Emma Goldman– Speaking out for Free Bread, going to jail. PART I.

Posted on by Ken Ackerman
Emma Goldman, seen in her police mug shot after being arrested in 1894. 

                      
             “Most of you left Russia, where you had a Czar who acted in as brutal a way as any man on
               earth.  Here in America we have capitalistic czars … We have Gould and Astor and Sage
              and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. … You built the palaces and others are living in them. The
              politicians are misleading you… We are told God will feed the starving, but that is humbug
              in the nineteenth century.”

             “I will speak, they can arrest me if they please, but they cannot shut my mouth.”
                                                                                       Emma Goldman – 1893.

Over three thousand people crammed themselves into New York City’s Union Square on that hot, sticky summer day, August 21, 1893. They carried red flags – symbol of socialists, nihilists, anarchists, and laborites around the world.  Most of them wore rags and smelled from sweat.  Most still spoke immigrant languages — German, Russian, Yiddish, Polish, and Italian — that sounded like menacing gibberish to native Americans.


Three months earlier, Wall Street’s Panic of 1893 had sent the US economy crashing into depression, throwing hundreds of thousands of men – bread winners – out of work.  In 1893, long before government safety net programs, this meant starvation, poverty, disease … and anger!!!


The people in Union Square that day wanted to scream rage and demand their rights. They wanted a voice, no excuses, no apologies, no whitewash. And they knew they could trust finding it in their favorite rabble-rouser, Emma Goldman.




Emma Goldman speaking in New York’s Union Square, 1916.

Just 24 years old then, Emma Goldman pounded the air with her fist when she spoke. She threw back her head and shouted – in their languages. She often preferred using Russian or Yiddish to confuse police detectives.  She always looked striking.  A reporter described her at one rally as appearing in a “cheap blue and white striped dress” and “her hair was as much awry as if it was 2 o’clock in the morning.”


To the small goggle of New York radicals who filled the saloons on lower Fifth Avenue, Emma was held in “almost reverence,” as one put it: her confidence, her intellect, her clarity, her fearlessness.  She never avoided a fight. When one rival got into an argument with her one night and called her latest article in one of the local socialist newspapers a fraud, Emma took a leather horse whip and lashed the man in the face.



What drove her?
She had always been rambunctious.  Born in 1869 in Kovno, Russia, Emma felt passionately about everything. As a girl, she starved herself once when her parents confronted her with an arranged marriage.  She remembered once seeing a Russian official take a peasant, tie him up, and whip him in public. At the Gymnasium (high school) she attended in Konigsberg, Germany, she once stuck pins in the chair of a religious teacher she disliked. Coming to America in 1885, she settled with family in Rochester, New York, and became fascinated by radical movements of the era – especially the Haymarket anarchists in Chicago.  She read voraciously.  Already married and divorced as a teenager, she left home, moved to New York City, and quickly befriended the radical crowd at the downtown saloons – including her soon-to-be lifelong friend and lover, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman.




Emma and Berkman took barely a few months to make their public mark. In June 1893, a strike at the Carnegie Steel plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, had ended in pitched gunfire between strikers and Pinkerton detectives.  Seven guards and nine strikers died in the melee. Emma and Sasha decided to make their statement by invoking justice on the oppressor, Carnegie Steel’s manager Henry Clay Frick. Berkman carried out the attack. He snuck into Frick’s office one day, shot him three times and stabbed him in the leg. Frick survived, and a court sentenced Berkman to 22 years in prison.


After this episode, Emma Goldman’s emerged as New York’s leading radical and anarchist.   In speeches and articles, she refused to apologize for the crime. I n fact, she gloried in it. “The bullets did not kill [Frick],” she told one crowd in early 1893, “but others are being molded and they will fly with surer aim.” This was tough, in-your-face talk, the kind that police took seriously.



Newspapers now covered Emma Goldman’s very word. They called her “Queen of the Anarchists” and “wife” or “friend” of the criminal Berkman.   The printed rumors she was “said to have lived with different men” and “spent her time drinking beer” at taverns.  “She was once good-looking,” said another, “but her record is not a savory one.” Admirers, on the other hand, called her a modern Joan of Arc.
After the 1893 financial panic and its resulting mass poverty, Emma’s speeches took a harder edge, as did the crowds.  After one speech at a hall on Orchard Street that summer, a riot broke out and police arrested over 500 people.  Emma recognized she had become a target. “I hope you will be quiet,” she told another group, “there are detectives here and spies of the police ready to kill the speakers.”


