Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Gardener, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Maud Wood Park at Suffrage House, where they helped make Catt’s “Winning Plan” a reality.

  Two days after the victory celebration, Gardener secured an introduction from the White House and reached out to William Ravenel at the Smithsonian to inquire about donating the portrait of Susan B. Anthony, along with other suffrage memorabilia. The previous year, the Smithsonian had turned down the very same portrait, noting “this is of no special interest to the Division of History. It might be regarded as a desirable addition to our series of portraits of noted Americans but exhibition space is in demand.”3 But when Gardener’s letter arrived just days after congressional passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, a portrait of its namesake now seemed more appealing. Curator William Holmes claimed that the painting was not of sufficiently good quality to adorn the National Portrait Gallery but suggested that it would fit in the Smithsonian’s History Museum, since “Miss Anthony’s life forms a most interesting episode in the history of woman’s place in the nation.”4

  In addition to the portrait, many of the movement’s most prized artifacts had come into the hands of Lucy Anthony, Susan’s niece, and Lucy’s partner, Anna Howard Shaw, the former NAWSA president, whose health was failing (she would die later that summer, several months before she would have been eligible to cast her vote).5 The two women asked Gardener to find a suitable home for their collections. By the end of June, Gardener had compiled the items for the Smithsonian donation, including: the red shawl that Susan B. Anthony wore at suffrage conventions, a copy of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, the table on which Stanton drafted the declaration, photos of the congressional signing ceremonies, and the gold pen Gardener had purchased for the momentous occasion.6 Lucy Anthony expressed great hope for the exhibit Gardener was working toward, describing it as “a crowning glory to everything.”7

  From the outset, Gardener insisted that the materials be donated to the Smithsonian, the nation’s museum. Catt had initially asked her to place the Anthony portrait at the Corcoran Gallery, but in a rare instance, Gardener ignored Catt’s directive, convinced that her plan was far better.8 Gardener explained to her colleagues the unique mission of the Smithsonian, as a branch of American government, to house historical collections and the nation’s most important artifacts. Seeing a portrait of the signing of the Declaration of Independence had convinced her that the Smithsonian “was the place for our Thomas Jefferson’s portrait.” Gardener’s aim was to make suffrage history tangible to the thousands of “men, women and children, from all over the world, now and in the future” who would come to the Smithsonian to “gather inspiration and to come close to the great leaders of America, through seeing what they looked like, and what they were, and what they had, and what they did.”9

  Gardener detailed very specific conditions to Ravenel about the placement and significance of the relics she donated. She insisted that “above all else this exhibit be kept all together in the most suitable place you can prepare for it, because these few things that we now have sent will not be the end of the historic collection to show the origin and development of the greatest bloodless revolution ever known,—the achieving of political and financial independence by one-half of the people without a drop of blood being shed.”10

  And she emphasized, more than once, that the exhibit represented the work of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The exhibit must never mention or be associated with, she instructed, the National Woman’s Party.11 Like the partisan version of events outlined in the History of Woman Suffrage a generation earlier, Gardener’s exhibit presented the history of one faction as the history of the movement.12 Thus, it came to pass that months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the Smithsonian debuted a new exhibit titled “An Important Epoch in American History.” Gardener told Anthony that she did not think they could have had better placement within the museum. But more privately she confessed to Park that “I do think that the Smithsonian matter will never be finished and done right until they understand it and its meaning better than they do now.”13 Men seemed to understand history in terms of war; they underestimated and misunderstood the stakes and sacrifices of women’s “bloodless revolution.”

  Organizing this exhibit was of great interest to NAWSA leaders, who all along had been concerned not just about attaining the vote but also about securing women’s place in American history. To help increase awareness of the movement’s significance, NAWSA distributed copies of the History of Woman Suffrage to libraries across America and to civic leaders. In 1909, the NAWSA education committee had surveyed history and civics textbooks to see how women were represented. The committee chair had ruefully reported that textbooks conveyed the point that “this world has been made by men and for men.”14 Leaders hoped that familiarity with movement history would curb this tendency.

  Gardener was especially keen for male leaders to have a copy of the History of Woman Suffrage. She asked Lucy Anthony to send her an autographed set of all volumes so that she could present it to Wilson to help him understand the “meaning and the magnitude of the suffrage work.” Gardener regretted that men did not grasp the significance of the women’s bravery and accomplishment. “We must see that [the men] do,” she implored Anthony. “That work is ahead of the younger ones. Make ‘history’ tell the truth and make people visualize that history! Yes, it is a big job—but not as big” as the job of the women who had won the vote.15

  WHILE STRATEGIZING ways to memorialize suffrage history, financial worries and ill health continued to plague Gardener. In August 1919, she retreated to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where “there is not a thing to do but eat and sleep.” She hoped to return rested and “fit to do some useful work later on.”16 In addition to coordinating the exhibit at the Smithsonian and representing Carrie Chapman Catt at various events in D.C., Gardener continued to conduct diplomacy for NAWSA, which most often meant enlisting President Wilson’s help in the ratification effort.17 She delighted in such work, but it did not pay the bills. She confessed to Maud Wood Park that she had been ignoring various invitations and fundraising appeals from suffrage colleagues because she did not dare “exploit my flattened pocketbook.” Rather than say no outright, she preferred to “draw into my shell a bit farther, even if they all think me rude and indifferent to the good things I’d love to do if I could.”18 She worried that she would have to sell her home and reluctantly accepted two cash gifts from Park.

