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University of Georgia Press

Chapter Title: Senator Hattie Caraway (1878–1950) A Southern Stealth Feminist and Enigmatic Liberal Chapter Author(s): SARAH WILKERSON FREEMAN

Book Title: Arkansas Women Book Subtitle: Their Lives and Times Book Editor(s): Cherisse Jones-Branch, Gary T. Edwards Published by: University of Georgia Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1vhtrh3.11

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Senator Hattie Caraway

(1878-1950)

A Southern Stealth Feminist and Enigmatic Liberal

SARAH W I L K E R S O N F R E E M A N

In December 1935, national newspapers noted that the voting record of Arkan- sas senator Hattie Caraway was "one of the most consistently liberal in Con- gress." Yet "Silent Hattie," as the press dubbed her, had not addressed the Senate during the four years since she took office in 1931.1 This changed in 1936 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought a second term. Caraway vocifer- ously defended New Deal relief programs, insisting that if FDR'S administra- tion "had done nothing else in the three years it has functioned, it would have justified the change of administration, as well as the radical departure from what was the conventional—nay, the old and ultraconservative way of dealing with these problems."2 Caraway swiped at FDR'S conservative Republican and Democratic critics while she maintained her independence from the president, for she was more liberal than he in her support of women's rights, old-age pen- sions, wealth redistribution, and federal aid for public education. For the most part, Caraway supported Depression-era New Deal legislation and received the honor of seconding FDR'S nomination at the 1936 Democratic National Conven- tion. She earned this distinction through hard work and dedication. As she told a reporter in 1937, "Chivalry's all right in the parlor, but mighty dangerous when carried into politics."3

Hattie Caraway's life and political career enable historians and others to see more clearly how southern populist and progressive agendas, coming out of Tennessee and Arkansas, survived, evolved, and prepared the ground for lib- eral and feminist social and political reforms while simultaneously perpetuating racial injustice and white supremacy. During the New Deal, some populist or quasi-socialist principles found new traction in the form of liberal legislation

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and programs. Hattie Caraway was instrumental in that transformation. She saw her southern liberal reform opportunity in the rise of FDR, and she took it. But her thirteen years on a rough and chauvinistic political main stage, fac- ing the greatest challenges of the twentieth century, have remained somewhat in shadow. While biographies by Diane Kincaid, Nancy Hendricks, and David Malone provide information regarding her life and career, little attention has focused on Caraway's southern liberalism and "stealth feminist" political style.4

This examination also reveals critical information regarding the surprising close to Caraway's career when, in the 1944 Democratic primary, the young, even more liberal, and newly elected Congressman J. William Fulbright made an extraordinary decision to run for the Senate and defeated her.

Hattie Wyatt Caraway's personal background sheds some light on her de- velopment as a southern white liberal and feminist in the 19308. She was born in February 1878 and grew up in Tennessee fifty miles west of Nashville, where multiple wild rivers created rich, isolated bottomlands. Her father, William C. Wyatt, was born in 1817, owned two enslaved women in 1860, and ran a farm and dry goods business. Wyatt was sixty and married to his third wife, Lucy Burch (twenty-five years his junior), when his fifteenth child, Hattie, named after Wyatt's first wife, was born. A sixteenth child, a son born a few years later, completed the family. Lucy Burch was born in 1842 in North Carolina and grew up near Centerville, Tennessee, where her father owned a grain mill.5 As Wyatt aged, Lucy took in boarders, and she and the children shouldered increasing responsibilities for the farm and store. As a youngster, Hattie clerked at the dry goods store, a gathering place for local farmers, and absorbed cracker barrel political discourse. The Wyatts, white Dickson County folk of some means and property, depended on southern farm-based economies and the resources of an aging patriarch.

A bright child, Hattie briefly attended nearby Ebenezer College and at age fourteen enrolled with her older sister Mozella ("Mosie") at Dickson Normal School, where she met Thaddeus Caraway, a fellow student ten years her se- nior.6 Their meeting at the white public coed college suggests some explana- tions for Hattie's progressive-to-liberal feminist ideology. During her formative years in the i88os and 18908, Tennessee had large, organized movements of women who fought hard and in the open to pass laws to restrict the sale of al- cohol, raise the female age of consent above the age often, and establish public schools. Many of these women became leaders in national women's rights and suffrage movements. Tennessee produced a number of particularly "audacious white feminists" in this period and led the South in that regard.7 Feminists and female teachers joined forces to fight for equal pay for equal work for educators

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Senator Hattie Caraway in

in Shelby County, Tennessee, where women served as school superintendents beginning in 1884. That year, Tennessee legislators named Julia Doak to serve as the interim state superintendent of public instruction.8 Pressure from east Ten- nessee feminists pushed open the doors of the University of Tennessee, which admitted women students in 1892.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Farmers' Alliance, populists, and other reform organizations in the i88os and 18908 prodded southern legis- lators to establish white coed public normal schools, which gave women op- tions for self-support, especially as schoolteachers. In 1895, during Hattie's and Thad's last year at Dickson, a young local widow, Agnes Ann Work Shipp, ran for county superintendent of schools (with her toddler daughter in tow) and won.9 After graduating, Hattie taught in Dickson County schools under Shipp, who had proven that women could overcome gender prejudice to achieve public office. Also, just north of the Wyatt farm was Ruskin Colony, a Utopian social- ist egalitarian cooperative established in 1894. Public talks at Ruskin regularly featured internationally known radicals, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a socialist feminist author who visited in 1898. Hattie Caraway's 19308 politics took shape as a natural extension of her education and local feminist practices in 18908 Tennessee. In later years, Senator Hattie Caraway supported temper- ance and voted against FDR'S 2.75 beer bill, but she did not come out of Dickson County, Tennessee, with a closed mind or a predilection for Bible thumping. Quite the contrary, she emerged with a ready wit and a fairly irreverent sense of humor, especially regarding men and power.10

Hattie's father died in 1901, and she and Thad married. She joined him in Mississippi County, Arkansas, where he was teaching while studying law. The couple bought and rented out rich Delta land near Big Lake, Arkansas, and Thad opened a law office in Jonesboro. By 1908, he had earned a reputation as a bombastic, sometimes shirt-ripping prosecuting attorney for the Second Judicial District. They had two sons, Paul and Forrest, the latter named for the founder of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Beginning in 1912, Thad was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Rep- resentatives. He served four terms, which coincided with Woodrow Wilson's presidency, the resegregation of federal offices, World War I, passage of the federal income tax, Prohibition, and the women's suffrage amendment—all of which Thad supported. Hattie and the boys made occasional visits during con- gressional sessions to D.C., where a third son, Robert Easley, was born in 1915. In Jonesboro, Hattie belonged to the local women's, music, and bridge clubs but was not directly involved in the women's suffrage movement even though she worked hard in Thad's political campaigns.11

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Arkansas, like Tennessee, had a strong and powerful network of women suf- fragists and feminists, such as Florence Cotnam. Like Hattie Caraway, Cotnam was educated in Tennessee in the i88os, and her teachers in Monteagle were in- spired feminist leaders who encouraged Cotnam to hone her oratorical skills.12

She married, settled in Little Rock, and became a founder of the Arkansas Fed- eration of Women's Clubs. Cotnam also emerged as an outspoken leader of the Arkansas Equal Suffrage Central Committee, affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and joined the more mili- tant National Woman's Party.13 In 1913, NAWSA tapped Cotnam to serve as a national speaker, sending her to twenty-five states. Women suffragists scored their first victory in the South when Arkansas's legislature passed a bill in 1917 that allowed white women to vote in the primaries. Cotnam led a delegation of Arkansas women suffragists in December 1917 to the White House, where President Woodrow Wilson granted the women a unique private interview.14