The speech that landed her in jail
And so it was that Emma Goldman mounted the podium to address the 3,000+ crowd of angry, unemployed, mostly-immigrant workers at New York City’s Union Square on that hot afternoon of August 21, 1893. Emma was the last speaker that day. “I saw a dense mass before me, their pale, pinched faces, upturned to me,” she recalled years later. “My heart beat, my temples throbbed, and my knees shook.” Emma spoke in German, so her exact words would remain subject to dispute. But here’s the key part, as she recalled it:

               “Fifth Avenue [where the wealthiest New Yorkers then lived] is laid in gold, every mansion
                a citadel of money and power. Yet here you stand, a giant, starved, and fettered… You too,
                will have to learn that you have a right to share your neighbors’ bread. Your neighbors —
                they have not only stolen your bread, but they are sapping your blood. They will go on
                robbing you, your children, and your children’s children, unless you wake up, unless you
                become daring enough to demand your rights. Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of
                the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both,
                take bread. It is your sacred right.”



The crowd bellowed deafening cheers.  What did Emma mean?  Was she issuing a call to politics?  Or a call to violence?  The police (and the residents of Fifth Avenue) had no trouble figuring it out.  To them, telling a mob of hungry people to invade rich people’s houses and steal bread had nothing to do with politics.  It was incitement to riot, and an excuse to put Red Emma behind bars.
A few nights later, as Emma was preparing to harangue yet another a crowd of 2,000 people crammed into Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, police barged in with an arrest warrant, mounted the stage, and seized her.  She “fought like a tigress,” one witness said, and men from the audience joined the free-for-all, throwing punches at the police to help her escape, but the police drew their guns.


Emma Goldman’s first encounter with American prisons was about to begin…

What happened next?  Click here for Part II, The Trial.


                

Victoria Woodhull — Speaking out for Free Love; going to jail.

Posted on by Ken Ackerman
Victoria Woodhull — in typical radical pose for the 1870s: no bonnet, no shawl, and short-cut hair. 




Free Love:

     “Yes, I am a free lover.  I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I 
      may, to love for as long or as short a period as I can; to exchange that love every day if I
      please…. and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame has any right to interfere….”

The Boston crowd screamed wildly — half booing and hissing, half cheering — when Victoria Woodhull shouted these words in January 1872.  Not surprisingly, more Americans back then saw her as the “Mrs. Satan” in the cartoon below, leading poor women to sin and poverty, that as the respectable face in the handsome photo of her above.  Victoria Woodhull earned her spot as the most noticed, emphatic, assertive, talented, envied, and (as a result) vilified, mocked, and slandered women in the country during the early 1870s, that free-wheeling period after the Civil War called the Flash Age.  


As a girl, she performed in her parents’ traveling medicine and fortune-telling shows.  She came to New York City in 1868 a vivacious 30year-old, already twice divorced.  She set up housekeeping with two husbands — one current, one former — and set up shop with her younger sister Tennessee (later Tennie C.) as spiritualist clairvoyants.  Victoria claimed to channel Demosthenes, the ancient Greek orator.  Her sister Tennessee’s healing massages soon won the physical affection of railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in town.  

Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan”
in 1872 Harpers Weekly. 

Fearless and with a sharp eye for publicity, Victoria quickly recorded a remarkable string of firsts:


  • She and Tennessee started the first women-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street, with help and trading tips from Vanderbilt; 
     

  • She then used the money they made to start a newspaper, Woodhall and Claflin’s Weekly, favoring free love, women’s rights, and a ten-hour work day.  In December 1871, she published the full text of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, its first appearance in the US; 
  • She became the first women to run for President of the United  States, nominated in 1872 by the Equal Rights Party. Notably, she was under age, and her VP running mate, Frederick Douglass, supported one of her opponents, Republican Ulysses S Grant.
And then there was the Henry Ward Beecher adultery scandal, the one that landed her in jail.  

The Adultery Scandal:

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Brooklyn’s popular Plymouth Church, was a uniquely well-liked public figure in America at the time.  His Sunday sermons reached far beyond his packed church, carried in newspaper columns across the country.  Dynamic and handsome, he was also cheating on his wife Eunice, the mother of his ten children.  Beecher had seduced the wife of one of his church followers, Theodore Tilton, and reputedly many others as well.   Eunice Beecher, distraught over the affair, finally told her friend Susan B. Anthony about it.  Anthony told the story to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who made the mistake of repeating it to Victoria Woodhull.  

Woodhull appearing before Congress’s House Judiciary
Committee,  from Leslie’s Illustrated, February 1871. 

Woodhull was appalled.  This same Henry Ward Beecher had publicly mocked her for her own “free love” speeches, yet here he was doing the same thing — only in secret and at his wife’s expense.  Victoria Woodhull,  decided there was only one thing to do with such a hypocrite coward.  Call him out !!!


