Free Thinker Read online

  OWING TO HER KEY ROLE in the March parade and her effectiveness as a D.C. liaison, Gardener was appointed, in June, to the NAWSA Convention Program Committee and tasked with coordinating events with the White House and Congress to take place that December, a plum assignment. However, this job, too, was beset by confusion. Alice Paul had asked another Mrs. Gardner—Mrs. Gilson Gardner—to set up D.C. meetings for the Congressional Union. The resulting mix-ups prompted NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw to exclaim in frustration, “I wish women had the good sense to stick to the names by which they were labeled when they were born. Then we might be able to tell them apart.”16

  Within a few weeks, Gardener had secured sixteen senators, eight from each party, representing the “cream of the Senate,” to speak on behalf of “our bill” at the Senate hearings in December. She also invited President Wilson to welcome the convention on its opening night, even though “Sunday is a very bad time to ask Presbyterians to do such a thing.”17 He declined.

  With much of the NAWSA convention planning completed, Gardener left town in November on a clandestine trip to New Orleans. Her husband, Selden Day, told Paul that Gardener had gone south for her health, but really she went to New Orleans to represent NAWSA at the meeting that formed the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, on whose letterhead she was subsequently listed (though her name was misspelled “Gardiner,” perhaps indicating that she was never asked her permission).18

  Southern suffragists, led by Kate Gordon, had become increasingly frustrated by NAWSA’s redoubled focus on the federal amendment and formed this group to continue working for the vote one state at a time.19 Southern women threatened to leave NAWSA (and several eventually did) if forced to advocate for a federal amendment because the strategy was too reminiscent of the Fifteenth Amendment and because they did not want black women to vote. Gardener was dispatched to represent the national organization in New Orleans, she recalled, because “I am a Southern woman and was, therefore, supposed to be able to speak ‘without offense’ to those who insisted upon waiting for the action of their states.”20

  At the meeting, Gardener gave a speech—later revised and published as the NAWSA pamphlet “Woman Suffrage: Which Way”—arguing that it was in the South’s best interest to match their Western counterparts in chivalry and grant women the vote before the federal government forced them to via a constitutional amendment.21 She did not focus on the merits of the federal amendment, as she did elsewhere, but rather on its inevitability. NAWSA’s efforts to enlist Southern support for the federal amendment became the group’s central challenge moving forward, and Gardener, soon the group’s highest-ranking Southerner, would play a crucial role.

  Back in Washington, generational tensions flared between the CU and NAWSA. Just days before the annual convention began, Lucy Burns was arrested by D.C. police for chalking sidewalks with suffrage messages. Anna Howard Shaw begged Burns to pay the fine, walk away, and “from this on to the Convention, see that nothing of this kind comes up.” Anticipating Burns’s objections, Shaw conceded, “You may think we are all a set of old fogies and perhaps we are; but I, for one, thank heaven that I am as much of an old fogy as I am, for I think there are certain laws of order which should be followed by everybody and that one never loses by doing so.” Shaw rejected the idea that following the rules signified cowardice. “It requires a good deal more courage to work steadily and steadfastly for forty or fifty years to gain an end,” she contended, “than it does to do an impulsive rash thing and lose it.”22

  While much of the NAWSA convention proceeded along typical lines—speeches, workshops, hurried meals—the highlight was the December 3 hearing before the House Rules Committee about the creation of a House Committee on Woman Suffrage. Over two efficient hours, the women presented their case for the committee, and Gardener ensured that many congressional wives and daughters also attended. Highlighting her insider credentials, Gardener proclaimed that “those of us who live here and have known Congress from our childhood know that an outside matter” such as suffrage has less of a chance to get before the House Judiciary Committee than “the proverbial rich man has of entering the kingdom of heaven.” Next she compared the plight of women to that of American Indians. Before the existence of the Committee on Indian Affairs, Gardener caustically declared, American Indians were under the province of the War Department, whose general position was that “the only good Indian was a dead Indian.” With their own committee, American Indians began to get “schools, lands in severalty and the general status of human beings.” Women demanded the same consideration before Congress—their own committee and the consideration afforded to independent human beings. “This is not much to ask,” Gardener concluded, “and it is not much to give.”23

