. Materson is an associate professor of history at the University of California at Davis. She is the author of For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (2009). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, the Women’s Studies International Forum, and the Radical History Review. She is a coeditor, with Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History. She is currently writing a political biography of Ruth Reynolds, a leading activist in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence.

Joe William Trotter, Jr. is Giant Eagle Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He also directs Carnegie Mellon’s Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE). His publications include Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh Since World War II (2010, with Jared Day); Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32 (1990); and Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (1985, 2007). In addition to a long-term project on African Americans in the urban Deep South, he is currently working on a synthesis of African American urban history since the Atlantic slave trade.

The New Woman and the Politics of the 1920S

Author(s): Lynn Dumenil

Source: OAH Magazine of History , Jul., 2007, Vol. 21, No. 3, Reinterpreting the 1920s (Jul., 2007), pp. 22-26

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians

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Lynn Dumenil

The New Woman and the Politics of the 1920s

The politics of the 1920s are often portrayed in fairly drab terms. Sandwiched between the more compelling eras of Progressivism and the New Deal, the decade seems comparatively uneventful

as Americans turned their backs on reform while conservative big business reigned over a "politics of normalcy." However, many scholars have challenged this stereotypical view of the eclipse of reform, and none more resoundingly than historians of American women. Conventional textbook treatment usually includes a brief mention of the passage of the women's suffrage amendment in 1920 and perhaps a discussion of the "new woman" embodied in one

of the most pervasive icons of the decade, the flapper. A more in-depth analysis, however, that includes changes in the family and sexual mores, women's participation in the work force, and the political activism of these newly enfranchised citizens, offers a vehicle for broadening our understanding of the social, economic, and political developments of the era. This essay on women and politics focuses on African American and white women's efforts to expand their political influence once enfranchised. Their activism illustrates women's role

in developing political pressure groups in the early twentieth century and demonstrates both the continuation of reform?and

its limits?in the so-called "jazz age" (1).

It should not be surprising

Three suffragists casting votes in New York City, 1917. The accompanying caption read, "Calm about it. At Fifty-sixth and Lexington Avenue, the women voters showed no ignorance or trepidation, but cast their ballots in a businesslike way that bespoke study of suffrage." (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-75334.)

that women activists would play an important role in the effort to keep the Progressive Era reform spirit alive in the 1920s. In the suffrage campaign's last stages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women's demand for the vote had been intertwined with the ferment for social justice. The practical uses of the vote attracted both upper and middle-class white and black reformers as well as working class women to the campaign.

Although a broad group of women supported the suffrage campaigns, they were far from united. With few exceptions, black women were excluded from the white-dominated suffrage groups. Racism, as well as a fear that black participation in the movement would confirm southern perceptions that expanding the suffrage to women would disrupt well-established black disenfranchisement in that region, led white suffragists to rebuff black women's overtures at cooperation.

White women themselves were divided, especially after Alice Paul formed the Congressional Union in 1914. This group, the members of which tended to be young and radical, launched a campaign for a national suffrage amendment and broke with the more conservative National

American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA), directed by Carrie Chapman Cart, which had focused on a state by state approach to enfranchisement. Congressional Union members picketed the White House during World War I to protest that while the country fought a war for democracy abroad it denied women their democratic

rights at home. Distressed by such militant tactics, NAWSA leaders continued their more

moderate campaigns in which they emphasized women's

wartime service to the country. This uneasy alliance of a wide variety of women, using different tactics, finally over came determined opposition,

and in 1920 the federal amend ment passed, extending the vote to women throughout the nation.

White women leaders entered the new decade with optimism about their newly enlarged public responsibilities. As they sought to expand their political influence, they debated among themselves as to how, and whether, they should act within the Democratic and Republican parties. Because suffragists had claimed that women were unsullied by the corruption of political parties, many now had grave reservations

22 OAH Magazine of History July 2007

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To encourage voter registration, members of the Cincinnati League of Women Voters prominently display the results of their efforts on a downtown billboard, 1926. (Image courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-14420.)

about working within the established party system. Indeed, the League of Women Voters (1920), the successor organization of NAWSA, was established as a nonpartisan group that urged women's active citizenship rather than the support of a particular political party or specific candidates. Some former suffragists followed Alice Paul's lead into the National Woman's Party (NWP), which became a single issue organization that after 1923 focused exclusively on an equal rights amendment to build on the success of constitutional enfranchisement.

