MAY ARKWRIGHT HUTTON was Spokane’s other feminine crusader. Unlike Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, she did not arrive from the Atlantic coast but from the mining camps of the Coeur d’Alenes, where, in the early eighties, as she liked to relate, she had disembarked from “the hurricane deck of a Cayuse” to woo fortune as a cook. Concerning events prior to her arrival there and her marriage to Levi (far better known as Al) Hutton, locomotive engineer, she had little to say.
She had been born May Arkwright in the coal-mining area of Ohio, and there, as the unrecorded child of an itinerant’ backwoods preacher, she had elbowed her way to belligerent young womanhood. Al Hutton had also spent an unsatisfactory youth, though a perfectly proper one. An orphan, he had been reared on an Iowa farm by a hard-working and not very sympathetic uncle. How the rebellious young woman and the steady young man made connections in the Coeur d’Alenes is a colorful tale.
Though the ceremony that joined them for better or for worse was considerably less spectacular than that of Dutch Jake Goetz, it was distinctly mining camp style. The beaming and more than ample bride took her vows garbed in light blue plush designed princess style by the best dressmaker in Wardner, Idaho. Guests arrived on foot, on horseback, in the cab of a locomotive. Presents flooded in from ex-boarders. There was plenty of fun, and a feast prepared by the prospective bride’s own hands. The only mishap of the evening befell May’s bridesmaid. Without having planned in advance to do so, she had said “Yes” that very day to an urgent suitor, and taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the presence of an honest-to-goodness preacher, she had entered matrimony as the second bride of the evening. At supper, in her excitement, she upset a bowl of oyster soup in her lap. Under the circumstances, the accident was readily understood by the other wedding guests.
After the wedding, the Huttons moved to Wallace, a little further up the Coeur d’Alene River. There, as the wife of a railroad engineer piloting ore trains between Wallace and Burke, through the deep cañon studded with silver mines, the new Mrs. Hutton settled down as a respectable housewife. In May’s career as a mining camp cook only the aura of respectability had been lacking. The men over whose coffee and doughnuts she presided with Irish wit and crude kindliness knew that beneath her sloppy calico lay not only a heart of gold but a basic sense of decency. Wallace was a step upward on the social scale; but such efforts as Al Hutton’s wife made to live up to her new social status were not successful. Her very looks were against her. She was huge, she was homely. She was strident, uncouth, and given to strong language. And the clothes she wore! The kaleidoscopic costumes in which she walked the street of an afternoon and the gowns in which she appeared bare-necked and bosomy at evening affairs shocked the wives and daughters of mine owners, engineers, and superintendents who constituted Wallace’s polite society. From the first, May was “that woman”—not to say “that awful woman!”
Nor was her reputation enhanced by her friendly association with the representatives of “radical” labor. For them the two-room Hutton home on the hillside above the tracks became a rendezvous. It was not alone the juiciness of May’s blueberry pies that won them. Equally it was her wholehearted sympathy for those who considered themselves the slaves of labor cruelly exploited in the Coeur d’Alenes by the barons of wealth.
May had come naturally by her concern for exploited labor. As girlhood guide, companion, and housekeeper for a blind old grandfather interested in all the “isms” of his day, her education after but three years in school had been largely confined to listening with him to the village-square evangelism of every wandering disciple of new economic and political theory that came to their Mahoning County community, and to the subsequent cracker-box discussions at the grocery store. During a short-lived marriage in her youth, she had been plunged into the inequities and growing unrest attendant upon monopolistic control of Ohio coal mining. Her trip to the Coeur d’Alenes had been made in the company of forty Kyles Corners coal miners rebelling against poor wages and bad working conditions. Altogether, May’s had been a background well calculated to breed resentment and militancy not only in the affairs of labor, but in politics and economic and social causes generally.
