The Square Pegs (16 page)

After a series of articles in the
New York Herald
, signed by Victoria Woodhull, but written by Andrews and Blood, advocating a universal government and a universal language published as a book in 1871 under the title
Origin, Tendencies, and Principles of Government
—it occurred to Victoria that she could not depend on the New York press to continue to publicize her radical views. If she was to gain speedy prominence, and successfully propagandize her theories, she must have her own newspaper. She had the necessary capital and she had the staff. Consequently, on May 14, 1870, appeared the first number of a sixteen-page, slick-papered journal called
Woodhull
&
Claflin’s Weekly
. Beneath its name the five-cent newspaper bore the legend: “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives!” And then, in smaller print, the promise: “Breaking The Way For Future Generations.”

Among the financial advertisements that crowded the first issue was a statement of policy. The
Weekly
would refrain from “scurrility in journalism.” Instead, it would be “devoted to the vital interests of the people.” Above all, it would “support Victoria C. Woodhull for president with its whole strength” and would “advocate Suffrage without distinction of sex.” The articles in the first issue, as well as in the issues that followed in the next four months, were tame, restrained, ladylike this, curiously, because two male idealists with little sense of showmanship were writing the copy. There were stories praising Commodore Vanderbilt, deploring women’s “voluptuous” fashions, and supporting business training for young ladies. There was a serialization of a novel by George Sand.

This editorial gentility did little to draw attention to Victoria, and it was costing a fortune. In September 1870 Victoria herself decided to take a more active part in publishing the newspaper and, at once, the paper was front-page news. Immediately, and for two years after, the
Weekly
gave its faithful readers their five cents’ worth and more. Article after article appeared supporting free love, abolition of the death penalty, short skirts, vegetarianism, excess-profit taxes, spiritualism, world government, better public housing, birth control, magnetic healing, and easier divorce laws. Fearlessly Victoria advocated legalized prostitution, exposure of Wall Street’s financial swindlers, and compulsory classes in physiology for women. At her insistence the
Weekly
featured the first full version of the Communist Manifesto published in English, self-help articles on the subject of abortion, Thomas Carlyle’s views on labor and every letter that backed Victoria for president. Circulation became national, and reached a high of twenty thousand.

It was not enough for Victoria to plead her progressive ideas in print. She insisted upon practicing them, too. It was an era when women did not patronize public restaurants unescorted after dark. Victoria, accompanied only by Tennessee, brazenly seated herself in Delmonico’s one evening at seven o’clock and demanded service. Charles Delmonico refused to serve her. “I can’t let you eat here without some man,” he said. Whereupon Victoria sent Tennessee outdoors to locate a cab driver and bring him to the table. They were served.

It was an era when women did not participate in rude labor-movements. Victoria joined Section 12 of the International Workingmen’s Association, which had been organized in 1864 by Karl Marx. The membership of Victoria and her followers was viewed with concern by Samuel Gompers. “Section 12 of the American group was dominated by a brilliant group of faddists, reformers, and sensation-loving spirits,” observed Gompers. “They were not working people and treated their relationship to the labor movement as a means to a ‘career.’ They did not realize that labor issues were tied up with the lives of men, women, and children issues not to be risked lightly.”

Finally, it was an era when women talked and agitated about equal rights, but did nothing more about them. Victoria was the first to take direct action in Washington. Her motives in planning to storm the nation’s capital may not have been entirely altruistic. She was beginning to realize that her newspaper was not influential enough properly to promote her person or her theories. To acquire a wider audience she knew that she must air her views in the capital. Diligently, she studied the records and personalities of congressional leaders, seeking one man who stood above the rest. When this man visited New York, Victoria went to see him. He was General Benjamin Franklin Butler, the pudgy, cross-eyed representative from Massachusetts. As military governor of New Orleans after the Civil War, he had been commonly known as Beast Butler and the Bluebeard of New Orleans for his uncavalier attitude toward Southern womanhood. Though his management of the city had been above reproach, his brusque management of its female population left much to be desired. When the belles of New Orleans insulted Northern soldiers, Butler retaliated by declaring that each female offender “be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” While this put a prompt end to all obvious gestures of contempt, the Southern ladies still turned their backs to Butler when they saw him, which provoked his memorable remark: “These women know which end of them looks best.” Yet, as a congressman the General proved more considerate than his colleagues toward American women in general. He believed not only in justice toward colored citizens and in the good sense of fiat or greenback money issued on faith in government, but also in equal rights for women. It was this last that gave Victoria Woodhull her hope.

