Discussion Topic #4

The Presidency, Social Movements, and Contentious Change: Lessons from the Woman's Suffrage and Labor Movements

Author(s): Daniel J. Tichenor

Source: Presidential Studies Quarterly , Mar., 1999, Vol. 29, No. 1, The Human Presidency (Mar., 1999), pp. 14-25

Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/27551956

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ARTICLES

The Presidency, Social Movements, and Contentious Change: Lessons from the Woman's Suffrage and Labor Movements

DANIEL J. TICHENOR Assistant Professor of Political Science

Rutgers University

No less than other specialized research fields in political science and history, presidency scholarship can exemplify many conceits regarding the causal power and transformative effects that its primary subject, the executive office, bestows on Ameri can politics. Studies old and new portray the institution of the presidency as perhaps the most crucial engine of contentious change in U.S. political development. "In presiden tial government, Americans have established one of the most powerful political institu tions in the free world," James MacGregor Burns asserted in 1965. "They have fash ioned, sometimes unwittingly, a weapon that has served them well in the long struggle for freedom and equality at home."1 In one of the most important recent works on the presidency, The Politics Presidents Make, Stephen Skowronek similarly depicts the execu tive office as a "blunt disruptive force" whose "deep-seated impulse to reorder things routinely jolts order and routine elsewhere." Although Skowronek does not embrace Burns's vision of a heroic presidency, he does find that the institution "routinely disrupts established power arrangements and continually opens new avenues of political activity for others."2 These studies place the presidency at the vanguard of change in American politics, a governing institution whose occupants are compelled to persistently challenge and remake the existing political order.

A growing literature on the executive office and racial politics contests this portrait of a transformative presidency. Far from being agents of contentious change, presidents are depicted in this scholarly work as staunch guardians of prevailing economic, social, and political arrangements. In a sweeping study of the presidency and race, Kenneth O'Reilly argues that the imperatives of elections and majoritarian politics in the United States made incumbents reactionary opponents of civil rights reform. "At root, it is noth ing more than a belief that presidential elections can be won only by following the doc trines and rituals of white over black," he notes. "The pecking order has stayed that way through the death of slavery and Jim Crow, and notwithstanding Lincoln and Johnson, our presidents have in nearly every other case made it their job to keep that order."3 According to scholars such as Russell Riley and Thomas Langston, executive caution and resistance on questions of racial justice also reflect the presidency's role as a "nation-maintaining institution" whose occupants "portray themselves ... as the embodiment of the whole nation."4 For most of our presidents, they argue, social

Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 1 (March) ? 1999 Center for the Study of the Presidency

14

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THE PRESIDENCY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND CONTENTIOUS CHANGE | 15

movement challenges to prevailing racial structures do not fit comfortably with execu tive imperatives to secure domestic tranquility and national unity. In contrast to the transformative model of the American presidency, Riley concludes that the presidency "is fundamentally a change-resistant institution."5

These contrasting portraits of the American presidency raise enormously impor tant theoretical questions. Most obvious, does executive power and leadership propel or frustrate major change in American politics? In particular, what is the relationship between the American presidency and efforts to secure greater freedom and equality of democratic citizens in the United States? Finally, if the presidency is in fact a cautious institution resistant to contentious change, then how do we account for episodic bursts of presidential activism on behalf of controversial reforms that enhance the freedom and equality of citizens?

This article begins to answer these daunting questions by investigating two illumi nating cases of presidential activism that helped produce major social and political breakthroughs, episodes that capture profound tensions between the presidency and social movements for greater democratic equality. The first case examines the uneven relationship between the Woodrow Wilson administration and the woman's suffrage

