Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  After a small, private service consisting only of classical music—“including his favorite Träumeri by Schumann”—Smart was cremated. His ashes remain at the Fresh Pond Crematory in Long Island, where Robert Ingersoll had been cremated just six months before. At the time, cremation was an uncommon and controversial practice, but freethinkers, none more so than Gardener, believed that they must carry their convictions with them to the end. Gardener had criticized other freethinkers who caved on their death beds and allowed a Christian burial.53 With Smart’s funeral and interment, she put their, or at least her, freethinking beliefs into action.

  Gardener’s situation grew more complex several weeks later when Smart’s wife Lovenia resurfaced to claim that she was his rightful heir. Legally, of course, she was. Gardener recalled that she and Smart had written their wills together on the eve of their trip to California in 1897, leaving everything to each other and, in the case of mutual demise, to Mary Phillips (because Gardener liked her and because they owed her money).54 When Gardener had announced plans to draft her will, Smart insisted on writing his, too, though he owned nothing, Gardener remarked, except some clothes and the watch she had given him. So, after his death, when his will could not be found, Gardener did not “disturb myself about it.” After all, she believed his will to have been “a mere formality and done to satisfy his own sense of ‘dignity’ when I made my own will.”55 But Gardener soon learned that Smart had drafted another will, back in 1893. As Gardener was making her way home after dazzling audiences at the world’s fair in Chicago, Smart had traveled to Charleston, West Virginia, to visit his family. While there, he filed a will naming his wife Love as his sole heir.56 After Smart’s death, Love appointed H. C. Bailey, her son-in-law, as executor and sent word to New York that she had Smart’s will in hand.

  Love also demanded possession of Smart’s belongings. This is when Gardener learned that he had rented a secret storage trunk the week before they had departed for California. The claim receipt stated that the trunk contained clothes and papers.57 What papers? With Gardener’s reputation at its tenuous peak, Love’s claim threatened to make public Gardener’s twenty-five years of illicit cohabitation with Smart.

  In an obituary for Smart published in Free Thought magazine, the editors acknowledged that even though they had never met Smart, everyone knew that “his religion was the Religion of Humanity, and the god he worshipped was Helen H. Gardener, his brilliant literary little wife” whom he lovingly called his “wee wifee.” The obituary also quoted women’s rights advocates who referred to Smart as a “Knight of the New Chivalry” because anyone who saw Gardener “with eyes and cheeks burning with that electric fire which makes her books so vital and so compelling standing . . . under the wing of her giant husband, whose joy and delight it was to protect her and further her work in every possible way, will realize what a loss his death will be to Helen Gardener.”

  Gardener wrote the magazine to thank freethinkers for the hundreds of condolences she had received, and her letter was included in the published tribute to Smart. She proclaimed that “my husband was a king among men, both in look and deed—over 6 feet 2 inches in height, firmly built and with a fine mind, cultivated, courteous, and always above all else my devoted lover.”58 In spite of everything, she never once let on that he was not her real husband or that he had deceived and disappointed her in every conceivable way.

  Despite her strong public face, Gardener suffered another breakdown. Smart’s death came just months after the deaths of Ingersoll, her longtime champion, and John Clark Ridpath, her oldest friend. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had recently celebrated her eighty-fourth birthday, and Gardener knew that Stanton, too, was not long for this earth. Financially insolvent and broken in mind and body, Gardener placed her belongings in a spare room at the Ridpaths’ New York home and left instructions for her trusted confidante Mary Phillips to reclaim the secret trunk and sort out Smart’s tangled probate, promising to repay her the money she owed.

  Just as Gardener’s adoring memorial to Smart was published in Free Thought magazine in March 1901, she was on her way to Puerto Rico to visit the army hero who had recently planted the first U.S. flag on the island: Col. Selden Allen Day, the very same man who had spoken about his Civil War experiences at her 1897 reading in San Francisco. Seventeen years had passed since Alice Chenoweth had emerged, like a butterfly from a cocoon, on the nation’s stage as Helen Hamilton Gardener. More phoenix than butterfly this time, Gardener would remake herself once more.