Victoria apparently had no difficulty in convincing Butler to support her plan. She wished to present a memorial on behalf of woman suffrage to the Senate and the House of Representatives. Butler thought this a splendid idea. It is said that he wrote the memorial and then had the House Judiciary Committee invite Victoria to appear in person and read it to them.

Victoria, attired in an attractive Alpine hat, blue necktie, and dark dress, arrived in Washington prepared to address the august representatives on the morning of January 11, 1871. It was a decisive appearance for her, and the arrangement of the timing (surely at her own suggestion) had behind it a Machiavellian purpose. For, as Victoria well knew, on that very morning the influential National Woman’s Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Paulina Wright Davis, was about to begin its third annual convention. Victoria sensed that, by her dramatic and highly publicized appearance, she was accomplishing what no member of the suffrage movement had yet accomplished. If her memorial impressed the committee of men, it might impress the association of women. And thus, with one stroke, Victoria might overcome female resistance to her radicalism and eccentricity and take over the suffragette following as her very own.

Certainly, her instinct was correct. For when members of the committee assembled behind their long table in the crowded room, Susan B. Anthony, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Paulina Wright Davis were on hand, anxiously watching.

At last Victoria was introduced. She rose gracefully, respectfully, and in a clear, musical voice began to read aloud her brief memorial. After stating that she had been born in Ohio, that she had been a resident of New York for three years, that she was a citizen of the United States, she went on:

“The right to vote is denied to women citizens of the United States, by the operation of Election Laws in the several States and Territories … the continuance of the enforcement of said local election laws, denying and abridging the right of citizens to vote on account of sex, is a grievance to your memorialist and to various other persons, citizens of the United States, being women …

“Therefore, your memorialist would most respectfully petition your Honorable Bodies to make such laws as in the wisdom of Congress shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the right vested by the Constitution in the Citizens of the United States to vote, without regard to sex.”

It was an impressive reading. Victoria’s simplicity, modesty, and feminity won the hearts of the members of the committee, but not their heads. Later, with two dissents, they voted against the memorial as being outside the province of Congressional action. The two dissents were made by Loughridge, of Iowa, and, of course, General Butler, of Massachusetts, whose minority report to the House vigorously backed Victoria’s demand for equal rights. But if Victoria failed to win over the Judiciary Committee, she won a battle almost as important that morning. For the suffragette leaders, who had seen her and heard her at last, saw and heard not a strident Jezebel, but a restrained and refined lady who voiced more effectively than they their deepest yearnings. Immediately, without hesitation, they congratulated Victoria and invited her to attend the Suffrage Association convention that afternoon and address the delegates.

The association convened at Lincoln Hall in Washington, Victoria was seated on the platform with Susan B. Anthony and the other renowned feminists. When she was introduced by Isabella Beecher Hooker, who cautioned the audience that it was to be Mrs. Woodhull’s first public address, Victoria appeared faint and needed assistance to come forward. She reread the content of her memorial and spoke briefly of the reaction it had made upon members of the Judiciary Committee. The suffragettes applauded her and welcomed her as their newest heroine.

When the convention broke up, the acceptance of Victoria Woodhull as a legitimate suffragette hung briefly in the balance. From all corners of the country, followers of the movement protested. But the new friends Victoria had made in Washington remained staunch. When several persons called Victoria an infamous woman, Susan B. Anthony snapped back that “she would welcome all the infamous women in New York if they would make speeches for freedom.”

In New York, Victoria tried to consolidate her new power and respectability. She made a mild defense of woman suffrage at the Cooper Institute and followed this with several windy lectures on labor reform. But her main effort was directed toward gaining the support of many still reluctant suffrage leaders, among them Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, president of the New York State Association. Victoria asked Mrs. Blake to call. Mrs. Blake called, accompanied by her husband, Grinfill Blake, and was met by both Victoria and the ever uninhibited Tennessee. Mrs. Blake recorded the experience in her diary: “In the evening went to Woodhull and Claflin’s, where we had a curious time.” The curious time was elaborated upon, later, in a memoir, by Mrs. Blake’s daughter, Katherine D. Blake:

“I remember vividly that the next morning she [Mrs.

