Citizens At Last (KLRU, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a KPBS showing of a fascinating little vest-pocket documentary called Citizens at Last, produced by the PBS affiliate in Austin, Texas, KLRU (a station ID I’ve otherwise seen only on the Austin City Limits music program), about the history of the fight for women’s suffrage in Texas. Directed, written and co-produced by Nancy Schiesari, the show mentioned that there’d been an active suffrage movement in Texas since the 1880’s but focused on the last decade before national ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. The show’s main heroine was Minnie Fisher Cunningham, a Texas woman who had studied pharmacy at the University of Texas and got a degree in it – not surprisingly, she was the only woman in her graduating class – only when she actually got a job at a drugstore she found that a male colleague who hadn’t gone to college and got a degree in the field was being paid twice as much as she was. She eventually married a lawyer named Cunningham and quit working, but used her time to get involved in various social-justice causes including suffrage. The show briefly mentioned Jovena Idal, a Mexican-American woman from El Paso who also became a key suffrage activist in Texas and helped bring together a coalition that included Latinas and African-American women as well as whites. One thing I give this documentary a lot of credit for is it showed (and was honest about) the close connection between the movements for suffrage and Prohibition.

Most of America’s first-generation feminists were also ardent Prohibitionists, and they saw the two issues as inseparably intertwined. They noticed that, in an era in which workers were paid in cash, saloon owners deliberately built their establishments near factory gates so male workers would be enticed to spend all or most of their week’s pay on drink – leaving their wives wondering how the hell they were going to feed themselves and their kids on what little money their husbands had left after their visits to the saloons. The early feminists also believed that Prohibition would end domestic violence; they assumed that the only reason men would beat the women they supposedly loved was if alcohol made them do it. One of the reasons it took so damned long for women to get the vote in the U.S. was the fierce opposition of the liquor and beer industries: they assumed – rightly – that votes for women would mean more votes for Prohibition. Another issue that complicated the struggle for women’s votes in Texas – and throughout the South – was the determination of the white men running the region to keep African-Americans disenfranchised. They feared that pressure to extend the franchise to women would generate a move to extend it to Blacks as well, and having already worked so hard in the decades since the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to block Blacks from voting (through not only restrictive laws but economic pressure and, when all else failed, nighttime visits from the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist terror organizations), a lot of Southern male politicians feared that opening the vote to women would put pressure on them to re-enfranchise Blacks as well.

The suffrage movement had more than its share of racists and white supremacists, including Louisiana-based Kate Gordon, who not only believed in restricting the vote to whites but thought the only way the suffrage movement could succeed in the South is if it made clear they were only interested in winning the vote for white women. Much to their credit, Minnie Fisher Cunningham and the other Texas suffrage leader responded to Gordon’s offer of help with, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Cunningham was in close contact with Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association; and Harriet Stanton Blach, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a major suffrage leader in her own right. The Texas suffragists focused on getting a bill through the Texas legislature to allow women to vote in primary elections – at a time when the Democratic Party so totally dominated Texas politics that winning its primary was tantamount to winning the election. Their principal opponent was Governor James Ferguson and the alcohol industry, which so dominated Texas politics in general and Ferguson in particular they were able to quash the suffrage bill. Ferguson’s downfall came in 1917, after a re-election campaign he’d won despite the energetic campaigning of women against him, until the news broke that he had received a personal loan of $180,000 from a consortium of alcohol manufacturers, including Anheuser-Busch. He was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives and convicted in the Texas Senate – though he tried to escape a ban on his ability to run again in the future by resigning one day before the Senate voted to convict him.