According to NAWSA'S 1918 Handbook, it was "a big year politically for the women of Arkansas.... A number of primaries have been held in the several counties and cities, and always the women's votes have been a big factor in deciding the election."15 Governor Charles Brough and Thad Caraway publicly supported the women's suffrage cause, and several county governing bodies elected women as members. Little Rock's Pulaski County, where Cotnam was most active, elected six women to office. Cotnam also addressed the Tennessee legislature in February 1919 on behalf of that state's women's suffrage bill. The legislation passed, marking another critical inroad for women suffragists in the South. At NAWSA'S 1919 national convention, Florence Cotnam led discussions about how women could improve election methods.16 Recognizing her influ- ence, male Democratic leaders named her as a delegate-at-large to the Demo- cratic National Convention in June 1920, and Arkansas sent a contingent of women to serve as alternate delegates. Of the southern states, only Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky, and Arkansas sent women delegates.17 Before the women's suffrage amendment passed in August, Cotnam had organized the Arkansas League of Women Voters and the Arkansas Democratic Women's Clubs. In Congress, Thaddeus Caraway stood apart from most southern Democrats as a stalwart advocate of white women's suffrage and an original supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment proposed by feminists in the National Woman's Party.18

Thad also distinguished himself in Congress as a virulent racist. He intro- duced legislation to arrest offenders of Washington, D.C.'s Jim Crow laws, to im- pose strict racial segregation in housing, and to outlaw interracial marriages.19

In July 1916, he introduced a bill to prohibit men of the "colored races" from

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Senator Hattie Caraway 113

enlisting or reenlisting in the armed forces. One African American editorialist sarcastically dismissed Caraway as a "great(?)" "statesman(?)" who pandered to his white southern constituents. Thad Caraway's racist proposals were politi- cally timely considering the recent release of the film The Birth of a Nation and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan.20 In August 1919, after thousands of African American men had fought in the First World War, Thad introduced a bill to prohibit the peacetime enlistment of black men and to bar them from enrolling in military academies (all three Caraway boys would attend West Point). The Washington Bee referred to Caraway as one of the southern Democrats' "cheap country jakes," but African American newspapers outside Washington, D.C., treated him as a serious threat.21 After the murder of untold numbers of black people by white mobs in Phillips County, Arkansas, in the fall of 1919, Thad read into the Congressional Record a diatribe against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and castigated the black farmers who defended themselves during the massacre.22

In 1920, Thad Caraway threw his hat into the ring for a Senate seat and turned his barbed prosecutor's tongue on his Democratic primary opponent, incumbent senator William Kirby. Thad had been a strong supporter of Wil- son, the war, the League of Nations, farm aid, and low tariffs.23 Kirby had fa- mously opposed Wilson's war policies. Arkansas women voted in that primary battle. While Hattie later recalled, "After equal suffrage in 1920, I just added voting to cooking and sewing and other household duties," her statement masked her political activities in 192O.24 Hattie worked at her husband's head- quarters during that vicious primary battle and helped propel her husband into the Senate. The family moved from Jonesboro to D.C., Paul and Forrest entered West Point, and Hattie Caraway's ride on the Washington merry-go-round began.

The 19208 were critical years in Hattie's political development as the Repub- licans settled in for a decade of political dominance. "Caustic Caraway" (the press's nickname for Thad) spearheaded unrelenting attacks against Republican president Warren G. Harding's administration that brought to light the Teapot Dome scandal and forced the U.S. attorney general to resign. Caraway's Senate office was ransacked, and the senator demanded a formal investigation. Senate testimony revealed that the Caraway family had been under surveillance in 1921 and 1922. Gaston Means, a special agent for the Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department, had hired former senator Kirby's Little Rock secretary, Laura Jacobson, to dig up dirt on the Caraways in hopes of blackmailing, and presumably silencing, the senator. In light of this abuse of federal power, the head of the Bureau of Investigation resigned.25

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Back in Arkansas, women as a political force continued to gain momentum.26

In April 1922, Congressman H. M. Jacoway announced his intention to resign. The national press reported that Florence Cotnam, supported by women voters, was vying to fill the remainder of Jacoway's term and positioning herself to be the first Arkansas woman to run for Congress.27 But Jacoway delayed his res- ignation. In June, newspapers reported that Cotnam remained a candidate for Jacoway's unexpired term once he vacated his office, but she would not be a can- didate in the primary.28 Rather than resigning, Jacoway simply decided not to run again. Cotnam refocused her energies on building the political strength of Arkansas women to challenge male dominance in the state's Democratic Party leadership. Her work bore fruit with the elections of Hattie Caraway.

As the wife of a U.S. senator in the 19208, Hattie Caraway became more worldly and somewhat glamorous, as her photos show. In 1926, she and Thad traveled to Europe, and he was reelected. During the 1927 inaugural season, Hattie playfully complained to her son Paul that she was "worn to a frazzle" after a week of card parties, Senate luncheons, and formal dinners.29 Her convivial personality earned her the presidency of the Arkansas State Society, a social organization of Arkansans in D.C. But she also retained a very down-to-earth, commonsense quality. In advising Paul, she asked him to give his friends her love but tell them "hands off. I want you to use your own mind as to what you will do."30 By this time, Paul was twenty-four years old, Forrest was eighteen, and Bobby was thirteen. With the heavy demands on Thad's time, Hattie de- voted a great deal of her attention to Bobby, perhaps trying to compensate for the boy's politically riven childhood with the special advantages his father's suc- cess could afford. In the summer of 1928, mother and son sailed to Casa Blanca.

Meanwhile, back in Arkansas, the Great Flood of 1927 had left thousands in the region homeless and destitute. President Calvin Coolidge, who did not intend to run in 1928, sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to survey the devastation and work out programs purportedly to assist white and black farm- ers, but they accomplished little. The agricultural economy had been suffering throughout the 19208, and many counties in Arkansas had closed their white public schools or had begun charging tuition to attend. The South was suffering, but the Republican, northern-based federal administrations did little to address the systemic decline.

The bombastic 1928 Democratic Convention nominated New York governor Al Smith, an Irish American and a "wet," to run against the Republican "Great Humanitarian" Herbert Hoover for the presidency. Thad Caraway had warned that women voters would not support Smith because of the Prohibition issue, but when Democrats chose Arkansas's senior senator, Joe Robinson, as the vice

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Senator Hattie Caraway 115

presidential nominee to balance the ticket, Caraway, who almost always stood with Robinson, had to support Smith too. The 1928 campaign quickly took on an ugly cast as superpatriots claiming to be "100% Americans" trained their sights on Smith, an Irish Catholic. Republican strategists focused on the South. The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan recruited white "Hoovercrats," traditional southern Democrats, and leaders in the Woman's Christian Temper- ance Union. Thad Caraway presumably had the Arkansas Klan in his pocket, or vice versa, as the state's KKK chapters had been extremely active during 1921- 1926, which were years of railroad strikes, oil booms, and Prohibition violations. But as a junior senator, Thad Caraway joined Joe Robinson in defending Smith against the K K K ' S hate-filled campaign of anti-Catholic bigotry. Nonetheless, the Republican "southern strategy" worked. The Democrats lost much of the South, and the Republicans retained their hold on the White House.31