And so, in the Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly of November 2, 1872, Victoria led with a splashy front-page column exposing all the dirty laundry of the Beecher family, calling Reverend Beecher himself a hypocrite, and daring him to sue.


Slanderous?  Tawdry?  Intrusive?  None of her business?  Yes to all these things.  Today we call it “sleazy tabloid journalism” — but that alone was not enough to put Victoria Woodhuill in jail, even in 1872.  


Instead, there was something worse.  Around this time in New York City, there lived a stout, pugnacious young man named Anthony Comstock obsessed with pornography and vice.  Backed by wealthy patrons like banker J.P. Morgan, Comstock had launched a crusade. He had convinced the local YMCA to create a New York Society for the Suppression of Vice with himself at its head, and had convinced the United States Congress to pass a law making it a crime to send obscene material through the US mail.  (Full disclosure: I once considered writing a book about Comstock, but in doing the research I found him so odious that I decided I did not want to have my own name attached to his in Google searches till the end of time.)  

Comstock had already run a few small-time smut dealers out of business, and drove one of them to suicide.  He now read Victoria Woodhull’s article about Henry Ward Beecher’s adultery and decided to make a bigger score.  Anthony Comstock decided that, to his eye, the article was obscene.  Among other things, it contained the words “token” and “virginity.”  And it traveled through the US mail — a crime.  He quickly obtained a federal arrest warrrant and instructed two burly marshals to waylay Victoria and sister Tennessee one day at their office after returning from a carriage ride.  

Behind Bars:
Victoria and Tennessee quickly found themselves in big trouble, placed under arrest and held for questioning at New York’s federal courthouse.  Passions ran high at this point against “Mrs. Satan,” an uppity woman talking Free Love, mocking politicians, and now staining the good name of a church leader.  “An example is needed, and we propose to make one of these women,” said U.S. Commissioner Osborn setting their initial bail at an eye-popping, unaffordable $8,000 apiece (about $200,000 apiece in modern money).    

The authorities immediately took Victoria and Tennessee and locked them up inside New York’s Ludlow Street Jail.  To make things worse, the police also arrested Victoria’s husband (the current one) and two men who worked at the Weekly, and  destroyed thousands of copies of the newspaper.  Typical of 1870s newspapers, the New-York Times, in covering the initial court hearing, failed to even notice the gross violation of free speech underway, focusing instead on Victoria’s clothes (a black dress with purple bows) and facial expression (she looked “grave and severe” while Tennessee looked “indignant.”). 

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher denied everything — causing major grumbling among people who knew better — and the public backed him.  A federal grand jury indicted Victoria and Tennessee under Comstock’s anti-obscenity law, and one of Beecher’s church friends filed a libel suit as well.  It would take a full month of legal wrangling, until December 3, for Victoria and her sister finally to be freed on bail that, for the multiple cases, ending up totalling $16,000 apiece.  During this entire time, the judge never allowed Victoria to answer the obscenity charge in a public hearing.  Instead, her only chance to speak came through a single letter she snuck out to the New York Herald in which she declared herself “sick in mind, sick in body, sick in heart…. because I am a women, I am to have no justice, no fair play, no chance through the press to reach public opinion.”

The legal costs almost bankrupted Victoria Woodhull and her newspaper.  Most auditoriums now black-listed her speeches.  Still, she left Ludlow Street Jail full of fight.  She immediately issued a new edition of Wooodhull and Claflin’s Weekly detailing all the legal conniving and used the publicity to pack out-of-the-way venues for her new featured speech performance: “Moral Cowardice and Moral Hypocrisy, or Four Weeks in the Ludlow Street Jail.”  Comstock had her arrested two more times, resulting in another week in the Ludlow Street Jail, a night at The Tombs — New York’s maximum security prison — and thousands more spent in bail money.  But when Victoria finally had the chance for a trial on the original obscenity change in June 1873, the judge found the case so weak that he threw it out before it even reached the jury.  


And more:  Theodore Tilton, husband of the women seduced by Henry Ward Beecher, finally had enough of the Reverend’s evasions and went public.  His lawsuit against Beecher over the affair would produce the first great media circus celebrity sex-scandal trial in America.  (The trial ended in a hung jury, a technical win for Beecher.)



All all this was not enough to save Victoria Woodhull.  After the Beecher-Comstock episode, she found her reputation destroyed, constantly harrassed by lawsuits and slanders.  In 1877, she finally called it quits and sailed to England where she married a rich British blue-blood banker named John Biddulph Martin. Here, she gave lectures, started a new magazine (The Humanist), and moved to remote Bredon’s Norton where she made her home a refuge for wayward eccentric Americans, then to Brighton near the sea.  A spritely old lady until 1927, she became the first women to drive a motorcar, to predict trans-Altantic flight, and to predict wireless radio.  