  PART THREE

  Two Calling Cards

  1901–1925

  11

  Around the World with the Sun

  In case you use (in print) any of the points, kindly use my name as Helen H. Gardener, only. I never use Day in print—for literary work.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1903

  AS HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER nursed Charles Smart through his final illness at the Westport Sanitarium in the winter of 1901, their family physician expected to hear one of two things: that “she had gone insane or had been killed by one insane.” He admitted, she recalled, that “he was not prepared to see her come through a whole and balanced woman.”1 If she hoped to save herself, the doctor advised her to “neither read, think, nor try to write. If you do, your mind, if not your life, will pay the penalty.”2 He warned that her next break would be her last and advised her to seek a change of scenery.

  So, just weeks after Smart’s death, Gardener embarked for Puerto Rico to visit Col. Selden Allen Day, accompanied by a woman she referred to only as “Mrs. B.”3 It would have been unseemly to visit Day by herself. She explained to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that her New York friends, together with Colonel Day, had conspired together and “put me on an army transport and shipped me” to a more hospitable climate.4 Gardener went to Puerto Rico to rest her mind and cure her tattered nerves because it was cheaper to live there than in New York and because she hoped that Day might offer her a lifeline.

  After she had settled in Puerto Rico, Gardener wrote her New York friend Mary Phillips, on Day’s “Chief Ordnance Officer” letterhead, to process her complicated emotions. “I still feel too stunned to think it out very clearly,” Gardener confessed. “It is a queer old world, Little Phil!”5 After a quarter century together, Smart had left Gardener with nothing but potentially humiliating probate issues. Having had her heart and her livelihood destroyed by a tempestuous relationship, Gardener was drawn to what she perceived to be the solid orderliness of Day.

  Born in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1838, Day, like Smart, was the same age that her beloved eldest brother Bernard would have been. Also like Bernard, Day was a celebrated Civil War hero. At the outbreak of the war, Day, then a dentist, immediately organized a unit of volunteer troops before ultimately enlisting with Company C of the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. At the first battle of Winchester (Gardener’s birthplace), Day helped capture Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s brother-in-law and earned his first medals. He served until the end of the war and was then tasked with guarding the cell of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who was held prisoner at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia.6 For the “generosity and consideration” Day extended to his famous captive (he even arranged to get Davis a rocking chair so that he could sit comfortably), he became lifelong friends with the Davis family and other prominent Confederates.7

  After the Civil War, Day remained in the army but continued his education, graduating from medical school in South Carolina in 1880. He was also an amateur inventor who improved upon the “dum dum” bullet (an expanding bullet) and who had a penchant for moving vehicles, trying for years to “perfect flying machine parts.” During the Spanish-American War, Day fought in Cuba and then Puerto Rico, where he hoisted the American flag over El Morro Castle and fired the national salute on the final day of occupation in October 1898.8

  For a man in his early sixties, Day remained quite handsome and fit, especially in his military uniform. He stood 5 feet 8 inches tall, a full 6 inch
es shorter than Smart, with light brown hair, sparse at the top, kind gray-blue eyes, and a cropped white beard with handlebar mustache.9 According to her letters to Phillips, Gardener’s relationship with Day was not immediately romantic, though the couple had several pictures taken of themselves during this initial trip.10 Gardener described Day as a nice older man who had taken a special interest in her, not unlike the many other prominent men who had helped her over the years, including Ingersoll, Spitzka, and Ridpath. “He is lovely to me and has done everything possible for me,” Gardener wrote Phillips. Gardener reciprocated by keeping Day company. “Between ourselves,” Gardener revealed, “he is utterly alone here, two miles from town and other folks. It is very bad for him.” Day needed “people with him and clings to those he likes as if his life depended on them.”

  Handsome widower Col. Selden A. Day, the year after he attended Gardener’s reading in San Francisco.

