Blood on the Snow--How the Boston Massacre Looks a Lot Like the Cases that Inspired Black Lives Matter

Blood on the snow in Boston.

Some parts of the tale of the so-called Boston Massacre, an iconic moment in pre-Revolutionary colonial history that used to be familiar to any school child echo in today’s world.  All of the ingredients—a rowdy protest boiling spontaneously up from streets where outrage over long time grievances sparked violence over a trivial incident and was met by either firm and appropriate action by responsible authorities or was a vicious and violent over reaction depending on the political bias of the observer.  And not only was the first victim a Black man who became a symbol of rebellion, but his uniformed killers were let off virtually Scot free at a trial on the flimsiest and most arcane of grounds.  Sounds like the familiar arc of a police slaying of an unarmed youth, the kind of all-to-common occurrence that fed the Black Lives Matter movement.

It was a miserable night in Boston in 1770.  What else would you expect on March 5 in the midst of the Little Ice Age which chilled Europe and the Eastern seaboard of North America for nearly two centuries?  A nasty wind whipped across the harbor, a few flakes of snow stung exposed fresh.  Old snow and ice were pushed up against buildings turning gray with the soot from a few thousand hearth fires.

A lone English soldier, Private Hugh White of the 29th Regiment of Foot had the bad luck to draw sentry duty outside of the Customs House on King’s Street that night.  The building was a symbol of unfair taxation without representation and oppression to the people of the city.  Customs collectors had been harassed for attempting to enforce the unpopular Townsend Duties and for seizing ships of leading merchants like John Hancock for smuggling, a mainstay of the local economy.  So, the building needed protection.

The bright red coat of an English private soldier, while colorful, was entirely unsuitable for the harsh New England winter.  Private White undoubtedly shivered in misery.  His life was made worse by the taunting by local toughs, mostly apprentices and day laborers loitering about.  One of them, Edward Garrick, a wig maker’s apprentice, mocked a passing British officer, Captain-Lieutenant John Goldfinch, for not paying a bill due his master.  Goldfinch ignored the jeers and in fact had settled his account that very afternoon.  But White scolded Garrick for insulting an officer.  The two exchanged heated words.  White struck Garrick with the butt of his musket. A small crowd gathered and began pelting the soldier with snow and ice balls. 

19-year-old bookseller Henry Knox made his bow in the history books by warning besieged Private White and later Captain Preston of the dangerous consequences of opening fire. In five years, he would be General Washington's trusted commander of artillery and the man who hauled the heavy artillery from overland from Ft. Ticonderoga setting the stage for the British evacuation of Boston.  Still later he would later be Washington's Secretary of War.

When White leveled his musket against his taunters, Henry Knox, a corpulent 19-year-old bookseller warned him not to shoot because, “if he fire, he must die.”  White refrained from shooting but the crowd on the street grew as church bells rang in alarm.  Someone thought of sending to nearby barracks for reinforcements for the now besieged White who had retreated to the steps of the Custom House with the door at his back.

Things were about to go from bad to worse.

Four regiments of troops were sent to Boston in 1768, more than were ever stationed there when its very existence was threatened by possible invasion during the French and Indian Wars, after the Massachusetts House of Representatives petitioned the Crown for relief from the Townsend Duties and circulated letters of other colonial legislatures asking for support in the protest.  The Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston officially asked for troops to protect him after some of his officers were manhandled and abused.

Four regiments were dispatched as a show of force.  That was about 4,000 men plus the wives and children of many of them, officers and enlisted alike, servants, and the inevitable hangers-on to any army.  The city of Boston boasted only 16,000 residents and a few thousand more resided in nearby villages.  Such a large force deployed among so few civilians, most of them hostile to their presence, led to inevitable friction.

Although two of the regiments had been withdrawn, soldiers of the remaining two were involved in a number of incidents over that winter.  In addition to hostility to the policy that dispatched them, minor personal disputes like the Captain’s late payment to a wig maker, irked the population.  So did the inevitable attention to the local girls by the soldiers, which was often returned by lasses enamored of a dashing uniform. 