If you’ve never heard of Victoria Woodhull because nobody bothered to mention her in your high school or college history classes, don’t let them get away with it!!   Before Women’s History Month is over, check out one of these good books: 
— Mrs. Satan: The incredible saga of Victoria C. Woodhull by Johanna Johnston (1976); or
—The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher dy Debby Applegate (2006).

Next up, Emma Goldman…..

         

For Purim 2011: A visit to New York City, 1872.

Posted on by Ken Ackerman
Happy Purim (which starts tonight).  We celebrate this Jewish holiday by giving gifts, wearing funny masks, and reading the “Megilla” or “Book of Esther.” (Click here for the full text, from Chabad.org.)  The Megilla tells the story of how, on this day, the Jews in ancient Persia were saved from an evil minister to King Ahasuerus, a homicidal maniac named Haman, whose plan was foiled by Jewish heroes Mordechai and Queen Esther.   Haman is best known today for the three-cornered hat he supposedly wore, which we Jews remember in typical form through a special pastry with poppy seeds.  

Back in the 1870s in New York City, Purim gave the then-still-small Jewish community an excuse to celebrate.  They marked it with fancy masquerade balls and house-to-house visits.  Here are two quick newspaper clips, windows on the era.

First, from the New-York Times, March 25, 1872:  
(BTW- The two politicians mentioned toward the end, Hank Smith and [Benjamin] Manierre, were members of NYC’s notoriously corrupt police commission who were exposed around this time as connected to Boss Tweed.  Smith fled the country to avoid prison.)

By this second clip, also from the New-York Times, March 7, 1879, the Purim Ball had grown more upscale.  Notice the Rothschilds, Seligmans, Schiffs, and other financial types in the box seats.

On Susan B. Anthony’s trail — Ohio’s South Newbury Union Chapel

Posted on by Ken Ackerman
The South Newbury Union Chapel in Newbury, Ohio.

Last time, I told you the story of how Susan B. Anthony had one chance to vote for president of the United States in her lifetime, in 1872,  and was thrown in jail as a result. (Click here for the story.)

Here’s a photo sent by Guest Blogger  Jim Robenalt taken from Remarkable Ohio, the fine website of the Ohio Historical Society, showing the South Newbury Union Chapel, where Susan B. Anthony gave many of her subsequent speeches on women’s suffrage.  Note how small the building is, but how big an impact had.  Here’s the description:


           “Called the ‘Cradle of Equal Suffrage’ and ‘Free Speech Chapel,’ Union Chapel was to be ‘…open and free for all denominations, but to be monopolized by no one or to the exclusion of anyone.’


           “Built in 1858 or 1859 on land donated by Anson Ma it tthews, the chapel reputedly exists in response to incident triggered by James A. Garfield, then principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College) and later president of the United States. He was scheduled to speak at the Congregationists’ ‘Brick Church’ in December 1857. Because of the supposed controversial nature of Garfield’s speech, however, the invitation was withdrawn.  Outraged citizens built Union Chapel in response. 


           “Fulfilling its mission, the chapel welcomed groups crusading for many causes in late 19th century America, including women’s dress reform and temperance. One of the most active groups at the chapel was the Newbury Woman’s Suffrage Political Club, founded in January 1874. The chapel was the club’s meeting place and the site of lectures by Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Taylor Upton, leaders in the woman’s suffrage movement. The chapel also hosted singing schools, plays, and other social, religious, and political gatherings.” 


Next time you’re in Ohio, check it out.  

Susan B. Anthony — Casting her first vote; going to jail.

Posted on by Ken Ackerman


Susan B. Anthony in 1848, as a 28 year-old school teacher in upstate New York,  shortly before meeting Elizabeth Cady Stanton and joining the movement for women’s rights.

 She always looks so stern in her photographs, even her face on the $1 gold coin.  I looked hard to find one that showed her smiling or laughing, but came up empty.  If any of you has one, please send it to me so I can post it here.

Susan B. Anthony dollar —
still not smiling.
Susan B. Anthony devoted herself to causes: ending slavery, temperance, and the one she’s most famous for, winning women the right to vote.  She lived 86 years, until 1906, and spent most of that time traveling the country giving thousands of speeches for the cause.  But she never saw it happen in her lifetime.  America would not give women the right to vote in Federal elections until 1920.  Never, that is, except once….

