Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Paul, a Quaker, objected to the U.S. entry into World War I. Once the United States officially declared war, she highlighted the hypocrisy of Wilson’s statement that the nation was fighting to “make the world safe for democracy” while simultaneously denying democracy to more than half the population at home.55 Initially, the president greeted the “pickets” with good cheer. He invited them inside for warm drinks and instructed grounds staff to provide the women with warm bricks for their feet. But over time he became increasingly irritated with the NWP. He wrote his daughter Jessie that “they certainly seem bent upon making their cause as obnoxious as possible.”56

  Meanwhile, Gardener and Catt worried that the “misguided women who have been picketing the White House” would undermine their efforts to establish the House committee, just as they believed Paul’s strident tactics had cost them the committee back in 1913.57 After Gardener and Maud Wood Park testified before the House Rules Committee on May 18 about the merits of their proposal, they expected a solid “yes” vote. But one representative unexpectedly issued a statement declaring that he would approve no such committee while women picketed the White House in a time of war.58 In response, Catt published an open letter to Alice Paul, deploring the protests and distancing NAWSA from them, warning that “there is now clear proof that the presence of the pickets is hurting our cause in Congress.”59

  On May 25, Gardener forwarded Catt’s letter to President Wilson. In her cover letter, Gardener explained that NAWSA feared that “in spite of your cordial endorsement of our request for a suffrage committee in the House, the Rules Committee may deny us this help because of their resentment toward a wholly different group of women.”60 Wilson again signaled his support, and the Rules Committee reported favorably. Worried that additional members of Congress would speak against the proposed committee when the measure came to the House floor, Gardener again approached Wilson on June 10. This time she asked him to send a “word or note” to Rep. James Heflin of Alabama, whom she described as “one of the two most dangerous and persistent opponents on the floor.” As requested, Wilson wrote Heflin and advised that it would be a very wise thing “both politically and from other points of view” for the House to approve a Committee on Woman Suffrage. Heflin replied that he had read Wilson’s letter several times and that even though he opposed women voting, he would “not oppose the creation of a Committee in the House on Woman Suffrage.”61

  The next day, Alice Paul sent out a fundraising letter incorrectly claiming that the National Woman’s Party was the only suffrage group “working on Congress that has not been turned aside by the war, but is still, as an organization, putting all its effort into the suffrage movement.”62 She likely had no idea what Gardener had been doing behind the scenes and how close she was to finally securing the House committee. But Paul did know that the NWP needed cash. The NWP had many wealthy benefactors, such as Alva Belmont, but after 1917, the NWP did not have the resources to function on the same scale as NAWSA.

  What enabled NAWSA to redouble their efforts for the amendment in 1917 was a huge bequest from Miriam Leslie, a magazine publisher who donated her multimillion-dollar fortune to NAWSA to do with as Catt saw fit. With this windfall, Catt increased the number of NAWSA paid staff (though Gardener remained a volunteer), purchased the Woman’s Journal, and set up the Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education in New York, which grew to comprise six departments and a staff of twenty-four.63

  Throughout the summer of 1917, the NWP picketers intensified their efforts. In July, several women were arrested and sentenced to jail. President Wilson issued a pardon, but the women refused to accept it. Meanwhile, Gardener and Maud Wood Park continued to meet with White House and congressional representatives to press for the creation of the House Committee on Woman Suffrage. On any given day, Gardener shuttled between congressional offices, committee rooms, the House floor, and the White House, gaining what information she could along the way.64 Speaker Clark informed her that the time to vote on the suffrage committee was inopportune because of the White House picketers, while Pou claimed that the new committee could not be taken up until all war measures had been dealt with.65 Desperate, Gardener and Park implored Speaker Clark for more help, only to be told that they should “Sit tight and trust in the Lord!”66

