Victoria Woodhull’s *Impending Revolution* (1872) — The Public Domain Review

To a modern-day reader, the speech’s rhetoric of liberation is eye-catching for Woodhull’s use of a regressive rhetoric of miscegenation — deployed the same year that Douglass was named her running mate. “The new race will combine all these different qualities in one grand character, and shall ultimately gather in all people of all races. Observe the merging of the black and white races. The white does not descend to the black, but the black gradually approaches the white.” Elsewhere, she takes aim at the moneymen, and by doing so, made herself a pariah to the Wall Street set, in general, and to one patron in particular: “A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks. . . . But if a poor, half-starved child were to take a loaf of bread from his cupboard, to prevent starvation, she would be sent first to the Tombs [a New York jail], and thence to Blackwell’s Island [a penitentiary].” With equal gravitas, Woodhull proceeds to critique New York real estate on terms that hold true for both Gilded Age moguls and twenty-first century developers: “an Astor may sit in his sumptuous apartments, and watch the property bequeathed him by his father, rise in value from one to fifty millions. . . . But if a tenant . . . fails to pay his month’s rent to Mr. Astor, the law sets him and his family into the street in midwinter”. Her speech ends with a call that rings with perhaps as much urgency today as it did in 1872: “Let all reformers rally, and, with a grand impulse and a generous enthusiasm, join in a common effort for the great political revolution, after the accomplishment of which the nations shall have cause to learn war no more.”