Quiet Al did not share her extravagant radicalism. But ultimately he, as well as she, was drawn into the Coeur d’Alene labor war of the nineties,{110} he unwittingly, she out of generous and loudly proclaimed sympathy. When one day the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mine was blown up, it was Al Hutton who at gunpoint unwillingly piloted a freight train loaded with dynamite and clamorous miners to Wardner, scene of the explosion. May for her part became the indignant chronicler of the event and of its sequel, in the course of which almost a thousand men, including Al Hutton, were rounded up and thrown into a stockade known to Coeur d’Alene history as “the bull pen.”
May’s book, for her narrative was published as such, caught on like wildfire. A confused jumble of invective, dime novel narrative, wit and oratory, The Coeur d’Alenes, a Tale of the Modern Inquisition in Idaho, sold eight thousand copies; This feat was accomplished largely through the Western Federation of Miners at whose convention the author was presented with appropriate acclaim. The volume is long since a collector’s item; but it remained on the market a sufficient length of time to give the author a reputation hard to live down when later she entered upon life in Spokane.
May Arkwright Hutton was not only a vehement friend of union labor; from girlhood she had been an equally vehement advocate of votes for women. Back in Ohio, budding politician William McKinley had one day placed a patronizing hand on the head of the little girl leading the blind grandfather and expressed the hope that when this lassie grew up she might live an emancipated woman in an enlightened age of equal suffrage. This was the one story of her childhood May told willingly. In fact, she lost no opportunity to repeat it. When, in Idaho, McKinley’s pious hope became reality in 1896, Al Hutton’s wife was jubilant. Now she was an emancipated woman in very truth. The law had made her so.
Like everybody else, the Huttons invested in holes in the mountain sides euphemistically known as “prospects,” convinced that one day the holes would become paying mines. The prospect in which Al and May became most deeply interested was The Hercules, so dubbed from a can of giant powder. The other owners were a grocer and his schoolteacher sister, a barber, a milkman, and several others who held fractional shares. Into this venture of “the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker” was poured for years all the money the group could save, scrape together, or borrow. Into it also went months and years of labor, for they worked the prospect themselves.
Occasionally the round of drudgery was punctuated by a moment of wild excitement when someone struck a likely lead. With his pockets full of ore, down he came to the Hutton cottage on a Saturday evening to spread out his samples on the bed in the front room. There the partners gazed and gloated and May made a flour-marked trail as she dashed in and out from her pie and biscuit-making in the kitchen.
As each new lead was vigorously pursued, the Hercules tunnel grew “crookeder than a cow’s hind leg,” and the partners leaner of purse. Then one day something really happened. It was in 1901. Gus, the big milkman, was gloomily pecking away at the rocky wall when his pick brought down a shower of what appeared to be white ashes but turned out to be the pay streak so long sought. The prospect hole was metamorphosed into a mine.
When assays revealed the vein to be extraordinarily rich, the partners were flooded with offers to buy; but they were canny. They determined to develop The Hercules themselves, even though the way to profitable production was sure to be difficult in a territory that was by this time largely in the hands of absent capitalists and corporations who owned smelters and had what appeared to be a strangle hold on other necessities.
These fears were well founded; sufficiently so to confirm May in her hatred of entrenched wealth. But the grocer, the barber, the milkman, and the others hung on and won out. By 1902 The Hercules began to pay. For the Huttons, a modest first dividend of seven hundred and fifty dollars rose sixteen years later to a peak of over five hundred thousand. They moved from their two-room cabin on the Wallace hillside to a comfortable house on a corner lot in the town itself. May acquired a hired girl, became an avid student of Shakespeare, and papered her “study” with personal notes and critical comments on her book. If guests were expected, the big dining-room table was spread with damask and loaded with silver and cut glass; but when the door-bell rang it was May herself who emerged from the kitchen to answer it, arms floured to the elbow, her expansive person bisected by the strings of a voluminous kitchen apron. She loved a cookstove and what it could be made to produce. Why conceal the fact?
