Free Thinker Page 20

  Also between 1908 and 1912, the group’s message shifted in ways that appealed to the freethinking, sex-reforming Gardener, who had opposed the merger that created NAWSA in 1890 and who resented the group’s slights of her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton. By the time Gardener moved to Washington, NAWSA’s internal debates about religion had receded and speakers regularly critiqued the sexual double standard at the group’s annual meetings. Gardener could now see a place for herself within the suffrage movement.

  BY 1910, Gardener had moved into closer contact with NAWSA. She attended the group’s annual convention, held in Washington that April, and established herself as a woman who could get things done in the nation’s capital. Carrie Chapman Catt had completed a petition drive in support of a federal amendment, resulting in 404,825 signatures, which she planned to deliver to Congress via a large procession of cars. As the wife of an early automobile enthusiast, Gardener knew just about everyone in Washington with a car. So she arranged for fifty cars, “handsomely adorned” with American flags and suffrage banners, to transport these petitions to the Capitol.13

  By 1912, Gardener had bolstered her position as NAWSA’s go-to volunteer in Washington. In March, she helped organize a high-profile suffrage event at the Columbia Theater, the largest yet held, featuring members of Congress and their wives speaking on behalf of women voting.14 Then, at the annual NAWSA hearings before Congress in April, Gardener recruited Rep. Edward Taylor of Colorado to talk about the effects of women voting in his state. His address characterized woman suffrage as an “unqualified success” and delineated 150 bills passed in Colorado at the behest of women since they first voted in 1894. Gardener made excellent use of Taylor’s remarks, becoming expert at navigating congressional printing and mail rules. She prided herself on persuading members of Congress to “frank”—mail for free—the speech because “Uncle Sam does not take orders on credit.” Ultimately, she sent out over 300,000 copies of Taylor’s speech.15 NAWSA officials took note of this “most efficient volunteer worker in Washington,” and Gardener pronounced 1912 the year that “the states discovered I was back in Washington.”16

  As Gardener and Day settled into life in Washington, their Civil War ties became increasingly pronounced. During the two decades that Gardener lived in New York, there is no evidence that she visited her Virginia relatives, even as she dramatized her Southern heritage in fiction. Likewise, when Day was posted in the West and in Puerto Rico, he did not have occasion to attend Civil War reunions or see his army colleagues along the East Coast. But being in Washington allowed the Days to visit Virginia regularly and to renew ties with his army friends. The Civil War became the defining element of their social life, just as it continued to set the parameters of national politics, including debates about women voting.

  The couple began spending several weeks each year with Gardener’s Virginia cousins—the Peales and Keezells, who had taken up arms for the Confederacy—and touring, either by car or on their prized Andalusian horses, the battlefields on which Day had fought as a young soldier. Day also enthusiastically attended the annual reunions of the Blue and Gray who had survived the Battle of Cedar Mountain.17 During this week-long festivity, old men who had once been young enemies became friends. The Washington Herald described the group’s fiftieth anniversary gathering, held in August 1912, as a “love feast.”18 The aged soldiers toured the battlegrounds, shared stories of privation and danger, and bonded as white men who had fought in the nation’s defining conflict and lived to tell the tale. The “blue and the gray are coming from Cal. and Texas, from Ohio and NY,” Gardener announced to Day’s cousin. “Some with one arm, others one leg etc. It is a sad, a tragic and an inspiring thing to see them together and to hear them talk it all over!”19

  At the same time, the Days’ Lamont Street home was a popular destination for their Virginia relatives—including Day’s cousin, the writer Paul Kester, and Gardener’s Peale nieces—along with Civil War veterans and their families, such as Caroline Greene Noble, daughter of Gen. Duff Greene, a Southern Democrat once kicked out of the White House for speaking rudely to Abraham Lincoln. While Day tinkered with his cars, Gardener hosted social events, often with her next-door neighbor Genevieve Clark, for Civil War memorials and veterans.20