Others attempted to exert influence within the Republican and Democratic parties. While many progressive women reformers had long been connected to the reformist wing of the Republican Party, some now began to support the Democrats, attracted by the urban liberalism that was emerging in the party in New York state.

In 1920, both Democrats and Republicans recognized women's issues in their platforms, presumably taking women at their word that they would use their combined votes as a powerful political tool. They opened up places within the organizational structure of their parties for female members, although the positions granted were marginal in terms of power or influence. Women became officeholders as well; only a handful were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (a high of

seven in 1928), and none to the Senate, but hundreds served at the state level in legislatures and executive positions earmarked as women's jobs, such as secretary of education and secretary of state. Women

were more successful in local government, in part because many of these positions were nonpartisan and thus seemingly more in keeping with ideas that women should operate "above politics." Despite these inroads, female officeholders generally operated within the context of prevailing assumptions that women should keep to women's issues, or "municipal housekeeping," the same assumption that limited their ability to wield much power within their political parties. As the New York Time's magazine, Current History, summed it up, "Where there is dignity of office but little else, or where there is routine work, little glory, and low pay, men prove willing to admit women to an equal share in the spoils of office" (2).

Although one focus of white activist women's energies centered specifically on breaking down the barriers to their participation in partisan politics, equally important was the determination to use their new political clout to continue the reforms of the Progressive era. Scholars term the approach of these women "maternalism," a fluid concept that usually refers to the idea that women's nurturing roles in

OAH Magazine of History July 2007 23

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the home could be brought into the public arena to implement social reforms, especially those concerning poor women and children. In the 1920s, white women continued what had begun in the Progressive era: a women's "dominion of reform," of interlocking groups of women who lobbied successfully for mothers' pensions for impoverished dependent women, education and industrial reform, wage and hour laws for working women, a wide range of child health programs on the state level, as well as a broad extension of women's legal rights (3).

The lobbying efforts of these women underline the importance of women activists in pioneering twentieth-century interest group politics (4). Progressive era women activists had worked mostly at the state level, but this changed in the 1920s. An astute recognition of the growing importance of national associations' lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C. led fourteen women's organizations to form the Women Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), with the goal of promoting federal legislation backed by the member organizations. National leaders

mobilized women's groups throughout the country as they passionately advocated for the Child Labor Amendment?after the Supreme Court invalidated a second national child labor law in 1921. Although that effort ultimately failed, the women's lobby saw an early success in the federal Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which gave matching federal funds to states to provide health care and other services for mothers and children.

Women's groups also lobbied on behalf of disarmament and the peace movement. A number of organizations, such as the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League, and the General Federation of Women's clubs, coordinated a drive to put pressure on President Warren Harding to support disarmament Their lobbying was a decisive factor in the convening of the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament in 1922, although women were disappointed that more was not accomplished. Later in the decade, it was again

women's groups, especially the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, that led the way in securing U.S. support for the Kellogg Briand Peace Pact of 1928 that countered isolationist sentiments to renounce war "as an instrument of national policy" (5).

Yet, as was the case with their entry into partisan politics, women activists had limited success in lobbying. Although many states had

Colored Women Voter Leagues were formed in several southern states to help both women and men qualify as voters, ca.1919-1920. (Image courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Re search in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenoz and Tilden Foundations).

passed laws extending women's legal rights and implementing social reforms, by the end of the decade, progress had slowed. Women were particularly discouraged by the failure of the effort to get a child labor amendment through Congress. Indeed, most national legislation supported by women lobbyists was unsuccessful. Congress successively cut the Sheppard-Towner Acf s appropriations and finally ended the program in 1929. By the end of the decade, many women activists were frustrated because, while both political parties seemed eager to woo the woman's vote by making rhetorical appeals to women's role as homemaker, they paid significantly less attention to the specific reforms demanded by the "women's lobby" (6).