movement, and the second case focuses on the labor movement and its engagement with the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency. As we shall see, even presidents as strong and reform-minded as Wilson and Roosevelt were deeply reluctant about, and often resis tant to, polarizing crusades for democratic equality. Circumspect presidential activism on behalf of woman's suffrage and labor union rights would rely on truly exceptional circumstances: historical moments when domestic or international crises gave presi dents greater flexibility and power to address the demands of social movements. Both cases also exemplify the capacity of social movements and their leaders to realign existing social, economic, and political structures. Far from being passive recipients of either executive benevolence or resistance, the woman's suffrage and labor movements we examine actively courted and provoked a modernizing presidency to serve as their insti tutional champion within American government. The prominent roles of movement leaders such as Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, and John L. Lewis in securing favor able presidential action highlight the influence that dissenting leaders who do not pos sess formal political power or occupy high political office may have on the achievement or demise of transformative ends. Both episodes of reluctant presidential activism cap ture an uneasy yet pivotal partnership between the presidency and social movements in the production of contentious change for women and unskilled laborers in America. It is to these movements that we now turn.

Wilson, Paul, Catt, and Woman's Suffrage At the time of the 1912 presidential campaign, the woman's suffrage move

ment was at a crossroads. Efforts to secure voting rights in the individual states were sty mied in one contest after another. Among younger suffragists, the notion of concentrat ing the movement's energies on a national amendment seemed a far more promising political strategy. And whereas federal constitutional amendments traditionally were crafted in Congress and the separate states, with presidential incumbents playing a

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16 I PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY

marginal role, younger suffragists believed that the White House was crucial to achiev ing their goals. "The transformation of the modern presidency," two historians recently noted, "... which had its genesis in Theodore Roosevelt's concept of the office as a 'bully pulpit,' gradually led suffragists to rethink their position." Paul, eventual leader of the militant wing of the suffrage movement, later recalled, "We knew that [the American presidency], and perhaps it alone, would ensure our success."6 The movement soon would discover, however, that gaining the support of the president was an arduous enterprise.

Of all the presidential aspirants in 1912, Wilson, the Democratic candidate, was perhaps the most elusive on the suffrage issue. Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party embraced woman's suffrage and invited Jane Addams and other prominent women to hold important positions in the party.7 Wilson, by contrast, evaded questions from jour nalists and delegations of women activists about the contentious suffrage issue by assert ing that it was not a matter for either presidential candidates or incumbents to discuss. "Suffrage is not a national issue," he insisted. "It is a local issue for each state to settle for itself."8 Although he vigorously lobbied the Democratic platform committee behind the scenes not to endorse a controversial pro-suffrage plank, Wilson told suffragist groups during the campaign that his hands were tied by a Democratic platform opposing their goals.9

Paul, who was schooled in militant activism by English suffragists until she returned to the United States in 1910, won support in 1912 from the National American

Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to initiate a national amendment campaign in Washington, D.C. Reflecting the importance that Paul accorded to the twentieth century presidency, her new Washington office organized a massive suffrage parade in the nation's capital on the day ofWilson's first inauguration. Crowds that assembled for the inauguration reacted violently to the parade, and federal troops eventually were called in to restore order. The incident was an ominous sign for Wilson, foreshadowing the unceasing suffragist efforts to hound the president throughout his two terms in office. As much as Abraham Lincoln was beleaguered by a steady stream of abolitionist delegations during his presidency, Wilson encountered dozens of local and national suf frage groups in the first year of his administration. At the same time as he asserted sweep ing presidential leadership over his party in Congress, even shattering the Jeffersonian precedent of not delivering speeches before the legislative body, Wilson incredibly told suffragists that any advocacy of a national amendment would conflict with his devotion to constitutional propriety, particularly the separation of powers. "I am not a free man," he told NAWSA's president, Anna Howard Shaw. "I am not at liberty until I speak for someone else besides myself to urge legislation upon the Congress."10 While NAWSA turned its attention to state referenda, Paul and her followers continued to press the Wil son administration. When she decided to vigorously campaign against the Democratic party in the midterm election of 1914, it forced a rupture with the nonpartisan NAWSA that led Paul to form the more radical Congressional Union and later the National

Woman's Party. Henceforth, there would be two rival factions engaged in the suffrage crusade: NAWSA's moderate wing and Paul's militant counterparts.11

In 1915, NAWSA suffered frustrating electoral setbacks in Newjersey, Massachu setts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Searching for new energy and direction, NAWSA

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THE PRESIDENCY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND CONTENTIOUS CHANGE | 17

elected a new president, Catt, former head of the New York Suffrage Association. On the eve of the 1916 presidential campaign, Catt designed a new political strategy for NAWSA that she called the "Winning Plan" that made the presidency a focal point of future lob bying efforts. When the 1916 Republican presidential candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, threw caution to the wind and strongly endorsed a national suffrage amendment (to the chagrin of party leaders who knew the initiative was unpopular), Catt and other suffra gists were optimistic that Wilson soon would follow. But the incumbent president remained extremely cautious during the election, refusing to take a strong public stand.