  The discussion eventually centered on the relationship between the proposed woman suffrage amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment. Then, over the next three days, the anti-suffragists, mostly men, addressed the Rules Committee. Some of them spoke for nearly an hour each about the risks to family and nation if women were to leave the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, NAWSA members remained hopeful that the Rules Committee would report favorably on the creation of a woman suffrage committee. Gardener considered this hearing—the very first of its kind—a signature triumph.24

  Gardener’s second coup was organizing a high-profile reception featuring an array of pro-suffrage Washington insiders at the home of Sen. Robert and Belle La Follette, cohosted by “four Cabinet ladies, about 20 Senate ladies, and 50 House ladies.”25 Gardener stressed to the editor of the Woman’s Journal that she had organized this event “through my personal friends in the Congressional Circles” and that “nothing of the kind was ever done before.”26 While social events did not carry the same weight as votes, Gardener believed that the more she could bring congressmen in contact with NAWSA members and the more she could entice congressmen to appear publicly in support of federal suffrage, the faster the amendment would pass.

  The next Monday, ninety-four suffragists went to the White House for what was only their second official meeting with the president (Alice Paul had arranged the first one following the March procession). This second meeting lasted just ten minutes but produced an important result. Wilson declined to endorse the federal amendment, but, to the suffragists’ delight, he affirmed that creating a woman suffrage committee in the House was “a proper thing to do.”27

  The support of the president was not enough to sway the House Rules Committee, however. The committee tied, four to four, regarding whether or not to report favorably on the creation of the woman suffrage committee. In advance of the vote, Paul had encouraged her followers to bombard the committee chair with letters, and the Congressional Union announced that members would work to defeat Democrats in the 1914 elections. Following Paul’s campaign announcement, the suffrage committee question unexpectedly went before the House Democratic caucus, which voted 123 to 55 that suffrage was a state, not a federal, question, derailing the chances that the House committee would be created.28

  NAWSA viewed this as a devastating and unnecessary defeat triggered by Paul’s showy, partisan tactics. NAWSA Congressional Committee vice chair Antoinette Funk confided that Rep. Robert Henry had promised a favorable report but had been “a good deal harassed, I understand, by Miss Paul. On one or two occasions he has had to leave his office when she came in because of her insistence with reference to his conduct.”29 Gardener’s year of careful relationship building with members of Congress and their wives had been for naught.

  AT THE DECEMBER NAWSA convention, Paul presented a report covering the Congressional Committee’s activities, highlighting the historic March 1913 parade. She received overwhelming applause from the members. But NAWSA leaders remained piqued that Paul had not submitted a detailed budget—which Paul found curious, since, to her mind, NAWSA financial records were in perpetual disarray—and they did not like her plan for the upcoming year, which proposed that she and Lucy Burns continue to lead the Congres
sional Union and simultaneously serve on the NAWSA Congressional Committee.30 NAWSA leaders feared this scenario would lead to more confusion in Washington and that it would be too hard for them to keep Paul and Burns in check.

  Because the “National ha[s] not yet accepted me on ‘my terms,’ ” Burns wrote a friend, she declined to remain on the Congressional Committee.31 Instead, Burns, Mary Beard, and Paul aggressively courted “the more intelligent younger women” who recognized “the danger of siding with the old fogeys.”32 They succeeded in recruiting Doris Stevens, a terrific young organizer who had been working on the Ohio ballot initiative with Harriet Taylor Upton. Stevens was excited to leave behind the “old fogeys,” enthusing to Burns, “I dare say you and Miss Paul even now have a most level-headed and far-reaching scheme to outwit the Dear Ladies.”33

  For several weeks following the 1913 convention, NAWSA’s Congressional Committee and Paul’s Congressional Union (CU) attempted to find a way to work together—with the Congressional Committee organizing women in the states to lobby their congressmen at home and the CU lobbying in Washington. But this tenuous compromise proved to be a “terrible ordeal.”34 The CU would not agree to follow NAWSA’s policy of nonpartisanship and chafed at the prospect of having the old fogies approve their every move. Congressional Committee chair Ruth Hanna McCormick, appointed in early 1914, described her tenure as “one of the most disagreeable tasks I have ever performed.”35

