100 Years Ago This Month...

Women's suffrage activists spent the Spring of 1912 trying to get their "plank" onto the platform of a national party in advance of the coming election. And they got it, in a roundabout way: Roosevelt lost the nomination of the GOP, but became the nominee of the Progressive (Bull Moose) party - and took the women with him. Women's suffrage was a plank in the platform (which is fascinating to read today) and Jane Addams, Chicago's own secular saint, seconded his nomination at a riotous convention.

The platform said:

Equal Suffrage

The Progressive party, believing that no people can justly claim to be a true democracy which denies political rights on account of sex, pledges itself to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.


This support was not what lost the election for Roosevelt - more likely, it's simply the fact that he was a third party candidate (though he DID come in second, beating out the Republicans). And women voting was in the constitution eight years later, after continuing as a "state-by-state" issue for a few years.  It's very interesting to think of all this in context of the President's announcement today that he's in favor of same sex marriage.

We wave our Bull Moose party banner high at Smart Aleck HQ, right above our "Nixon Resigns" newspaper that you can see in some of Adam's dust jacket photos. And our "Hipster Bert" Muppet.