The Scarlet Sisters (22 page)

To the man Marx had appointed watchdog over the IWA’s sections, a German immigrant named Friedrich Sorge, the sisters’ cadre disrupted his single-minded goal to organize white male trade unions. Sorge devoted himself to undermining and discrediting the sisters’ section, appalled at their fight for working women and blacks. “The battle for the soul of the American International was waged over section 12,” wrote Marxist historian Timothy Messer-Kruse.

Like many American reformers in 1871, the sisters were propelled into action after the battle that crushed the Paris Commune in May. Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Paris workers rebelled against the new Third French Republic, formed under humiliating peace terms. Monarchist leaders of the Republic fled Paris, and workers and socialists elected the Paris Commune as an independent government. The Communards called for labor reforms, separation of church and state, and free education for all, with emphasis on girls’ schools, since women had been so deprived of education.

On March 26, 1871, French workers cheered as the socialist red flag waved atop the Tuileries Palace. The Commune lasted less than three months against the army of the Third French Republic. Communard cannons were set amid barricades made from cobblestones and mattresses,
some on the steep hills of Montmartre. The last barricades were smashed during the “Bloody Week” massacre beginning May 18. Immediate executions, death in prisons, and exile followed. “An orgy of killing took place. Many innocent were killed,” mistaken for Communards, including chimney sweeps “on the assumption that their hands had been blackened by gunpowder.” In two prisons, some 2,300 were said to be shot in two days. As reprisals continued, even anti-Communard newspapers implored “Let us kill no more!”

Some 25,000 Communards were allegedly killed, another 6,000 were executed or died in prison, and 7,500 were exiled.

In the aftermath, the question of wages, hours, equity, and poverty were fervently discussed on both sides of the Atlantic. The establishment press routinely portrayed the workers who declared their independence from the Versailles government as rampaging, murderous mobs. But former abolitionist, Spiritualist, and other radical papers supported the Commune. Here Tilton and Woodhull were politically aligned; his
Golden Age
magazine supported the Communards, as did the
Weekly
. In December of 1871, Tilton and the sisters were among thousands marching in a mock funeral parade to honor the French workers massacred in Paris that May. The sisters, as always, were newsworthy. The parade came a month after Woodhull’s “I Am a Free Lover” speech, and she was even more in demand as a celebrity.

Curious bystanders turned out in record numbers, shoving close to marchers, climbing trees and lampposts, and leaning out of windows all along the two-and-a-half-mile route. A majority of newspapers surprisingly treated the procession with respect, as did the spectators, praising the Skidmore Guards, a “magnificently uniformed” black military band. Even the Fifth Avenue rich tumbled out of hotels and clubs to watch, surprising the procession by cheering heartily; out of respect, the prestigious Manhattan Club lowered the American flag to half-mast. However, preliminary scuffling with a Zouave band, which refused “to march in front of the ‘niggers,’ ” held up the parade. Leaders eventually forged a compromise with honor guards and an American flag carrier placed between the two bands. During the delay, as the sisters waited in the street, gangs cornered them,
jostling and badgering them with cries of “Which is Tennie?” “Lor’ ain’t she homely?” “Let me through, I’m a free lover.” Each jeer was greeted with uproarious laughter. No police came to the sisters’ aid. The two women bravely stood their ground, and Andrews and Blood “exerted themselves like Trojans to prevent their fair charge from being squeezed to death.”

As the marchers turned onto Broadway, huge cheers for the women surpassed any of the day. All the spectators stared at Victoria and Tennie. Marching in front, the sisters wore matching dark blue jackets “cut tight to the figure, black dresses, white collars, Alpine hats and each wore a broad crimson scarf.” Tennie led the women’s group, carrying a heavy red flag on which was written
I.W.A. SECTION 12, COMPLETE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EQUALITY FOR BOTH SEXES
, although the weight was so much that she had to give up the banner after walking a half mile. Victoria walked behind her sister, but for a portion of the parade she rode in a carriage at the rear. The
World
praised the IWA for honoring the martyrs of a “great idea,” and noted their banner:
THE WORLD IS OUR COUNTRY—TO DO GOOD OUR RELIGION
.

