Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Even though living in Missouri took Gardener out of the pulse center of reform circles, she made St. Louis a “grand battleground for freedom.”41 She sent letters to St. Louis papers in protest of clergymen’s refusal to debate her colleague Charlie Watts. Clergy, she exclaimed, regularly pilloried “infidels” from their podiums, so why not debate one in person?42 Local papers refused to publish her letters, so she sent them to The Truth Seeker. A few months later, she wrote to The Truth Seeker to complain of “library vandals” who defaced, with impunity, “liberal books.” When her complaints got no attention from library staff, she alerted them that theological books had been mutilated. This prompted a thorough response.43

  Gardener increasingly turned her attention to publishing her own book, a compilation of three of her lectures. Advertisements for the book began to run in September 1885, just as Gardener headlined the New York State Freethinkers Convention, held in Albany.44 Gardener delivered her address, “Historical Facts and Theological Fictions,” to a packed room at Leland’s Opera House on Sunday, September 13, in a premier time slot just before Ingersoll.

  Church teachings, Gardener proclaimed, denied that women were people with “absolute rights of persons,” including the right to control their own bodies, “crushing [a woman’s] self-respect and destroying her sense of personal responsibility as to her own acts in the matter of chastity.” From Bible verses and Sunday sermons, a woman learned that she “must subordinate her own sense of right and her own judgment to the dictates of someone else—anyone else of the opposite sex.”45 The Bible offered no logical way to puzzle through the complexities women encountered in life and instead clouded women’s thinking with stories about blessed virgins and the evils of women who craved knowledge.

  Referencing the pagan Roman philosopher murdered by a Christian mob, one of the group’s 2,600 members described Gardener as the “modern Hypatia, ‘no less admired for her beauty than her wit.’ When she discourses about ‘men, women, and gods’ all three listen.”46 Another attendee recalled his embarrassment at rudely dismissing Gardener, who stood out as “a bright-eyed, petite and extremely amiable young lady trying to get people acquainted and make everyone feel comfortable.” He thought she seemed “silly” and gave her dirty looks only to realize later that she was the keynote speaker.47

  Weeks after the convention, Gardener’s Men, Women, and Gods proved an immediate success. Even the middle-brow Chicago Times praised the book.48 Navy Secretary W. M. Chandler proclaimed that “a more readable, brave, sparkling and at the same time more true, original, and logical little volume was never written.”49 Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first ordained female minister and the first woman to publish a feminist interpretation of evolution, also favorably reviewed Gardener’s book. Blackwell declared that Gardener was “not only an able attorney for her sex, but a brave one too.” Like Gardener, Blackwell saw hope in science’s potential to nullify the Adam and Eve creation story which “has had the terrible effect of putting dishonor and privation upon the female sex for centuries of years.”50

  Dozens of people wrote to The Truth Seeker in praise of Gardener’s book or to request a copy for 50 cents. Several writers suggested that every woman read Men, Women, and Gods. The book was even cited in a Cass County, Minnesota, divorce case. A young bride felt that her older husband, a wealthy doctor, had married her under false pretenses because he had claimed to be a Christian. When he gave her a copy of Men, Women, and Gods, she demanded that the court allow her to leave her husband. She lost.51

  While most reviews were positive, reviewers could not resist including comments about Gardener’s appearance, gender, and age. One reader noted, as a compliment, that the book was “forcible enough to be masculine, yet delicate and modest enough to be womanly in the truest sense of the word.”52 A reviewer in The Sociologist observed that “It is indeed progress that a young, refined, handsome woman should dare to mount the rostrum and address large audiences in behalf of her sex and to impeach before the bar of reason the false teachings which have been so effectual in keeping women in their position of industrial, political, and social dependence.”53

