Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

friends. He first removed all the members who were not friendly to him.”

S

ENATOR VARE has only two gestures, apparently-throwing his hands wide apart in the air, or else tapping emphasis into a point by means of one finger which plays on your knee or your shoulder. He is tapping fast now.

"The Governor never complained of that list from May 18 to the day he went out of office. Then he handed me a certificate reading, 'On the face of the returns it appears,' and the rest of it. That form is a violation of the United States Senate rules as to such certificates, and Governor Pinchot knew it was. When I found out it was not in correct form, I wrote to Governor Fisher, who was kind enough to send me one in correct form, which the Senate accepted."

It is Vare, the fighter, who is talking now. His gray and weary face is flushed with interest. His words are sharply formed and crisply shot out at his listener.

"As I saw it then, I had one of two things to do; either go into an extensive letter-writing campaign to inform the voters of the issues, or else throw up my hands and say that it was no use to oppose the powers that be. I had only one county organized and another partly organized; the rest of the sixty-odd county organizations were definitely committed to Pepper or Pinchot. Governor Pinchot had a State-wide machine of possibly 50,000 office-holders which he had built up with great care. Senator Pepper had an organization of perhaps 25,000 from all his Federal patronage. The Mellon banking interests together with the power of the Treasury was against me. Mr. Joseph R. Grundy, the head of the Manufacturers Association of Pennsylvania, was also in the opposition."

As Vare names the list of his eminent foes in that campaign of 1926 he looks like something out of old tales of war; he becomes a stubby embodiment of the historical common man. Did you ever think of those snub-nosed Saxons who stuck it out in that last ditch at Hastings against the armored might of William the Conqueror? Or of those frowzy Scots, grooms and serving men, who closed together in a bitter ring of defiance when England's chivalry swept them down at Flodden Field? Or of those tattered, frost-bitten colonials at Valley Forge? Well, this man Vare is that sort of a sticker.

"So I had the law looked up as to primaries, etc. I was advised that Congress had nothing to do with primaries, as the Newberry case had shown, and that personal letter-writing was not in-, cluded in the expense total of $25,000 to which the candidate was limited. I was advised to limit my personal expenditures to letter-writing. So then I took up the question of letter-writing. I did this in order to get my platform before the people, and because by ordinary means it was not possible to do this.

"Letters cost about six to seven cents to get up and mail. If I had sent one letter to every voter in Pennsylvania, it would cost me over $200,000. So we used a picked list of voters."

It is worth noting that Mr. Vare said nothing whatever about his franking privilege as a Congressman. Very likely he never thought of it. Franks have been extensively used in such campaigns, and would have saved Vare $71,435.80 of his own money.

"How about that $50,000 that Cunningham said he contributed?"

"Don't bother about that. Let's get at something important. They attribute to my campaign all the rest of the odd $570,000 that was spent for the entire ticket. They might as well charge me with the $120,000 that were spent separately by the Beidleman-for-Governor Campaign Committee. The total of our funds, about $580,000 in all, was spent funds, about $580,000 in all, was spent for our entire ticket, and don't forget that. In a primary you are inside of the party. You must have a complete layout of candidates for your side, clear down to the last committeeman, so the local voters can vote for your local group. Because it is as members of the party that they are choosing between the groups which contest the primary election. Get that?"

o one listening to W. S. Vare will forget that he believes, absolutely, in the locality, the voter, and the party as the inseparable Big Three of our American politics.

"A great deal has been said about the $230,000 that was contributed by the State Campaign Committee for our entire ticket to the county committees. This criticism has picked especially on the fact that these contributions were in cash, and not by check. There was a reason for that. Time and again when we thought we had a county leader for our side in some section of the State information would leak out, pressure would be applied, and we would lose the

services of that man before he got started. Checks deposited in small local banks would have shown our plans, and we had to prevent this. I am not charging irregular practices, but I am saying that we were in a real fight, and that there wasn't anything soft about it. Besides, we accounted legally for every cent of these sums in our official report filed at Harrisburg under the Corrupt Practices Act."

Getting hold of the necessary money does not seem to bulk large in this man's mind. Doing the day's work as it comes along, the money comes also. His own or his friends. What does that signify? The use made of it is the issue.

