2020 Presentation Transcript

Transcription of "Country Roads and Small Towns: Tracking West Virginia's Contribution to the 19th Amendment” 

West Virginia Day 2020

Saturday, June 20, 2020

Transcribed by Intellitext

Karen Diaz:   Good morning, everyone.  We'll start in just a couple minutes.  Thank you for joining us today. 

Good morning, everyone.  Welcome to the annual celebration of West Virginia Day, sponsored by the WVU Libraries and the West Virginia and Regional History Center. 

In 1861, as the U.S. became massively divided over the issue of slavery, leading to the American Civil War, the western regions of Virginia split with the eastern portion politically. On June 20, 1863, the western region was admitted to the Union as a new separate state, initially planned to be called the State of Kanawha, but ultimately named West Virginia.

Thus, we are here to celebrate the day we became a state.  We typically use the opportunity to celebrate in person in our lovely library building and enjoy eating a piece of birthday cake.  It also marks the opening of a new exhibit in our WVRHC that educates us on the topic of the state’s history that we have chosen to examine in a particular year.  This year, we are unable to do any of that, but I'm glad we can celebrate together virtually.  One benefit is that I hope people who may not have been able to join us in Morgantown may be able to join us here.  I am also happy to say that we look forward to opening the on-site exhibition on August 18th, on the occasion of the ratification of the amendment. 

Each West Virginia Day we mark a different aspect of West Virginia history.  This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.  This year, though, also marks the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which gave the right to vote to racial minorities.  Together these two events are being explored in our Art in the Libraries Exhibit, Undefeated, which will open online in August and in our Downtown Campus Library in January 2021.  I invite you to visit the WVU Libraries’ Art in the Libraries page for more information on that.

Now I'll turn it over to Dr. John Cuthbert, the Director of the West Virginia and Regional History Center who will introduce our speaker.

John Cuthbert:   Good morning, everyone, and happy West Virginia Day to you all.  It's my honor to introduce our speaker this morning, but I want to say first that we'll hold all questions until the end of the program.  You can ask questions using the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen at any time.  If a question pops up that you see on your screen that coincides with your interests, you can give it a vote with the thumbs up icon.  Questions that receive multiple thumbs up will receive priority, if time runs short in the Q&A period. 

Our speaker today, Anne Effland, holds a Master’s Degree in History from WVU and a Ph.D. in Agricultural History and Rural Studies from Iowa State University.

For the past 30 years she has worked as a research historian, social scientist, and economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, currently as a post-retirement “experienced worker.”

Her historical research since 1990 has ranged widely, including studies of U.S. farm and rural policy; rural labor, women, and minorities; and institutional history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

She recently received an award for lifetime achievement in field of agricultural history.

Anne got her start as a professional historian at WVU, in fact, working full-time here in the West Virginia and Regional History Center as a manuscripts processor, while pursuing her graduate studies.

A fellow grad student working at the center at the same time was me, so the two of us go back a long way.  [Laughter.] 

Anne’s MA thesis was the first in-depth study of the West Virginia woman suffrage movement, and most of the thesis was published in a series of articles in West Virginia History. 

She also participated in several WV Humanities Council projects on women’s history, both while in Morgantown, and after moving to away, including the first Missing Chapters volume and an exhibit project Traditions and Transitions: Women in West Virginia History.

Anne told me that she was delighted to be given an opportunity to return to her West Virginia and women’s history roots today, at the place where it all began, and we are delighted to have her.

Please welcome Anne Effland.

Anne Effland:   Thank you, John.  As he said, I'm very delighted to have this opportunity to return to women's history, to West Virginia, and the work I did many years ago which is of current interest again, with this 100th anniversary point. 

Since leaving West Virginia University, I've spent a lot of time studying rural and agricultural history, and I want to connect that to my study of women's history, including in West Virginia, given the strong agricultural base here.  But first I'll talk about what happened in the movement, to give you some clear background, before I go into any analysis like that. 

As John mentioned, I started my work in a roundabout way.  I wanted to give a shout out of the West Virginia University Libraries, in the Regional Collection as we called it at the time.  We came across some chapters by Lenna Lowe Yost, who was part of the Temperance movement but also the suffragist movement as well.  So it became a natural fit for me to focus on that in particular. 

Having worked through the research for the missing chapters of her book, I came across many bits and pieces.  It was a typical history project, where you find bits and pieces of the information and then journal records and legislature records from out of state, and then more from the West Virginia archives, etc.  It was an investigative process to put everything together, and it was trickier than I thought it would be when I started, but that's how they always seem to go.  [Laughter.] 