  Gardener herself was deluged with mail, but she became annoyed by the many clergymen who requested to meet with her privately so that they might convince her of the error of her ways. Who were these men to assume that she did not know her own mind or that they could change it through some unimpeachable force of their presence? To such correspondents, she said no thanks. When clergy would agree to publicly answer her points about Christianity, then and only then would she agree to meet them in private.54 In a more measured reply written a few years later, Gardener shared that she saw her work “in the same line” as the clergymen who wrote her. She, too, was a preacher of sorts. But as an agnostic, she refused to concede that charity was inherently best practiced by Christians. To the contrary, she claimed to have “met it in its most exalted form among the ‘heathen.’ “55

  THE SUCCESS OF Men, Women, and Gods—published years before better-known feminist critiques of Christianity, such as Matilda Josyln Gage’s Woman, Church, and State (1893), Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898)—elevated Gardener’s status within and beyond the freethought movement. She began seeking wider, more mainstream venues in which to place her articles, and she contemplated her next move.

  In March 1886, Gardener announced plans to settle permanently in New York City.56 The Ingersolls had recently moved from Washington, D.C., to a mansion on Fifth Avenue, and Charles Smart’s prospects appeared more certain tied to the home office of Equitable Life Assurance.

  Gardener continued to struggle with ill health but went “back into the field” as a lecturer that summer, probably to finance her move. Many of the reformers she encountered had fortunes against which to buffer their unconventional ideas. Gardener had no such bulwarks, so she continued to brainstorm ways to make ends meet. Settling in Manhattan at the height of the Gilded Age and in the midst of national economic turmoil, however, would reveal to Gardener additional layers of women’s degradation and the precariousness of her existence as a freethinking reformer cohabitating with a man to whom she was not legally married.

  6

  The Cultured Poor

  For the rich, the world is a playground. For the very poor, it is a workshop, or a treadmill, or an almshouse. For the great and steadily increasing middle class of cultured poor, it furnishes neither pleasure, nor work, nor alms.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1889

  WHEN HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1886, the city seemed tailor-made to greet her. In the two years since her debut at Chickering Hall, she had traveled around the East Coast and as far west as Chicago, but no city appealed to her as much as New York. When health and family struggles had compelled her back to Missouri, Gardener chafed against the small-mindedness of St. Louis. She also resented the lingering influence of her orthodox brother Alfred. In New York City, she could be herself.

  It was in New York that she had become “Helen Hamilton Gardener,” and by 1886, she moved there permanently so that she could inhabit the new world that being Helen Hamilton Gardener had opened up—a world of big ideas and of social events attended by the most prominent thinkers, writers, artists, and politicians of the day. Gardener embraced her new cosmopolitan life with gusto, the only impediments being her tenuous foothold on financial security and her erratic, often sick paramour Charles Smart, whom she claimed as her husband, truth be damned.

  From the couple’s new apartment at 44 East 21st Street, near Gramercy Park, Gardener contacted anyone and everyone she could think of who might be able to help her gain her foothold as a writer, not just a freethought writer, but a real writer. She began listing “writer” as her profession and eventually joined the Woman’s Press Club of New York City, founded in 1889. She expanded her reach beyond freethought periodicals, publishing “Rome or Reason” in the Nov
ember 1886 issue of the North American Review, the prestigious literary magazine once edited by Charles Eliot Norton and Henry Adams. She was in elite company. This particular issue included articles by Walt Whitman, Jefferson Davis, and Generals Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman.1

  Penning charming letters of introduction to powerful men remained a vital tool in Gardener’s march to becoming a nationally known writer. “I am a Chenoweth of Virginia,” she began her appeal to Edward Eggleston. Eggleston had served as a Methodist minister in Indiana with her father and was, by 1886, a novelist living in New York. Gardener had lived less than one year of her life in Virginia, but her Chenoweth ancestry provided entry into otherwise closed circles. She asked Eggleston if she and her husband could call on him and signed off as “Mrs. Alice Chenoweth Smart,” making no mention of Helen Hamilton Gardener.2

