Notorious Victoria Read online

  On May 14, 1870, the first issue of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly was published out of an office on Park Row, the center of newspaper activity in New York City, under the banner “Upward & Onward.” Its sixteen pages featured a story by George Sand on its front page and a statement of purpose on page eight that most likely was written by Blood: “This Journal will be primarily devoted to the vital interests of the people and will treat all matters freely and without reservation. It will support Victoria C. Woodhull for President, with its whole strength; otherwise it will be untrammeled by party or personal considerations, free from all affiliation with political or social creeds, and will advocate Suffrage without distinction of sex! . . .

  “Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly affirms that the Democratic party has long been only the shade of a name—that the Republican party is effete, and only coheres by reason of place and power; that conservatism is impracticable, while Progress is the only principle worthy of a live, intelligent, independent Journal.”

  The first issue also set the rules of engagement for its own stories and for how its proprietors expected to be covered by their rivals in the press: “To one thing only will we advert in this our opening. We shall in no instance, and under no circumstance, descend to personal journalism in our remarks on the opinions and conduct of other newspapers. . .. We deprecate personality, willful misstatement, or scurlity in journalism, because they lower the tone of the press and injure its just influence with the people. It is extremely unfortunate that an editor’s own life and practice should be notoriously at variance with his written principles—if such a case there be. But that has nothing to do with the wisdom of his teaching. Unlike a clergyman he is not brought into personal contact with his patrons. His personal life only affects the circle of his family and friends, his written words go broadcast through the world. It is the journal not the man to which we look.”

  Reviews of the Weekly were printed around the country. One writer said, “[It] has voices from the seventh heaven, and gablism from a frog pond . . .yet the amazing journal is crowded with thought, and with needed information that can be got nowhere else.” Skeptics greeted it guardedly but with good humor—not unlike the response Victoria’s well-publicized antics usually received.

  THE RELEASE OF the first issue of the Weekly, coincidentally or not, occurred during a major gathering of women’s rights activists in New York City. By the spring of 1870, the long-anticipated split among the women reformers had occurred and two separate organizations were formed. The National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), headed by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, focused almost exclusively on winning women the right to vote under a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution. The second major women’s group, which would be called the American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA), was led by a contingent of middle-class and professional New England women so proper they did not even dare to introduce a resolution denouncing “free loveism” because just to mention the phrase was considered disgraceful. The AWSA selected the nation’s preeminent minister, Henry Ward Beecher, as its president. Beecher’s younger and more liberal colleague Theodore Tilton was selected to head the NWSA. Beecher and Tilton met in their new capacities at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but Anthony and Stanton wrote in their history of the movement that “nothing was gained” except to decide to hold a women’s convention in January 1871 in Washington, D.C.

  In fact, the women’s movement, after twenty-three years of life, had reached a standstill. It lacked money, momentum, and fresh ideas. It had shifted its focus from the grand fight to internal squabbles and was the object of mockery in the press, which referred to its meetings as “hen conventions.” After the spring meetings the New York Herald wrote: “The two hostile factions of woman’s righters, under the belligerent lead respectively of Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton, are passing their time in refusing to coalesce with each other. . .. There are at least two advocates of the woman movement that endeavor to show by example and precept that their sex, with ordinary fair work and industry, can take care of itself. We refer to the lady brokers who recently created a stir among the bulls and bears of Wall street by setting up, so to speak, a China shop right in the midst of that disorderly locality, and who have more recently [caught] the eyes of the slow old fogies who think women not fit for such, by starting an excellent weekly newspaper under the business-like title Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. . .. The Weekly, bearing for its motto ‘Upward and Onward,’ strongly advocates woman’s rights and even nominates and supports a woman for the next Presidency. There should, therefore, be no reasonable doubt of its devotion to the woman cause, and we would suggest to the female agitators who waste their breath and their hearers’ patience at conventions and mass meetings that, while the press is not so noisy an organ as a tongue, it is heard much further. The example of Messers. Woodhull & Claflin, if we can prefix that title to the firm name, is therefore a highly commendable one, as they do more and talk less than two divisions of female agitators put together.”

