Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Though his first wife also supported women’s rights, Day assumed a more traditional role as husband than had Charles Smart—perhaps because, unlike Smart, he actually was Gardener’s legal husband. During their first few months together, Gardener was working on a book called Woman in the Saddle, which detailed her love of horseback riding. But when she asked her husband to look at the book’s illustrations, he nitpicked her choices.26 Another day, she showed Johnson photographs of her ungloved hands that she had intended to use in the book and complained that Day had insisted on photos with gloved hands because that was more “horsemanlike.”27 Woman in the Saddle was never published.

  While part of Day’s appeal may have been his steady government paycheck, Gardener soon found that he was not very good with money. She related to Johnson his “most evident incapacity to cope with the combination of her and his own new position of having but a limited income and out of which all the necessities of life must come.” For forty years, Day had lived in army housing, with many of his necessities paid for or subsidized. Now, living on his army pension, he had taken on a wife with her own needs, and he himself harbored “the desires of a gentleman of leisure and financial freedom.” As a new wife, Gardener said nothing to Day but worried about her prospects tied to another man whose financial acumen she did not trust. Listening to these and other similar tales, Johnson observed that “it is clear that there is a culmination of events and Helen Gardener is trying to hold out.” Johnson concluded, “My feeling is that her heart is crying out.”28

  DAY AND GARDENER spent several weeks touring Virginia on their horses in the fall of 1902, but hastily returned home on October 29 when they received the news that Gardener’s close friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton had died.29 Stanton’s death was not entirely unexpected, but it came as a blow to Gardener nevertheless. Following the death of their mutual friend Robert Ingersoll in 1900, Stanton and Gardener pledged that they would speak for each other at their graves, in part to explain their unusual brain donations. Gardener had fully prepared to go to New York to speak at Stanton’s memorial service. She even reached out to Dr. Edward Spitzka to confirm whether or not the brain of any educated woman had been studied since she wrote “Sex in Brain” back in 1888 (she hoped Stanton’s would be the first).30 But Stanton’s children blocked Gardener from speaking at the memorial. Stanton’s daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, herself a prominent suffragist, also denied her mother’s brain bequest, announcing, “My mother never did anything to pain those nearest to her and whom she loved, and I am quite sure she would never have done this.”31 For years, Gardener remained hurt that she had been shunned from the service and that Stanton’s “mediocre commonplace children,” as Johnson described them, had thwarted Stanton’s brain donation.32

  “Mrs. Stanton asked me, in case she should go into the silence before me, if I would speak for her—at her grave,” Gardener proclaimed at a separate, smaller event held in Washington. “I have come here tonight, in part to keep my promise to the dead.” Gardener explained that Stanton wished it known that she “died as she had lived, a fearless, serene agnostic.” Stanton knew that scientists examined the brains of great men, and yet “science had learned about woman through its hospital subjects, its paupers, its ‘unknown’ dead.” Stanton felt that “a brain like hers would be useful for all time in the record it would give the world, for the first time—the scientific record of a thinker among women.” Thus, she wanted to leave her “splendid brain” to the world as “her last and holiest gift.” Revealing that just three days before her death Stanton had penned an essay in favor of easier access to divorce, Gardener hailed Stanton as the world’s “greatest woman, noblest mother, and clearest thinker.” Gardener prophesied that women around the world would light a candle to Stanton “in the years to come when the mothers of the race shall, for the first time on earth, be reckoned as self-respecting, self-directing human units, with brains and bodies that are sacredly their own.”33

  Within the span of two years, the most important friends in Gardener’s life had died—Robert Ingersoll, Charles Smart, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. With no new books since 1894, she felt it was increasingly unlikely that she could restart her career as a writer. Though she had steadied herself somewhat by marrying Selden Day, Gardener remained at a personal and professional crossroads. She still considered herself a writer and a reformer, but she had hardly published anything and rarely attended reform conferences since her 1897 trip to California. Nor did she feel comfortable embracing her new role as the wife of a celebrated army veteran. If she could not participate in radical social change, she needed one herself. In November 1902, she and Day announced that they were embarking on a multiyear “journey around the world with the sun.”34