  In June of 1911, the Days welcomed the colonel’s old friend, former Confederate general and Mississippi congressman Charles Hooker. Infamous as one of the most rabid secessionists, Hooker had been a close friend of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, whose jail cell Day guarded at Fort Monroe, and that is how he came to know Day.21 On this, Hooker’s last visit to Washington, Day and Senator John Sharp Williams (D-MS) escorted the eighty-six-year-old Confederate around the Capitol, where he walked with a “triumphal march.” Washington newspapers covered the “one-armed General’s” visit to the Days because it symbolized the healing of tensions between white men from the North and South. As the Washington Herald reported, “those first bitter days after the Civil War, now so happily forgotten as the one-armed old Confederate and the lame Federal veteran hobnob on the porch or drive to the Capitol.”22

  WHITE UNION AND CONFEDERATE veterans came together to socialize and consolidate power in the decades following the Civil War, but this reconciliation came at the expense of African Americans, then suffering record levels of violence, segregation, and discrimination. The Compromise of 1877, in which Republicans agreed to stop enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in exchange for the presidency, was just one example of a larger pattern through which white Americans preserved their wealth and status rather than the ideals of the abolition movement and Reconstruction era.23

  At the same time, white suffragists grappled with what the war had meant for women. On a practical, demographic level, the Civil War spurred white women’s entry into college, the professions, and paid labor on a large scale. (Women of color also entered college and professions during this time, and the vast majority worked outside the home, although most often they were limited to working in domestic service). But on the levels of politics and ideology, the Civil War and its aftermath shaped the suffrage movement in vitally important yet often contradictory ways. Whereas white women had fought alongside African Americans for “universal suffrage” before and during the Civil War, after the war many white women sought the political support of white men at the expense of people of color.

  Fifty years after the war, some white women still saw a federal suffrage amendment as the Civil War promise they had been denied. Up until the ratification of the federal income tax amendment in 1913, NAWSA members referred to the suffrage amendment as the Sixteenth Amendment, believing that it would logically and rightfully follow the Fifteenth Amendment (which guaranteed that race could not be used to deny voting rights but which had not been enforced since the end of Reconstruction). Nearly all NAWSA conventions and publications referenced the Civil War in some way, often bitterly prioritizing the claims of white women over those of black men, obscuring black women and their rights altogether. The leaders of NAWSA—who desired but did not have a strong presence in the South—walked a fine line regarding race, generally claiming that they themselves were not racist but that they dared not publicly align with black women lest they offend potential white allies in the South, a necessary contingent if woman suffrage was ever going to pass Congress. While some NAWSA officers, notably Jane Addams and Mary Ware Dennett, forcefully defended the right of African American women to vote, NAWSA as a whole did not, prompting some historians to conclude that Northern leaders of NAWSA used deference to Southern racism as a convenient cover for their own.24

  Officially, NAWSA let individual chapters determine membership requirements, which in practice meant that affiliates could deny African American women membership. Individual African American leaders, including Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, were occasionally invited to speak at NAWSA events, but NAWSA leaders generally ignored their insights and refused to work together in meaningful, coordinated ways. Beyond
NAWSA, black women actively worked for the vote, along with a host of other civil rights causes, through black women’s clubs, churches, and reform organizations.25

  Debates regarding racism within the movement, state versus federal strategy, and how the suffragists should engage with elected officials in Washington all came to a head in March 1913 when NAWSA produced the largest suffrage event ever organized—and one that might have transpired very differently without the contributions of Helen Hamilton Gardener.

  AROUND THE SAME TIME that Gardener became active in NAWSA, another enthusiastic volunteer joined the organization: Alice Paul. A twenty-eight-year-old Swarthmore College graduate, Paul had recently returned to the United States after spending time in England with the more militant British suffragettes, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, whose motto was “deeds, not words.” While in London, Paul was arrested for civil disobedience, went on a prison hunger strike, and was force-fed. Inspired by the bravery of the British women, she returned home determined to expedite ratification of a federal suffrage amendment and disrupt the “old fogies” of NAWSA who, to her mind, had been politely and ineffectually circulating petitions for more than fifty years.

