The Scarlet Sisters (26 page)

When Victoria showed up with Tennie on her arm, both dressed in black silk, the smiling sisters were swarmed by hugging and kissing delegates, but Tennie “objects to kissing, and would not have it.” The night session was packed with delegates and the curious who had come to gawk. Woodhull, looking “extremely pretty,” prophesied, “From this convention will go forth a tide of revolution that shall sweep over the whole world.”

Woodhull waited until the roar of applause died down, then gave an hour-long firebrand speech, denouncing politicians and the U.S. Constitution. “Some may call this a revolution. Well, and if it does mean revolution what then? Shall we be slaves to escape revolution?” Her voice rising, she shouted, “I say, never! I say, away with such weak stupidity… let us have justice, though the heavens fall!” To tremendous applause and cheering, she called for a united movement to purge the country of “political trickery, despotic assumption and all industrial injustice.” A new constitution was needed to replace an inadequate, “blood-stained document.” In the din, a delegate jumped up and swiftly nominated Woodhull for president; this was followed by a five-minute standing ovation. The uproar was so great that crowds rushed in from the street. Rumors that Woodhull had fainted were quelled when she reappeared onstage. Her bosom heaving and her voice trembling, she said, “I thank you from the bottom of my soul for the honor you have conferred upon me tonight.”

The vice-presidential choice was not so unanimous. IWA delegate Moses Hull nominated Frederick Douglass. Thundering shouts of “No!” were followed by shouts of “Yes!” A delegate nominated a Native American named Spotted Tail, saying, “The Indians were here before the Negroes.” Some accounts said he used the word
nigger
. Another said if Douglass didn’t accept, they should nominate a “heathen Chinese.”

When Douglass was chosen, newspapers outdid themselves in derogatory headlines:
THE HIGHLY COLORED HUMAN TICKET
. The “venerable and colored” man coupled with the “young and painted creature in petticoats.” The
Philadelphia Inquirer
simply tagged the delegates “semi-lunatics.” Nothing could compare to a western paper, the
Guard
, which named Woodhull and Douglass
A SHAMELESS PROSTITUTE AND A NEGRO
. The racist New York
Pomeroy’s Democrat
drew Woodhull and Douglass as a pair of ugly minstrels, looking like distorted dolls with tiny legs, riding on two costume ponies, Douglass’s pitch-black face next to Woodhull’s grim white one.

However joyous the crowd, there was a general rush for the door when the house was asked to contribute to Woodhull’s campaign. In the land of the left-out radicals, there was little money to offer.

Male reporters and politicians viewed Victoria’s campaign as self-aggrandizing lunacy. Yet Woodhull earned a footnote in history as the first woman to be nominated for president, although her candidacy was stillborn. Her name was not on the ballot, but a few states wrote it in. If by some fluke she had won, she would have been ineligible because she would not have reached the constitutionally mandated age of thirty-five. In her quixotic and symbolic quest, Woodhull had hoped to gain attention and support for her equality-based coalition in a time of dissatisfaction with the two major political party candidates.

No group was more discouraged than NWSA suffragists, who had hoped to throw clout behind the best major candidate but had found little to praise in either. The race was indeed a mess. Republican president Grant was faced with a rebellion, albeit ineffective, when a group calling themselves Liberal Republicans defected and backed Horace Greeley on
the Democratic Party ticket. The
Tribune
’s Greeley was pummeled by the press for his “shameless and corrupt bargain” to head this hybrid ticket. The women’s movement had no horse in the race.

Anthony must have been furious when the NWSA convention, held the same day as Woodhull’s, took second billing in all the newspapers. But Woodhull and the NWSA were at least in alignment regarding Greeley; the sisters had loathed him for not supporting suffrage and for his repeated attacks on them. Woodhull called him “this pettifogging pretender to honest journalism.” At the NWSA convention, Isabella Beecher Hooker scathingly attacked him, stating, “He has no backbone. When he gets into a pinch he always backs out… He has stamped upon us.”

The Republican convention in Philadelphia did not endorse suffrage, but the platform added a weak plank recognizing that “the honest demands of any class of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration.” As tame as this was, the reference was the first to women in any major party platform. Wit intact, Stanton referred to the Republicans’ women’s plank as the “Philadelphia Splinter” whittled to a “toothpick.”

