A century ago, Lena Springs made history. Before that, she studied in Bristol and Roanoke.

Lena Jones arrived in Bristol in the fall of, well, we can’t be sure, but probably 1901.

She would have been 18 then, and Bristol must have felt like the big city to her. It was three times bigger than her hometown in Pulaski, Tennessee, along the Alabama border.

She came to study at Sullins College, then a well-known junior college for women. In an era when such schools were sometimes regarded as “finishing schools” for proper Southern ladies, the teenaged Lena Jones likely stood out because subsequent years showed she was interested in far more than simply learning etiquette. While other graduates may have gone on to “earn their Mrs.,” as the saying went, Lena Jones went on to additional studies at another women’s college — Virginia College in Roanoke, more formally called the Virginia College for Ladies.

Both schools are now long gone — Virginia College closed in 1929, Sullins College in 1976 — and Lena Jones is, too. Her place in history remains, though. It is somewhat obscure, to be sure, but it is there nonetheless.

In 1924 — a full century ago this summer — Lena Jones Wade Springs, as she was known by then, became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for vice president on a national ticket with one of our two major parties. She wasn’t nominated, of course — that history would have to wait until Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 became Walter Mondale’s running mate. Still, the 100th anniversary of Springs’ name being put in nomination (henceforth, I’ll refer to her as Springs) is worthy of some attention, so here it is.

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Springs was a native of Tennessee and lived most of her adult life in South Carolina, but she was educated in Virginia, in two cities in the western part of the state, so we can claim some indirect credit for shaping the life of a remarkable personality of her time. We’ll come back to that, but let’s jump into the politics of 1924, some of which may seem strangely familiar today, some quite alien to our experience.

Republican Calvin Coolidge sat in the White House, having become president the summer before when Warren Harding died. His secretary — what today we’d call chief of staff — was C. Bascom Slemp, a former Republican congressman from Lee County (those familiar with Southwest Virginia will recognize the Slemp name, which adorns multiple public buildings). Harding today is known mostly for the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, where the government leased federally owned oil reserves to private companies without competitive bidding. Coolidge was sufficiently distant from those tawdry matters, and he publicly ousted Harding’s attorney general for failing to cooperate with congressional investigators, which only burnished his reputation for honesty. Coolidge would be a strong favorite to be elected to a full term in November.

The Democrats, meanwhile, were in utter disarray , the party split among multiple factions whose interests seemed impossible to reconcile. Prohibition was in force but there were still fights between the “wets” and the “drys” over that policy. The Ku Klux Klan was having a resurgence — the 1920s were infamous for an upswing in racism and xenophobia — and Democrats were split over a resolution that condemned the Klan. Republicans had avoided a similar division by not taking up an anti-Klan resolution at all, but some Democrats insisted on a vote. This was not a simple matter of Northern Democrats vs. Southern Democrats; the sponsor of the anti-Klan resolution was Sen. Oscar Underwood of Alabama, a University of Virginia graduate who declared that the Klan was “a national menace.” He was one of the few Southern politicians who were outspoken against the Klan, but Underwood left no doubt where he stood: “It is either the Ku Klux Klan or the United States of America. Both cannot survive. Between the two, I choose my county.” Brave words — there were hundreds of Klansmen among the thousands of delegates at the New York City convention and 20,000 more were assembled across the Hudson River in New Jersey, where they burned crosses to protest the candidacy of New York Gov. Al Smith on the grounds that he was Roman Catholic.

Today’s conventions are short and scripted; conventions in those days went on until they were done and no one knew when that would be. Four days into the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden, The New York Times headlined: “Klan issue overshadows all on eve of balloting.” Beneath that front-page headline was something quite curious: a photograph of a woman, Lena Jones Wade Springs.

The notion of women being involved in politics was still a novelty in 1924. Only four years before, women had won the right to vote. At that 1920 Democratic convention, which went on for 44 ballots, the names of two women had been entered into nomination, mostly for symbolic purposes. Two women from Kentucky — Laura Clay, a suffragist champion, and Cora Wilson Stewart, an educator — each received a single vote.