After dinner, May watched or occasionally joined in a shell game on a corner of the dining-room table, that being ĄPs idea of a pleasant evening at home. Outside the four walls of home, lodge doors were those most invitingly open. When Elks or Masons put on a dance, the Huttons were pretty sure to be on hand, Al in a modest business suit, his spouse resplendent in the latest mode as interpreted in ruffles and flounces and dandelion tones. As Lady Bountiful, May was also a regular attendant at church fairs and charity bazaars. There, as elsewhere, her raiment was regularly the occasion for lifted eyebrows and many a whispered “My dear, did you notice!” on the part of the good ladies who endured rather than rejoiced in her presence.
May was far too astute not to be aware of her status in the town of Wallace, but it worried her not a whit. Why waste time on afternoon whist and tea when all about lay a world of social injustice and political chicanery crying for reform? She preferred to spend her time reading, attending national equal suffrage and labor conventions and local political rallies. Or she entertained in her own home any crusader who would come—men like Clarence Darrow and William E. Borah, women like Carrie Chapman Catt touring the Northwest in the interest of suffrage.
A poetess was also fair prey for Hutton hospitality. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose Poems of Passion occupied an exalted position in May’s esteem, was once captured for a reception and tea appropriately brought to the attention of the local press. Mrs. Wilcox’s verses, and those of many another popular bard, snuggled cozily in May’s voluminous scrapbooks among excerpts from the radical labor press, suffrage news, and May’s own frequent ventures into rime. For the Elks in convention assembled in Wallace she had written:
At eve the antlered elk came down
From each surrounding hill,
And from the purling mountain streams
Each one would drink his fill.
And though the forest now is dead
And muddied each pure rill,
The Elk of this, our latter day,
Still often drink their fill!
And this was her appeal to the Attorney General of the United States, delivered by the beaming author herself at a big labor convention:
Chief expounder of legal lore,
We ask you our cause to advocate.
Lawmakers and others of the law
Do not our intricate worth forget.
Equip our industry as others are named
With an officer in the Cabinet.
Al Hutton’s wife also ran for public office. “You know,” was her ingratiating approach to county delegates of her acquaintance, “that being a woman I don’t stand the ghost of a show in the Democratic county convention to get the nomination for state legislator, but do give me your vote on the first ballot—just to let folks know a woman counts for something politically in Shoshone County. Afterwards switch to anybody you please.”
Obliging delegates did as requested, and considerably to their own astonishment found that May had won the nomination. Not only that. In the ensuing campaign she was all but elected. How? The would-be state Congresswoman was laconic: “Just like any man. I gave away cigars—and hustled.”
Such was the woman who arrived in Spokane in 1907, leaving with open regret the enlightened state of Idaho where women could vote, but consoled by the thought of what she might accomplish for the emancipation of Washington women.
While Al supervised the erection of the Hutton Block on a business corner, his wife hurried East to visit with the D arrow family in Chicago and to buy the “luxuriant” appointments for the top floor “apartments” where she and Al were to live. Apartments were something new in Spokane, and on her return May made the most of the fact when talking to reporters, who from the start found her excellent copy and took pains to quote her verbatim. Al, she added, would have equally “luxuriant” quarters in the Hutton Block: expensively furnished offices in which he would preside over their investments in Spokane real estate and participate in the management of The Hercules mine.
“Don’t make a holy show of yourself,” was Al’s good-natured advice to his devoted but in every way superabundant life partner. Nevertheless, in no time at all May Arkwright Hutton was a town character. No amount of hard work had ever diminished the amount of flesh she carried on her great frame, nor did she care to diminish it by plain living. Courting gentility through restraint in costume never entered her head. Daily, with a chauffeur at the wheel, she rode forth to market or on errands of mercy or social battle in a scarlet Thomas Flyer as noticeable as a fire wagon. As she sat gaudily caparisoned in a tiger-striped coat and yellow satin shirtwaist, with tidal waves of ostrich plumes billowing from hat to shoulder, she was pointed out to newcomers with a relish rivaling that accorded the foaming falls—at least by the male population. With the ladies it was different. Anxiously striving to divest the city of its mining camp aroma, they definitely frowned upon such crudeness as a blot on community culture.
