Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president, called for a revolution in 1872

historyThe Public Domain Review1872 · New York, USA

Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president, called for a revolution in 1872

the gist

Victoria Woodhull was a stockbroker, newspaper publisher and suffrage campaigner who became the first woman to run for president in 1872, as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. Her lecture The Impending Revolution, given in February 1872 to audiences of thousands in Boston and New York, called for a Christian socialist uprising against inequality and for the dissolution of divisions between citizens. She attacked the financial elite of the Gilded Age, arguing that the law punished the poor while shielding wealthy landlords and speculators. The speech also contains racist language about race mixing that modern readers find offensive. Her campaign cost her the support of her backers, and she lost her paper and income.

so what

Woodhull's campaign was one of the earliest challenges to the idea that women could hold national office, and her critique of inequality was part of a wider Gilded Age debate about wealth and labour. Her rhetoric also shows how reform movements of the period mixed radical and deeply troubling ideas.

fun fact

Woodhull was also the first female stockbroker to open a brokerage on Wall Street.

more on this

background

Victoria Claflin Woodhull (born Victoria California Claflin; September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.

An activist for women's rights and labor reforms, Woodhull was also an advocate of "free love", by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference. "They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform", she often said. "The world moves."

From Wikipedia: Victoria Woodhull (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗

see

Mathew Benjamin Brady / Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mathew Benjamin Brady / Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

key facts

Born: 23 September 1838
Died: 9 June 1927
Known as: stockbroker, suffragist

Facts: Wikidata (CC0)

Image: The Public Domain Review

source: The Public Domain Review ↗

historyThe Public Domain Review1909 · United States

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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