CHAPTER 4 -- Women's Suffrage

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CHAPTER TWO WOMENS SUFFRAGE – Ed Sebesta 10/10/2020 Hatton W. Sumners opposed women’s suffrage up until it was obvious it would pass and then voted for it.

Jan. 12, 1915 Sumners was one of the votes against passage of the Mondell resolution which would have submitted to the states an amendment to the Federal Constitution to enfranchise women. A DMN article on the defeat reports Sumners’ position as follows: Representative Sumners of Dallas, one of the early speakers against the resolution, declared that the entire discussion did not seem pertinent, as it would be if no other forum were open. It did not appear so much a question of whether women should be given the ballot as it did, he said, whether Congress should take from the States the right to determine the issue. His adherence to the principle of local control was not drawn from theory, he added, but form observation that the citizens makes the most rapid and permanent progress under that system of government the power and necessity in control of which was close to the people as possible.

Since the submission of the question would be irrevocable action on the part of Congress, he said, it ought not to speculate on the development of the future.

When three-fourths of the States have adopted the plan for themselves, it would be time enough, he thought, for Congress to take notice of it.1 Of course if some of the people are denied the vote government would not be close at all to them, or perhaps Sumners didn’t consider women people. Notice how Sumners side steps the issue of whether women should vote or not, but instead makes it an issue of local control and local initiative as if the U.S. House is somehow appointed and not locally elected. This would also be Sumners’ general strategy in opposing civil rights for racial minorities as time went on to argue about the American constitution and general governmental philosophy.

However, Sumners does work in the issue of race in this debate over suffrage. From his speech in the U.S. House on Jan. 12, 1915: The real issue here is, Does Congress believe that the right possessed by the several States of the Union from the beginning of the Government, except for the constitutional provision enfranchising the negro, to determine each for itself the question of suffrage should be taken from them and that an amendment to the Federal Constitution further limiting that power should now be submitted to the country? The control of suffrage is the highest prerogative of government. The loss of that control is the loss of the most vital element of sovereignty. I am 1

No author, “Votes for Women Defeated in House,” DMN, Jan. 13, 1915, page 1, 2.

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unwilling to surrender the right of Texas to exercise this control, and I am unwilling to give my support to this amendment which, if adopted, would wrest that control from her.2 At the time the amendment to give women the vote was denounced as a Reconstruction amendment connecting it to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment which abolished slavery, established African Americans as citizens, and gave them the vote.

Kenneth R. Johnson in his article, “White Racial Attitudes as a Factor in the Arguments Against the Nineteenth Amendment,” in the academic journal Phylon, repeatedly gives examples that Southern elected officials saw the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment as leading to the federal government enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment which gave African Americans the right to vote. Johnson states that these officials denounced the purposed ratification of the 19th Amendment as a “double ratification.”

Johnson explains that there was concern in the South that the Nineteenth Amendment might result in African Americans getting the vote, since it would authorize women voting including African American women voting and the South might not be able to prevent African American women from voting without federal intervention. If African American women could vote then it would surely follow that African American men would be able to vote.

Johnson describes the hysterical fear of Southern legislators: This condition led Senator Ellison D. Smith, Democrat of South Carolina, to announce that the South had always considered the Fifteenth Amendment a crime against civilization and that a vote for the proposed amendment as the same as a vote to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. He protested against adding another amendment to the organic law which would permit “an alien and ignorant race to be turned loose upon us.”3 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae in her article, “Caretakers of Southern Civilization: Georgia Women and the Anti-Suffrage Campaign,” described the campaigns of two Lost Cause leaders, Dolly Blount Lamar, who was a president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Mildred Rutherford the Historian General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy for many years, against the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

McRae explains, “Images of Reconstruction were central to the anti-suffrage political strategy. Schooled in lessons of southern history, anti-suffragists repeatedly referred to a chaotic time in the remembered white past to address the uncertainty and insecurity of

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Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 63rd Cong. Third Session, Vol. 52 Part 2, Jan. 12, 1915, page 1417.

3 Johnson, Kenneth R., “White Racial Attitudes as a Factor in the Arguments Against the Nineteenth Amendment,” Phylon, Vol. 31 No. 1, 1st Qtr. 1970, pp. 31-37. The articles reference is to the Woman Patriot, Vol. 3, June 28, 1919, pp. 6-7.