  A major concern was the fact that members of Congress still could not differentiate between NAWSA and the NWP pickets. To most congressmen, all uppity women were one and the same. In an effort to stem the conflation of suffragists in the public mind, Gardener met with White House press staff and various national press representatives to entreat newspapers to leave out the word “suffrage” or “suffragist” when reporting on the NWP protesters so as to not inadvertently impugn the reputation of NAWSA. The NWP, which had become so adept at promoting suffrage through the nation’s newspapers, resented this press blackout.67

  At the end of July, Gardener scheduled a meeting between the president, herself, and Carrie Chapman Catt. A giddy Gardener wrote Catt, instructing, “Now, lady, think up all the pretty, strong, and fine arguments in the world to put up to him. Ask him to put it in a ‘message’ the moment he feels he can wedge it in to advantage as a war measure and that this will let us free to work for ‘our country’ instead of for our own freedom, etc etc. If you can, I think it will be pretty wise to put a lot of your points in type and leave them with him. He is a very absorbent party.” Gardener also indicated that the press situation had much improved since President Wilson had pardoned the picketers and since reporters had been more careful to distinguish the NWP from NAWSA.68

  Through their regular canvasing, Gardener and her colleagues learned that the House would vote on their suffrage committee in September and that the strongest case for the committee could be made by representatives from suffrage states. So the women got to work shoring up their male allies from the West. The work proved exhilarating. After so many years of politely circulating petitions from the margins, NAWSA members reveled in their newfound insider status. One Congressional Committee member wrote to a colleague that “We are having a most delightful time and I find it almost as good as a vacation.”69 After two weeks of nonstop persuading, however, she grew weary. Her next chatty report bemoaned that “life has been dragging lazily on . . . even the best men, we find, will bear constant watching.”70

  With the impending suffrage committee vote, Gardener dispatched a few more frantic pleas to Tumulty, asking him to use the power of the White House to get a few more House Democrats to fall in line.71 Finally, after years of meetings, arm-twisting, and memo writing, the House scheduled a vote on the Woman Suffrage Committee for September 24, 1917. Various representatives impugned the suffragists—especially the pickets—as “nagging . . . iron-jawed angels” and “deluded creatures with short hair and short skirts.” Then Judiciary Committee chairman Edwin Webb (D-NC) insisted that voting rights were a state issue and denied that President Wilson had endorsed the committee. To prove that the committee had the president’s backing, Chairman Pou brandished the letter that Wilson sent him at Gardener’s request. The House voted, 181 to 107, to establish a Committee on Woman Suffrage. The creation of this committee was a landmark victory in the quest to secure the federal amendment. NAWSA credited Gardener with it.72

  Gardener and Park rushed from the House gallery to thank their friends, beginning with Speaker Clark. “We trusted in the Lord and He stood by us,” Gardener exclaimed, quoting the Speaker’s own words. Clark grunted, “The Lord didn’t have anything to do with it. Tended to it myself.”73 Gardener spent the next several days back at the Capitol, orchestrating the composition of this new committee.74 She also wrote to Chairman Pou to thank him for his support and welcome him and his wife to the NAWSA Advisory Council. She knew he did not support votes for women, but she really wanted his name on her letterhead.75

  As Gardener detailed in a subsequent NAWSA report, hers was “the silent work of dealing with certain officials of both parties, securing their cooperation in ex
pediting our various plans.” What made this work so challenging was that alliances constantly shifted and every few years the party in power changed. “To secure and hold the confidence and respect, the goodwill and cooperation of opposing administrations, and of men who are fighting night and day ‘to get the best of’ the other faction or party,” Gardener asserted, “is a work that few, indeed, can do successfully.”76 Gardener’s efforts to expedite the creation of the House Committee on Woman Suffrage testify to her deft lobbying of allies and adversaries alike.

