Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  By February 1919, Catt felt more sanguine. The chances for Senate passage had not changed, she told Park, “except by the additional earnestness of our friends and bitterness of our foes. . . . If fate perchances victory on our bedraggled and outworn banner, we shall all be glad and perhaps we shall even feel jubilant. We shall shed no tears at any rate.” Catt prepared two editorials for The Woman Citizen—one for Senate victory and one for Senate defeat.63

  The intense scrutiny on the Senate—and in particular on Southern Democrats—continued to keep Gardener busy and in regular contact with the White House. As a measure of Gardener’s effectiveness, Park appointed her vice chairman of the Congressional Committee.64

  Once again, hopes hinged on the unlikely possibility that Sen. John Sharp Williams might change his vote. On January 10, 1919, Tumulty suggested that Wilson contact him.65 Wilson telegrammed Williams from France to express his hope that “a new survey of affairs may convince you the wisdom of [the Nineteenth Amendment’s] passage.” At the bottom of Wilson’s telegram, Williams scribbled in pencil, “Not as long as they keep up their infantile and asinine bonfire performances in LaFayette Park.”66 As warmly as he felt toward Gardener, Williams despised the NWP protesters, though they certainly had succeeded in capturing his attention.

  NAWSA map showing the increasing power of women voters even before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

  Paul and her intrepid followers had kept up their protests in increasingly creative ways, despite ongoing arrest and imprisonment. In August 1918, for example, they had demonstrated at LaFayette Square, only to be imprisoned at an uninhabitable abandoned workhouse near the district jail, where the women were sickened by tainted water and open toilets. Paul was sentenced to ten days simply for attending the protest; she led another hunger strike.67

  Gardener tried to convince Williams that the “childish and offensive conduct of the women who perform on Lafayette Square” was not a legitimate justification for a “no” vote.68 But deep down she knew that his real objection remained his desire to keep African Americans from the polls. To another friend, Gardener described Williams as a man with a “splendid” feeling for democracy as a “fundamental principle,” but whose aristocratic blood and “slave-holding states’ rights traditions tone down and modify certain of the fundamentals just as they did with Washington and Jefferson.”69

  Sen. William Borah (R-ID), the “Lion of Idaho,” presented the most vexing obstacle of all. For years, he had spoken in Congress and in whatever state NASWA dispatched him to about the benefits of women voting in his home state. And yet he would not budge on the federal amendment. Catt and other NAWSA leaders targeted Borah in early 1918, after he voted for Prohibition, which, in the words of Catt, made his states’ rights objection to suffrage “really quite unaccountable.”70 Borah finally told Catt that there was no point in further communication because there was no way he would change his mind.71 By November 1918, Catt concluded, “Do not count on Borah for anything which calls for common sense or honesty. He possesses neither.”72

  Each time the Senate seemed ready to vote, Borah was deluged with letters and telegrams urging him to vote “yes” and a few thanking him in advance for voting “no.” His home-state constituents were especially perplexed by his position. Idaho provided a prominent example of the benefits of women voting, so how could an Idaho senator be a stronghold of opposition? Borah even resisted an appeal from former president Theodore Roosevelt, with whose daughter, Alice, he carried on a lengthy affair and fathered a child in 1924.73

  When constituents asked Borah why he would not support the federal amendment, he told them it was because he received “thousands and thousands of letters” from white women of the South, begging him to not let black women vote.74 But this was not true, at least not according to what is saved in Borah’s papers at the Library of Congress. To the contrary, in December 1917, Borah wrote to his friend James Callaway, a Confederate apologist who wrote a popular column for the Macon (GA) Daily Telegraph, and asked to hear firsthand “the best thought of the women of the South” on the federal amendment “especially as it touches the race question.”75 Not only was Borah not bombarded with letters from white Southern women, he had to recruit the one such correspondent he had: a Mrs. J. B. Evans, of Selma, Alabama.

  Mrs. Evans informed Borah that she was very fond of all her black servants. But she had no kind words for suffragists. She objected to suffrage, first of all, because it had grown out of the abolition movement, and to her mind, all suffragists had a “venomous hatred of the south, and the southern white people.” Worst of all, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment would “bring . . . to life” the Fifteenth Amendment, which had “never been enforced.”76

  Borah elaborated on his position in a long letter to the chair of the Idaho Republican Party, which was later reprinted as anti-suffrage propaganda by the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. Enfranchising women would, according to Borah, “impose upon the South three million colored voters.” This scenario would result either in violent civil chaos or in the federal government endorsing discrimination against black women voters, just as it had done in the case of black male voters since the end of Reconstruction. Neither scenario was acceptable to Borah. “I am asked to help write into the fundamental law that which would be to a large portion of the people of the country a cowardly lie,” Borah asserted. “The north has sat still for forty years and witnessed the disfranchisement of the Negroes of the south and now they want their representatives to write another solemn clause into the charter and sit still for forty years or interminably while the negro women are disfranchised.” Borah vowed he would oppose the federal amendment, even if doing so caused him to be voted out of office.77

  On February 10, 1919, the Senate again voted on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. This time, the measure failed to meet the two-thirds majority by one vote. Gardener, her NAWSA colleagues, and their allies in the White House had exhausted all possible leads, but their efforts were not enough to surmount the “Southern Wall of Opposition” in the Sixty-Fifth Congress.