Whereas Paul and the National Woman's Party promised electoral retribution for Wil son's intransigence, Catt and NAWSA exercised pragmatic restraint and personal diplomacy12

Both concerned by Hughes's pro-suffrage gesture and responsive to NAWSA's moderate approach, Wilson agreed to address the association's national meeting during the election campaign. In a remarkable speech to the NAWSA delegates, Wilson told them that he shared their frustration with constitutional barriers to reform. "The whole

conception of government when the United States became a nation was a mechanical conception of government, and the mechanical conception that underlay it was a New tonian theory of the universe," Wilson lamented in a manner reminiscent of his earlier

work as a political scientist. But he declared that the suffragists, like the abolitionists before them, "have seen visions of duty" that transcend tedious questions of mechanics. Theirs were aspirations "for the deepest sort of liberty of the mind and of the heart," Wil son said admiringly, "and as visions ofthat sort come up . . . America comes more and

more into the perfection of her development." Yet, Wilson stopped well short of endors ing the suffragist agenda. Instead, he reminded NAWSA activists that his presidential duties

made him accountable to democratic majorities who did not share the suffragist vision. "It is all very well to be ahead and beckon," he lectured them, "but after all, you have got to wait for the body to follow."13 Wilson, the renowned idealist, was delivering a sermon on the realities of democratic politics.

Shortly before the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Paul and her militant followers initiated daily pickets of the White House, convinced that the admini stration must be cajoled into action. Others chained themselves to the White House fence. After American entrance into World War I, Paul's radical protesters unfurled con

frontational banners with "Kaiser Wilson" on them to emphasize lack of democracy on the homefront.14 Nearby crowds responded with hostility to the banners, attacking the picketers as unpatriotic. When the protesters were jailed, their abuse by Washington prison officials and a subsequent hunger strike made national headlines. Meanwhile, a new crop of National Woman's Party activists defiantly carried "Kaiser Wilson" banners in front of the White House. As they explained to all who would listen, "A kaiser is an autocratic ruler, and to 20 [million] women, the president of the United States is a kaiser!"15

Catt and other NAWSA leaders shrewdly sought to capitalize on these pressures, recognizing that Paul's militant activities might make Wilson more responsive to their friendly overtures and gentle lobbying. Helen Gardener, one of Catt's closest political confidantes, cultivated good relations with key White House advisers during this period. In addition, Catt and Gardener frequently reminded Wilson that NAWSA devotedly

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18 I PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY

"refrained from forcing the issue" because its leaders understood the enormous strains imposed on the president by war preparation and management. Finally, Catt graciously agreed to serve on the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense.16 Cal culated restraint, Catt believed, would pay political dividends.

As NAWSA drew closer to the Wilson administration, Catt devised "a war measure

plan" intended to take advantage of the enormous power and prestige the president commanded during the crisis of global warfare. As protesting by National Woman's Party activists became more and more of a nuisance to the White House, with radical suffragists burning Wilson in effigy, Gardener urged the president to end disruptive pro tests and to focus women's energies more fully on the war effort by throwing his "pow erful influence" behind the national suffrage amendment. The reform was on both accounts an essential "war measure," she insisted.17 In several letters, Catt also coaxed

Wilson to urge Congress to pass the suffrage amendment as crucial to the conduct of the war. The denial of voting rights for women, she explained to the president, aroused in patriotic women

a just suspicion that men and women are not coworkers for world freedom but that women are regarded as mere servitors with no interest or rightful voice in the out come. ... I asked a young woman, who for patriotic reasons has been working in the ordinance department, why woman suffrage should be called a war measure, [and] she promptly replied, "Because it is an incentive to better and more work."18

