Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  As Gardener’s correspondence illustrates, the party politics of suffrage were often unpredictable and did not fall along straight partisan or regional lines.22 Both the Republican and Democratic Parties had adopted planks in support of suffrage—if granted state by state—at their respective 1916 conventions. Although the most vehement and coordinated opposition to the federal amendment came from the South, several Western and Northern Republicans—including both senators from Massachusetts, one from Delaware, plus one from New York—were also virulent anti-suffragists, generally because they feared that women would vote for reforms that curbed the power of big business or because they, too, feared the growth of the black electorate.

  Despite having antagonists on both sides of the aisle, Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party continued to oppose only Democrats, even pro-suffrage allies, as long as the party controlled both the Congress and the White House. To Paul, doing so showcased the ability of women to steer the congressional agenda.23 NAWSA remained nonpartisan but worked closely with the Democrats in power. And Gardener, as Carrie Chapman Catt observed, “may be a non-partisan, but she is so well known to be a very enthusiastic Wilsonite that she passes for a Democrat.”24 The one and only time Gardener had voted, in California, she cast her ballot for the straight Republican ticket.25 But her letters to Democratic leaders reveal that she was deeply invested in diminishing the power of the old guard of “states’ rights” within the party. In this she found common cause with Wilson’s influential secretary Tumulty, who joined Gardener in encouraging the president to champion the federal amendment.

  PATIENTLY, over the eighteen months since she had first met Wilson in the summer of 1916, Gardener had alternated between publicly praising him and privately urging him to do more for women. In the spring of 1918, she told Tumulty that the time had arrived for Wilson’s big push in the Senate. Gardener regularly provided the president with NAWSA’s lists of senators who were for suffrage, against, and “doubtful” so that he could channel his influence accordingly.26 Every time Gardener got a lead on a Democratic senator who might be swayed, she nudged Tumulty to get the president to reach out to the man in question.

  Wilson initially resisted, noting that it had long been his policy to offer his recommendations to members of Congress only when they asked for his opinion. At one point he even resorted to a ruse. In March, he invited two senators from Gardener’s list to the Oval Office on the pretense of discussing the Commerce Committee’s investigation of the Shipping Board. A third senator was then invited and instructed in advance to ask the president his thoughts regarding women voting so that Wilson could subtly inform the first two senators that he wanted them to vote for the federal amendment without seeming to have invited them for the express purpose of arm-twisting.27 But as the Sixty-Fifth Congress dragged on without the prospect of Senate passage, the president dropped such pretexts and began openly calling, writing, and telegramming individual senators.

  Gardener also kept a lookout for other opportunities for the president to speak publicly in favor of suffrage. She used a statement he made in praise of the Women’s Overseas Hospital Committee—a group supported by NAWSA—to promote the federal amendment.28 And then she persuaded him to revise a letter he had written to French suffragists to include a statement urging immediate congressional passage of the amendment. His secretary Rudolph Forster marveled that this was the only time the president had changed a statement after it had left the White House. Together with other NAWSA officers, Gardener went to the White House to receive this letter so that they could publicize its message.29

  Gardener (bottom right) and NAWSA officers leaving the White House armed with a letter from President Wilson urging congressional passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

  Besides her skillful maneuvering to secure the House Committee on Woman Suffrage, Gardener’s signature diplomatic achievement was the way she interacted with the president and his top aides. Nearly every time she wrote Wilson a letter, Gardener also included a cover letter to Tumulty or Forster or both, explaining her purpose, what she wanted the president to do, and how they could help. After a June 1918 White House visit, she thanked Tumulty for all his invaluable help and confessed that it had been hard on her to “seem so insistent and persistent” and that “if I had your job, I’d be crazy.” Above all, she appreciated that he treated her with “sympathy and good will whatever I have to bring to you.”30