Blake] said at the breakfast table, ‘Grinfill! You know you behaved disgracefully last night!’

“His reply was, ‘Well, Lillie, my dear, if you will take me to a house where there are not chairs enough to sit on, so that a pretty plump young lady [Tennessee] with nothing on but a Mother Hubbard comes and sits on the arm of my chair and leans over me, you must expect me to put my arm around her.’”

Thereafter, Mrs. Blake was an implacable enemy. She kept her distance, and her husband distant, from Victoria. She also withheld all suffragette support from Victoria. Presently, she began to receive anonymous letters which, according to Katherine D. Blake, warned her “that unless she paid $500 her misdeeds would be ‘shown up’ in Woodhull and Claflin’s scurrilous paper.” Mrs. Blake put the blame for blackmail squarely on Victoria’s shoulders, accusing her of having “had similar letters written to many other people.” Others, too, accused Victoria of resorting to blackmail to bludgeon antagonistic suffragettes into compliance, though Victoria always vehemently denied the charges. At any rate, by this time she realized that she could not overcome all resistance to her candidacy. She had to be satisfied with the support of the liberal element of the feminist movement, and she moved quickly to exploit this support.

The anniversary of the launching of the suffrage movement was scheduled to be celebrated in Apollo Hall, New York City, on May 11, 1871. Victoria, who had found her stage presence at last, made a ringing, emotional bid for followers and front-page attention. “If the very next Congress refuses women all the legitimate results of citizenship,” she cried, “we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government… . We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the South. We are plotting revolution; we will overthrow this bogus Republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead.”

The good effects of this speech were nullified in five days by a public scandal instigated by Victoria’s mother. Some months earlier, Dr. Canning Woodhull had appeared at the three-story house at 15 East Thirty-eighth Street which Victoria maintained for herself and her relatives. Since the divorce Dr. Woodhull had lost himself in alcoholism. He was impoverished and he was ill, and he begged Victoria for help. She took him in to care for their two children. She did not think it unusual that her lover, Colonel Blood, remained under the same roof. But Roxanna Claflin thought it unusual, and she saw her chance to get rid of Blood. She hated him. She thought that he had filled Victoria’s head with high-flown ideas, that he had taken her from the happier life of the medicine show and spiritualism, and that he was using her only for her money, which might better be diverted to the Claflins. Moreover, Blood had little respect for Mrs. Claflin and had often threatened her.

In a fine frenzy Mrs. Claflin went to the police. At the Essex Street station she swore out a complaint against Colonel Blood for assault and battery. “My daughters were good daughters and affectionate children,” she told the law, “till they got in with this man Blood. He has threatened my life several times. … I say here and I call Heaven to witness that there was the worst gang of free lovers in that house in Thirty-eighth Street that ever lived. Stephen Pearl Andrews and Dr. Woodhull and lots more of such trash.”

The case went to court. Colonel Blood said that he had never laid a hand on Mrs. Claflin. Once he had threatened to “turn her over my knee and spank her.” That was the extent of it. He insisted that he was Victoria’s husband, though there was no proof of it. When asked if he and Dr. Woodhull occupied the same bedroom with Victoria, he would not reply. Victoria appeared in defense of her lover. “Colonel Blood never treated my mother otherwise than kind, … Sometimes she would come down to the table and sit on Mr. Blood’s lap and say he was the best son-in-law she had. Then again she would abuse him like a thief.” Tennessee testified that Colonel Blood rescued her from the evil influence of her mother and family. “Since I was fourteen years old, I have kept thirty or thirty-five deadheads. … I have humbugged people, I know. But if I did it, it was to make money to keep these deadheads.” Dr. Woodhull wobbled up to the stand to state that, notwithstanding Mrs. Claflin’s charges, it was she who was actually threatening poor Blood. In the end, the judge threw the case out of court and into the lap of the press.