  In a letter on the topic of who was best positioned to argue the case for the federal amendment in Washington, Gardener warned the NAWSA secretary about the dangers of ceding such vital work to Alice Paul. The existence of two suffrage groups with offices in the nation’s capital would, Gardener warned, “go far to tie the hands of the [NAWSA] Committee and to continue the ‘befuddling of the brains and understanding’ up at the Capitol.” Far more dangerous, the men on the Hill “do not like the kind of ‘lobbying and lobbyists’ the Union will provide and has provided so far.” And “they ‘dodge’ [Paul] whenever they can.” Women with personal charm and connections, Gardener urged, “will do more with the men on the Hill to help us in a week than Miss Paul could do in a year.”36

  At the same time, Paul flatly refused to accept NAWSA’s invitation to return to the Congressional Committee if Helen Gardener remained on it. She and Burns maintained that Gardener opposed the federal amendment and supported the states’ rights position popular among Southern suffragists. In a letter to CU member Mary Beard, Burns described Gardener as “very shaky” on the federal amendment and “flirting a little with both sides of the question.”37 Gardener never wrote anything publicly or privately in support of the states’ rights argument (and she wrote much in favor of the federal amendment), so it is more likely that Burns misinterpreted Gardener’s adroit lobbying or her attendance at the New Orleans meeting. But Paul’s ultimatum stood.

  Thinking she had the final compromise agreement in hand, Ruth McCormick met with Paul in January 1914 to get her signature. In the hours since they had last spoken, however, Paul had seen a NAWSA press release listing the names of the women nominated for the Congressional Committee. This list included Gardener. Paul withdrew her support for the compromise plan. Desperate to save the deal, McCormick phoned NAWSA headquarters, and leaders agreed to rescind Gardener’s nomination. But the damage had been done. Paul refused to sign an agreement with NAWSA, and Gardener was later reappointed to the committee.38

  The Congressional Union and the NAWSA Congressional Committee formally parted ways in February 1914, but for years to come, they continued to be conflated by members of Congress, the president, the press, and the general public.39 To her growing frustration, much of Gardener’s lobbying and publicity work would focus on distinguishing the NAWSA Congressional Committee from the CU.

  AS THE ONLY MEMBER of the Congressional Committee who lived in Washington, Gardener hosted a few events in early 1914 and testified before the House Judiciary Committee that March.40 Gardener, a woman who had helped make sexual consent a national issue in the 1890s, used her congressional testimony to demand women’s right to consent to their government through voting. She critiqued the “aristocracy of sex” that denied women this constitutional right by invoking a speech given the previous day by Secretary of State and three-time Democratic nominee for president William Jennings Bryan. Bryan had argued that the cornerstone of democracy was the consent of the governed. The irony enraged Gardener. “You do not allow us women to give our consent,” Gardener informed the members of the House Judiciary Committee, “yet we are governed.” She concluded: “No one who lives, who ever lived, who ever will live understands or really accepts and believes in a republic which denies to women the right of consent by their ballots to that government.”41

  Amplifying the connections between political and sexual autonomy, earlier that week Gardener had answered the question “Why I’m a Suffragist” in the Washington Herald. “Because I am an adult human unit who has not forfeited the fundamental right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she declared. Besides all the usual reasons for wanting the vote, Gardener claimed for women one particular reason: to protect themselves from the unwanted advances of men. “As a last resort men can and do resort to brute force,” Gardener professed; thus women needed the vote to protect themselves and to have a say in the laws that governed relations between men and women.42

  After the March 1914 congressional hearings, Gardener was largely sidelined from suffrage activities as a result of illness, travel, and internecine drama (though she continued to send out franked congressional speeches).43 All things considered, 1914–1915 was a good time to sit out of suffrage activities. NAWSA records suggest this was a year of particularly extreme infighting at the national headquarters, still in New York City.44 And according to the History of Woman Suffrage, 1914 will “always be noted for the long controversy over what was known as the Shafroth national suffrage amendment,” which was a proposal to make it easier to get state suffrage referenda on the ballot and to distinguish NAWSA from Paul’s Congressional Union.45