Equally perilous, Catt warned the president, was the image of the United States pledged to "making the world safer for democracy" while half of its adult population was deprived of basic democratic rights.19

As Paul and radical suffragists intensified their confrontational tactics in front of the White House in 1918, Wilson finally informed Catt and NAWSA activists that he

would urge Congress to pass the national suffrage amendment as a critical war measure. "The services of women during this supreme crisis of the world's history have been of the most signal usefulness and distinction," Wilson wrote in an open letter to Catt intended for public consideration. "It is high time that some part of our debt of gratitude to them should be acknowledged and paid, and the only acknowledgment they ask is their admission to the suffrage. Can we justly refuse?"20 In a dramatic address to Con gress on suffrage a few months later, Wilson told lawmakers that it was incumbent on him as commander-in-chief to endorse woman's suffrage: "The effort of the women lies at the very heart of the war? I tell you plainly that this [suffrage] measure which I urge upon you is vital to the winning of the war and to the energies alike of preparation and of battle."21 After vigorously lobbying by both suffragists and the White House, Congress reluctantly affirmed the suffrage amendment.

On passage of the amendment, Catt reflected that Wilson's belated stand on suf frage represented bold leadership. "The president may be a bit ahead of the masses, but that is leadership," she reasoned. "Where the president stood today, the masses will stand tomorrow."22 But Wilson did nothing to justify suffrage more broadly than as a war

measure, thereby missing an important opportunity to educate the public concerning its democratic meaning. The president who moralistically championed the League of

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THE PRESIDENCY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND CONTENTIOUS CHANGE | 19

Nations to a reluctant public remained a cautious politician to the end on the subject of women's rights. The ability of Catt, Paul, and other activists to press a reluctant presi dent into service of woman's suffrage underscores the significant influence that social movements and dissenting leaders can have on the production of major social and politi cal change.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lewis, and the Labor Movement During the 1930s, the fortunes of the labor movement were closely tied to

the meteoric rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal regime against the back drop of the Great Depression. Like social movement activists before him, Lewis, the ambitious leader of the United Mine Workers (UMW), hoped to take advantage of the political opportunities presented by national crisis and unusual presidential activism to advance his transformative ends. Although his oratory, filled with classical, Biblical, and Shakespearean flourishes, could soar to prophetic heights, Lewis was by no means opposed to the tasks of democratic politics. A man of great political cunning, Lewis once was a prot?g? of the American Federation of Labor's (AFL) conservative Samuel Gompers, a staunch defender of liberalism and the free market system as well as a mas terful political opportunist. He eagerly welcomed opportunities to affirm and participate in the formation of the New Deal if it would enhance the fortunes of the union

movement.

In 1933, the administration invited a broad panoply of interests, including business and labor leaders, to help in shaping the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Although Roosevelt permitted labor leaders to participate in designing the NIRA, he did so more out of a desire to conciliate disparate strands of the political community than out of any enthusiasm for the union movement. In general, he envisioned social programs and government standards as the crucial means of protecting the interests of America's working class, not self-empowerment through unions. Nevertheless, New Dealers such as Frances Perkins were careful to include labor advocates in the drafting of recov ery legislation. Lewis saw to it that his lieutenant, W Jett Lauck, worked closely with New Dealers in molding the NIRA.23

At the persistent urging of Lauck and other labor activists, Roosevelt and New Dealers reluctantly included avague provision in the NIRA, Section 7(a), that recog nized the right of workers to bargain collectively. "Before the [NIRA], industry leaders had bridled at the least hint of legitimacy accorded to the union movement," James Morone notes. "But in the context of national crisis ... and in the relative safety of a pro gram that granted employers new powers without imposing state sanctions, they accepted Section 7(a)."24 Industrial giants also were reassured by their lawyers that there

was no administrative mechanism to enforce Section 7(a) and that any future hint of rig orous enforcement would be derailed in the courts. But, as Lauck reported to Lewis, the NIRA's ambiguous Section 7(a) "will suit our purposes." Once convinced that the NIRA would pass Congress with Section 7(a) intact, Lewis mobilized dozens of union organizers to recruit new members of the UMW. Fanning out across the Appalachian fields, UMW activists capitalized on the popularity of Roosevelt and the NIRA to attract miners. "The president wants you to join the union," UMW literature and organizers

