Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out who’s singing about a presidential campaign with a woman at the top of the ticket. We’ll also get details on the latest resignation at City Hall.
This is about a presidential campaign — not the one that will end on Nov. 5, but the first one with woman at the top of a ticket. One 152 years ago.
She was Victoria Woodhull, who was a suffrage leader in New York in the late 1860s and early 1870s and is the subject of the opera “Mrs. President.” The soprano Amy Justman will sing two arias from “Mrs. President” tonight at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side during a performance for the Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival, a series organized by Victoria Bond, who wrote the music for “Mrs. President.”
The Woodhull story is “a messy story,” Bond said, with considerable understatement. The original title of “Mrs. President” was “Mrs. Satan,” the name that the cartoonist Thomas Nast gave Woodhull. Her story simmers with scandal, sex and politics — and Bond sees parallels to former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate this year.
“Mrs. President” has two main characters. One is Woodhull, who had been a stockbroker (bankrolled by the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt) and a newspaper publisher. The other is Henry Ward Beecher, the spellbinding preacher who led the prosperous Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. “It was a who’s who of New York,” Bond said.
Beecher “had been having affairs for years, an open secret in New York society,” the writer Annalee Newitz explained in 2019.
Woodhull was an advocate of free love, which did not mean what it came to mean a century later. To Woodhull, Bond said, free love “meant one was free to dissolve a marriage when love was no longer a part of it.”
She realized that there was no love left in Beecher’s marriage, Bond said, and threatened to expose his infidelities in her newspaper in return for a campaign endorsement.
He didn’t endorse her. She ran the exposé and paid a price.
For “Mrs. President,” Bond said that the librettist Hilary Bell had narrowed the focus to a single day during the campaign. The challenge, Bond said, was to write the aria for the end of the first act, “which is a very important moment because either people go home or they stay for Act 2.”
The two collaborators came up with a duet called “Predators,” a term that Bond said fit both Beecher and Woodhull. “Henry Ward Beecher had been a bully all his life,” she said. “Even though he espoused equality for men and women, there really was no equality as far as he was concerned because he was always the boss.”
In “Mrs. President,” after Woodhull tells Beecher that she is going to publish the exposé, “the curtain comes down as they are ripping their clothes off,” Bond said. “I thought, ‘That will bring people back for Act 2.’”
The ripping of the clothes, she said, is “pure opera.” There is no evidence that such a liaison took place, she said.
Woodhull’s attempt at blackmail was real, and it backfired: Her ticket received no votes in the Electoral College. By Election Day, Woodhull had been convicted of sending obscenity through the mail — her newspaper — and sentenced to prison.
“Everybody has abandoned her, because Beecher has threatened them,” Bond said. “That was a very Trump-like move. I didn’t know about Trump when I wrote it, but Beecher’s a Trump-like character because he has tremendous power and uses it to silence his enemies and to jail his foremost enemy, who has printed a story about him in her paper.”
Weather
Today, expect a sunny sky, with temperatures in the mid-60s. This evening, the sky will be mostly clear, and temperatures will fall to the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 12 (Yom Kippur).
The latest New York news
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Class-action lawsuit: Student absenteeism has been steadily on the rise since 2020. The Legal Aid Society argues that New York City’s Education Department fails its special education students, increasing absence rates.
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New home: Once a home for radical art and radical politics, ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side will get a new four-story building, thanks to $21 million from the city — which once fought to evict it.
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Opening date: The Studio Museum in Harlem announced that it would open its new home on West 125th Street next fall with a show on the work of Tom Lloyd, who was featured in the museum’s opening exhibition in 1968.
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At home upstate: At 95, the cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer is starting “from scratch” in a new house in upstate New York. “I never thought I could live out of the city or for that matter out of the Upper West Side,” he says.
Sheena Wright resigns as first deputy mayor
The drumbeat of resignations at City Hall continued with the departure of Sheena Wright, a longtime ally of Mayor Eric Adams, who became the seventh senior official to depart in the last few weeks.
Adams said he was replacing her with Maria Torres-Springer, who has been the deputy mayor for housing, economic development and work force.
News of Wright’s departure came as Adams’s former chief liaison to Muslim New Yorkers, Mohamed Bahi, was arrested and charged with federal witness tampering and destruction of evidence, in connection with the investigation that led to the mayor’s indictment last month. Wright’s exit also followed the resignation announcements of her husband, David Banks, the schools chancellor, and of her brother-in-law Philip B. Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety.
My colleagues Dana Rubinstein and William K. Rashbaum write that the departures seem to reflect the administrative housecleaning that Gov. Kathy Hochul — and some of Adams’s own advisers — have pressed for as federal investigations have swirled around City Hall and cast doubt on Adams’s viability as mayor.
Adams said at his weekly news briefing that he had spoken with Hochul over the weekend but had not cleared Torres-Springer’s promotion with her. “I’m the mayor,” he said. “I don’t get signed off from other entities to make movement within the department or the agencies.”
In announcing Torres-Springer’s promotion, Adams seemed to be trying to refocus New Yorkers’ attention. He stood in front of signs headed “Keeping N.Y.C. the safest big city in America,” and a video monitor nearby read “Making New York City more affordable.”
“We’re continuing to do the challenging job, and that’s what we’re supposed to do,” he said at one point.
He asserted that none of the recent personnel changes had to do with the federal investigations, even though everyone who resigned has been touched by at least one inquiry. And he presented himself as unbowed by the avalanche of inquiries, insisting that he planned to run for re-election next year.
“Listen, I am going to serve my term and run for re-election,” he said. Referring to the investigations, he said: “You’ve got a one-sided view of this — extremely creative. And I think my attorneys are going to show both sides.”
With Wright’s departure, the group of senior officials at City Hall who were also Adams’s loyalists has been all but decimated. The mayor’s chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, is one of the few who remain. But she is herself burdened by legal scrutiny: More than a week ago, investigators seized her phones and searched her home.
While Wright was seen as closely linked to Adams through her relationship with the Banks family and their decades-long ties to the mayor, Torres-Springer has roots on the technocratic side of City Hall. She worked as a senior policy director for Daniel Doctoroff when he was a deputy mayor under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Under Adams, she is playing a leading role in “City of Yes,” an initiative that aims to add up to 109,000 units of housing.
METROPOLITAN diary
Float
Dear Diary:
I was at that place in Central Park
That place replicated to look like Paris
Where people come to sail model boats
A kid eating ice cream
Handed me his remote control
Urging me to cast off
Zoom — Zoom feel the glide
Zoom — Zoom how relaxing
Ice cream kid asked
If I could sail anywhere in the world
Where would I go
I answered, I’d like to go to England
Ice cream kid replied
If you get to go anywhere
It’s best to go someplace with a volcano
After thinking about it
I didn’t disagree
— Danny Klecko
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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The post 152 Years Ago, This Woman Ran for President appeared first on New York Times.
