The Victoria Woodhull/Frederick Douglass Ticket in the 1872 U.S. Presidential Election (and Comparing Woodhull's Career to a Classic Movie)

This was the preamble (back when you could get away with writing one sentence as a paragraph) to the official report of the Equal Rights Party convention held in NYC in the middle of May of 1872. The reason I highlighted in bold one of the women above is because that particular one ultimately became the nominee for this party to run for President of the United States against Ulysses S. Grant who was running for a second term. A controversial figure, Victoria Woodhull probably has no real similarity (for much better than worse) to Hillary Clinton of today. Yet, Woodhull's unexpected running mate on that Presidential run was an eyebrow-raising choice for the time period...and one that would still cause unfortunate interesting reactions if a possible similar scenario happened at the 2008 Democratic Convention. All the crazy machinations that happened after Woodhull's nomination are ripe for a movie (with eerie parallels to a classic movie I'll mention later) to prove that political history has enough strange twists and turns to almost outdo modern political news.

In the early 1870's, Woodhull was a popular 30-something suffragist who was also somewhat of a loose cannon in the context of staid Victorian era America. She was a proponent of women exploring free love and not forcing themselves to stay trapped in loveless marriages (as the husbands were out having secrets trysts on their own). Obviously, this brought her a mess of enemies to her freedom approaches--and even ruffled the feathers (temporarily) of Susan B. Anthony--possibly suspecting Woodhull being a bit of a charlatan at times. While it was tucked under the rug, some knew that Woodhull had made a possible unethical fortune years earlier being a supposed healer with magnets. She was also involved in the spiritualist movements that Harry Houdini eventually helped bring down decades later with his quest to scope mediums out as frauds. With her younger sister (Tennie C. Claflin)--Woodhull managed to make another fortune as the first female Wall Street stock broker team. The two were successfully showing that women could do anything when the assumption was at the time they couldn't. Eventually, Woodhull took her aspirations to the furthest level you can go here in America other than gaining a seat on the Supreme Court or becoming the next Bill Gates.

Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly-and two surprising nominations...

And here you thought that an American publication trying to start a sexual revolution started with Hugh Hefner and Playboy in the 1950's. Woodhull and her younger sis started a controversial newspaper a couple of years before that 1872 Equal Rights Party convention and named the paper after themselves. It also was one of the first publications in America to have articles talking frankly about sexual issues from a women's perspective. The newspaper attempted to get women to wear (gasp) shorter skirts, forwarding Woodhull's association with the concept of free love (yet still within the borders of monogamy), promoted the use of sex education in schools--and even argued that prostitution should be legal. This was obviously powerfully provocative material for the times...and she and her sister would eventually pay for it. Nevertheless, many women were agreeing with Woodhull's ideas...especially when some of those ideas should have been implemented at the time for the sake of education. But that newspaper wasn't what sent Woodhull into the stratosphere of popularity in the feminist movements.

In 1871, Woodhull used her lobbying skills to make a fascinating speech at a convention for the National Woman Suffrage Association that stopped everything cold. Her ability to grab the attention of people was only part of her skills in finding governmental loopholes to throw the status quo into a quandary. In her speech to the all-female audience--Woodhull convinced everybody there that every woman technically had the right to vote for President or in any election. She cited the 14^th and 15^th amendments that granted the voting rights (or at least in the wording) for ALL citizens of the United States. While directly applied to the rights of African-Americans in being able to legally vote--Woodhull realized that the amendments never mentioned giving exemptions to women. This brilliant interpretation of the 14^th and 15^th amendments helped repair her reputation with Susan B. Anthony and all previous women who weren't sure of Woodhull's tactics. Now she was the true hero for women's rights.

At that Equal Rights Party convention, Woodhull was nominated to be the first woman U.S. President. That only became more powerful as that nomination became ratified the following June at another convention. It was there when the party inadvertently nominated legendary African-American journalist Frederick Douglass to be the Vice-President nominee. While a part of government record--he never even knew he was nominated and didn't really acknowledge it. Nobody knows if Woodhull was the one who concocted the idea of nominating Douglass...but it was still a brilliant one outside of being overly calculated. It's one that's still overdue and mirroring the wishes of many (at the time of this writing) that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will team up at the 2008 Democratic Convention. If you're reading this article after 2008...it likely didn't happen for reasons that have nothing to do with race.