Their gibes had small effect on May. Mostly, she ignored them; but she could strike back if occasion demanded. One such occasion arose at a reception in the Hutton apartments for one of the causes in which May had immediately interested herself. “Oh, my dear,” gurgled a socially aspiring acquaintance of mining camp days, “do you remember how once you used to do our washing for us?” “Sure,” retorted her hostess, “and that you never paid the bill.”
May was for the underdog. Her interest in the girls who found their way into the recently established Crittenton Home for unwed mothers soon landed her on the governing board. There her methods were at times as upsetting to the other ladies of the Board as they were unique and practical. So the girls in the Home needed husbands! Well, then, she would find husbands. Roundabout there must be plenty of dependable men, preferably lonely ranchers, who would be glad to marry girls whose only crime was that they had made a youthful mistake—and to take the baby along with the bride. When a carefully supervised courtship in which May acted as matrimonial agent brought desired results, she provided trousseau, clergyman, and a proper wedding in the Hutton apartments.
The Crittenton Home was but one of May Arkwright Hutton’s charitable interests. She was soon concerned with the Children’s Home to which both she and Al contributed generously. She helped lift the mortgage on the Spokane Women’s Club Cottage—and got the reputation of being a tactless member with a propensity for stirring up trouble. Her name topped the list for the Afro-American Women’s Charity Home. She invested in a shoestore—and the wags reported she bought and gave away enough shoes to keep the store in business. Thanksgiving and turkey dinners cooked by May herself went out from the Hutton kitchen to a long list of needy families. Human derelicts of any description unfailingly got a hearing, and frequently a handout. Stranded chorus girls and indigent vaudeville performers found their way as unerringly to the Hutton Block as needy miners did to Dutch Jake’s basement. In many respects the owner of the gambling resort and the mistress of the Hutton Block stood on common ground. Both heartily subscribed to the sentiments expressed in a sign decorating the bar of Jimmie Durkin, gentleman saloonkeeper:
If children need shoes
Don’t buy booze.
Jimmie, it may be recorded in passing, once offered to let the pastor of a local church decorate the saloon windows with whatever signs he wished. The minister had told his congregation he would like to do just that, and Jimmie’s reply had been, “Go ahead. I’ll foot the bill.” When the curtains went up on a phalanx of signs and decorative extras decrying the business carried on within, it was to a packed crowd. For the three weeks during which the display remained in place, Jimmie did an excellent business, and when a reporter called up the somewhat outmaneuvered clergyman, the latter retreated with good grace: “Jimmie Durkin,” said he, “is a man of his word.” Highly pleased, Jimmie immortalized the preacher’s retort by having it spelled out on the tiled floor of the entrance to his place of business. Later it was carved on the tombstone Jimmie prepared in advance for his interment in Greenwood cemetery.
But to return to the mistress of the Hutton Block. Her happiest recreation was theatre-going. She loved the theatre in its every aspect. Road show, vaudeville, grand opera, or Shakespeare—whatever came along, May Arkwright Hutton was there to enjoy it, sitting in the most expensive box and dressed in her finest if the affair happened to be in the Auditorium Theatre. That box drew all eyes. Once, according to rumor, David Warfield, starring in The Music Master, almost missed his lines when, glancing upward at a tragic moment, he caught sight of the mountainous lady in baby blue gown, black lace mantilla, and remarkable pink and blue plumed headgear, who hung over the box rail sobbing audibly.
Upon Henrietta Crosman’s arrival as a star straight from Broadway, Al Hutton’s wife was in her element. Miss Crosman was known to be a suffragist, and May, by that time president of the local equal suffrage association, entertained with a box party and a reception for three hundred guests. At the theatre, the Hutton box and two others bore decorations including a more than life-size portrait of another famous suffrage leader, a banner exhorting “Votes for Women,” and a yellow transparency that glowed with a similar appeal when the house lights were turned off.