Now in 1924, there were a record 182 women registered as convention delegates, a tiny fraction of the total, to be sure, but enough to be noticed. Furthermore, one of them had been elected to chair the important credential committee. Yes, Lena Jones Wade Springs.

Scarcely two decades had passed since she had studied in Bristol and Roanoke, and a lot had happened. She’d gone on to teach at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina, eventually becoming chair of the English department. (Today the school is Queens University.) She’d married, and been widowed, then remarried to Leroy Springs, a wealthy widower from Fort Mill, South Carolina. Springs owned cotton mills, a bank, a railroad and, according to one biographical sketch, “thousands of acres of cotton plantations.”

Leroy Springs comes across in historical accounts as a grumpy old man, something Lena Springs certainly was not. He also seemed content to keep a low profile, while Lena Springs plunged into public affairs . She became an officer in the South Carolina League of Women Voters — this is when there were no women voters in South Carolina. (Although the 19th Amendment solved that in 1920, South Carolina didn’t get around to ratifying the amendment until well after the fact, in 1969.) When World War I broke out, she organized a local chapter of the Red Cross and criss-crossed the state making speeches on behalf of either that organization or women’s suffrage. By 1922, just two years after women were granted the right to vote, she was elected as a member of the Democratic National Committee, the party’s national governing body. Come 1924, she was credentials committee chair — and on the front page of The New York Times.

She also became something of a minor media star when she presented the credential committee report. It probably didn’t hurt that Lena Springs was also considered good-looking. One newspaper correspondent wrote that, “So impressed were the delegates and visitors by Mrs. Springs’ beauty and clear, sweet voice that the band, uninstructed, struck up with the tune ‘Oh, You Beautiful Doll.'” The New York Times took a more serious approach, writing: “Mrs. Springs caught the fancy of the convention from the start. Mrs. Springs handled her committees like a veteran, winning the plaudits of her colleagues not only for the ability she showed but for the courtesy and fairness of her every act.”

The two main candidates — out of 58 who received votes — were Smith and William McAdoo, the former treasury secretary under Woodrow Wilson. Both carried more baggage than a train porter. Smith’s Catholicism and “wet” views were anathema to many conservative delegates. McAdoo was hobbled by scandals, and boosted by the Klan. For one of his seconding speeches, McAdoo turned to the star of the convention, Lena Springs. The more important nominating speech that year was by Franklin Roosevelt. Four years prior, he was the party’s candidate for vice president, then contracted the polio that paralyzed him. The 1924 convention speech marked his political comeback that eventually sent him to the governor’s mansion in Albany and the White House in Washington, but that was far in the future. Roosevelt’s speech at the 1924 convention also contributed to our political lexicon: He dubbed Smith “the Happy Warrior.”

The balloting went on for days, and then for weeks. McAdoo led through 77 ballots but no was nowhere close to the two-thirds vote that was then necessary to win at Democratic conventions. The Smith supporters refused to give way to McAdoo and the McAdoo supporters refused to give way to Smith. The convention was hopelessly deadlocked between those two forces, which meant lots of other contenders thought they might be able to emerge as a compromise choice. Over the course of the voting, no fewer than 60 candidates received at least one vote at some point. One of those much further back in the pack was another former treasury secretary: Carter Glass of Lynchburg, by then a U.S. senator from Virginia.

As the balloting went on and on and on, South Carolina Democrats were already hatching a plan on who to nominate for vice president — their own Lena Springs. “Mrs. Springs was taken completely by surprise when told of the plan,” the Times reported. Her fellow delegates hadn’t taken into account one thing and now found themselves in a predicament: Was she old enough? How could they dare ask whether she met the constitutional requirement of being 35? Someone must have, though, perhaps some impertinent journalist, because The New York Times reported “Mrs. Springs admits she meets this constitutional provision.” The paper also noted: “To the casual observer she might seem to be below the age limit and therefore ineligible.” (She was 41 at the time.)