  ALL WINTER, NAWSA members had been frantically canvasing the incoming Sixty-Sixth Congress, and the numbers were still too close for comfort in the Senate. While the women counted just enough “yes” votes, their slim margin meant that one illness or one changed mind could signal another defeat. On April 30, 1919, as the president prepared to return from Europe for the opening of Congress, Tumulty cabled to let him know that his suffrage contacts, no doubt Gardener, informed him that they needed one more vote in the Senate. Tumulty suggested that Wilson track down Sen. William Harris of Georgia, who was also in Paris, and convince him to issue a public statement saying that he would deliver the vote. Three days later, he reminded the president, “It is urgent that you see Senator Harris about suffrage matter.” Senator Harris issued the public statement as requested.78

  Wilson then dispatched a message to Congress urging members to pass the suffrage amendment immediately upon convening, as part of his larger post-War agenda.79 The Sixty-Sixth Congress assembled on May 19. Rep. James Mann (R-IL), who had come from his hospital bed to vote “yes” the previous January, assumed the chairmanship of the House Committee on Woman Suffrage. He assured a nervous Maud Wood Park that he had all the necessary votes lined up and that he intended to make the Susan B. Anthony Amendment the very first item on the House agenda.80 Two days later, he did.

  Gardener hurried excitedly to the Capitol on the morning of May 21, though she missed sitting in her reserved seats on the Speaker’s bench. Under the new leadership, she and Park sat in regular seats on the Republican side. Wearing a black silk dress with a drop waist and a jaunty black straw hat, Gardener listened stoically as men debated whether or not women would be full citizens.81 After several hours, the House overwhelmingly approved the amendment: 304 in favor to 89 against.82 The vote had been called so hastily that not very many suffragists had time to get to Washington, so the celebration was more subdued than the
previous year’s. Maud Wood Park filmed a moving picture newsreel with Representative Mann, and pictures of Gardener, together with the rest of the NAWSA Congressional Committee, were cabled across the country to spread the historic news.83

  Two weeks later, on June 4, the Senate scheduled a vote on the amendment. The heat was oppressive—this time, Gardener wore all white—and the discussion dragged on and on. Sen. James Reed (D-MO) delivered a three-hour filibuster about states’ rights. And Sen. Pat Harrison (D-MS) introduced a measure to exclude black women from voting. Sen. Ellison Smith (D-SC) summarized the opposition when he protested that “the southern man who votes for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment votes to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment.”84 Finally, the vote was called. At 5:15 p.m., Senate president pro tempore Albert Cummins announced that the amendment had carried 56 to 25, narrowly meeting the two-thirds majority. In addition to the two “yes” votes the suffragists picked up in the 1918 election, Senator Harris kept his promise to Wilson, and Sen. Frederick Hale of Maine changed his vote to “yes” after Mainers agreed, in 1918, to let women vote in presidential elections. Speaking for the Southern Wall of Opposition, Sen. Edward Gay of Louisiana bitterly declared that “thirteen states will never vote for this measure unless you amend it to spare the South the problem of the negro woman vote.”85

  After the vote was announced, all rules of Senate decorum were ignored. The Senate floor and galleries erupted in cheers and “deafening applause” lasting two straight minutes.86 The New York Tribune reported that the suffragists “indulged in a good old fashioned feminine kissing and hugging bee.”87 But Gardener could not spend much time celebrating; she had to rush to the official signing ceremony that she herself had planned.

  IN ADVANCE OF the long-awaited Senate vote, Gardener had contacted the press, purchased a decorative gold pen, and organized a stately signing ceremony to take place in the Speaker of the House’s office. Gardener stood next to Speaker Frederick Gillett (R-MA) as he signed the landmark amendment. The following day, she and Maud Wood Park flanked Vice President Thomas Marshall as he signed it as president of the Senate. Reporters, photographers, and even motion picture cameras caught these historic scenes. Countless women and several suffrage groups had fought long and hard for the amendment, and it was certainly not a given that any of them would be invited to the signing ceremony or that there would even be such a ceremony. But Gardener made sure that there was a momentous event to mark this achievement and that the members of the NAWSA Congressional Committee were there.88

  Gardener saw her work as NAWSA’s “Diplomatic Corps” as the culmination of her life’s efforts to secure full autonomy for women. And she had personified the NAWSA Congressional Committee for nearly ten years. To members of Congress, to the White House, and to most suffragists, Gardener had been, since 1910, NAWSA’s most constant presence in Washington. As she reflected in her 1919 vice chairman’s report, “I have served upon the Congressional Committee longer than has any other person, having been a member from the first, and having served under every chairman.”89 In the years before there was an active Congressional Committee, Gardener attended congressional hearings related to suffrage and circulated reports across the country. Gardener was there when the first NAWSA Congressional Committee office opened in 1913, and she would be the one to turn off the lights when Suffrage House closed its doors.

  Gardener standing next to the Speaker of the House as he signed the Nineteenth Amendment with the gold pen she purchased just for the ceremony.