The vote: 
That one time came in 1872 when she was 52 years old — already a grizzled activist veteran.  Susan B. Anthony fully expected the men at the desk to tell her “no” that day, November 2, when she and two women friends stopped by the courthouse in Rochester, New York, and asked if they might register.  Women had never yet been allowed to vote anyplace in the USA in 1872, except the Wyoming territory.  Still, the newly-minted 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868 after the Civil War to protect freed black slaves, guaranteed equal rights to all citizens.  Were not women ciitizens?  Did this not include the right to vote?  



Nobody had yet tested the idea.  So Susan B. Anthony decided to go first.  To her delight, none of the voting officials complained that day.  They let her write her name in the registration book, and that was that.  She told some friends about it and, within 24 hours, fourteen other local women also registered to vote.




Susan B. Anthony, circa 1872, 
still stern-looking at 52 years old.



Election Day 1872 came two days later, on November 5, and Susan B. Anthony came early to cast her ballot.  This time, when her turn came, a poll watcher named Sylvester Lewis raised his voice to object.  New York State law limited voting to men, he argued, making her vote illegal.   



In respense, the chief inspector at the polling place, a man named Beverly Waugh Jones, asked Susan B. Anthony to please take an oath.  Then he asked her some questions:  Was she a US citizen?  Yes, she said.  Did she live in Rochester’s 8th Ward?  Yes.  Had she accepted any bribe for her vote?  Certainly not.  


Amazingly, with that, inspector Jones took her ballot and placed it in the box.  The fiirst woman’s vote for president in American history was thus duly cast for Republican Ulysses S. Grant.  “Successful Attempt of Women to Vote in Rochester,” announced the New York Times.   It was time to celebrate.  Or so it seemed.

The arrest:
But then, twelve days later, came a knock at the door of her home in Rochester.  Susan B. Anthony answered it and immediately found herself facing a deputy federal marshall asking her to accompany him downtown.  “What for?” she asked.   “To arrest you,” the marshall replied.  It seems the poll watcher had complained, and the US government had decided that a crime had taken place. 


If it seems strange today, in 2011, that a women (or any person of any sex) could be arrested in America simply for voting,  it should.  Yes, we have rights in this country, and they are fundamental to us.  But they are also very fragile, and it is way too easy to take them for granted.  In almost every case, before the rest of us can start enjoying those rights, somebody had to go first and fight for them.  That was Susan B. Anthony.  




Cartoon mocking Susan B. Anthony
for wanting to vote.



Facing the deputy marshall at her door that morning in 1872, Susan B. Anthony not only didn’t mind being arrested, she insisted on it.  Having never been arrested before, she asked him if this was the way he arrested men?   When he said no, she shot back:  “Then I demand that I should be arrested properly.”  If that was unlady-like, then so be it.


And so the great legal case of United States v. Susan B. Anthony began.  A federal grand jury indicted her for intentional casting of an illegal vote. They offered to release her on bail, but she refused to pay it and was placed under custody of a federal marshal.  .  Her lawyer– a very good one named Henry Selden — filed for a habeas corpus writ for her release, but the judge refused it.  Just for good measure, the Rochester police also arrested the voting inspectors who had accepted her ballot, and they too refused bail.    Enemies mocked and vilified her, as in this cartoon.


The news quickly flashed across the country:  “Woman arrested for casting illegal vote.”  Supporters organized protest rallies, and Susan B. Anthony supplied then a constant stream of material: speeches, letters, and interviews.  The authorities allowed her to travel in  mid-January 1873 to Washington, D.C., but only if the federal marshall came along so she wouldn’t escape.  In her speech there, she described her arrest this way:  “When arrested, I was taken to the office of the United States Commissioner in Rochester — in the very same room where fugitive slaves … were examined and turned over to their masters for bondage.  Never till then did I fully realize the ease and rapidity with which an American citizen can be deprived of his or her liberty.” 

The trial:
The trial took place in June 1973 in Canandaigua, New York, before a jury of 12 men. ( Click here for more details.).  The Judge, Ward Hunt, a non-nonsense Utica politico, took a narrow view of the 14th Amendment.  Susan B. Anthony asked to testify, wanting to explain that she was no criminal because she had voted in good faith in the belief that her vote was legal, but Judge Hunt found her “incompetent” and denied the request.  Then, rather than risk having the jury take her side, Judge Hunt ordered a “directed verdict,” that is, he determined that there were no issues of fact to decide and instructed the jury to return a verdict of guilty.   (In 1895, twenty years later, New York State’s own Court of Appeals would find this proceduire unacceptable in state criminal cases.) 

Susan B. Anthony’s lawyer then insisted that the jury members be polled so they could speak for themselves.  Again, Judge Hunt refused.


