Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Though she published a few Southern nostalgia stories in the 1890s, Gardener had not previously written much about race in the United States beyond praising her family’s abolitionism and critiquing the racism she witnessed when she lived in Boston.42 Her main point in such writings seemed not so much to critique racism itself but to argue that racism was an American—not just a Southern—problem. In her efforts to raise the age of sexual consent for girls, she insisted that such laws must apply equally to all girls, regardless of race, which distinguished her among most of her reform colleagues. But after settling in Washington, she seems to have unquestionably adopted the dominant NAWSA positions that white women’s rights took precedence over African American rights and that it was out of the question to simultaneously lobby for the enfranchisement of black women.

  Gardener ended her letter to Blackwell by emphasizing her own unique heritage as the daughter of a Virginian who had emancipated his slaves “when it was against the law of his State to do so—who gave up his property, his friends and his home for the principle of human liberty.” Attuned to charges of racism within NAWSA, Gardener attempted to deflect criticism of her racist position by pointing out her anti-racist heritage. “With his blood in my veins and the record of nearly forty years of work, myself, for human rights I need not remind you that it is not the appeal of a coward or reactionary.” She hoped that Blackwell would support their efforts to prevent “the color question from appearing in any form in this demonstration.”43 Blackwell agreed not to raise the issue in the Woman’s Journal.44

  Paul remained concerned about black women marching. At the top of one letter from a hopeful participant, someone at headquarters wrote in pencil, “please see if these are negroes.”45 And Nellie Quander, president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority at Howard University, had to write twice in order for her group to participate because no one replied to her first letter.46 Paul’s position was quietly to allow black suffragists to apply to march, hope that few would actually do so, and stall when they did.47

  But Paul was not following an official directive from NAWSA. To the contrary, NAWSA leaders urged Paul to welcome African American women into the march. At the outset, Mary Ware Dennett, Paul’s chief liaison to the NAWSA board, sent a pointed letter saying she had heard that a group of African American women had been asked to withdraw their application to participate. According to Dennett, it would be “absolutely impossible to rightly endorse any such plan” to discriminate. “The Suffrage movement stands for enfranchising every single women [sic] in the United States,” Dennett proclaimed, and “there was no occasion when we would be justified in not living up to our principles.”48

  Then, just a few days before the March procession, Dennett sent a frantic night telegram to Paul. “Am informed that Parade committee has so strongly urged Colored women not to march that it amounts to official discrimination which is distinctly contrary to instructions from National headquarters. Please instruct all marshals to see that all colored women who wish to march shall be accorded every service given to other marchers.”49 But on the day of the parade, state delegations received conflicting messages regarding NAWSA’s policy on black women marching. Illinois leaders reluctantly informed the journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells that she would have to march at the back of the parade, thinking that was NAWSA’s directive. Declaring she would “not march at all unless I can march under the Illinois banner,” Wells waited among the crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue until the Illinois delegation passed and then took her rightful place under the banner.50

  Some forty black women did ultimately march alongside white women in the procession, but there is no telling how many more women of color were discouraged from marching by headquarters’ volunteers or by NAWSA’s conflicting messages.51 In response to a critical article in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Paul insisted that she had received no letters of protest and issued no segregation order but conceded “the point concerning a cool reception, is, I suppose, true.”52

  As the controversy regarding black women’s right to participate in the parade indicates, the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction was highly pronounced in the March 3 procession. Wilson’s election had been hailed as a victory for the latter-day Confederacy. His move to Washington highlighted the Southern character of the nation’s capital and the ascendency of Southern Democrats—many of whom had once been leading Confederates or were sons of Confederates. In the 1912 election, Democrats also won control of both chambers of Congress, prompting one NAWSA leader to lament that it seemed as if congressional leaders spoke a different language because their Southern accents were so pronounced.53

  Paul chose to end the procession by placing a quote from Abraham Lincoln on the final float. Women dressed in white, representing light, walked around a black float, depicting the states where women had no vote. The float was adorned with a banner that read: “‘No country can exist half slave and half free.’ Abraham Lincoln.”54 White NAWSA leaders drew connections between themselves and enslaved people, all the while discounting or ignoring the rights of black women and the continued disenfranchisement of black men in the South.