On November 19,1928, just days after reelection to a tenth consecutive term in Congress, Arkansas representative William Oldfield, the House Demo- cratic whip and the Democratic National Committee chair, died unexpectedly. The Arkansas Democratic Central Committee at first asked Oldfield's widow, Pearl, to run in the special election to complete the remainder of her husband's term but also nominated her to fill the House seat to which William Oldfield had been elected before he died. In January 1929, Pearl Oldfield was elected and sworn into office, becoming the first southern woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, a position she held during the crisis-ridden years of 1929-1931.32

In this period, Hattie Caraway lived a full life of family and social obliga- tions, but she also exhibited an increasing interest in the work of the Senate and sat in on important treaty deliberations in January 1929. By this time, she had spent the last seventeen years as the wife of a U.S. congressman and senator, nine of those years in Washington, D.C. She felt the need for a haven from the rough, pretentious, and chilly capital, a place where she could be close but not consumed by politics. In February 1929, she moved her family into Riversdale, a historic mansion in Maryland.33 The 1801 mansion had been built for a Flem- ish aristocrat and passed into the Calvert family, descendants of the fifth Lord Baltimore. Hattie began to restore the home and its spacious grounds, where she raised chickens. She bought a collie puppy for fourteen-year-old Bobby and a loud but affectionate Siamese cat with the intention of raising and selling kit- tens. Society pages in the late 19208 depicted Hattie as a southern senator's wife ensconced in a white-columned mansion—the picture of gentility. Paul and Forrest hosted grand parties for their West Point friends in Riversdale's mir- rored ballroom while Hattie used the mansion for political entertaining, such

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as hosting the Arkansas Parents and Teachers Association delegation that was in town to attend the national PTA convention.34

As the Great Depression set in, Senator Thad Caraway championed the causes of labor, farmers, and Bonus Army veterans. He opposed Hoover's high tariffs and relief for the banks. When Hoover blocked aid to Arkansas drought victims in 1930, Hattie wrote off "Sir Erbert" as mean, arrogant, and small. She clearly had very strong views on the failure of politicians, especially Republi- cans, to attend to the desperate needs of millions in distress. Then, in October 1930, Arkansas representative Otis Wingo died from injuries incurred in an ac- cident years before. His wife, Effiegene, had served as his unpaid assistant, and Congressman Wingo wanted her to succeed him. Before he died, Otis Wingo wrote to a top male contender for his office that for four years, Effiegene "has done most of the work.... This experience, her natural qualifications, her per- sonality, and strong ties of friendship . . . will enable her to render splendid service."35 Both the Arkansas Democratic and Republican central committees nominated Effiegene Wingo to run for her deceased husband's House seat. She won, and Wingo joined Pearl Oldfield in Congress. In 1930, Arkansas became the only state with two congresswomen in the U.S. House.

In the dark days of economic crisis, ideological divisions deepened and in- truded into everyday relationships. In June 1930, Hattie and Bobby took another transatlantic voyage, this time to Spain, Portugal, and Greece. On the voyage, Hattie complained that other passengers snubbed her for no apparent reason. She felt "a subtle antagonism that makes me so self-conscious and stiff." Hattie was unable to make a "point of contact" and suspected she was being "hazed" because her husband was a senator. "I have been so spoiled by having people love me and laugh with me, and at me," Hattie wrote to Paul, "that I wilt under competition."36

Back in the States, Hattie became more deeply involved in the serious busi- ness of solving the South's economic challenges and discussed with Thad how to deal with agricultural and infrastructural problems in the region. During the 1931 Cotton Convention in New Orleans, the Caraways spent time with Gover- nor Huey Long and his wife, Rose. Federal government power could be used, they believed, to help the South by purchasing large quantities of cotton and/ or limiting planting. The highly controversial Louisiana governor soon ran for a U.S. Senate seat on a quasi-populist platform of social and economic reform. Once elected, Long asked Thad Caraway to escort him to his Senate swearing-in ceremony. Thad accepted but did not live to perform the honor.37 On Novem- ber 6,1931, Senator Thaddeus Caraway was in a Little Rock hospital recovering from a kidney stone operation and preparing to run for a third term. He did not

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Senator Hattie Caraway 117

recover, and his unexpected death shocked Hattie, his wife of thirty years, and their three sons. But there was little time for grieving as the Democrats held the majority in the Senate by only one vote. It was imperative that Arkansas gover- nor Harvey Parnell quickly name a successor. The law required that an interim appointee be named and a special election held to determine who would serve the remainder of the term. The interim officeholder would have some advantage in the special election and in the 1932 primaries and election for a full Senate term. To avoid infighting among leading Democratic men, Governor Parnell discussed with Hattie and her sons if she would serve in Thad's place. Parnell assured her that she would be the chosen candidate for the special election, giv- ing her the opportunity to be the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

Just days after Thaddeus's death, Hattie Caraway accepted the high office and began a career in the U.S. Senate that spanned the dark years of the Great De- pression and World War II. As with Oldfield and Wingo, Arkansas's Democrats supported her in the special election. But as Caraway biographer Diane Kincaid noted, the Arkansas Women's Democratic Club (AWDC), under the leadership of Florence Cotnam and Laura Davis Fitzhugh, raised funds to hold the election in precincts that otherwise could not afford it and turned out a large women's vote for Caraway.38

Caraway's history-making victory in the special election inspired many Ar- kansas women to become politically active. The AWDC also encouraged women to enter the August primary as candidates for political office.39 Fitzhugh had reinvigorated the flagging AWDC and became its president in 1932. She orga- nized Democratic "study clubs" for white women throughout the state and worked to garner support for Caraway. Fitzhugh also became vice chair of the state's Democratic Central Committee in 1934 and continued to lead Arkan- sas women in Democratic political activism. Myrtle Price, the assistant man- ager of the Glenwood Herald (a newspaper owned by her husband, Charles), strongly supported Hattie Caraway during her controversial campaign with Huey Long.40 On the basis of that experience, Price became chair of the Pike County Democratic Club in 1936 and an enthusiastic partisan operative on behalf of the New Deal. In August 1936, Vivian Lewis Sigmon of Monticello, Arkansas, represented Caraway at the Chicago Democratic Convention and began corresponding with Molly Dewson, the head of the Democratic Party's Women's Division and vice chair of the Democratic National Campaign Com- mittee. Sigmon provided Dewson with materials sent to her by FDR'S Republi- can enemies and detractors, most notably derogatory tracts sent by the former president general of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Sigmon was a DAR member but not a Republican. Dewson thanked her for the "succilous

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propaganda" and sent her sets of "rainbow flyers," multicolored sheets contain- ing pertinent pro-Democratic facts and policy statements that the Women's Division used to spread its own propaganda.41 Some county units of the AWDC hosted benefits to help women pay their poll taxes so they could afford to vote.42

Throughout the New Deal, the AWDC remained a strong political force in the region.