A serious bone of contention was the employment of off duty soldiers at the rope walk, Boston’s biggest industrial concern and a main employer of unskilled and casual labor.  The soldiers were working for less than locals and costing many of them jobs.  Wives of several soldiers publicly scolded colonists.  That very afternoon one had promised that the troops would wet their bayonets on troublemakers.

Back at the Customs House, White was finally relieved by a corporal and six private soldiers under the personal command of Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the watch who declined to trust a junior lieutenant with the sensitive assignment.  As they drew close to the Customs House where the angry crowd had grown to over a hundred, Knox again warned the Captain of the awful consequences if his men fired.  Preston reportedly told him, “I am aware of it.”

This 19th Century engraving featured the death of Crispus Attucks.  It also depicted Captain Preston ordering a disciplined volley.

Once at the Customs House Preston had his men load and prime their muskets and form a semi-circle in front of Private White and the door.  They faced a crowd now swollen by further reinforcements, many of them armed with cudgels and brick bats.  In the very front of the mob, just feet away from Captain Preston who took up a position in front of his men, was a dark-skinned man named Crispus Attucks.

Not much is known about Attucks, not even whether he was a slave, an escaped slave, or a freeman.  He worked as a sailor on coastal traders and on the docks.  He was described as Mulato but was known to have both African and Native American Wampanoag ancestry.  Although there were not many Blacks in Boston, their presence was not that unusual.  They mixed casually and freely with the lowest classes of White Bostonians—the day laborers, indentured servants, and apprentice boys.

As Attucks and the crowd pressed forward, Preston had his men level their muskets but ordered them to hold their fire.  He ordered the mob to disperse.  They responded with taunts of “go ahead and fire.”  Preston said that the troops would not fire “except on his order” and made the point of standing in front of his men’s guns.

From out of the crowd someone hit Private Hugh Montgomery on the arm with a clump of ice or in other accounts he was struck by a cudgel.  Montgomery fell to the ground, although he may simply have lost his footing on the ice and lost his musket.  He grabbed the gun and scrambled to his feet.  Enraged, he leveled his gun at the nearest man, Atticus, and fired yelling “Damn you, fire!” to his fellow soldiers.

Attucks crumpled to the ground mortally wounded.  There was a pause of a few seconds and then a ragged, un-coordinated volley went off from the troops.  The only command Preston gave was a desperate order to cease fire.

Eleven men were hit by fire indicating that some may have been injured by the same round or that some soldiers had time to re-load and fire. In addition to Attucks rope maker Samuel Gray and mariner James Caldwel died on the cobblestones.  Seventeen-year-old ivory turner apprentice Samuel Maverick standing near the rear of the crowd was struck by a ricocheting fragment and died a few hours later. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant died of his wounds two weeks later.

The crowd retreated to near-by streets but continued to grow.  Preston called out the entire regiment for protection and withdrew his squad to the barracks. 

Massachusetts born Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to calm the angry mob that surrounded the State House.

An angry mob descended on the near-by State House which was ringed with troops for protection.  Massachusetts-born Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to calm the crowd by addressing them from the relative safety of a balcony.  He promised a thorough and prompt investigation.  After a few hours the crowd drifted away.

Local malcontents, becoming known loosely as Patriots, were quick to use the slaughter to raise a hue and cry against the Townsend Duties and to the onerous virtual military occupation of their city.  Two virtually identical engravings purporting to accurately portray the shooting were rushed to publication.  The most famous, engraved by Paul Revere, the master silver and coppersmith, iron foundry man, bell caster, and master of all trades, after a drawing by Henry Pelham was published in the Boston Gazette and then re-issued in sometimes hand colored prints which made Revere and the printer a good deal of money.

A hand tinted copy of Paul Revere's famous broadside of the affair on King's Street.  The image was actually cribbed from an earlier version by Henry Pelham that appeared in the Boston Gazette.

With public opinion inflamed, the two regiments in the city were withdrawn to Castle William on an island in the harbor.  Had they not been, “they would probably be destroyed by the people—should it be called rebellion, should it incur the loss of our charter, or be the consequence what it would,” according to Secretary of State Andrew Oliver.  By May General Thomas Gage, in command of all troops in the colonies, decided that the presence of the 29th Regiment was counterproductive to good order, and had the regiment removed from Massachusetts entirely.

