Each day over breakfast, Congressional Committee members shared their plans for the day, then departed for Capitol Hill, returning at dinnertime to compare notes. A few secretaries kept charge of the office, and volunteers took turns as greeters so that visiting suffragists, reporters, and politicians would always be welcomed by someone friendly and knowledgeable. Suffrage House became everything Gardener imagined when she outlined for Catt her ideal Washington headquarters back in August.
Gardener and Maud Wood Park (center) hosting one of many events at NAWSA’s Suffrage House in Washington, D.C.
Similar to the event she organized in 1913 at the La Follettes’ home, Gardener invited a “who’s who” of Washington’s political, military, and legal officials to the grand opening. The suffragists expected hundreds of guests, but only a handful attended, and many of those were on their way back from another party. Gardener, “as slender and appealing as the crescent moon” in her white and silver dress, remained undaunted.20 She set about getting the prominent invitees to serve on a new NAWSA Advisory Council—not that she necessarily wanted their advice. What she wanted was a letterhead listing all the elected and appointed officials who favored the federal amendment to make its passage appear inevitable.21
Park recalled attending her first Congressional Committee meeting at Suffrage House. After appraising the 531 congressional files, one for each member of Congress, meticulously compiled by NAWSA volunteers, Park left feeling intimidated by the task ahead. As she stood waiting for a streetcar, she “was joined by a small woman with gray hair, who had sat throughout the evening without a question or remark. She told me that she was Helen Hamilton Gardener and that she had been a member of the Congressional Committee for some time.” That was Park’s first memory of “a woman of genius who was to teach me almost everything of value that I came to know during those years in Washington.”22
Thus, 1916 drew to a close. The Democratic and Republican Parties offered lukewarm endorsements of suffrage on a state-by-state basis, and all states that voted on suffrage referenda denied women the vote. But with Catt’s “Winning Plan” and the opening of Suffrage House, NAWSA members felt hopeful about the federal amendment. Gardener’s stature in Washington continued to rise.
WITH NAWSA MATTERS in hand, Gardener turned to another legislative challenge during the winter of 1916–1917: securing a long-sought promotion for her husband, Col. Selden Day, before it was too late. Day had served in the army for forty-two years, from the outbreak of the Civil War straight through his retirement in 1902. He had been wounded several times, fought in two wars, and requested active duty in the Philippines, too. But he had spent twenty years at the level of lieutenant colonel because of the “regimental promotion” system whereby officers used favors or even cash bribes to attain promotions. As a result, Day retired at the rank of colonel when he believed he should have been brigadier general, a title accompanied by a larger pension.23
Day’s health was failing, so Gardener attempted to fix things without her husband knowing while he wintered in California. (No longer sidelined from suffrage, Gardener declined to go west with him this year.) She began with her friend, Sen. John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, who had once referred to her on the Senate floor as a woman “whom we all know as a very intellectual, bright woman.”24 Williams had been orphaned during the Civil War, which connected him to Gardener, who, while not technically orphaned, had also lost her family and home as a result of the war. Gardener socialized with Mrs. Williams, hosted their daughter Sallie, and exchanged books with the senator, whom Maud Wood Park characterized as “the most erudite member of the Senate.”25 So, it was to him she turned for help in her secret mission to get Day promoted before he died.
Williams enthusiastically came to Gardener and Day’s aid, repeatedly lobbying his colleagues on behalf of Day’s private bill. He praised Day as a “sweet and lovable” man who had given his entire career to serving his country, never asking for anything in return. During the Civil War, Williams declared, Day “was not only a brave, but chivalrous enemy of my people.”26 Gardener underscored the importance of the Civil War in securing her relationship to Williams, noting that “we appreciate your really fundamentally helpful and kind way of making us feel that the men of the South and the men who fought on the other side were and are ‘brothers under the skin’ and nearer to each other than are the generation which has no memories of the great struggle to make them understand.”27
Sen. Atlee Pomerene (D-OH) introduced Day’s promotion bill, S. 8088, but the War Department disapproved, dooming its chances. The experience did, however, further bond Gardener to Williams and their shared experiences of the Civil War. Throughout 1917, she curried favor with members of Congress by pressing them on Day’s bill—legislation that had nothing to do with women’s suffrage but instead reminded congressmen that Gardener was the devoted wife of a Civil War hero. Gardener understood the give-and-take of negotiations. She knew that men in Congress rarely thought about one issue in isolation, but rather viewed each issue in light of the others they were simultaneously considering and in the context of their personal relationships. While unrelated to women voting, Day’s bill advanced Gardener’s NAWSA lobbying efforts nonetheless.