Moreover, the women's rights movement itself was in shambles, with white women divided among themselves as to tactics and goals. Ironically, the problems hindering a sustained feminist movement to some extent grew out of the success of the suffrage battle. Before national suffrage was achieved, a great many women?equally excluded from this basic right of citizenship?could come under the same umbrella of "votes for women." Once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the

lines that divided women?class, race, age, ideology?became more significant. By gaining the individual right they had so vigorously sought, they laid the groundwork for the fracturing of female communities. As one activist ruefully put it in 1923, "The American woman's movement, and her interest in great moral and social questions, is splintered into a hundred fragments under as many warring leaders" (7).

This fragmentation was particularly evident in the ferocious debate over the NWP's proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which stated that, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." Under the leadership of Alice Paul, the NWP focused so exclusively on the ERA as a means of achieving the political and economic equality that the newly coined term feminism soon came to refer exclusively to their specific agenda.

Women interested in broader social reform, especially the sex-specific labor laws that they had worked so hard to achieve for working women in the states, were alarmed at this "blanket amendment," which they feared would undermine labor protection for women.

Another serious issue that hampered women's efforts in behalf of reform was the white racism and indifference that limited black and

white women activists' ability to work together. African American women hoped that suffrage would allow them to address issues such as Jim Crow, lynching, male disenfranchisement, the sexual abuse of black women, and economic discrimination, goals that underlined their view that the elevation of black women was inseparable from racial progress. Even before the suffrage amendment passed, African American

women's organizations had embarked on voter registration campaigns in states that had given women the vote. After the amendment was ratified, black women redoubled their efforts, focusing especially on the South, where the majority of blacks still lived. White southern ers, however, resisted black female registration through official channels that had been used since the late nineteenth century to deny suffrage to black men?tax qualifications, educational tests, grandfather clauses, and harassment.

Black women, through the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), assisted by the NAACP, fought back. They assembled evidence in behalf of the Tinkham bill, designed

24 OAH Magazine of History July 2007

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Nina Oter-Warren (left) of Santa Fe campaigned for the U.S. House of Represen tatives in 1922 after making sure New Mexico ratified the suffrage amendment. The widely respected Latina Republican won over 49,000 votes. (Image courtesy the New Mexico State Archives, Bergere Collection, #21252).

to reduce congressional representation of states that restricted women's suffrage. When this tactic failed, black women approached white women's organizations to elicit some support for enforcing the Nineteenth Amendment. But neither the League of Women Voters, nor the NWP was willing to support the antidisfranchisement efforts of black women voters in the South.

Black women had one advantage over white women: they were all concentrated in a single party, the Republican. But even here, in the Republican party, which could have used their votes, they met with frustration. In the states outside the South, they organized "Republican Clubs" to support the candidates of the party of Lincoln and Radical Reconstruction. And in 1924 they created the National League of Republican Colored Women (NLRCW), with the slogan, "We are in politics to stay and we shall be a stay in politics" (8). Initially the GOP was attentive to black women leaders, inviting them to their first national conference of women leaders, where the NLRCW president, Nannie Burroughs, spoke. The white feminist Ruth Hanna McCormick drew on black women's support in her futile effort to move from the House of Representatives to the Senate in 1928. But while the Republicans offered symbolic nods to black voters' issues, by 1929, African Americans were beginning to feel disillusionment with Hoover's and the Republicans' lack of concern for the problems facing black Americans in the context of the depression. Black men

and women still gave their votes to the Republicans in 1932, but by 1934 a shift toward the Democrats was clear. The networks that African

American women had created in the 1920s became a mainstay of black political organizing in the 1930s. Now, however, that organizing was increasingly in support of the Democrats, as blacks became a part of the urban liberal coalition that was reshaping the Democratic Party.

While the difficulties all women reformers faced arose in part from women's disunity, the underlying problem was the decade's overall conservative political climate. Observers in the 1920s, citing declining voter participation during the decade (roughly half of those eligible voted), assumed that women's nonvoting accounted for the decline.

With only sparse data of voting by sex available, many historians have echoed this assumption. More recent studies, however, maintain that women's participation in elections varied significantly by location and by election. Women in states that had only recently enfranchised them seemed less likely to vote than those living in states such as California where they had longer experience with the electoral process. What is most interesting is that men's voting decreased in this period as well, following a long-standing trend of declining engagement in partisan politics. Jane Addams ruefully commented in 1924 that the question should not be "Is Woman Suffrage Failing?", but rather, "is suffrage failing?" (9). Both men and women were not voting in large numbers, which points to a political climate of disaffected or disinterested citizenry; and it is this broader context of American politics, not women's failures as voters, that offers the most compelling explanation for the difficulties women reformers faced (10).

