Ever Victoria!
Part 27, the last
Victoria goes quiet, too. A financial panic in 1873 has spawned America’s first depression of the industrial age; erstwhile sons of the soil—and some daughters—who are still adjusting to working in factories suddenly have to adjust to not working in factories. By the hundreds of thousands they huddle in cities hoping to be recalled to the jobs that have just disappeared; by the tens of thousands they roam the country seeking jobs that have never existed. Those toilers fortunate enough to retain their positions experience the slow wrenching of wage cuts; the better organized—in nascent trade unions—go out on strike. Their bosses respond by engaging strike-breakers and private security forces; pitched battles and sporadic arson ensue. An 1877 railroad strike paralyzes transport throughout the country, spreading the suffering to millions as yet untouched by the depression.
Meanwhile Reconstruction staggers to an inglorious end. The presidential election of 1876 hangs on contested counts in three Southern states; for months Republicans and Democrats angle to skew the counting their way. Not till hours before the scheduled inauguration do the two sides cut a deal: Republican Rutherford Hayes will get the presidency while the Democrats will get the South. After fifteen years of fighting for the liberties and rights of the slaves and freedmen, the Republicans throw Southern blacks upon the mercies, such few as they are, of their former masters.
Amid the discouragement of the depression and the disillusionment of Reconstruction’s end, the flame of hope and altruism that has inspired reform in America for two generations flickers and nearly dies. Moral exhaustion sweeps the country. Temperance advocates still preach against booze, but America mutters in its beer against them. Suffragists still hold conventions, but their goal recedes ever farther into the future, until its arrival appears likely to occur about the time of the Second Coming. Even the spiritualists, those diehards of faith in things unseen, fall on hard times. They bicker among themselves and boycott one another’s lectures and meetings.
Their quarrels deprive Victoria of the last of her audiences, and she quietly severs her ties to the spiritualist movement. The depression has hit all the newspapers, but it punishes the small ones especially; the Weekly appears only when Victoria can find the money to pay the printers. Faltering health—partly caused, no doubt, by the nervous strain of extended hostile scrutiny—compels her to withdraw recurrently from the public sphere.
The death of Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1877 encourages a further withdrawal. The reading of Vanderbilt’s will rivets New York and much of the rest of the nation. Long acknowledged to be the richest man in America, Vanderbilt proves—at $100 million—to be even richer than most people imagined. The disposition of his estate evokes another surprise. For decades the Commodore has derided the intelligence and abilities of his eldest son, William, causing the other children to expect an equal, or larger, share of their father’s fortune. But in his final moments Cornelius can’t bring himself to divide the pile he has labored so long to accumulate, and he gives William almost the whole thing.
The other children are outraged. They believe their father lost his mind, or at least his sense of proportion, in his final years. They sue to break the will. Among their arguments is that Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin seduced the Commodore with spiritualist blatherings, besides whatever else they seduced him with.
Victoria by now is ready to disappear from the public arena entirely. She drops a hint in the Weekly that the Vanderbilt children don’t know the half of what their father was up to. “It would make a splendid sensational article if we gave the reasons why Commodore Vanderbilt took such an interest in a paper that expressed the most radical of radical views,” she says. She drops the hint harder by telling William Vanderbilt how surprised she is that his father, who in life took such an avid interest in spiritualism, should in death have forgotten his favorite spiritualists. William, not wishing to hear anything more from Victoria in print or in court, sends her and Tennie on a European tour with enough money—reportedly one hundred thousand dollars—to stay a long time.
Henry Beecher is happy to see her go. His Plymouth Church remains as crowded as ever, with the few members who have resigned over the scandal being replaced by newcomers attracted by all the attention. Beecher’s lectures are even more popular than before; the whiff of sin—of sex—imparts a new appeal to the veteran performer. An eight-week lecture tour in 1877 draws seventy thousand people and nets Beecher forty thousand dollars. Victoria’s departure completes his triumph. “The old scandal is hardly thought of,” he writes a friend.