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20 I PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY

told workers.25 Thousands of workers signed union cards and formed lodges that they named, for example, "New Deal," "NIRA," and "Blue Eagle." Before the organizing campaign, membership in Lewis's UMW had plummeted to 150,000. After only one year of invoking the hallowed names of Roosevelt and the New Deal, the UMW could claim more than 500,000 new members.26

Eager to place himself at the head of a massive drive to unionize the nation's indus trial workers, Lewis soon orchestrated a dramatic break with the conservative AFL,

whose staid leadership showed little passion for organizing unskilled workers. At the AFL's 1934 convention in San Francisco, he publicly pressed federation leaders to mobi lize industrial workers while quietly lining up support for a possible Committee on Industrial Organizations (CIO) for unskilled laborers long ignored by the AFL. At Lewis's prodding, 30 percent of the membership urged the AFL's executive council to organize factory workers into industrial unions. At the AFL convention one year later, Lewis held the floor for an hour assailing the AFL's leadership for cowardly deceiving him in the past. "At San Francisco, they seduced me with fair words," he thundered. "Now, of course, having learned that I was seduced, I am enraged and I am ready to rend

my seducers from limb to limb." But the betrayal was far greater, Lewis insisted, because the AFL had forsaken at least 25 million unskilled workers that AFL leaders had once

pledged to unionize. "Where are those 25 million?" Lewis dramatically intoned. "Dying like the grass withering before the autumn sun." Neither the UMW nor American

workers, he declared, could stand to abide an intransigent AFL leadership that sat on its hands while "our people are suffering."27 The next day, after dramatically decking an AFL stalwart on the convention floor before rapt delegates, Lewis assumed the helm of the new CIO.

Carefully portraying himself as a militant within the labor movement, Lewis was fundamentally more conservative outside it. Indeed, although Lewis privately distrusted Roosevelt, he instinctively endorsed Roosevelt's efforts to lend democratic durability to the New Deal's transformative ends. Roosevelt's political pragmatism was legendary in his own time, and critics claimed he was an unprincipled leader. "If he became con vinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he so sorely needs," H. L. Mencken once quipped, "he would begin fattening a missionary in the

White House backyard come Wednesday."28 When asked about his political philosophy by a reporter, Roosevelt offered his now famous retort: "Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat?that's all."29 But if Roosevelt sometimes could appear to be a political

weathervane or an experimenter without vision, he understood that "the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate" and that "the presidency is predominantly a place of moral leadership."30 In fact, there was an unwavering purpose in Roosevelt's pragmatism: to root government activism on behalf of the economic security of hard-working citizens

within liberal traditions that might allow it to remain viable in American politics long after the Depression receded.

Roosevelt attempted to legitimate his New Deal initiatives as an expansion of lib eral traditions rather than an abandonment of them. "The moral indignation of New

Dealers," observes Robert Eden, were directed against notions of limited government "that made a mockery of the work ethic by wiping out savings and tolerating unemploy

ment of millions of hard-working Americans who had lost their jobs because of the

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THE PRESIDENCY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND CONTENTIOUS CHANGE | 21

Depression."31 The closing of the frontier and the rise of industrial giants, Roosevelt explained in his 1932 Commonwealth Club Address, meant that comprehensive national programs were necessary to ameliorate the hardships of an advanced industrial democracy. Individual freedom and equal opportunity now required the federal govern ment to guarantee certain negative and positive freedoms for citizens, he averred.32 These were themes to which Roosevelt would return throughout his long tenure as president, including his 1944 State of the Union address.