  AFTER SPENDING the holidays in New York with Dr. Spitzka, his family, and the writers Herbert Casson and his wife Lydia Commander, Gardener and Day took the train to California to visit Day’s family and his property in Point Loma. As Gardener spent her days “pleasuring and resting” along the coast in preparation for her world travels, Mary Phillips was stuck in New York trying to sort out Charles Smart’s increasingly complex probate matters.35

  Back in April 1901, H. C. Bailey, Smart’s son-in-law and the executor of his West Virginia will, had traveled to New York to meet with Phillips and see about Smart’s trunk, held in lien at the Garfield Safe Deposit Company because Smart had not bothered to pay the rent. Phillips initially dismissed Bailey as a hayseed who “had never been before” to New York and asserted that he agreed to let her have the trunk. But several months later, Bailey threatened to file papers in New York claiming the trunk and establishing the primacy of the West Virginia will.

  On March 7, 1903, Phillips wrote to her lawyer, M. Cleiland Milnor, to discuss “a matter connected with Helen Gardener and of the greatest importance.”36 Phillips feared what would happen if the contents of the mysterious trunk became public and aimed to protect her friend from disgrace. Smart and Gardener also owed Phillips money. Phillips did not seem to care about the money, but she used this debt as leverage to assert her priority over the trunk. As she explained to her lawyer, “I do not think [the trunk] has anything of value in it to a stranger. My object is to keep the papers it may contain from falling into strange hands.”37

  In Phillips’s retelling, years ago Smart had shown Gardener papers ostensibly proving that he had divorced Love in Ohio. In light of Smart’s West Virginia will, Phillips now entertained the idea that the alleged divorce papers had been forged and thought they might be in this secret trunk. “The copy of the will is astonishing, yet if a bogus divorce was secured years ago by Judge Hardin of Ohio—or bogus papers shown to my friend,” Phillips reasoned, “the old sinner may have been obliged to write this will to prevent suspicion by no. 1.”38

  Unbelievably, the extensive correspondence between Phillips, her lawyer Milnor, and Bailey also suggests that Smart’s original family did not know he had been living with Gardener for the past twenty-five years. In confessing a small ruse to Milnor, Phillips revealed that she “did not want Mr. Bailey to know that no. 2 was Helen H. Gardener so do not bring her name up to him if possible to prevent it.”39

  Even though Gardener never produced a marriage certificate (which certainly would have been helpful as Phillips was attempting to establish her claim to Smart’s estate), Phillips remained convinced that her friend believed she had been married to Smart. “I have great compassion for Helen Gardener,” she told her lawyer, “and believe her to have been entirely innocent of the true condition of affairs.” If any of the papers in the trunk could tarnish her reputation, Phillips pledged “I am willing to inconvenience myself” to keep them out of the wrong hands.40

  Phillips thought that the most likely scenario was that Smart had married both Love and Gardener. She doubted that his family wanted “the scandal of Smart’s having been a bigamist aired in [West] Virginia,” so she suggested that her lawyer bully them into submission. Observing that several different
hands had composed one of Bailey’s letters, Phillips told Milnor, “They are poor people, and all seem to lack general intelligence.” Phillips proposed to Milnor that he “put on a bold front” and threaten suit in West Virginia, believing that this would “frighten them all.”41

  Phillips, Milnor, Bailey, and Garfield Safe Deposit Company executives sent dozens of letters, increasingly threatening in tone, back and forth throughout the spring and summer of 1903. But the paper trail regarding the trunk and the West Virginia will goes cold after July 1903, perhaps because Lovenia died that summer (her obituary described her as Charles Smart’s widow).42 Nothing was ever revealed in the press about Smart’s family in West Virginia. Gardener continued to claim—in private, in public, and even in Day’s official army pension file—that she had been married to Smart since 1875. Mary Phillips and her “bold front” succeeded in keeping her friend’s scandalous life secret. Meanwhile, Gardener spent a “charming” winter in California, blissfully unaware that her reputation teetered on the precipice of ruin back in New York.43