  The Weekly had made the splash Victoria was looking for—suddenly she was being recognized as the new woman. With Blood in the business and editorial chair, Victoria assumed the role of publisher and personality, and Tennie did what she knew best and enjoyed most—acted as a kind of ambassador of goodwill. Interspersed among bylined articles by contributing writers, as well as unsigned articles presumably by Blood, (on topics ranging from “Women as a Political Element” and “Women and Prisons” and “Education and Street Cleaning” to “Capital Punishment” and even “Racing”) were notices of Tennie’s travels to Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore promoting the paper and selling advertising space. It was a going concern that attracted an increasingly wide readership and much discussion. It also attracted new visitors to the Woodhull circle.

  Just as the brokerage had introduced Victoria and Tennessee to the leaders of the financial world, the newspaper, with its bold positions and columns open to would-be writers, introduced the sisters to the city’s thinkers. Horace Greeley, the editor of The Tribune, brought one such man to meet them, Stephen Pearl Andrews. Andrews had once worked for Greeley at The Tribune as a Washington correspondent and had engaged in a famous published argument on marriage with Greeley and Henry James, Sr. Ironically, the lengthy dialogue on love, marriage, and divorce was published in 1853, the year Victoria was first married. Andrews took the radical position in favor of a woman’s right to divorce, while James took the middle ground and Greeley argued vehemently that a marriage should not be dissolved under any circumstances, but most especially not when the divorce was initiated by the wife.

  After his initial introduction by Greeley, Andrews returned to the Weekly with a mission. The fifty-eight-year-old—whom one writer described as looking “every bit the apostle of another apocalypse” with his furrowed brow and free-flowing beard—climbed the steps to the Woodhull office and announced, quite simply, to Victoria and Blood: “I have many things of immense importance which I want to communicate.”

  Andrews was a veteran of nearly every left-leaning American reform movement. He listed as his occupations lawyer, doctor, philosopher, scholar, and linguist, but he aspired to no less than “planetary grand master of all the free masons” and/or pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He used various pseudonyms, Andruisius Bisihop, Servant of the Servants of Truth with the Approbation of the Integralistic Council, and Professor Pearlo being just two of them; he had completed a manifesto called “Primary Synopsis of Universology,” which called for the establishment of a world government with himself installed as “Pantarch”; and he was the chief proponent of a universal language called Alwato, which coincidentally he had invented and almost no one else understood. He believed that all ideas evolved from either something or nothing: “a somethingized nothing or a nothingized something.” But behind the jargon and hyperbole his philosophy was not so distant from Victoria and Blood’s. Andrews believed in individual rights and equitable commer
ce, which by extension included women’s rights and the even more controversial but less clearly defined concept of free love.

  Blood and Victoria listened to the tall, shabby, professorial man, with his gray eyes and hair and beard. They agreed to allow him to write for the Weekly as an “almost editor.” Andrews introduced himself in a bylined article declaring: “I am a somewhat irrepressible character. I write best when I simply talk to the people. I have generally scared to the death every publisher that I have ever undertaken to write for, by telling something which he thought ought not to be told or by telling it in a way that he didn’t like. The result was that I retired, disgusted with journalism, and for a dozen years I have hardly written a dozen paragraphs, until within the few months past.

  “And yet there is no man living who has more to say to the world than I have; nor, as I think, that which the people need more to hear; nor that which is better adapted to the newspaper as an organ; according to my conception of what a newspaper ought to be. . ..

  “It is the inversion (the topsi-ter-vi-ness) of our existing society that wealth, substance, mere material Bulk, is put above Thought, Science, Truth; that the buttocks of the community are upheaved, in an unseemly way, above its head. Swedenborg says that Society is The Grand Man inverted; or, as it were, standing on its Head.

