Interviews: Chris Driggs | Phillip Earl | Ann Howard | Bob Kent | Elizabeth Raymond | Guy Rocha

Ann Howard
Professor Emeritus; University of Nevada, Reno

Q: Describe Anne Martin as she was in 1914.

AH: Anne Martin thought she was somebody fairly important. She belonged to a prominent family. Her father had recently died, and uh she had good education. She'd gone to the University of Nevada, and then she'd gone on to Stanford, in one of the earliest classes at Stanford. At Stanford she had made friends with a number of important people including one named Lew Henry who later married Herbert Hoover. Anne had done a lot of traveling. She didn't quite know what to do with her self. She had this Master's in History, and she taught for a while at the university, but she also traveled to Europe, back and forth. She tried various things. She wanted to be a writer. And she at one time went to England with Mary Austin who is a familiar name to almost any reader of Western literature. And she and Mary didn't get along to well, a couple of rather crusty characters. Anne was about 40; Mary was probably older. They just didn't meld very well. Anne wasn't very good at working hard. But she became interested in a number of different topics. She traveled to lots of different places. And the women's suffrage movement in England fascinated her. When she was there, she was quite enchanted with the Parkhurst branch of the suffrage movement. These were the people that were members of the Women's Social and Political Union and otherwise known as the militants. They were a little bit tired of lady-like parades. They were a little bit tired of lady-like petitions. And they are the people who began the violent action in the streets. Well, they weren't violent but it seemed to incite violence from the police. And Anne Martin had been to England and she had been there for one of the most dramatic incidents in the life of the Women's Social & Political Union, what they called Black Friday in 1910. When Winston Churchill of all people called out the police against the file of women who were insisting upon being admitted into the Houses of Parliament to claim for the right to vote. Well, it turned into a kind of lady-like riot with women being pushed around and eventually getting arrested. Anne Martin was arrested. She was pretty excited about that. She got rescued because Hoover was a friend. He said I shouldn't have to rescue you but he did it. And uh she came back to Nevada all fired up with the idea of women's suffrage, which had begun to be organized in Nevada in 1910. And she moved into the organization with a good deal of zeal and tried in many way to displace the leadership that was there because she felt that she had experience and therefore should qualified. Eventually the women got together. As you know it takes two campaigns to pass an amendment, two legislatures to pass an amendment and then a vote of the people. And they did pretty well with the legislature but there was a good deal of worry about what might happen in the suffrage vote with the people. Now Anne Martin was good at organization. She loved putting things together. And she managed to be the leader of a pile of wonderfully organized women all over this scattered state. Think of what it was like to get around Nevada in those days. It was really quite difficult. She rode in a car, she rode on trains. And they went everyplace they possibly could go in town persuading men to vote for them.

Q: Did she see herself more as the general in charge?

AH: Well that fairly accurate. She really liked to run things. She could work with some people but there were other people, strong-minded women that she clashed with. But she had the time. She had the leisure. This was one great important advantage. She didn't need to work and she sympathized with the need for women's suffrage. She was strong-minded but I think it took someone like that. She got along fine with certain kinds of people. And she'd done very well in the national organization for women's suffrage, had recognized here and there.

Q: She seemed more interested in the national movement over the local.

AH: In fact there were women in Nevada who were a little bit unhappy about the fact that she spent so much time in Washington, which of course she did. It was really exciting to be there. She early became associated with the National Women's Party. It wasn't quite that yet. She was actually its first president. It was then a unit of the Women's Suffrage Association called the Congressional Union. And their particular job was to lobbied congress. It later separated from the national organization and became the National Women's Party and Anne Martin was connected with it, which in some ways was good for her, and some ways not. But that really started after Nevada suffrage had been won. It was won incidentally not in the cities, Reno, Washoe County was against it. Carson was against it. Las Vegas didn't much count because it was just a tiny little village. But it was the miners, the socialists miners most people said, out in the state at large who gave the votes that gave women the right to vote.

Q: So June 1914 is the final push. Did she relish the last campaign?

AH: She certainly enjoyed it. She liked traveling the state. She had seen a great deal of the state. And uh, she was a woman of considerable physical endurance. She was a great rider of horses. I mean she engaged … she was once a Nevada Tennis champion. I don't know what that really meant in the 1890s. But she was an energetic and ambitious and adventure-some person who quite enjoyed the rigors of the campaign.

Q: Was she able to talk to the miners?

AH: Well, she was a good speaker. We hear that she never wrote her speeches out. She spoke from notes. And the notes simply had a list of points, which she wanted to cover. And apparently the reaction of women at any rate who spoke about it was that she was a good speaker. Not particularly emotional or impassioned but very organized and good at using the necessary points.