Hattie's Senate diary for her first six months in office shows her hard at work. As she listened to arguments on the floor, she became increasingly disgusted by the displays of male egotism and inefficiency.43 Privately, she wrote sarcastic poems criticizing senators for their pompous grandstanding while people suf- fered in need of government assistance. She quietly voted to tax large fortunes and increase income and inheritance taxes on the wealthy. Without bombast, she voted against sales taxes on candy, automobiles, and bank checks and voted to exempt low-paid federal employees from wage cuts.44 She voted to protect labor from injunctions, supported tariffs on oil and lumber to help Arkansas in- dustries, and secured the first federal loan through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for a public college, a model later used by the New Deal. She also quietly endured nationwide embarrassment when in February 1932 newspapers reported that her brother Walter Wyatt had been charged in a Nashville federal court with illegally owning and operating a distillery near Waverly, Tennessee.45

She said little to the press, which in turn called her "demure," "unsophisticated," and "silent." But her silence was strategic and deliberate. Hattie's quiet liberal- ism was such that she was deeply annoyed when a reporter "made me out to be a communist."46

Although she was a new senator, Caraway had a critical advantage in that Garrett Whiteside, Thad Caraway's secretary, had remained in harness to run the office and help Hattie manage affairs. Whiteside was the well-seasoned "dean of senatorial secretaries," who had come to Washington, D.C., in 1907 and served Arkansas representatives William Ben Cravens and Otis Wingo. He became Thad's secretary in 1921, when Caraway opened his Senate office—the office that was ransacked by federal operatives. After ten years of working with the irascible Thad, Whiteside had become a loyal friend of the Caraways.47

As primary season neared, Hattie experienced a crisis of conscience. None of the male candidates for her seat, she believed, would protect farmers and workers as she had. It saddened her to think of her political life as over, and she worried about spending years as a dependent, presumably taken care of by her boys. She wondered what it would be like to return to the simple life. On May 9, 1932, the day before the filing deadline, Hattie Caraway presided over the Senate at the request of Republican vice president Charles Curtis. Lifting the gavel, she

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Senator Hattie Caraway 119

became the first woman to preside, and then shocked everyone by announcing her candidacy for a full term in the U.S. Senate. Caraway seemed to make her decision on impulse, but when asked by reporters why she was running, she answered, "The time has passed when a woman should be placed in a position and kept there only while someone else is being groomed for the job."48

That evening, Hattie wrote in her diary: "Well, I pitched a coin and heads came three times, so because the boys wish and because I really want to try out my own theory of a woman running for office I let my check and pledges be filed. And now won't be able to sleep or eat."49 Arkansas's Democratic leaders had pressured Pearl Oldfield and Effiegene Wingo not to run again after their terms ended in order to make way for new men. Wingo at first had resisted, but health issues convinced her to capitulate. Hattie Caraway was in new territory. As the reality of her situation set in, she noted, "Thank God (in all reverence) that I am able to eat and sleep and laugh at myself. If I can hold on to my sense of humor and a modicum of dignity I shall have had a wonderful time running for office, whether I get there or not."50 One man, O. L. Bodenhamer, the former national commander of the American Legion and a friend of Thad, had visited Hattie Caraway in Washington earlier in the spring to tell her that if she decided to run, he would support her. She had insisted that she did not intend to run, and probably at that moment she did not. Bodenhamer returned to Arkansas to launch his own campaign using many of Thad's former managers and fund- raisers.51 Hattie Caraway would have to run her unprecedented campaign in an unprecedented way.

While Arkansas's Democratic leaders were dismissive of Hattie Caraway's candidacy, Senator Huey Long passionately endorsed Caraway on the Senate floor. "It would be a fatal error, a distinct loss, a march backward," he insisted, if Caraway was not returned to the Senate. "The common people of this coun- try need that Caraway vote," Long proclaimed, because she voted a straight "progressive" humanitarian line.52 She had also supported Long's "Share the Wealth" legislation, and she and Long had both voted differently from Arkan- sas's business-oriented senior senator, Joe Robinson, on key issues. Caraway gambled that Long's elite-bashing oratory would resonate with Arkansas vot- ers and accepted his offer of a whirlwind one-week campaign tour. Together, they challenged big corporate interests and stood up for the "Have-nots and Have-littles."53 She had sold Riversdale in February, but Long's machine de- picted Caraway as a victim of foreclosure.54 Wearing black, Hattie looked the picture of a matronly, down-to-earth, rural widow. Against the odds, she and Long beat her opponents, and with the Democratic landslide in 1932, Hattie Caraway's time had arrived.

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Her years in the Senate reveal a woman with a liberal conscience. In the first hundred days and second hundred days of the New Deal, Caraway voted for emergency and unemployment relief, the five-day work week, farm aid, rural resettlement, federal housing, higher taxes on the wealthy and utilities, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electricity to millions of southern- ers. She initiated legislation to build levees for flood control and bridges that became critical links in national transportation networks. She voted against repealing Prohibition (and lost). Caraway fought for public works and protec- tions for coal miners, and she strengthened an antipollution law to limit the discharge of corrosives. Tragically, in July 1934, in the midst of the launching of a myriad of critical New Deal programs, Hattie's eighteen-year-old son, Bobby, was killed when he was thrown from a horse while visiting relatives near New- bern, Tennessee.55

But, again, there was little opportunity for grief. New rounds of legislation, some designed to create long-lasting change and not just emergency relief, re- quired her attention. Hattie Caraway not only supported the creation of Social Security, she wanted to guarantee all recipients a monthly payment of fifteen dollars even if states did not match the federal entitlements; the amendment lost. Then another tragedy occurred. Just when the political heat of Huey Long, Caraway's seatmate, was pressuring FDR to expand social programs, Long was assassinated. Senator Caraway delivered Long's eulogy on the Senate floor and then continued her work with Senator Rose Long filling the seat next to her. In January 1936, Caraway voted with Republicans to override FDR'S veto and de- livered long-promised payments to veterans. She also opposed FDR'S 1937 U.S. Supreme Court packing scheme, parting company with Senator Joe Robinson, who expended himself so vigorously for the plan that he died in the midst of the ill-fated battle.56

Even though Caraway had enjoyed the support of Robinson's avowed arch- enemy Huey Long, after Long's assassination the Caraway-Robinson relation- ship improved. After Robinson was reelected in 1936, the petite woman senator from Arkansas, in a moment of playful gender-bending, and to the delight and laughter of her fellow senators, "firmly grasped the elbow of her bulky colleague Senator Robinson and escorted him to the dais" for his swearing-in.57 After Robinson's death in 1937, Caraway abandoned her standard practice of silence on the Senate floor. She also became more openly supportive of the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in which many white farm women from northeastern Arkansas were active.58

Caraway also became more vocal in her support of the Equal Rights Amend- ment (ERA). One week after she dressed in black and sat next to Robinson's

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Senator Hattie Caraway 121

empty chair during the Senate's memorial ceremonies, both House and Senate subcommittees gave unanimous reports in support of the ERA. Caraway told the press she was delighted and hoped the amendment would soon be submit- ted to the states for ratification.59 Simultaneously the Business and Professional Women's Clubs (BPWC), which counted significant numbers of female federal employees as members, endorsed the ERA. The national presidents of the BPWC in 1937 and 1938 were fellow Tennessean Charl Ormond Williams and Missis- sippi postmistress Erline White. Hattie Caraway's work on behalf of women's rights earned her endorsements from the BPWC and the National Woman's Party, and in 1937 she introduced the ERA on the floor of the Senate.60 White's support of Caraway and her close proximity to Arkansas would be factors in Caraway's 1938 campaign.