Meanwhile, at the end of March Captain Preston, the men in his rescue squad, Pvt. White and four civilian employees of the Customs House, who some had charged fired out the windows of the building were indicted for murder and manslaughter.

Gov. Hutchinson managed by hook or by crook to delay the start of the trial for nearly a year to let inflamed passions died down.  Patriots took that time to organize the publication of an account of the event, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, which although banned from circulation in the city, inflamed passions across the Colonies, and even earned sympathy when it was reprinted in London.

Patriot lawyer John Adams successfully took up the defense of Captain Preston, the accused soldiers, and civilian employees of the Customs House.

Despite the delay, it looked like it would be very difficult for Captain Preston and the soldiers to get a fair trial in Massachusetts.  All of the leading local lawyers had refused to take their cases.  John Adams, a leading Patriot, a man with boundless political ambition, and first cousin to rabble-rouser-in-chief Samuel Adams, agreed to take on the case, despite howls of protest from his political allies.

It was a great choice.  Assisted by his cousin Josiah Quincy, another Patriot, and Loyalist Robert Auchmuty he quickly obtained a not guilty verdict in the first trial.  Captain Preston was shown by the testimony of multiple witnesses to have never ordered the troops to fire and to have tried to get them under control.  That was in October.

In November the cases of the enlisted soldiers proved dicer.   They had, after all, fired lethal rounds without orders.  Adam’s pled straight up self-defense.  He told the jury that the men were under attack by the mob, “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.”  Appealing to the class prejudice of the land-owning pool of eligible jurors, Adams won acquittal on murder charges for all of the defendants, and only two were convicted of manslaughter.      

Privates Montgomery and Kilroy still faced the death penalty at the sentencing on December 14, they “prayed the benefit of clergy”, a remnant of Medieval law in which the essentially claimed exemption from punishment on the grounds that they were “clergy” who could read a Bible verse.        The two were branded on the thumb and released.

By the time the civilians were up for trial in December, enthusiasm for continuing the case against them, which was weak and based on the testimony of one servant easily proven to be false, was waning.

Whatever the outcome of the trials, the events of March 5 helped set the stage for the American Revolution.

By the way, the term Boston Massacre was not applied to the bloody ruckus until long after the fact.  Like another iconic event, the so-called Boston Tea Party it got its name during the brief national enthusiasm generated by the 50th anniversaries of important Revolutionary and pre-revolutionary events.  And like the Tea Party it was soon imbued with a lot of romantic myth and nonsense.            

 

Patsy Cline Was Country Musicas Greatest Thrush

Early in her career Patsy Cline worked in cowgirl outfits that her mother designed and hand made.

There may not be a Don McLean song to commemorate the occasion, but sixty-three years ago, March 5, 1963, was surely another day the music died.  On that day a small plane carrying Patsy Cline and fellow Grand Ol’ Opry stars Cowboy Copas and Hankshaw Hawkins went down on the way home to Nashville from a Kansas City benefit.  The three stars and two others were killed in the crash in remote woods near Camden, Tennessee.  

Learning that the plane was missing in the area friends from Nashville joined in the frantic search.  The crash site was discovered by Roger Miller, one of the many young artists Cline mentored. 

                                Roger Miller, overcome by grief, at the crash site he discovered.  Hankshaw Hawkins's guitar strap and a boot lie at his feet.

Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Virginia in 1932 to a sixteen-year-old seamstress and her blacksmith husband, she was performing in local talent shows and clubs by her mid-teens.  During a short-lived marriage to Gerald Cline in the early ‘50’s she began performing as Patsy Cline. 

Cline was soon being featured on a local Washington, DC TV program along another rising young country star, Jimmy Dean and signed a contract with Four Star Records.  She enjoyed middling success recording, at the label’s insistence, material not suited for her rich voice and emotional delivery.  Still, she was getting enough attention to be invited to occasionally appear on the Opry. 

In 1957 she competed on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, one of the most popular shows on television.  Godfrey insisted that she abandon the cowgirl outfits her mother made for a sophisticated cocktail dress.  She sang her recently recorded Walkin’ After Midnight and won the competition handily.  The song was released as a single and soared to the top of the country music and pop charts.  Cline regularly appeared on Godfrey’s radio show and became a featured performer on the Ozark Jubilee on ABC. 