Q: Was she readily received in the small camps or towns? Where did she hold her meetings?

AH: But there were places for men to gather, and since only men voted, there was always a difficulty. There were women who wrote, for example, "I can't go into saloons. The only social place in my town is a saloon." And a nice woman did not go into the saloon to solicit votes. So they spoke to church groups and tried to get, uh, they spoke to women who in turn spoke to their husbands. And they did strange things to raise money. There was one little group that taught people to do the tango which was the great rage at the time as a way of raising money. You know, it was the standard no money but a lot of enthusiasm kind of campaign. And uh they did get results. I think it was time. Most of the Western states by that time had given suffrage to their women. The national problem was still there.

Q: Was the vote expected to go in favor of suffrage?

AH: Nobody seemed to know what was going to happen, so they were really quite thrilled. It was not a huge margin but it was enough to do it. Because they had gotten it through the legislature twice. The tendency was in that direction. But people in the big cities claimed they didn't like it. (George) Wingfield, for example, threatened to take his investments out of Nevada if suffrage passed. I always wondered how he'd take mines out of Nevada and take his …but then, of course, they tried to laugh at him. Anne Martin always had a frightened attitude about Wingfield. She held him responsible for something related to the family estate, I don't know what. The bank he owned or something that she felt she had been misused. But, uh, he clearly didn't like the idea of women getting suffrage but uh, it passed.

Q: Wasn't it the Socialist votes that made it happen?

AH: That's right. Uh, Katharine Anderson who did a very interesting study of this campaign really believed it was the Socialist miners that did it. There were a lot of socialists among the miners. Anne Martin was interested in socialism. She had been a member of the Fabian Club in London. She liked that. They were classy socialist people, upper class people who talked socialism very nicely and uh she was interested in the ideas. Her father was a populist thinker. He had been in the legislature at one time. You know in that progressive period that had begun about that time.

Q: So she and Wingfield were not friends?

AH: No. She actually had the nerve in 1918 when she ran for the Senate to ask if one of the parties would nominate her, and of course they didn't. And in 1920 she tried again. She said, "Well, if the Republicans will nominate me I won't split the Republican vote by running as an independent." And they weren't worried at all. She always ended up third, which wasn't bad for a woman making a run for the kind of office women hadn't run for before.

Q: Was the 1914 election a pivotal election or just a typical one?

AH: I don't think it was anything special. They were so concentrated upon the amendment the women didn't think about anything else. There were some conflicts in '14, '15, '16 about the number of bars in town there were conflicts always about the divorce laws and as you know they got changed and reformed this way and that way and moved around. And they generally tried to form into a force the league of women voters but in Reno there was a civic club, which had existed before suffrage, tried to be a force in the city and the state. One woman was elected to the state legislature but Anne Martin didn't run, she was appointed to some state board as far as I can tell she never served on it. But she turned her eyes to Washington after the amendment was passed. She was very pleased with being in the company of a leader like Alice Paul and being involved in national organizations.

Q: How soon did she leave Nevada?

AH: Oh a couple of months but then she came back. So she had enough time to savor the win and then go triumphantly to Washington and flaunt that she was a good campaigner. The group of women in the women's party were a little different than the others. These were women who had, Alice Paul for example had a Doctorate in German a number of women in that were highly educated women who were forced to go abroad to do the ends of their education because it wasn't possible in this country. They weren't willing to wait. The ladies of women's suffrage association were being very patient and no fancy tactics. But these women had all been associated with the Parkhurst in London almost all the leaders of women's parties and they were very anxious to use some of those tactics at home since congress was slow at responding. And that's where Anne Martin got into trouble in Washington for picketing the White House in 1917.

Q: Why did she do that?

AH: Well they wanted Wilson to respond to their requests. They wanted Wilson to back them up and give them the help through congress. It was a show of publicity and it met with very poor response because in 1917 when this began the nation was in war and it wasn't seen as very patriotic to picket the White House? Not by ladies. But they got arrested and they got sent to prison briefly which was always a big event in Britain to get sent to prison. Anne Martin was never sent to prison, she was always booked and bailed out. But in Washington all the women had gone to prison with all the drama that had gone on across the ocean with the forced feeding and the mistreatment.

Q: In the election of 1918 they never talked about her issues.

AH: Nobody dealt with the questions she raised and she had some interesting ideas that should have appealed to people. But it was her, and having been a militant and they landed on that one very very hard. And they attacked her personally you know, how old is Anne. This wasn't relevant. Women didn't have to tell their age. At this point she was about 43 or 44, she looked her age, she didn't ever try and conceal it. They knew when she had gone to college but they were petty attacks in the press. Almost nobody said anything decent about her. But she sure tried and there were women who backed her.

