Cambridge. In the midst of the weathered spires, the ivied halls, and
the storied dignity of Trinity and Kings, Noel Porter and his wife,
Bevan, had converted an old public house, The Half Moon, into a home,
yet had managed to keep its original atmosphere of convivial
hospitality. The tap-room had once opened directly on Little St. Mary’s
Lane; now the bar had been removed, but the ancient sign still swung
back and forth and the smoky ceilings and mildewed paneling were the
same as when former generations had congregated there over mugs of ale.
Opposite was a tiny, old-fashioned graveyard, no longer used, and I went
out there and let the sun beat against my aching back. It was amusing to
have to resort to a cemetery for privacy, but the house was constantly
filled with hatless students coming and going through the enormous
downstairs room which served as rendezvous for all. In the afternoons
these youths on the threshold of manhood came to talk over the questions
which were perplexing them; in the evenings they had little meetings, at
one of which I spoke.
Guy Aldred, who was in Scotland, had planned my schedule there, and I
had three weeks of a Scottish summer—bluebells so thick in spots that
the ground was azure, long twilights when the lavender heather faded the
hills into purple.
When I had been in Glasgow before, I had encountered only officials, but
on this occasion I met the people in their homes and found them quite
opposite to the stingy, tight-fisted, middle-class stereotype. They were
hospitable, generous, mentally alert, just as witty as the Irish and in
much the same way, which rather surprised me.
Fourth of July, Sunday, we had a noon meeting on the Glasgow Green.
Nearly two thousand shipyard workers in caps and baggy corduroys stood
close together listening in utter, dead stillness without cough or
whisper. That evening I spoke in a hall under Socialist auspices, Guy
Aldred acting as chairman. One old-timer said he had been a party member
for eleven years, attending Sunday night lectures regularly, but never
before had he been able to induce his wife to come; tonight he could not
keep her home. “Look!” he cried in amazement. “The women have crowded
the men out of this hall. I never saw so many wives of comrades before.”
The men were there, partly through curiosity to hear the American and
partly through interest in the subject, ready to fight the ancient
battle of Marx against Malthus. Efforts of the English Neo-Malthusians
to introduce birth control to the masses had been hampered not only by
the opposition of the upper classes, but more especially by the
persistent hostility of the orthodox Socialists.
Marx, dealing with problems after they had arisen, had taught that any
reform likely to dull the edge of poverty was bad for Socialism because
it made labor less dissatisfied. It followed that if a man had to fight
for the hungers and necessities of ten or twelve children, he made a
better revolutionary. “Let ’em have as many as they can,” was the cry.
On the other hand, if birth control were practiced by the working
classes, the wage earner who could support two children and knew how not
to have more was going to be content and would not struggle against
conditions of economic insecurity. Hence he was likely to forget “the
Revolution.”
Knowing that the Scotch took mental notes of items on which to debate, I
had tried to prepare myself well, and I produced the unanswerable
argument to this theory. “Why do you demand higher wages then,” I asked,
“when what you really want is privation? If misery is your weapon you
should not insist on an eight-hour day but on a twelve- or fourteen-hour
one. You should pile up your grievances, and pile them up higher.
However, in spite of your best efforts I believe your hunger-revolution
will, as it has always done, capitulate to whatever force or government
will fill your stomachs.”
Socialists, like anarchists and syndicalists, were used to contesting
Malthusianism on economic grounds, but, unlike the others, they had as a
part of their platform the freedom of woman. I pointed out that she
could have the sort of freedom they desired for her right here and now
through birth control.
When I ended, Guy Aldred asked, “Now are there any questions?” After a
few somewhat irrelevant ones, silence fell; confronted by their own
philosophy they could see it. One man finally rose, “We’d like to hear
what the Chairman thinks of all this. Does he believe birth control will
do what the lady speaker claims for it?” Apparently they were waiting
for their cue. But Guy Aldred was not to be drawn. After giving him an
opportunity to express himself they plunged in and said their say. Even
some women who had never been on their feet before got up to tell
dramatic, vivid, personal stories.
The next day I was on my way to a town not far from Dunfermline, Andrew
Carnegie’s birthplace. I arrived about four o’clock in a driving storm,
lacking both umbrella and raincoat. No taxi had ever graced the railroad
station, and we trudged through the rain to the cottage of one of the
“most advanced friends of labor.” I was soaking wet up to the knees. A
hurry-call was sent to neighbors for dry clothing, but among that
population of five thousand not a single woman had an extra skirt to
lend, and only after long search was a new pair of Sunday shoes
forthcoming.