While Caraway supported programs that assisted women and white and black farmers, she drew the line at advancing the political rights of black Ar- kansans.61 Thaddeus Caraway in 1922 had joined other southern senators to filibuster the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, arguing that "a [white] man will have to stand over his family with his gun" if the proposed antilynching legislation passed.62 In 1938, Senator Hattie Caraway sided with her southern Democratic colleagues in "filibustering . . . to death" the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill. The black press castigated her. One editorialist wrote, "We have seen also, Southern white women stoop to the same shameful language of cheap southern white m e n . . . . Particularly of[f ] key was the remark by Senator Hattie Caraway of Arkansas that she likes Negroes cas servants.' Then why is Arkansas support- ing a State College for Negroes at Pine Bluff, granting Liberal Arts degrees? . . . Senator Caraway is just a cheap Southern white woman following in the tradi- tion of cheap Southern white men. Sad, but true."63

While Hattie Caraway defended white supremacy, in June 1938 she engaged in a dramatic fight in the Senate to pass a wage and hour bill being piloted by her female Democratic colleague in the House, Mary T. Norton of New Jer- sey.64 Once again, Caraway's liberal attitudes toward federally guaranteed fair wages and working conditions set her apart from conservative Republicans and Democrats. After that vote, Caraway immediately returned to Arkansas to par- lay her bona fides as a southern New Deal Democrat and feminist into a suc- cessful campaign for a second term in the Senate.

The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and its women auxiliaries, the American Federation of Labor, the STFU, the American Legion, and the DAR all endorsed her. Talking with a reporter, while "darning a stocking and an- swering a persistent telephone," Caraway stated, "My record is there now to stand for itself." This time, there was no Huey Long to assist her, and three men

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stepped up to vie for her seat. While Caraway observed that "a woman senator isn't so much of a novelty as before," her principal opponent, Representative John McClellan, ran on the slogan "Arkansas Needs Another Man in the Sen- ate."65 Caraway appealed to feminist voters, appearing before the BPWC beside national president Erline White of Mississippi. Through the Women's Division of her campaign headquarters, Caraway deployed an army of women to speak on her behalf.66 McClellan protested that women working in Arkansas's Works Progress Administration offices were actively campaigning for Caraway, and undoubtedly many were. In July, FDR visited Arkansas and personally, though tepidly, endorsed her.67 She beat McClellan by eight thousand votes.68

Embarking on her second full term, Hattie Caraway assumed she would wield the power of a senior senator in controlling patronage appointments. But in early 1940, Congressman Wade Kitchen nominated Irene Bodenhamer, a Mc- Clellan supporter and the widow of O. L. Bodenhamer, to be the postmistress of El Dorado, Arkansas. Bodenhamer, a thirty-four-year-old widow, had two small children and was financially wiped out soon after her husband was killed in an accident.69 Nonetheless, Caraway sharply communicated to one of Roo- sevelt's advisors that Irene Bodenhamer's nomination was "personally obnox- ious" to her. The two women were "long-standing political enemies and very bitter."70 Caraway insisted that Bodenhamer had walked out of an El Dorado meeting when the national BPWC president, Erline White, was complimenting Caraway.71 Bodenhamer, who also served as an alternate delegate to the 1938 Democratic National Convention, defended herself before a Senate committee by explaining that she had been in the back of the room and slipped out quietly during the BPWC meeting to take care of her elderly father-in-law. Irene Boden- hamer had also worked as John Miller's assistant campaign manager in 1937, when he won the special election to fill the remainder of Joe Robinson's term, making Miller the junior senator.72 Caraway refused to bury the hatchet, and the Senate committee tactfully allowed the nomination to die.73 Bodenhamer's son Lee recalled that his family's situation "changed for the worse" when his mother did not receive the federal appointment, and a year later, loyal sup- porters appointed Bodenhamer to a paid position on the state's Oil and Gas Commission.74 While Caraway again introduced the ERA on the Senate floor, her treatment of Bodenhamer made Hattie look mean and petty and tarnished her image as a feminist.

For the most part, Caraway continued to conduct herself in an understated manner even as her stature, with her seniority, grew. She was the first woman to chair a Senate hearing, earned coveted assignments on the Commerce Com- mittee, and weighed in and asked questions during hearings, most particularly

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Senator Hattie Caraway 123

on arbitration law She was especially dedicated to her work on the Agriculture and Forestry Committee since this enabled her to directly affect the lives of rural southerners. Her secretary Garrett Whiteside, noted in a 1942 Arkansas Historical Quarterly article that Hattie Caraway's office served as a "sort of bu- reau of information regarding Arkansas" and that "the scope covered by the average volume of mail coming to [a] Congressional office is almost beyond comprehension."75 He also praised her for preventing the loss of an Arkansas congressional seat through the passage of her Apportionment Act, calling it "the cleverest handling of a legislative measure of comparable importance I have ever seen."76

With the rise of Adolf Hitler, Nazism, and the fascist takeover of much of Europe, Hattie Caraway stepped squarely into the international spotlight at 9:30 p.m. on February 27,1941, and delivered a stirring speech over a nationwide ra- dio network in support of the Lend-Lease Bill. She noted how isolationists had played on people's fear of war to oppose both the Neutrality and Selective Ser- vice acts, neither of which drew the nation into war. They had been false proph- ets. She made it clear that Hitler was the enemy and called out the opponents of lend-lease as fearful cowards overly concerned with Hitler's wrath. "Why all this cringing before Hitler?" she challenged. "Why the fear that we may do something which would make the German dictator angry?" Caraway told her listeners that because she was the only woman in the Senate, she received a great deal of mail from opponents of lend-lease, detractors who seemed to think she and the women of the country would be frightened by the possibility of bellig- erent ramifications. While most letters were sincere, she also saw in this effort the "slimy hands of Nazi propagandists" and many who were "unwittingly being used as tools by the Hitler machine."77

Her response was to fight Hitlerism with feminism. She explained: "I stated when I entered the Senate that I saw no reason for differentiating between men and women who serve in legislative capacities. There should be equal respon- sibility among them with a new view toward equal service to achieve identical goals.... The history of this country shows that the women of America are just as loyal, just as courageous, and just as self-sacrificing as the men. I know that if war should come to us, the women would show equal courage with the men. In fact, I sometimes think they would have to show more, for long after war is over the women will still be fighting for American principles." To further illustrate the depth of her conviction, she stated, "I think that I have as much interest in keeping this nation out of war as anyone. I have two sons already in the military service. They entered military service because it was their wish to do so. I gave my consent. If they were civilians and there was a national emergency and they

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did not do their part, I would disown them." She did not want war, nor was she willing to allow the brutality of fascism and the devastation of Great Britain to continue with the tacit compliance of the United States.78 Caraway's speech was printed in the Congressional Record at the request of a Senate colleague, and newspapers throughout the country reprinted versions of the text. Her speech was considered one of the most effective in the campaign for lend-lease, and the bill passed soon afterward.

While Hattie had written at the beginning of her Senate career that she would try to vote the way she thought Thad would vote, the challenges of World War II could not have been anticipated. In truth, her own lights guided her. Historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones noted that Caraway's support of the military helped Ar- kansas.79 She supported the GI Bill and used her influence to establish in Arkan- sas five airbases, two incarceration and relocation camps for Japanese Ameri- cans, ordnance and aluminum factories, Camps Robinson and Chaffee, and a large veterans' hospital in Hot Springs.

