Baltimore’s original headline-grabbing socialist
Decades before Alexandria OcasioCortez burst on to the political stage, Baltimore had its own headline-grabbing socialist woman. She was Elisabeth Gilman, daughter of Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of Johns Hopkins University.
One hundred years ago this month — on Sept. 22, 1919 — Elisabeth slipped quietly into her old Victorian home at 513 Park Ave., returning from two years of service in World War I. She had been a volunteer manager of a YMCA canteen in Paris, providing rest and recreation services for hundreds of soldiers and sailors seeking a few days’ respite from the stress of war.
A pioneer social worker in Baltimore, Gilman was a no-holds-barred advocate for social justice most of her life. She ratcheted up her efforts in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1921, at a meeting in her Park Avenue living room, she led the effort to create the Maryland Civil Liberties Committee. Ten years later it became the Maryland Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
She spent all of 1922 raising money for food and clothing for thousands of striking West Virginia coal miners and their families, who were trying to eke out a living under dire circumstances.
On May 19, 1926, The Sun’s Washington bureau reported that Elisabeth appeared before the House Immigration Committee to denounce Congressional plans to register aliens and extend deportation laws.
For more than 20 years, she directed Baltimore’s Open Forum, a Sunday afternoon speakers’ series that brought dozens of liberal and radical voices to the city’s largest auditoriums like the Hippodrome and the Lyric. Audiences often numbered more than 1,000.
In 1928, Elisabeth wanted to honor the editor of The Nation, Oswald Villard. She planned a large dinner party for him at the best hotel in the city, the Southern. When the hotel’s management learned African Americans would be among her guests, they turned her away. Receiving the same response from every hotel in the city, and even the Friends Meeting, which had a public hall, Elisabeth held the dinner at her home. The Sun headline said it all: “Villard Group Loses Friends’ Hall. To Dine at Gilman Home.” The sub-head read: “Banquet in Honor of Editor to be Held at Private House After Dispute Caused by Seating of White and Negro Guests.”
In 1930, when she was 62, the Socialist Party of Maryland nominated Elisabeth to be their candidate for governor in that year’s election. She lost badly to the sitting governor, Democrat Albert Ritchie, and his Republican opponent, Baltimore Mayor William F. Broening, but the loss only stimulated her to run for public office again and again.
Her efforts to promote federal antilynching legislation took her to the U.S. Senate in February1935, where she joined two of Baltimore’s leading African American civil rights activists, Juanita Jackson and Clarence Mitchell, in testifying in favor of the Costigan-Wagner Bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime. The measure failed in Congress, and it did not have the support of President Franklin Roosevelt.
In November1941, when she was almost 74, more than 500 friends gathered at the Southern Hotel to honor Elisabeth for her contributions to the advancement of social justice in Baltimore and the nation. This time African Americans were seated among the guests.
Following the dinner, The Evening Sun commented on its editorial page: “There are testimonial dinners and testimonial dinners, but too few like last night’s occasion to honor Miss Elisabeth Gilman, indefatigable liberal, reformer and Hound of Heaven Extraordinary. Given Miss Gilman herself, and the energy, cheerfulness and good temper with which she has pursued her objectives, and persuaded or dynamited others to join her, all could join in making Miss Gilman’s dinner the brilliant and touching success it was.”
Elisabeth Gilman died on Dec. 14, 1950, just short of her 83rd birthday. The next day, The Evening Sun, under the simple headline, “Miss Gilman,” acknowledged that her socialist, radical, reformist ideas often created “a storm center,” though “they were not disturbing or ill tempered, but lively and often invigorating. That was Miss Gilman’ great contribution to Baltimore as a citizen.”