Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

“We have practically (in Colorado) all the forms of graft and misgovernment found elsewhere. Woman’s suffrage seems to have been neither a preventive, an alleviator, nor a cure for any of our political ills.”

Only about one-third of the Colorado women actually vote, and a great many of them flatly and indignantly refuse to do so. Referring to an election in Colorado, 1910, Miss Seawell says:

“At the election in May, 1910, the sale of women’s votes was open and shameless. At each of the 211 voting precincts in Denver, there were four women working in the interests of the saloon-keepers. These women had previously visited the headquarters of the saloon-keepers and openly accepted each a ten dollar bill for her services. In this and other ways Mr. Barry says he saw about $17,000 paid to women voters, who apparently made no effort to conceal it, as indeed it would have been useless.... Such wholesale corruption has probably never been approximated in any city in the United States.”

Robert H. Fuller says that:

“Some of the worst election frauds ever perpetrated in this country marked the Colorado election of 1904. The character and average intelligence of the voting population, as a whole, have not improved in the states where women vote; there has been no improvement in the fitness or capacity of the elected public officials.” (Government by the People.)

Miss Seawell says that in the election case of Bonynge vs. Shafroth, in the First Congressional District of Colorado, containing the City of Denver (Second Session of the Fifty-eighth Congress, H. R. report No. 2705), it appeared that out of 9000 ballots in the boxes there were 6000 fraudulent ones which had been prepared by three men and by one woman. One woman poll clerk voted three times; forgeries were committed by the women; two women arranged to have a fight started so as to distract the attention of the watchers at the polls, while a third woman stuffed the ballot-boxes. Because of this exposure, Shafroth resigned.

Moral stimulus there certainly could be none in contact with this fraud organization which goes by the name of politics in Colorado. Of mental stimulus and “broadening in the outlook” thus to be miraculously achieved by the mere process of selecting one out of two scamps for public office, Miss Sumner was reluctantly compelled to admit, that after all in actual result she found but little. Few people were able to give her any clear reason why they favored woman suffrage nor why they opposed it. It seems likely that all the mental stimulus the Colorado women ever got by entering the mire of politics, they could have obtained at less expense to their delicacy and good manners, by taking part in church fairs, golfing, gardening, playing base-ball, walking, lawn tennis, singing schools, literary societies, spelling bees, horseback riding or dancing. And if some of the precious creatures must at any rate be kept amused while the rest of us work, it would be less expensive to the state to provide these amusements at state charge than to permit them to divert their minds by playing with our national welfare, and using poor old Uncle Sam as the object on which to try their various experiments in political quackery.

Glancing over the New York Evening Post of August 27, 1919, the writer was interested to read that a young lady politician, convicted in 1916 of a murder during a political quarrel at Thompson Falls, the victim being one Thomas, also a politician, had been paroled from the Montana State Penitentiary. It is reassuring to know that a suffragette murderess actually risks three years confinement (softened no doubt by sympathy) in Montana, the first woman suffrage state, and the one who gave us our first lady “congressman.”