But even as Caraway invoked the American beliefs in freedom, democracy, and self-government, she actively worked against the political advancements of racial minorities. In 1942, she filibustered to block a bill to eliminate the poll tax, although many southern white feminists, notably Florence Cotnam, had begun to fight for poll tax reforms. When Arkansas's freshman congress- man, J. William Fulbright, entered the House in 1943, he supported anti-poll tax legislation. The war also inspired Fulbright to want to bridge the gaps between nations and races. In April, he proposed a resolution to put the House on record as supporting "the creation of appropriate international machinery with power adequate to prevent future aggression and to maintain lasting peace, and as favoring participation by the United States therein through its constitutional processes."80

In the summer of 1943, John Hughes Reynolds, the president of Hendrix Col- lege, a Methodist-affiliated school in Conway, Arkansas, began "urging" Ful- bright to run for Caraway's seat.81 Reynolds had been an outspoken and influen- tial white supremacist academic in the early 19008, but in 1942 he began to give speeches promoting a new internationalism, proclaiming: "We must recognize the brotherhood of man, remembering that the colored people constitute the majority of the human race. We must be prepared to get down off of our sense of racial superiority and feel and think in terms of all mankind."82 Reynolds feared that Caraway and other candidates did not share his vision of a tolerant sweeping internationalism that meant also giving up their white racial superiority com- plex.83 Fulbright had not planned to run for the Senate so early in his political career, but Reynolds would not take no for an answer. He lobbied senators to

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Senator Hattie Caraway 125

support the Fulbright resolution, which laid the groundwork for the United Na-

tions.84 After its adoption, Reynolds contacted other college presidents and be-

gan a campaign to solicit support for a Fulbright candidacy. He contacted local

leaders in Caraway's own Jonesboro to assess her strength and persuade them to

shift their allegiance to Fulbright. With great reservations, Fulbright finally threw

his hat in the ring. Reynolds pulled out all the stops, using his substantial influ-

ence to undermine Caraway, whom he privately called a "good housemother."85

Caraway was thrown off by Fulbright's announced candidacy. She had vig-

orously supported military preparedness and strengthening international re-

lations, but she could not depend on the younger generation of veterans to

support her. As she prepared to run for a third term in 1944, the U.S. Supreme

Court ruled that all-white primaries were unconstitutional.86 The Arkansas

Negro Democratic Association organized to get out the vote. The electoral

ground had shifted.87 Caraway sent FDR a desperate plea for his endorsement,

but he was embarking on his own extremely controversial campaign for a fourth

term. Aides counseled that Caraway's chances were not good and advised FDR

to send a simple message of gratitude for their work together as old friends in

the past.

The primary debates centered on the military records of the principal male

contenders, Fulbright and Governor Homer Adkins. Caraway refused to engage

this issue and spent little time campaigning in Arkansas, explaining that gov-

erning in the midst of war required her presence in Washington, D.C. Criti-

cally, the previous support she had relied on from women did not materialize.

Fulbright's mother, Roberta, a powerful newspaperwoman and editorialist, was

without question instrumental in electing her son to the Senate. But the early

intervention of John Hughes Reynolds played a strong, perhaps decisive role

in defeating Hattie Caraway in the 1944 Democratic primary.88 Hattie Caraway

placed last in the field of four in the first round of the primaries.

This loss marked the rise of a new sort of southern white liberal. In the Au-

gust 1944 Democratic primary runoff between Adkins and Fulbright, twelve

thousand African Americans purportedly voted and voted overwhelmingly

for Fulbright, who had supported anti-poll tax legislation. Adkins had stated

clearly that he did not want "a single nigger vote" and accused Fulbright of

being a "nigger lover."89 The press made a great deal of the role of black voters

in Fulbright's victory.

When Caraway left the Senate in March 1945, her colleagues gave her a rare

standing ovation. Roosevelt, before his death in April, appointed her to the Em-

ployees' Compensation Commission. President Harry S. Truman appointed her

to the Employees' Compensation Appeals Board in 1946.

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Senator Hattie Caraway participated in arguably the most important domes- tic and foreign policy decisions of the twentieth century While her record on black civil rights in particular stands as a telling remnant of Old and New South racism, a great number of programs and policies she supported shaped and con- tinue to define the liberal policies and agendas of the Democratic Party Cara- way's long career as a southern Democrat in the 19308 and 19408 demonstrates how the shifting ground of southern politics in those years made it possible for southern white women to gain unprecedented influence within the estab- lished system of white supremacy It also demonstrates how difficult it would have been for her to continue to serve in the Senate beyond 1945. Her career began with a silent but determined dedication to increasing women's roles in government by inserting herself, to the great surprise of leading male Arkansas Democrats, into the political equation. It ended at the juncture recognized by scholars as a wartime transition toward respecting human rights and women's abilities—critical groundwork for the rise of a rather boisterous second wave of feminism.

But the first woman in history to be elected (and reelected) to the U.S. Senate would not live to see the world-changing domestic human rights movements of the 19508 and 19608. Hattie Caraway, a progressive southern schoolteacher born in 1878 in the wild hollows of middle Tennessee, passed away after suffering a stroke in 1950. She was laid to rest in Jonesboro, Arkansas, next to her husband, Thaddeus, and son Robert, in a simple grave at Oaklawn Cemetery.

NOTES

I would like to express my gratitude to the dedicated and good-natured historians known as the Delta Women Writers, who critiqued drafts of this chapter.

1. Logansport Pharos Tribune (Ind.), December 9,1935. 2. Senate Proceedings, sess. 72-2, Congressional Record 80, pt. 5 (April 14,1936), 5474-77, high-

lights Caraway's emphatic support of the New Deal's "radical departure" and her simultaneous rejection of "conventional" and "ultra-conservative" approaches to the nation's problems.

3. George Creel, "The Woman Who Holds Her Tongue," Collier's, September 18, 1937, cited in Betty Marie Sneed, "Hattie Wyatt Caraway, United States Senator, 1931-1945," MA thesis, University of Arkansas, 1975,13.

4. Diane D. Kincaid (Blair), ed., Silent Hattie Speaks: The Personal Journal of Senator Hattie Caraway (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979); David Malone, Hattie and Huey: An Arkansas Tour (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989); and Nancy Hendricks, Senator Hattie Caraway: An Arkansas Legacy (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2013). For an explanation regarding southern femi- nists who were not obvious in their ideology and practices, see Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, "Stealth in the Political Arsenal of Southern Women: A Retrospective for the Millennium," in Southern

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Senator Hattie Caraway 127

Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective, ed. Melissa Walker, Jeanette Dunn, and Joe Dunn (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).

5. Lucy Burch had been previously married in the i86os, but the fate of that union remains un- known. Single again by 1870, Lucy married William Wyatt in 1873.

6. Jill Knight Garrett, A History of Humphreys County, Tennessee (N.p.: N.p., 1963), 169. 7. See Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, "Tennessee's Audacious White Feminists, 1825-1910," in Ten-

nessee Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. Beverly Greene Bond and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 2:182-214.

8. For more on feminist activism among southern white women teachers, especially equal pay for equal work campaigns, see Kathleen C. Berkeley, "'The Ladies Want to Bring about Reform in the Public Schools': Public Education and Women's Rights in the Post-Civil War South," History of Education Quarterly 24 (Winter 1984): 45-58; and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, "Pauline Van de Graaf Orr (1861-1955): Feminist Education in Mississippi," in Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, vol. i, ed. Martha H. Swain, Elizabeth Anne Payne, Susan Ditto, and Marjorie Julian Spruill (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 72-97

9. Shipp remarried and strongly encouraged her children and grandchildren to get involved in politics. Her grandson Frank Clement was elected governor of Tennessee, and her granddaughter Anna Belle Clement O'Brien was elected to the Tennessee state senate. Steve Jacks, Anna Belle Clement O'Brien: The First Lady of Tennessee Politics (Wartburg, Tenn.: Morgan County Publishing,

1995), 20-23. 10. Among the first entries in Caraway's Senate diary was her response when she learned she had

been assigned to the same desk previously occupied by Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to serve in the Senate. Felton had been a token and temporary appointment, serving only one day. Caraway quipped about the desk, "I guess they wanted as few of them contaminated as possible." See Kincaid, Silent Hattie Speaks, 28.