                                    Patsy on her 1957 wedding day to Charlie Dick.

Cline was touring regularly and was a fast-rising star when she married Charlie Dick.  Despite rumors of abuse, she always called Dick the “Love of my life.”  Together they had two children, Randy and Julie, who her mother helped raise while she was on tour.  After her death Dick dedicated much of the rest of his life to preserving Patsy’s memory.

With a new manager Cline was finally released from her restrictive Four Star contract and signed with Decca in 1960.  She enjoyed country and pop success with a string of hits that featured full orchestration and elaborate production values, the so-called Nashville Sound.  Her first Decca record I Fall to Pieces set the standard for the new sound. 

By 1961 Cline became a member of the Opry and was soon one of its biggest stars.  She befriended and mentored many artists, especially women like Lorretta Lynn, Dottie West, and Barbara Mandrel.  But she could also hang out with male performers matching beers and dirty jokes.  Incredibly generous, she often supported struggling performers, even bringing them into her home.  Cline was the best loved woman in Nashville. 

Her high ride almost ended in a near fatal car crash in 1961 in which she was thrown through the windshield.  Dottie West rushed to the scene and cradled her injured friend picking glass out of her hair.  Cline declined treatment in the hospital until the other driver was cared for.  That driver died, and the delay may have made Cline’s injuries worse.  She suffered a broken hip, several broken ribs, and a deep, long gash on her forehead. 

After her auto accident in 1961, Cline's appearance dramatically changed as she used wigs and heavy makeup to cover a serious scar on her forehead.

The rest of her life she had to hide the scar under wigs and heavy make-up.  Ever the trooper, she returned to touring while still on crutches. 

Her recording of young songwriter Willie Nelson’s Crazy became the biggest hit of her career.  Cline became the first woman in country music to have her own show at Carnage Hall.  She also sang at the Hollywood Bowl and headlined her own show in Las Vegas. 

Patsy Cline was only 30 years old when she died.  As so often happens after the tragic early death of a star she has since become a cultural icon.

                                              Jessica Lang earned an Oscar nod for Best Actress for her portrayal of Cline in Sweet Dreams.

Cline was featured in at least two notable feature films and two made-for-TV movies. In 1980 she was played by Beverly D’Angelo in the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter.  Five years later she got her own biopic, Sweet Dreams, staring Jessica Lang and Ed Harris as her husband Charlie Dick.  The film was criticized for putting Cline’s career on the back burner instead of focusing on the melodrama around her tempestuous marriage.  None-the-less Lang garnered an Academy Award Nomination for her star turn.as co-produced by Lynn’s and Cline’s daughter, Julie Fudge.

Cline was also prominently featured in Ken Burn’s epic PBS series Country Music.

On the stage, the 1985 off-Broadway two person play Always...Patsy Cline based on the friendship and correspondence of the star with a Houston fan has become a staple of regional and 

In 1995 Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story, a film about the life and career of Cline’s friend Dottie West played on CBS with Tere Myers as Patsy.  Yet another take on the relationship with Lynn, Patsy & Loretta was 2019 Lifetime flick with Broadway star Megan Hilty as Cline.  Directed by the Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri the film a staple of regional and dinner theater productions.  A 1991 production, A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline is a straightforward account of Cline's career featuring many of her most famous songs.  It is also regularly staged.

                                       Cline was the first woman solo artist to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1971.

To this day no one sings a song with emotional intensity of the girl from Winchester.

 

The Washington Women’s Suffrage Procession of 1913 Unleashed New Militancy

The stunning program cover for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington.

Note—This has become an annual post because it is much requested.  It is also a timely reminder of the importance of bold action.

The giant Women’s March on Washington and sister marches across the country that greeted Donald Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017 and they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done even larger marches a year later were seismic events that brought a broad, united, new intersessional feminism to the forefront of American social and political life after years on the defense as hard-fought gains once thought secure were under attack at every level.