  “It is, then, part of my object to reinvert the grand man; and set him on his feet, or to seat him on its legitimate posteriors.”

  Andrews’s influence on the Weekly was profound. Not only did the paper increasingly bear his mark in the form of philosophical and scientific arguments on arcane subjects, and through the appearance of phonetic charts and obscure alphabets, but his presence on the staff also attracted a host of new writers from the many reform movements to which he had been attached. The paper was at once more dense and more daring. It ventured into territory that polite society dared not even discuss, let alone publish for general consumption.

  Articles by anonymous writers declared that the “maelstrom” in which all “smart girls” were wrecked was marriage, and that all their “powers and faculties are either surrendered to the interests of trivialities or else they are devoted to the successful capture of husbands.” The paper exposed police involvement in prostitution, describing how individual prostitutes and brothels regularly paid the police to avoid arrest and how “wine is furnished them when wanted, and they are accorded the ‘run of the house,’ or the privilege of frequenting, without charge, such inmates as they may select.” And by October 1870—under a new and more businesslike masthead that replaced “Upward & Onward” with “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations!”—there appeared muckraking articles on insurance scams and railroad bond schemes. “At that time,” Victoria said later, “everything, to the external view, was at the height of prosperity. But we exposed, in our Weekly, one nefarious scheme after another when we realized that companies were floated to work mines that did not exist, or that, if they did exist, had nothing in them, and to make railways to nowhere in particular, and that banks and insurance societies flourished by devouring their shareholders’ capital.”

  Some of the articles on social questions were so radical in their positions that the editorial we, who presumably were Victoria, Tennie, and Blood, ran a disclaimer in several issues to remind readers that the purpose of the paper was to allow the “free and untrammeled” exchange of ideas: “We frequently differ widely from much which appears thus; but we do not assume to be infallible judges of right and wrong. . .. For ourselves we have no desire to state our convictions of truth.”

  Despite the disclaimers, it wasn’t long before the counterattacks were launched against the newspaper’s proprietors and the paper was forced to defend itself against charges of blackmail: “To the public—At the moment of going to press, we are credibly informed that a combination has been made to stigmatize our paper, by a name understood as ‘Black Mail.’ We have but to point to our articles upon companies perpetrating frauds on the public, and which could, and doubtless, would, have given us large amounts to suppress these articles—more than we can make in many months by a course of independent integrity—to contradict in the most thorough manner this gross device of fraud to prevent its own overthrow.” When attacks on the newspaper’s credibility failed, Victoria recalled later that individuals threatened by the Weekly’s exposés began to resort to personal attacks, “[saying] that we were immoral women or we would not have commenced such an undertaking.”

  As if to show that she and her newspaper were not to be cowed by threats, the Weekly continued to run bold titles—“The Stupendous Intended Frauds, Spurious (Counterfeit) Mexican Bonds,” “The Pennsylvania Railroad Company: Its Antecedents and Practices,” “The Outrages of Corporations.” The paper vastly increased its number of enemies but also attracted a new audience of admirers. In exposing corporate misdeeds, the Weekly became a player in the country’s burgeoning labor movement.

  By 1870, largely as a result of widespread corruption during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, industrialists, corporations, utilities, bankers, and brokers were increasingly viewed as an enemy by the working class, whose wages had stagnated while men who were already millionaires added to their coffers. Labor unions were born to represent these angry and beleaguered workers. Like political parties, the unions relied upon newspapers to get their message out. By the time the Weekly began its exposés of corporations, one of the strongest voices for the mass of German-born workers in the United States, the Arbeiter-Union, had died. The closing of that newspaper left only French-language publications to spread the labor message in New York City and the Weekly was able to step in and fill the void.