  Getting a suffrage amendment out of this new committee—the goal of setting up the committee in the first place—proved tricky. Judiciary Committee chairman Webb informed Gardener and Park that only the Judiciary Committee could forward constitutional amendments. Indignant, Park and Gardener went to see Clark, who confirmed that this was true. Park blurted out, “Why didn’t you tell us this before?” to which the Speaker replied, “You didn’t ask me.” Once outside the Speaker’s office, Park “broke into denunciations of the Speaker’s treachery.” Gardener, however, took a different view. She surmised that the Speaker had not previously known that constitutional amendments had to originate in the Judiciary Committee. “That old man is so conceited that he would rather have us think he double crossed us,” Gardener said, “than admit that he didn’t know an important fact about the procedure of the House.”

  Next Gardener orchestrated the solution. Park researched the issue in Hinds’ Precedents and found that it was possible for constitutional amendments to come through committees other than Judiciary. Rather than correct the Speaker themselves, Gardener called Clark’s secretary, Mr. Bassford, “whom she had previously made a devoted friend,” and explained the situation. Bassford agreed to place Hinds’ Precedents, open to the precise page, on the Speaker’s desk so that he would see the correct rule and act accordingly.77

  After many such encounters, Park recalled that “no other lesson that I learned in Washington stood me in as good stead as my growing realization of the value of Helen Gardener’s help.”78 Drawing on Gardener’s tactics, Park codified, somewhat humorously, a list of “dos and don’ts” for the NAWSA Congressional Committee to follow as they lobbied Congress, including “don’t nag; don’t boast; don’t threaten; don’t stay too long; don’t lose your temper; don’t talk about your work in corridors or elevators; don’t tell everything you know.”79

  The NWP continued protesting at the White House throughout the summer and fall, even after several women were arrested and imprisoned at Occoquan Workhouse. In a mass mailing to members, Paul pronounced picketing the White House as “our most effective method of voicing to the Administration the protest of women against their disfranchisement.” She asked for volunteers who were “prepared for imprisonment.”80

  By the end of October, Paul herself was sentenced to six months in jail, an unheard of punishment for a white, middle-class reformer. After her demands to be treated as a political prisoner were refused, Paul led a hunger strike, which resulted in forced feedings and numerous other abuses, creating a national outcry. Earlier that summer, when Wilson had pardoned other NWP protesters, he hinted that the D.C. police had gone too far. But he never put the full weight of his authority behind the release of the prisoners and many took his relative silence as an endorsement of the women’s cruel treatment.81

  Nor did NAWSA come to the defense of the imprisoned NWP protesters. Publicly, NAWSA leaders continued to distance themselves from the NWP and, privately, to press Wilson for help, often by reminding him that they were not like the NWP. Catt was especially concerned that the pickets would harm the chances that the woman suffrage referendum would pass in New York State that November. Her canvassers informed her that men were saying they would never vote for suffrage because of “the pickets.” Catt dismissed this as a “plain case of male hysteria,” but to hedge her bets she tasked Gardener with “another ‘diplomatic service,’ and this is perhaps the most important yet.” Would Gardener ask the president to issue a public statement saying that he hoped the New York measure would pass and that “no man will be influenced in his decision by ‘the pickets’ ”? Since Wilson was the only man to have been directly picketed, Catt reasoned that his words would “carry weight.”82

  Gardener again worked her magic, via Tumulty.83 Within a few hours of receiving her request, Wilson sent the following message to the voters of New York: “May I not express to you my very deep interest in the campaign in New York for the adoption of woman suffrage, and may I not say that I hope that no voter will be influenced in his decision with regard to this great matter by anything the so-called pickets may have done here in Washington?” These women “represent so small a fraction” of suffragists, Wilson proclaimed, “that it would be most unfair and argue a very narrow view to allow their actions to prejudice the cause itself.”84

  On November 6, New York enfranchised millions of women, doubling the number of women voters nationally and substantially increasing the number of congressmen who represented voting female constituents (New York State had the largest House delegation, at 43 representatives).85 Catt referred to the New York victory as the “Gettysburg of the woman suffrage movement.”86 And Gardener proclaimed this win an augury that “national suffrage, through the federal amendment, is practically won.”87 She also sensed that President Wilson might soon come out publicly for the federal amendment.

