The Scarlet Sisters (32 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Panic and Victory

Ever since Jay Cooke became known as the Union “savior” who had helped finance the Civil War, his banking firm was seen as the citadel for security in the world of finance, and Cooke himself was known as the Rothschild of America. Cooke was said to have “bought congressmen, bribed two vice-presidents, built churches” and helped penniless preachers; he “combined the qualities of money-getting, corruption, farsightedness and piety in such successful proportion that he was venerated by the public, feared by politicians, and considered by all the country’s leading banker.”

Unlike some of the very rich, Cooke had given generously to the poor, albeit from his fifty-three-room mansion that was light years away from the life of hod carriers, bricklayers, and domestics and from the slums of America’s cities. Everything ended—for Cooke, the middle and lower classes, and those at the very bottom—on Thursday, September 18, 1873. With tears in his eyes, Cooke gave the order. Customers were ushered out of his Wall Street branch. The massive bronze doors were bolted. The unbelievable had happened. Jay Cooke and Co. had gone bankrupt, precipitating a nationwide collapse.

The twenty-first-century financial disaster eerily echoed the causes of the 1873 crash—ungoverned and rampant real estate speculation, easy mortgages and lending, and bank failures. Corruption at the top had
caused credit to dry up and banks to go under. An epidemic of foreclosures followed, farms failed, factories closed, and thousands upon thousands of unemployed and homeless roamed the streets.

The failure of Jay Cooke and Co. “came like a thunderbolt.” Even Vanderbilt and Jay Gould were pressed to the wall. Henry Clews, the arrogant detractor of Tennie Claflin a few years before, closed his banking house. Men walked the Street with blanched faces, swearing, weeping, staring. As another of the “richest and soundest” banks went under, a run on the remaining banks ensued. This was not a “mere Wall Street panic but a nationwide collapse.” People hoarded greenbacks and the Cooke failure caused a “veritable paralysis” in several industrial regions. As the depth of the disaster began to register, the New York
Sun
attempted an analysis: Construction in railroads and housing had “been done on credit.” A prime example was the collapse of Cooke’s expensive gamble, the Northern Pacific Railroad.

The day after Cooke folded, brokers sloshed through heavy rain to the Exchange floor screaming, yelling, and running pell-mell in an attempt to sell, but no one was buying. Wall Street still hoped for a correction. Then, the next day, Saturday, the twentieth, for the first time in history, the New York Stock Exchange closed, and stayed closed for ten days, a financial disaster still unparalleled.

The sisters hurried back from Chicago’s Spiritualist meeting to a city marked by fear and terror. They had nothing to lose on Wall Street. Their brokerage firm had faded. They were living at sister Meg Miles’s crowded house in Manhattan, assembling the
Weekly
, surrounded by a bickering contingent of Claflins.

Despite their own financial straits, the sisters were invigorated, back on a mission, fired up by suffering laborers and the gross inequities between rich and poor. “We shall lift up our voices to advocate the rights of the ‘Lower Million’ against the Upper Ten!” was their proletariat battle cry. Underdogs all their life, they found their natural inclination surfacing. By December, 105,000 unemployed workers, about a quarter of New York City’s population, were roaming the streets. Exhausted charity
workers fed 7,000 a day, yet this was but a dent in the masses seeking food or shelter. The sisters strived to turn those statistics into people, to make their readers and audiences feel the suffering, printing stories that showed the city’s “terrible conditions.”

“The demand for shelter of really respectable-looking, deserving men, is so great,” wrote the
New York Herald
, which the sisters splashed on their pages. These were the newly down and out, not the usual handful of vagrants. Quiet, hardworking men presented themselves with cast-down eyes. Speaking of the fifty-eight hungry men crowded into the Fifteenth Precinct, the squad captain said, “There ain’t a man in this room but is willing to work and has tried hard to get it. Do you think they’d come here if they had any other place; no sir, they would not.”

