Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights

5. Belmont’s Orphan Child

141 Belmont’s Orphan Child After her summer with Field was over, Alva returned to New York. From there she continued to offer the CU, now known as the National Woman’s Party (NWP), both money and moral support.1 Paul credited Alva for the name change. Mrs. Belmont preferred it, she said, and since she was providing them with operating funds and no one objected , it was an easy way to keep her happy and involved. The effort paid off. “Belmont was so pleased . . . and so full of interest that she . . . pledged . . . [a] tremendous sum of money” to the new organization, Paul remembered.2 Alva did not participate in suffrage activities that fall. Her invisibility meant that when the State of New York granted women suffrage in early November 1917, her name was nowhere to be seen in the press coverage.3 It was Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt of the NAWSA who got all of the attention. Infuriated, Alva called reporters to a press conference at the headquarters of the PEA. “I have received letters and telegrams from all over the country . . . asking why, in the recording of the New York State victory, the name of the woman responsible for it—my own—was never mentioned by a person or a paper ,” she indignantly told them. Maybe Shaw and Catt had “forgotten who is responsible for this victory,” she continued. “But I don’t care. I shall go down in history.” The New York World’s coverage of her statement was absolutely gleeful. “Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont is miffed,” it said. “She feels that Hamlet has been left out of the cast; then in the magnificent drama of the 5 • 142 | Alva Vanderbilt Belmont Suffrage victory in this State the woman who should have played a stellar role has been forgotten.” Unconvinced that she deserved credit for the enfranchisement of women in New York, it noted that while she may have brought the NAWSA to New York City and donated money to pay for its headquarters in 1914, she had since allied herself with the NWP and had made it known that she considered state campaigns a “needless waste of money and energy.”4 On the heels of the New York victory, the U.S. House of Representatives finally passed the Susan B. Anthony amendment.5 At the time, Alva was in Florida enjoying the warm weather and raising money for the NWP in Miami, Ft. Myers, and Palm Beach.6 When Paul proposed putting more pressure on Wilson by burning his speeches in the urns that dotted Lafayette Park across from the White House, Alva reluctantly supported the effort. She was concerned that the strategy might backfire on the NWP and make it even more difficult to raise money to support the suffrage campaign.7 Alva remained out of sight (and out of mind) until December 1918, when she gave her PEA headquarters in New York City to the Salvation Army. “Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont’s suffrage shop . . . famous for the votes-for-women cold creams and lip salves, which did so much to make woman suffrage and beauty synonymous in New York City, and for the votes-for-women beef stew and apple pie, which made many a convert to the cause before suffrage orators got in a word, passed into history yesterday,” said the New York Tribune. Henceforth, it would serve as sleeping quarters for 160 veterans and a snack bar where exsoldiers could get donuts and coffee for free.8 By the time Congress began its session in May 1919, Wilson had pub­ licly come out in support of a suffrage amendment. On May 21, the House of Representatives again passed the suffrage amendment by a vote of 304–89. The Senate followed suit on June 4.9 It is unclear what role the NWP’s militant tactics played in the amendment’s passage. The New York Times credited the pressure that the NWP activists placed on members of Congress through the use of an elaborate card-index system containing information on each of them combined with the masterful coordination of state and national campaigns as key factors in guaranteeing the success of their campaign.10 Thomas Marshall, Wilson’s vice president, had a different perspective. Women got the vote, he said, because the militants wore Belmont’s Orphan Child | 143 down Congress’s resistance. Congressmen simply got...