Let me go through my research process.  Lenna Lowe Yost had a cousin in Fairmont, it turned out.  In West Virginia the suffragist movement followed a similar trajectory as the national one.  As early as 1867 there was a resolution introduced for women's suffrage.  The idea was that West Virginia, as a new state, might also bring in women's suffrage as part of its new character.  Of course, it wasn't accepted.  He brought it up again the next year, which also failed.  Then it was brought up again the next time in 1869.

Then many other states began introducing resolutions, such as Colorado in 1886.  But most of these were related to statehood.  Nine suffrage clubs in West Virginia were organized.  The suffragists in Wheeling met, but still had no luck getting anything through the legislature. 

There was an effort to try to get presidential women's suffrage, to try to get their foot in the door, similar to what people in Washington, DC do now, and not granting the right to vote for legislators or Congressmen.  But that effort also failed. 

I hope you can see the top of this screen.  But there were clubs in Wellsburg, Wheeling, Moundsville I believe, New Manchester, etc.  I'm sorry, I can't see this on my screen.  And there were a few more in the northern panhandle area.  These were all areas with a concentration of professional, married women, often married to successful professionals or businesspeople who may have had experience with the women's suffrage movement in other parts of the country before they came to West Virginia.  They began to organize in 1885. 

Interest in women's suffrage in the legislature changed and increased as we got closer to the 20th century, along with protections for workers and women workers.  There was more and more interest and support, but still no success until about 1915, when even the governor was calling for including women's suffrage in a state referendum. 

Although there was a dieout period in the early 1900s with very little activity in the state, it picked up again around 1905-1910.  By the early teens, as in other parts of the country, West Virginia women were more active and West Virginia men were more supportive.  Governor Hatfield appeared at the 1914 West Virginia Suffrage Day.  There was also a march in 1913 in New York to fight for a national amendment. 

But in West Virginia, the success only led to the passing of a resolution to allow the voters of the state to make a decision.  So it was very quick, introduced in January, coming out of committee, and passed by both Houses within about nine days.  At that point, all efforts in the state, as well as at the national level, turned their attention to trying to get this passed in West Virginia.  It was a bit of a surprise because it wasn't known as a strong suffragist state. 

So the women and their male supporters got to work, setting up a referendum campaign headquarters in Morgantown, which had Lenna Lowe Yost as its leader.  There was support at the national level, with paid organizers and speakers.  Later in November, finally, the vote was held, with high hopes for success. 

There was increasing attention from male politicians.  Both political parties had moved toward favoring women's suffrage at the national level, but it was also becoming an acceptable national reform for politicians of both parties.  Along with women leaders, there was a group of men who participated in the "Flying Squadron of Speakers," that traveled around the state to speak in favor of women's suffrage.  There was a larger number of speakers speaking in favor of suffrage then, than against suffrage.  So the expectations were very high that this would pass. 

The National Women's Suffrage Association had planned to take part, as part of their state by state strategy.  A number of other campaigns were going on in different states, such as in both Dakotas, and all were supported with about $20,000, which was a lot in those times.  In the end, though, West Virginia was unable to come up with that large sum of money of $5,000 for the national effort.  The annual dues at the time was only $600. 

However, the money raised was used to bring in speakers and women to do the organizing.  To reach the level of a successful vote on a statewide referendum was going to take a lot more effort than those small clubs I mentioned before, such as in Newtown, Parkington, etc.  They gave a lot of hope to the campaign, but most of the work was done by women coming in from the outside.  As those organizers pointed out, the amount of money and people brought in showed that the National Association considered West Virginia a key state to win in their plan to win the national right to vote. 

A leader from Chicago spoke to the Republican Convention in the state, for example, and Anna Howard Shaw spoke 13 times throughout the year, they brought in the National Chairwomen's Organization to help Yost get the local organization started.  There were 28 paid organizers in the state that gathered together all the smaller and local organizations.  So it was a great effort.  Even at the end, they made sure all the right newspapers and speakers, etc., were being rallied. 

They also sent an organizer who worked directly with labor, always considered high priority in the state, with a lot of manufacturing and extractive industries, particularly along the Ohio Valley and the north and central parts of the state. 