"Besides, the other fellows spent a great deal more than we did. The money doesn't mean so much. Here are some facts that may interest you." The Senator was calling my attention to his figures:

[blocks in formation]

That money depends, however used, for its force and weight on organization, on the layout of your crowd, and their loyalty to you. Of his own crowd Mr. Vare is sure, absolutely.

"They talk a lot about having watchers, and say that when you pay a watcher you bribe a voter. Now the Pennsylvania law prescribes as to watchers and both parties have them. There were over 7,000 watchers for the opposition in this city alone. How much could you get away with at an election like that? If the watchers you hired were men you had to bribe to be on your side, how much watching would they do for you? Would anybody in their senses hire an enemy for their watchman? Most of the work in our campaign was not done for pay. We never paid a cent for a speaker."

[blocks in formation]

O`

Did They Know What They Wanted?

N election night of this year a group of some eighty enthusiastic women gathered in the New York Women's City Club. They were the leaders of a campaign ten years gone, the women who were responsible for the organization and the battles that won New York State, and thereby the Nation, to the cause of woman's suffrage.

Their mood was as gay as that of a college reunion. "The good old times" when they marched up and down the long New York avenues; when they besieged Albany with petitions, and used the 6 P.M. train as a dressing-room that they might be fresh, after all-day battering at legislators, to appear before metropolitan evening audiences; when they organized and staged the most magnificent pageants New York has ever seen; when they made speeches from soapboxes and automobiles; when they picketed every polling-place and climbed long stairs to talk to tenement-house dwellers of every nationality-these days were recalled with laughter and affection. All triumphs were rosy, all defeats matters for jest, now that the weary nerves and muscles and hearts were ten years healed.

Listening to them, one could have no doubt that these leaders "knew what they wanted" when they were pouring all their energy, their enthusiasm, their money, into the suffrage cause.

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

the vote had proved to be so surely the thing they had wanted-whether they whole-heartedly enjoyed being citizens, whether a free woman in real life was as care-free and buoyant a lady as their posters had painted her.

If you examine into what they said they wanted during those seventy-six long years of the campaigns, you will find everything ranging from the right to speak in public assembly to the right to control property and children. "Equal rights" was the cry that went forth from Seneca Falls in 1848, and the presumable end of the phrase was "with men."

B

UT that was too diffuse and complex a program to serve as an effective rallying-point. If you started out for one objective, you bumped up against another that must be obtained first, and gradually the whole thing sifted down in the mind of Susan B. Anthony, who for years carried the cause almost singlehanded, to a matter of the vote. If women could cast their ballots, then they could win a way through all the other chains and barriers.

So the vote became desirable as a means to power. As the years went on, and one woman after another bumped her nose and her self-respect against this barrier and that, it became a symbol of all the balked desires, the aspirations, the withheld masculine rights, the incoherent longings, and the chaotic clutchings of women. Like all symbols, it was the focus for a vast amount of emotion. It became the goal of prayer and hard work, the altar of faiths, hopes, and ambitions, the weapon with which woman was to purify the world. It was

a sort of feminine Holy Grail, into whose search was poured treasure, endless labor, and the subconscious hungers of thousands.

Never had there been such solidarity among women, never so vast an organization, never such fruitful lessons of mass action and team-work, in spite of individual differences of class, race, income, and social position. The suffrage campaign had the fervor of a revival meeting and the steady, organized power of a great machine.

With such a combination success was inevitable. New York State capitulated in 1917, and three years later women were by National Amendment granted the right to vote throughout the Nation.

And hand in hand with victory there began the disillusionment which is visible today wherever thoughtful veteran suffragists gather together to talk about themselves, their sisters, and politics. They have not accomplished what they expected to accomplish when, with tears and prayers and the singing of the "Doxology," they celebrated the winning of New York.

L

OOKING back from sane and unemotional 1927, it is easy to understand how disillusionment was inevitable. The achieving of the vote left a great machine with no place to go and nothing to do. There was the inescapable collapse of morale which follows on demobilization of forces. The energies so long compressed into this one channel flowed into a thousand different small streams. Few of the women had been politically minded. The rest considered victory a sufficient reason for dropping their temporary artificial interest in politics, and went off about the affairs for which the winning of the vote had freed them. So the aftermath of the most effective campaign ever carried on for a political end seems to some of the people who worked hardest for it sterility and disappointment.