It all seemd pretty well locked up, until Judge Hunt made one big mistake.  As with any defendant at the end of a trial, he asked if she had anything to say before he pronounced sentence.  Asking Susan B. Anthony if she had anything to say — especially in a crowded coutroom brimming with newspaper reporters — was not the way to keep things quiet. 


Given the chance, Susan B. Anthony immediately stood up and launched into an eloquent, searing, and blunt indictment of the preposterously unfair trial, unfair law, and unfair judge.   “Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government.  My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored.”  

Judge Hunt immediate saw his mistake.  He started banging his gavel and told her to sit down.  Not a chance.  Instead, she lectured him.  “May it please the court to remember that since the day of my arrest last November, this is the first time that either myself or any person of my disenfranchised class has been allowed a word of defense before judge or jury.”  She then explained why she believed she had the right to vote, how the 14th Amendment worked, how this same court in Rochester had ignored the Fugitive Slave Law back in the 1850s, and why the trial was unfair — how she had failed “even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers.”
   
At least seven times during the harrangue Judge Hunt interrupted Susan B. Anthory and told her to sit down and be quiet.   But she just kept on talking, politely, clearly, and directly.  The newsmen wrote it all down.

When she finished, she sat down.   But then Judge Hunt ordered her to stand up  again.  “The sentence of the court is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the procesution,” he announced from the bench.

“May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” she replied, standing at her seat.  She never did.  He never did anything about it.   [By contrast, the male inspectors who allowed her to vote in 1872 were tried and convicted as well.  The judge ordered them to pay a  fine of $25 which they too refused.  But the men were thrown in jail until President Grant pardoned them later in 1874.]

Susan B. Anthony lost her court case but she won her point.  She would spend the rest of her life lobbying and rabble-rousing for adoption of a Constitutional amendment allowing women the right to vote.  She, along with her friend and partner-in-advocacy Elizabeth Cady Stanton, would be celebrated as the founding heroes of women’s right in America, culminating in her face on the $1 gold coin in 1979.  


So for Women’s History Month, my favorite to start is Susan B. Anthony.  Let her scowl all she wants in her photographs.  She’s  welcome any time on this Blog.
.

Special: Women’s History Month

Posted on by Ken Ackerman
Ms. Apolinaria Gutierrez Garrett, wife of famous frontier sheriff Pat Garrett, holding the gun he used in 1881 to kill Billy the Kid.  Photo circa 1920.   More on Pat Garrett later ….

March is Women’s History Month.   For we zealots here at Viral History, this is cause for yet another party.   


To celebrate, this month we will give you three iconic moments from three favorite American women:

Stay tuned all March for plenty of good stuff.  


[As for Ms. Pat Garrett, top of page, one of the generation of no-nonsense women who helped settle the Old West, don’t be surprised to see a set of posts on Old West lawmen coming up in the not-too-distant future.] 


Meanwhile, here are a few links on Women’s History Month.  Enjoy — 

  — International Women’s Day
  — Library of Congress
  — National Women’s History Project

For Spring: A bicycle ride in Paris, circa 1900.

Posted on by Ken Ackerman
The Paris policeman asks:  “What’s going on here !!”

To which the people in the crowd say:  “But Officer, we are admiring the pneumatic tires on this bicycle by  Kosmos.  They are marvelous !!”

The poster, by artist Louis Oury for the tire company Le Kosmos (affiliated with Dunlap), was printed in Paris around 1900.   Click on the image and enjoy the detail — the women’s dresses, the policeman’s face, and all the hats.

Happy Meteorological Spring, which began yesterday (March 1).  Get outside and ride your bike.  

Finally: The last one-termer, George H.W. Bush.

Posted on by Ken Ackerman
George H.W. Bush taking the oath from Chief Justice William Rehnquist on January 20, 1989.  Onlookers include House Speaker Jim Wright, Senator Ted Stevens, boyish-lookingVice President Dan Quayle,  and Bush’s wife Barbara. 



Two years after becoming president, George H.W. Bush assembled and led a multi-national military coalition against Saddam Hussein in the first Persian Gulf War, successfully ejecting Iraq from Kuwait with minimal US casualties and a prompt exit.  In its wake, April 1991, Bush’s popularity soared to 89 percent, the 2d highest ever recorded by the Gallop Poll.  (Click here for the historical numbers.)  The highest score, 90 percent, would go to Bush’s son George W. after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

But by June 1992, just one year later, Bush’s poll number collapsed to 29 percent — an amazing 60 point drop.  A few months later, he lost his presidency to Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.  

What happened?  How did all that popularity disappear?  The lessons — two of them — are written in big red letters (literally): 

  • First, polls lie.  And lying polls can lull a president into the politician’s worst enemy – complacency.
  • Second, budget deficits matter, sometimes more than wars.