He builds himself a mansion in Peekskill and lives like a country gentleman. Political candidates seek his endorsement. When Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884 is rumored to have fathered a child out of wedlock, Beecher bucks him up by reminding audiences that others have faced similar charges of impropriety. “Because I know the bitterness of venomous lies, I will stand against infamous lies that seek to sting to death an upright man,” Beecher says. “Men counsel me to prudence lest I stir again my own griefs. No! I will not be prudent. If I refuse to interpose a shield of well-placed confidence between Grover Cleveland and the swarm of liars that nuzzle in the mud, or sling arrows from ambush, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and my right hand forget its cunning.” When the stories about Cleveland turn out to be true, Beecher finds himself in an awkward position. Did he know they were true? Was he covertly confessing his own transgression? But then Cleveland goes on to victory and all is forgotten again.
Beecher travels to England for another lecture tour. He attends the London theater and is invited backstage. “I clasp hands with my fellow-actors as often as I can,” he says.
He appears happy and healthy until the late winter of 1887, when he suffers a stroke. He goes to bed but gets worse, and six days later dies. Plymouth Church holds a public funeral, to which tens of thousands come. Brooklyn declares a day of mourning.
Catharine Beecher isn’t there to mourn her brother, having died several years before. Isabella Beecher Hooker is alive but absent; Henry’s widow, still angry over Isabella’s friendship with Victoria Woodhull, won’t let her come. Harriet Beecher Stowe is slipping into dementia that erases both Victoria and the scandal she set in motion.
For Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony, forgetting Victoria is a conscious choice. The veteran suffragists collaborate on a multi-volume history of the women’s movement, from which the efforts of Victoria Woodhull are almost entirely expunged. Victoria receives credit for her memorial to Congress, but the memorial is reprinted without comment, and Victoria’s other accomplishments—and their endorsements by Stanton and Anthony—are consigned to oblivion.
Yet Victoria has the revenge of longevity. Of the main Gilded Age advocates of equality for women, only Victoria lives long enough to win the right to vote. While Stanton and Anthony are breathing their last, in the first decade of the twentieth century, a fresh wave of reform takes shape in American politics. The new reformers call themselves “progressives,” and they are less moralistic and more pragmatic than their grandmothers and grandfathers. They seek social justice, business regulation, consumer protection, honest government; in general terms they aim to repair the damage and redress the insults industrial capitalism has inflicted on American democracy.
The progressives pursue woman suffrage, but with a different mindset than the suffragists of the previous century. For the progressives, the vote for women is less a matter of equality than of efficiency, less of natural right than of political usefulness. The franchise for women is a means as much as an end, for the progressives think women will vote progressively. The prohibitionist wing of the progressive movement—the more-demanding heirs of the temperance movement—believe women will support prohibition. Advocates of immigration reform consider women probable allies in the effort to stem the flood from abroad. The new generation of suffragists mend the rift that split the movement after the Civil War; the National Association and the American Association are remarried as the National American Association. The new suffragists take a page from Victoria Woodhull’s book and petition Congress for action. The House and the Senate eventually yield, forwarding a suffrage amendment to the states, which ratify it in time for the 1920 elections.
But Victoria, confounding expectations till the end, neglects to exercise her newly acknowledged right. Awakened on her English tour to the possibility of starting afresh on foreign soil, she divorces James Blood—on grounds, ironically, of adultery—and takes up with John Martin, a wealthy British banker who falls madly in love with her. They marry, and Martin supports her lavishly until his death, which enables her to support herself even more lavishly. A handsome estate on the Avon completes her reinvention as a British matron of means, with neither opportunity nor reason to vote in American elections.
Yet her past is not quite forgotten. Upon her death in 1927, she bequeaths her fortune to her daughter, but her will directs that such sums as remain upon her daughter’s death shall be given to the Society for Psychical Research.