Mass demonstrations no matter how large, critics maintained, had lost their power as the media lost interest in them and the public became bored.  Huge anti-war demonstrations that broke all records were barely covered by the press and had no discernible effect on curtailing a vastly unpopular war in Congress or in the Bush administration and only moderately moved the needle during the Obama years when painfully slow withdrawals of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were matched by a brutal escalation of bombing and drone attacks not only in those two countries but across the region. 

The Women's March on Washington was a rough welcome to Trump and a game changer for the feminist movement.

Instead, the media became fixated with a shiny new object—the tiny but colorful Tea Party movement.  Events drawing a few dozen in silly hats waving "Don’t Tread on Me" flags, and toting misspelled homemade signs received lead coverage night after night on network and cable TV news. Part of it was the sheer novelty of a right wing “grassroots” movement.  Traditional conservatives were at first dismissive and doubtful, but a hand-full of deep pocket millionaires saw potential and pumped unlimited money into the movement, created faux grassroots national organizations to “lead it,” and soon used it to capture the Republican Party for their oligarchical aims.  Within what seemed like a blink of an eye they were in control of dozens of state governments, Congress, and the Presidency and seemed capable of completely remaking America with no effective opposition.

But there were signs of restiveness and resistance—the Occupy Movement which spread like wildfire, the up-from-the-streets youth-led Black Lives Matter movement, the May Day Immigration Rights marches and the rise of the Dreamers, the New Civil Rights movement represented by Moral Mondays.  But it was the Women’s Marches, perhaps because they included so many middle-class White women, that finally recaptured the media and nation’s attention. 

To its credit the Women’s March movement has, not always smoothly, taken pains to broaden its leadership and representation and to stand for an intersessional struggle that includes not just traditional feminist objectives like preserving abortion rights, removing obstacles to social and professional advancement, the Equal Rights Amendment, and election of women, but in support of Women of Color, immigrants and refugees, Muslims and other minority religions, the LBGTQ+ communities, Native Americans, the disabled, the labor movement, and environmentalists.  It was a perfect process, and serious divisions remain over issues like electoral politics, particularly endorsement of Democrats, and levels of street militancy, but it was a game changer.

One 113 years ago today, another march of women in Washington, in some ways quite different, marked a radical turning point in the long struggle for women’s suffrage and became a spiritual ancestor of today’s movements.

Alice Paul was inspired by the militant campaigns of the British Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst seen under arrest in the right foreground and her daughter Christabel in custody behind her.

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were uppity women.  Worse they were angry, uppity women.  They were more youthful than the dowagers whose decades’ long drive for women’s suffrage had been noble, but fruitless.  Paul had been in England and was impressed with how Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, leaders of a new militant suffrage movement which was making a sensation by using direct action tactics such as publicly heckling politicians, window smashing, and rock throwing raising the profile of the cause there.

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910 she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and soon advanced to a leadership role.  Although the national organization was committed to a state-by-state strategy as its top priority, Paul was made Chair of the Congressional Committee with the responsibility of lobbying for Federal action.  Carrie Chapman Catt, the formidable leader of the NAWSA, did not have much faith in Paul or her project, but was probably glad to have the gadfly out her hair in New York where she was carefully planning an elaborate political effort to win state approval of the Vote by referendum.

Carrie Chapman Catt of New York was the formidable head of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.  She would split with Alice Paul over strategy and style and the two were sometimes bitter rivals.  Their two-pronged suffrage campaign, moderate and radical, actually complimented each other and help rapidly move to the goal.  But when the 19th Amendment was ratified, it was the moderate Catt, not the bur-under-the-saddle Paul who was invited to the Wilson White House.

By 1912 Paul and Burns set up shop in the Capitol as a semi-autonomous affiliate of the NAWSA called the Congressional Union.  

In the Presidential election that year, Catt broke ranks with many older suffragists who were traditionally Republican, and endorsed Woodrow Wilson, a distinguished academic and supposedly a new breed of progressive Democrat, in the hopes that he would swing his party behind suffrage.

Paul, however, did not want to wait for a painfully slow lobbing process to nudge the new Chief Executive in the right direction.  She declared her intention to “hold his feet to the fire” from the very beginning with a huge Suffrage demonstration on the eve of his inauguration.

