Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Gardener worked at the border between these two worlds. She knew that something was inherently wrong with Hammond’s biological determinism, but the pioneering studies of cultural difference coming out of Columbia and the University of Chicago had not yet entered the mainstream, so she was unlikely to have encountered them. Most of her travel photos depict schools, families, and religious ceremonies. Her notes puzzled over how societal customs, not nature, inculcated cultural and gender norms. If women steered riverboats in China but not in America, certainly one could not say that it was “unnatural” for women to steer boats. Also, her travel writings, far from touting white American superiority, critiqued it by emphasizing the unique contributions of each culture she encountered. Thus, she studied the skulls of the Native American performers as part of her quest to better understand the various peoples of the world, perhaps not realizing that she was simultaneously naturalizing difference.

  While in Paris, Day “got the auto fever.” A lifelong tinkerer, he “bought a machine and is now practicing as his own driver,” Gardener announced to Spitkza. “The Colonel always wanted to buy an elephant and ride across India. Not doing that he invested in a horse of a different breed here and proposes to ride (or drive) it instead,” she reported. Gardener admitted that she was “rather afraid of the antics of the machine but I never back out of any place where others can go so I am whistling gaily and holding my breath.” Gardener feared what the car might portend but faced this new challenge in good cheer. “You may get my brain,” she joked to Spitzka, “by having to gather it from the branches of some wayside tree in France or Italy.”62

  After Day passed his French driving exam, a feat he considered more harrowing than any battle in which he had fought, the couple embarked on a twenty-month-long auto tour of Europe through Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Corsica, Monaco, and Germany.63 In this, the Days pioneered a brand new form of adventure travel. As the couple zoomed from France to Italy, American novelist Edith Wharton also bought a car and drove around France with her husband, her brother, and her friend Henry James. In 1908, Wharton published an account of her travels titled A Motor-Flight through France, in which she claimed that “the motor-car has restored the romance of travel.” According to Wharton, the beauty of the car trip was the freedom of the open road, freedom from “all the compulsions and contacts of the railway” and the “delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths.”64 Although Gardener lamented the expense and unreliability of Day’s “elephant” and the difficulty of writing with “hotel pens . . . and an auto crank looking at his watch every two seconds,” she, too, was drawn to the open road.65

  BY JANUARY 1907, the couple had returned to Paris. They had already stayed abroad three years longer than planned, but Day had just learned that the money he invested in California real estate had been lost.66 Without the financial safety net they had counted on, they were not sure what to do. From their room at the Hotel Louis le Grande, at the Place Vendôme, they counted their pennies and plotted their next move.

  Day had fallen head over heels for the “auto” and decided the couple would rent a cheap place in the French countryside so that he could build his own car. “I explained this would render me helpless to do anything,” Gardener confided in her diary, “but am quite willing to do whatever is best for his work.”67 Her attempts to conform to the self-sacrificing wife ideal she had long critiqued were half-hearted at best. For weeks, Day and his friend scouted cars and homes while Gardener stayed at the hotel, taking French lessons, having regular “depil” (hair removal) appointments, and writing.

  She lost patience, though, on January 21, 1907, her fifty-fourth birthday. “Nothing done or said to welcome it by any one,” she vented in her diary. “Feel as much as sad and alone as if on a desert island. What a sad mistake it is not to be gentle and loving in all the little ways of life. The loss is terrible—the gain, what?” While her husband was out looking at cars, Gardener “spent the day alone in hotel. No recognition of any kind of birthday. I wrote article.”68 The next month she noted that February 24 would have been “C.S.S.’s” birthday, “a day I always made much of with little gifts and many attentions and efforts to create happiness. Xxx.”69 For all his many failings, Charles Smart still compared favorably as a husband next to Day. At least they had celebrated birthdays together.

  When he wasn’t out looking for and driving cars, Day spent much of February and March sick with the “grippe,” or flu. But he refused to see a doctor and, Gardener complained, “flies at me if I urge it.” His coughing spasms kept the couple up most nights and made it impossible for them to do much during the day. Occasionally, Gardener snuck away to the theater or to socialize without Day. In her few free afternoons, she managed to visit with a fascinating array of Americans—from the Baroness de Chabonlou to the Confederate veteran, congressman, and writer Henry Watterson to the wife of the American-British department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge. Her personal charms had been restored.

  Unable to reach a deal on a rental house, Gardener concluded they “best go home.”70 On Easter Eve 1907, the couple set sail from le Havre to New York on the steamship La Lorraine, which Gardener depicted as an “old tub, acts like an empty barrel in the bottom of a runaway wagon.”71 Rough seas kept most of the passengers, including Day, inside for much of the nine-day voyage. But Gardener preferred to be outside in the fresh air. As they prepared for the next chapter—the first time they would really live together on U.S. soil as husband and wife—Day remarked to his wife, “When we get home we won’t see so much of each other anymore. You’ll have your friends and all, and I my work.” Gardener confided in her diary that it “sounds as if he felt rather jealous of it. Keeps asking why I don’t love him more.” If he asked her again, Gardener confessed “I will say something ugly!”72 In this her first real marriage, Gardener had found a semblance of security but she longed for independence.