Unfortunately, after all that effort, which took most of a year, in November only two counties out of all 55 returned majorities in favor of suffrage.  It was a huge shock of the suffragists themselves, having put in all this energy from the national and state level, and the apparent support of so many state leaders.  In the end, though, they had such a large majority against it.  It was the largest majority by far against suffrage in all the eight states undergoing referendums in the same year.  Four of those were successful, but of the ones that failed, West Virginia was at the bottom. 

Only the two northern counties in the northern panhandle actually voted for suffrage, which is where the local organizations started.  The places that appeared to have strong organizing and strong support, like Wheeling and Ohio County, had 30% or less.  Fairburg [name?] only had 42%.  Morgantown, a more recent organization, and a site of the university with women from the university supporting the organization, is only 42%.  And it goes down from there.  We see that they are all showing less and less support as we go further south. 

So what happened?  There was a variety of opinions.  From the national level, Carrie Chapman Catt blamed their normal enemies, the liquor interests and in particular -- [didn't finish.]  That's one range of reasons.  At the other end, we find Eleonore Raoul, who traveled around meeting people and starting clubs, who said, "There's no getting around the fact that the state was woefully unprepared for a campaign," even though it was important and there was leadership support.  Clearly, though, there was not enough organizing that had grown over many years to support this kind of activity, at least according to Raoul. 

I'll talk a bit about Carrie Chapman Catt's suggestion, which was a common one from those who feared that women would vote for Prohibition.  It doesn't seem like a likely explanation in a state like West Virginia, that had passed a Prohibition amendment in 1912.  It was part of the Temperance movement, and had already made the decision that Prohibition is what it would have.  You can see there's very high support for Prohibition in the state, according to this map.  It's possible this had some influence in Wheeling, with 33% opposition to Prohibition there.  But the chances of this idea having a strong influence on the outcome was pretty slim. 

The state leaders who had spoken at the 1915 Convention were actually concerned about the rural areas of the state, understanding that that would be an area of high opposition.  They had pointed out that raising the Temperance issue may help bring in votes for women's suffrage.  The anti-suffragists were clear this was not an issue in West Virginia, because male voters had already brought about Prohibition.  They didn't see a conflict there and considered it irrelevant. 

As I noted, the votes for Prohibition don't track at all with the votes for suffrage.  The highest majority votes for Prohibition occurred in Dodger County, Clay County, etc., and the majority of votes against suffrage in those counties were almost as high.  So the link is essentially non-existent.  My husband, who does statistics, ran a correlation on these statistics and said it was essentially zero.  So this had very little to do with what came about in the referendum. 

One possible explanation might have been the ramping up activism against women's suffrage, which was not really part of the conversation until the activity for women's suffrage came about.  It never got much attention before the referendum.  But as soon as the idea came up, they were very busy getting out speakers, broadsides, and newspaper articles, explaining to women why they should oppose it and to men why they should vote against it. 

You can see a bit on these broadsides, but they're hard to read on the screen.  But the reasons the opponents claimed suffrage should be opposed resonated with people who hadn't yet thought a lot about women voting, or had seen it as a potentially dangerous change.  There hadn't been a strong argument in favor of it yet.  They pointed out it would disrupt family unity, remove women from the domestic sphere, was linked with socialism -- a real worry at the time -- subject women to jury duty and military service, etc.  They also did calculations that took the number of women belonging to suffrage organizations and calculated the share they were of the total women, and said the majority of women didn't want to vote.  They argued this would be unfair, to foist on them a right they didn't want. 

Finally, they also pointed out that conditions for labor for women and children did not actually improve in states where women could vote, pointing to Utah as an example, which gave women the right to vote early on.  They cited the immoral lifestyles of the Mormon families.  [Laughter.] 

Some organizers pointed out that it may have been possible to overcome some of this, but really, the state hadn't done the work over the years to bring this issue up fully to people so they could think about it, especially to men in particular.  Eleonore Raoul was not alone in recognizing that awareness of suffrage was very low in this state.  Irene Drukker Broh founded the Huntington Suffrage Organization and was the daughter of one of the first women who called for women's suffrage in the 1840s.  She said in this quotation that people thought they were cranks and crazies.  This is a very new club near a commercial center by the Ohio River and the railroad.  The referendum was taking place at a time and place where people didn't even give credence to women's suffrage as an idea. 

At the same time, Madeliene Breckenridge, a leader from Kentucky, said they were very hopeful about West Virginia, but at the same time concerned about the lack of preparation, as seen in this quotation. 