  Her most influential contact, in New York or elsewhere, remained Robert Ingersoll. Ingersoll quickly became a dominant presence in New York social and reform circles. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from his speaking engagements and legal work, and he lavishly spent every cent. His Fifth Avenue home, the first of four increasingly posh Manhattan mansions he would rent over the next decade, boasted a piano on all three floors. His final mansion, at 220 Madison Avenue, included a roof-top theater that could seat 200 people.3

  Ingersoll loved to entertain and welcomed anyone who came to his door, especially on Sunday evenings, when he hosted weekly “at homes” that often lasted until dawn. The New York Daily Graphic heralded these gatherings as the social “events of the season.” On any given Sunday, guests could expect to encounter industrial magnates like Andrew Carnegie, one of Ingersoll’s most ardent admirers; politicians such as Speaker of the House Thomas Bracket Reed; the military hero General Sherman; famous reformers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Henry George; writers, painters, and especially actors and musicians, Ingersoll’s favorite guests. Visitors devoured feasts set on enormous banquet tables, danced, listened to legends, such as the Italian contralto Sofia Scalchi, and took turns playing Ingersoll’s pianos.4

  One correspondent described the Sunday at-homes as “a company of the most interesting men and women in New York” where everyone felt “exactly as though they had known each other all their lives” thanks to the Ingersolls’ unpretentious “home folk ways.” Describing Gardener’s presence at these soirees, the reporter observed that “she is a pretty, petite, girlish-looking lady, whom nobody would suspect of holding opinions so ponderous, and launching them so courageously at the public.” She “writes books worthy of the biggest-brained man and the most radical in America, but she doesn’t look it.”5

  For nearly twenty years, Gardener was a regular at these parties.6 She later reflected that Ingersoll “radiated love and confidence and happiness in his home,” where it was her “privilege to spend many happy and instructive hours under his hospitable roof.” On Sunday evenings “one met there the great men and women of the world, for men of all creeds and of none admired and loved the Great Agnostic. . . . It was a liberal education to know him and his friends.”7 Ingersoll’s at-homes, as much as anything else, catapulted Gardener from obscurity into the world of letters.

  GARDENER BEGAN most every week at the Ingersolls, and she often ended the week with a visit to the Manhattan Liberal Club, which gathered Friday nights at 8 p.m. at the German Masonic Lodge at 220 East 15th Street, in Union Square. Led by charismatic freethinkers, including Samuel Putnam (whose subtle misogyny she had critiqued in The Truth Seeker) and the radical abolitionist and anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews (confidante of the feminist, free love advocate Victoria Woodhull), the Liberal Club welcomed both male and female speakers on “all sorts of social, political, scientific, or religious subjects.” According to the New York Sun, “no topic is forbidden and the talk is very free.”8

  Each Friday the club hosted a different speaker and then debated the speaker’s main points. In 1887 alone, the Liberal Club took up ideas as far-ranging as anarchism, free love, Marxism, temperance, and cooperative housekeeping. In addition to its weekly gatherings, the club also hosted secular, solstice-themed Christmas parties and celebrations of the birthday of Thomas Paine, still the lodestar of American secularism. From 1868 to the early 1910s (when the group splintered after officers refused to allow anarchist Emma Goldman and African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois to speak), the Liberal Club provided the social and intellectual hub for New York’s left-leaning literati.9

  One night, as the Liberal Club discussed whether or not the death penalty should apply to women, Gardener made an especially noteworthy impression. She refused to abide the group’s long-standing admission policy, which was to charge everyone 5 cents—except for Presbyterians and women, who were admitted for free. She told the group’s secretary that “it was bad enough for women to be denied the right to vote or to be hanged, and to be robbed of other legal prerogatives, without being classed with Presbyterians as deadheads.”10 As she had done within freethought organizations, wherever Gardener went she sought not only to express her views but also to change institutions and structures to accord with them, often through humor.

