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Twenty-Two Favors
There are some men of real vision and of lofty aim in Washington political circles today, and there are others whose personality and value to the nation could be poised upon the point of a cambric needle and leave room for a jazz band.
—HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1919
WITH MOMENTUM from the creation of the House Committee on Woman Suffrage, Wilson’s increasingly public support, and the passage of suffrage in New York, Helen Gardener and her NAWSA colleagues entered 1918 expecting that the Susan B. Anthony Amendment would pass both chambers by the conclusion of the Sixty-Fifth Congress, leaving plenty of time for ratification in advance of the 1920 election. But the women underestimated just how impenetrable the “Southern Wall of Opposition,” as Carrie Chapman Catt called it, would be.
Southern politicians said they opposed the amendment on the grounds that it infringed on “states’ rights” to determine voter qualifications. In actuality, they dreaded the enfranchisement of African American women and the overall growth of the black electorate. White Southerners deeply resented the Fifteenth Amendment, which made it illegal to bar citizens from voting on the basis of race, and they understood the Nineteenth Amendment as inherently linked to it, as indeed it was. After federal troops withdrew from the region in the late 1870s, Southern states began to enact various state-specific laws—including poll taxes, property restrictions, and literacy tests—to bar black men from voting and void the Fifteenth Amendment. In the decades since, federal authorities had not challenged these discriminatory laws, which violated the spirit but not necessarily the letter of the Fifteenth Amendment.
As part of a larger movement to formally restrict voting rights in the early 1900s, some Southern congressmen even proposed repealing the Fifteenth Amendment.1 Repeal efforts did not succeed, but white Southerners worried that the Nineteenth Amendment would bring scrutiny to the ways states had gutted the Fifteenth Amendment and maybe even compel the federal government to enforce it. In this, Southerners were joined by several Northern and Western members of Congress who also declared that their fidelity to states’ rights—code for racial exclusion—trumped any interest they might have otherwise had in women voting. As Maud Wood Park recalled, “If I had needed a lesson about the tendency of acquiescence in one injustice to breed tolerance of another, I should have learned it from the way so many of the men from the South saw other questions only in the light of their determination to keep the Negro from the ballot box.”2
African American women also recognized that the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments were “two fronts in the same fight,” as historian Liette Gidlow has established.3 In a 1915 essay in The Crisis, African American leader Mary Church Terrell asserted that “the reasons for repealing the Fifteenth Amendment differ but little from the arguments advanced by those who oppose the enfranchisement of women.”4 But white suffragists no longer understood their struggle to vote as fundamentally linked with that of African Americans. They fought for the Nineteenth Amendment knowing full well that black women would be barred from voting in Southern states just as black men had been, despite the guarantee of the Fifteenth Amendment.
NAWSA even published state-by-state population counts, showing that enfranchising Southern women would actually increase the white majority because white women outnumbered black women in most Southern states.5 Throughout the early 1900s and especially after the ascendency of Catt, NAWSA leaders cooled relationships with the Southern women (such as Gardener’s one-time friend Kate Gordon) who advocated explicitly racist proposals for whites-only suffrage and stood firm against such measures, but they stopped far short of embracing African American women as their partners in the struggle for equal citizenship.6
Throughout her life, Gardener expressed tremendous pride in her father’s and three brothers’ Union service—a rare sacrifice among Virginians and one that led to the premature deaths of all four men—and she idolized Abraham Lincoln, saluting his statue in the Capitol rotunda every time she passed it.7 But she seems to have felt as though her family’s valiant efforts to abolish slavery excused her from having to actively engage in the ongoing struggle for African American civil rights. Like many white progressives of her era, Gardener considered herself an ally of African Americans even as she held tight to white privilege and remained silent in the face of increasing violence and discrimination against African Americans.
As a proud Chenoweth of Virginia, Gardener also prioritized white reconciliation over the full incorporation of African Americans into American life. Gardener’s social life in Washington, D.C., revolved around her Virginia relatives and Col. Selden Day’s friends from the Civil War, both Union and especially Confederate veterans. As she watched white men from the North and South consolidate power through their shared wartime experiences, Gardener, who had also suffered greatly as a result of the Civil War, wanted in. Beginning with the publication of An Unofficial Patriot (which she regularly sent new friends through the late 1910s), she worked toward sectional reconciliation in her own way.8
From behind the scenes, Gardener reached out to President Wilson and her Southern friends in Congress to dismantle the “Southern Wall of Opposition” to the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. In large part she did this by emphasizing that World War I, like the Civil War before it, was a fight to extend democracy and by applying the promises of America’s founding documents to white women. She presented herself to NAWSA as a woman who could advocate for the federal amendment in the South, and she presented herself to Southern politicians as a Southern woman who understood—but did not agree with—their states’ rights objections. Such a dual perspective proved instrumental in the final months of suffrage lobby work in Washington, but it also underscored the fact that NAWSA’s priority remained the enfranchisement of white women.