  Increasingly, Gardener’s White House lobbying focused on securing prominent appointments for women. Having women employed by government at the highest levels would, she hoped, signal the larger changes in American life that suffragists imagined the vote portended. Throughout the fall and winter of 1919–1920, Gardener repeatedly contacted the White House to suggest women for various commissions and to gently scold when they were not appointed. As she explained to Tumulty in one characteristic letter, “I was afraid that the appointing power would not think of [a woman] at all—nor what such ‘recognition’ would mean to the women of the country at such a time. Think it over, oh, you clever political actor.”19

  Then, on October 2, 1919, President Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke that incapacitated him for the rest of his term. At the time, the White House obscured the gravity of his impairment, but historians now concur that his wife, Edith, and top staff, including Gardener’s close friends Tumulty and Rudolph Forster, essentially ran his presidency for its final months.20 Gardener focused her redoubled lobbying efforts on them. By the end of 1919, twenty-two states had ratified the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, but no women had been appointed to high-level government positions.

  Gardener hosted Selden Day’s nephew Sam Day and his cousin Paul Kester, the playwright, along with Maud Wood Park for Christmas. In a letter to Kester, she hailed Park as “my closest woman friend” because “she understands and has no place in her large and fine soul for the purely conventional.”21 Now in her late sixties, Gardener, ever yo
ung at heart, felt most at home around people decades her junior. Friends described her as the “personification of eternal youth.”22

  Gardener spent most of January and February 1920 working on the Smithsonian exhibit and then traveled to Chicago for the final NAWSA annual convention, which celebrated the legacies of pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw. She gave a moving tribute to Anthony, and she updated members about the NAWSA exhibit at the Smithsonian, which she characterized as a “shrine” to the “great women leaders of liberty and civilization on the same broad basis accorded to men.” She expressed her fond hope that this exhibit would be “an object of reverence and education to all American womanhood.”23

  The Chicago convention formally transitioned NAWSA chapters into chapters of the League of Women Voters (LWV), to be led by Maud Wood Park. Though voter education remained the top priority, the LWV also pledged to prioritize the eradication of prostitution, through the equal punishment of johns, and “venereal disease control.”24 Newly minted women citizens sought, among other things, to obliterate the sexual double standard and craft laws governing sexual relations from the perspective of women.

  But Gardener did not spend much time discussing the institutionalization of her once radical ideals. She was too busy trying to obtain appointments for women in government. She took multiple breaks from the meetings to communicate with Tumulty. During the convention, rumors circulated that the president was thinking of appointing Mrs. Edith Owen Stoner, a D.C. suffragist aligned with the Southern states’ rights faction, to the three-person U.S. Civil Service Commission. This would be by far the highest-ranking position ever held by a woman, rating just under a cabinet secretary.25 NAWSA members considered the potential selection of Stoner to be a “calamity,” according to Gardener, because she was “totally unfit” and “has no woman following nor influence.” Before Gardener left for Chicago, she had met with Tumulty and Forster to discuss this post and felt confident that they agreed with her suggestions (Park and Mary Foy, of California) and that “there was not the slightest danger” of Stoner getting the prized nomination.26 She urged Tumulty to please send her an assurance that these rumors were mistaken.27

  Earlier in his presidency, Wilson had bowed to pressure from racist Southern senators and segregated the civil service, which had been the backbone of the black middle class in Washington for decades. Besides enlisting the federal government in support of segregation, this move also relegated African American employees to substandard working conditions and severely limited opportunities for advancement.28 In appointing a woman civil service commissioner, the Wilson White House again sought to manifest an ideological position through government jobs. Such a high-profile post would acknowledge the contributions of female government workers (a category that had ballooned during the war) and publicly recognize white women’s new civic status.

  Gardener may not have realized that in addition to Stoner, several other women, themselves highly aware of the symbolism of the civil service appointment, had been actively lobbying the White House for the position. But Gardener’s favor within the Oval Office stood out among the rest. In March of 1920, the president (or, more accurately, Tumulty and Forster acting on his behalf) nominated not Park or Foy but Gardener herself to Theodore Roosevelt’s former seat on the Civil Service Commission, making her the highest-ranking and highest-paid woman in federal government. Overnight, Gardener became a national symbol of what it meant, finally, for (white) women to be full citizens.29

