Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and the Battle for a New South

10: Kentucky's "most distinguished woman citizen" 1919-1920

215 Chapter 10 Kentucky’s “most distinguished woman citizen” 1919–1920 After being pronounced cured of tuberculosis in autumn 1918, Madge Breckinridge felt reinvigorated and eager to move forward for the cause of woman suffrage. The international influenza epidemic had caused the annual KERA convention to be postponed until the following spring, and when it met in March 1919, Madge again became president. Prospects for the federal amendment had never looked brighter, even though the U.S. Senate had failed by one vote on February 10 to give it the necessary two-thirds majority. NAWSA now constituted a mass movement whose strength had grown exponentially since Catt devised her “Winning Plan.” At the same time, demonstrations by the National Woman’s Party and the government’s attack on its right of assembly through arrest, imprisonment, and force-feeding led many in Washington to question the government’s actions. Together, the two suffrage groups, though not consciously cooperating, caused a backlash that coerced the Wilson administration to endorse the federal amendment. As a result, Kentucky’s entire congressional delegation with the exception of Senator J. C. W. Beckham now supported the amendment. Strong resistance continued, however, in the Deep South, where the Anthony amendment remained inextricably linked with the issue of black voting rights and the perception that it would threaten white supremacy. Some antisuffragists even went so far as to imply that the tactics used to prevent black men from voting could not be applied to black women. (Apparently, they feared the muchvaunted concept of “southern chivalry” applied to black women enough to prevent widespread violence or threats thereof from being used to pre- 216 Madeline McDowell Breckinridge vent their voting.) Mainstream southern suffragists tried to ignore the race issue whenever possible, and when forced to address it, argued that the federal amendment would add more white women to the electorate than the total of black men and black women combined, if all were allowed to Portrait of Madeline McDowell Breckinridge by Dixie Selden, 1920. The portrait hangs at Ashland. Courtesy of Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington. 217 Kentucky’s Most Distinguished Woman Citizen vote. Yet few could deny that equal suffrage meant political, and possibly social, equality.1 Despite the fact that Kentucky, with a black population of only 9.5 percent in 1920, had implemented a number of segregationist policies, it had never taken the final step of disfranchising blacks. Nevertheless, culturally it identified in many ways with the Deep South—with some historians even arguing that Kentucky joined the Confederacy after the Civil War—and many in the commonwealth clung to the states’ rights philosophy. This climate created a challenge for support of the Anthony amendment. Thus, the final episode of the suffrage movement in Kentucky revolved around the issue of states’ rights versus federal amendment and the contrasting attitudes of the state’s two leading suffragists— Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and Laura Clay.2 In February 1919 the Herald published arguments for and against the federal amendment by Laura Clay, Lexington attorney John T. Shelby, Desha Breckinridge, and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge. Laura Clay launched the debate with a letter to the editor stating that her chief objection to the Anthony amendment centered on section 2, which stated: “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by legislation,” the exact wording of section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment. It was this “federal supervision of state elections” to which Clay objected, believing that if the amendment were passed, any partisan majority in Congress might thereby force its will on some state. She believed the Republican Party had used section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment during Reconstruction primarily to maintain itself in power rather than to protect the ex-slaves, and the effect of the Anthony amendment might be even greater because the amendment would enfranchise one-half of the population and might lead to federal intervention in every election in every state. Moreover, she maintained, in virtual defiance of her life’s work, that while woman suffrage was an important issue, it was not more important than state control of state elections.3 John T. Shelby, former law partner of W. C. P. Breckinridge and one of his defending attorneys in the Madeline Pollard lawsuit, stated his belief that the federal amendment would violate “the spirit of the Constitution .” Desha replied by asking Shelby if the constitutionality of a...