  ON JUNE 12, 1903, Gardener and Day boarded the Maru for the six-day journey from California to Hawaii. In 1903, travel to Hawaii was still new and exotic. When Gardener and Day arrived, they were treated like the novelties they were. “Distinguished Authoress Here” proclaimed a local paper, and Gardener boasted to Mary Phillips that she did not have a chance to call on Mary’s friends in Honolulu because she was so busy being feted elsewhere. Gardener shared with reporters that she had suffered a breakdown three years before and had not attempted to do much work since. Accordingly, this was a “pleasure trip,” though she planned to research the people she met on her travels. “I expect to study the characteristics of the people of the countries we visit,” Gardener said, “the family life; its sociological, political, and educational features. I am not writing a book, simply taking notes and absorbing knowledge.”44

  Gardener’s goal for this trip, her first international travel, was to see the world, not like a tourist, but from “the inside.” When they first imagined this trip “around the world with the sun,” as Gardener referred to it, the couple predicted they would be gone for a year or two. In the end, they were abroad for four years, visiting twenty-two countries in total. In particular, Gardener could not wait to step foot in Japan. In both New York and Boston, she had employed Japanese servants and become fascinated with Japanese culture. According to Gardener, it was customary for highly educated Japanese men and women to spend a year or two “in service” in the United States to learn Western ways. Most people who encountered Japanese servants had no idea that they were rising stars in their home country. Gardener admitted that only after he left her home did she realize that one of her servants had recently received his PhD from a German university.45 On June 26, 1903, after a runaway team of mules nearly catapulted their wagon over a Hawaiian cliff (breaking several of Gardener’s ribs), they boarded the passenger ship Korea and sailed for Japan.46

  Thanks to the men and women who had been Gardener’s servants, she and Day lived among the locals in a lovely rented home in Tokyo. Her former cook Kussaka managed “one of the great banks,” another servant had become a doctor, another was the son-in-law of the prime minister, and still another was the minister to Siam. These connections enabled the couple to, as she related to Mary Phillips, “get right at the heart of things through our various friends who are taking pains to have us see Japan of the Orient not Europeanized Japan.”

  To this same letter, Gardener attached a private postscript, intending for Phillips to share it with their mutual friend Gertrude Aguerre. Apparently, Gardener owed both Aguerre and Phillips money. She had written, under contract, a script for the actress Lillian Burkhart and hoped to use that money to repay Aguerre the $125 that Charles Smart had “wrongfully used of hers.” But Burkhart returned the script without paying for it. This “discouraged me dreadfully,” Gardener wrote, “but I am just trying my very best to get well, absorb new things, and come back with ‘earning power’ to pay that and you.” (In her 1919 will, Gardener allotted $1,000 for Mary Phillips to “serve her in a time of need as she served me.”47)

  Even though they had now been married more than a year, Gardener confessed to Phillips that she had “said no word to Col. D. of either debt.” She then instructed Phillips to write “this sort of thing” on a separate sheet of paper because Day often asked her to read her mail aloud. Gardener concluded her chatty letter with the question, “Did ever anything come of the trunk?”48 So far from her mind was the trunk that it merited only a one-sentence afterthought to a three-page letter.

  Gardener and Day traveled extensively throughout Japan, often accompanied by the popular American singer Emma Thursby and her sister.49 Gardener took copious notes and over 1,500 photographs, a new hobby for her and thousands of others at the turn of the century.50 “Their food is good,” she reported to Dr. Edward A. Spitzka (the son of her friend, Edward C., who had become a favorite correspondent), “whether it appeals to the European taste or not.” Gardener was also impressed by Japanese children, who were so kind to each other, especially the older children who carried the younger ones on their backs. “Their quiet dignity and their almost omnivorous eagerness to learn—to develop mentally,” she wrote, “makes of it a nation that has sprung forward 500 years in the last 40.”51 Gardener loved to boast about Japanese culture because, to her, such examples exposed the hubris underpinning American missionary ideology (though she praised the American imperialist efforts she witnessed in Puerto Rico and elsewhere). She had critiqued the missionary enterprise since the 1880s, noting that “in the abundance of our ignorance and self-righteousness we have presumed to send missionaries to the Japanese.”52