If you ask suffrage leaders whether they are satisfied with what has hap pened since their cause was won, you may see a shade pass over their facesa tightening of the lips and an unrealized vision in the eyes. They say: "We

[blocks in formation]

knew it was only a means to an end. We knew that there was very little power in the individual ballot. We did not expect that the millennium would come when women were granted the right to vote."

They will not admit for publication that they are disappointed. They say: "Give us time. You must not expect miracles in ten years, nor even in twenty." They will cite as evidence of work done the Cable Bill, the SheppardTowner Infancy and Maternity Act, the Women's Bureau. They will mention specific instances of the removal of laws prejudiced against their sex. They will name four women in Congress and a hundred and twenty-two in State Legislatures, two who have been Governors, several in the mayors' chairs of small towns, one on the bench of a State Supreme Court.

the generals would like to write a code of behavior for her sisters.

Added to this is the irritating spectacle of the girls who came of age after their grandmothers, mothers, and elder sisters had won for them the right to vote. The ungrateful little things scarcely remember that there was a suf

frage campaign. frage campaign. They grew up to a world where voting was as normal as latchkeys or bobbed hair. They have no more instinctive reverence for Lucretia Mott and Anna Howard Shaw than they have for Thomas Jefferson or Oliver Cromwell. Very few of these young chits know or care any more about the organization of county politics or the duties of the National Government than do their brothers. And that to women who felt that their sisters would take an important hand in saving the world is high treason and a social crime.

BUT if you can persuade them in pri- suffrage was still a cause are perhaps

vate conversation to tell you what they really think of women, for whom they worked so many years, you will get a different picture. It is not only that the shouting has ceased and the banners have been put away. The women have not measured up to what their leaders Expected of them, and more than one of

The girls who were in college when suffrage was still a cause are perhaps even more unsatisfactory. One can be downright outraged with the flapper, but, after all, she is young and ignorant. Her older sister knew what it was all about, worked for the cause, paraded in all the dignity of her cap and gown. Yet she will not take her proper place in political life. She is bored, and uneasy,

and a bit rebellious. She knows that she ought to be interested in the thing for which her mother got nervous prostration and she sold yellow roses, but she finds continual harping on the vote a bit boring.

Part of the reason lies in the fact that she had, perhaps, a harder jolt than did the older leaders. She was young, and idealism caught her by the throat and swept her up until she felt like Joan of Arc. To her Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, Inez Milholland, were the most wonderful women in the world. However carefully they may have guarded their speech against exaggerated promises, they did give her the feeling that when women won the vote they would move the world whole leagues nearer to the heart's desire.

Then she found that no such thing happened. A ballot was only a single vote, and it wouldn't reform anything. Voting was a way of carrying on government; it wasn't a perfected means of expressing one's ideals of good citizenship. It wasn't a Holy Grail which glowed with ineffable light when one took it reverently from the shrine and carried it into the booth on election day. It was merely an artificial means of expressing a personal choice for a candidate whom one must take on faith or party promises. There was no more reason for getting excited about it than about a street car. Both of them were more or less unsatisfactory ways of getting somewhere, and of the two, the street car was much more certain to take one to one's destination.

[graphic]

I'

F the leaders find their children and grandchildren deserving only of a spanking, the young ones find their leaders hopelessly illogical. They fought for freedom, and they will not accept the consequences of their own victory. Short skirts, cigarettes, free speech-all these modern manifestations and many more are "shocking" to the women who gloried in shocking their day by unladylike parades and soap-box speeches.

They overturned the canons governing the public behavior of a lady and relegated that idol to the scrap-basket. Then, as soon as they won the specific thing for which they had fought, they constructed something they called "womanly" and bade their daughters conform. They demanded freedom of speech, but now they prefer that nothing be said which they do not think proper. They fought for freedom of movement, unhampered by the clinging weight of

[graphic][merged small]

Suffragists gathered on the Capitol steps in 1915 before presenting a petition signed by 4,000,000 women to President Wilson

heavy skirts, but now they object to the silk-clad legs of girls who obviously have achieved just that.