The start of World War I in 1914 and America’s entry into it in 1917 complicated the suffrage issue and also boosted the cause of the Prohibitionists to which the suffragists were so closely aligned. Apparently 60 percent of the American servicemembers who fought in World War I trained in Texas, and following their well-established strategy of locating saloons near factories where workers were paid, they set up saloons and brothels just outside the Army camps to grab as much as possible of the servicemembers’ pay in exchange for alcohol and commodity sex. This led to a huge outbreak of sexually transmitted disease – Schiesari’s narration said STD’s were incurable then, which wasn’t quite true (there were regimens involving mercury and arsenic, but they took a long time to work and were themselves potentially life-threatening) – and the women activists of Texas fought for and won laws establishing so-called “white zones” in which saloons and brothels were prohibited within 10 miles of a military base. In later years Minnie Fisher Cunningham (who lived until 1964 and continued her activist career until the end) and other Texas suffragists resented the “print the legend” version of their history that said Texas women had been rewarded with the vote in return for their supporting the war effort by pushing for the “white zones.”

In fact Cunningham and the other Texas suffrage leaders had cut a quid pro quo deal with William Hobby, the lieutenant governor who’d become acting governor on Ferguson’s departure, that if women got the right to vote in Democratic primaries they would ensure a huge women’s turnout for Hobby. Then Hobby, in an excess of zeal, called for a statewide suffrage referendum that would, alas, be voted on in a general election in which women were still not allowed to vote. It lost big-time, which convinced Cunningham and her activist sisters that they needed to concentrate their efforts on the nationwide suffrage amendment – which was being blocked by a coalition of Southern states who had pledged that none of them would ratify it, thereby denying it the 36 states it needed to become part of the Constitution. Thanks to the hard work of Cunningham and her fellow Texas suffragists, Texas became the ninth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment – and the first one in the South. In an irony not mentioned in this program, after unsuccessful runs for the presidency and a U.S. Senate seat from Texas, and barred from running for governor himself because of his impeachment and conviction, James Ferguson, ferocious opponent of women’s suffrage, staged a political comeback in the 1920’s by running his wife for Governor of Texas and getting her elected. What was amazing about Citizens at Last – aside from its honesty about the close connection between the suffrage and Prohibition movements (most of the retrospective documentaries prepared for the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 2020 either fudged the inconvenient truth of the suffrage/Prohibition connection or ignored it completely) – is how many modern-day issues had their reflections in this story. When Governor Hobby wanted to push through the primary suffrage bill he called a special session of the Texas legislature to do so – and managed to get it passed despite the attempts of anti-suffrage legislators to stay away from the legislature to deny Hobby the quorum he needed to get the bill passed. It’s a piece of history being repeated today for just the opposite reason: Republican Governor Greg Abbott called a special session of the Texas legislature to push through a bill making it harder for Texans to vote (in particular for Texans of color) and Texas Democrats: remember that until the 1960’s the Democrats were the party of slavery, secession, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan and the Republicans were the party of civil rights – until Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond concocted the “Southern strategy” that essentially flipped the two major parties’ positions and made the Republicans the party of racism and white supremacy), many of them women and/or people of color, boycotted the legislature to deny it a quorum for a bill to suppress voting rights.

With all the hand-wringing on the media right now over the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and the crocodile tears being cried about the reduction of Afghan women to essentially property status (first of their fathers and then of their husbands, often men their families have arranged and forced them to marry), a show like this is a good reminder that women in the U.S. haven’t had such a great time either: at the turn of the last century American women were still legally essentially their husbands’ chattel, and the same bullshit “religious” arguments used by the anti-suffragists (many of whom were women themselves) in the 1910’s and the Taliban today were heard again in the 1970’s by Phyllis Schafly and other anti-feminist women to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment – when I read an article by Schlafly saying that if the ERA passed women would lose their “dower rights,” I found myself wondering, “What century is this, anyway?” Citizens at Last ends with Black woman Texas Congressmember Barbara Jordan at the 1974 impeachment hearings for Richard Nixon pointing out that the words “We the People” that begin the Constitution originally didn’t include people like her – they basically meant “We the White Men with Property” – and it took generations of struggle to expand that definition to include Barbara Jordan … struggle that is still going on given the determination of Republicans in state governments, Congress and the Supreme Court to cut back voting rights and turn America’s electorate all-white again.