WHEN CONGRESS CONVENED in January 1918, the House—thanks to the newly constituted Committee on Woman Suffrage—immediately took up the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. From January 3 to January 7, the committee held hearings and listened to testimony from supporters and opponents. A long-standing objection to women voting had been the fear that women would vote for Prohibition. But just weeks before, Congress had passed the Prohibition Amendment, neutralizing this argument. Antis had also claimed that women voting would destroy the family, voiced concerns about prostitutes voting, and insisted that most women really did not want the vote.9 But after more and more states had granted women at least partial suffrage and none of these objections had been borne out, the singular sticking point remained states’ rights. Having rebutted so many arguments over the years, Carrie Chapman Catt seemed almost relieved to now focus on just one.10
NAWSA members and their allies prevailed at the hearings. On January 8, 1918, the House Committee on Woman Suffrage reported favorably on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, clearing the way for a floor vote. Anticipating the vote and knowing they would need every possible “yes,” Park, Gardener, and their colleagues had spent the previous month “like a three-ringed circus in which our Congressional Committee had to perform hair-raising stunts in all the rings at practically the same time.” Gardener organized another high-profile reception, while Park put together a suffrage steering committee in the House, chaired by Rep. Carl Hayden of Arizona, whom she claimed was “easily the most popular member of the House.” Thanks to Catt’s “Winning Plan,” NAWSA internal polls showed tremendous gains in 1917. In one year, the number of confirmed “yes” votes had grown from 182 to 245. They needed at least 273.11
With the House vote looming, Gardener stepped up the pressure on President Wilson through his secretary, Joseph Tumulty. Even though he had assured her of his support, Wilson had yet to make a public statement in favor of the federal amendment. Now was the time, Gardener and other suffragists urged. Catt asked Wilson’s son-in-law, the cabinet secretary William McAdoo, for assistance. And Elizabeth Bass, the head of the Woman’s Bureau of the Democratic National Committee, appealed to Wilson for a public st
atement, promising that doing so “would enthrone you forever in the hearts of the women of America as the second Great Emancipator.”12
Finally, on the eve of the House vote, Wilson summoned to the White House the Democratic members of the House Committee on Woman Suffrage and encouraged them to vote “yes” on the amendment (the committee vote had been procedural). This meeting had been arranged by Tumulty in consultation with Gardener, who was, by then, his daily correspondent. The president wrote his statement to the committee in his own hand and allowed it to be released to the press. It read, “The committee found that the President had not felt at liberty to volunteer to Members of Congress his advice in this important matter, but when we sought his advice, he very frankly and earnestly advised us to vote for the Amendment as an act of right and justice to the women of the country and of the world.”13
Tumulty saved the handwritten scrap of paper for Gardener, a thoughtful testament to their close working relationship and to her role in cultivating Wilson’s support of the federal amendment. She “thanked him from the bottom of [her] heart for thinking of it” and asked him to please “not fold it” and “ask [the president] to sign it and let me have it just as it is.” Gardener predicted that the president’s statement would be a “historic document,” but it remains in an obscure folder in Tumulty’s papers at the Library of Congress.14
On the morning of January 10, Gardener headed to the Hill and took her reserved seat in the House gallery, courtesy of Speaker Clark. Around noon, the Reverend Billy Sunday, who happened to be in town, opened the session with a prayer. After forty minutes of debate over committee jurisdiction, Rep. Jeanette Rankin offered the first floor speech in favor of the amendment. For the next five hours, Gardener listened anxiously while congressional opponents voiced objections and proposed various impediments. Rep. John Moon (D-TN) argued that in Southern states where black people outnumbered whites, giving women the vote would “produce a condition that would be absolutely intolerable. We owe something to the wishes and the sentiments of the people of our sister States struggling to maintain law and order and white supremacy.” Rep. William Greene (R-MA) claimed he could not vote for the amendment because he objected to the NWP pickets. Rep. John Raker (D-CA), chair of the House Committee on Woman Suffrage, brought in hundreds of letters from Southern women demanding the vote and claimed that white women in the South far outnumbered black women, intimating that women suffrage would bolster white supremacy.15
Finally, the vote was called just before 5 p.m. Knowing the outcome would be close, Rep. James Mann (R-IL) traveled to the Capitol from his hospital bed, against doctor’s orders, to vote “yes”; Rep. Henry Barnhart (R-IN) was wheeled in on a stretcher just in time to answer the second roll call and cast his vote in the affirmative; and Rep. Thetus Sims (D-TN), who had slipped on the ice and broken his shoulder that morning, refused treatment so that he could attempt to rally his fellow Southerners to approve the measure. Most poignantly of all, New York representative Frederick Hicks, Jr., took the train to D.C. immediately after the death of his wife, who had been an “ardent suffragist,” and stayed just long enough to vote “yes.” After recounts and last-minute challenges, the measure passed 274 to 136, meeting the two-thirds requirement with one vote to spare. Gardener and her colleagues in the House chamber were “jubilant” and broke out singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”16
CATT FELT CONFIDENT about the amendment’s chances in the Senate, but NAWSA’s polling showed that they fell a few votes shy of the required two-thirds majority. Gardener went straight to work. She began with her old friend Sen. John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, whom her colleagues described as “hopeless.” Gardener first inquired about Mrs. Williams, reminding the senator how they had celebrated her birthday dinner together the year before. Then she laid into him: “Did you analyze the vote on Suffrage in the House?” Did you, she pressed, notice that twenty-five state delegations were united in support of the amendment and only six states, including Mississippi, were solidly opposed? “I want you to redeem that state,” she implored. “You are by far its leading citizen.” Do not, she beseeched him, “insist upon remaining with a sinking ship” when everyone could see that “Democracy’s hour has struck” for women.
