News shared from Knoxville Branch
In the summer of 1920, Tennessee Gov. A.H. Roberts called a special session in Nashville for legislators to vote whether to ratify the 19th Amendment.
With women’s right to vote on the line – if Tennessee voted yes, the amendment would become the law of the land – suffragists and anti-suffragists swarmed the city and set up their headquarters at The Hermitage Hotel, the bastion for the battle that ensued.
The hallways of the hotel were like trenches, and the lobby was the battlefield.
Suffragists shot accusations, and antis fired insults back, each side wearing roses like battle emblems, yellow for the suffragists, red for the antis.
But the antis had a secret weapon – the Jack Daniel’s Suite, a wild room on the eighth floor where legislators were wooed and boozed by liquor lobbyists allied with the antis.
The room is still shrouded in mystery because it was illegal – Prohibition was newly in place just that January – but the hotel’s historian Tom Vickstrom and suffrage researchers have preserved some of the stories from its time.