As they rose and began their chores on the morning of March 22, settlers along Virginia’s James River had reason to be optimistic about the future. After the harrowing first few years that followed its founding in 1607, the colony was starting to prosper from the cultivation of West Indian tobacco. It enjoyed a measure of self-government, and ships regularly brought new settlers, indentured servants, and marriageable women. Moreover, the Powhatan Indians, second only to disease as a threat to the early colonists, had been rendered friendly and docile. The two races mingled so freely, in fact, that the Powhatans often ate and slept in whites’ houses and borrowed their possessions—even firearms. So when Jamestown and its surrounding plantations began to stir that Good Friday morning, the presence of Indian guests and traders drew no particular attention.
Then, at the prearranged hour of eight o’clock, Indians throughout the widely spaced settlements suddenly attacked their hosts with clubs, tomahawks, and the whites’ own fowling pieces. Others descended from the woods to join the slaughter and cut off escape routes. The Powhatans massacred men, women, and children indiscriminately, mutilating many of their corpses. In the end some 350 whites were slain, about a quarter of the population. Most of the outlying settlements were completely destroyed. Only a timely warning from a Christianized Indian saved the town of Jamestown from destruction.
Although the survivors were shocked at the treachery of their supposed neighbors, a decade and a half of hatred had lain beneath the Indians’ veneer of amiability. Consider, for example, one early settler’s account of his punitive raid on an Indian village: “I dispersed my soldiers to burn their houses and cut down their corn … we marched out with the queen and her children to our boats, [and] my soldiers began to complain because these Indians had been spared. … It was agreed to put the children to death. This was done by throwing them overboard and shooting out their brains in the water.” For their part, the whites could cite equally barbarous and (to them) unprovoked atrocities by the Indians.
The massacre dealt the colonists a terrible blow, but not terrible enough to drive them away. Soon they were inflicting massive retaliation on the Powhatans. One Virginian wrote that “now we have just cause to destroy them by all meanes possible,” adding, “it is more easie to civilize them by conquest then faire meanes.” The settlers and Indians continued their mutual butchery for a decade before agreeing to a shaky cease-fire in 1632. By that point, however, it was impossible for either side to trust the other. In April 1644 the Powhatans struck again, killing several hundred whites in another surprise attack. Two years later the Powhatans surrendered, but the bloody struggle between red and white would continue following the frontier west for another two and a half centuries.
1922Seventy-five Years Ago
Women Who Smoke and the Men Who Arrest Them
Having recently secured the right to vote, America’s women rose up in early 1922 to defend an even more fundamental liberty: the right to smoke. In February newspapers reported the shocking news that smoking was common among female students at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University’s Teachers College. In response, the state of Nebraska took swift action to shield its daughters from such evil big-city ways. The board of education of Nebraska’s normal schools voted to refuse leaves of absence for teachers to attend those three colleges, or any other where female smoking was common. Citing Prohibition, The New York Times sarcastically endorsed the ban: “Tobacco must ‘go.’… Millions of people enjoy its use. Therefore, they mustn’t be allowed to use it.”
A newspaper survey of colleges in the heartland showed little smoking by coeds. Purdue and three Pittsburgh-area colleges reported no such cases. The same was true of Louisville, whose dean of women doubted that “a real, genuine womanly girl would form the habit” and explained that the South was “a little more conservative than the North.” Kansas’s dean of women called the problem “negligible”: “We have no rule against smoking by women here any more than we have a specific rule against lying or stealing.” Ohio State’s dean of women estimated that one percent of her charges smoked, and her Minnesota counterpart was equally dismissive: “The sororities at Minnesota have all spoken against it.”
Wisconsin’s dean of women said the smoking fad, most popular among women of the “idle, blasé, disappointed class,” was already passing. She pointed out that an intelligent woman “cannot see herself rocking a baby or making a pie with a cigarette in her mouth, flicking ashes in the baby’s face or dropping them in the pie crust.” Among Eastern women’s schools, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, and Bryn Mawr all punished smokers with expulsion, though they left enforcement of the rules to the students themselves. Barnard College, the women’s division of Columbia, was (as usual) less prim than its sisters, allowing unrestricted use of the devil’s weed.
Barnard’s permissive attitude was not universal throughout New York City. On March 27, with no warning, police began to enforce an ordinance that banned smoking by females in restaurants, hotels, and other public gathering places. The women of Gotham were outraged, especially in bohemian Greenwich Village, where, according to the proprietor of a tearoom on MacDougal Street, almost every woman smoked. The law’s sponsor, Alderman Peter J. McGuinness of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, defended the prohibition by saying: “If the morals of all New York were those of Greenpoint, there would be no crime wave. But young fellows go into our restaurants to find women folks sucking cigarettes. What happens? The young fellows … vampired by these smoking women, desert their homes, their wives and children, rob their employers and even commit murder so that they can get money to lavish on these smoking women.”