Because there was not an inn within miles, I slept that night with my
hostess in the one bed the house contained; the husband stretched
himself out on two chairs in the kitchen. Since Sylvia Pankhurst had
been similarly accommodated just a few months before, I knew I was
having the best the village afforded.
The inhabitants had been dispatched from Lancashire factory towns during
the War for special munitions work, and here they had stayed and made
their homes. Practically all had been apprenticed to the mills at the
age of eight or nine. Girls, because they were destined for marriage and
therefore needed no education, had worked ten or twelve hours a day
throughout their adolescence, and even after their weddings up to the
time pregnancy was well advanced. As a result, the young mothers, who
had never, from childhood to maturity, had a chance to become rested and
get the fatigue out of their systems, had apparently transmitted their
weariness to their children; the firstborn were sleepy, inert, and
always tired. A doctor told me it was common for boys and girls of five,
six, and seven to fall asleep at their school desks and have to be
awakened.
When I had arrived in England I had gone to see Havelock in the quaint
old Cornwall village where he was living alone since Edith’s death.
Winding pathways, well-trodden and embraced on either side by rambling
shrubbery and verbena, led from his house to the sea hundreds of feet
below. The waves dashed continuously against the crags and rocks, and
thousands of gulls shrieked or sailed majestically almost in front of my
eyes.
We had then talked about going to Ireland where I could make a foray
into my own genealogy. Mother’s ancestors at some stage had been the
same as Edward Fitzgerald’s and I thought I might find some of the
places from which they had sprung. I had no exact information—just
tradition from childhood days. Now, after my strenuous lecturing, I
needed a brief holiday, and Havelock also wanted a vacation; so we
joined forces.
My primary purpose was frustrated because after half a century nobody in
any of the little villages seemed to know anything definite. At
Glengariff they said, “Sure, and I thought it was Killarney your
grandfather was born in.” But at Killarney I was told, “Oh, it was Cork
your family came from. My grandmother knew them very well.”
More difficult to surmount than the vague discursiveness of these good
people was the Sinn Fein Rebellion, in the thick of which we found
ourselves. The night before we reached Cork there had been a raid and
the leaders were in hiding. Everywhere we went we could sense a subtle,
surreptitious undercurrent—in the hotels, in the restaurants, among
small, whispering groups which dispersed when any stranger approached.
Ireland had great natural beauty, and I was sorry to see the beginnings
of ugly, modern industrialism cropping up, especially in Cork with the
Ford factory. The mustard-colored kilts of the men astonished me; I had
never known the Irish wore them, but they were trying to bring back
their ancestral dress along with the Gaelic language. Always their
kindness and interest and the sadness in their voices moved me deeply.
They were never too sad, however, to give a quick turn to a phrase. One
morning the tram in which we were riding suddenly stopped. Nobody knew
why; everybody was complaining. Then from a side street came a handful
of Black and Tans with bayonets fixed. I asked the Irishman sitting
beside me, “What does that mean?”
“You should know,” he replied. “Those are Wilson’s Fourteen Pints.”
Havelock was a delightful companion, not loquacious, but keenly
interested in everything, and forever jotting down his copious notes. We
hired a two-wheeled jaunting car in which we sat back to back, and in
this way bumped from Glengariff to Killarney. Occasionally the sun broke
through for half an hour, but it was wet that year—potatoes and hay were
rotting on the ground because the sun did not shine long enough to dry
them.
We arrived at the inn, drenched and sopping. Havelock, with his
typically English dread of a cold, went to bed, but I stayed up talking
with a young woman and three equally young traveling priests—Sinn
Feiners all. We chatted desultorily until I happened to mention I had a
letter to the widow of the hero, Skeffington, who had been killed in the
disturbances.
The company, assuming me to be one with their cause, immediately became
most friendly. The girl began discussing higher education for her sex. I
asked her how she could keep on when she married and had the inevitable
succession of offspring. The priests, somewhat to my surprise, fell in
with my ideas by deploring too large families; some of the older sons
and daughters had to emigrate, and even those who were left could not
care adequately for their parents. It would be better for the Catholic
Church as well as for the world if they could help people to have only a
few children and bring them up decently. I felt hopeful because they
were speaking of birth control as solving some of their own problems;
they were saying exactly what I most wanted them to say.