Here's another shout out to my husband, who did this nice map for me, different from the one I typed out and colored myself years ago.  [Laughter.]  This just gives you an idea of the areas of support and lack of support in that referendum campaign.  Previous scholarship has tried to find consistent explanations related to regional characteristics and other explanations for why suffrage did and did not succeed in some places.  Industrialization and commercial development, along with manufacturing, were associated often with relatively strong pro-suffrage movements.  Voluntary organizations were often linked to progressive reforms and considered important.  But there's no clear link.  Women in those types of places also opposed suffrage in many of these places. 

So my own analysis in my thesis, some years ago, was that West Virginia's complex commercial industry by the Ohio River, and mixed farming in the western area, also tied to southern sympathies from not too far back at that time, and the high mountain areas where extractive industries were more prominent, all played a role, while other areas also had greater contact with more progressive areas.  The interior or eastern areas were more isolated and thus had more conservative ideologies.  This map supports those ideas to some extent. 

But in terms of rural history, what they call small towns may be different in our current view.  Places like Fairmont and Wheeling were large centers at the time, but there were other places at the time that may have served in that capacity with a leadership matching that progressive ideal in other parts of the state.  You can see the idea of having the southern sympathies along the southern mountain part of the state, and then along the Ohio River Valley there's more progressive ideas.  But there's a lot of variety in the interior of West Virginia.  It's hard to know what kind of leadership existed in those places.  What looks like a tiny town in an interior county without a lot of development could actually function similar to a center like Fairmont in a different part of the state, as far as the views on suffrage and thus carry more of the votes for suffrage. 

I don't want to spend too much more time on this, so we have time for questions.  I'll just leave that out there for anyone who wants to do some more interesting research projects.  I've been talking with friends in Iowa and Maine, about how and why some of these places supported or didn't support suffrage despite expectations. 

To add credence to that, Eleonore Raoul, who was hired by the national organization to do organizing in Georgia and New Jersey, by the time West Virginia was a high priority she was considered experienced and so they sent her to the northern panhandle.  She traveled in other parts of the state as well, and left a whole collection of letters behind written to her mother with some interesting anecdotes, sharing some of her views about some of the rural areas that suggest they were not as backwards as they expected.  The more time they spent with rural people, she said, the more successful they were.  She says she's on a trip to Preston County here, and says they're waiting for the mail to go out ten miles off, way out in the countryside, to where they'll speak that night.  She said they were hard after the farmers' votes and she thinks they'll get them, in the far eastern side of Preston County. 

She has another interesting anecdote, as the quotation on the slide says.  She says she was very discouraged about the lack of interest in Wheeling and more encouraged by the rural counties.  And two of which she helped with organizing, Brooke and Hancock, did vote in favor of suffrage. 

I have to read one more.  She said, last, I had not reckoned on the natives calling a hill a mountain.  There were ditches, stones, and boulders.  "When I left the village, there was little admiration that I was going."  She had use of a car that was provided by the Georgia group her mother had been part of.  She knew if she made it, it would be a feather in her cap.  Afterward, she knew she had clinched for good some votes because the countryside knew she was no city parasite.  [Laughter.] 

Enough of the referendum.  Let's move on to the final vote for the ratification, which only happened a few years after the devastating vote against the referendum.  You saw this map which shows the state of suffrage in 1917 before.  At the time, the congressional delegation was moving more towards supporting national suffrage in part because of politicians from both sides showing their support for it.  In fact, many people believed it was war work that women did in support of WWI that brought up a lot of support for the idea of women voting. 

When the resolution came up in Congress, in fact, the entire delegation voted in favor of it.  And just to contrast between the 1915 and 1920 support -- [didn't finish.]  Let me stop for a second.  I'm concerned about time.  But the House and Senate delegations from West Virginia all supported the passage of the amendment, including Davis Elkins, who had been against it all his life.  So he had left the family tradition of opposing women's suffrage and voted for it in Congress. 

Once it passes Congress it has to be ratified by all the states.  For some it went very quickly.  West Virginia also became interested.  It's a bit surprising that the national leadership still saw a possibility for passage in West Virginia, despite the previous loss.  You can see how the extent of support changed over time, with only these nine counties initiating support in favor of suffrage in 1915, whereas 23 did in 1920. 

It was a bit of a difficult fight.  I think the expectation was just getting the political leadership to support it, and not everyone.  So we were at a different level of political views.  But the state legislators who had to vote felt free of the pressure of that state referendum even just a few years later.  I mentioned women's war work.  There were also concerns about political support at the national level.  So it was a bit complicated.  Governor Cornwell supported it but didn't want to bring in an expensive special state session, but he worked out a way to do it by combining it with a tax issue, and it was a fairly easy victory. 

