It was the presidential election year of 1920, and Kentucky Governor Edwin P. Morrow had a woman problem.
Sworn into office on December 9, 1919, Morrow, a Republican,
had thumped his Democratic rival James D. Black by running on a progressive
platform that included woman suffrage. His
party made good on its promise: on January 6, 1920, the Kentucky General
Assembly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the vote. Two days later, Morrow invited a delegation
of women, including representatives of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association,
to a ceremony to witness his official signing of the ratification bill.
Governor Edwin P. Morrow signs Kentucky’s ratification of the 19th Amendment.
But the Nineteenth Amendment was not the law of the land, as it had not yet achieved ratification by the required 36 states. Accordingly, Morrow signed another bill on March 29 giving Kentucky women presidential suffrage, in order to guarantee their right to participate in the November 1920 election.
But Morrow knew that the next crucial step would be to get this newly empowered bloc of voters to the polls to put Republican Warren G. Harding into the White House. His letter to supporters in October betrayed a hint of desperation as he outlined the challenges they faced. “The election in Kentucky hangs by a thread,” he wrote. In order to counter the Democratic strongholds in the Bluegrass, the “mountain women” had to turn out to vote. But the hoped-for stampede, it seemed, was to be driven by the sterner sex. “For God’s sake,” Morrow begged, “put every effort forth. Do everything! See that organization is made with wagons and teams and, above all, fire every man so that he will bring his [sic] women out. . . . For the future of the Party and success at the polls, bring out the women!”
Did the whip-cracking work? Yes and no. Harding won the presidency, but his Democratic opponent James Cox edged him out in Kentucky by less than a percentage point.
In fall 1860, Sallie McElroy Knott enjoyed recording in her journal her impressions of the young Prince of Wales when he visited the St. Louis Fair. Newly married, Sallie was living with her husband, future Kentucky governor J. Proctor Knott, in Jefferson City, where he was serving as attorney general. But Sallie had other fair experiences, including one in Bowling Green, Kentucky, when she was still Miss Sallie McElroy, a teacher at the local female academy.
It was late September, 1857, the school was closed “on account of the Fair,” and her students “were crazy” to go. Sallie herself was somewhat indifferent, but had resolved to attend in order to root for some of the young people in their first public displays of horsemanship. The next day, however, she had to confess to her journal of the “dire catastrophe my poor self met with yesterday! Where to find a corner dark enough to hide my blushes or a washing tub big enough to contain the floods of tears issuing from my eyes!”
Sallie had dressed quickly to meet her escort at the fair—as quickly as possible, given that these were not the days of shorts, tank tops and flip-flops—but in her rush she had neglected to notice that “my unmentionables were about to burst out at the buttonhole.” Upon her arrival, “horrors!” Sallie wrote. “The 1st step I took I felt a loosening around my waist.” She tried to “clutch desperately” at her “most nether garment through crinoline, flannel etc. with both hands,” but then she met a flight of steps and her escort insisted on taking one of her hands. Making it to the top “with the aforesaid garment dangling around my feet,” she found a place to sit down, then managed somehow to shed the rogue undies and stuff them in a crack under the seat.
Sallie’s hope that no one would discover her cast-offs was disappointed in the worst way. Some young boys not only found them, she wrote, but “twisted my poor lost trousers on a pole & perambulated with them round the Fairgrounds.” A patron at the fair, one “Dr. Vanmeter,” gallantly intervened “& rescued my poor unfortunates,” but instead of attempting to reunite them with their owner’s “longing legs,” he carefully put them in his pocket! “I’m afraid he’ll wear ‘em clean out,” Sallie concluded in a comic coda to this bizarre episode, “& I shan’t ever get a last fond look at ‘em.”
It was the 1860 fall fair season, and St. Louis, Missouri
was abuzz over a royal visit to the Fifth Annual Fair of the city’s
Agricultural and Mechanical Association.
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) was just eighteen
when he arrived on September 27 with the Duke of Newcastle as part of a tour of
Canada and the United States. He had
drawn large and appreciative crowds everywhere he went, and newspapers gushed
over the young prince’s appearance and demeanor. It was left to individual Americans, at once
dazzled by and suspicious of this embodiment of inherited privilege, to offer
more realistic impressions.