  The Days stayed in Japan six months longer than planned, spending nearly a year there in total. During this extended stay, Gardener penned anonymous pro-Japanese articles for the American press and made inroads among the Japanese scientific elite, passing along information about Japanese brains to Spitzka and helping the Imperial University of Tokyo establish its own brain collection.53 Between her ethnographic note-taking, anonymous writing, amateur science studies, and enthusiastic picture taking, Gardener was beginning to return to her old self. She would also bring back to the United States several pieces of valuable Japanese lacquer, 400 or more years old, which became among her most prized possessions. But that was not all Gardener planned for her return. She told Phillips that “we shall bring home hundreds of lantern slides and I hope to be able to do some fairly good and intelligent and appreciative work in America that may be a help toward a better understanding of the nations of the east.”54

  FROM JAPAN, Col. and Mrs. Day sailed on to Manila, Malaysia, then China and Hong Kong. In China, Gardener visited the cities of Peking, Shanghai, Canton, Chefoo, and Tientsin. She also traveled along China’s rivers to visit rural villages and farmlands, and she took pictures of herself on the Great Wall. Having long argued that Western gender roles were unnatural, Gardener delighted in seeing Chinese women captaining river boats as well as “nurses, chambermaids, ‘hired-girls,’ and washerwomen” who were all men.55 More poignantly, she visited the grave of her beloved brother Bernard, who had died in China more than thirty years before.

  At the end of October 1904, the Days traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), via Singapore. Though they stayed only four weeks in Ceylon, Gardener took more notes and photos there than in any other country, documenting the trees, spices, tea, fruits, elephants, and people. Gardener marveled at Ceylon’s railroad engineering and at the beauty of its ancient cities, which she speculated must have rivaled any in Europe. She did not approve, however, of the “ugly practice” whereby “girls marry at 12—grandmothers at 30.”56

  Among her many adventures, Gardener rode a camel across Egypt, all the way to the Nile.

  Next, the Days sailed past the Maldives and up the Red Sea to Cairo, Egypt, where they were detained unexpectedly for several weeks because Day got sick.57 Gardener enjoyed some of
her best adventures in Egypt, visiting mosques, watching whirling dervishes, admiring the engineering wonder of the Suez Canal, and observing the ritual of the Holy Carpet departing Cairo for Mecca. She especially enjoyed riding a camel through the desert to see the famed pyramids and the Nile River. While crossing the “desert of Sahara we came upon the home of a Bedouin—and the footprints of John D. Rockefeller,” Gardener joked. “The main furniture of that happy home was two Standard Oil cans!”58

  AFTER EGYPT, the Days traveled to Paris to begin the western European portion of their world tour. At the suggestion of Spitzka, Gardener contacted the renowned French anthropologist Léonce Pierre Manouvrier. In April, she and Day visited Manouvrier and his brain collection. This prompted Gardener to invite Manouvrier to accompany her on a visit to Day’s old friend “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show, which was then in Paris for a two-month run. “Since ‘Bill’ and Col. Day are very old time comrades in arms and scouting,” Gardener gloated, “we go and come as we see fit, show time or any other.”59 A few days later, Manouvrier and Gardener met with Buffalo Bill, watched the show, and measured the heads of thirteen Native American performers, including the famous Chief Iron Tail, of the Oglala Lakota Nation.60

  After measuring skulls, Gardener (center) posed with Chief Iron Tail, Dr. Leonce Pierre Manouvrier, and others at “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show (Paris, 1905).

  Throughout the nineteenth century, skull and brain measurements had been used as justification to limit the opportunities of women and people of color. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, phrenology—the study of bumps on the head—promised to reveal one’s personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as important differences according to sex, race, and ethnicity. After phrenology fell out of favor, scientists such as William Hammond contended that it was not bumps but brain weight and visible brain structures that could reveal the differences between the sexes and among races. In the early 1900s, the first generation of female social scientists—including Helen Thompson Woolley and Leta Stetter Hollingworth, who had been trained by John Dewey at the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike and Franz Boas at Columbia—established that differences between people were cultural, not natural.61