  Gardener spent much of 1914 and 1915 in Virginia and traveling. On New Year’s Eve, she and Day sailed from New York for Panama. They spent several weeks in the Canal Zone before traveling to California to visit Day’s siblings and attend the 1915 world’s fair in San Francisco. By April 1915, the Days were back in Washington. Gardener testified before the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee on April 16 but did not actively participate in other Congressional Committee activities that season.46 With the NAWSA Congressional Committee not actively lobbying in Washington, Gardener bided her time.

  That November, the NAWSA annual convention was held in Washington, and Gardener was again tapped to help organize the event.47 Two major events transpired at the convention that propelled Gardener toward the pulse center of suffrage activities. First, the members decisively rejected any further attempts to push the Shafroth-Palmer amendment.48 In the 1915 elections, all four state suffrage ballot initiatives failed, underscoring the challenges of the state-by-state method. Second, NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw, who had never been keen on Gardener, stepped down after eleven years at the helm. NAWSA members recruited former president (1900–1904) and international suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt to lead the organization in what everyone believed would be the final push for the federal amendment. Catt reluctantly accepted and laid down her terms, which included stepping up efforts in Washington and enlisting the states in an all-out effort for federal enfranchisement.49

  Catt immediately recognized that the main impediment to NAWSA’s efforts in Washington was the ineffectual Congressional Committee. As Catt surveyed the national scene, she “found many big tasks awaiting it and nothing was in order anywhere. The most obvious thing to do at once was the Congressional Committee work in Washington.” Catt was surprised to learn that Chair Ruth McCormick had resigned several weeks earlier and that Vice Chair Antoinette Funk had essentially stopped working the previous June. Nothing at
all had been done to prepare for the incoming Congress. The NAWSA board appointed Mrs. Jennie Roessing as chair, but Catt had another leader in mind. She reached out to Boston organizer Maud Wood Park, the woman who had founded and led the very successful College Equal Suffrage League, and instructed her to “pack your grip” and “obediently leave for Washington.”50

  As Catt continued to analyze the situation in D.C., she was further dismayed to find that “the National Association is losing its federal amendment zealots to the Congressional Union merely because we do not work on that job hard enough.” According to Catt, NAWSA “never has really worked for the Federal Amendment. If it should once do it there is no knowing what might happen.”51 To turn her prophecy into a reality, Catt built an all-star team in Washington. Initially, Maud Wood Park served as vice chair of the Congressional Committee, but she traveled frequently and still considered New England her home. Chairwoman Roessing, too, commuted from Pennsylvania. Catt needed a Washington insider to be her conduit, and she found that person in Helen Hamilton Gardener.

  14

  NAWSA’s “Diplomatic Corps”

  No one more sincerely regrets, deprecates and opposes the heckling of the President by the militant, English branch of the suffragists, than do the real suffragists of America who have carried the woman suffrage banner, with dignity and good sense, from the early days to the splendid showing of complete triumph in twelve states and its promise of very early success in several others.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1916

  BACK IN THE 1890s, Helen Hamilton Gardener and Carrie Chapman Catt had been on opposite sides of the women’s rights movement. After all, it was Catt who spearheaded the official censure of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible at the 1896 NAWSA convention.1 Yet, Catt had long respected Gardener’s intellectual bravery and winning personality, recalling decades later that she had been awed by Gardener and her bold novels. And it turned out that these were the qualities she was looking for in a Washington ambassador. Gardener’s seemingly disparate life experiences—freethinking lyceum speaker, sex reformer, secret fallen woman, daughter of the Civil War, wife of a Civil War veteran—all came together in this her penultimate role as NAWSA’s inside woman in Washington. Technically, she remained a member of the Congressional Committee, but her colleagues began referring to her as NAWSA’s “Diplomatic Corps,” a title that more aptly captured her true role.