PROPONENTS of equal suffrage had frequently argued that the entrance of women into politics would have a salutary effect. For a time, at least, the political history of Washington appears to have borne out this argument. A recent historian has noted that the state legislature of 1911, the first to convene after women became voters, was the best in the state’s history.{113} To what extent feminine influence and votes were responsible for the simultaneous renovation of Spokane city government it would be hard to determine. But at any rate, once the city had turned over a new leaf, women undeniably wrote upon it.
In 1911, Spokane began operating under a non-partisan commission. That form of government had originated in Galveston after the great flood. There, a commission functioning as a disaster relief agency had done so outstandingly well that the citizens decided to abandon party government in favor of the new plan. Two or three other cities had followed suit, and late in 1909 Spokane’s mayor had appointed a citizens’ committee to frame proposals for a new type of city government embodying the commission idea. Public opinion was behind him, and the efforts of a frightened city council to prevent the drafting of a new charter by a committee of freeholders elected by the voters came to naught. So did efforts to prevent adoption of the charter. Good government was at last seen to be as important as broad streets, fine homes, railroads, and a growing reputation as a center of hydroelectric development.
Five commissioners from the field of fifty-two whose names appeared on a preferential ballot were elected simultaneously with the adoption of the charter. Among the commissioners were a preacher and a labor leader, David C. Coates, who had seconded May Arkwright Hutton’s efforts at east side recognition in the Seattle equal suffrage convention. The preacher was the florid, two-fisted man of the cloth nominated by Dutch Jake Goetz to preach his funeral sermon, the Reverend W. J. Hindley.
When the commissioners met to organize as a sort of board of directors, Hindley was chosen chairman and commissioner in charge of the Department of Public Affairs. As chairman, he also functioned as mayor, a circumstance which, combined with his ministerial background, afforded him more publicity than might otherwise have been the case. It also made him an easy target for criticism. However, the seven-year pastor of Pilgrim Congregational Church had been in the habit of dealing frankly in the pulpit with explosive issues. Leaving the pulpit for the city hall was but changing from one fighting stage to another.
The city suddenly found itself in a new kind of limelight. It was no longer “Barbarous Spokane.” National publications discovered good copy in the varied experiments it was trying out all at once: commission government, the preferential ballot adopted from Australia, the oath of non-partisanship required of candidates for the commissionership, and a number of others. The American City headlined the municipal laboratory where everything was tested from pills to paving materials to make sure there was no finagling with the public health or the public pocketbook. Editorial articles and newspaper comment called attention to The Official Gazette issued weekly from the city hall, a publication through whose statistics-filled pages any citizen could, if he would, keep tab on city projects and business transactions. It was also noted that positions in the city hall other than that of commissioner were under civil service, and that for jobs in private enterprises there had been inaugurated by Commissioner Coates a free employment bureau, the need for which had been pointed up by the earlier I.W.W. free-speech campaign.
Public improvements forged ahead. Outstanding among them was a magnificent concrete bridge spanning the river at Monroe Street, just below the falls. There had been Monroe Street bridges before—two of them. The first was a swayback affair of wood and the second none too substantial. Now the job was to be done right—by the Department of Public Works instead of by a contractor, and constructed after the design of the former city engineer. Said to be the biggest concrete span then in existence, the bridge was successfully completed and made engineering headlines. The figures were, and are, impressive: a center arch two hundred and eighty-one feet in length rising a hundred and thirty-five feet from water to floor at normal flow; a total concrete bridge length of seven hundred and eighty feet supplemented by generous approaches. A still beautiful bridge, broad and well lighted, its loveliness is marred only by the steel railway trestle cutting the sky above it at a sharp angle. What with the towering arches of another concrete bridge spanning the deep ravine of Hangman Creek, and less spectacular but highly utilitarian structures for rail and vehicular traffic, Spokane was not long in earning for itself a proud place among “the bridge cities of the world”; so reported the Spokesman-Review.
Another milestone in municipal history was the inauguration of a Park Board. There were already a number of parks, for the most part privately donated and not very well managed. The time had come for better things, and with a board whose members served for ten-year terms those better things began to happen. Thanks to businesslike management and far seeing policies removed from politics, hundreds of wooded acres on sightly eminences, in rock-bolstered ravines and along the lower river gorge, together with playground and other recreational areas, were over the years to put the wide outdoors within easy reach of every family in Spokane.