  In between the excitement of Ingersoll’s Sunday at-homes and Friday evenings at the Liberal Club, Gardener wrote and worked, generally from the offices of The Truth Seeker. Percy Carrington, a young freethinker from Dillon, Montana, recalled his thrill upon stopping by the Truth Seeker offices at 33 Clinton Place only to find Gardener there. She even accompanied the boy and his family on a picnic and drive through Central Park. “We all like her ever so much,” effused young Carrington.11 By April 1887, The Truth Seeker reported that whenever Gardener went out in New York, “reporters throw themselves at her feet.”12 Another freethought paper, Common Sense, proposed that Ingersoll and Gardener run together for president and vice president in the 1888 election.13

  FOR MOST OF THEIR TIME in New York, Gardener and Smart leased a two-bedroom apartment at 165 West 82nd Street in the neighborhood now called the Upper West Side.14 Her apartment featured beautiful wood floors, high ceilings, tile fireplaces, spacious sitting areas for entertaining, and large floor-to-ceiling windows she could gaze out as she drafted her many essays. From her corner building, Gardener was midway between Central Park and Riverside Drive, bordering the Hudson River, and just a few blocks from the American Museum of Natural History. From this central perch, Gardener could enjoy Sunday strolls through Riverside Park and catch the nearby elevated train at the 81st Street station and be downtown in a matter of minutes.15

  Gardener greeted the city’s diverse residents with open curiosity. When they could afford it, she and Smart employed Japanese servants, not the more typical Irish girls.16 She especially liked meeting people with different religious backgrounds because they provided her with fodder to contradict the prevailing American wisdom that Anglo Christians were the most moral people on the planet.17 Gardener embraced the “melting pot” image of America that took hold in the late nineteenth century as immigration skyrocketed, an era memorialized with the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. In the summer of 1887, she attended a Decoration Day parade to honor Civil War dead. A British friend commented on how strange it was that so many of the city’s municipal firemen and policemen did not appear to be native-born. Gardener countered that it was this very mix that made the forces so effective.18

  But even as she embraced diversity in theory, her own existence in the Upper West Side had been made possible by the forceful removal of others. In the 1880s, city leaders extended rail lines and neighborhoods, improved infrastructure, installed underground electric and telegraph lines, built new parks, and erected the historic monuments that have come to symbolize the city—the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb, and the Washington Square Arch. Gardener arrived just in time to witness New York City become the global metropolis that it remains to this day. But until the early 1880s, city planners’ lofty aspirations for the West Side contrasted sharply with the real
ity of thousands of squatters residing in the neighborhood. After construction began on Central Park and especially after the economic Panic of 1873, thousands of homeless people lived on the West Side. By 1880, there were an estimated 10,000 squatters in several ethnically distinct shanty towns. After the extension of the el to Tenth Avenue, the shanty towns were destroyed.19 Gardener moved in shortly thereafter.

  This disturbing contrast between haves and have-nots became a telltale sign of city life in the 1880s and informed Gardener’s thinking about wealth in America. Though she longed to recapture the status of her Chenoweth ancestors, who themselves came to Maryland thanks to a land grant extracted from Native Americans, she also disdained the modern corporation for creating huge economic disparities. She supported the reformer Henry George in his candidacy for mayor of New York in 1886 (he came in second but ahead of the third-place candidate, Theodore Roosevelt). In his best-selling book Progress and Poverty (1879), George proposed a “land value tax” on all private property, the vast majority of which was held by corporations, so that corporate profits would be reinvested in the public good.

  In an essay entitled “The Cultured Poor,” Gardener illustrated the plight of people like herself and Charles Smart—the sons and daughters of “merchants, lawyers, clergymen, book-keepers” who had grown up to be members of “that large class, the most pathetic of all the victims of our present social system who have the culture, tastes, and habits of the rich, combined with a purse not to be envied by the sturdy laundress.” Gardener asserted that there were few jobs for educated middle-class people, much less women, yet no one would dream of offering them “cast-off clothes” or extending them alms.20 While Gardener was willfully blind to other aspects of her privilege—she and Smart were far from the most pathetic victims of the era’s economic policies—she movingly evoked the economic anxieties of the era.