These mutual misunderstandings and recriminations are not merely a matter of conflict between age and youth, nor of the drift from radical to conservative. They go back to that fundamental confusion which began when the crinolined ladies of Seneca Falls started a campaign for equal rights, and found it had to be narrowed down to suffrage. They then worked for the right to cast a vote, but they kept on thinking and talking in terms of freedom. Their grandchildren glory in the freedom, but they find the ballot only a sheet of paper, to be used perhaps once a year.

After all, it is the normal thing in this democracy that an adult citizen should possess the right to vote. Only when he or she (and it took seventy-six years to add that second pronoun) is deprived of that right is there reason for a campaign of protest. Start to take it away from men, and you would arouse an instant and violent response. Business, traveling, inertia, may have kept them from voting for years; but tell them they can't, that they have been arbitrarily deprived of their ballots, and they would protest, raise a riot, go to law, hold indignation meetings and fiery parades

in short, behave much as women behaved for years.

N

ow that they have achieved the normal, many women are settling down to the same frame of mind. It was a movie star who gave crisp expression to that point of view. "In spite of the fact that I don't use it, suffrage means more to me than I can possibly put into words. It is a symbol of the freedom of women to do the thing that they have the inborn ability to do, instead of being forced to follow outside orders. I wouldn't give it up for anything. And if they tried to take it away from me I'd fight!"

The question which always comes up in a discussion of this sort, "What will women do next, now that they have the vote?" would be difficult enough if it concerned only the fairly homogeneous group which fought for suffrage. Even they are no longer bound together by any common cause. They have not all voted for child welfare laws, for prohibition, for protective legislation, for reform candidates. Some of them are working for world peace, some for National and international organizations, some in their own individual jobs.

Add to them the unassorted thousands who had no close-knit suffrage back

ground, and the question becomes as impossible of a single answer as "What about the next war?" or "What will be the next parlor game?"

Yet there are certain discernible trends. The passion for organization, for example, which foreigners find native to this country, is in full tide. Women have some twenty great National organizations, outside of those which are strictly religious or fraternal. They have ten to twelve million members. Their purposes are high and publicspirited, having to do with the welfarespiritual, political, moral, economic-of the community.

It begins to look as though there were

not much left of the old superstition that women did not like to associate with women. They are building great club-houses all over the country, where "the crowd" can meet for a lecture, bridge, swimming, a dance, or a conference. The West leads in magnificence. Los Angeles has a Women's Athletic Club which cost a million and a half, is equipped with the last word in gymnasium, swimming-pool, bedrooms, and dining facilities, and goes in for tropical beauty as well as for physical excellence. Chicago has just opened a Women's Athletic Club which cost three and a quarter million. Smaller editions, all the way down to modest shingled cottages, flourish from Florida to Seattle, all run and financed by and for women.

Politically, there are three favorite roads. Women work with the old established parties, do the small jobs, are politely appointed to National committees. However lost they may still feel in metropolitan organizations, there is no doubt that they wield real power in small communities. And even in the great cities the old days of open pollingplace debauchery are over. As some one said at the last election, "Women have made voting as normal and decent an occupation as going to market."

If they prefer non-partisan information to party loyalty, they join the League of Women Voters. This was the child of the old National Woman Suffrage Association, in which they sought to perpetuate the knowledge of organization and government and the devotion to good citizenship, which were so valuable in the long campaign. They are unique in that they are the only National body whose business it is to collect and disseminate intelligent, non-partisan information concerning candidates and meas (Continued on page 544)

M

Four Senators

Editorial Correspondence from Washington

IGUEL AVILA is a remarkable

man. In the delicate and devious business of getting official documents from the files of the Mexican Government never once did he fail to get just the document that he went after.

That appears from the testimony of Avila and others before the special committee investigating the Hearst charges that the Mexican Government extracted from its Treasury and sent to the United States the sum of $1,215,000 to be paid to United States Senators Borah of Idaho, Norris of Nebraska, Heflin of Alabama, and La Follette of Wisconsin.

The whole great structure of documents and deductions drawn from documents rests absolutely on the veracity of Miguel Avila, who either is or is not telling the truth. And that brings us back to reiteration of the statement that, either way, Miguel Avila is a remarkable

man.

he

If he got the documents as he says got them, he has refined Gastonbeemeansism to a point of pure artistry that has rarely, if ever, been equaled in the world. Beside this Mexican in the art of subornation of filching, the original Gaston B. Means would be compelled to confess himself a crude amateur, a clumsy bungler.