Gloom — and perhaps some doom — was setting into this seemingly interminable convention, but some delegates were thrilled at the prospect of nominating Springs. After The New York Times broke the news for the Springs-for-vice president boomlet in a front-page story, she was “immediately surrounded by scores of friends and admirers, with men in the majority.” Sen. Burton Wheeler of Montana, a powerful figure, declared his approval although it’s unclear how seriously he took the prospect. “She would most certainly improve the situation in the Senate.” The humorist Will Rogers cracked that maybe Springs should be the presidential nominee.

Journalists sought out Springs for interviews. Among those was a reporter for the Long Beach (California) Telegram. He interviewed Springs in her hotel room. The summer heat was oppressive but the unnamed interviewer noted: “Mrs. Springs came smiling into the room like a breath of April into a stoke-hole.”

Much of the reporting about Springs focused on her physical appearance, not any policy positions she might have held (although she must have held some, given how politically involved she was). “She is a sure-enough beauty,” the Long Beach Telegram reporter wrote. “Dark hair, drawn simply and gracefully back from a beautifully molded forehead; clear blue eyes; a tall, slim figure; and a complexion which Helen of Troy might envy.”

Springs told her interviewer she didn’t expect to get the nomination but made a prediction considered startling for the time: “Although I shall not fill the office, I firmly believe this is the first step toward placing women in high office. The day is not very far off when a woman will be president of the United States.”

Her husband, who sat in on the interview, was apparently horrified. “That’s the day I leave for some other country,” he said. He apparently made several other comments of a similar nature, which Springs first ignored, then brushed aside. “And you know,” she said, “many men feel that same way. It would just about kill them to have a woman as president, yet a woman wouldn’t make any more of a muddle of the job than a lot of men have done.” She then looked over at her husband and asked pointedly: “Would they, dear?”

Leroy Springs grudgingly agreed, but only to a point. “But, my dear,” he said. “I refuse to be known as the husband of the president of the United States. You’ll have to choose between the presidency and me.”

The couple never had to make that decision. By the 103rd ballot, both McAdoo and Smith realized that neither one would be nominated. They withdrew and the weary delegates turned to John Davis, a New York corporate lawyer and former ambassador who had grown up in West Virginia. (More Virginia connections: Davis graduated from Washington and Lee University as well as W&L’s law school. For a time, the school had a building named after him.)

As promised, South Carolina Democrats really did nominate Lena Springs for vice president. The Long Beach Telegram reported: “Men — and women — began rising hither and yon in the convention hall with anxious looks upon their faces and one anxious query on their lips. ‘What,’ they demanded, ‘will become of the country if a woman gets into the vice presidential chair?’” The New York Times, by contrast, reported that “delegates from nearly every state … complimented the brilliant and comely woman.”

Poor Leroy Springs was beside himself. “He appeared to harbor the fear that his wife might be nominated,” The New York Times reported. He needn’t have worried. There was now a rush to put forward names for vice president — in all, 30 candidates received votes on the first ballot. Springs finished fifth and then rose to fourth on the second ballot, but by then Nebraska Gov. Charles Bryan had been nominated. Still, Springs finished ahead of 25 other contenders, including the governors of Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey and Rhode Island; senators from Montana and Nevada; a former governor of Missouri; and two former cabinet secretaries.

The Davis-Bryan ticket went on to a crushing defeat. The Democrats took just 28.8% of the vote — a historic low. Coolidge was so secure that he didn’t even leave the White House to campaign.

We can only wonder what would have happened if the party had nominated Springs. The 1924 convention appears to have been her last hoorah in politics. Her husband died seven years later and she spent much of her time living at the Plaza Hotel in New York. She died in 1942, just 59 years old. She lies buried in her hometown in Tennessee.

We have no way of knowing what she’d have thought about a woman being elected vice president 96 years after her name was placed in nomination for that office, or what she’d have thought of that same first female vice president being nominated for the presidency four years after that. We also don’t really need to know. It’s sufficient to know that Lena Springs made history and that while our connection to her is admittedly slight, she did live and study in Bristol and Roanoke in what must have been formative years. History is full of stories that don’t fit neatly into the shorthand version most of us learn; this is one of them.

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