AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
A woman ran for president in 1872. On May 10th of that year, Victoria Woodhull became the first female to attempt to become the Chief Executive. She was nominated by the Equal Rights Party. Her vice-presidential running mate was Frederick Douglass.. The ER Party hoped to unite the causes of women’s suffrage and civil rights for Black people.
Victoria Woodhull
It all sounds so good at this remove but, sadly, the Woodhull/Douglass ticket didn’t earn a single Electoral College vote. The incumbent president, Republican Ulysses S. Grant ran against the Liberal Republican Democrat Horace Greeley. Funny isn’t it, that a major political party in the United States could proudly call itself liberal. That, of course, was a hundred and fifty years ago, before Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and social media turned the word into an condemnation.
Four other candidates received Electoral votes. Remember, no matter what kind of a job Grant had done in his first term, nearly half the country despised him thanks to his role as the victorious general in the Civil War. Still, he whomped the other five wannabes; 55.6 percent of voters chose Grant; 43.8 went for Greeley. The other four fellows split the remaining six-tenths of one percent. I couldn’t find any figures for the Woodhull/Douglass ticket. Not that it would have mattered — Victoria Woodhull would have been six months shy of her 35th birthday by the time the March 4, 1973 inauguration date arrived, making her too young to be president. The Equal Rights Party ticket gained no Electoral votes and no source that I’ve found is able to say how many actual votes she and Douglass got. A common descriptor of her total vote count is “negligible.”
1872 was a fitting year for the nation’s first woman presidential candidate. That same year, Congress enacted a law calling for equal pay for male and female federal employees. Now that surprised me, inasmuch as equal pay sounds so 1970s or even later. Nevertheless, the US government a century and a half ago, in many ways, set a progressive — dare I say liberal — tone for the country and for the world. This even as it still was engaged in a sweeping campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide west of the Mississippi River. Once again illustrating the too-often baffling contradictions inherent in our country’s DNA.
For example, here’s another counterpoint to the Equal Pay act: the year prior, an organization was founded, one that would, over the decades, assume gargantuan power within the halls of Congress, the Supreme Court, and American life in general. A couple of old soldiers named William Conant Church and George Wood Wingate started the National Rifle Association of America in New York state. Their idea being soldiers needed to learn how to shoot better. US Army studies showed that, during the Civil War, Union soldiers fired about a thousand shots for every recorded Confederate hit. Church and Wood’s new group proposed to offer English-made rifles as prizes for the top marksmen in competitions.
The NRA eventually would morph into a gun safety organizations until the 1960s when it shifted gears to become — get this! — a gun control group. Yep. The Black Panthers of Oakland had begun toting long guns onto the steps of the statehouse in Sacramento (California was an open-carry state at the time). The virtually-all-White NRA was aghast and began proposing gun control legislation — and succeeding in its offorts. Then, of course, it became an advocate for everybody to carry everything up to and including, it seems, thermonuclear weapons.
The Black Panthers demonstrate in Sacramento
Anyway, Victoria Woodhull. She was among the more radical women of the day, an advocate of free love, a serious women’s liberation movement. Others who called for free love, a rejection of traditional marriage that relegated women to chattel status, included Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Emma Goldman.
Woodhull, who was called “the high priestess of free love” wrote: “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.” All of which sounds pretty normal in this day and age but 150 years ago was seen as something akin to calling for the worship of Satan.
By the way, Woodhull also was a pioneer in a couple of other arenas — she and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, were among the very first women to found and publish a newspaper in the United States and Victoria alone was the first woman to found and operate a brokerage house on Wall Street.
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