11. In Jonesboro, Hattie Caraway was active in the Study Circle of the Woman's Foreign Mission Society of the First Methodist Church. Craighead County Sun (Jonesboro, Ark.), September 22, 1904. Also prominent in Jonesboro's Twentieth Century Club activities, Caraway frequently hosted meetings and large parties for the white women's organization. Club members studied and gave papers called "The Lives of Japanese Women" and "The Religions of Japan." Jonesboro Evening Sun, April 20, 1905. As part of the club's Education, Civic, and Philanthropy Committee, Caraway re- ported on the committee's work. Jonesboro Daily News, April 17,1909. See also Creel, "The Woman Who Holds Her Tongue."

12. For more on the Monteagle, Tennessee, feminists, see Freeman, "Tennessee's Audacious White Feminists."

13. "Mrs. Cotnam Speaks at Aggie College," Jonesboro Daily Tribune, May 4, 1916; Handbook of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and Proceedings of the Jubilee Convention, 1869-1919, Held at St. Louis, Mo., March 24-29,1919, National American Woman Suffrage Associa- tion Convention, National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, Library of Congress; Dallas Tabor Herndon, "Florence Brown Cotnam (Mrs. T. T.)," in Centennial History of Arkansas (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing, 1922), 3:1140-42.

14. Herndon, "Florence Brown Cotnam." 15. Handbook of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 254. 16. Ibid., 57 17 New York Times, June 27,1920.

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18. Kincaid, Silent Hattie Speaks, 3112, 32. 19. Washington Bee, August 5, 1916, February 6 and August 23, 1919; Savannah Tribune, Au-

gust 30,1919. 20. Washington Bee, August 5,1916. 21. Washington Bee, August 23,1919; Savannah Tribune, August 30,1919. 22. Helena World, November 26, 1919; Congressional Record, 58th Cong., November 19, 1919,

8818-21; J. W. Butts and Dorothy James, "The Underlying Causes of the Elaine Riot of 1919" Arkan- sas Historical Quarterly 20, no. i (Spring 1961): 95-104.

23. Thad Caraway also supported Wilson s progressive legislation (Clayton Antitrust Act, Fed- eral Reserve Act, direct election of senators, etc.), but he was best known at home for securing a $50,000 federal appropriation to build a white girls reform school in Arkansas in 1918.

24. Current Biography, 1945 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1945), 89-92. 25. New York Times, March 5,1922. 26. In 1922, Pulaski County boasted that it had a woman sheriff, Alice Clark, who carried a

revolver and commanded the "healthy respect of law violators." Bismarck Tribune, April 3,1922. 27. Bemidji Daily Pioneer (Minn.), May 16,1922.1 want to thank Amanda Milligan for bringing

this source to my attention. 28. Sunday Tulsa Daily World (Okla.), June 25,1922. 29. Hattie Caraway to Paul Caraway, February 28,1927, box 38, Caraway Papers, William L. Cle-

ments Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (hereafter Caraway Papers). In this period, the Caraways frequently socialized with Rhode Island senator Peter Gerry and his wife, Edith Stuyves- ant Dresser. I am extremely grateful to Eeta Gershow and Judith Rose for obtaining copies of these letters for use in this chapter.

30. Hattie Caraway to Paul Caraway, n.d., box 38, Caraway Papers. 31. When Thaddeus Caraway campaigned for Smith and Robinson, he argued that superpa-

triots and religious bigots should have more trouble with Hoover's pacifistic Quakerism than Smith's Catholicism. For more on the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas, see Charles C. Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); Kathleen Blee, Women of the KKK: Racism and Gender in the 19205 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Brooks R. Blevins, "The Strike and the Still: Anti-Radical Violence and the Ku Klux Klan in the Ozarks," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 52 (Winter 1993): 405-25; Donald Holley, "A Look behind the Masks: The 19205 Ku Klux Klan in Monticello, Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quar- terly 60 (Summer 2001): 131-50; Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

32. Pearl Oldfield followed the same path as Mae Ella Nolan (R-Calif.), who was elected in 1922 by special election to fill her deceased husband's seat; Florence Prag Kahn (R-Calif.), who in 1925 was elected to fill the vacancy created by the death of her husband; and Edith Nourse Rogers (R- Mass.), who in 1927 was elected in a special election to fill her deceased husband's seat. Nolan served only one term, but Kahn, the first Jewish woman in Congress, was reelected until 1936, when she was defeated in the FDR landslide. Rogers was elected to eighteen consecutive terms and shared many of the same interests in supporting veterans and the military as Hattie Caraway. Mary Teresa Norton (D-N.J.) was elected in 1924 and served until 1951. In light of the political success of these women and the Republicans' willingness to advance women into office in the 19205 through the "widow's succession," the Arkansas Democratic Central Committee's treatment of Oldfield

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Senator Hattie Caraway 129

and Caraway (and Wingo, discussed later in the chapter) was not a great departure but part of a trend.

33. Washington Evening Star, February 16,1926. Thad Caraway's desire to possess Riversdale con- flicted with Hiram Johnson s presumption that he could occupy the home even after the Caraways purchased it. Consequently, it took years for the Caraways to move into Riversdale.

34. Hattie Caraway to Paul Caraway, May 11,1929, box 38, Caraway Papers. 35. Quoted in Lindley C. Shedd, "Efnegene Wingo: An Early Congresswoman from Arkansas,"

Arkansas Historical Quarterly 67, no. i (Spring 2008): 27-53. 36. Hattie Caraway to Paul Caraway, June 17,1930, box 38, Caraway Papers. 37. Time, November 16,1931. 38. Jour not-Advance (Gentry, Ark.), December 17,1931. 39. Ibid. 40. Malone, Hattie and Huey, 62-63; Mrs. Charles [Myrtle] Price to Mary Dewson, Septem-

ber 24 and October 26,1936, folder 32, Correspondence by State, Arkansas-Misc H-Z, 1934-1936, Women's Division, Democratic National Committee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. (hereafter FDR Library).

41. Vivian Sigmon to James Farley, August 26, 1936; Sigmon to Molly Dewson, October 26, 1936; Dewson to Sigman [sic], October 27,1936, all in box 13, Correspondence by States, 1933-1937, Women's Division 1933-1944, Democratic National Committee, FDR Library.

42. Mrs. C. Woodward Baughman to Mrs. James Wolfe, February 17,1936, Democratic National Committee, Women's Division, Correspondence by State, Arkansas-Misc H-Z, 1934-1936, folder 32, FDR Library.

43. Kincaid, Silent Hattie Speaks. Hattie Caraway's style contrasted sharply with the press's depic- tion of her husband's methods. In 1930, Time had applauded one of Thad's Republican adversaries for standing up to the "arrogant," "pestiferous," "bumptious," "menacing" Senator Caraway and his "senile gabbling" and "gutter psychology." When Thaddeus Caraway died, Time noted that the Sen- ate had lost "its foremost sarcastigator, the Democrat whose tongue was like the lash of an Arkansas snake whip." The "narrow-eyed" junior senator, Time eulogized, never made long formal speeches but drawled out bitter words that stung his adversaries and left scars. Time, January 6, 1930, and November 16,1931.

44. Kincaid, Silent Hattie Speaks, 30. 45. Reno Evening Gazette (Nev), February 23,1932. 46. Ibid. 47. Washington Times-Herald, December 9, 1941, read by Senator Lister Hill of Alabama into

Congressional Record 87, pt. 9 (December 11, 1941), sess. 77-1, A5539. See also Garrett Whiteside, "'Watching Washington for Thirty-Five Years," Arkansas Historical Quarterly i, no. 3 (September 1942): 235-43.