  BY THE FALL of 1870, the Weekly had a very respectable circulation of twenty thousand and, except for Blood, who continued to shun the limelight, the paper’s staff received even more press coverage. Andrews was featured on the front page of the Sunday New York World in a series of articles called “The Queer Philosophers,” and Victoria and Tennessee continued to be the darlings of the local newsmen. There was little objectivity in the reporting on the sisters if for no other reason than they made such good copy. Their home had become a salon where bankers mingled with labor leaders in front of countless floor-to-ceiling mirrors, judges rubbed shoulders with thieves under glistening chandeliers, and women’s rights advocates could press their cause with newspaper editors, who were otherwise unavailable, while posed next to bronze statuary of coupling gods and goddesses. It was a sanctuary of free speech and free thinking.

  A Sun reporter went to the 38th Street mansion to get a look at the remarkable place. After an initial interview with Tennie, who “with the impulsive gayety of a gypsy” took his hand and hurried him through the house, he had a brief but memorable encounter with Victoria: “Here Mrs. Woodhull came in. She was dressed in a handsome trained silk dress. As she raised her skirts to ascend the stairs, leather buckled man’s slippers were disclosed and blue silk socks.

  “[Victoria said,] ‘I see you admire my dress. Let me show you the dress I intended to wear in the streets of New York, and at my banking house on Broad street.’ She tripped out of the room, Tennie in the meantime engaging the reporter’s attention. When he turned around to see where Mrs. Woodhull was gone, there she stood before him in pants of dark blue cloth reaching to the knee and buckling over hose of light blue silk. Her dark blue blouse fell to the knee. Shirt front, collar and cravat matched well with her short hair, worn like a boy’s, her blue-gray eyes, just like her sister’s, and pale, but perfectly healthy blonde complexion. Reporter (after a pause)—‘Mrs. Woodhull, if you appear on the street in that dress the police will arrest you.’ Her fair cheek flushed rosy red. She folded her arms and drew herself erect. ‘No they won’t,’ she said. ‘When I am ready to make my appearance in this dress no police will touch me.’”

  Victoria did not know how wrong she was. From her perspective high atop Murray Hill, the queen of a financ
ial and publishing empire that bore her name and a self-proclaimed presidential candidate, she must have felt invulnerable. But if she had closely examined her own newspaper on October 29, 1870, she would have seen the first shot fired in a war that eventually would bring down her growing empire and end in her arrest. In an article titled “Henry Ward Beecher Arraigned and Charged By Stephen Pearl Andrews With A Series of Falsehoods, Slander, Moral Cowardice and Other Conduct Unbecoming A Christian Minister,” Andrews issued a not-so-veiled threat against the preacher. He wrote: “I have a long score to settle with Mr. Beecher on the ground of moral vacillation and cowardice, in his intercourse with the public and with me personally. He may take this as a first installment, and I will choose my time for making the additional payments. His immunity as the only one of the two who had an organ is, for the moment, at least, past. He may take up the glove I throw down or not, as he pleases; he will not, in any event, escape from being held to the strict logic of his position, and of his public and private deportment; unless he repents, and brings forth [fruits ?] for repentance.” In case Beecher didn’t know who was making the threat, the article was signed a second time by Stephen Pearl Andrews.

  NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 1870

  On November 19, 1870, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly proclaimed it had a “Startling Annunciation! A New Political Platform Proclaimed! Woman’s Right of Suffrage Fully Recognized in the Constitution and Completely Established by Positive Law and Recent Events, The Sixteenth Amendment a Dead Letter!”

  There was a new wise man in Victoria’s court.

  What Vanderbilt was to finance and Andrews was to publishing, Benjamin Butler was to politics for Victoria. A Civil War legend, retired general, and Massachusetts congressman, Butler may have found his way to the Woodhull salon, like Andrews, at the invitation of Greeley, who was a Republican Party stalwart. Also like Andrews, Butler was one of the most polemical personalities of the era. One newspaper called him “the hideous front of hell’s blackest imp, Apollyon’s twin brother; the grand high-priest of Pandaemonium, the unclean, perjured, false hearted product of Massachusetts civilization; the meanest thief; the dirtiest knave God ever gave breath to; total depravity personified.”