  Gardener frequently visited the White House in person and called on the telephone several times each week, becoming a regular and welcome presence during Wilson’s second term. She positioned herself as providing insider information on suffrage and Democratic politics in the South. Ultimately, Wilson’s staff came to view her as a partner and collaborator, not as a pesky supplicant. She sent apricots from her garden, effusive thank-you notes, and a heartfelt letter when Tumulty’s father died.31 Even NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt generally did not approach Wilson without first going through Gardener, and she often stayed at Gardener’s house when in D.C. Catt once instructed Park, “Tell Helen to go in person about the President’s message but I will write also and send the letter to her. No! She writes so much better than I do that she must write it and she may sign my name if she thinks it necessary. She will know what to say!”32 By 1918, the White House had come to consider Gardener as the voice of NAWSA in Washington and as a friend.

  NAWSA Congressional Committee chair Maud Wood Park recalled that Gardener’s work with the White House proved invaluable during this final push in Congress. As NAWSA’s White House emissary, “she was vastly better than anyone else,” Park explained. “She was the one woman to whom the President was always willing to grant an appointment and whom Mr. Joseph Tumulty and Mr. Rudolph Forster, the secretaries in the executive office, were always glad to assist.”33 Gardener later boasted that she had asked the president for twenty-two favors and been granted twenty-one.34

  In contrast, when the National Woman’s Party requested a meeting to discuss the Senate situation in May 1918, Wilson’s aide wrote a memo observing that “the case of these women presents a bit of a problem. They refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer. They come to the Executive Office with letters which they insist shall be brought to the President’s attention at once . . . and remain in the Executive Office for hours.” Wilson personally crafted the reply to this latest NWP appeal indicating that there was no reason for him to meet with them because “no further representations could make his interest in the suffrage matter any deeper than it is now.”35

  Gardener and Carrie Chapman Catt leaving the White House after one of their many meetings with President Wilson.

  Over the course of 1918, Gardener grew bolder. In addition to giving the White House names of senators for the president to contact, she began also providing talking points about suffrage as a war measure. And the White House started sharing copies of the president’s letters to senators with Gardener.36 At one point, she even sent Forster a bulleted to-do list for the president.37 Summoning her literary humor, Gardener penned a July 4 poem to the President, which she claimed, tongue in cheek, had been written by a soldier on the front:

  We’ll fight with all that’s in us for justice to all mankind, but it takes our nerve and riles us, to know that such men behind can bully and flout our women who ask but their honest due—so we’re asking, Woodrow Wilson, for another blast from you!38

  Gardener was literally trying everything she could think of to get the amendment through the Senate before the Sixty-Fifth Congress adjourned.

  But by the summer of 1918, the suffragists still did not have enough “yes” votes in the Senate. Gardener, now sixty-five, was hospitalized for appendix surgery for much of July and August while Congress recessed. From her sick bed, Gardener pressured Wilson to move beyond writing letters to individual senators and to use his presidential authority to demand that Congress pass suffrage as a war measure. This was the strategy NAWSA had long worked toward, and Gardener attempted to g
et Wilson to put the full weight of the presidency behind it. One day she told him that her “good friend and yours” Sen. John Sharp Williams would “back the President in all war measures.” So Gardener reasoned that “a ‘war measure blast’ from you is, I believe, our last best hope.”39 Another day, she gave Wilson a copy of Catt’s open speech to Congress, which she delivered several times in 1917–1918, explicating the suffrage-as-a-war-measure argument.

  Gardener spoke regularly with White House staff from the hospital phone, and she boasted to NAWSA colleagues that the White House sent her copies of the president’s letters to senators while the ink was still wet.40 In August, Wilson had staff send Gardener several dozen roses from the White House Conservatory. But nothing cheered her as much as Wilson’s promise to grant her wish that he “say to the Senate and the country some of the splendid things you have said to individuals” about his support for the federal amendment.41 This vow so exhilarated Gardener that even though “the doctor says I may go downstairs once a day, I have been down twice today.”42

  By September, NAWSA leaders believed they were just one vote shy in the Senate.43 Gardener immediately arranged a meeting at the White House to discuss what Park described as their best prospects yet in the Senate.44 The women implored the president to issue a public statement demanding that the Senate pass the Nineteenth Amendment as a war measure. “The hope and the fate of the women of the nation rest in your hands,” Catt declared.45

  Gardener often presented President Wilson with instructive reading material, sometimes even including “to do” lists.