  Ever since first meeting Wilson in the summer of 1916, Gardener had intuited that the president wanted to do right by the suffragists. She made it her mission to identify favors that he would be comfortable doing, increasing the significance of her asks one by one. To thank the president for his statement about the New York vote, Gardener requested a meeting at the White House on Friday, November 9.88 Once at the White House, Gardener, Catt, and a couple of other NAWSA representatives informed the president that it was time for him to demand that Congress pass the federal amendment “in order that women may be saved the expense and long struggle which is involved in the States by the State referendum plan.” They shared their strategy for the upcoming congressional session and asked for Wilson’s help in seeing it through. Catt issued a statement—after Gardener first cleared it with Tumulty—announcing, “We believe [President Wilson] is going to do everything that he can to help us.”89 News reports described Gardener leaving the meeting exuding “triumph and gratification.”90

  In follow-up correspondence with Tumulty, Gardener detailed her ideas for congressional passage of the amendment, emphasizing the decisive role that she hoped Wilson would play. She presented Tumulty with a copy of her book An Unofficial Patriot (1894) and boasted that Senator Williams had declared it the very best portrait of Abraham Lincoln in American literature. She then explained that her careful study of Wilson, another wartime president, had convinced her that he, too, would be remembered for expanding rights and that suffrage would ultimately be extended to women as a war measure, in spite of lingering Southern opposition. “Congress cannot, for long, ask of women to work alongside of men, to suffer together with men, to sacrifice more than any man is asked to sacrifice—the sons they bore—to finance the battle for justice and ‘world democracy,’ ” Gardener stressed, “and at the same time refuse the benefits of all this work and suffering and sacrifice to one half of those who are called upon. It is too utterly illogical. It is too tragically and hideously unfair.”91

  As NAWSA’s “Diplomatic Corp,” Gardener relied on her charm, her insider knowledge of Congress, and her discretion.

  CONFIDENT THAT their decades of toil were about to pay off, NAWSA members went into their December 1917 annual convention “full speed ahead” for the federal amendment.92 Catt laid out detailed plans for congressional passage of what was now known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, a 1918 election contingency plan should it fail to pass during the Sixty-Fifth Congress, and a national ratification strategy to go into immediate effect following congressional victory. Maud Wood Park reported on the Congressional Committee’
s activities, giving special praise to Gardener: “The association is profoundly indebted [to Gardener] for constant advice and help, as well as for the most skillful handling of delicate and difficult situations. She has been called the ‘Diplomatic Corps’ of the committee and the name in every good sense has been well won by the important services which she has rendered.”93 As a testament to her contributions, Gardener was appointed a NAWSA vice president, a position that came with a coveted spot on the letterhead.94

  While the suffragists convened at Poli’s Theater, Gardener took a break from conferencing to meet twice with Tumulty at the White House. She shared with him NAWSA’s tally regarding the odds of passage during the Sixty-Fifth Congress and asked if Wilson would personally persuade eight to ten more members to vote “yes.” Drawing on a conversation she had with Tumulty the previous month, she observed that the women’s main adversaries continued to be Southern Democrats.95

  NAWSA officers had ideas about how to work with Southerners in Congress, but they still refused to partner with African American leaders or to publicly endorse the idea of black women voting. Thousands and thousands of black women continued to work independently for the vote and to sustain the core conviction that citizenship must include voting rights through their own organizations, as the historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and others have documented, but they were more or less shunned by NAWSA.96 At an executive committee meeting following the December convention, NAWSA officers—a category that now included Gardener—considered an application for affiliate membership from the Northeastern Federation of Women’s Clubs, an African American women’s group. With three members dissenting, NAWSA leaders denied this application on a technicality.97 Meeting minutes do not detail the discussion, but NAWSA leaders had long feared that openly joining forces with black women would doom the federal amendment’s chances for congressional passage and ratification, both of which would require at least some support from white Southern officeholders. In the coming years, the question of black women voting would determine the trajectory of the Nineteenth Amendment, its reach, and its historical legacy.