“The inhuman, blood-curdling scream of injustice!” Marty Forth is young. I can only guess at what else may have motivated his column of Oct. 30.

Last year, a secret society on campus calling itself the Society Against Academic Dishonesty submitted a short essay by Carrie Chapman Catt from “The Woman Citizen” (1924).

They framed this piece, entitled “The Kluxers,” with quotes from Milton McGriff, one calling Catt a white-supremacist; the other stated, “History ultimately will decide who is silly, sophomoric and ignorant of the past, not newspaper editors.”

At the time of this SAADness, I spoke up and distinguished between scholarly incompetence and academic dishonesty. Forth tells us that “Carrie Chapman Catt … lived in a time when it was acceptable to own slaves.”

I quote Catt: “the outsider who knows something of history is filled with amazed disgust.” I cannot say it better myself, but unless willful ignorance is dishonest, I doubt that his column was an example of academic dishonesty.

Carrie Chapman Catt was born in 1859. Abraham Lincoln was re-elected president in 1864. (He was the guy who said that preserving the UNION was more important than freeing the slaves, remember?)

The Confederate States surrendered on April 9, 1865. Lincoln was shot on April 14. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified on December 6, 1865. Carrie Lane was six.

Skip ahead to the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870: “The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Carrie Lane was 11.

Women who had fought hard for the abolition of slavery and for UNIVERSAL suffrage felt betrayed, and in that sense of betrayal the campaign for woman suffrage began anew. In 1871 Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act in an effort to eradicate the Klan and restore order in the South. Carrie Lane was 12.

That sense of betrayal underlay much of the most offensive rhetoric of the suffragists.

Campaigners for woman’s suffrage exploited the dread of enfranchised blacks by arguing that enfranchising white women would ensure the continuation of white supremacy.

Why should savage Indians and illiterate black men be allowed to vote when educated and refined women were not?

They didn’t really mean it, some will say; and yet the legacy of racism stirred up, validated and prolonged in the fight for woman’s suffrage has divided the country ever since.

Read the speeches “The American Sovereign” and “Sovereign and Subject” (both dated 1888/1892).

Chapman/Catt was 31/35 when she stumped those speeches from one end of the country to the other.

Plessey vs Ferguson established “separate but equal” as the law of the land in 1896 against a backdrop of suffrage rhetoric.

If my arithmetic is right, Carrie Chapman Catt was 37, not the youthful, exuberant and outspoken advocate of women’s rights as yet untempered by time and maturity as some have argued in her defense.

A young white male student hears “secret societies” and thinks about fun-loving fraternities who cannot get along with guys living in dorms; people of color hear the same words and think “Ku Klux Klan.”

Catt asked, “if the alleged object is meritorious … why is it necessary to proclaim the aim in secret or enforce it by the terrifying process of masquerade costume.”

In his promised history of secret societies at ISU, perhaps young Forth will explore the nature of what Catt referred to in 1924 as a “whispering campaign of lies and intolerance” against Jews and Catholics that kept the U.S. out of the League of Nations.

Whether it was “instituted by the Kluxers or someone else, it happens they travel along the same road,” she said then.

Secret societies. Private clubs. Anonymity in the fight for social justice.

The private eating clubs that effectively kept blacks, Jews, American Indians and most women out of business, government, science and university administration for so long are called by the generic term “fraternities.” As Forth tells us, they are “a way of life.” (By the way, I for one deplore the formation of a Faculty Club — admission limited to those who can pay the freight — at ISU.) They all travel the same road.

In his promised column on the effective use of sarcasm, perhaps Mr. Forth will explain how sarcasm can be used to reinforce attitudes that one dare not express openly.

It’s all very SAAD.

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Virginia Allen

Graduate English examiner