“My first hobby is the suffrage question,” had been May’s immediate announcement upon arriving in Spokane. Before coming, she had followed with a keen sense of outrage the later vicissitudes of the movement in the state of Washington so distressfully long drawn out.{111} Beginning in the 1850’s, and intermittently thereafter, bills permitting women to vote on any and all questions had been presented in the territorial legislature. Some had become law, only to be rescinded by court decisions. Thus, in 1881, the right of suffrage extended to the women was enjoyed by them during several elections before the law was declared unconstitutional as exceeding the powers of the territorial legislature. Later, in connection with the adoption of the state constitution, a suffrage proposition was defeated by popular vote. A similar amendment was voted down in 1898. Meantime, national leaders like Susan B. Anthony and live-wire Oregon editor and suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway had periodically toured the state or appeared before the legislature. May had met and traveled with them and at the conventions she made a point of attending had eagerly absorbed campaign techniques and platform methods. Once in Idaho she had been among those accompanying Mrs. Duniway on a pilgrimage to the Idaho state capitol when suffrage was an issue there. Aflame with enthusiasm, she determined to become a leader herself, translating their methods into her own idiom.
In Spokane the opportunity soon came. The best-organized state movement yet was under way. It was guided by Emma Smith DeVoe, paid national organizer from Illinois, who also acted in the capacity of president of a rejuvenated Washington Equal Suffrage Association with headquarters in Seattle. May saw herself heading up the campaign east of the mountains.
She had known Mrs. DeVoe in Idaho, and at first supported her in Washington with tongue, pen, and cash. But presently the traditional East-West rivalry awoke. Even more effective in causing trouble were the violently opposed personalities of the two women. Like most of the campaign leaders both national and state, Mrs. Devoe was cultured, well-educated, and committed to a program of education, dignified persuasion, and well-organized pressure on the state legislature looking toward submission to the voters of a constitutional amendment. To this program May gave willing lip service; but her suggestions for carrying it out tended to meet with a polite but frigid reception in Seattle. Also her well-meant initial activities. Her proposals were put down as stunts; they shrieked personal publicity.
For a time May ignored the snubs, continued her financial support of the state organization, and joined with its leaders in maintaining a suffrage lobby with headquarters in an Olympia mansion. This adventure she enjoyed to the full. It was something to write home about, and there was nothing May loved better than to write. The lobby, she reported to the Spokane press, mixed sweet reasonableness and feminine appeal with the cleverest of legislative tactics. The ladies attended the combined inaugural ball and housewarming at the Governor’s mansion en masse, but
Out from the secret recesses of Saratogas and suit cases we brought forth our finest apparel and brightest jewels to bedeck our most charming member for the conquest of the...chairman [of the legislative committee responsible for reporting out the proposed constitutional amendment].
The attack on this important gentleman was most successful for.
Ere the hour for the guests to depart from this long to be remembered occasion, the gentleman acknowledged that he believed he had been mistaken, and if the ladies really wanted to vote, he was willing they should.
His conversion was complete: “When the committee met, he reversed his [original] decision, signed the majority report, talked for the bill on the floor of the House, and voted for it.”
Passage of the bill by the House was responsible, wrote May, for great elation on the pan of some members of the lobby, “but the old warhorses knew bills had been passed before...by one branch of the legislature only to be killed by another.”
So the lobby went to work again, indignantly refused subtle attempts to buy them off, and emerged triumphant. Submission of the amendment to the electorate was approved by the Legislature, and the ladies returned triumphantly to kitchens and parlors to continue the fight from the home base.
At once, West-Side cohorts, headed by Mrs. DeVoe, began planning the dignified campaign previously agreed upon: platform appearances by the state chairman and others chosen by the executive committee, distribution of suffrage literature, personal appeals by interested women to husbands, sweethearts, and male voters generally. It had often been said that Washington women did not want the vote. The state suffrage association believed it could prove the contrary.
Mrs. DeVoe was appointed manager of the state-wide campaign. May had no hand in the arrangements. Not unnaturally, she was furious. So that was it: “foreigners” and coast women were to be the “whole thing.” Mrs. DeVoe was a foreigner, since she hailed from the Middle West and represented the ideas of the national organization with headquarters far removed from the Far West. Eastern Washington women had been deliberately shut out, not only from the campaign but also from the leadership coveted by May. It was rank injustice.