Tellingly, Lewis passionately joined Roosevelt in this pragmatic exercise in demo cratic education. In a 1934 Commonwealth Club Address, for example, Lewis fervently defended the New Deal as a virtuous American "middle way." Indeed, he suggested that Roosevelt's redefinition of American liberalism was perhaps the only way between European fascism and the vicious capitalism of predatory industrial captains who have "eyes but see not" and have "ears but hear not." To a considerable degree, then, Lewis shared Roosevelt's purposeful pragmatism.33

Despite their philosophical affinity, Lewis had good reason to remain skeptical about the Roosevelt administration. The White House assumed an aloof disinterest

when Senator Robert Wagner (D-N.Y) championed legislation that would fundamen tally protect unionizing efforts. Roosevelt tepidly endorsed the Wagner Act of 1935, labor's "Magna Carta," only at the eleventh hour. Roosevelt's labor secretary, Perkins, later commented that Roosevelt never grasped that unions provided workers with "unbreakable bonds which gave them power and status to deal with their employers on equal terms."34 Burns aptly observes that during the struggles for labor reform in the 1930s, Roosevelt's role "was not much more than that of an onlooker."35

However, Roosevelt's benign neutrality toward the union movement did mark an important shift in presidential behavior. Nearly all of his predecessors sided with man agement during strikes and were not hesitant to employ the power of the federal govern ment to quiet union-inspired unrest. Grover Cleveland went so far as to send federal troops to Chicago to put down the Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894, a use of prerogative powers that Illinois Governor John Altgeld found worthy of "the autocrat of Russia."36 During a disruptive general strike by San Francisco unions in 1934, however, Roosevelt ignored demands by employers, state officials, and California voters to send federal troops to end the walkout. Instead, the White House stated its "confidence that common sense and good order will prevail on both sides of the controversy" Striking a paternalis tic tone, Roosevelt often urged citizens to remember that strikers were "young" and, as a result, often "did silly things." Labor militancy, he suggested, could be chalked up to impetuous youth and must be allowed to grow into more responsible maturity. "They have got to learn by going through the actual processes ... and not by interference from the federal government or the president or the United States troops." Moreover, man agement often was described in more sinister terms as an "old conservative crowd" that for too long had exploited workers, "being clever enough to know that a... strike always fails."37 Later, when Flint, Michigan, auto workers loyal to the CIO refused to vacate General Motors plants, the White House pressured management to negotiate by refus ing to permit troops to remove the strikers. Roosevelt told reporters, "I consider the call ing out of federal troops during a strike, except in a national emergency, one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a democracy"38

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22 I PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY

Lewis clearly understood Roosevelt's lack of enthusiasm for union radicalism, but he also recognized that the labor movement could make the most of what Alonzo Hamby has called "the New Deal's general endorsement of social change and fair play for the underdog."39 In 1936, Lewis envisioned an electoral marriage of convenience between the CIO and the Democratic party to reelect Roosevelt. Forming the Labor Nonpartisan League, Lewis hoped that union votes could be marshaled in future elec tions to support whichever party or candidate best served the interests of the CIO's

membership. Whereas donations to the Democratic party from business leaders plum meted between 1932 and 1936, CIO unions contributed $770,000 to the president's campaign coffers. The $469,000 raised by the Lewis's UMW made it the Democratic party's largest single benefactor. Perhaps more important, Lewis mobilized the CIO and called on his own formidable rhetorical skills to lionize Roosevelt and the Democratic

party as the champions of unions and their membership. As one working-class voter declared during the election, "Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son-of-a-bitch."40 Lewis and CIO sup port were credited with turning the tide in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana and in making Pennsylvania Democratic. "Never before had union leaders done so effective a job of mobilizing the labor vote in a national campaign," writes William Leuchtenburg.41 Lewis cashed in on the electoral debt Roosevelt owed the CIO during the Flint strikes of late 1936, but he soon discovered that the president was eager to maintain his distance from the labor movement.