The plain truth is, that the entry of women into politics has brought no promise to the American people of any practical help in any of their real problems. The whole movement bears the stamp of crudeness and mediocrity. Its ideals and operations have been low and its leaders lacking in every quality of greatness. Part of its success is no doubt due to the love of novelty, and the inability in most minds to distinguish what is really progress from what is merely blind or foolish experiment. To many superficial people there is a fascination attached to everything which smacks of revolution; because in the past an occasional revolt has been justified, they think it is heroic and noble to take part in any political rumpus. But nothing either noble or heroic was ever in or behind the woman suffrage movement, or has ever come out of it. The really great political agitations have all produced something worth while, in orators, leaders or authorship; see, for example, the chronicles of the American Revolution or the abolition movement; even the French Revolution, in its compass from Rousseau to Napoleon, evolved some greatness to offset the mass of rubbish and infamy which it vomited forth. Its political incapables though unfit for any good constructive work were at least able to talk and write with effect; they drew attractive political pictures and proposals, and could promise and speculate in a way to arouse interest. Not so the suffragists. Among political agitators they stand supreme for dullness and stupidity. Looking at their literature one is immediately struck by its cheapness, by its utter lack of noble and patriotic sentiments, by the lack of appeal to broad and elevating motives. We have had thousands of suffragist speeches, and tons of printed literature, and after all, what have they or what has their movement offered to the nation or to the world? Nothing, absolutely nothing. The movement has not produced one idea worthy of the consideration of a well-educated and sensible man; it has apparently been motived by vanity, love of notoriety and power, and characterized by hysteria; the proposals advanced have been pilfered from socialists and other fanatics; the oratory and literature of the suffragists is characterized by flippant insincerity and unscrupulousness; progressive legislation in which they had no perceptible part is boldly claimed as their work; their leaders often display dense ignorance of the political history of the country, and a sad lack of capacity to understand sound political principles or to sympathize with anything beyond the popular smartness of the hour. The personnel of their leaders has been commonplace and uninteresting. Some of them have been sincere fanatics; most of them are political adventuresses. Dr. C. L. Dana says of the movement: “It is adopted as a kind of religion, a holy cult of self and sex, expressed by a passion to get what they want. There is no program, no promise, only ecstatic assertions that they ought to have it and must have it, and of the wonders that will follow its possession.... Measured by fair rules of intelligence testing, I should say that the average zealot in the cause has about the mental age of eleven.” (Letter to Miss Chittenden.) During the war with Germany the patriotism of many of the leaders was doubtful, and their associates suspicious. And during the progress of the whole agitation, there has been no suggestion of any effort to be made by those women or their followers to stop political graft or corruption, or to raise the standard of politics or of legislation. They have had the vote at two annual elections in the great state of New York; what do they offer there? Nothing. Who are their standard bearers and who has benefited by their vote? The most notorious boss and the most noted and powerful political machine in the world.

The strongest proof, however, of the utter unworthiness of the cause of female suffrage and the meanness of its motives is furnished by the public declarations of its female advocates. Many of these addresses are flavored with half contemptuous, half vicious and altogether impudent and vile sneers at men, and assertions of masculine inferiority, which could not have been readily displayed but by those familiar with households whose men habitually receive at home but scant respect. Those scoffs at men are accompanied by a great show of half hysterical, all gushing, admiration for the mystic excellences of contemporary women, and of contempt for those of the last generation; in fact these female reform leaders usually assume a top-lofty attitude of disdain for our ancestors generally, their work and their ideals. Each of them is of course filled with wonder at her own superior wisdom. One cannot help suspecting that most of this display of crudity and egotism is due to the fact that much of the suffragist work was done by newly fledged graduates of female colleges, where uppish young women, largely of the type who dislike home duties, or sometimes it is feared work of any kind, are sent by their parents either to get rid of them for a while, or because it is the thing to do, or to fit them for teaching. As from the college president down, nothing of actual life is known, or ever was known, within the college walls, where everything needed, buildings, endowments, salaries, books, instruments and sustenance, is provided by someone else, one can readily imagine the quality of the stuff expounded in these places under the pretence of instruction in sociology, politics and economics, and greedily swallowed by the extremely silly and conceited undergraduates. On leaving college, the best or most fortunate of these girls, aided by good luck or guided by wise parents, go to work at some useful occupation, and begin to get real lessons in life followed usually by still higher instruction as wives and mothers later on. Of the lazy, rattle-brained, and otherwise good for nothing, a certain percentage find their way every year into the field of female suffrage agitation. Some scraps of knowledge they have picked up in the class-room, the value of which they enormously exaggerate in their own minds, and give themselves intellectual airs in consequence. Many of them lack sense or judgment sufficient to enable them to appreciate the immense importance of the business world, the great mental capacity required in dealing with problems of commerce, manufacturing and finance, and feel a certain contempt for business people who take no part in the literary and artistic patter of the day, or who lack taste for trashy new poetry and rubbishy modern novels. The participation of this class in the “movement” is prompted partly by morbid desire to associate with men; and partly by vanity and a longing for notoriety, and for opportunity to display their own imagined powers. Fools, being afraid of no social or political problems, walk in where angels fear to tread; and it is no unusual thing to see charming and prudent women reduced to meek silence by these female blatherskites, with their irrelevant harangues about primitive men, cave dwellers, man-made law, dual-sexed insects and female spiders who devour their mates. If the reader doubts that such have been of the class of female suffrage deliverances it will be because he has been fortunate enough not to have heard many of them.