  When she mentioned leaving Puerto Rico, Day “simply went into hysterics.” He begged Gardener and Mrs. B. to accompany him to his next post, wherever it might be, and “‘run’ his place.” Gardener told him that “would not do” but he “can’t seem to see it.” After so many years of army life and living in “the frontier country,” Day was “ill fitted for other life.” Gardener was torn. She appreciated the warm weather and slower pace of life in Puerto Rico, but she worried that she would not be able to regain a foothold as a writer there. Gardener told Stanton that she wanted to return to New York but didn’t know how she could make a living there.11 She had been writing historical sketches to accompany a series of paintings by the artist Edward Moran and desperately hoped to be paid for the work. Ultimately, Moran compensated her with a painting that she proudly hung in her home, a prized possession that did not pay the bills.12

  Just weeks before Day was to depart Puerto Rico, Gardener had not yet decided if she would stay in Puerto Rico without him, accompany him to his next post, or return to New York in the hopes of restarting her career. Further complicating her options, Gardener had not been forthcoming with Day. He knew nothing about her debts, Smart’s probate issues, or that she had been, strictly speaking, Smart’s mistress and not his wife. “He knows only the surface of my affairs so far as the within matters go,” Gardener divulged to Phillips. “Of course I can trust you in all this,” Gardener confided. But she did not trust completely. At the top of this seven-page-long confessional letter, she instructed Phillips: “Best Destroy This Letter.”13

  In October 1901, Day departed for Fort Williams, in Maine—a cold and sleepy post compared with Puerto Rico. He was “very sore” about what was to be his last official duty before retiring. Gardener decided not to accompany him, at least not yet. Instead she set up “housekeeping” in Washington, D.C., with her friend LaSalle Corbell Pickett, the widow of the famous Confederate general George Pickett, the man who led “Pickett’s Charge” at the Battle of Gettysburg.

  AS DAY SETTLED into his post in Maine just before the first snow, Gardener and Sister Pickett, as she called her, selected a suite of five rooms at the Cumberland Hotel on Thomas Circle. “Floored” by the trip back from Puerto Rico, Gardener was too weak to go to New York to oversee the transfer of her belongings, so she sent detailed instructions to Mary Phillips. “We need my two beds immediately—the mahogany one and the little green iron one,” Gardener commanded. “Also all of my good chairs, rug, bookcase, pictures, table ware, etc etc. Mrs. P. has no table things hardly and we are going to keep house.”14 The two women had likely met years before in New York, where Pickett had moved after the death of her husband in 1875 to restore her reputation and that of the Confederacy. In addition to mythologizing her husband’s questionable military prowess, Pickett wrote apologias for the “Lost Cause” that popularized racist depictions of happy slaves, benevolent slave owners, and idyllic life on the plantation.15 Though her ultimate aim differed significantly from Gardener’s, Pickett had also remade herself, in a calculated blend of fact and fiction, through her writing.

  As they settled in to life in Washington, the two women joined the League of American Pen Women, a group of female writers, journalists, and artists founded in 1897 because women were denied membership to the all-male National Press Club.16 Gardener also began to enter Washington society, serving as a hostess at various events and entertaining callers at the flat she shared with Pickett.

  Gardener’s favorite Washington activity, however, were her “daily drives” on one of the two white Andalusian horses, Kayo and Bayo, that Day had brought back from Puerto Rico. In this she made a “conspicuous figure,” according to D.C. society pages.17 Just as other women had recently discovered the freedom of movement afforded by the newly invented bicycle—including WCTU President Frances Willard, who published a book chronicling her enthusiasm for cycling—Gardener took to the streets with abandon on her white horse.18

  But living with Pickett began to grate. For one thing, she spent lavishly on “absurd and cruel” offerings of hospitality without concern for where the money would come from.19 Gardener sought a better domestic arrangement. In April 1902, she announced that she would marry Colonel Day. The couple recited their vows in a small private ceremony at the Cumberland, witnessed only by Sister Pickett, the matron of honor, and her son George, the best man. In deference to Gardener’s freethinking beliefs, the wedding was officiated by Judge Seth Shepard of the D.C. Court of Appeals.