ACT FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Down and Out in Manhattan

Victoria’s glorious moment in June of 1872 as the first woman nominated for president of the United States was simply that, a moment. The house of cards propping up the sisters and hiding their financial vulnerability was collapsing. To conserve money, the
Weekly
moved into cheaper brokerage quarters at 48 Broad Street. Their firm was failing. Their high-risk gamble of speculating in gold on margin, which Tennie had touted, was disastrous in a volatile gold market. The firm had been “guessing wrong more often than right,” and clients closed out their accounts.

Woodhull’s Equal Rights Party had no money to fuel a campaign. She tried selling bonds, but few of her “oppressed” followers could afford to buy them. In a long-winded
Weekly
article, she thanked the party for nominating a duo representing America’s “two oppressed and repressed classes” but did not tell her readers that Douglass had never responded to the party’s nomination. Douglass seemed to have no interest in joining this radical group, but at the time the nominations were ratified, on June 15, Douglass was also preoccupied by a “very grievous loss.” On June 2, his Rochester home was burned to the ground (arson was suspected but not proved). His family was safe, but twelve volumes of his writing were “devoured in flames.” Crucial years of antislavery history, from 1848 to 1860, were destroyed. “The loss is immeasurable,” wrote Douglass. In the fall, he was stumping for Grant, not Woodhull.

As if to solidify the oppressed and repressed nature of the party, the Grand Opera House in New York barred them from holding their June ratification meeting following the nominating convention. After accepting payment for its rental, the Opera House decided that the party’s class of people “would damage the house irreparably.” Damaging its reputation was an absurdity; the house was the massive marble edifice built by Jim Fisk and still owned by his former partner, Jay Gould, of the rapacious Erie Ring. Woodhull charged that barring her was the work of “Greeleyites,” and vowed a “day of reckoning.” The party members followed the sisters to the Cooper Institute and boisterously ratified the nomination.

Back in the winter, the
Weekly
had wittily protested violation of the separation of church and state by religious groups that wanted to put God in the Constitution. “We have no evidence that God has any desire to get into the Constitution, nor yet that it should be agreeable to either of the remaining members of the trinity… badly as the constitution needs improvement, we don’t think this movement is of that character.” Now, in the summer, the sisters had a candidate to ridicule on the God front. Greeley’s vice-presidential running mate, B. Gratz Brown, called for overthrowing “civil and religious liberty” by “incorporating the name of God in the United States constitution.” Like many politicians, Woodhull mentioned God in speeches, but was appalled by this, especially at the proposed wording that exalted “a Christian nation.” The
Weekly
attacked: “The free-thinking German, the Jew, the materialist, the Atheist have equal rights with Christians under our present constitution, but Brown would rob them of civil and religious liberty.”

Woodhull was also furious at Tilton for having left her side to support Greeley. Tilton was a turncoat who had deserted the women’s movement and was now “urging as a candidate the very man whom he had recently so severely castigated with his most caustic pen.” Greeley “denounces the greatest of all reforms—the enfranchisement of women.”

By June, the
Weekly
had increasingly taken on a beleaguered tone. The paper counterattacked when Lucy Stone argued that Woodhull had lost
the battle for suffragist supremacy. “We hope the suffragists have got rid of the Free Love incubus which has done incalculable harm to the cause of woman Suffrage,” said Stone, adding, “Women, like men, are ‘known by the company they keep.’ ” The
Weekly
mused, “How can Lucy Stone ever again claim to be an honest, truthful woman” after her “barefaced attempt to misrepresent” the Equal Rights convention and Woodhull?

During the 1872 general election, Anthony practically begged Stone to join ranks with her at a public meeting so the world could see a united women’s suffrage movement. When Stone did not, that was the last straw for Anthony. She and Stanton had nothing to do with Stone’s AWSA until the two groups united in 1890.