A related problem was a political climate hostile to reform that made it impossible to sustain the prewar enthusiasm for progressive measures. On the national scene, the Republicans, now largely divested of their progressive elements, dominated the White House and Congress, and, reflecting in part the parties' ties to corporate business interests, resisted efforts to expand federal regulatory powers or raise taxes to pay for social welfare legislation. The Prohibition amendment ratified in 1919 further increased many Americans' wariness of intrusive social reforms. Prohibition met with vigorous opposition.

Many Americans resented and circumvented the law and others worried that the ineffectual effort to control alcohol consumption had fostered contempt for law. That women reformers were so closely associated with the controversial amendment surely fueled hostility to the social reforms women activists promoted in the 1920s. Finally, the widening prosperity of the period may well have influenced many Americans to turn toward new consumer and leisure pleasures and away from political engagement and concern for the nation's poor.

Perhaps most damaging to reform and especially women's part in it was the "Red Scare" of 1919 to 1921. Prompted initially by American fear of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the revolutionary ambitions of the fledgling Communist Party in the United States to topple this nation's government, Americans succumbed to a hysteria in which wild-eyed Bolsheviks seemed to be lurking around every corner. The Red Scare quickly expanded to target a wide range of people and associations deemed "un-American," and led to the deportation of "suspicious" immigrants, the suppression of the labor movement, and

massive violations of civil liberties. It also helped to fuel the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan, an organization opposed to immigrants, Catholics, Jews and blacks, that achieved significant popularity and influence in the early 1920s. Finally, the Red Scare contributed to the passage of restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s and in addition became a weapon for opponents of reform legislation, who could now argue that efforts to increase government's role in regulating the economy or protecting workers and the poor would lead American down the same path as Russia.

OAH Magazine of History July 2007 25

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Red Scare hysteria particularly focused on a number of women's groups, including those in the Women's Joint Congressional Committee and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which they claimed were spreading Bolshevism in the United States. Jane Addams, in particular, came in for forceful criticism. Attempts by opponents to discredit women reformers with claims that they were Bolsheviks points to a further dilemma facing women activists. Preeminent among the opponents of reform were right-wing women's organizations. The

Women Sentinels of the Republic was a small but vocal group that opposed social reform as the forerunner of Bolshevism. The Daughters of the American Revolution, initially interested in women's social reform efforts, had by mid-decade also taken up the antiradical hysteria.

Women in an auxiliary of the all-male Ku Klux Klan supported some reforms like Prohibition, but like other right-wing women's groups promoted what was called "one-hundred percent Americanism," and were suspicious of the liberal goals of the white women's lobby and hostile to black women's demands for equal citizenship.

With these counterpressures, then, it is not surprising that the reform agenda of women's groups stalled in the nation's capitol and it is impressive that women activists accomplished as much as they did on the local and state level. In the process, they helped keep the reform spirit alive, if not well. Black women created and sustained organizational efforts that would give them more political influence in the 1930s, and white women developed lobbying skills that would serve as a crucial bridge to the social welfare reforms of the 1930s introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelf s New Deal. Q

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Endnotes i. For further discussion of the "New Woman" in the 1920s and bibliographic

resources, see Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 10.20s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 98-144, 321-25.

2. Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 69.

3. On the maternalist reforms and organized women, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

4. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 97.

5. Rhodri Jeffreys-J ones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917-1994 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 32-34.

6. Anna L. Harvey, Votes without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104-135.

7. Brown, Setting a Course, 50. 8. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the

1920s," in African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 144.

9. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 102. 10. Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics

before the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 104-108, 318-19.

Lynn Dumenil is Robert Glass Cleland Professor of American History at Occidental College. She is the author of 'The Modern Temper American Culture and Society in the 1920s; Freemasonry and American Culture 1880-1930 and coauthor of Through Women's Eyes: An American His tory with Documents. She is currently working on a study of American women during World War L

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