  Gardener (right) and Maud Wood Park (left) as Vice President Thomas Marshall signed the Nineteenth Amendment.

  What made Gardener’s tenure on the Congressional Committee so critical was her ability to infiltrate various settings that had long been closed to women and befriend male allies and adversaries alike, realizing that the boundary between the two was often arbitrary and tenuous. Gardener also possessed remarkable personal magnetism and social intuition—gifts forged over a long, varied life surmounting many obstacles in many places. In dealing with powerful men, Gardener relied on some old-fashioned womanly charm and a certain degree of dissemblance—skills practiced for decades on Charles Smart and Selden Day. She prided herself for understanding “human nature,” and she harbored no illusions about the men with whom she worked. “The study of human nature in high places is more illuminating than an encyclopedia,—not always disappointing; sometimes inspiring,” she proclaimed in her final report to NAWSA. “There are,” Gardener granted, “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.”90

  Both Catt and Park credited Gardener’s contributions as key to congressional passage. To the extent that NAWSA’s Congressional Committee had succeeded, Park claimed, it was due to “Helen Gardener’s gift for making and holding friends for the cause and to the influence of her advice and example upon the rest of us.”91 As Park elaborated, “her incomparable service, a service which no one else could possibly have rendered, came in the months when the efforts of the suffragists were centered upon the Congress of the United States. Then her knowledge of men in public life, her familiarity with official custom and legislative procedure, combined with her rare gifts of person and mind and character, made her the most potent factor in securing the passage of the Amendment by the Congress.”92

  Alice Paul, the woman whose agitation had propelled NAWSA to focus on the federal amendment and caused the nation to take notice, was livid that she and the other NWP leaders had been excluded from the signing ceremony. Even fifty-five years later, she wondered how Helen Hamilton Gardener had made her way to the “pen ceremony.” In her oral history, Paul reflected on how suffrage history might have turned out differently had Gardener aligned with her, rather than NAWSA. “This one lady’s resignation really hurt us,” Paul recalled, “because if she had kept on with the publicity, we would have been much better off.”

  Paul then lamented that Gardener had been invited to the pen ceremony. According to Paul’s recollection, the president “invited a group of women to be there for this ceremony of the proclamation, and among others was this Mrs. Helen Gardener, whom we hadn’t seen all these intervening years . . . not one of us was invited or recognized in any possible [way], but all these opponents, every person who was there [had been] an opponent!”93

  Gardener certainly opposed picketing, but she was no opponent of the federal amendment. Paul surmised, incorrectly, that Gardener and Wilson had bonded over a shared commitment to the state-by-state strategy, when, in fact, Gardener had been nudging the president to champion the federal amendment all along. Such efforts necessarily occurred behind closed doors and were never covered by the press, so only White House staff, individual congressmen, and Gardener’s NAWSA colleagues understood the scope of her diplomatic work. For years Paul had led valiant protests outside the White House, not realizing that Gardener had used her opposition to Paul’s tactics to charm her way inside.

  The rivalry between Paul and Gardener, a microcosm of the larger organizational rift between the NWP and NAWSA, permeated the suffrage movement in its final years and continued to shape suffrage history as both sides—following directives from their leaders—took credit for the victory, distorting a more impartial understanding of the movement and obscuring the myriad contributions of women of color. Though their tactics contrasted, both the NWP and NAWSA contributed vitally to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, just as both organizations bear responsibility for the movement’s failure to work with and for black women.

  As it turned out, the pen ceremony was just the beginning of a much longer struggle over the meaning of women’s suffrage. For the next five years, Gardener’s efforts to secure the movement’s history and her own personal legacy would prove nearly as challenging as getting the Nineteenth Amendment through Congress.

  16

  Our Heroic Dead<
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  Our Arlington is scattered over America in graves little recognized, where lie the great commanders of our bloodless revolution that freed womankind—Lucretia Mott, Ernestine Rose, Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton . . . and hundreds of others many of whose very names would be new to many of you but whose deeds were mighty.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1925

  ON JUNE 10, 1919, less than a week after congressional passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, Helen Gardener presided over a victory celebration at Suffrage House. Carrie Chapman Catt looked “queenly” in a “most Frenchy creation” of white lace with pink rosebuds while a string trio serenaded members of Congress, congressional wives, and White House representative Joseph Tumulty.1 The party also marked the closure of Suffrage House. After the festivities, Catt instructed Maud Wood Park to let Gardener have the best typewriter so that she could continue on as NAWSA’s one-woman office in the nation’s capital, working out of her home, while the rest of NAWSA leadership turned to ratification.2

  As the sole remaining NAWSA officer in Washington, Gardener’s first challenge was to figure out where to place the many relics displayed at Suffrage House, including a portrait of Susan B. Anthony. Gardener, a student of history and a writer, understood the importance of narrative and of memory. And she knew firsthand that the stories we tell about our past shape our present and our future. Gardener feared, rightly as it turned out, that the memories of women’s rights activists were already being lost and that if the nation failed to commemorate them, future generations of women would be hampered in their efforts to participate in democracy and attain true equality.