  At the 1910 NAWSA convention, Paul delivered a speech detailing her experiences with the English suffragettes, and, at the 1912 NAWSA convention, she proposed a radical idea to reinvigorate the American movement. Paul suggested that NAWSA leaders let her take over the more or less dormant Congressional Committee with the goal of organizing a massive procession of women suffragists to coincide with the first inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in March 1913.

  On December 5, 1912, NAWSA secretary Mary Ware Dennett wrote Paul to let her know that NAWSA leaders had tentatively approved her plan, as long as she raised all her own money and submitted a formal proposal. Paul wasted no time. Within a week, she had begun soliciting funds and convened a series of meetings in Washington with local officials and suffragists to ascertain the feasibility of her bold idea. The third Washington woman Paul sought out was Helen Hamilton Gardener. Paul recalled that Gardener was “very cooperative,” though she seemed “very displeased that a young whippersnapper such as myself should be the chairman, because she talked about ‘Well they don’t have much sense about who they put in charge’ and ‘all these undertakings which need great experience’ and so on. I think she probably thought she should have been made the chairman, but nobody had known I suppose that she would even think of it.”26

  Paul’s intuitions were correct. Gardener had not made herself NAWSA’s “most efficient” D.C. volunteer for nothing. At first, the two iconoclasts worked together warmly, but the parade set up a lasting rivalry between Paul and Gardener, which played out over the next six years, to determine who would be the suffragists’ most effective emissary in Washington.27

  From the outset, Gardener was Paul’s most constant helper at the makeshift parade headquarters at 1420 F Street, NW. As Paul recalled, Gardener was the only person besides herself who “came in every day and stayed all day . . . and never budged.”28

  Alice Paul and Gardener worked around the clock to organize the biggest women’s march the nation had ever witnessed.

  As Press Committee chair, Gardener was back in her old element, calling on her skills and contacts from her days as a writer and member of the New York Woman’s Press Club and the League of American Pen Women. Morning, afternoon, and evening, she talked to reporters all over the country and distributed press releases and photos. She placed pithy quotes in newspapers and steered editorials in NAWSA’s favor.29 Paul excitedly told a friend in February that “the Washington papers are full of our procession. The Inaugural procession seems almost forgotten. . . . I do hope we can measure up to what seems to be expected of us.”30 Even in her oral history conducted more than sixty years later, Paul credited Gardener with securing tremendous press coverage and commended her as a “super-whiz at this. . . . certainly she was 100% wonderful, I thought. Didn’t see how anybody could have been better.”31

  Gardener told a friend in late February that she had been “working every day at the desk here from nine o’clock often until eight in the evening and when I go home I am too tired to sit up a moment beyond what is necessary. The poor Colonel has to attend to the home and get along the best he can without me and he is doing the very best he can to make it easy for me to be away and keep things going.”32 Through her stellar press work, Gardener became, once more, a woman whose name was printed in periodicals across the country. Dozens of newspapers profiled the women who had charge of the parade, often focusing on their “beauty” and including photos as proof.33

  In addition to running the press operation, Gardener used her network of well-placed D.C. contacts to secure the necessary permits for the procession and related open-air meetings. Initially, the D.C. chief of police, Richard Sylvester, refused to endorse a parade on March 3, the day before Inauguration. Next, he denied the suffragists permission to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, suggesting instead that the women proceed along 16th Street, a popular shopping thoroughfare but one that would not guarantee a large, inaugural audience. To persuade Sylvester of the merits of their case, Gardener brought groups of prominent women—including congressional wives—to his office, met with his superiors (all the way up to President William Howard Taft), and wrote a slew of charming letters. She explained that the marchers would be the “leading women of every state” representing “women of splendid standing and dignity, college women, professional women, homemakers (mothers), and workers.” All the women requested, Gardener emphasized, was that D.C. police keep Pennsylvania Avenue open for the procession. “Is that so much to ask?”34