Son of a US Senator (Prescott Bush, D.-Conn.), youngest Navy pilot in World War II, a Yale graduate, self-made Texas oilman, and two-term congressman,  George H.W. Bush in the 1970s was given the chance by Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford to fill four key posts that made him a national figure: Ambassador to the UN, Republican Party chairman, chief US diplomat in China, and Director of the CIA.  In 1980, he ran well enough against Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination that Reagan gave him the VP spot, a role that Bush filled loyally for eight years before winning his own presidency in 1988.   

By 1992, Bush had used his presidency to become an accomplished world leader, presiding over not just the Persian Gulf War but also the collapse of Soviet Russia and other Communist dictatorships and a quick invasion of Panama — all handled cleanly.      

Unfortunately for Bush, however, this was not quite the right mix for American politics.  American votes elect American presidents — not the world — and global feats often play second fiddle to local issues.  Republican conservatives never quite trusted Bush, who had famously referred to Reagan’s tax cut plans in 1980 as “voodoo economics.”   Then add in a few headaches under Bush’s watch like these–

  • The collapse of the savings and loan industry, which required a clean-up costing taxpayers an estimated $500 billion, with scandals galore.  
  • The nomination to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, the most controversial in modern history, complete with an ugly sex-harrassment scandal played out on national TV.
  • Finally, in late 1991, a six-month economic recession pushing unemployment to 7.8 percent and Americans in poverty to 14.2 percent.  Voters still felt pain into the 1992 campaign season. 

Ross Period explaining the budget definit in 1992.

And then there was the deficit.  A point of passion?  Absolutely !!  


During the 1980s, US federal budget deficits had ballooned — a product of Reagan-era tax cuts combined with failure to control spending that caused national debt to triple during this era, from $900 billion to almost $3 trillion.  (It still sounds quint next to today’s mid-2011 debt of $13.5 trillion, but that’s another story.)    


Bush wanted to confront this problem, but he had tired his own hands during the 1988 campaign with his famous pledge: “Read my lips!  New new taxes!”  In the end, Bush broke this pledge and approved a $500 billion deficit reduction package in1990 that included tax hikes.  Click here for more about the pledge.



Breaking the pledge was bad enough, but then came something worse: Ross Perot.  


Perot, a cranky self-made Texas billionaire (founder of computer giant EDS), fed up with Washington incompetence, decided to launch his own self-financed independent presidential campaign in 1992 based on his own version of home-spun economic virtues: balanced budget, trade protection for US jobs, and direct town-hall-style democracy.  Partial to CNN’s Larry King, he came to interviews and debates armed with charts and graphs to explain just how badly the deficit was hurting everyone in the country.  


Bush seemed lost in the crossfire, worsened by his disdain for what he called “the vision thing.”  Perot won 19.7 million votes (about 18 percent)  — the best popular-vote showing by any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.  This allowed Clinton to win with a 43% plurality. (See full results here.)


And that sky-high, 89 percent poll numbers after the Persian Gulf War?  They simply melted — like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.  They had been a mirage, what pollsters call a “rally around the leader” affect in times of crisis.  They had only served to hide Bush’s weakness and allow him to get caught flat-footed and out-hustled by hungry Democrats. 



Finally — Lesson for Obama?


Stay tuned for the series finale — lessons for Barack Obama in 2012.   Coming tomorrow morning.  I  promise!!





The next presidential one-termer: Jimmy Carter.

Posted on by Ken Ackerman

Jimmy Carter answering questions as president.  

[Clirk here for (a) part I of this series, the first eight one-term presidents: John Adams to William Howard Taft and (b) part II, on the ninth one-termer, Herbert Hoover.]

Remember all the good feelings of optiimism and relief in January 1977 when Jimmy Carter was sworn in as president of the USA.  (You guys not born yet, trust me on this.)   


After the house-of-horrors presidency of “Tricky Dick” Richard M. Nixon – his enemies list, spying on his own staff, wiretaps of news reporters, his “plumbers unit,” IRS audits of political enemies, plus Vietnam, the Cambodia invasion, the shootings at Kent State, and all the lying and deceit of Watergate that finally did him in (I won’t pretend to be neutral about RMN) — after all that, Jimmy Carter seemed a breath of fresh air, even after the interlude of Gerald Ford’s relatively calm brief presidency.  

Honest Jimmy, he came across as down-home and normal, truthful, grounded, at ease with his wife and cute little daughter, a peanut farmer, nuclear engineer, and Navy submariner, willing to get out of his car and walk on his own two feet during his inaugural parade.  Carter was an “outsider” –a one-term governor from Plains, Georgia, with no taint of Washington experience.  He promised to deliver “a government as good and honest and decent and compassionate … as its people.”  And he said “I will never lie to you.”