  DESPITE THE MISGIVINGS of NAWSA headquarters that the scope of the parade might be too militant or too ambitious, Paul, Gardener, and their small team had organized the biggest and highest-profile suffrage event in history. But just as the procession began, hostile men crowded onto Pennsylvania Avenue, obstructing the path of the marchers for several blocks, often reducing the parade to a single file. The men pressed up against the marchers, called them unprintable names, spat on them, tripped them, and assaulted them. Few policemen could be seen, and many simply joined the crowd. For almost two hours, thousands of women stood virtually unprotected against an angry, intoxicated mob. The procession stood at a standstill, from 6th to 14th Streets, until the U.S. Calvary was called in to clear Pennsylvania Avenue and restore order.55

  In the short term, the police snafu succeeded in getting the suffragists an immediate audience before Congress. Just days after the procession, the Senate Subcommittee on the District of Columbia convened hearings to determine what had gone wrong and whose fault it was. The hearings lasted several days—nearly as long as the suffragists had ever testified before Congress over the past fifty years combined—and generated a tremendous amount of written material and photos. The women blamed Washington officials, Police Chief Sylvester, and his bosses, while Sylvester blamed individual officers themselves. Sen. Clyde Tavender reported that he and his wife saw just six policemen along the entire procession and long periods when absolutely no police could be seen to guard the “dignified women” against the “jeering hoodlums.”56 Another witness, William E. Ambrose, described police efforts to clear a path for the procession as “the efforts of a boy to stop a waterfall by using first one hand and then the other.”57

  Thousands of angry men blocked the suffragists’ parade for nearly two hours.

  Gardener testified extensively about her involvement in the planning of the parade and what she experienced along the route. She explained to the senators that she had repeatedly asked Sylvester for additional protection and that Sylvester had refused, insisting that his staff could handle the parade, even though he had initially denied women the right to march on the grounds that his staff could not adequately protect them from the Southern “riff raff.” Gardener told the senators that men came right up to her float, took away the newspapers she had used for decoration, and pushed the groomsmen who were driving the float. The police “did nothing” except say “go back” to the sidewalks in a nonauthoritative manner. “I am used to Army life,” Gardener declared. “I am used to tones of authority and conduct that means authority. I did not see any of that.” Instead, the police “seemed to be quite entertained.”58 As a result of the Senate hearings, thirteen men were arrested and a subsequent investigation of Chief Sylvester resulted in his termination in 1915.59
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br />   Although the women’s plans for a flawless procession had been ruined, the violent protesters and police failures vividly made NAWSA’s point for them: women needed the vote to protect their interests from unscrupulous and incompetent men. Senator Tavender declared that “more votes were made for women suffrage in the city of Washington on the afternoon of March 3 than will perhaps ever be made again in the same length of time so long as the government stands.”60 Even Anna Howard Shaw, whose letters were not generally marked by optimism, told Paul that the violent disruption of the procession “has done more for suffrage and will do more for suffrage in the end than the parade itself would have done.”61

  As the suffragists rejoiced in capturing positive national media attention for the first time, tensions simmered between Alice Paul’s faction—now called the Congressional Union—and NAWSA. NAWSA leaders sensed, correctly, that Paul’s plans were much larger than one parade. What Paul wanted was to organize women across the nation to advocate for the federal amendment and against Democrats, the party in power. At the time, NAWSA was engaged in several state campaigns, had virtually no money, and was strictly nonpartisan, so everything about Paul’s plans threatened the organization’s existence.

  All sides agreed that meaningful suffrage action had finally focused on Washington and the federal amendment, but the essential struggle came down to this: which suffrage group would represent the national movement in D.C., and who would be that group’s spokesperson? From behind the scenes, Helen Hamilton Gardener moved confidently to counter Alice Paul and represent the suffrage movement in Washington.

  13

  Old Fogies

  You do not allow us women to give our consent, yet we are governed . . . 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.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1914

  IN THE WEEKS immediately following the March 3, 1913, suffrage procession, Helen Gardener and Alice Paul worked on a variety of meetings, petitions, and visits to Congress to keep up the pressure for the federal amendment that the parade had invigorated. But in a split that would shape the final years of the suffrage movement, they followed increasingly divergent paths. Gardener endeared herself to NAWSA leadership and embraced its policy of nonpartisanship, while Paul doubled down on protest tactics targeting Democrats. Ironically, that summer a syndicated newspaper article profiled Gardener and Paul, with photos, describing them as the “two busiest women in the capital,” not realizing they were often working at cross-purposes.1

  Unofficially, Paul began to build a national organization that would work solely for the federal amendment. Within days of the parade, she wrote to suffrage leaders in various states requesting their mailing lists and asked NAWSA secretary Mary Ware Dennett to share the addresses of the group’s life members. Several respondents, including Dennett and Harriet Taylor Upton, of Ohio, warily replied, “You don’t wish to ask for money, do you?” Indeed she did. Paul even approached the Woman’s Journal to see if the NAWSA paper of record would consider relocating from Boston to Washington, D.C., so that it could better report on the federal amendment.2 NAWSA leaders refused most of Paul’s requests because resources—both financial and temporal—were scarce and because they correctly sensed that Paul was staging a revolt.

  Paul intended nothing less than a wholesale redirection of the national suffrage movement and a takeover from the “old fogies.” As the year progressed, she and Lucy Burns set up their own newspaper, The Suffragist, and national organization, first called the Congressional Union (CU) and later the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Paul proposed that she would both run the CU and remain a member of the NAWSA Congressional Committee. But NAWSA leaders deplored Paul’s strident tactics and especially her partisan attacks against Democrats. While they recognized Paul’s brilliance and tried to find a way to work together, NAWSA officials repeatedly warned Paul that her militancy would not be tolerated and would only hurt the cause.3 No one felt this more urgently than Gardener.