  The couple docked in New York and took the first train to Washington, D.C. They arrived back at Sister Pickett’s apartment on April 9, their fifth anniversary and “five years from the day we left home.” Several days later, Day’s auto arrived on a separate ship. Soon he added a second car to his collection; Gardener still preferred their Andalusian horses. The couple spent the summer in a rented house in Mountclair, New Jersey, visiting with friends, especially Mary Phillips, and relatives. Gardener enjoyed reconnecting but fretted over missing vital hours of work, lamenting to her diary, “I can do no work with people here.”73

  They also debated where to settle. Gardener hoped for a home “where I may have roots” and yet still “go and come as I like.” The colonel maintained that New York was too cold for his bronchial problems, so Gardener fancied “either Washington, Va or California may be the final choice. I would greatly prefer the former, since it may not be New York City.”74 In October, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., settling in at the Ontario to “live on Day’s pay as a retired officer.”75 Gardener may have lost the battle for her husband’s attention to his new cars, but she had won the war in terms of selecting their home city.

  Throughout their five-year journey, Gardener grappled with how to reconcile her desire for independence with her role as a wife, as evidenced by the variety of ways she signed her name in letters, oscillating between Mrs. Col. Selden Day, Helen H. Gardener, and Helen H. Gardener-Day. But she had saved her soul. This extended trip abroad fortified Gardener in mind and body (she gained more than 15 pounds), transformed her into a woman of the world, and enabled her to think about writing and working once again.76 Upon returning to the United States, Gardener was eager to resume her public life, though she was not yet sure precisely how. Hints of what was to come can be seen in the hundreds of photographs she took on her travels. The vast majority of her images depict the people and places she encountered; only a few include Gardener. The most revealing one shows her posing proudly in front of the statue of Joan of Arc in Paris. Descended from
a “long line of fighters and writers,” Gardener had returned home to fight and write once more.77

  Gardener standing proudly beside Joan of Arc, another fearless fighter, Paris, ca. 1906.

  12

  Mrs. Day Comes to Washington

  Woman has no voice in her own government, nor in fixing the standards by which she is judged and controlled. She is a dependent morally, mentally, financially and physically. It is all very well—and very silly—to say that women control society and make the moral standards that govern it.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1891

  AFTER FIVE YEARS of global travel, Helen Hamilton Gardener struggled to settle into life in Washington, D.C., as the wife of a retired army colonel. When she had last lived in the United States, she was famous in her own right as a popular author, lecturer, and reformer in New York City. But during her travels, she “died out as a ‘seller’ ” of books, and, as she recalled years later, her “literary life ceased.” She had to be “‘born again’ into quite another life.”1 But it was not immediately clear just what this new life would be. Now fifty-four years old, Gardener looked for new social circles, new groups to join, and yet another new sense of self. Illustrating her internal struggle, she even had two calling cards printed: one for Helen Hamilton Gardener and one for Mrs. Selden Allen Day.2

  A worldly Gardener promoting her lecture series “Ourselves and Other People.”

  During her first several months in Washington, Gardener tried to reestablish herself as a writer and lecturer. She organized her travel notes and lantern slides into a lecture series called “Ourselves and Other People.” Gardener advertised this series, consisting of fourteen distinct talks, to university extension programs and other educational institutions, including the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Gardener was embarrassed by the boorish, pompous attitude that Americans often took toward other countries and other people. She wanted to promote international peace and understanding though her lectures on such topics as “Some Moral and Religious Ideas of the Japanese,” “Egypt: Old and New,” and “China as I Saw It: Inside the Home.”3

  But the constant hustle of promoting herself and booking these talks proved overwhelming. In January 1909, she asked Dr. Edward A. Spitzka (her younger friend) to help her schedule lectures in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The very next week, she told him not to bother.4 “I don’t know whether I am a bit lazy or whether my physique is too much depleted by the grave, plus the strains of earlier days, plus its original lack of robustness,” she had disclosed to him months before, “but some or all of these reasons keep me always so far behind the goal I set for achievement that I seem to accomplish almost nothing anymore.”5

  After a busy lecture season in New York in the fall of 1910, the answer to Gardener’s identity crisis came in the form of a new house. Colonel and Mrs. Day bought a three-story home at 1838 Lamont Street, in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Northwest Washington, an investment that stretched the limits of Day’s army pension but enabled the next phase of Gardener’s life. From her back porch, she could hear the animals at the nearby National Zoo, and Day could plant a tiny backyard garden. Her large home provided ample room for visitors and for hosting events, and she could easily travel downtown, to Virginia, or to New York City. Her wish for a home with “roots” from which she could still “go and come” as she pleased had come true.