Sound slightly arrogant?  Slightly smug?  Like an accident waiting to happen?  By 1980,barely three years later, Carter’s popularity had plummeted, his poll numbers at around 20 percent — close to Richard Nixon’s own lowest point during Watergate.  

[Full disclosure: At the time, in the late 1970s, I was a young staff lawyer for Republican Senator Chuck Percy (R-Ill.) on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee — scene of much Carter-era action — so I had a nice ring-side seat.]


To his credit, Carter compiled a pretty nice legislative record.  He won major deregulations of the airlines, trucking, and natural gas prices, created the Energy and Education Departments, took major energy conservation steps and pushed through the Alaska Lands Act and bans on ocean dumping and strip mining.  He negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel, pardoned Vietnam-era draft evaders, and won a treaty to return the Panama Canal to Panama (still a sore point with conservatives).  


This was all good.  Put it on the plus side of the ledger.  Now for the rest ….


So what was the accident waiting to happen? 

Almost from the start, things under Carter seemed chaotic, out-of control.  In his first year as president, Carter’s team stumbled into a first-rate scandal that forced the resignation of Carter’s long-time crony and OMB Director, Bert Lance.  After that, a veritable cascade of toubless followed —   

  • First, the economy sank into a swamp of high inflation, high interest rates, sagging markets, and low growth — a new phenomenon called Carter “stagflation.”  Rubbing sand in the wound were repeated hikes in the price of oil (gasoline) dictated by the OPEC cartel of Arab countries.  Then, in late 1979, the Hunt Brothers of Dallas, Texas, cornered the silver market, driving prices of silver and gold to historic highs before crashing in early 1980.  No, the economic mess wasn’t all Carter’s fault.  And to his credit, his Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker had plans to fix it.  But there’s more;
  • Then, as things kept going wrong, Carter decided to closet himself for a week-long, high-profile secret enclave at Camp David after which he (a) first conducted a purge of his staff, sacking five cabinet secretaries, and (b) then followed it with a national televised speech in which he decried the country’s “crisis of the spirit” – known to posterity as the “malaise” speech; 
  • Then, in late 1979, militants in Iran seized the US embassy there and held 52 American hostages for what would be 444 days.  Carter ordered a military rescue (causing his Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to resign in protest) which failed because of a helicopter crash that, costing the lives of eight servicemen;
  • Then came the late-1979 Russian invasion of Afghanistan, causing Carter to (a) cancel US participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympics (pissing off sports fans all across America) and (b)  embargo grain shipments to Russia (causing US grain prices to tank, pissing off farmers all across America); 

  • Then, finally, just when he needed friends the most, came a revolt from within his own Democratic Party as Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) decided to challenge Carter for the 1980 presidential nomination.  Carter beat him (he was, after all, an incumbent president), but only after an ugly fight.

By 1980 when the ran for re-eleciton, Jimmy Carter seemed reduced to one last voter appeal:  That as bad as things might be under his own leadership, his opponent, Republican Ronald Reagan, was worse — too inexperienced, too right wing, too extreme.  Voters didn’t buy it.  When Reagan and Carter debated face to face, Reagan came across as calm and reasonable.  He won by a landslide.


(Carter managed to bungle even the debates.  When third-party candidate John Anderson asked to participate, Reagan agreed and Carter refused.  The debate when ahead with just Reagan and Anderson, and Carter’s glaring absence make him again look petty and insecure.)




Lesson for Obama:


How to avoid being like Jimmy Carter?  Obama, let’s start with this:  Please do not start thinking that you are smarter than everyone else.  The minute you do, you’re lost. 

Here was Carter’s trap:  Being an “outsider” and painting yourself as “better than” Washington might make you popular in the short run, even win an election or two.  But those same Washington “insiders” – most just as honest, decent, and civic-minded as you — are the very people whose help you need to accomplish your goals, and whose friendship you need when things get tough.   Living in a White House cacoon surrounded by old friends from back home does little good when issues get complicated.

Yes, partisanship today is out of conttrol.  But the golden rule of Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunket from 1905 still holds today::  “The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary….”

Jimmy Carter is celebrated today as an admirable former President.  Since leaving the White House, he and his Carter Center have helped sooth dozens of world crises, wining him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. This, of course, very nice.  But for now,  the key fact about Carter is this: 1980 Electoral Votes- Ronald Reagan, 489; Carter, 49. (C-SPAN 2009 poll rank: 22.)

Next up, the final one-term president: George H. W. Bush.