Sallie (McElroy) Knott
One such onlooker in St. Louis was Sarah “Sallie” (McElroy)
Knott. Married for two years to Missouri’s
attorney general J. Proctor Knott, 26-year-old Sallie was still having
difficulty adjusting to life away from her family in Bowling Green, Kentucky
and being the wife of a “public man” (Knott would later become Governor of
Kentucky). But she found a confidante in
her journal, in which she recorded her earnest thoughts and sometimes acid
takes on the people and events around her.
When a procession of carriages carrying the Prince of Wales and his retinue arrived at the St. Louis Fair, Sallie was there. Like so many of her countrymen and women, she had written in her journal, “I anticipate the pleasure of feasting my Republican eyes with a sight of royalty!” Afterward, she described her experience with the requisite amount of Republican snark. “He sat in a carriage,” she wrote, “with the Duke of New Castle beside him, & drove round the circuit of the grounds, for the gratification of the plebeian crowd of a hundred thousand or more, all eager to see a future King. I stood within three feet of him, & gave him a specimen of American manners in the shape of my best tuck & bob curtsey! of which he was ill-bred enough to take no manner of notice!!” The massed spectators did not prevent Sallie from getting a close look at what Queen Victoria’s genes had wrought: “He was a gawky Dutch-English stripling, sitting with head tucked down like any awkward boy, & picking to pieces a bouquet he held in his hands. He is the possessor of an immense nose – huge feet & hands – bandy legs – blue eyes & quantity of light hair – ruddy complexion, almost fair as a girl’s – upon the whole rather a good face, but nothing uncommon.” She also found the “old Duke” to be nothing special beyond “a portly, good natured looking Englishman.” It was an age before paparazzi, when the strobe of camera flashes was yet to annoy the royal retinas, but Sallie also found the Prince spared of another hazard: the halitosis of over-adoring commoners. “The multitude had sense enough to keep quiet,” she observed, “& so the cortege swept by, undisturbed by sniffing the air, tainted by the huzzahing breath of the ‘great-unwashed’”!
On February 6, 1974, a resolution of the House of Representatives gave the Judiciary Committee authority to investigate the possible impeachment of President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal. Watching the proceedings closely was Kentucky’s Fifth District representative, Republican Tim Lee Carter. Serving the fifth of his eight terms, the physician from Monroe County had brought his own causes to Congress, including a plan for national health insurance and, in 1967, a call to end to the Vietnam War. With respect to impeachment, however, Carter was a strong defender of Nixon and, as he would later point out, was the first member of Congress to give testimony on the President’s behalf.
Like other legislators, Carter heard plenty from voters in his district and around the country on the question of impeachment. From October 1973 to November 1974, he received hundreds of letters, cards, telegrams, petitions and preprinted cards from both supporters and opponents of the measure. Some were brief – “Censure Yes Impeachment No” read a terse telegram from a couple in Coral Gables, Florida — while another telegram from California declared: “Immediate impeachment and trial of President essential to country nothing less will serve act promptly.”
A “fishing expedition,” a/k/a “witch hunt”?
Many communications, not surprisingly, were lengthy and passionate. “President Nixon is the victim of a relentless witch hunt,” wrote a Missouri couple. “We urge that you stand firm and cast your vote against impeachment.” From Richmond, Kentucky, an EKU faculty member wrote, “I think this nation cannot stand to allow people in high offices to get away with unconstitutional acts. . . . Nixon will accomplish not a generation of Peace but a generation of under-the-table crooked deals!” Some saw mere partisanship—“Why are the democrats stirring up such a fuss over campaign donations when they are spending and wasting so much money trying to drag up some evidence to impeach Pres. Nixon?” asked a couple from Summer Shade, Kentucky. “The envy, harassment, venom of the Media and Leftists would destroy the U.S. to get Nixon,” came from Mount Vernon, Kentucky.
. . . or a slam dunk?