The new municipal broom swept clean. In two years The Literary Digest reported a “contractors’ ring” broken, with forty percent saving in the cost of public improvements; a reduced tax levy; forty saloons forced out of business; vice driven to cover. Mayor Hindley, it continued, could boast that “Not a street or an alley [remains] in the city where a ten-year-old girl [can] see anything, other than perhaps a drunken man, that will...cause a blush.”{114}
As Commissioner of Public Welfare, Mayor Hindley was not content to do a job of civic housecleaning and let it go at that. Social service institutions publicly managed or looking to the city for financial aid required investigation and, in some cases, supervision and advice; he would appoint a City Charities Commission to take over the job.
It was inevitable that the mayor, looking about in search of suitable personnel for such a commission, should light upon May Arkwright Hutton. Who, to a greater degree than she, combined good horse sense with a warm heart? At Mayor Hindley’s request she became a member of the Commission. At election time her doubts had been considerable about the efficiency of a preacher as a man of affairs. If she had voted for him at all on the long preferential ballot, it had undoubtedly been as second or third choice and with tongue in cheek. Coates had been her favorite candidate. She was openly disappointed that though elected as a city commissioner he had not been offered by his fellow-commissioners the chair of honor as mayor; but you couldn’t have everything your own way in public affairs. She would serve under any mayor if the job offered an opportunity for social service.
From the outset, the Charities Commission was under fire—from institutions whose management was unbusinesslike or whose toes were soon stepped on in one way or another; from the good people of church and lodge and club who couldn’t see why their pet charities should be screened; from city or county officials under pressure from friends or doubtful social agencies. To such criticisms, the new Charity Commission’s answer was, “Get the facts,” and at that May proved as competent as a well-trained detective, though not as subtle. Her methods emphasized surprise. If the Women’s Club Day Nursery or the Salvation Army lodging house or the county poor farm was up for consideration, she listened to the opinions of the many. Then, a committee of one, not infrequently self-appointed, she set forth. Unannounced, she knocked at the door of the institution that was asking funds from the city. Once within, she blew through the place like a whirlwind. She beat down excuses, flung open closed doors, raised a tremendous dust. Like her housekeeping in boardinghouse days, there was no puttering about with gloves and a soft mop. Rather, a straightaway attack with suds and a broom. She huffed and she puffed. But her firsthand report to the Charities Commission, and like enough to the press, was apt to be conclusive.
The Women’s Club Day Nursery was a case in point, May was a member of the Club and a liberal contributor. But why let sentiment stand in the way of common sense? Look what the parents of a lot of those children were earning! Why, asked May, encourage them to “pull the city’s leg?” Let them shoulder their own responsibilities as they should.
There was also the matter of a matron for the city jail. When the Women’s Club battled with the commissioners to force such an appointment, May joined the fight and the Labor Council backed her up. First, however, she set her foot down hard on an offer from certain society women to officiate as matrons a week at a time on a rotating schedule. What did they know about dealing with wayward women and girls? They would be worse than useless, and they would be depriving a competent woman of a job. The city didn’t need volunteers. Spokane City Commissioners could find the funds to pay the salary of a qualified matron if they wanted to.
The funds were found. May had a way of making it very uncomfortable for officials who stalled on what she had decided was desirable action.
The boundaries of institutional care and welfare work in city and county often overlapped. Whether or not the Board of County Commissioners voluntarily invited May Arkwright Hutton to meet with them to discuss a new building at the county poor farm, she was present at the discussion. First, however, she organized a pilgrimage to the farm, taking pains to include among the pilgrims a representative of the local Democratic Club, of which she was an enthusiastic member, and other influential citizens, taxpayers, and representatives of the press.
“The minute that woman set out for the poor farm,” exploded one of the County Commissioners, “I knew it meant trouble.”
He was right. The guardians of the county purse were forced to provide funds for the new building. Not, however, before the irate Commissioner received through the press a retort as tart as May’s famous cherry pies:
You might tell the Commissioner that he can spend to better advantage the time for which the taxpayers fork over to him $8.50 per day than in watching to see me leave town—or encouraging the petticoat contingent in his office to watch for him!
Periodically, May engaged in a battle royal with the mayor, whose appointee she was. Both enjoyed a good fight and no tears were shed. Grinned the mayor when his militant Charity Commissioner’s first term was up: “There is no love lost between us. I have had my share of public roasting. But I’d have to look a long time to find a more useful person for the job. I’m inviting her to stay.”
