So it was one day several months ago when I came across an article from Grand Forks, North Dakota republished in the Jefferson City Tribune on January 24,1922 about a man who married a FEMINIST.
Not just a feminist but a “blazing feminist” according to the article.
This was the era in which women had achieved the right to vote after years of public and private pressure. Two or three generations of descendants of those women would set fire to some of their “unmentionables” and force their way to even more significant standing in society.
The lead character in the article was university of North Dakota Professor Albert Levitt, who secretly married Elsie Hill, at the time an assistant law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Elsie Hill was a self-proclaimed militant suffragette and also was the Chairman of the National Woman’s Party.
Levitt proclaimed himself the “luckiest married man in the world.” He solemnly said he was content, “even eager to lose his ‘sex arrogance.’”
“I am in luck because I married not a plaything but a companion; not a chattel but a a chum. LA man who marries a feminist sees clearly that problems of civilization cannot be solved until they are approached from the feminine as well as the masculine point of view,” he said.
Here’s another thing about stumbling across a story such as this that gets in the way of time-efficient research: What happened to this luckiest man in the world and his feminist wife?
They turn out to have been quite a couple, actually, although his luck ran out and they divorced after 35 years of marriage.
Here’s a picture of Albert in 1937 on his way to the U. S. Supreme Court. He was there to challenge the seating of a new member of the court as part of a historic collision between the Executive and the Judicial branches of government. But we’re getting ahead our story.
Albert, described at his death as “the unbelievable, improbable little character,” was born in Maryland and waited until he was about 35 to get married. He was 17 when he joined the Army and went to a seminary for a while after he got out and then picked up degrees from three Ivy League schools and served as an assistant pastor at a Unitarian chapel before he went back into the Army where he served as an ambulance corpsman for the French and then became a U.S. Army chaplain, during which time he was wounded and survived a German gas attack.
Post-war, he became a lawyer where he helped National Women’s Party leader Alice Paul write an Equal Rights Amendment (he wrote 75 drafts before the NWP was satisfied) that failed to go anywhere in those times.
He and Elsie eventually settled in Connecticut where he dabbled in politics. He ran for office several times in his career and was never elected. Ahe helped Wilbur Cross, a Democrat, become governor in 1939 and hen campaigned against Cross’ re-election.
His support of Democrats caught the attention of President Roosevelt, who gave him a job in the Justice Department and in 1935 he was appointed by FDR as the judge of the District Court of the Virgin Islands. He lasted a year in that job and returned to the department. But his break with Roosevelt in 1937 cost him his department job.
He objected to Roosevelt’s appointment of Alabama Senator Hugo Black, whose past association with the Ku Klux Klan and his anti-Catholic public positions made him a target of opponents, to the Supreme Court in 1937. He charged Black had violated the emoluments clause to the Constitution.
The case was based on Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution that says no member of Congress can be appointed to any civil office for which the salary had been increased during that member’s term. In other words, a member of Congress cannot take a government job made more lucrative by the actions of Congress.
During Black’s term in the Senate, Congress had created a new pension program that allowed Supreme Court Justices to retire and continue to collect their salaries. for members of the Supreme Court during Black’s membership. When Justice Willis Van Devanter took advantage of that clause, Senator Black was appointed to succeed him. The Supreme Court refused to hear his case and held he lacked legal standing to file it, a decision that University of Chicago Law professor William Baude wrote in a 2019 Texas Law Review article was worth closer examination.
“Upon closer inspection, it turns out that Levitt’s standing is more plausible than the Court acknowledged. Indeed, such a plaintiff would likely have standing today. Worse, on the merits his claims were correct: Hugo Black was unconstitutionally appointed to the Supreme Court. The Court’s treatment of the case and the broader controversy suggests some uncomfortable facts about the role of the Supreme Court in settling constitutional questions.”
Black went on to a 35-year career on the Supreme Court, the fifth-longest term in court history.
Levitts stayed in the Justice Department until his opposition to Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court cost him that job. He returned to Connecticut, practiced law and became involved in Republican politics although he endorsed FDR’s fourth-term campaign in 1940..
Albert and Elsie moved to California in the 1940s. His name became a familiar one on various California ballots through the years, always as a fringe candidate (he was last in a field of six in the 1950 election that made Richard Nixon a U.S. Senator). He also became a strong critic of the Catholic Church and considered it a threat to American Democracy. He and Elsie divorced in 1956. He soon remarried and died twelve years later, two years before Elsie’s death in 1970.
And Elsie?
She stayed a dedicated feminist the rest of her life. She was born in Connecticut, the daughter of a ten-term Congressman and his wife. In 1901, her father traveled on the first trans-Siberian train during an around-the world trip. Elsie, at the age of 84, was on Pan-American Airlines’ first New York-Moscow flight.
While teaching high school French in Washington, D.C. in 1913, she became involved with the College Equal Suffrage League and quickly moved into the leadership. She was a big supporter of the 19th Amendment—the women’s suffrage amendment
She was arrested for speaking at a rally in Washington in 1918 and later in Boston. She did some jail time.
She kept her own name after marrying Albert, chaired the NWP and led the party’s national council for four years.
Her marriage to Albert merited a story in the New York Times that referred to her as a “militant” who was “Chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Woman’s Pary and a prominent picketer.” It was a secret event with only relatives present. He told some of her suffragist friends about it the next day.
“Miss Hill will not change her Christian or maiden name, thus following the example of several other women—artists, authors, actresses, suffrage leaders and others.,” said the Times. The two didn’t have much of a honeymoon. Albert had to return to his law-teaching duties at the University of North Dakota while her duties with the NWP kept her in Washington until June when they could get together for the summer in Connecticut.
. The ERA that Albert drafted was submitted to Congress in 1923 and was not ratified. It was reintroduced in 1971 and approved by the House and, in 1972, by the Senate. It lacked three states of being ratified when its time limit ran out in 1982. Nevada (2017), Illinois (2018) and Virginia (2020) have passed ratification resolutions.
Missouri has never ratified the ERA.