Others took the longer view. “We have to have faith in the truthfulness of our leaders, and he [Nixon] has caused us to be sadly skeptical of every word he says . . . since he and his aides still persist in covering up and fighting the investigations, he must be impeached by Congress,” a writer argued from Barbourville, Kentucky. “There is so much evidence of wrongdoing committed to enhance the President’s power, his prestige, or his individual niche in history, that I no longer trust his leadership. If allowed to remain in office, Mr. Nixon will probably continue the pattern he has set,” concluded a voter from Monticello, Kentucky, conveying “a sincere expression of a tragic concern” and “not another anti-Nixon vendetta.” Congressman Carter wanted to maintain the focus on Nixon’s positive achievements, particularly in the area of foreign policy, and some of his constituents made clear that distressing domestic issues such as energy and food prices, taxes, abortion, and perceived media bias were coloring their opinions of the impeachment crisis.
Even after the Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment and Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974 rather than face trial in the Senate, the letters to Congressman Carter continued. Words like “traumatic” and “tragedy” appeared, as did expressions of both support and opposition toward granting the President a pardon or immunity from prosecution. A week after the resignation, Carter regretted that Nixon’s administration had been “involuntarily terminated” but looked with gratitude to the Constitution and its provisions for a smooth transfer of power. “Recent events,” he wrote, “have clearly demonstrated the strength of our government, our people, and the principles that have guided us through our great history.”
Perhaps feeling justified during a time of war, in 1943 Congressman Hampton P. Fulmer decided to push back against a cranky voter. The South Carolina Democrat, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, had received a complaint from Eugene M. Biggers of Houston, Texas concerning the plethora of federal agencies created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—“Alphabetical Agencies,” as they were called, because of the acronyms by which they were known: the NRA (National Recovery Act), WPA (Works Progress Administration), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and so on.
“I would like to know just what
line of business you are engaged in,” the congressman challenged Biggers. “In the next place, I would like to know whether
or not you would prefer going back to the conditions which existed in every
line of business in 1930-33,” referring, of course to America’s tumble into the
Depression.
Biggers, meanwhile, had been busy compiling a list of agencies and offering copies to interested parties. The response, he found, was overwhelming. Small businesses, taxpayers associations, educational groups, farmers, and the press clamored for confirmation of what many had long maintained: that these “damnable Bureaus,” as Biggers wrote, were wasteful, oppressive, and manipulative, run by “fan-tailed theorists” burdening the American people with regulations and regimentation. In a three-page reply to Congressman Fulmer, Biggers railed against the “Roosevelt New Deal Party” and, despite the war, presented an unapologetic indictment of the “experimenters in Washington” who had imposed themselves between producers and their markets and upended the laws of supply and demand.
And just what was Biggers’ line of
business? Unfortunately for Congressman
Fulmer, it was printing. Even without
the internet, he was well positioned to “go viral” with his views. He offered, for the low price of $1 per
hundred, a reproduction of the congressman’s letter, his own response, and his
list of 104 “Alphabetical Agencies” (out of a total of 2,241 agencies, bureaus
and commissions that he had uncovered) as souvenirs of “the goofiest period in
America’s history.”
It was summer 1913, and
Put-in-Bay, Ohio was gearing up to celebrate the centennial of one of the most
important naval battles of the War of 1812.
On September 10, 1813, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry wrested control of
Lake Erie from the British Royal Navy, forcing the surrender of a squadron of
ships and opening his terse report of the victory with the memorable phrase,
“We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
Remarkably, at the center of the
excitement, and one of the most honored guests expected at the celebration, was
“a frail, sweet-faced, silver haired Kentucky woman.” Emily Perry was the daughter of the late
Reverend Gideon Babcock Perry, who had been born in Rhode Island at the same
family homestead as his cousin, the famous Commodore. Emily had followed her father through numerous
pastoral postings in the Midwest and South until they reached Hopkinsville,
Kentucky in 1867, where Reverend Perry became rector of Grace Episcopal
Church. “Miss Em,” as she became known, immersed
herself in social, cultural and charitable activities, organizing concerts and
other entertainments for worthy recipients like Hopkinsville’s public school
library. Now, with her parents and three
brothers gone, she lived with her sister, Maria Efnor, who had been adopted
into the family as a child. In addition
to superintending the work of her United Volunteers Musical and Literary
Society, Emily was a devoted scrapbook-keeper, pulling together newspaper
clippings on the vast number of topics that attracted her interest: Civil War
history, music, poetry, celebrities, and women as well as men who had made
names for themselves in politics, science, arts and culture.