  Gardener created a memorable impression riding her beloved Andalusian horses through the streets of the nation’s capital.

  One society page described the event as “a curious mingling of sentiment with advancing years.” The bride, nearly fifty, was a “wonderfully well preserved woman” who wore a cream-colored crepe dress, embroidered in white daisies, forget-me-nots, golden bees, butterflies, and wheat. Made in Paris, the extravagant dress was a gift from Pickett. At the conclusion of the brief ceremony, Gardener thanked Judge Shepard for his service, and Day proclaimed the wedding as “the happiest, proudest day of [his] life.” Invitations to a late afternoon reception had been sent to friends as far away as Sandusky, Ohio, but the party was canceled due to the illness of Day’s sister. Instead, the newlyweds boarded an afternoon train to Fort Williams, Maine, so that Day could return to his post.20

  Life in Maine did not suit the couple, so Day arranged for a slightly early retirement, and they returned to Washington within weeks. Day began lobbying, unsuccessfully, for a promotion so that he could retire at a higher rank. In June, Gardener accompanied her friend Senator William Mason (R-IL) to the White House to meet, for the first time, President Theodore Roosevelt.21 And in August, she began regular visits to the sculptor Adelaide Johnson’s Washington studio so that she could be molded in clay for the “gallery of eminent women” Johnson hoped to create. Though she had only been in residence a few months, Gardener was already establishing herself as a Washington insider.

  BORN IN ILLINOIS IN 1859, Adelaide Johnson was a highly skilled seamstress who longed to be an artist. As a young woman living in Chicago, she fell 20 feet to the ground from an open elevator shaft, broke several bones and gained a permanent limp, but received $15,000 in damages. With this windfall, Johnson traveled to Rome to study sculpture. She returned to the United States in 1886, joined the women’s movement, and soon had the opportunity to sculpt Susan B. Anthony. Her bust of Anthony received wide acclaim, and Johnson was commissioned to sculpt busts of movement leaders to be displayed at the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago. Johnson had found her lifelong calling as “the sculptor of suffrage.”22

  Johnson wrote Gardener in March of 1902, explaining that she wanted to “tell the tale of strength and delicacy knit into one” by sculpting Gardener’s bust in clay. Gardener thanked Johnson for her kind words, noting dolefully, “It is such words and feeling from such fine and brave women as you that keep some of us from despair, sometimes.”23 When Gardener returned to D.C. in the summer of 1902, she immediately arranged to sit for Johnson. A devotee of the philosopher François De
lsarte, Johnson believed that she had to understand her subjects’ inner selves in order to capture their outer likenesses, so her method involved in-depth personal conversations with her subjects.24 Following each of their twenty-six sittings, conducted between August and November 1902, Johnson carefully recorded what they talked about in a handwritten log, in teeny script, spanning thirty-four pages. While Johnson’s Gallery of Eminent Women never materialized, her “sitting notes,” preserved at the Library of Congress, offer a unique window into the personal lives of women reformers, including Gardener as she struggled to maintain her equilibrium in a new, somewhat hasty marriage.

  When Johnson asked Gardener for her definition of love, Gardener replied that “as husbands go,” “as homes go,” marriage was “doing as someone else wishes,” while, the women agreed, “having the heroic power to save your own very soul from disintegration at the same time.” At their first session, Johnson noted that Gardener did not seem like herself and clung “to the reasonable hope that the state may be the result of . . . her long strain and pressure in the care of Col. Smart.” As the weeks went on, Johnson increasingly fretted over her friend’s well-being, observing that “she is letting go of something herself. It began when she married the second time and so soon. She cast away an ideal. It has hurt her with herself. How will she be able to stand that is the question and a tremendous test.”25