Another corrupt election long before the 2000 election fiasco?

It's also likely that nobody in the Equal Right Party probably thought Woodhull had a true fighting chance to win the Presidency. Yet numerous clues came out after the fact that showed she had more popular votes than people may have known. The Washington Post published an editorial in the 1920's that stated the ERP had printed up ballots with Woodhull's name that were sent to voting polls right before the 1872 election...yet mysteriously disappeared. The government claimed no official record of her running for the Presidency ever existed--mainly because they weren't responsible for printing ballots in those days.

It's been said, too, that her popular votes were possibly in the thousands despite nobody at the polls bothering to count them or even notice if Woodhull's name was on them. The biases against women were just too strong...and the U.S. government run by men weren't about to recognize it. In fact, New York took away all voting rights against women five years later probably due to the unknown success of Woodhull at the polls.

While it'll always be a mystery just how many votes she had--without the Electoral College, she wouldn't have won anyway. At best, she could have gone down on record as making a small dent...as say Pat Robertson once did when he ran (or even Ralph Nader) during the late 20^th century. Ironically, VP nominee Frederick Douglass likely wanted to get Ulysses S. Grant re-elected because of Grant's prior signing of the Klan Act and the Enforcement Acts to help in the rights of African-Americans.

Considering what else happened to Woodhull during the actual election--other reasons for voting information conveniently disappearing looked more suspect...

"Citizen Woodhull"...

Once you see how Woodhull was eventually brought down (two days before the Presidential election, incidentally)--you'll see that her life eerily mirrors the fictional story of a classic film: "Citizen Kane" and Orson Welles's creation of Charles Foster Kane. As Kane, Woodhull was rich, a charlatan, started a newspaper that started controversial new trends, became too powerful for her own good, ran for high political office...and then was brought down by her own ego and people colluding to destroy her.

Just who was it that ultimately destroyed Woodhull's power? Someone who also resembled a later powerful force in Hollywood during the 1930's-1950's. Anthony Comstock was Victorian Era America's Hay's Code for bringing down immorality in the country via his own accord. Also ironic is that William Hays of the 1930's Hollywood Hay's Code and Comstock were associated with the U.S. post office. Hays was once Postmaster General--and Comstock was given a powerful position of policing the U.S. Post Office once his influential "Comstock Laws" were passed in Congress after the Civil War. That made it illegal for anybody to send any piece of "immoral" content through the mail service. Yes, believe it or not, he managed to even ban anatomy textbooks from being sent through the mail to students studying in college. All of that as the initial result of Comstock starting the snicker-inducing (at least for us today) New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

This was the equivalent of garlic to a vampire in the case of Woodhull--but it didn't stop her from continuing to do what she always had. She, her husband, and her sister were all arrested that week for writing in the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly about an alleged affair between a well-known Reverend and another woman. Once it made the rounds in the mail--Comstock knew he could make a legal arrest and had the three put on trial.

Perhaps the popular votes Woodhull did receive were the result of sympathy votes as she sat in jail during election week. Nevertheless, Comstock (and possibly the U.S. Government in general) won and ultimately brought down Woodhull, her practices and ideas. Despite her, her husband, and her sister being acquitted in a trial the following year--she ultimately went to live in England a few years later and for the rest of her life after divorcing her husband and getting mostly American public ridicule.

Woodhull became a bit delusional later when deciding to declare her run for the U.S. Presidency two other times (in 1884...plus one last attempt in 1892) and claiming to the press she was "destined to be President." As far as we know, she never uttered "Rosebud" on her deathbed in her U.K. countryside home as an old woman in 1927--but she did help all fringe political parties gain a little more credence later on and after the 19^th Amendment went into effect. In those arenas, other women attempted to run for President during the 20^th century until Hillary Clinton made it more of a serious possibility. Fortunately, Hillary doesn't promote free love...with no comment from husband Bill.