Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  After Catt took over as NAWSA president in late 1915, Gardener and Selden Day left D.C. to winter in California. Gardener’s first assignment was to interview Californians about the Congressional Union’s (CU) campaign against Democratic incumbents in the upcoming 1916 election. A main source of contention between NAWSA and Alice Paul’s CU remained the CU’s policy of holding the party in power—since 1913, the Democrats—accountable as long as the federal amendment had not passed. Shockingly to NAWSA, the CU even campaigned against Democrats who actively supported suffrage. In a lengthy memo, Gardener reported to Catt that every Democrat opposed by the CU in California had also been a suffrage ally. She struggled to see the wisdom in such a plan. If the CU policy had succeeded in converting other Democrats to suffrage, Gardener reported, this “has yet to be disclosed.”2

  Gardener was also aghast to learn more about Paul’s lobbying tactics, especially her dealings with President Woodrow Wilson. To Gardener, Paul’s efforts to reach the president bordered on harassment. CU members had even followed Wilson to a lunch on the nineteenth floor of the Biltmore Hotel in New York and promised to trail him everywhere he went, all over the country. To Gardener, an intellectual radical who had long relied on her good manners to push her unorthodox agenda, such methods tarnished all suffragists by association and simply would not do. What Gardener did not mention and perhaps failed to even realize was that Paul’s aggressive tactics had made woman suffrage front-page news, attracted the attention of political leaders, and provided an opening for her.

  When Gardener returned to Washington, she immediately set out to counteract the damage she felt had been done to the cause by Paul and her followers.3 On July 5, 1916, she wrote to Joseph P. Tumulty, Wilson’s secretary, who functioned more like a chief of staff, to introduce herself and to clarify that “the real suffragists of America” had nothing whatsoever to do with the young militants who had recently started heckling the president at his public appearances. She enclosed an “outpouring of my wrath” decrying the Congressional Union and explaining the differences between NAWSA and Alice Paul’s group, suggesting that he and the president use her memo in any way they saw fit. “Our old, original Constitution forbids any ‘partisan’ action by our Suffrage Organization,” she explained, “and our leaders deplore it now as always.”

  Along with her missive, Gardener included her calling card, a photo, a list of references, and a 1915 NAWSA letterhead listing her position “since you may never have heard of me.” She emphasized her political contacts, noting, “if you wish to ask Senators Williams, Sutherland, Thomas, Smoot or Representatives Taylor (Col.), Champ Clark (or his secretary Mr. Bassford) you will find who and what I am.” Of the scores of letters that Tumulty and Wilson regularly received from various factions of local, state, and national suffragists, something about Gardener’s letter stood out. Perhaps it was because her letter was typewritten and easily legible. Perhaps it was her telltale charm, honed over decades of writing such letters to powerful men. Or perhaps her letter stood out because, rather than ask Tumulty for a favor, her memo provided something useful to him. Whatever the reason, Gardener’s letter made an impression on the White House and distinguished her from the many other women who wrote the president about the vote.

  To that same letter, Gardener penned a postscript for the president’s new wife, Edith Bolling Galt, whom he had married—just a few months after the death of his first wife—in December 1915. “As the wife of an Army Officer,” Gardener declared, it would “give me pleasure to call.”4 Mrs. Wilson invited Gardener for tea at 10:15 a.m. the very next day. Political observers and Washington residents had scoffed at the president’s hasty marriage to Galt, sixteen years his junior, and the First Lady must have welcomed some friendly company. Though she remained opposed to the federal amendment, Edith Wilson, the daughter of another impoverished “first family” of Virginia and the first woman in Washington to drive a car, immediately warmed to Gardener.5

  Several days after Gardener introduced herself to Tumulty and befriended Mrs. Wilson, Carrie Chapman Catt requested a meeting with the president to ascertain his thoughts on the newly approved Democratic Party platform, which included a statement in support of suffrage, but only if granted state by state. The Republican Party adopted a similar plank (after hundreds of suffragists, including Gardener, gathered at their convention in Chicago to demand action). Catt had lobbied for party platforms that endorsed the federal amendment, and she wanted to discuss the prospects of such an amendment with the president.6

  Before accepting Catt’s request for a meeting, Wilson pressed Tumulty for more information about the women of NAWSA. “Are these ladies of the ‘Congressional Union’ variety?” the president inquired.7 Even after more than three years in office and multiple meetings with suffrage groups, Wilson still could not distinguish the various suffrage factions, nor did he realize that NAWSA was the nonpartisan, national voice of women suffragists. Drawing on Gardener’s instructive July 5 letter, Tumulty assured the president that these women were not of the “‘heckling’ variety” (Gardener’s letter was later inserted into the Congressional Record to help congressmen differentiate between suffragist groups).8

  Wilson gladly accepted the meeting: “OK Tuesday at 2 p.m.—office.” In agreeing to meet with NAWSA leaders, President Wilson hoped to avert a crisis among women and to tamp down the protests against him. By the summer of 1916, it was clear that the upcoming presidential election would be very close. Wilson did not want to further enrage the women who could now vote in twelve states and who helped determine 91 electoral votes. Wilson’s Republican opponent, Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, enthusiastically supported a federal amendment to enfranchise women and eagerly courted Paul’s Congressional Union.