  With the proud, indulgent tone of someone bearing a great and unexpected gift, the president replied to Catt, “I did not do what [your letter] suggested, but I hope that you think what I did do was better.”46 What Wilson did was grant Gardener’s sick bed wish that he publicly say some “splendid things” about suffrage. On September 30, he went to the Capitol to address the entire U.S. Senate, for only the second time in his presidency, accompanied by all but one member of his cabinet. Wilson told the senators that passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was “vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged.” The nation had “made partners of the women in this war,” Wilson implored, “shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”47

  Heeding the president’s call to action, the Senate scheduled a vote on the amendment for the very next day. Once again, the question of black women voting anchored the debate. Senator Williams even tried unsuccessfully to add a clause limiting the vote to white women. Ultimately, the Senate fell short of passing the Susan B. Anthony Amendment by two votes. With “heads held as high as we could get them,” Gardener, Park, and Mary Hay (of New York) went to thank their friends in the Senate for their help. More disappointed than at any previous defeat, Carrie Chapman Catt vowed never again to watch another vote.48

  THE “SOLID SOUTH” accounted for most of the “no” votes, but the Southerners were joined by Massachusetts senators John W. Weeks and Henry Cabot Lodge, among others. “Nothing in the history of the Amendment,” observed Maud Wood Park, “has been more amazing than the constant working together of Republican opponents from the north-eastern states and Democrats from the so-called solid south.”49 Wilson’s advocacy may have failed to turn enough votes in the Senate, but it nevertheless bolstered the public perception that the Anthony Amendment was a vital war measure and emboldened the women of NAWSA to do everything they could to ensure its immediate passage.

  NAWSA members focused their efforts on ousting two Senate opponents in the upcoming 1918 election, one from each party: Republican John Weeks of Massachusetts and Democrat Willard Saulsbury of Delaware. The fact that women could not vote raised obvious challenges to NAWSA’s plan to defeat incumbent senators at the polls. NAWSA set up a special task force in Massachusetts to send speakers around the state and to distribute thousands of flyers to targeted groups, urging every woman to “get at least one” man to vote against Senator Weeks.50 The suffragists and their husbands, fathers, and brothers succeeded. Weeks was defeated by a pro-suffrage Democrat and Saulsbury lost to a pro-suffrage Republican. As Catt gloated, “When Senators cannot change their minds, the Senators, themselves, must be changed.”51

  In an attempt to appear nonpartisan, the NWP threw its support behind two pro-suffrage Democrats who were vying to fill unexpired terms, but neither succeeded.52 Meanwhile, all three suffrage referenda on state ballots passed, providing additional momentum. And as Gardener had predicted to Justice Clarke, Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress, resulting in a divided government for the first time in years. With at least two new “yes” votes in the Senate, suffragists believed that—as long as they did not lose any votes and as long as they maintained strong relationships with the incoming Republican congressional leadership—the federal amendment would pass in the Sixty-Sixth Congress.