48. Susan M. Hartmann, "Caraway, Hattie Ophelia Wyatt," in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4:369-70.

49. Kincaid, Silent Hattie Speaks, 121. 50. Ibid., 124. 51. Author's telephone interview with Lee Bodenhamer, August 19, 2014. 52. Kincaid, Silent Hattie Speaks, 22. 53. There are competing stories about how and why Louisiana senator Huey Long joined Cara-

way's campaign. One version is that Long, Caraway's seatmate, noticed that Caraway quietly but consistently voted along a progressive line. Other versions suggest that he simply took pity on

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her and offered to help. His motives seemed to be, of course, political since he was able to use Caraway's support of "Share the Wealth" legislation to cast Senator Joe Robinson as a friend of the wealthy and big business. Long also saw the Arkansas campaign as an opportunity to flex his populist political muscle outside of Louisiana, perhaps as a dress rehearsal for a 1936 run for the White House. In yet another version, one of Caraway's campaign organizers, L. S. (Sharpe) Du- naway (an Arkansas Gazette editor), who knew Long when the young itinerate salesman from Louisiana peddled pencils and soap in the small towns of Arkansas, asked Long to help with the Caraway campaign. See Malone, Hattie andHuey; William Curtis Mears, "L. S. (Sharpe) Dunaway," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. i (Spring 1954): 77-85; Stuart Towns, "A Louisiana Medicine Show: The Kingfish Elects an Arkansas Senator," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 25, no. 2 (June 1966): 117-27.

54. Washington Post, January 9,1932. 55. Hope Star (Hope, Ark.), August i, 1934. 56. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the

Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 152. 57. Billings Gazette (Mont.), January 6,1937. 58. See Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from Cotton (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000),

i58-59n7O. Grubbs noted that the STFU-style cooperatives in Arkansas received support from Cara- way, who had been a "former enemy."

59. Syracuse Herald, July 25,1937. 60. New York Times, June 24,1937. 61. Hattie Caraway also blocked the appointment of Brooks Hays, whom FDR considered the

most progressive Arkansas politician, to a federal judgeship in 1936 and tried to get Hays fired from his federal job working for Henry Wallace in the Department of Agriculture. Roosevelt intervened, and Hays kept his job. James Thomas Baker, Brooks Hays (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press,

1989), 58-59. 62. New York Times, March 5,1922. 63. Plaindealer (Kansas City, Kans.), January 28,1938. 64. Reno Evening Gazette (Nev), June 15,1938. 65. Reno Evening Gazette (Nev), June 22,1938. 66. Northwest Arkansas Times, July 28,1938. 67. Northwest Arkansas Times, July 16,1938. 68. New York Times, July 29, 1938; and J. B. Shannon, "Presidential Politics in the South: 1938,"

Journal of Politics i, no. 2 (May 1939): 146-70. 69. Author's interview with Lee Bodenhamer. See also U.S. Census, 1940, El Dorado, Union

County, Ark., roll T627_i77, 6A, enumeration district 70-16. 70. James Rowe Jr. to F D R , April 19 and 29,1940, PPF 5456, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library,

Hyde Park, N.Y.; Hope Star, April 19,1940. 71. Northwest Arkansas Times, April 17,1940. 72. Northwest Arkansas Times, October 2,1937. 73. Senator Miller publicly stated that he would support the Bodenhamer nomination and, as

newspapers reported, "some members privately expressed hope that a reconciliation of differences could be effected, but those close to the Arkansas senator [Caraway] are not optimistic." Hope Star, May i, 1940.

74. Author's interview with Lee Bodenhamer. 75. Whiteside, "'Watching Washington for Thirty-Five Years," 241.

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Senator Hattie Caraway 131

76. Ibid., 238. 77. Congressional Record, 77th Cong., ist sess., 1941, 87, pt. 10, appendix, A893-94. 78. Ibid. 79. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign

Policy, 1917-1994 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 95. 80. See Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1995), 80-83. 81. Typed campaign speech, July 14,1944, box "J. H. Reynolds Speech and Reports," John Hughes

Reynolds Papers, Hendrix College Archives, Conway, Ark. (hereafter Reynolds Papers). 82. December 23,1942, speech delivered at the Conway Rotary Club, box "J. H. Reynolds Speech

and Reports," Reynolds Papers. 83. John Reynolds has been regarded by Arkansas historians as a leader in the Lost Cause move-

ment to valorize the history of the Confederate states. See Fred Arthur Bailey, "The Free Speech and the 'Lost Cause' in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 143-66. Reynolds's extraordinary shift away from his earlier ideology and views on race are a fascinating aspect of the liberalization process in response to World War II.

84. Within days of the Senate concurring with the Fulbright resolution on September 21,1943, John Hughes Reynolds met with Senator Harold Hitz Burton of Ohio and other internationalists in New York and Washington, D.C. See Concurrent Resolution 25, 78th Cong., September 21,1943; typed notes from luncheon on September 24,1943, Roosevelt Hotel, New York City, September 27, 1943, Reynolds Papers.

85. Reynolds to President Wiley Lin Hurie, College of the Ozarks, December 15,1943, Reynolds Papers. Reynolds's letter followed up on a telephone conversation he had with Hurie the previous evening: "Mrs. Caraway, a good housemother, has been there long enough, if we were under obliga- tion to her distinguished husband If we put Fulbright in now, he will have a distinguished career in the United States Senate for the next twenty years. Arkansas needs that. I believe the college men of Arkansas can exercise a powerful influence in this effort."

86. In 1930, the Arkansas Supreme Court had upheld the use of the all-white primary, and the U.S. Supreme Court had refused to hear an appeal. But in 1941 the tide turned in favor of voting rights when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Classic (a Louisiana case) that pri- mary elections were subject to federal regulation. The constitutional test of the Texas Democratic white primary, Smith v. Allright, was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on January 12, 1944, and decided in favor of the African American plaintiff, Lonnie Smith, on April 3. The Court ruled that Smith's federally guaranteed right to vote had been violated and, as Justice Stanley F. Reed argued, a state could not legally "permit a private organization to practice racial discrimination" in elections.

87. Caraway had received criticism in the national press as one of the "Senators who voted to deprive soldiers of their right to the ballot in 1944 by putting responsibility for creating election machinery in the hands of each of the 48 states." See the anonymously written "Lest We Forget," Antioch Review 3, no. 4 (Winter 1943): 618.

88. The critical role of Reynolds in Fulbright's 1944 campaign has been neglected by historians. Evidence in Reynolds's papers indicates that he approached Fulbright in June or early July 1943 to encourage him to run and began contacting others to similarly pressure Fulbright. Fulbright's biog- rapher Randall Woods seemed unsure of the process by which Fulbright began to consider such a bold move and simply wrote: "Sometime that summer [1943] the thought crossed Fulbright's mind" to challenge Senator Caraway. Not until August 1943, after Reynolds began pressuring Fulbright,

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did Roberta Fulbright, who had been a friend of Caraway, begin organizing meetings to garner support for her son's possible run for the Senate. Woods was mistaken about Caraway's relationship with Huey Long, whom she and Thad visited in New Orleans. Long was her seatmate after Thad's death. Woods, however, wrote that Long had not met Caraway until he offered to campaign for her in 1932. See Woods, Fulbright, 87-90.

89. Plaindealer (Kansas City, Kans.), August 18,1944.

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