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the present.” These same lessons were what the United Daughters of the Confederacy insured were taught in the schools.

Dolly Blount Lamar gave an anti-suffrage speech to the Georgia state legislature. McRae writes, “Lamar claimed that the ‘foul fiend of carpetbaggery’ cloaked in women’s clothes would descend on Georgia and recruit modern-day scalawags. Like the despicable Fifteenth Amendment and the Lodge bill, the proposed suffrage amendment represented the most recent attempt by the federal government to infringe on states’ rights.”4 Scalawag is a neo-Confederate term for Southerners who don’t support white supremacy, southern nationalism, or neo-Confederacy. It is used specifically in histories of Reconstruction in reference to white southerners who were members of the Republican Party. Neo-Confederates consider them traitors and the terms synonymous.

The Lodge bill also known as the Federal Election Bill was legislation drafted by U.S. House Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and submitted in 1890, would have authorized federal government supervision of elections to enable African American men to vote which would have directly threatened white supremacy in the former Confederate state.

In the Sumners papers Dallas Historical Society Box 70 Folder 1.5 is a pamphlet by George R. Lockwood titled, “Woman’s Suffrage: A Menace to the South,” with an illustration, opposite of McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie, “Caretakers of Southern Civilization: Georgia Women and the Anti-Suffrage Campaign, 1914-1920,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 82 No. 4, Winter 1998, pp. 801-828.

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the first page of the pamphlet, of a woman with a club labeled “federal constitution” swinging at two eagles, “segregation” and “Jim Crow Law” with an eagle named “GrandFather Clause” already knocked to the ground and it is taken from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People publication, The Crisis, May 1916, in support of the Amendment.5 Sumners was quite aware how to refer to Reconstruction as to invoke fear of African American equality and used it in his letters during his career. In Sumners January 3, 1922 letter to Tom Gooch, head of the Dallas Times Herald, about his opposition to the Dyer Federal Anti-lynching bill, he states, “There isn’t one Member of Congress from the South who does not recognize this proposed bill as a revival of a spirit and policy akin to that of the ‘carpet-bag regime’ …”6 “Carpet-bag” refers to the Reconstruction period in American history. In another Jan. 31, 1922 letter to W.A. Holford, editor of the Garland News, thanking Holford for his support of Sumners effort to defeat the Dyer Bill, he expresses his fear “Unless we have a most fortunate development of circumstances, we are going to have the stress and the tragedy of the old carpet-bag regime reenacted in the South.”7 There is a street in Garland named after Holford. Other letters by Sumners in 1922 refer to a “carpet-bag” regime.8 In his 1944 re-election flyer he attacks the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO, who were opposed to Sumners for his anti-labor policies, and were in opposition to his re-election. They flyer refers to the CIO leadership as carpet-baggers and quoted from a United Autoworkers pamphlet their discussion of Reconstruction as a good thing for labor.9 Sumners would understand what his reference to African Americans being given the right to vote in the American constitution would mean to his constituents and had an ongoing practice of referring to Reconstruction in his arguments.

Sumner would however cease to be an opponent as it became apparent that support for the enfranchisement of women was gaining support and being an opponent of woman’s suffrage would be fatal to his political career.

On March 26, 1918 Texas governor William P. Hobby signed into law the right for women to vote in the Texas primaries, but not in the general elections.10 With women 5

Editorial Cartoon, “Woman to the Rescue,” The Crisis, Vol. 12 No. 1, May 1916, Whole No. 67, page 42. George R. Lockwood pamphlet, “Woman Suffrage: A Menace to the South,” unpaginated, cartoon inside front cover, Hatton W. Sumners papers, Box 70.1.5.