  NEWSPAPERS AROUND THE COUNTRY devoted front-page coverage to this historic appointment, and suffragists cheered Gardener as the “right woman honored.”30 Many articles focused on the larger meaning of Gardener’s new job. The Atlanta Journal Constitution observed that Gardener’s nomination “marks the beginning of a new era of feminine activities in the government of our country.” The civil service functioned, as Gardener explained, like a civilian branch of the military, fulfilling all the tasks that the government needed to function. Employing over 660,000 people, more than the army and navy combined, the civil service was the biggest employer in the world. Because about two-fifths of these employees were now women, the consensus was that it was only fitting for a woman to sit on the commission. Emphasizing the discrepancy between Gardener’s diminutive stature and the enormity of the task at hand, several news accounts reported that, seated behind her stately desk, Gardener’s feet did not touch the ground. She had to bring in a footstool.31

  Gardener felt thrilled and daunted by the opportunity. She wrote to Wilson to thank him for placing his trust in her, noting that “all our lives we have heard of the ‘office seeking the man’ but it is something quite new in our experience for the office to seek the woman.” Her first impulse, she confessed, was to ask him to withdraw her name, but “upon thinking it over I realize that since women are now, for the first time, to enter fully into the benefits of American citizenship, they must not refuse to take up such duties as are laid upon them.” She understood that she alone would not be held accountable for her work. Rather, the “women of the country . . . will be on trial until I shall have proved myself efficient in this important and vital work.”32

  In more private letters to Paul Kester, she admitted that she felt “rather scared” by the “big job.” She knew she “must not fail.”33 She told Wilson and Kester that her nomination had come “out of the clear sky,” but she must have realized that throughout the many months she had been lobbying the White House to appoint women to prominent posts, she had also been lobbying for herself. She revealed to Tumulty that she suspected the idea to nominate her had originated in his “fertile brain” and that, after having dedicated her life to women’s rights, she felt very fortunate to have the opportunity to “complete some of the work I dreamed of and began very many years ago.” She promised to “do her level best.”34

  After being unanimously approved by the Senate, Gardener was sworn in as commissioner on April 13, 1920. That very day she began her first full-time paying job since she had worked as a teacher in Sandusky nearly fifty years before. But before Gardener could fully settle into her new position, she had some vital NAWSA diplomacy to complete. During the spring of 1920, NAWSA leaders believed that either Delaware or North Carolina would become the thirty-sixth and final state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, so Gardener remained in regular contact with Tumulty and Forster about ways the White House could expedite the ratifications and thwart pending legal challenges, just as she had done regarding congressional passage.35 Neither North Carolina nor Delaware ratified, though, and the governors of Vermont and Connecticut refused to call special sessions of their legislatures. The only chance to ratify in time for women to vote in the 1920 election, then, was Tennessee.

  At age sixty-seven, Gardener was sworn in as the highest-ranking woman in U.S. history.

  The Tennessee state legislature was not in regular session, so ratification would require the governor to call a special session, which he initially refused to do because he claimed that constitutional amendments had to be approved during regular sessions. Gardener implored Tumulty to get President Wilson to intervene. Wilson asked the Department of Justice to issue a report on the question. Once the department determined there was no constitutional basis for the Tennessee governor’s refusal, Wilson urged him to call a special session, which he did in August.36 As Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and suffrage allies and opponents from across the country assembled in Nashville for the ratification session, Gardener was tasked with keeping a handle on things in Washington.

  Anti-suffragists vowed to pursue various legal challenges that would prohibit the Nineteenth Amendment, once ratified by thirty-six states, from being signed into effect by the secretary of state. As the Tennessee vote drew near, Gardener waited by the phone for word of passage so that she could ferry the news to the secretary of state before any countersuits could be filed.37 The Tennessee legislature ratified the amendment on August 18, and after various protests and recounts,
the governor sent the official certificate to Washington on August 24. Gardener, the solicitor general, and Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby stayed up all night waiting for the paper to arrive, which it did at 4 o’clock on the morning of August 26. Not wishing to participate in the feuding signing ceremonies planned by Catt, on behalf of NAWSA, and Paul, on behalf of the NWP, Colby signed the proclamation by himself at home.38 Catt arrived in D.C. by 8 a.m. and met up with Gardener and Park. The trio went first to see the signed document at the Department of State and next to the White House to thank President Wilson.

  Though there had been many setbacks and surprises along the way, Catt’s “Winning Plan” had succeeded more or less as she had planned. Women in the North and West and white women in the South would be able to vote in the 1920 election. A resident of the District of Columbia, Gardener had no representation in Congress, but she voted for James Cox, the Democratic nominee, for president.39 He lost in a landslide to Warren G. Harding. As Sen. William Borah of Idaho had predicted, however, black women living in states with racist voter discrimination laws, along with other women of color, would have to wait another forty-five years for the federal government to enforce the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments.

  The members of NAWSA celebrated what they considered to be an unquestioned triumph with a “jubilee” at Poli’s Theater in Washington on the night of August 26. Gardener and Catt attended, and the next morning Catt took the train to New York City, where women gathered to cheer her at every stop along the way. In Manhattan, Catt was treated to a hero’s welcome and another huge victory party.40 Gardener did not attend the New York events because she had a new job to do.