  The place of pride in Gardener’s new home was occupied by two glass-door bookcases, filled with books written by her friends and inscribed to her. She called this her “rogue’s gallery,” treasuring her intimate connections with so many writers. In addition, her walls proudly displayed artwork given to her by her painterly friends, including “The Viking’s Daughter,” by Frederick Church, and an early version of Edward Moran’s classic painting depicting the burning of the U.S.S. Philadelphia. Her drawing room, which she referred to as the Louis XVI salon, was furnished in Italian carved wood and matching drapery. And she could luxuriate in the claw-footed tub in her bathroom adorned in hand-painted tile, featuring blue and pink floral bouquets.6

  Gardener even modeled her new dining room on the wood-paneled one she had admired as a boarder in the Widow Melville’s house in Sandusky, Ohio. Where the Widow Melville had decorated her dining room with paintings, however, Gardener displayed her treasures from Japan—antique black lacquer, hand-painted screens, and cushions. One reporter described Gardener’s dining room “as much like a Japanese interior as modern building conditions on this side of the world will permit.” Gardener “delighted” in entertaining friends in the traditional Japanese style, she enthused to a visiting reporter, and her home was always filled with the “literati” and other interesting people. While practicality did not permit her to require her guests to sit on the floor, per Japanese custom, Gardener did encourage everyone to eat with chopsticks, as she had become expert at doing during her travels.7

  Gardener’s most noteworthy new friend proved to be her next-door neighbor, Rep. James “Champ” Clark (D-MO), a presidential contender in 1912 and, from 1913 to 1918, Speaker of the House of Representatives. With her lovely new home, prominent neighbor, and an address book full of Colonel Day’s old army buddies—men and their sons who had gone on to fill important posts in Washington—Gardener’s next chapter began to come into focus.

  For nearly twenty years, Gardener had skirted the edges of Manhattan society, but she found that world nearly impenetrable, based as it was on inherited wealth and old family names. A lapsed Chenoweth of Virginia carried little prestige among the Astors, Roosevelts, and Vanderbilts of New York. But in Washington, a person could distinguish oneself through a charming personality, social connections, and political savvy. This Gardener could do. She would be the suffragists’ inside woman in the nation’s capital. Mrs. Day had come to Washington to stay.

  IN THE EARLY 1900s, the national suffrage movement, represented by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), was in the doldrums. Since 1896, no new states had enfranchised women, and the organization perpetually lacked funds. After the death of Susan B. Anthony in 1906, suffragists also lacked a charismatic guiding spirit. While women led reforms in several other sectors—from temperance to labor to food safety—it was not clear precisely what the relationship was between these progressive reforms and woman suffrage. In general, progressive reformers supported the vote for women—mainly because they hoped women voters would expedite the passage of reform legislation—but woman suffrage itself had not yet emerged as a pressing national policy goal. In her rousing remarks at the 1898 NAWSA convention, the group’s future president, Carrie Chapman Catt, surmised that the “chief obstacle” to the ballot was “that large body of suffragists who believe that the franchise will come, but that it will come in some unaccountable way without effort or concern on their part.”8

  The suffrage movement was so marginal that from 1903 to 1910 NAWSA’s national headquarters were located in a room in the courthouse in Warren, Ohio, the hometown of NAWSA treasurer Harriet Taylor Upton. NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw, a gifted lecturer, preferred life on the hustings to office work and tasked Upton and her secretary with the day-to-day running of the organization.9 The suffragists’ position in Washington, D.C., looked especially bleak. Carrie Chapman Catt led the group’s Congressional Committee, which had organized hearings before Congress every year since 1883. The Congressional Committee had no budget, no mandate beyond the perfunctory annual hearings, and no members who resided in Washington. At the 1908 NAWSA convention, Catt reported that the previous year’s congressional hearings had absolutely no effect. When the NAWSA Congressional Committee asked President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 if the signatures of 1 million women would convince him to support a federal suffrage amendment, he harshly told them to “go, get another state.”10

  For decades, suffragists had debated whether to pursue a state-by-state or federal path to enfranchisement. The state-by-state approach was considered less controversial by white NAWSA
leaders because it sidestepped the question of black women voting in the South. In addition to being exclusionary, the one-state-at-a-time method was inordinately costly and exhausting. Prior to 1910, suffragists had succeeded in getting referenda on dozens of state ballots, but only four states had extended the franchise to women. Ultimately, there would be a whopping fifty-five state referenda to add woman suffrage amendments to state constitutions, the vast majority of which failed, and many of those that prevailed had to overcome subsequent legal challenges.11 A federal approach would be strategically more focused, less time-consuming, and, at least ostensibly, more inclusive.

  Officially, NAWSA pursued both strategies—state referenda and federal amendment—simultaneously, which appeased white Southern members but drained resources, leaving virtually nothing for the federal amendment. After 1908, however, the federal strategy gained momentum. For the first time, every presidential candidate in 1908 was asked his position on woman suffrage, and NAWSA leaders lobbied, unsuccessfully, the two major political parties to insert a suffrage plank in their respective platforms. To help the movement work more successfully with the press, Mrs. Alva Belmont, a multimillionaire socialite from New York, donated the funds for the NAWSA headquarters to relocate from Warren, Ohio, to New York City.12