  For Gardener, forging a relationship with the White House was both strategic and personal. Twenty years ago, she had been one of the most prominent and respected women in America. By 1916, though, most of the younger suffragists with whom she worked had never even heard of her and knew nothing of the personal hardships she had endured for her bold feminist ideas. Since moving to Washington, Gardener, now sixty-three, had watched as younger and, to her mind, less qualified women received choice suffrage posts and public acclaim for advancing ideas she had articulated decades earlier. She knew that Carrie Chapman Catt was hoping to identify a strong NAWSA leader in Washington. Gardener wanted to be that leader.

  FOLLOWING THEIR cordial August meeting, Catt invited President Wilson to address the members of NAWSA at their upcoming annual convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to be held in early September. After both political parties declined to endorse the federal amendment in their platforms, Catt moved up the convention from December to September as an emergency measure to regroup and strategize. Wilson readily agreed, the first president to do more than offer tepid welcoming remarks at a NAWSA convention.

  Thrilled to be at the center of suffrage activity but worried that her health might prevent her from attending the convention in person, Gardener sent Catt a nine-page memo detailing the situation in Washington and including a ten-point plan. Finally, someone valued Gardener’s opinion about how to lobby for the amendment in Washington. For starters, Gardener implored Catt to move the NAWSA headquarters from New York to D.C. and to move herself so that she could personally oversee things. Without Catt at the helm, Gardener feared “the National will fall into a decidedly second place in suffrage and trudge along at a consistent disadvantage that will be of its own making as it has been in the past. It was this blind refusal to see the perfectly obvious that resulted in the C.U.” Catt, Gardener urged, needed to be on hand to meet with the “political leaders of the nation. She could and should dominate the situation.”

  Also, publicity would be much improved if NAWSA were headquartered in Washington, as Gardener well understood from having handled the press for the 1913 parade so masterfully. National papers and syndicates sent their “picked men” to Washington, Gardener explained. T
hese men looked for suffrage news and found only the Congressional Union. To make NAWSA truly the voice of the national movement, the organization’s headquarters needed to be fully staffed in Washington by the best paid workers available (“otherwise employed, or overworked women, cannot in these strenuous days carry the burden alone”) and stocked with pamphlets and educational material.

  Next, Gardener suggested that Catt appoint a “Diplomatic Agent” who understood that “both the political and social etiquette of Washington is often precisely the opposite of that employed in any other American city, for the simple reason that a part of it was adopted from France and much has been adopted and adjusted to meet foreign diplomatic needs and requirements.” Therefore, NAWSA needed someone “to prevent ‘collisions’ or mistakes in procedure that might seem trivial to an outsider (or be entirely unknown) but which might spell failure as against success if gone at the wrong way or at the wrong time.” Gardener reminded Catt that NAWSA had frequently “lost out” because, historically, the group had not looked to women who understood the ways of Washington.9

  The 1916 NAWSA convention marked a turning point in suffrage history. The women focused with renewed zeal on the federal amendment because they understood that the European war would place new responsibilities on women and because they knew that to abolish the sexual double standard, women needed the vote. A portion of the program was dedicated to “public morals” and prostitution. Katherine Bement Davis, the reformer and social scientist who would later compile groundbreaking statistics on women’s sexual activity, delivered an address (which President Wilson listened to before giving his own talk), arguing that women voters would help eliminate prostitution—not because women were inherently more moral (as some purity reformers had argued), but because “all down the ages women have paid the price of vice and crime.” For generations, Davis explained, men had been taught that they could do “some things which a woman may not.” Men then wrote these sexual double standards into law and decided how to enforce them. Drawing on her years of working in the penal system, Davis observed that the woman’s “point of view has no representation,” and thus, women alone were punished for sexual vice, even their own sexual assault.10 Ideas that Gardener helped normalize in the 1890s had become a standard feature of women’s demands for the vote.

  In his address, Wilson reiterated his preference for the state-by-state method, which did not endear him to his audience. But the women were glad to have this show of presidential goodwill nevertheless. After remarking on the comparatively swift progress of suffrage, Wilson explained that he had not come to tell the women to “be patient” because they had been patient already but to “congratulate them” that they would soon be victorious. They just needed to wait a little longer.11

  But in her presidential keynote, Catt declared that women would wait no more. Catt’s speech, “The Crisis,” argued that the time had come for women to vote. Catt called for a “mobilization of spirit,” telling NAWSA members that they had become too accustomed to being patient. Now was the moment to act.12 To crystalize her thoughts, Catt drafted a comprehensive “Winning Plan,” which would guide the movement over the next four years. Her multipronged strategy involved working for the federal amendment along with targeted state referenda—because she rightly predicted that a few more state victories would force federal action—while at the same time preparing for ratification in the required thirty-six states.13 Catt shared her plan with the NAWSA board and state chairs, vowing that she would resign unless thirty-six state chairs committed themselves to her plan by signing a compact.14 Everyone signed on.