Stay May Arkwright Hutton did, to go on joyfully breaking a lance for the public good as she saw it. Meantime, she never lost sight of political affairs. As a voter, how could she? All her life she had been a Democrat. During the early Free Silver campaign under Bryan she had deserted the Democratic regulars. In later years the progressivism of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt might have wooed, if not actually won her, had not an unfortunate remark attributed to the doughty Colonel been given wide publicity before he found out how politically important women had become in the Far West. Only twice should a lady’s name appear in public, he had said; when she married and when she died. That was enough for May. From that time on Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party were anathema. William Jennings Bryan was the only true Progressive. She was for him, first, last, and always.
In the Inland Empire, politics during the Presidential campaign of 1912 ran true to form in so far as “Divided We Stand” expressed the prevailing situation. Progressivism had split both leading parties, and the East Side-West Side fight was as always an important feature.
Since the adoption of the suffrage amendment, the president of the Spokane Non-Partisan League had made it her business to keep careful tab on the activities and reactions of state legislators and state officials in connection with pending legislation or the enforcement of laws already on the statute books. She visited Olympia while the legislature was in session, and state institutions whenever she felt like it—but particularly if their administration was under fire. To old-line Democratic politicians and ward heelers she was a thorn in the flesh. They disliked her heartily, but the feminine vote could not be ignored. Egged on by her, the ladies of the Non-Partisan League had invaded the county convention and the primaries to spill the political beans all over the place. There was Mrs. Kuns. When in the convention she observed some of the male delegates stuffing the ballot box, she had no more sense than to speak up and tell the world what was going on. Mrs. Hutton, announcing her personal candidacy for representative to the state legislature, said pointedly that if elected she would pay her own expenses and accept no salary. She could live as cheaply at Olympia as at home and would be happy to give sixty days of a lifetime to representing home folks. Nor would anybody need to maintain an expensive lobby to influence her. She would vote as she thought best.
When the time for the state Democratic convention arrived, May Arkwright Hutton and several other women delegates bought tickets for Walla Walla with great satisfaction. On the train, May extended the privileges of her drawing-room to the others; and in Walla Walla she shared her spacious hotel quarters with them because, as she was careful to explain, there was “no room in the inn.”
She was unperturbed when word was passed around that “May Arkwright Hutton is buying her gang.” Who were the faultfinders, she retorted, to hint at graft when because of the prevailing unit rule it took sixty-nine delegates from Spokane County to cast one vote that a single delegate could just as well take care of? As managed, the Convention was nothing but political high jinks. She was quite willing to pay her own expenses to this biennial Democratic rodeo, but—catch her contributing to delegation expenses as a whole! “Let the men who favor this extravagant system fork up for it. I won’t,” was her emphatic reply to heads of the delegation busy seeking contributions.
Carefully typed and packed in her valise was a speech which had been written as an “eloquent tribute to my two guiding stars, Democracy and Equal Suffrage.” Her followers agreed it was downright mean of the convention officials to give her no opportunity to deliver all of it, but an obliging home press printed the most telling passages:
Every seaman and officer sailing under the flag of true democracy will have a sweetheart in every port to wish him bon voyage and welcome him home; nor will his welcome be the siren song of the wanton that wrecked the barque and maimed the lives of the early mariners, but the dulcet tones of the queen of his heart and home—wife, mother, sweetheart, co-workers fortified with a power that equals his own, waving aloft the emblem of personal liberty, the ballot, beckoning him to the safe haven of Democracy.
The Convention was a highly confused gathering, torn to shreds by factional pulling and hauling. At one point a stampede for William Jennings Bryan was attempted. But in spite of May’s admiration for “that greatest living American,” she held her group of women delegates in line behind the leader of the Spokane delegation, who, against all reason, plague take him, was for “Champ” Clark. But if you were going to be a successful politician, May reasoned, you had to go along with the team, at least part of the time.
In the end the Convention plumped for Clark. May went home in disgust, considerably mollified, however, by her success in getting herself appointed as a member of the state delegation to the forthcoming national convention in Baltimore. She hated being instructed to vote for a candidate she did not want, but go she would. In fact, she had boldly demanded the honor as her due. It would be something for the state of Washington to send what might turn out to be the first woman delegate to a Democratic national convention. Back in Spokane, she was undoubtedly pleased to accept as a personal tribute the parody on the Democratic “Houn’ Dog” campaign song composed by loyal friends:
The people all o’ this here town,
They gotta quit kickin’ our gal aroun’.
We don’t care if she isn’t thin,
The suffrage fight she sure did win.