Meanwhile, Henry Ward Beecher used the parade and the IWA’s eight-hour-day battle to hector the working poor from the pulpit. Fewer hours would tend “to make men feel that work is not a good thing… hard knocks, and a good many of them” were the only way to “carve out independent fortunes.” Beecher admitted that underpaid workers could not make enough in an eight-hour day to advance from their lowly state at their present pay, but he neglected to denounce the owners who paid them so poorly. Working longer hours was his Christian solution.

In February 1872, Victoria gave a rabble-rousing “Impending Revolution” speech in the hall she loved the most (for its fine acoustics), the Academy of Music. She could be heard in every corner, with little strain on her voice. No longer Wall Street darlings, the sisters were now causing capitalists to shudder at their message as they declared a pox on high finance and the corruption that went with it, untrammeled by laws, and the exploitation of the many for the wealth of the few. And the masses came to listen.
An estimated twelve thousand showed up—and six thousand were able to push into the hall for Victoria’s denunciation of capitalist power.

Most New York newspapers used such phrases as “motley crew” to describe the immense audience, and infuriated Woodhull by concentrating on the mob scene and not the content of her speech. She now larded her messages with passages from the Bible, preaching that her view was not antagonistic to religion and arguing that Jesus was a beneficent socialist (a point made by modern liberation theologists). The sisters’ pointed message was that Christ “commanded the rich to ‘go sell all thou hast and give to the poor,’ ” but their biblical interpretations did not sit well with wealthy church brethren.

The red meat that had her audience cheering for more came when Woodhull attacked individual capitalists. This resulted in a counterattack from the pro-capitalist
New York Times
. “It is a crime for a single person to steal a dollar,” she said, her face flushing with enthusiasm, “but a corporation may steal a million dollars, and be canonized as saints. Oh, the stupid blindness of this people! Swindled every day before their very eyes, and yet they don’t seem to know that there is everything wrong, simply because no law has been violated.”

She even attacked a hand that had once fed her. “A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks, or make dividends, by which, in a few years, he amasses fifty million dollars… But if a poor, half-starved child were to take a loaf of bread from his cupboard, to prevent starvation, she would be sent first to the Tombs, and thence to Blackwell’s Island.” Woodhull took on William Backhouse Astor, Manhattan’s predominant slumlord: “An Astor may sit in his sumptuous apartments, and watch the property bequeathed him by his father, rise in value from one to fifty millions, and everybody bows before his immense power… But if a tenant of his, whose employer has discharged him because he did not vote the Republican ticket, and thereby fails to pay his month’s rent to Mr. Astor, the law sets him and his family into the street… and, whether he dies of cold or starvation, neither Mr. Astor or anybody else stops to ask.”

The
New York Times
editorial attacked her character: “Victoria C. Woodhull has been married rather more extensively than most matrons,
and hence it might be deemed inappropriate to style her a ‘foolish virgin’; but by her inconsequential method of reasoning, Mrs. Woodhull closely resembles them.” As a person, she was of “no possible consequence” and her presidential candidacy a “feeble travesty.” However, her “Communist fanaticism” and “hostility to accepted social morality” could inflame the “hostility of the poor to the rich” and foster “the conviction that capitalists have no rights which working men are bound to accept.”

The editorial incorrectly slammed her for omitting Vanderbilt “among her rich oppressors of the poor. Mr. Stewart [owner of Lord & Taylor], she asserts, has no right to his wealth, because he never produced a dollar of it by his own physical labor; and Mr. Astor, who received his fortune by inheritance, is even a worse criminal.” Woodhull should be asked “upon what title her own claim to hold property, wear dresses, and accumulate jewels and chignons rests… she does not profess to have earned them by manual labor… has she a right to receive the proceeds of a newspaper which she does not write and bank which she does not conduct, if Mr. Stewart has no right to the revenues of a business which he has created and continues to manage?” If “Mr. Astor should surrender his houses to the carpenters who built them, and Mr. Stewart his goods to the shopmen who sell them, by all means let them also insist that Mrs. Woodhull… should be consistent and heave her best black silk and her jaunty sealskin jacket, her diamond rings and her golden necklaces, her dainty high-heeled boots, and her most cherished chignons” into a bonfire. “She ought to consent to mingle a little consistency of action with her rhetorical malice, and her mendacious abuse of men who have made her no presents.”