  The Washington-based elements of Catt’s “Winning Plan” included many ideas detailed in Gardener’s August memo. The NAWSA board approved plans to open a large office in Washington (while retaining the official headquarters in New York). But Catt herself refused to move, preferring to delegate the day-to-day dealings in Washington to Maud Wood Park and Gardener. Finally given official license to do what she had wanted to do all along, Gardener took to the task with her father’s evangelical zeal.

  IN OCTOBER 1916, Gardener approached Wilson, via Tumulty, with her first major request. In the upcoming November election, two states—South Dakota and West Virginia—had woman suffrage on the ballot. Catt had tasked Gardener with asking the president to write notes in support of these two measures. But Gardener stressed that the president could do much more than just write two letters because “when you want things to happen you don’t confine yourself to official communications.” As a young man, Wilson had once written that hearing women speak in public left him with a “chilled, scandalized feeling.”15 As a presidential candidate he had remained silent on women’s rights, and as president he avoided the suffragists as best he could for as long as he could. But Gardener saw room for hope in this distinguished educator, who had (reluctantly) begun his teaching career at the all-women’s college Bryn Mawr and who was a devoted father to three daughters.

  Gardener strove to convince Wilson of the folly of the state-by-state method. She described to him in painstaking detail the labor that women had to undertake to get referenda on ballots in states where they could not vote. “To win the attention of the voters in a matter so far removed from their own interests and experiences,” Gardener related, women had to collect signatures through “a house to house canvas which involves calling upon men in their homes,—yes and in their lodging houses, at night.” For dramatic effect, Gardener recalled how the previous summer she had “groped my way up a dark stairway” only to have her knock answered “by a colored man in his underclothes. . . . And with that man in a dark hall-way, half undressed, I had to discuss my right to vote.” Worse, “even young girls must do it.”

  These were highly charged words in the era of unprecedented lynching of black men on the false pretense that they had sexually assaulted white women. Gardener made no other references to direct canvasing herself—that was not her specialty—and it is more likely that she invented this story to stir up Wilson’s racial animus. She resorted to dangerous racist stereotypes to ask Wilson who was more deserving of the vote, the black man in his underclothes or the white woman who sat before him at the White House? Since the collapse of the universal suffrage coalition in the late 1860s, white suffragists had often invoked such stereotypes to argue that educated white women were more deserving of the vote than men of color.16 Gardener never espoused the states’ rights position or the whites-only voting provisions advocated by some other Southerners. But she did use her whiteness to endear herself to male leaders and to prioritize the rights of white women over those of African Americans.

  Gardener further emphasized to Wilson that “we do not have to go through these state referenda just once.” To the contrary, “since 1867 there have been no less than 43 suffrage referenda taken, of which only seven carried.” Wilson must have understood the stakes, at some level, because he had heard from dozens of New Jersey women regarding the 1915 ballot initiative in his home state. Wilson voted for the measure, but it failed to carry. Gardener lamented, “It is the life of leading spirits of two generations of women which is being spent upon the unreasonable task of asking to be allowed to take their part in the world as full-fledged human beings.” She did not name names, but she may have been thinking of her own compromised health or that of labor lawyer Inez Milholland, the so-called “most beautiful suffragist.” Astride a stunning white horse, Milholland had dramatically led the 1913 suffrage procession, but just a few weeks after Gardener sent Wilson this letter, she died from anemia and exhaustion brought on by constant travel for the Congressional Union. She was just thirty years old.

  Worse, Gardener told Wilson, the disenfranchisement of women squandered a vast amount of human power “while every social abomination that can be conceived by wicked women and men stalks through the land.” Finally, Gardener hinted that there would be “political advantages” to Wilson taking a more public stance in favor of suffrage. Doing so would keep his Republican
rival, Justice Hughes, from claiming that he was the candidate of women voters. And it would give lie to the impression that the Democratic Party stood in the way of women voting. “Mr. President,” Gardener implored, “your performances have been so much greater than your promises that I hope the same may prove true in the present case. . . . I hate to have you only come in when our fight is won.”17

  Per Gardener’s request, Wilson signaled his support for the pending suffrage ballot measures in West Virginia and South Dakota; nevertheless, both failed. Wilson himself was just narrowly reelected over Justice Hughes. Alice Paul took credit for keeping the presidential election so close, though Wilson won in eleven of the twelve states where the CU campaigned against him.18 The 1916 election also marked the victory of Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives.

  In December 1916, Gardener helped plan a party to celebrate the grand opening of the new NAWSA Washington office at 1626 Rhode Island Avenue. The sixteen-bedroom “Suffrage House” featured a grand second-floor space for entertaining and plenty of offices, along with extra rooms to rent out to visiting suffragists. It was to be “as much of a club and a gathering space” for suffragists as it was a workspace.19 Several members of the NAWSA Congressional Committee boarded there, including Maud Wood Park, who moved to D.C. after the 1916 convention and soon became chair.