The Senate was then tied up with gubernatorial strategic positioning and ended up with a tie that couldn't seem to be broken.  One of them was in California and afraid of flying, but they managed to persuade him to return to vote, and kept the session going by threatening to hold a vote if too many of them left.  So everyone stayed in session, and the senator who was in California took a three-day train ride across the country and West Virginia became the 34th [?] state to ratify. 

Carrie Chapman Catt made clear that suffrage is won.  She said, the words are simple but thrill as few words can do.  To them, it meant that the nation is won and that the seventy-year struggle is over.  She considered the West Virginia win critical to providing the momentum that gave Tennessee the incentive to ratify in time for the 1920 election.  So West Virginia played a critical role that was overlooked by many. 

I included a small collage of women who were involved.  I want to have time for a Q&A, so I won't go into it too much.  It's hard to track these women, but a number of them were professional leaders or educators or otherwise involved.  And here's my final slide with my contact information, if you have questions or further ideas for research on this.  And here's the West Virginia Suffrage Campaign song, sung to the tune of "Oh Christmas Tree." 

Thank you for your attention. 

Lori Hostuttler:  I'll moderate the questions.  The first question goes back to the beginning of the presentation, when you showed the timeline and some of the early introduction of suffrage.  It was surprisingly earlier than we thought.  What parts of West Virginia did the early introducers of suffrage legislation come from? 

Anne Effland:   Good question.  It's hard to trace some of them.  I didn't have the biographical directories for these, but they tended to come from areas like Fairmont or where these suffrage clubs were from.  Whoever asked that question, if you email me, I can go back through the details of my thesis and pull those out.  I didn't put that in my notes.  But I do remember a couple came from more interior counties that were a bit of a surprise, which tracks with my idea that some towns in those interior counties were more important commercial centers of ideas and professional people than we sometimes give them credit for. 

Lori Hostuttler:  Okay.  Thank you.  For the second question, you had her photo and then you mentioned her later: Mrs. Stephen B. Elkins, the wife of a senator.  Do you know if her views were actually her own?  Was she actually against suffrage?  Or were they her husband's views? 

Anne Effland:   Yeah.  Her compatriot was Carrie Watson, a daughter of the Watson family and married to Arthur Fleming.  But I have not seen any of their own papers that would reflect their own views on things.  They clearly had some national standing, being the wives of well-known men.  Stephen Elking actually came back to make sure a vote wasn't taken in the early 1900s.  It's hard to separate them out.  But it's also easy to imagine that women in her position would either accept or recognize their role in the family.  But she's also the daughter of Henry Davis, who was a strong opponent of suffrage. 

Just like with Carrie Watson, there's a strong daughter and wife component to it.  And she was willing to represent the national organization, so it's hard to say she would do that if it wasn't her own views, but then again it's hard to say without looking at a broader set of papers from her.  Her son, though, did vote for suffrage when he was a congressman for West Virginia.  Does that mean he defied his mother?  Maybe they had some revealing conversations.  That would be interesting to know. 

Lori Hostuttler:  I thought the same thing.  [Laughter.]  She must have been flexible enough that he thought he could come out with that position. 

Anne Effland:   Right, or who knows what her position was. 

Lori Hostuttler:  So there's a hunt for the records and documents about her, too. 

Our next question asks about a photo you had on the screen.  It says, have you looked at support for Governor Cornwell in the southern and eastern part of the state? 

Anne Effland:   This is a nice research topic, again.  There was Governor Hatfield and other politicians in West Virginia who came out fairly early in favor of suffrage, along with a couple other congressional representatives, like Hunter Moss.  But he's certainly critical to ratification because the amendment came up at a time when the legislature was not in session, so he managed to organize a special session around a tax issue that already had to be dealt with.  So he made sure that cost issue wasn't weighed against the suffrage views.  He felt there was strong support to not worry about passage until this gubernatorial stuff came into the fray.  He was instrumental in getting the Senator back from California, Senator Block.  He helped make sure another Senator wasn't unseated.  So he was instrumental in making sure the vote happened in a way that it would support ratification of the suffrage amendment.  Another great research project!

Lori Hostuttler:  Great.  We did have someone say that Senator Young was from Pocahontas County. 

Anne Effland:   Thank you for bringing that up.  That's an interesting idea about where the strength really lies. 