NAWSA’S MAIN GOAL during the winter of 1917 was to court increasingly public shows of support from President Wilson. Now that Wilson finally understood the difference between the rival groups of suffragists, he welcomed opportunities to cooperate with NAWSA and cold-shoulder the CU, now known as the National Woman’s Party (NWP).
Alice Paul rang in the New Year by requesting an immediate meeting with Wilson to present him with resolutions passed at the recent memorial services for Inez Milholland. From his typed memo to staff, one can almost hear Wilson groan, “Please say that the days and the hours named are impossible. I would like to avoid seeing them altogether, but if I do see them, it will be at a time of my own selection.” Paul wrote back to demand a meeting “for the earliest date” possible. Wilson reluctantly agreed to meet on January 9 but then learned that Paul planned to bring along 300 NWP members. Wilson instructed his staff to tell Paul that he could meet with only a single representative.28 She sent three.
The next month, NWP representatives requested a meeting with the president in advance of his March inauguration. This time he was even less welcoming. He instructed Tumulty to “please say to these ladies that it would be literally impossible for me at such a crowded time to do what they ask.”29
As Paul’s efforts to reach Wilson were increasingly rebuffed, Gardener’s relationship with the White House grew closer. In the early months of 1917, she asked for and received several favors from Wilson. In January, she phoned the White House to ask the president to please pen a birthday greeting to Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. She even took the liberty of suggesting he write that Shaw “has lived to see the Cause in which she has spent her life so near to its fulfillment and expressing the hope that she may live to be its full beneficiary.”30 Implicit was a subtle plea that the president ought to do everything in his power to enable Anna Howard Shaw to vote before she died. Wilson promptly sent the greeting as instructed.
Later that month, Catt and Gardener reached out to Wilson, along with several congressmen, to request letters in support of Oklahoma and North Dakota’s pending measures to extend women limited franchise, which he gladly wrote.31 Gardener even convinced the president’s staff to rewrite the North Dakota letter to her specifications and send it “out from the White House with a flourish of trumpets.”32 Catt’s “Winning Plan” was beginning to bear fruit; in just seven months, suffragists had increased the number of electoral votes cast in states where women had at least partial suffrage from fewer than 100 to 172.33
Next, Gardener took the opportunity to offer Catt, who admitted she was no publicity expert, a tip on how to promote her new book, Woman Suffrage by Federal Constitutional Amendment. Why not send autographed copies to every member of Congress, Gardener suggested? As an “old-time edit
or,” Gardener explained that a man was twice as likely to read a book if his own name was written in it. “I worked that on the legislators in putting out Pray You, Sir, Whose Daughter? in raising the ‘age of consent’ in 34 states,” Gardener revealed. Catt followed her advice.34
Gardener enjoyed doing “inside” work for suffrage, but she chafed against her lack of official position. Catt relied on Gardener as her emissary in D.C., regularly asking her to write and sign letters under Catt’s signature, but Gardener regretted that she had no proper title in the movement. After reporting to Catt that she convinced several members of Congress to issue statements praising the victory in North Dakota, she suggested that Catt write her own thank-you notes. “You see I have no ‘standing in court’ officially and no title and all the rest of it,” wrote Gardener, “so it is only my personality, and social side, that can speak to them and for you and suffrage.” Catt replied by instructing Gardener to go ahead and write and sign all the notes for her.35
After the flurry of activity in getting Day’s promotion bill introduced and in coordinating various suffrage messages in Washington, Gardener was “laid up in bed for repairs” for much of February and early March.36 As she told Senator Williams, “the Grim Reaper has been swinging his Scythe back and forth in front of me for the past ten days . . . but missed me at every stroke!”37 She invited her friend Caroline Noble to come help with her correspondence, prompting Noble to observe to Catt that Gardener was a “powerful human Dynamo to hold in check, as you may imagine.”38
From her sick bed, Gardener “adopted” five members of Congress by signing them up for subscriptions to the Woman’s Journal. Senator Williams initially thought Gardener had meant to send the paper to his wife, but then laughed when Gardener confirmed it was for him. He promised to “read that blessed paper” as best he could.39 Gardener’s “adoption” plan was so popular that suffragists in two other states followed suit.40 Gardener returned to full health just as the nation prepared to enter World War I.