In her four-page entreaty, Gardener also invoked white superiority as a reason to oppose Williams’s preferred state-by-state method. To organize for a federal amendment, she emphasized, women had to lobby only the “picked men of the Legislature.” Wasn’t that enough? “Do you want to force the refined white women of your state to appeal to all of the individual voters there?” Surely, Gardener presumed, Williams must be “willing to save them from that humiliation.” In this race-baiting argument, Gardener demanded that Williams rectify what to her mind was the fundamental unfairness of allowing all men to vote (at least in theory) when women—even educated white ones—could not.
Next, Gardener invited the senator, in so many ways her peer, to put himself in her position and imagine that “when the day comes (very soon now) when the Senate votes upon this question, I shall sit (as I did all day long in the House, as the guest of the Speaker) tense and anxious in the gallery, while men decided our fate.” Gardener implored, “Remember that you are holding in your power my right to attain self-government by the shortest, best, and constitutionally prescribed method. Remember that I want it with all my heart with all my soul and with all my strength—whether or not any other women whose good will you value cares for it or not.”17
The following day, Senator Williams sent his “Dear Friend” a candid reply: “If anything in the world could make me do the thing you want done it would be your letter.” But even though he realized that women’s suffrage was on the horizon, he could not do as Gardener wished. Mainly, Williams divulged, he could not vote for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment because it would, at least on paper, enfranchise the black women of Mississippi. This he could not abide, even if it meant disenfranchising his daughters and offending Gardener. If he lived in “any white state,” he acknowledged, he would vote for suffrage, but not in Mississippi. Black women, he charged, “cannot be controlled, as the men can be, and they would almost all, without exception, go to the polls while a great many white women would not.”
Referring to the “injurious” Fifteenth Amendment, Williams clarified that he considered the vote a privilege, not a right, and that it should be up to each individual state to determine who could cast a ballot. He then returned explicitly to race. “Of course, you know as well as I do, and if you do not I will tell you confidentially, that the real reason why negro men do not vote in the State of Mississippi, is not because of their legal disqualifications, but because they are afraid that if they do vote some of them might get hurt.” But such violent tactics would not work with black women because “a woman is a woman after all, whether she be black or white.” And even if “a few men of the very lowest sort” did use violence to scare black women from the polls, the “whole moral sense of the world would be set against the Mississippi white man.”
Williams concluded that he would make no public statements on woman suffrage and that he had answered no other letters on the topic, only Gardener’s because she was his friend. He preferred that his “no” vote on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment “be the sole answer I make.”18 Decades after Reconstruction, the Fifteenth Amendment still set the terms of debate regarding women voting and highlighted the lengths to which some white leaders would go to keep African Americans from the polls.
GARDENER MAY HAVE been disappointed by Williams’s reply, but as a savvy lobbyist, she intended her letter to Williams for wider audience. She immediately sent a copy of it to Tumulty and asked him to share it with the president.19 During these tense months of lobbying, Gardener repeatedly sent the White House copies of her letters to Southern Democrats, using this back channel method as a way to critique the states’ rights position, which had until that month been Wilson’s stance, without overreaching.20
A
few days before the January 1918 House vote, Gardener had also given Tumulty a copy of a letter she had just sent to her friend Chief Justice Walter M. Clarke of North Carolina, a progressive Democrat who advocated woman suffrage and condemned lynching. She used this letter to make an argument to Wilson about the underlying party politics of suffrage. “The defeat by the Democratic Party of the suffrage amendment of this session of the Congress,” Gardener warned Clarke, “will also be the sure defeat of the Democratic Party at the next Presidential election and the loss of the Congress of the House before that time.” She asked him if the Democratic Party could “afford to allow a group of its backward-looking men [to] lose for it the opportunity of a generation.” Gardener boasted that NAWSA members could easily unseat enough congressmen to ensure that the amendment would pass in the next Congress: “Two million well organized women with a goodly supply of financial and voting backing can accomplish quite a change in the face of things when they try, and the men in the Congress who have not yet ‘got the hang of the Declaration of Independence’ enough to apply its principles to one half of the population will doubtless ‘return to the practice of the law’ in large numbers.”21
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