Don’t imagine a modern march on Washington with mobs of somewhat disorganized marchers in pink pussy caps carrying banners, signs, and puppets in a mass throng on the Capitol’s wide avenues.  Paul’s Woman Suffrage Procession was planned out with military precision, the thousands of women marchers were arrayed in designated units, marching abreast.  Most units wore white, the symbol of purity and adopted color of the suffrage movement.   The procession would be led by equestrians and floats with women as various allegorical figures broke up the ranks of marchers.  An elaborate program was printed, and a proper parade permit was obtained from local authorities.

Wilson arrived by train from his New Jersey home on Monday, March 3, 1913, the day before his inauguration.  As the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to break the grip of Republican dominance and as a man of known Southern roots and sympathies, he likely expected a whoopsie-do reception in the culturally Southern city.  Instead, only a handful of dignitaries, politicians, and the press were at hand.  Everybody else in town seems to have been lining Pennsylvania Avenue.

No wonder, for Paul had put on a dazzling show led by the beautiful blonde lawyer and activist Inez Milholland astride a white horse in flowing Greek robes.  Behind her, Paul and her friends, also on horseback, led 8,000 marchers, almost all women, and on parade.

An estimated half a million onlookers crowded the route including cheering supporters, the idly curious, a lot of very, very angry men.

Mobs of men swarm and menace an ambulance trying to transport injured marchers as police stood by.  It took Army troops to restore order and allow the parade to finish.  Despite the violence, maybe because of it, Paul knew the Procession was a triumph.

The procession was quickly attacked by mobs of men along the route, throwing rocks and battering participants with clubs and fists as the police stood by without intervening.  Retaining as much courage and dignity as they could muster, the marchers continued on their route while running a virtual gauntlet.  Before the rear of the march reached its destination some hastily mobilized troops from Fort Myer arrived to provide some protection.  Over 800 marchers, almost all women, were injured in the attacks.

Reaction to the parade and the attacks threatened to overwhelm news of the Presidential inauguration the next day, much to the annoyance of Wilson.  And to the delight of Paul who regarded the operation as successful in every way. She was sure that public outrage would lead to greater support for the cause.

A subsequent investigation held the police derelict in their duty for failing to protect the lawful demonstration and the District of Columbia Police Chief was fired.

In New York Catt was less than thrilled and feared the bold confrontation would alienate male supporters critical for her state-by-state campaign.  None-the-less, Catt staged her own giant parade down Fifth Avenue in May as the kick-off for her ballot initiative plan.  A fifth the marchers in her parade were men.

The breach over militancy and confrontation between Catt and Paul became irreparable in 1914 and Paul’s group severed ties with the national organization.  Two years later they reorganized as the National Women’s Party (NWP.)

                     Alice Paul and her Federal strategy was big news in the New York Times. 

They continued to press Wilson for action with daily picketing at the White House.  When the picketing continued even after the country entered the Great War in Europe, Wilson had Paul and dozens of her associates and supporters arrested, jailed, and force-fed during hunger strikes.  When word got out about the abuse, Wilson was embarrassed yet again. Exasperated, Wilson finally declared support of a Federal Constitutional Amendment for women’s suffrage as a “war measure” and in recognition of the contribution of women to the effort.  He made no mention of Paul or the NWP, but no one doubted that their stubborn militancy had forced his hand.

Both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919.  Then the battle moved to ratification by state legislatures and the state-by-state struggle advocated by Catt was back on.  The NAWSA and NWP played a kind of “good cop/bad cop” tag team on state legislatures with Catt’s group wooing them with compliments and charm, and Paul threatening disruption and defiance.

Alice Paul raises a grape juice toast to the banner that she and members of the National Women's Party sewed by hand to hang on their Washington, D.C. headquarters building in celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment just over 7 years after the Suffrage Procession--a remarkably swift victory.

It proceeded, all things considered, with astonishing speed. On August 19, 1920, Tennessee passed the Amendment by one vote in the legislature, securing the necessary support to become a part of the Constitution.  When the Secretary of State certified the adoption on August 26, Paul and her cohorts proudly unfolded a banner on the NWP headquarters building in Washington and toasted the event—with grape juice, of course.