  Gardener also engineered a clever strategy to secure Pennsylvania Avenue by getting the Speaker of the House and the president of the Senate to grant the suffragists permission to assemble for the parade at the Peace Monument, on U.S. Capitol grounds. If the women received congressional approval to assemble at the base of Pennsylvania Avenue, surely the D.C. chief of police could not insist they march down 16th Street. By mid-January, the suffragists had received all the necessary approvals to hold the procession when and where they wanted.

  Next, Gardener began assembling a high-profile “advisory committee” of elected and appointed officials and their wives, beginning with Genevieve Clark.35 As NAWSA officials grew increasingly concerned that Alice Paul and her collaborator Lucy Burns wanted to bring English-style protests to America, Gardener tempered Paul’s militant instincts with her exceedingly polite outreach to congressmen and their wives. She also helped enlist members in a D.C. Men’s League for women’s suffrage, a group that included her husband, Selden Day, as a charter member.36

  Paul recruited dozens of women to help mount the procession, organize costumes and floats, solicit pledges, contract with platform builders, raise money, create a beautiful souvenir book, and stage tableaux. She ordered 1,500 costumes by famed designer Lanzilotti and thought carefully about the timing of the parade and the music, which included several bands and an orchestra.37 She even convinced pageant creator Hazel MacKaye to write and direct the tableaux and then dispatched Gardener to New York City to persuade famous actresses to participate.38 The legendary actress Lillian Russell agreed. Her manager/husband told Gardener that “she’d rather do it than eat.” But the timing did not work with Russell’s New York performance schedule.39

  Gardener, Alice Paul, and NAWSA parade volunteers outside the makeshift parade headquarters at 1420 F Street NW.

  More than 5,000 women from across the nation arrived as planned and assembled themselves in an orderly fashion to participate in what was to be the largest and most dignified procession of women the world had ever seen. The massive parade consisted of seven large sections, each with hundreds of women organized by theme, to tell the international story of women’s quest for full citizenship. The first section highlighted the countries where women could vote. The second section paid homage to the pioneers of
the U.S. movement, featuring the few surviving women riding in cars. The other sections argued for suffrage by showcasing women’s achievements throughout history as well as in the professions, in reform work, and in the home. Gardener chose to march in the professional women’s section on a float labeled “Molding Public Opinion,” wearing a costume identifying her as a “writer.” She rode on a chair on top of newspapers and magazines, holding a tablet and a pencil to make her point that “An Enlightened Press is Making an Enlightened People.”40

  Though the parade included women from across the country, the participants were nearly all white. The virtual exclusion of black women from this iconic event made visual their larger exclusion from the mainstream suffrage movement as a whole. Initially, Paul imagined that perhaps a few black women would march alongside white women as they had done in previous suffrage marches in the North.41 But Washington women urged her to reconsider the ramifications of an integrated parade in what was essentially a Southern city on the eve of the inauguration of the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War.

  In January, Paul got wind that the Woman’s Journal, the official paper of NAWSA, was contemplating running a story about African American women in the procession. Paul asked Gardener, because she hailed from Virginia, to write Alice Stone Blackwell, the journal’s editor, and explain their position. Gardener began by detailing how hard they had fought to get permission for the parade in the first place, emphasizing that they had only tenuously succeeded by using the “utmost diplomacy” and by promising that they would not raise any other issues beyond equal suffrage, as if equal suffrage did not also pertain to black women. Bringing in the right of black women to vote, Gardener feared, would cost the group “absolutely all we have gained and more. It will prevent the parade, ruin us, and do nobody the least little bit of good—and least of all the negroes.” Gardener reminded Blackwell, a Bostonian, that “Washington is not Boston—nor even New York—and our wisdom and discretion now means much, much, much for our cause.”