  WITH CONGRESSIONAL PASSAGE in sight, Gardener set about establishing a place for women in world affairs. The week after the 1918 election, she wrote to Wilson suggesting that he appoint Carrie Chapman Catt, an international leader who had earned the goodwill of the women of twenty-six countries during her tenure as president of the International Suffrage Commission, as a member of the World War I Peace Commission.53

  Wilson replied that it was “not practicable” to appoint a woman to the Peace Commission, “much as [he] would personally like to do so.”54 Gardener informed Wilson that his reply “took courage out of” her heart. This was the only favor he had refused her. She held out hope that he would convince America’s allies to appoint women to the Peace Commission. And she did not share his refusal with NAWSA officers, lest the women feel that when “they were sorely needed to help men save man’s own idea of civilization, all was asked of them and they gave all; only to be denied even a small voice when they asked, in return, to be represented and consulted as to the use to be made of the victory they did so much to secure.”55

  In all the correspondence between Gardener and the president, this was the only time she wrote sharply to him. But she had a lot on her mind that November day. On top of her letter to Wilson, she placed a handwritten note for Tumulty, informing him that she had written the president from her husband’s deathbed and thus was not in the proper state of mind to judge the letter’s appropriateness. She asked Tumulty to destroy her letter to Wilson if he thought she had gone too far; he did not.56 The president asked Tumulty to assure Gardener that he would mention the amendment in his upcoming speech to Congress, which he delivered on December 2, the night before he left for Europe to negotiate the end of World War I with the world’s leading men.57

  Col. Selden Day had lived to see the end of another U.S. war. On December 22, 1918, he died at home, with Gardener at his side. The cause of death was “cardiac decompensation” following years of heart problems. Day requested a private funeral conducted by his longtime friend Henry Couden, the “Blind Chaplain” of the House of Representatives. On Christmas Eve, the colonel was laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.58

  Gardener faced her loss virtually alone, except for a visit from Day’s cousin, Paul Kester, a younger writer who lived nearby in Virginia. She revealed to Kester that she had kept Day’s true condition secret over the past several months—he was mostly sedated on opiates—because she did not want their friends to know him as anything other than his best self. Other than Kester, Day’s family did not visit or write. She never hinted at these personal struggles in her letters to her suffrage colleagues, much less her correspondence with the White House, always keeping cheery and funny, even when she herself was in the hospital or her husband was dying at home. In saying goodbye to Day, Gardener realized she was also closing another distinct chapter of her life. She reflected to Kester, “I seemed to have lived several totally separate ones.”59 She could never have anticipated that her favorite chap
ter was yet to come.

  AFTER TAKING a month to mourn Day’s death, Gardener launched straight into another legislative campaign. On January 25, 1919, she filed for her army widow’s pension, which was granted at the rate of $25 per month. As the various documents certifying their marriage, Day’s death, and the death of Charles Smart circulated through the government bureaucracy, the pension commissioner intimated that she might be entitled to more money.60 Gardener got right to work. She contacted her friends in Congress, starting with Sen. Thomas Walsh, who chaired the Pension Committee. In her sworn testimony, she stated that since Day’s death, she had absolutely no income and a $3,000 mortgage to pay on their Lamont Street home. Senator Walsh hastily calculated the numbers and introduced a legislative fix. On February, 22, 1919, both houses of Congress passed S. 5649, doubling Gardener’s widow’s pension, a nice bump but still not enough to pay her bills. On March 4, President Wilson signed the bill into law. At the time, so-called private bills were quite common, though Gardener’s may have set a record for speed of passage. This was not the legislation that Gardener had planned to pass in 1919, but it was a promising start to the year.

  The Sixty-Fifth Congress did not adjourn until March, and NAWSA leadership stubbornly refused to give up hope that the Senate might pass the Susan B. Anthony Amendment by then. If not, the measure would have to pass the House again in the Sixty-Sixth Congress, and ratification in time for the 1920 election would be much more complicated. Many state legislatures did not meet every year, so the more time between congressional passage and the 1920 election, the better the odds that thirty-six states could ratify in time. Catt, unflappable on the outside and in all public pronouncements, sent frantic letters to Park. “What more can we do?” she implored in November 1918. “I am on the verge of suicide.”61 Regarding the ongoing impasse in the Senate, she wrote Park again to say, “Of course everything is a whirl around the White House, but Helen must get something done there.” She signed off, “If I don’t hear from you about every ten minutes I’m crazy.”62