Alas for domestic tranquillity, the law vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Investigation revealed that the ordinance had never been properly passed by the city council or signed by the mayor and had been sent to the police department by mistake. Mayor John Hylan, visiting his fellow den of coed iniquity in Chicago, approved the reversal: “I make it a policy in my administration never to interfere with the ladies—for they will do as they please anyway.” As predicted, the ladies of Hylan’s city returned to their cancer sticks, and New York City’s moral climate resumed its eternal downward spiral.
1947Fifty Years Ago
Stomping at the Kremlin
On February 17 the Voice of America (VOA) began broadcasting in Russian from a shortwave transmitter in Munich. A newspaper cartoon had predicted that the Soviet public would be baffled by such American radio hits as “Open the Door, Richard” and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” but the VOA’s hour-long inaugural broadcast came closer to the opposite extreme. It began with a summary of world news. Next came an exposition of the relationship between America’s state and federal governments, meant to answer such supposedly common questions as, “Why must the motorist in one State of the United States observe traffic rules different from those in another?” There followed a selection of folk and cowboy tunes and a rundown of scientific developments (“The study of the infrared spectrum of the stars was until recently complicated by the absence of sufficiently sensitive detectors …”). Rounding out the hour were Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” and a recap of the news from the top of the program.
No one could be certain how many people heard the initial broadcast. The transmitter was far from the audience, atmospheric conditions were poor, and only about one Russian in a thousand had the proper type of receiver. Most who di^Tnanage to tune in politely suggested that the program had been interesting but a bit wordy. According to W. Bedell Smith, the American ambassador in Moscow, everyone said that “Night and Day” was what they had been waiting for all along. At the end of March the VOA took the hint and hired Benny Goodman (“the hot clarinet man,” as the Associated Press described him) as its unpaid musical adviser. The New York Times explained the choice by saying: “It is claimed in jive circles that Goodman is the most popular American musician in Russia.” Soon Russians from Leningrad to Sevastopol were jumping to the sounds of Artie Shaw, Gene Krupa, and Tommy Dorsey, giving incontrovertible evidence of one area where the vaunted Soviet industrial machine could not outproduce the West.
1972Twenty-five Years Ago
E.R.A.
On March 22, by a vote of 84 to 8, the Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment, a goal of feminists for half a century. Since the House had given equally lopsided approval the previous fall, the amendment went to the states for ratification. Thirty-two minutes after the Senate vote, Hawaii became the first to ratify; New Hampshire and Nebraska followed the next day. Support for the idea of equality quickly swept the country, with both major parties endorsing the amendment. Within a year of the Senate vote, 30 of the required 38 states had passed the E.R.A. Boosters confidently predicted a quick completion of the process.
Over the remainder of 1973, though, no more states added their names to the list. In 1974, even as polls showed three-quarters of Americans in favor, just three states gave their consent. One state ratified in 1975 and one in 1977, raising the total to 35, but that was all.The E.R.A.’s time limit expired in 1982, and since then, there has been no serious attempt to get it through Congress again. What happened?
Most likely, Americans took a second look at the E.R.A. and did not like what they saw. Some, especially in the South, feared a loss of women’s “special role” in the family. But others, including many who sympathized with the women’s movement, were uneasy over what the Supreme Court might make of the amendment’s bare reference to “equality of rights.” When opponents raised specters of unisex bathrooms, women being drafted, and a ban on alimony, supporters responded with little but blandishments or mockery.
Even as the amendment faltered, though, legal and social barriers continued to fall. Women won public office in ever-growing numbers, attended the service academies, and entered virtually every profession. As these changes took root, many citizens wondered if the blunderbuss E.R.A. was the best way to resolve a very complicated set of questions.
Women’s rights had been broadly protected in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and during the 1970s additional measures extended the principle to such areas as maternity leave. One strongly feminist scholar admits that “by the time of its defeat, it is not clear what practical effect the E.R.A. might have had.” As the battle for equality shifted from the legal to the social arena, the E.R.A. came to look redundant where it overlapped with existing laws, and like a can of worms where it did not. In the end, feminist victories in other areas made the E.R.A. seem irrelevant. Its overwhelming early support gave striking proof of the strength of the women’s movement, and its later defeat, paradoxically, showed how successful the movement had already been.
