Theodore Roosevelt: Cowboy in the White House 567improve the character of the electorate. Society would
benefit because politics would become less corrupt, war
a thing of the past. “City housekeeping has failed,” said
Jane Addams of Hull House in arguing for the reform
of municipal government, “partly because women, the
traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted.”
The trouble with this argument (aside from the
fact that opponents could easily demonstrate that in
states where women did vote, governments were no
better or worse than elsewhere) was that it surren-
dered the principle of equality. In the long run this
was to have serious consequences for the women’s
movement, although the immediate effect of the
purity argument was probably to advance the suffrag-
ists’ cause.
By the early twentieth century there were signs of
progress. In 1890 the two major women’s groups com-
bined as the National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA). Stanton and Anthony were
the first two presidents of the association, but new lead-
ers were emerging, the most notable being Carrie
Chapman Catt, a woman who combined superb orga-
nizing abilities and political skills with commitment to
broad social reform. The NAWSA made winning the
right to vote its main objective and concentrated on a
state-by-state approach. Wyoming gave women the
vote in 1869, and Utah, Colorado, and Idaho had been
won over to woman suffrage by 1896.
The burgeoning of the progressive movement
helped as middle-class recruits of both sexes adopted
the suffrage cause. The 1911 referendum in
California was crucial. Fifteen years earlier, California
voters had rejected the measure. But in 1911, despite
determined opposition from saloonkeepers, the pro-
posal barely passed. Within three years, most other
Western states fell into line. For the first time, large
numbers of working-class women began to agitate for
the vote. In 1917, bosses at New York City’s
Tammany Hall, who had engineered the defeat of
woman suffrage in that state two years earlier, con-
cluded that passage was inevitable and threw their
support to the measure, which passed. The suffrag-
ists then shifted the campaign back to the national
level, the lead taken by a new organization, the
Congressional Union, headed by Alice Paul and the
wealthy reformer Alva Belmont. When President
Wilson refused to support the idea of a constitutional
amendment granting women the vote, militant
women picketed the White House. A number of
them, including the daughter of Thomas Bayard, a
former senator and secretary of state, were arrested
and sentenced to sixty days in the workhouse. This
roused a storm of criticism, and Wilson quickly par-
doned the picketers. After some hesitation the NAWSA
stopped concentrating on the state-by-state approach
and began to campaign for a constitutional amend-
ment. Pressure on Congress mounted steadily. Later,
Vice President Thomas R. Marshall complained that
the “everlasting clatter of the militant suffragettes”
was keeping Congress from transacting other busi-
ness. This was an overstatement, but in any case the
amendment finally won congressional approval in- By 1920 the necessary three-quarters of the
states had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment; the
long fight was over.
Woman Suffrage Before the 19th Centuryat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Theodore Roosevelt: Cowboy in the White House
On September 6, 1901, an anarchist named Leon
Czolgosz shot President McKinley during a public
reception at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo,
New York. Eight days later McKinley died and
Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United
States. His ascension to the presidency marked the
beginning of a new era in national politics.
Although only forty-two, by far the youngest
president in the nation’s history up to that time,
Roosevelt brought solid qualifications to the office.
Son of a well-to-do New York merchant, he had grad-
uated from Harvard in 1880 and studied law briefly at
Columbia, though he did not obtain a degree. In
addition to political experience that included three
terms in the New York assembly, six years on the U.S.
Civil Service Commission, two years as police com-
missioner of New York City, another as assistant secre-
tary of the navy, and a term as governor of New York,
he had been a rancher in the Dakota Territory and a
soldier in the Spanish-American War. He was also a
well-known historian: HisNaval War of 1812(1882),
begun during his undergraduate days at Harvard, and
his four-volumeWinning of the West (1889–1896)
were valuable works of scholarship, and he had writ-
ten two popular biographies and other books as well.
Politically, he had always been a loyal Republican. He
rejected the mugwump heresy in 1884, and during
the tempestuous 1890s he vigorously denounced
populism, Bryanism, and “labor agitators.”
Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s elevation to the presi-
dency alarmed many conservatives, and not without
reason. He did not fit their conception, based on a
composite image of the chief executives from Hayes to
McKinley, of a president. He seemed too undignified,
too energetic, too outspoken, too unconventional. It
was one thing to have operated a cattle ranch, another
to have captured a gang of rustlers at gunpoint; one
thing to have run a metropolitan police force, another
to have roamed New York slums in the small hours to
catch patrolmen fraternizing with thieves and prosti-
tutes; and one thing to have commanded a regiment,
another to have killed a Spaniard personally.SeetheMap