Alas, as proud as she was of her heritage, and despite being promised every comfort and consideration she might have wished for, Emily decided to decline the invitation to the festivities. At 69 years of age, her eyesight was failing, and that of 82-year-old sister Maria’s was completely gone. Emily instead remained at the family home at Ninth and Campbell streets, ultimately compelled to obey the command on Oliver Hazard Perry’s battle flag—“Don’t give up the ship.”
An all-too-common crinoline fire (Wellcome Collection CC BY)
William Weldon was 22 when he left
his mother, father and 16-year-old brother Vachel in Ballard County, Kentucky
and struck out for Arkansas in 1848. The
entire family was on the lookout for opportunities elsewhere: Vachel would decamp
for Texas in 1854, and his widowed father followed.
Five months into his absence, however, William was still anxious to hear all the news from back home in Kentucky—marriages, crops, religious conversions, and so on. But he had his own story to tell about a recent test of his gallantry. It involved a young lady, “Modest, Handsome, & sensable,” but afflicted with “a disease which is very common in Kentucky called the flirts.” Indeed, Weldon wrote in a letter, “Miss Fanny” was really on her game one “coald dry day,” pausing only briefly from her non-stop coquetry to pose herself dangerously close to the fireplace. Weldon considered warning her but thought, no worries, she’ll “flirt away soon.”
He was wrong. Fanny’s dress, no doubt a flammable mix of
crinoline, muslin and gauze, suddenly ignited, and “she broke for the door with
the blaze higher than her head.” With no
water handy, and without time to consider what a gentleman should do in such circumstances,
Weldon surrendered to the “painful necessity” of tearing off her burning
clothes. “Just think of a young man
stripping a lady in company,” he wrote sheepishly. But it was all over quickly and Miss Fanny,
her dignity no doubt as charred as her wardrobe, “made a straight shirttail for
home.”
J. Proctor Knott (Mathew Brady photo, Washington, D.C.)
Today, it would have caused a Twitter-storm. On January 27, 1871, a well-liked but relatively unknown Kentucky congressman took the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and (to quote a later newspaper) brazenly “twitted” Duluth, a Minnesota town of a few thousand clinging to the western shores of Lake Superior.
J. Proctor Knott’s beef with Duluth arose from his unhappiness with the common practice of handing over public lands to railroads—in this case, in the form of a bill giving federal land to the St. Croix and Lake Superior Railroad. Knott believed (or pretended to) that the terminus of the proposed line would be at Duluth rather than at Superior, Wisconsin, a short distance to the south.
Given a generous 30 minutes to vent on the issue, Knott proceeded to double over the chamber in laughter with a satirical takedown of the pretensions of this northern town. Where was Duluth, anyway? he asked. “Never, in my limited reading, had my vision been gladdened by seeing the celestial word in print.” But he professed confidence “that it existed somewhere, and that its discovery would constitute the crowning glory of the present century, if not all modern times.”
The Northern Pacific Railroad’s brochure included Knott’s speech
Claiming to have consulted maps and other oracles to determine Duluth’s location, Knott imagined “one of those ethereal creations of intellectual frost-work. . . one of those airy exhalations of the speculator’s brain, which I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and cities along the lines of railroads built with government subsidies.” Despite hearing rumors of cold that could “freeze the smoke-stack off a locomotive,” Knott expressed faux confidence in the “illimitable and inexhaustible” potential of the town. His prediction that Duluth “was destined to become the commercial metropolis of the universe” and his snarky plea for the railroad line to be built without delay drew, according to reprints of the speech, “roars of laughter.”