“I walked the streets for four nights before I could bring myself down to come in here, but the cold and the want of clothing drove me to it at last,” sobbed one man. He had sold his possessions “one after another to keep the children together. Two or three of us married men club together what we squeeze out during the day to pay for a room for the women and children to sleep in… Where it is going to end, heaven only knows.” A younger man came in, having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours. A maker of paper boxes, he drew out of his pocket two crumpled letters of recommendation from bosses who themselves no longer had their jobs; showing them around to salvage some pride. “I’m willing to take a job at anything for anything, but I can’t get one.” An older man jumped up and said, “What chance have I to feed my five children, my mother and my wife against that young man!?… what am I to do? Lie down and starve, and see my children do the same thing? Great God! And in America!”

Such hunger, pain, and humiliation formed the basis of an angry Populist Party that surged briefly during this depression, which was the forerunner to the powerful turn-of-the-century socialist movement. The sisters once again found their voice and an audience—among restless laborers. The halls of New York had been “closed against us for nine months,” the two women shouted, but now “we shall lift up our voices to advocate the rights” of the poor against the rich and to thunder against
“the monopolies which starve the laboring class.” A
Weekly
ad promised that “Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin will both speak in the large hall of Cooper Institute on Friday evening, October 17.”

That night, “every available inch of room in the great hall of the Cooper Institute was occupied,” while hundreds more never got inside. The restless audience hissed and booed until the man giving an introduction gave up and turned the stage over to Woodhull; Tennie waited her turn nearby. A flushed Woodhull begged for the rowdy crowd to act like “ladies and gentlemen.” She stood alone, waiting for the prolonged applause to stop, dressed in her familiar lecturing outfit of a plain black dress with a single rose, this time red, pinned at her throat. For a change, she was almost no match for the crowd, some of them a heckling clique who had come to disrupt. She apologized for her voice, weak and husky from a cold. Everywhere in the country, people were crying, “Give me back our riches or we will take them,” she exclaimed. She preferred reform to revolution, but “if the former were denied,” she would use “all her influence to bring about the latter.” Applause and hisses followed. Woodhull gained strength, and soon she was mesmerizing the audience. She had named herself the “Queen of the Rostrum” and had her reputation as a major orator to uphold.

She attacked the fraud and corruption that were “everywhere,” the culmination of a rotten system of government. She recited a long list of charges against the government, and her audience shook the hall with the “violence of their applause” as she shouted that the “country is on the high road to a monarchy in which Grant would be Dictator.” She urged the audience to vote against every incumbent running, “for there was not one of them fit to pick out of the gutter.” Loud laughter followed with cries of “That’s so!”

Her pleas for starving children and women oppressed in marriages were impassioned, and at times she strode quickly back and forth on the stage as she kept up for an hour and a half. Woodhull flailed away at a perennial favorite, the press, which she said had already “tried to kill me, but was not able to do so.” The crowd loved this. Woodhull jumped into the need for prison reform; the system was a “disgrace.”

Although the sisters—Woodhull more than Claflin—spoke about
their own spiritual feelings and God, Victoria said to her agreeing audience that Christian platitudes did not help: “How many poor in New York who for the past twelve days had listened to the fervent utterances of the Evangelical Alliance would be able to purchase coal for the coming winter?” Again there was a storm of applause. The audience was so clearly for the downtrodden that it sympathized with poor women possibly forced into prostitution. Cheers broke out when Woodhull said that, rather than religious banality, she wanted to know how thousands of her “suffering sisters would be able to procure the necessaries of life without falling into vice” that could not be solved by their learning “the worn-out song of Christianity which had been sung for the last thousand years.” Except for throwing the rascals out, she offered few remedies to clean up government and business, only warning that if reform did not happen, revolution could result.

As Woodhull ended the lecture the applause was deafening, reminiscent of rowdy political conventions; no one was in the mood to quiet down. When Woodhull bowed, she quickly declared the meeting adjourned, cutting off her sister’s advertised speech. The audience clamored with shouts of “TENNIE!” But the disorder and shouting, along with Woodhull’s abrupt adjournment, gave Tennie no chance to get to the stage.

In the winter of 1873 and the early days of 1874, Woodhull took this show on the road to the Midwest. Her daughter, Zula, was her warm-up act. Woodhull no doubt thought that a child reading a noncontroversial poem would have audience appeal, and newspapers generally did refer to Zula favorably. Blood introduced mother and daughter. If Tennie was present, newspapers did not record any speeches by her.