The full story of Washington’s woman delegate as revealed through the Baltimore press is too lengthy for these pages.{115} There was the episode of her laundry. Hot and sticky after the long journey, May disrobed, and having laundered her intimate garments in the wash basin, hung them out to the public gaze from the window of the swank place where she had registered. Objection was immediately made to the display. It was not customary thus to expose——
Customary nothing! blazed May. She had rented that room, hadn’t she—incidentally, for an outrageous sum. Windows went with rooms as far as she knew. Air and sunshine were free. She’d leave her washing right where it was or know the reason why.
Reporters dogged her footsteps, whittling pencils in anticipation. They were not disappointed. Yes, she said, she had always been a suffragist. But, laying a plump and be jeweled finger on a reporter’s arm, “I’m not militant, you know. We Western women don’t have to be militant. The men out West are too nice. All we have to say is we want something and we get it. Why, if I told you all about the West you’d want to take the next train and go out there yourself.”
“A big, motherly person,” her interlocutors noted. “Calls herself fat...astonishing headgear...displays gold hatpin...took the gold from her own mine with her own hands...admits being worth $2,000,000.00 in her own right...will stump Ohio for suffrage this fall...if women had had something to say about planning this convention, would have been more comfortable...wouldn’t have to pay five cents for ice-water...would have had electric fans to help in awful heat...Republicans of last half century had allowed greed of gain to chloroform conscience of people into compliance with corporate demands...finest husband on earth...stuck on him...but drop ‘Mrs.’ and call her May Arkwright Hutton....”
Outside convention walls, the woman delegate from Washington spoke at length and with no restraint. Within, it was different. About all she had a chance to do was to act as temporary chairman of the delegation during six roll calls, and respond each time with “Washington, fourteen for Clark.”
Socially, May’s life was full. Concerning the breakfasts and tea parties, the banquets, and the charming contacts with Mrs. Perry Belmont and Mrs. Bryan she took pains to see that the home papers were kept well informed.
Meantime the convention dragged along day after day in devastating heat. “Men going out to smoke have almost rubbed all the buttons off the back of my dress,” she complained. Still she stuck to her post. “May Arkwright Hutton left the Convention hall at midnight to retire,” ran a Baltimore news item, “and if the ballot is taken before her alarm clock sounds, her vote will be adequately cared for under the unit rule.”
At long last the deadlock had to be broken and it became possible to forget about instructions. “Get the Spokane boys and girls together and ascertain their sentiments relative to a presidential candidate,” May wired a Democratic henchman at home. Spokane, came the reply, was overwhelmingly in favor of Bryan; but in the end the perspiring Spokane delegate had to join the state group in switching to Bryan’s own substitute candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
In November, the college president from Princeton was elected President of the United States and May Arkwright Hutton, freed from the rigor and duties of the Democratic campaign, settled down in Spokane to take up her less spectacular duties as housewife, member of the Charity Commission, public monitor, universal suffragist, and poet of occasion.
Fifty-two, tired and ailing, she sought medical advice with ill-concealed reluctance and no idea whatsoever of turning over to another her position of leadership. Rest, fewer pork roasts, not so many cherry pies—so said the doctors. May showed them the door. Their prescriptions were as outrageous as their fees. Did they think they could treat her like a sickly child? They could go hang, was the purport of her farewell remarks. Strong language had never been taboo in May’s vocabulary when occasion demanded.
While flouting medical advice, she was in these days increasingly willing to give heed to a tactful dressmaker. At least she didn’t prescribe a diet or try to rid her customer of superfluous flesh; her job was to conceal it. “Stout Women Told How to Be Dressy” read the headline of a column pasted in May’s scrapbook. Softer colors and longer lines were, however, mere palliatives. Nothing could give May Arkwright Hutton a really refined appearance. She had always been homely and coarse of feature and the years had not helped. “Gee, what a mug for a Pierce Arrow,” muttered a fascinated newsboy as he watched a chauffeur ease into her open car the well-upholstered lady with chin all but disappearing in rolls of flesh.