For the sisters, wrangling with Stone was a mere flea bite compared to what they faced in their personal and professional lives. They were now desperate for money, jilted by capitalists and Communists alike. Their anticapitalist winter speeches signified the public demise of their Vanderbilt connection, which had ended privately well before, after Tennie broadcast during the Claflin family feud trial that she had “humbugged” Vanderbilt for money. The sisters’ continued feeble attempts to cite his influence in the
Weekly
were just window dressing. Without Vanderbilt, Wall Street support had long vanished.

Still popular with laborers, who cheered their speeches, the sisters lost favor with Marx, who saw their egalitarian inclusion of women, blacks, and democratic freedoms destructively at odds with his ideology. It did not matter that the
Weekly
had reprinted a thousand copies of Marx’s treatise on the Paris Commune, an interview with Marx, and
The Communist Manifesto
. Nor did he consider their devoted support of wage reform, the eight-hour workday, and strikes. Free love, women’s suffrage, and a call for a universal language—Stephen Pearl Andrews’s mystifying contribution—were all just too much for him. The end of the sisters’ Section 12 of the International Workingmen’s Association came at the IWA’s international convention in the Hague, in June 1872, when Marx refused to recognize their delegate. Pausing to adjust his monocle, Marx leveled assaults at Woodhull as the “president of the spiritists” [
sic
], and as
a “general humbug” who “preaches free love, has a banking business.” The sin of “bourgeoisie” thinking hung over Section 12, he said, adding that it “agitated especially for the women’s franchise” and talked of “personal liberty, social liberty [free love].” He demanded the section’s immediate expulsion, calling its members “riffraff.”

While some Marxist historians blame the sisters and their eclectic makeup for causing the American IWA’s downfall, others fault Marx. He did not see the “great potential of the Yankees to adapt the International to their own situation and spread it among experienced American radicals,” wrote historian Timothy Messer-Kruse. Killing the sisters’ section spelled defeat for Marxist orthodoxy in America. “The tremendous gains” in recruitment made by the sisters came to a halt. “Yankee radicals simply had no reason to join an organization that was torn by faction and treachery” or follow a leader who did not hold their democratic values dear. The sisters finished Marx off in the
Weekly
, calling him a fallen despot.

Despite their inglorious end in the IWA, the sisters remain honored by liberal historians; they and Section 12 were considered to have “made greater strides toward bridging America’s racial divide than had any radical movement since abolitionism.” But for this, they paid a large price.

Publicity about Woodhull heading a “Red Party” with a “Negro” as a running mate, and Tennie’s honorary leadership of a black regiment, plagued them everywhere they tried to find housing. Temporary lodging in sister Meg Miles’s home was insufficient for Victoria, Tennie, Colonel Blood, Byron, and Zula Maud. The Hoffman House, where they had begun their glorious climb just two and a half years before, had now banned them. Under assumed names, they found rooms in Gilsey House, at the corner of Broadway and East Twenty-Ninth, but were soon recognized and asked to leave when four black lieutenants called to take Tennie for an inspection of the regiment. The manager told Tennie, “If you go off with those niggers you need never come back here.” Tennie turned around and jumped into the carriage. Later that afternoon, Victoria, Blood, and Tennie found Zula Maud and Byron standing on the sidewalk surrounded by luggage.

Victoria took aim at the hypocrisy: “We might have lived there as the mistress of any man; but we ought not to talk out loud in the halls and parlors about social reform. They told me that they admired us for the course we had taken, but to have it known that Woodhull and Claflin were living in the hotel would frighten away all their family boarders.”

Tennie was even stronger on the issue. “Hotels have virtually adopted the motto—‘best of accommodation for the worst of men, the best women not admitted.’ If however they are accompanied by any of the aforesaid men, no questions asked.” She and her family were evicted “because, forsooth, we hold social theories and have the courage to advocate them that do not quite suit the hypocritical pretenders to a virtue they do not possess, and because we publish a paper to advocate advanced ideas of reform.”

After the Gilsey eviction, the clan trooped to the brokerage firm, hoisted Zula over the transom, waited while she unlocked the door, and slept on the office floor. Even this shelter would be temporary. The landlord had upped the rent by $1,000 a year. Anguished, the sisters were forced to suspend the
Weekly
, and the campaign was abandoned.