The railroad bill never came to a vote, but Duluth had the last laugh. It was, in fact, at the heart of a wealth of resources and soon fulfilled its promise to become “The Zenith City of the Unsalted Sea.” Only a few decades later, it could claim to be the greatest shipping hub in the world, as millions of tons of wheat, iron ore, dairy products and lumber passed through its port. And of course Duluthians (being Minnesotans) held no grudge against the saucy congressman who had, after all, put them on the map with his widely circulated speech. Proctorknott, Minnesota (now just Proctor) was established in 1894 just a few miles from Duluth. In 1890, Knott himself, now a former Governor of Kentucky, visited Duluth and good-naturedly acknowledged its “marvelous prosperity” at a banquet in his honor. The Commercial Club of Duluth proudly reprinted Knott’s original speech on the left-hand pages of a commemorative booklet, with a proud narrative of the city’s accomplishments on the opposite pages. In 1925, fourteen years after Knott’s death, his portrait was displayed at Duluth’s Exposition of Progress and Iron Ore Golden Jubilee.
James Proctor Knott’s Duluth speeches and related material are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections. Click here for a finding aid to the Knott Collection. A recent donation of more Knott family materials is currently being processed and will soon be available. For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.
Historical marker for Paducah’s Eighth of August celebration
Paducah, Kentucky’s Eighth of August Emancipation Celebration is a days-long, event-filled dive into the city’s African-American heritage. Since at least 1886, the community has been the site of an annual grand gathering to commemorate the end of slavery. The relation of August 8 to emancipation is a little uncertain, but the most popular theory is that it harkens back to the day in the 1790s when the enslaved people of Santo Domingo (Haiti) were declared to be free.
In 2008, field workers with the Kentucky Folklife Program visited Paducah to gather information about the current celebration. They took photographs and video and collected material, including a thick program highlighting that year’s theme “A Journey By Faith.” Along with sponsors’ ads and event schedules, the program features memorials, announcements, and autobiographies of African-American Paducahns that chronicle their lives, achievements, and spiritual journeys. Included for that election year of 2008 was a scholarship-winning essay by a local high school senior on the topic “Is America Ready for an African-American President?”
The field workers also conducted an interview with James Dawson, a Hopkinsville native who had made his home in Paducah since 1951. He recalled hearing his grandfather talk about the celebration, which drew African Americans from all over the country. Dawson’s own memories included dances, bands, street parties, class and family reunions, and all-night merriment. He and his son helped to serve up a food staple—barbeque (Dawson’s favorite was pork or mutton)—together with fried fish and hamburgers. Unlike the old days, Dawson observed, the event had become less spontaneous, bringing in commercial food vendors and requiring committees, permits, insurance, security and all the accoutrements of modern civic existence. Nevertheless, the 2008 gathering was another successful chapter in a tradition that retains its unique place in Paducah.
Maud Howell’s brother Ray (left) and his namesake (right)
Like many soldiers overseas, Bowling Green’s Ray Howell (1893-1977), who served in the U.S. Army from July 1918 to September 1919, exchanged correspondence with the folks at home. Often included were personalized postcards with a photograph meant to assure the family that their boy was hale and hearty.
One of Ray’s correspondents was
his sister Maud, but the reply to her letter of December 3, 1918, complete with
postcard portrait, was not quite what she expected. “You start your letter Dear Brother,” it
read. “Sorry I cannot claim you as a
sister I only have one and her name is Grace.”
None of the other personalities mentioned in Maud’s letter rang a bell:
no “Uncle Ira,” no “Eli”—indeed, the writer “had no relations in Kentucky that
I know of.”
Ray, of course, hadn’t contracted amnesia. This was a different “Ray Howell,” a private with the American Expeditionary Forces occupying Germany after the Armistice, to whom Maud’s letter had been sent by mistake. But he had read its contents carefully, and his reply betrayed his eagerness to win a pen pal as he impatiently awaited demobilization. “I have been here 2 yrs this coming June,” he wrote, referring her to an enclosed picture showing a uniformed young man with arms crossed who bore a startling resemblance to Maud’s brother. “You can see by the stripes I wear on my lower part of left arm. Each one represents 6 months 3 of them 4 in June.” Further, if another letter were to come from his newfound “sister,” perhaps they could be strangers no longer. Of the mistaken identity, Ray concluded, he was “hoping to get an explanation on this subject and hearing from you very soon.”