Amid labor confrontations with "little steel" in the spring of 1937, Roosevelt stunned labor supporters in his response to the killing of ten steelworkers who were peacefully demonstrating in Chicago against Republic Steel Corporation. Denouncing both the management and unions as sponsors of senseless violence, Roosevelt declared "a curse on both your houses." In a Labor Day radio address to more than 20 million lis teners, Lewis responded with a seething rebuke of Roosevelt that signaled the impend ing demise of their awkward political alliance. Lewis spoke of the dead in Chicago as only the latest in a long list of workers who had died on the altar of corporate greed and government indifference. "Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows," he proclaimed. "Its women weep for their fallen, and they lament for the future of the children of the race." Then he focused on the president: "It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine imparti ality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace."42 Dur ing the 1940 election, Lewis worked in vain to derail Roosevelt's reelection, fearing that it would bring about an American entry into war. The crisis of global warfare, he believed, would derail a progressive labor agenda. Lewis predicted that war production would swallow labor up in an efficient military-industrial state.43 After a vain attempt to use his Labor Nonpartisan League as the springboard of a third-party challenge, Lewis backed the Republican candidate, Wendell Wilkie. Shortly after the 1940 election, Lewis stepped down as CIO president.

However strained the relationship among Roosevelt, Lewis, and the union move ment, their creative tensions ultimately produced significant reform and cemented ties between organized labor and the Democratic party. Strikingly, Lewis most dreaded the co-optation of his movement by Roosevelt and the New Dealers, whereas the president

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THE PRESIDENCY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND CONTENTIOUS CHANGE | 23

hoped to keep his party free of labor dominance. Yet, industrial workers refused to for sake their champion, Roosevelt, in the election of 1940, and they emerged as a fixture of the postwar Democratic party. And during ensuing years, as labor interests were incor porated into the national state that Roosevelt built, union militancy gave way to an increasingly moderate and bureaucratic labor organization. Nevertheless, the Roosevelt presidency and the labor movement together transformed the relationship between government and workers in a modern industrial economy.

Conclusion The successful campaigns waged by the woman's suffrage and labor move

ments to secure the support of modern presidents and ultimately new rights suggest that major social and political change have occurred during rare moments of American political development, times when national crisis has made the American presidency a cautious agent of contentious democratic transformation. Against the backdrop of

World War I, Wilson curiously justified his advocacy of women's suffrage as consistent with his role as commander-in-chief. Thus, Wilson and NAWSA embraced anti majoritarian means?the president's prerogative authority during wartime?to secure greater democratic equality for women.44 In contrast to NAWSA, the CIO made itself a significant presence in the Democratic party to secure its controversial goals, contribut ing money, volunteers, and votes to the New Deal cause. Ultimately, however, the CIO also secured favorable policy outcomes by winning the cautious but pivotal support of a president whose exceptional power, if not mastery over the political system, sprang from a national crisis of the first order: the Great Depression. The fact that Lincoln's contribu tions to the abolitionist cause rested heavily on his unprecedented prerogative powers during the Civil War adds further credence to the importance of unusual executive power in the production of contentious egalitarian change. Ironically, then, anti democratic institutional processes?in these cases, the elevation of executive authority to overcome formidable barriers to reform posed by routine majoritarian poli tics?might be required to secure greater democratic equality of citizens.

The relative success of the woman's suffrage and labor crusades during these peri ods also illuminates the influential role that social movements and their leaders can play in the production of nonincremental social and political change. As much as Charles

Jones highlights the frailties of presidency-centered research in an American polity that fragments power and authority among different branches and levels of government, our cases draw attention to the potential transformative power of political leaders and social movements dwelling outside the formal structures of the American state.45 Absent the political mobilization of NAWSA, the National Woman's Party, and the CIO or the influential leadership of Catt, Paul, and Lewis, presidential activism on behalf of

woman's suffrage and the right of unskilled laborers to organize for greater economic security would have proven either elusive or decidedly limited. These two struggles for contentious change capture the volatile, often strained interactions between social movements and the modern presidency and their remarkable capacity to remake estab lished social, economic, and political structures during extraordinary moments of

American political development.

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24 I PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY

Notes

1. James MacGregor Burns, Presidential Government: The Crucible of Leadership (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 351.

2. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from fohn Adams to George Bush (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 4,15. 3. Kenneth O'Reilly, Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free

Press, 1995), p. 10. 4. Russell Riley, "The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Movements, Mobilization, and Ma

nipulation, 1831-1965" (Ph.D. diss., University ofVirginia, 1995); Thomas Langston, With Reverence and Contempt: How Americans Think about Their President (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 32.

5. Riley, 77ie Presidency. 6. Christine Lunardini and Thomas Knock, "Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage: A New Look," Politi

cal Science Quarterly 95, no. 4 (1980-81): 656, 671. 7. Sidney Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor, " 'Direct Democracy' and Social Justice: The Progressive Party

Campaign of 1912," Studies in American Political Development 8 (Fall 1994): 311-14. 8. Frank Parker Stockbridge, "How Woodrow Wilson Won His Nomination," Current History 20 (July

1924): 567. 9. Stockbridge, "How Woodrow Wilson," pp. 567-69. 10. Lunardi and Knock, "Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage," p. 659. 11. Christine Lunardi, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1986),

pp. 32-49. 12. Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Roles Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics (New York: Scribner, 1926). 13. "Speech of President Woodrow Wilson before the 48th Annual Conference of the National American

Woman Suffrage Association," Atlantic City, NJ, September 8,1916, Records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division (hereafter Records of NAWSA), microfilm reel no. 55.

14. "Report for 1916," National Woman's Party Papers, 1913-29, Microfilms Corporation of America, 1979, microfilm reel no. 2.

15. National Woman's Party to Mrs. Davis Ewing, August 20,1917, National Woman's Party Papers, micro film reel no. 2.

16. Lunardi and Knock, "Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage," p. 665. 17. Helen H. Gardener to Woodrow Wilson, July 19, 1917, Records of NAWSA, microfilm reel no. 21. 18. Carrie Chapman Catt to Woodrow Wilson, September 29,1918, Records of NAWSA, microfilm reel no.

21. 19. Ibid. 20. Lunardi and Knock, "Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage," p. 667. 21. "President Woodrow Wilson's Message to the United States Senate Urging Passage of the Suffrage

Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," September 30,1918, National Woman's Party Papers, microfilm reel no. 2.

22. "Press Statement of Carrie Chapman Catt," June 7, 1919, National Woman's Party Papers, microfilm reel no. 2.

23. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, fohn L. Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 132-35.

24. James Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 160.

25. Robert Zeiger, John L. Lewis: Labor Leader (Boston: Twayne, 1988), p. 64. 26. William Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 106-7. 27. Ibid., p. 82. 28. William E. Leuchtenburg, "Franklin D. Roosevelt: The First Modern President," in Leadership in the

Modern Presidency, ed. Fred Greenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 8. 29. Bruce Miroff, Icons of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 244. 30. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), pp. 316-17.

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THE PRESIDENCY, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND CONTENTIOUS CHANGE | 25

31. Robert Eden, "Dealing Democratic Honor Out," in Remaking American Politics, eds. Richard Harris and Sidney Milkis (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989), p. 67.

32. For a superb discussion of the Commonwealth Club Address and the aggrandizement of administrative power, see Sidney Milkis, "The Presidency, Policy Reform, and the Rise of Administrative Politics," in Remaking American Politics, eds. Harris and Milkis, pp. 150-51.

33. The most incisive treatment of the shared political conservativism of Roosevelt and Lewis is provided by Marc Landy, "FDR and John L. Lewis: The Lessons of Rivalry," in Modem Presidents and the Presidency, ed. Marc Landy (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1985), pp. 106-12.

34. Miroff, Icons of Democracy, p. 262. 35. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956),

p. 217. 36. John Altgeld, Live Questions (Chicago, self-published, 1899), pp. 49-50. 37. Miroff, Icons of Democracy, pp. 260-61. 38. Ibid., pp. 261-62. 39. Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: From FDR to Bush (New\brk: Oxford University Press,

1992), p. 25. 40. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, p. 189. 41. Ibid. 42. Zeiger,Jo/m L. Lewis, pp. 105-6. 43. Ibid., p. 109. 44. For a magisterial account of republican leadership and its "ambivalent" place in constitutional govern

ment, see Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

45. Charles O. Jones, The Presidency in a Separated System (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994).

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