Lori Hostuttler:  The next question asks about the role of the ministry in the educated and uneducated, especially as it seems like a missing dynamic. 

Anne Effland:   I apologize, since it's been about 40 years since I did this research.  I should have looked into some of these aspects more deeply.  That would have taken a bit more effort, looking at newspapers.  Clearly the mainstream Protestant ministry was pro-suffrage, and there was a rabbi who spoke in favor around the state at the time.  Presbyterian in particular that I recall, as well as Episcopalian and some others from the mainstream side, also supported suffrage.  There's not a lot of details about speakers who spoke in favor, except that they were leaders from outside the state. 

But the general consensus among those who look at the suffrage movement in general is that the more traditional side, like the southern Baptists and others, would have had a stronger connection to the ideas of the women's sphere and not disrupting the social fabric.  There's a lot of belief for why men in more rural areas in particular wouldn't have supported suffrage.  Again, that's another good research project.  Clearly, religious ideology was a component of both pro- and anti-suffrage movements. 

Lori Hostuttler:  We have one more question.  I think it's a really good question.  What role, if any, did race play in the suffrage debate in West Virginia? 

Anne Effland:   That's a very good question, which I didn't mention.  It certainly has come up, especially along the eastern counties with a stronger connection to the confederacy.  We're only 50 years out from the Civil War at this point.  As a new state, West Virginia was not as welcome in that part of the state as in other parts of the state, so there's still some opposition to that.  But there's very little Black population in that part of the state at the time, and moreso in the southern areas where they're starting to be part of the coal mining and other extractive industries.  So there's issues around Blacks and whites being brought into the mines to break up the labor unionization efforts. 

But I didn't see in any of the literature for either side a discussion of the impact of the Black vote.  The anti-suffragists may have been coding it a bit, saying, "It's not just your wives and daughters who will voting," but there were other issues around working-class voters and other ethnic minorities, including Italians and eastern European immigrants from that time.  It would be worth looking into at a more local level.  West Virginia is challenging to do research on, because the regions are so diverse.  Local research can be very time-consuming to get into with the whole state.  But if you put those pieces together, that picture will get clearer. 

Lori Hostuttler:  In addition to race being used as a strategy by either side, is there any evidence that suffragists may have reached out to women of color?  Linda notes in the comments that she thinks McDowell County had Memphis Tennessee Garrison as a suffragist. 

Anne Effland:   That may be.  I didn't come across that in my research, but there's so much more to look into once you have the story and chronology down.  It didn't appear in the newspapers I was looking at, but I wasn't able to do research in all those localities.  That would be a really interesting discovery.  There are suggestions.  It's hard to find even on the national level, as far as links they should have made before.  But it's blindness, looking for chronology first and then explanations later.  It's easier to look at the rhetoric than the stories of individuals. 

Lori Hostuttler:  Thank you.  So those were our last questions and comments.  There was a question I wanted to address, from the Q&A section, about Anne's thesis and its availability.  It's available through the WVU Libraries website as part of our institutional repository.  You can download a digital copy.  The link is in the Q&A box right now, if you don't already have it.  So you do have access to Anne's research. 

We have a nice thank you from Linda in there.  It's true.  So few realize West Virginia's role in the passage of suffrage for the entire nation.  Thank you for enlightening us and speaking with us this morning, Anne.  It's great to see the primary sources in your presentation. 

Thank you to everyone who attended.  I think we plan to put this on our website at some time in the future.  You'll be able to catch it again if you'd like to.  So thank you, and happy West Virginia Day, and have a great rest of your day.  Thanks, everyone. 

Anne Effland:   Thank you, Lori. 

John Cuthbert:   Thanks, Anne.  I thought it was a very interesting program, and I really appreciate your willingness to come on and do it. 

Anne Effland:   Yeah.  Sorry it couldn't be in Morgantown.  Those are all really good questions.  I feel the lapse in time between the time I did the work and now, and the difference between what I did then and how I would do it now. 

John Cuthbert:   But it's a great point of departure, and as you say, there's a lot of new things to do and research to look into.  As you say, there's access to so much more information now.  Now, with digital newspapers, you can take any topic and take it somewhere else.  So yours will lay a nice groundwork for someone who'll explore some other aspects. 

Anne Effland:   There's a new book out by a political scientist, looking very carefully at the changes in political affiliations and parties, which I think would be very revealing in the West Virginia case. 

[End of transcript.]

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