In June, 1909, the year of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, the Washington Equal Suffrage Association was to meet in that city just ahead of the National Woman Suffrage Association. May’s strategy was soon in working order. It was simple. Get enough new members to outvote the West Side; have the Suffrage Special bearing national officers from the East and an entourage of beribboned delegates stop over in Spokane; entertain them to the limit.
“Prize trip to the Exposition!” announced posters liberally sprinkled throughout Spokane. “To be given to the first young lady or young man who secures 50 members for the Spokane Equal Suffrage Association. Contest ends June 10. Cards for solicitation at 319 Hutton Block.”
The local branch of the state association with May as president grew by leaps and bounds; but May saw to it that dues to the state organization were prudently withheld until just before the Seattle meeting. She was taking no risk of pre-convention objection to her methods with possible blackballing of the Spokane delegates as a result.
The reception accorded the Suffrage Special when it arrived in Spokane was impressive. The Chamber of Commerce, of which Al was a member, contributed five hundred dollars for the affair. Automobiles, far less commonplace than now, bore the visitors about the city. They were given the privileges of the best club, were banqueted in the Hall of the Doges in the recently erected and already famous Davenport Hotel. They appeared at an evening mass meeting. At the banquet, the Mayor presented Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, national president, with a gavel contrived of wood from three suffrage states and bound with Idaho silver. “When you call the convention to order with it,” he declaimed, “may it be like the shot heard round the world.”
According to schedule, the state suffrage convention convened in Seattle just ahead of the national. And there was May Arkwright Hutton heading a Spokane delegation of fifty! Not only that; she reported a paid-up Spokane membership of four hundred.
The convention refused to seat the Spokane delegates. When, led by Mrs. Hutton and David C. Coates, Spokane publisher and labor leader, the rejected delegation demanded the reason, the Chairman of the credentials committee obliged. The methods used in Spokane to secure members had been so reprehensible, she reported, that the dues withheld until two days before the convention had been rejected. Padding was suspected. “Go home and clean house,” was the gist of her advice. “Then come back next year and there will be seats for you.”
Pandemonium ensued. While Mrs. DeVoe alternately wielded her gavel and wrung her hands in despair, someone telephoned the police. Two responded; but according to one newspaper, “After contemplating the expanse of moving millinery and hearing the Babylon of voices...[they] retired, content to attend to the business of maintaining order on the streets.” The “guest” status finally thrown as a sop to the fifty delegates from Spokane was scornfully rejected. They marched across the street to a hall hired by their feminine leader and there Organized a rump convention with May in the chair.
When the National American Woman Suffrage Association convened a day or two later, both factions demanded seats. In this dilemma the Association pronounced what an interested press reported as a “Solomon’s judgment.” They seated both groups but allowed neither to vote.
The convention at an end, May called in the reporters to announce that “My name hasn’t spelled defeat yet,” and went home to organize an independent Washington Political Equality League with headquarters in the Hutton Block and herself as president. In that capacity she entertained at dinner the following day two hundred members of the Chamber of Commerce and, to a toast to “The men,” responded with a hearty “God bless ‘em!” The press reported that she wore a pale blue gown with dainty draperies.
The story of the suffrage campaign put on in eastern Washington by the new League is largely a tale of May Arkwright Hutton’s exploits. At once, she employed in the name of the League a Denver newspaper woman to help with publicity. Though she would probably not have admitted it, May sometimes felt the need of a ghost writer. In the present instance, Minnie J. Reynolds, the lady of her choice, was an outsider of course, but not a real foreigner like Mrs. DeVoe, since she came from Colorado, a Western state and one already within the suffrage fold. “Mrs. Hutton says” was pleasantly flattering in print, but May had a growing awareness of the merriment concealed behind the poker faces of reporters wont faithfully to record her verbal lapses. No fool, she was also increasingly aware that her hodgepodge tale of the Coeur d’Alene labor war was anything but a literary asset. In fact, she was soon to be industriously engaged in buying up copies to get it off the market.