Woodhull combined her speeches on the ills of government, corporate America, and organized Christianity with frank talk about the “social question,” mainly parental neglect in sexual matters. Papers throughout the country wrote how shocked audiences were that Woodhull was not the “coarse and rude” woman they had expected from what they had read about her. She still astounded many, to be sure, when “she launched
hot thunderbolts at the hypocrisies of priests, churches and law-makers.” Recognizing that Woodhull was “telling the truth” but “telling it far in advance of the readiness of the people to act upon it,” the
Republican
of Sparta, Wisconsin, nonetheless praised her for her courage, as did many other newspapers that championed free speech, although “we cannot subscribe to her doctrine.” This reporter had heard Stanton, Anthony, and Anna Dickinson, “but none of these can approach Mrs. Woodhull in the eloquence and the power of her oratory.”

Then, at one of her lectures, Woodhull announced that she must race back to New York. Challis’s libel suit was finally being tried.

Despite depression woes, or perhaps because of them, an overflowing crowd, many no doubt unemployed and seeking entertainment, mobbed the courtroom during the sisters’ eight-day trial in March 1874.

“The defense was conducted in magnificent style by Charlie Brooke,” remembered Benjamin Tucker, the young anarchist who claimed to have lost his virginity to Victoria and remained part of the Claflin family entourage. He took Victoria twice to Brooke’s home office for evening consultations as he prepped her for the courtroom. Brooke was a “dashing young Irish lawyer, who after making a reputation in Philadelphia, had transferred his practice to New York under the wing of Tammany Hall.”

When the sisters eagerly arrived in court, they learned that one of their bondsmen had withdrawn his security. After the first day of trial, without time to gather bail, they and Blood were once again locked up in the dank Tombs. Brooke gained sympathy when he argued that this showed “palpable oppression” and that he needed his clients free for consultation. The judge denied his request. After their second day locked up, there could be no mistaking the judge’s partisanship. When Brooke asked that bail be reduced, the judge refused.

After three nights in the Tombs, one of New York’s worst, rat-infested jails, Woodhull was called to testify. Stunned by her prison stay, she nervously burst into tears on the stand. She swore to the truth of the entire article and said she had published it to show that if women were ostracized or rebuked for their behavior, men should be as well. Loud applause
bolstered her and angered the judge, who tried to gavel them down several times before the crowd quieted. It was imperative to argue, as Brooke did, that the article’s facts were true and therefore not libelous. The sisters were extremely worried; many who had sworn they saw Challis with several women at the masked French Ball had run for cover and could not be found to testify. However, Brooke was able to establish that Challis had been at the bawdy ball, drinking wine in a box with several women.

Brooke needed to show that Challis was hardly the upright citizen his categorical denials purported him to be. Just as attorney Howe had tried in earlier court sessions, Brooke had to convince the jury that Challis was close enough to Tennie that she might have asked for money for her lecture, not as blackmail but as a gift from a rich friend. To that end, Meg Miles, the older Claflin sister, took the stand and was asked if Challis had come to the Woodhull residence so intoxicated that the family put him to bed, where he vomited on the bed and floor. The court ruled out the question, so that Miles was not able to answer. Displaying Claflin wiles, Miles passed by the jurors after her testimony and declared in a voice loud enough for them to hear: “I had to wipe up the vomit.”

Tennie swore on the stand that a letter with her signature asking for $200 for her lecture was genuine, but the other—which Challis vowed was a blackmail threat accompanying a page of her article—was a forgery, or “at the least was not sent by her nor by her authority.”

On the eighth day of the trial, as the judge instructed the jury, the nervous sisters stared intensely at the white males. While “the punishment for libel was comparatively trifling,” said the judge, he “considered that the present case… was of very great importance.” His instructions were dire regarding the sisters’ contention that their masked ball article had been written for the worthy cause of exposing hypocrisy. The judge told the jury that there was no way that its being published with “good motives” was a justifiable argument. After seven hours, the jury returned, still puzzled about the “good motives” argument. The judge practically ordered them to convict: “It would be absurd,” he said, to judge that something is
“not libelous because a person causing it to be published thought he had good motives.” The still-deliberating jurors were locked up for the night.