6 HWS to Tom Gooch, Jan. 3, 1922. DHS Box 70.3.2.

7 HWS to W.A. Holford, Jan. 31, 1922. DHS Box 70.3.2.

8 HWS to Ben E. Cabell, Jan. 9, 1922. DHS Box 71.2.2. HWS to Robert A. Shivers, Jan. 9. 1922. Box 71.2.2.

9 HWS re-election flyer in DHS Box 135.6.7. Inside right side page.

10 Taylor, Elizabeth, revisions by Wranosky, Jessica Brannon, “Woman Suffrage,” TSHA Handbook, downloaded 4/3/2020.

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voting in the primaries surely there would be support for a Texas constitutional amendment to allow women to vote soon. Nonie Boren Mahoney, president of the Dallas Equal Suffrage League, sent a Jan. 6, 1918 telegram to Sumners quoting from the very strong endorsements for suffrage by the Dallas Evening Journal, Dallas Times Herald, Dallas News, and Dallas Dispatch as well as the Fort Worth Record. 11 Additionally, Sumners was getting letters from the Dallas elite who were supporting woman’s suffrage. T.L. Lauve, on the letter head of the prestigious Trezevant & Cochran firm, writes a Jan. 4, 1918 letter to Sumners explaining how his views have changed from opposition to support for woman’s suffrage and urging him to vote for woman’s suffrage.12 Major real estate developer W.H. Prather writes a Jan. 11, 1918 letter to Sumners thanking him for voting for woman’s suffrage.13 On Jan. 10, 1918 in the Sumners voted for woman’s suffrage constitutional amendment which passed in the U.S. House with the required two-thirds, 274 to 136, but failed in the U.S. Senate.14 Lest anyone have the idea that there was a solidarity of women of all races in the effort to get the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in Texas there is this concluding paragraph from the Jan. 11, 1918 letter of thanks to Sumners by Minnie Fisher Cunningham, president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association, she writes: Our hands are full of the war work, so necessary to the success of our arms abroad, and we truly rejoice to be spared the added strain of state campaigns for Suffrage, and that the shorter, easier route so long accessible to the Indian, the Mexican, and our “alien enemies,” has been opened to use too, by your chivalrous action.15 “Alien enemies” would refer to citizens of Germany resident in the United States during World War I. It is fairly clear that not voting for woman’s suffrage in 1918 would have ended Sumners’ career, if not in 1918, then in 1920, after the 19th Amendment was sent out for ratification by the states after an overwhelming vote by the U.S. House.

Sumners in his Jan. 12, 1918 letter to Nonie Boren Mahoney however is condescending and positions his vote for woman’s suffrage as a favor granted to Mahoney and suffragettes. He writes:

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Nonie Boren Mahoney to HWS, Jan. 6. 1918. Box 70.1.1.

T.L. Lauve to HWS, Jan. 4, 1918. DHS Box 70.1.1.

13 W.H. Prather to HWS, Jan. 11, 1918. DHS Box 70.1.3.

14 No author, “Suffrage Amendment is Passed by House,” DMN, Jan. 11, 1918, pages 1, 2.

15 Minnie Fisher Cunningham letter to HWS, Jan. 11, 1918. DHS Box 70.1.3.

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My dear Mrs. Mahoney, Because of your interest in the adoption of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, I was especially glad to be able to finally reach the conclusion that under the circumstances I should vote to submit that Resolution. The untiring effort and sincerity of purpose, together with your remarkable consideration and respect for my own opinion has all the while appealed very strongly to me. If you good women had quested my integrity or sincerity of purpose, had threatened me with political opposition, and things of that sort, I am sure that I would not have retained that constant attitude towards your question, which had involved in it the constant realization that I would be deeply gratified to find myself able to vote on this question in line with your desire.

I will ask you not to give publicity to this letter in any of the papers because others would not understand as I am sure you do understand the things that I am saying.

I do not want to close this letter without mentioning the wonderful work which Mrs. Potter, of Tyler, has done here. She has hardly taken time to sleep, I believe, and she has worked with constant tact in so far as I have discovered.16 Oddly also, though Mahoney signed her telegram as President of the Dallas Equal Suffrage League, Sumners addresses her as Vice-President and of the Dallas Equal Suffrage Association. His sentiment in the previous letter is repeated in a Jan. 15, 1918 letter with the same request for confidentiality.17 Though Sumners realized that his arguments about states’ rights and federal government power wasn’t going to work in opposing white women voting he did not abandoned these arguments when it came to maintaining white supremacy.

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HWS to Nonie Boren Mahoney, Jan. 12, 1918. DHS Box 70.1.3.

HWS to Nonie Boren Mahoney, Jan. 15, 1918. DHS Box 70.1.4.