From the moment of the new publicist’s arrival, local editors were bombarded with suffrage news and contributed articles. Had Jim Hill of railway fame opened his mouth to say that modern women would do well to emulate their grandmothers who saved thirty dollars per month by doing without telephones and going personally to market? Possibly Jim held stock in street railways instead of telephones. Did the papers report that Boston women had no desire to vote? That was like them. When visiting the East, May herself had noticed that the ladies of the Bay City did not know there were other places on earth where women were equally cultured even though holding contrary opinions.
Miss Reynolds did her best, but the President of the League continued to wander into print on her own. A Seattle clergyman given to sensational methods must have been suffering, she wrote, from an attack of “noter-itis” when he asserted that feminine adherents of suffrage were afflicted with “male-itis.” The fashionable “tube skirt” and “risky gown foisted upon the gentler sex by mere man” should be boycotted, declared May. “Women should refuse to buy the audacious, venturesome, undress contraptions which prevent...taking a forward stride literally and figuratively.”
The President of the Washington Political Equality League found other avenues of publicity. In a local celebration she rode through the streets on a float, personating “Woman” and companioned by two denizens of the zoo, one in chains, the other obviously lacking in mental equipment. “Criminals and idiots can’t vote, and neither can women,” was the gist of the legend emblazoned on the float.
She wrote a campaign song:
Put on your new auto bonnet,
With the rhododendrons on it,{112}
While I crank up Chalmers for the fray,
And we’ll spin the country over
In the big red Rover,
Hustling votes for election day.
Spin the country over the President of the League and her chosen companions did. Stopping at schools, churches, grange halls, or wherever opportunity offered, they sang and made speeches. May appeared in person at the annual convention of the State Federation of Labor, where she did a good job of lining up the labor vote. Having helped bake eighty cherry pies for the Grand Army of the Republic Encampment—May was an artist with pies—she made a stump speech to the effect that the men in blue were surely too chivalrous to refuse the modest request of the ladies to visit the polls.
Her most brilliant scheme centered in the public schools. She had previously given prizes for the best essays on suffrage, but the new idea went much further. On Arbor Day next, school grounds all over the United States would burgeon with Susan B. Anthony oaks bearing the legend “Defeat Is Impossible!” In each instance there would be an appropriate ceremony, with school children singing the national suffrage anthem as the tree was set out. Spokane would put on the first show. This would be elaborately written up and photographed for the coming National American Woman Suffrage convention in Washington, D.C. There the display would set off a country-wide chain reaction and provide Spokane with ever-welcome publicity.
May unfolded her plan to the principal of the new north side high school. The principal took it to the Board of Education. The Board was unimpressed; they dodged the issue by postponing action. But May was far too persistent to be balked by delay and polite excuses. As usual when temporarily thwarted, she betook herself to the local press, whose reporters seized upon the affair with alacrity and wrote it up tongue-in-cheek. The town laughed, the Board continued to stall, and May was obliged to depart for the nation’s capital with the issue still unsettled, though by no means dropped. A local League committee kept up the pressure. Time, however, was of the essence. The first Susan B. Anthony oak, ordered well in advance, lay waiting. Something had to be done in a hurry if the planting ceremony was to take place on Arbor Day as scheduled and publicized through the national gathering toward which the Political League president was speeding.) When the Board of Education remained obdurate, the Committee turned to Spokane College. There the oak was set out only one day behind schedule, a monument to its placard, “Defeat Is Impossible!”
In the fall of 1910, the Washington state equal suffrage amendment was passed by a handsome majority. Many organizations besides May Arkwright Hutton’s League were responsible: the Washington Equal Suffrage Association, College Women’s Suffrage Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the churches had all contributed generously. The campaign over, some of these organizations went out of business. But not the Washington Political Equality League with headquarters in the Hutton Block. Transformed into a Non-Partisan League with May Arkwright Hutton still at the head, it began at once to look for and find new worlds to conquer.