Q: Apparently she tried to recreate the same strategy that won her the 1914 election but in this election it didn't play.

AH: No and no one took her very seriously, this was very sad. There were women who organized for her but they were afraid she was going to split the vote. She did a credible job but not enough to split the vote. And in the 1920 election there were those who said yes she did cause the election of the opposing party, but just didn't have the right sort of approach. She had wonderful ideas. Trying to improve child and maternal health, they were already talking about great many changes in federal government because they knew by this 1920 campaign that the federal amendment was assured. There were things that women could do and she did a lot of writing and national publications to try and promote things. And she is probably responsible for doing a lot for helping the passage of the Shepard towner act, which was one of the very earliest prenatal maternal care acts passed. Which some believe congress passed because they were really afraid of the women's vote. Actually turned out the women didn't vote. It's like the 18-year-olds that we've all experienced in recent years. Everyone campaigned to get the 18-year-olds the chance to vote and then they didn't bother to do it. A lot of the women didn't but she did remain involved in women's issues for a long time.

Q: Did the "rurals" receiver her campaign well?

AH: No they didn't. She had little crowds. Some crowds were very enthusiastic. She did all the work herself. There's one picture I can still remember of her standing at the top of a hill. And there's the car at the foot of the hill well it isn't able to make it up. With this little figure in a huge sagebrush landscape trying very hard for what she was going to do. But I don't think she understood that just because women had the right to vote didn't mean they were going to vote for her. Women continued to vote the way their husbands did and were told not to take her campaign seriously. The newspapers certainly didn't. They were most unpleasant. In the 1920 campaign she was also saddled with the fact that she came out for amnesty, for conscientious objectors and this was very bad. The American Legion post in Reno came out against her and all the soldiers were, ex-soldier were talking about her lack of patriotism. And she picketed the White House. You know the White House picket. And you know they took the, in the 1918 campaign they kept talking about the only person who could give the President trouble were the women's party candidate and the daughters of the Hun. I mean they came up with jingles that were absolutely unbelievable. Personal attacks and she knew this. She couldn't admit this publicly but she was very much aware of what was going on. I think she had tremendous courage to do it a second time. And to try once more with the hope that now with women voting that they would vote. And of course they would slowly vote.

Q: In 1918 when she comes back she was out of touch with the average woman in Nevada.

AH: Sure she never had known a lot. She had always been in a house where work was done. They always had servants they lived in a glorious house. Down where the holiday is now on the lake that part of town. Gorgeous house, servants, all the attentions anyone could want and I don't think she was too good at connecting with every body else either. But she had ambition and she really wanted to work and she tried hard.

Q: During the first WW was she involved in an anti-war movement?

AH: Well not an official anti-war movement although I think she signed petitions. Jane Addams who you may recall the great social reformer Jane Addams, and a number of other women organized a peace ship that was going to sail to Europe and try to make some affect on the leaders and to perhaps stop the war. And she was involved in that, how deeply? I don't know. Most of the women in the national women's party were Quakers. There were quite a heavy collection of Quaker women there who were not fond of the war. That's why they were able to organize so many women to protest to Wilson in spite of the fact that the war was going on. She later became involved with the women's international league for peace and freedom which by the way still exists. You can find their offices in Berkley just off campus and it was active during the Vietnam War. She go interested in that because of Jane Addams whom she had meet and became in her mind the Sainted Jane Addams and to her if Jane Addams wanted to do it, why she was for it. That was her connection with the peace initiative you might call it now but it wasn't very successful but a great many women did go on that trip.

Q: It is very surprising how quickly America made the switch from not wanting involvement in the war to being super patriots. Anne Martin never made that switch did she?

AH: No, she didn't because of the people she was around at the time. (They) were in general opposed to the war. She recognized that terrible circumstance you know that very first vote in congress I think at least very early was against the war.

Q: So how did Anne change from 1914 to 1918?

AH: Well, I think the problem was she didn't change a lot. She was a person who saw herself as a leader and she needed an army and needed something to lead or an organization. Yet there wasn't anything quite suited to her she was aware all the time she had some powers she had some abilities but she didn't quite know where to place them and that had been the case all of her life. She was a bright student who couldn’t quite choose a career. She had good glorious goals but wasn't very good at making herself liked by people. She didn't change much. In the '20's she was involved in a number of social movements. She was involved a very early member of the civil liberties union. She wrote articles for generally liberal magazines. And she knew a lot that fairly leftesh organization of people in Carmel in that area. Some of whom got in trouble and were listed on the spider web chart, I think she would love to have been on the chart except that she wasn't important enough to be there. Jane Adams was which was one of the early red scares of the '20's but she spent a lot of time campaign.