This sneer about “presents” was of course aimed at the sisters’ Vanderbilt connection. The
Times
refused to print Woodhull’s response, citing the press of other news. She was forced to print it in the
Weekly
, first attacking the
Times
for its incorrect statement regarding Vanderbilt. She challenged the newspaper to deny her point about Stewart’s poverty wages; his underpaid sewing women were building his fortune by “coining their blood into money, drop by drop, stitch by stitch to pay for it.” Tackling railroad “kings,” Woodhull condemned “a system of law which will permit them to ‘water’ their stocks… the
Times
would have the people continue to think… that the laws which permit such thieving are just and right… A single line of railroad leading from this city to Chicago, takes from the people to pay dividends on fictitious stock, more money every year than Tammany has stolen from the city.”

As for the personal attack: “I see no comparison.” As she often did, here Victoria switched back and forth from first and third person, and this may well have been written by Andrews. “Mrs. Woodhull does not monopolize dresses, jewels, or chignons; since of the first she only possesses sufficient to render her comfortable, while with the last two she has nothing to do.” Nor was there any similarity between her small enterprises and the tycoons she described: “When Mrs. Woodhull conducts her paper and bank under cover of legal contrivances, so that she shall enslave a million people and be enabled to tax the entire country, to increase her possessions from the common necessities of life to many millions more than her demands require, then the
Times
may consistently put her in comparison with Mr. Astor and Mr. Stewart.”

Meanwhile, Woodhull was being honored—if that could possibly be the word—in the Thomas Nast Hall of Infamy. The famous political cartoonist portrayed her as a demon titled “Mrs. Satan.” The ominously dark illustration shows Woodhull in the foreground, wearing horns and massive clawed bat wings, holding a sign that reads,
BE SAVED BY FREE LOVE
. She is looking back at a woman in rags, carrying a drunken husband and several children on her back. The trudging woman, stooped over by the weight, vows, “I would rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow in your footsteps.” Suffragists and free lovers saw the irony in the cartoon; such a terrible version of matrimony could hardly be an appealing alternative. The damaging tag of Mrs. Satan, however, stayed with Victoria far into the future.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Being Tennie

One evening after working at their brokerage firm, the two sisters entered famous Delmonico’s. They strode across the plush carpet, under the soft glow of gaslit chandeliers, sat at a damask-covered table, and ordered soup for two. The owner, who catered to money, old or new, and to celebrities, fair or foul, glided over. He bowed low enough to whisper that he would swiftly walk with them to the door so that other diners would think the sisters had merely come to have a business chat with him. Surely, he said to the sisters, they knew the rule: women were not allowed to dine without a male escort at night. Tennie jumped up and hurried out the door, and commanded to their coachman, “Come down off your box and come here.” She herded the embarrassed driver, in crimson coat and polished high boots, top hat plucked off his head, into the restaurant and sat him down.

“Soup for three,” she ordered.

This response was pure Tennie. As Victoria pushed her presidential campaign, Tennie acted like the younger sister who was no pretender to the throne: determinedly rebellious. Throughout 1871 and 1872, she kept a beaming smile, tossing her curls, flirting, and pushing her own political agenda. The sisters were such a force that the
New York Times
remarked sarcastically, “That there should be two such, jointly working at the same time, would surpass belief, did not the fact stare one in the face.”

Unlike most Victorian maidens, Tennie was easily at home with the saucy retort. When she experienced an uncomfortable railroad journey in France in 1874—there were no toilets on the train, which meant getting off and on at station stops—Tennie declared vehemently that, had she to travel longer in France, she would not stand for this at all; she would carry with her a large tin cup. With animated gestures that made others laugh, she said that she would fill it… and that at the first convenient chance she would toss the contents out the window. One of her fellow travelers said, “What I have known and seen of Tennie convinces me that she would have been as good as her word. Very good humored as a rule, she nevertheless was not a person to trifle with.”