ON APRIL 2, 1917, Congress convened for a special war session, and President Wilson addressed both Houses concurrently, signaling the U.S. entry into the war in Europe. Earlier that same day, suffragists gathered at the Capitol to greet Jeannette Rankin. The NAWSA Congressional Committee requested fifty seats in the gallery, via Gardener’s next-door neighbor Speaker Champ Clark, and the women all wore the suffrage colors, yellow and purple, to welcome Representative Rankin. Gardener sat on the Speaker’s bench, as she often did, to take in the momentous occasion. Prior to the swearing in ceremony, NAWSA hosted a breakfast in Rankin’s honor at Suffrage House, and a “personal escort” composed of Gardener, Catt, Park, and Harriet Laidlaw, of New York, accompanied Rankin to the Capitol in a “decorated auto parade.”41 The sense of new possibilities for women was palpable.
At home, the outbreak of war also impacted Gardener. Day was disappointed that his promotion bill had not passed, and he struggled to find purpose, which no doubt distressed Gardener, too. After serving in the army for nearly his whole adult life, Day longed to rejoin the action. Perhaps watching his younger wife so actively engaged in her own battles exacerbated the sting of his futility. Just days after Wilson’s declaration of war, Day, age eighty, hurried home from California so that he could volunteer for military service. He wrote two letters to the Secretary of War asking to be placed on the “active” list “for any duty as may be desired.”42 Gardener confided to Senator Williams that Day’s “past treatment cut him to the quick, but the present call of his country—like the one in 1860, finds him first of all a soldier of freedom.”43 Day’s offer was kindly rebuffed.
Day’s health seems to have rapidly deteriorated following his return from California. He drops out as a presence in Gardener’s letters and in the society pages. Though she did not write about it, nursing Day—as with Smart before—must have taken a toll. To help care for Day and herself, Gardener welcomed her favorite great-niece and namesake, Helen Gardener Crane, of St. Louis, into their home.
War preparations prompted major shifts in NAWSA strategy, which pushed Gardener into closer contact with the White House and Wilson into a more outspoken suffragist. First, NAWSA leaders began encouraging Wilson to demand the enfranchisement of women as a war measure. Anna Howard Shaw implored the president to call on Congress, in his special April 2 address, to pass the federal suffrage amendment because, otherwise, how could the government “without shame, call upon its women citizens to perform patriotic duties while depriving them of the fundamental right of all free people in a Republic—the right of self government?”44 The president declined to do so that day, but the suffragists would continue to press this strategy for the next two years.