If he did not get the documents as he says he got them, Avila has fabricated a story the most perfect of all the stories that adorn the history of false swearing. On that supposition, he is thoroughly the genius, but not quite the artist. Despite cubism, futurism, and what not else of our time, art has always tried to be true to nature. This man goes clear beyond the upper limit of nature, allowing nothing for any of the weaknesses of human kind, nothing for cupidity, conscience, wine, women, or the perversity of fate. An artist would have made some procured procurer fail, just once, to "come through." Avila made himself and all with whom he dealt perfect pilFering machines.

It is not, perhaps, remarkable that this man could sell his wares, without estimonials, to William Randolph Hearst. It is not, perhaps, remarkable hat Mr. Hearst should use them to create the impression that four United

By DIXON MERRITT

States Senators got $1,215,000 of Mexican Government money and then say on, the witness-stand that he never believed they got it. But it is hard on the Senators and on the public.

Who are these four Senators?

W

ILLIAM EDGAR BORAH has been a United States Senator for twenty years. He never held or sought any other public office.

It is hard to say just what Borah has accomplished as a Senator, but this thing he has accomplished: He has demonstrated the fact that the best way to play politics is not to play politics at all.

Borah has disappointed more people and disappointed them more deeply than has any other man in the Senate by failure to do what they thought he ought to do not by refusing to do it, but merely by not doing it. When they expected him to be at a particular place for a particular purpose, when his every previous step indicated that he would be there, he was not there. So often has this occurred, so characteristic has it become of the man, that it has been said of him, "Borah never follows through."

And yet it may be said to be the consensus of opinion that Borah is the ablest of the ninety-six men who compose the Senate of the United Statesable not merely because of intellect, but also because of impeccable integrity.

Borah is believed to be a man of absolute sincerity. I, an iconoclast, have doubted his sincerity only once. That was when I read what he had to say of the books he has read. Any man (I thought) who can heap such praise upon so many classics and upon no non-classics is either insincere or inhuman. But I pass the point.

Borah is Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, one of the most important of the Senate Committees. On the floor he is beyond doubt the most impressive speaker in the Senate.

Ponderous, slow-moving, and rugged of countenance; approachable, patiently polite, but circumspect and sparing of words; Borah attracts attention and commands admiration.

But there is over his countenance, as over his conduct, something baffling. I do not think it is a mask. It seems to

me merely a mental and physical heaviness, a heaviness which weighs him down and stops him short of his goal. In plain English, I think that the mystery of Borah is laziness.

A man to whom no man has been able to put the measuring stick. But, looking at him, he seems to fall just short of the giant's stature.

G

EORGE W. NORRIS, of Ohio, and A. A. Jones, of Tennessee, were close friends and, I believe, roommates at Valparaiso University in the early eighties. But they were leaders of rival groups whose activities took a political turn and caused considerable trouble in the University.

The story is told that Professor Oliver Perry Kinsey, now living in extreme old age at St. Petersburg, Florida, called Norris into his office one day and said to him, in substance, this:

"It may interest you, Norris, to know that your friend Jones is going to the United States Senate. He will be a good Democratic Senator, promoting the principles of his party in the affairs of the Government. You, too, Norris, are going to the United States Senate. You will go as a Republican. But you will oppose everything that your party fa

[ocr errors][merged small]

Norris and Jones did come to the Senate at about the same time, the former as a Republican from Nebraska, the latter as a Democrat from New Mexico. But Norris had previously been for ten years a member of the House.

In every particular he had justified the prophecy of his professor. Opposing what his party stood for in those early days, he had become one of the most serviceable rebels that the Congress of the United States had known or has known until this day.

No matter what part others may have played, it was George W. Norris who handed the knock-out blow to Joseph G. Cannon, who ended the czarism of the Speaker. Other things of a similar kind he did in those early days.

But the reform of the Republican party did not align Mr. Norris with it. When the zeal of the revival died and Republicanism reverted nearly to what (Continued on page 534)

« AnteriorContinuar »