  For the first few months of 1913, Gardener had been energized by working alongside Paul—a young firebrand not unlike herself thirty years earlier. But long before NAWSA leaders figured out that Paul posed a threat to the organization and its reputation, Gardener cooled relations and began to separate herself from Paul. Over time, Gardener positioned herself as the seasoned D.C. antidote to Paul’s militant, partisan upstart. Paul may well have been the “smartest woman in America,” as Gardener once characterized her, but she lacked Gardener’s lobbying skills, varied life experiences, contacts, and personal charms—all of which would prove crucial in securing the federal amendment.4

  As Paul began lining up her forces to challenge Democrats in upcoming elections, Gardener approached her friends in Congress, often through their wives, beginning with Rep. Edward Taylor (D-CO)—the suffragists’ staunchest ally—and Rep. John Raker (D-CA), to see about establishing a House Committee on Woman Suffrage. Such a committee had long been a goal of NAWSA, and it became an even more pressing need as the federal amendment gained ground because it was the necessary procedural mechanism to advance the amendment to the House floor for a vote. The Senate had had a Committee on Woman Suffrage in place since 1883, and each year this committee held hearings and provided women the chance to testify. But the House had no such committee, so suffragists were forced to plead their case before the House Judiciary Committee, where they were stymied, rebuffed, or ignored.

  On March 28, 1913, Lucy Burns, Paul’s second in command, reported to Paul that Gardener was “working nobly” for the House committee and that her personal lobbying “may be very well to secure a Suffrage committee in the House.”5 The following month, NAWSA tapped Gardener to testify before the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee. At the hearings, Gardener deployed her signature humor to win new converts. She quoted members of Congress who had recently praised America’s founding documents before pointing out that in denying women political rights, the congressmen acted much like the king whom the colonists had deplored. Were women people, she demanded to know, and if so, how could congressmen justify women’s exclusion from democracy?6 The Washington Times reported that Gardener’s “witty speech attacked various arguments against suffrage” and was delivered amid “laughter and applause.”7 On May 14, 1913, the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee reported favorably on women voting for the first time in twenty-one years.8

  Nevertheless, on May 22, Paul wrote Mary Beard complaining that it was “almost hopeless” to get action from the House Judiciary Committee. She predicted that “it is going to be a very hard fight” to get a suffrage committee in the House.9 Gardener had a different read of the situation.

  By June, Gardener was giddy with excitement over the prospects of the House committee. She informed NAWSA board member Harriet Laidlaw “sub rosa” that “Mr. Underwood (leader of the House of Representatives) has just assured me he will try to get us a hearing (right away) making the Rules Committee to agree to the appointment of a House Committee on Woman Suffrage. It now looks as if we’d get it! If we do, it will be the first hearing before it (and a tremendous advance step, nationally, when the [NAWSA] Convention comes).” She was “almost bursting with delight” over her congressional inroads but cautioned that her behind-the-scenes work “must not be spoken of or get into print.”10

  In July, Gardener, accompanied by the wives of four pro-suffrage congressmen, met with the chairman of the House Rules Committee to plead the case for a woman suffrage committee. Rep. Robert Lee Henry (D-TX) told the women that a hearing on such a topic could only be held during the regular session of Congress, which would be in December, so Gardener turned her attention to that.11

  Throughout the summer and fall of 1913, Gardener and Paul worked independently for the House committee. Their parallel efforts caused much confusion among members of Congress, the press, and even other suffragists, because, as Gardener lamented to
Paul, it was “very difficult” to get people to understand that not all suffrage groups were one and the same.12 As it stood, several factions of suffragists—the Federal Equality Association (led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s longtime ally Clara Bewick Colby), the National Council of Women Voters, the College Equal Suffrage League, NAWSA, and now Paul’s Congressional Union—all requested meetings with the White House and Congress. The men simply could not keep track of who was who. NAWSA tried to establish itself as the voice of the suffrage movement but was repeatedly thwarted by congressmen’s lack of attention to detail and especially by Paul’s highly publicized statements that presented her as the voice of the national movement.13

  For her part, Gardener endeavored to sustain NAWSA’s Congressional Committee as an entity distinct from Paul’s Congressional Union, which, confusingly, still worked out of the NAWSA office at 1420 F Street. Gardener distanced herself from Paul after the Senate hearings and regularly decamped to visit friends and family in Virginia, leaving her desk at the headquarters untouched for weeks at a time.14 Gardener lamented to Illinois suffrage leaders that for years she had functioned as the de facto NAWSA Congressional Committee and now the officially appointed committee, still led by Paul, seemed poised to take the lead just “when things are ready to boil over.”15