Two years after the Baltimore episode the Huttons moved into a new home more appropriate for advancing years and well-established wealth than a downtown business block. From a south hill terrace in Rockwood, its plate glass windows and broad veranda overlooked the valley of the Spokane where hundreds of orchards now bloomed along the Apple Way in spring. Beyond the orchards rose Baldy (Mount Spokane), deep blue in summer, in winter snow-crowned against the northern horizon. The house was big; spacious enough to require a small retinue of help—not “servants,” for May hated and avoided that word as a blot on a democratic vocabulary. There was a man to look after the kitchen garden and the cow. The latter was kept on the place so that there would always be plenty of cream when the mistress resorted to the kitchen to superintend the ice-cream freezer or chum a pat of butter. Two girls wiped the dust from the heavy carved furniture and made the beds bedecked with drawn-work counterpanes; a chauffeur shared the huge family table, which was loaded with cut glass and heavy silver. May sat many hours at her desk wielding a pen grown less acrimonious than of yore, or drove about in a great car looking after the welfare of her numerous protégés old and young. With suffrage an accomplished fact and a decent municipal government well established in the city hall, there yet remained plenty of worthy causes in which a wealthy woman could take an active part, and May seldom overlooked one unless illness interfered. Her communications to the press ran the gamut from uniforms for school girls as a means of eliminating class distinctions to the world peace longed for by a country drifting toward World War I.
In spite of her bold front, May Arkwright Hutton was living on borrowed time. She no longer scoffed at doctors; she tried everything from sassafras tea and patent nostrums to Divine Healing and Christian Science, and back again to the prescriptions of licensed physicians; but nothing helped. Diabetes slowed her footsteps, and more and more frequently brought her to her huge mahogany bed. Yet she never gave up.
“Look at those pipestems,” she remarked to a reporter one day as she eyed her emaciated “underpinnings” after a particularly painful illness from which she was recuperating. “Look at them! I don’t know how I’m going to ramble around on them. But so far they seem to hold, so I guess I can manage.”
She did to the extent of launching a Spokane organization for world peace and occupying a box at the Liberty Theatre during the opening night and for several nights following. The theatre was hers—hers and Al’s. They had just bought it. All over town huge posters announced the appearance of Mrs. Leslie Carter in The Heart of Maryland, and a male quartette singing as an entre-acte May Arkwright Hutton’s recently penned “The Song of a Soldier Boy” set to the music of “Just before the Battle, Mother.” The song, a plea for world peace, would be on sale in the theatre at twenty-five cents per copy, proceeds to go to the Children’s Tuberculosis Sanitarium.
Some months later, seated in an invalid chair, May welcomed at a lawn fete a thousand members of the Washington State Federation of Women’s Clubs. To the strains of a mandolin orchestra, the guests were ushered to a table emblazoned “Women for Peace,” there to sign a resolution commending President Wilson for his neutral stand in a world at war. The affair was a last public gesture. One morning early, life flickered out. The day the Methodist minister conducted the funeral service in the great drawing room with the plate glass windows, young girls with babies in their arms, rough miners, derelicts, and unfortunates stood wedged in the crowd on the lawn. Many followed the hearse to the cemetery where the woman who had taken May’s place as president of the local Democratic Club released from a basket above the open grave to soar away into the blue a pigeon—white dove of peace. Drama to the last! May would have loved it.
Alone and lonely in the big house, Al Hutton was left to use as he would most of the accumulated millions and to find a way for their final disposition. He too had an abiding concern for those to whom fortune had been unkind—especially orphans. Had he not been an orphan himself? He soon worked out his plan. A few miles up the Spokane Valley between the irrigated orchard tracts and the foothills he purchased a farm. On its three hundred and twenty rolling acres he built barns, granary, and a group of friendly, gabled cottages arranged about an ample lawn, the whole to be known as the Hutton Settlement. On a white painted post he swung the bell of his old locomotive. There it still swings and rings—not to set the echoes clamoring across a narrow mountain gorge, but to call a flock of children from sleep or work or play to well-spread tables or to start them down the road to a rural school.
For its time and place, the Settlement was unique—one of the early substitutes for the old-fashioned lock-step, institutionalized orphanage. Al’s cottages were to be homes. In each was to live a small group of children mothered and directed by a kindly woman, as in a real home where everybody helped and everyone old enough had his job in kitchen, dairy, barn, or field. No starched “matrons” for Al’s orphans. Mothers. The lack of a father he made it his job to supply personally. From the hour when in his own arms he carried the first child across a Settlement threshold he was “Dad” to all of them.
In Fairmont Cemetery at the edge of a bluff above the Spokane River rises a shaft of rose pink granite. It is inscribed “Hutton” and overlooks two footstones marked “Levi W. Hutton 1860-1928” and “May A. Hutton 1860-1915.” But Spokane likes to point the way to the farm up the valley, where boys and girls continue to spill from friendly cottages at the sound of an old locomotive bell. That, most folks think, is a finer monument.