Harry Burn and the Deciding Vote

On the morning of August eighteenth, nineteen twenty, a twenty-four-year-old Republican state representative from McMinn County in East Tennessee arrived at the Tennessee House of Representatives carrying a letter from his mother. His name was Harry Burn, and he was expected to vote against ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The amendment, which would grant women the right to vote, had already passed the United States Senate and the House of Representatives with the required two-thirds majority.

It had been ratified by thirty-five of the necessary thirty-six states. Tennessee was the last realistic option. The vote in the state senate had already passed.

In the House, the count was too close to call. That morning, Febb Ensminger Burn had written her son a letter. She was a college-educated woman who had never been allowed to cast a ballot in her life.

She told him to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ratification through. She signed it, your mother.

Harry Burn had planned to vote no. Instead he voted yes. The amendment was ratified.

The Speaker of the House, himself an anti-suffrage vote, tried to have the result reversed on procedural grounds. The parliamentary maneuvering went on for days. In the end it held.

Burn later told colleagues he had two reasons. The first was that he believed women had the right to vote. The second was that he had received a mother's request and it was always a son's duty to comply with that request if possible.

The Nineteenth Amendment was certified as law on August twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty. Tennessee had been the state that made it happen.