Harkening back to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s decision to suspend women’s rights activism during the Civil War, Gardener suggested to the NAWSA board in April that “no drive should be undertaken during the Extra [war] Session of Congress.” The board unanimously approved. To demonstrate their patriotism, NAWSA members worked on behalf of the Women’s Overseas Hospital Committee, which sent all-female hospital staff to care for patients in France, and Wilson appointed both Shaw and Catt to influential wartime volunteer posts.45 NAWSA also organized its own three-person committee, including Gardener, who ostensibly understood military preparedness because of her husband’s career, to coordinate women’s war work with the government.46 As Catt would point out time and again, American women could be so helpful in the war effort because they had already been so well organized for suffrage.47
Yet, suspension of efforts was not exactly what Gardener and the NAWSA Congressional Committee had in mind. Rather, they valued the appearance of suspension while continuing to work behind the scenes for the suffrage amendment. Gardener aimed to use the special wartime session of Congress to establish, finally, the House Committee on Woman Suffrage, the vital infrastructure suffragists would need to get their amendment to the floor for a vote. She spent March 13, 1917, in Speaker Champ Clark’s office, meeting with congressional leaders and discussing plans. “I believe that we now have the chance of a lifetime to secure a position that will enable us to push our work successfully and rapidly,” Gardener reported to Catt. The congressmen assured her that the election of Jeanette Rankin would bolster the suffragists’ case for the House committee and that NAWSA could “pretty nearly name its membership.”48
Gardener’s legislative work often began on her front porch, which adjoined that of Speaker Clark, who lived at 1836 Lamont Street.49 Over 6 feet tall and a natural raconteur, Clark was “the dominant personality in the House.” Though the Speaker was a proud Southerner whose thick accent made Maud Wood Park pine for an interpreter, he had long been on record as a supporter of the vote for women.50 As Park recalled, “having the Clarks next door furnished opportunities that Mrs. Gardener used to our advantage. Occasionally she had her cook make Southern delicacies to be handed to their cook over the back fence. . . . If she wanted to get a bit of information from him or to convey some without the formality of a call at his office she would sometimes wait, with coat and hat on, until she heard the door of the next house slam after him. Then she would appear, as if by accident, on her own steps; and during the moment of friendly chat that was sure to follow she would adroitly drop in her question . . . but she was far too wise to do that too often.”51
Even though Clark had signaled his approval of the House committee, he told Gardener that the final authority rested with Rep. Edward W. Pou of North Carolina, the powerful chairman of the House Rules Committee. Clark further intimated that even though Pou opposed the federal amendment, he might be swayed by the president.
Gardener went immediately to Wilson, who had offered tentative, verbal support of a House committee back in 1913. This time, she justified her appeal in terms of the war, NAWSA’s cooperative spirit, and President Wilson’s chivalrous, principled nature. Emphasizing that this was the “only request that the National American Woman Suffrage Association has made o
f this session of the Congress,” Gardener implored the president to help the women “secure to us the machinery of future work for which we have pled in vain for years.” Gardener concluded by reminding Wilson that Shaw and Catt were, at that very moment, busy with national defense work and that “with this added bit of legislative machinery . . . we can all the more freely and happily give of our services in other directions to our country.”52 Again, Gardener’s combination of timing, flattery, and logic worked. Wilson responded, “It will give me great pleasure to write to Mr. Pou as you suggest.”53 This was, by far, the biggest request NAWSA had yet made of Wilson, and the outcome hinged on the close relationships Gardener had built with Wilson and his staff.
That same day, Wilson wrote to Chairman Pou. He noted that while “strictly speaking, it is none of my business, and I have not the least desire to intervene in the matter” he had heard from Gardener that his opinion could be of significance in determining whether or not the House should establish a Committee on Woman Suffrage. Wilson informed Pou that such a committee “would be a very wise act of public policy, and also an act of fairness to the best women who are engaged in the cause of women suffrage.”54 In his estimation of the “best women,” Wilson surely drew on his impressions of Gardener, the suffragist he liked most and the one most frequently in his office.
AS WAR PREPARATIONS pushed NAWSA into closer contact with the White House, Alice Paul and the NWP employed new methods to capture the president’s attention. Frustrated by Wilson’s brush-off in January, NWP activists began staging daily protests at the White House. On January 10, twelve “silent sentinels” adorned with colorful sashes and banners stood at the Pennsylvania Avenue gates demanding: “Mr. President, What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?” and “How Long Must Women Wait for Victory?” The vigil continued, six days a week, rain, snow, or shine. Then, on March 4, the eve of Wilson’s second inaugural and harkening back to the 1913 parade, Paul planned a massive demonstration at the White House.
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