Wilson’s Stand for Suffrage, Part I of III
The world, the president had said, was locked in a cataclysmic final war for freedom, democracy, and peace. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” Woodrow Wilson told Congress in April 1917, asking for a declaration of war against the Central Powers.
“Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”
On the morning of Sunday, September 29, 1918, the president was once again faced with the glaring question of the realization of democracy at home, and not just the survival and extension of democracy abroad.
Wilson disliked discussing political affairs on Sundays, except in emergencies. But his Treasury Secretary, William Gibbs McAdoo, believed that the issue before Congress warranted an exception.
“I felt that since no president of the United States had ever spoken in favor of women’s suffrage, and that since we were fighting a war for democracy, it seemed to me that we could not consistently persist in refusing to admit women to the benefits of democracy on an equal footing with men,” he recalled years later.
By September 29, 1918, the suffrage amendment had failed in Congress for roughly four decades, dozens of times in both chambers. And although the House had finally passed it in January by a narrow margin of 274–136—the first congressional victory for the suffrage movement and just one vote over the required two-thirds majority—the Senate had not yet done so even once.
McAdoo urged the president to go down to the Senate chamber himself and urge the passage of the suffrage amendment ahead of the scheduled Tuesday, October 1, vote.
“What I had in mind was a most unusual procedure for the president,” he admitted. “There was no precedent for the chief executive’s addressing either house of Congress in person in behalf of any pending measure.”
Wilson “listened patiently” as McAdoo, his son-in-law, pitched the idea. The president was not an ignorant man; he knew well that the Senate lacked the votes to pass the legislation and believed his address would be futile in that respect.
(Wilson had already written to several defiant senators, calling the amendment a “very necessary public reform,” one that would strengthen “the cause of world-democracy.”)
McAdoo agreed with Wilson’s analysis but argued that the speech could “exercise… a profound impression on public opinion.” After all, the midterm elections were only weeks away. McAdoo calculated that the president’s intervention might help elect enough sympathetic senators to ensure passage in the next session—the fateful year of 1919.
Wilson said he’d think it over.
As Allied soldiers were breaking through the last walls of autocracy in Europe—storming the Hindenburg Line along the St. Quentin Canal, where American, British, and Australian troops fought through barbed wire and machine-gun fire to seize the heights at Bellicourt and Bony—Wilson was confronted with an opportunity at home to break through one of the last, and most reinforced, walls of disenfranchisement in America.
In the hours that followed, the words of suffrage titan Carrie Chapman Catt, who had written to him not long before, likely reappeared in Wilson’s mind, reminding him of a profound truth: “The hope and fate of the women of the nation rest in your hands.”