Several happy days we spent at Killarney, exploring on foot, on
horseback, and in boats. The men who drove the cart or rowed us through
the lakes always knew the old myths of the mountains and poured into our
ears tales of leprechauns and other “little people.” You heard the word
“divil” more than any other. Here the divil, so they told us, had left
his step, there he had run away. The shape of every mountain, the twist
of every stream had their stories.
Wherever we went women, lean and elderly, wearing tiny shoulder shawls
and calico print dresses, fairly started out of the hillsides,
bareheaded, barefooted, complexions like roses, and eyes as blue as the
sky. Yet their faces were hungry and worn. Getting on in years as they
were, they could and did run faster than our ponies. When we spurred
forward they came right along, flattering, cajoling, uttering prayers
and “God bless you’s,” calling on all the saints to preserve you if you
would buy a drop of “Mountain Dew,” which was so good for your health.
If you bought this Irish whiskey from one, another took her place, and,
quite undiscouraged, began again the flow of sales talk.
One of our last days, when the wraiths of the lake dimmed the emerald
hills, we walked to red-bricked Killarney House, to which, as Havelock
said, nature was adding her own wild beauty to the beauty that man had
made.
All of Ireland had seemed draped in mist and sadness and, lovely as it
had been, I never wanted to go back.
_Chapter Twenty-two_
DO YE HEAR THE CHILDREN WEEPING?
After the Irish interlude I was ready to go on to Germany to carry out
the most important objective of my journey abroad. It had become obvious
that progress depended on finding a means of contraception, cheap,
harmless, easily applied. Way back in 1914 Havelock had seen in some of
the last medical journals to come out of Germany an advertisement of a
chemical contraceptive. He had mentioned it to me, and ever since I had
been eager to track it down. In pre-War Germany every advertised product
had been required to live up to the claims made for it; the public must
not be misled. Thus I was convinced that if the notice had stated it was
to prevent conception, the assertion was true. No news of it had come
since the War, and I wished to ascertain whether it was still being
manufactured. Perhaps this formula would be the solution to our problem.
I had a secondary reason also for going to Germany—to investigate the
decline in the birth rate. It was said half the married women had become
barren during the blockade for lack of proper food. I was always looking
for evidence to support and strengthen our arguments, and, consequently,
wanted to discover what had been learned of the relation between
vitamins and fertility.
Berlin was cold and dark when Rose Witcop and I, about eleven at night,
arrived at Neuköln, a special proletarian section of the city. The train
was late, an unusual state of things in efficient Germany, but this was
the period of her greatest disorganization. The telegram which had been
sent to Rose’s sister and brother-in-law, Milly and Rudolph Rocker, had
apparently not been delivered; nobody met us. There were no taxis, no
carriages, no lamps, no lights in the windows to relieve the pitch
blackness. A sleepy, disgruntled porter led us across the street to an
insignificant hotel. He knocked at the door; a head popped out of a
window above. “Two ladies want to stay overnight.” The proprietress said
she could give us nothing to eat, but that we could have a room. We
accepted gladly, climbed up a ladder into the same bed, piled high with
feathered mattresses above and below us, and settled ourselves to
comforting sleep after the long and tiresome journey.
In the morning, refreshed, we took a tram to the Rockers’ small
apartment. Rudolph was a syndicalist, a friend of Portet, and had been
interned in a concentration camp near London during the War. Both Milly
and Rudolph had suffered great privations after their return. But,
although food was very scarce, they were more than prodigal and kind in
sharing with us.
Germany was still no place for casual visitors in 1920. She seemed dead,
crushed, broken. Street traffic, even in a metropolis the size of
Berlin, was slight. I noted particularly the grim silence everywhere;
people had forgotten how to smile. They were thankful for the
Revolution, but it had not brought much relief, and the winter to come
was dreaded. Instead of displaying food or clothing, the windows of shop
after shop on street after street were decorated only with streamers of
colored paper.
Everybody was ravenous for fresh vegetables; money meant nothing, food
everything. I saw old peasant women coming in from the country with bags
of potatoes on their backs. Fifteen minutes after emptying them on to
pushcarts they were sold out. The only fruit to be had were plums, and
that is how I remember it was late summer in Berlin; it is curious how
such memories crop up.
Ordinarily I could go without eating if I had plenty of water, but in
Berlin I found myself haunting grocery stores like a hungry animal,
examining each new article avariciously. I cannot as a rule bear tinned
milk and will not give it to babies, yet here when I saw a can of
American evaporated milk, I found myself viewing it with glowing eyes. I
was disgusted with myself. Nothing satisfied my appetite except eggs,
and these, along with milk, could be purchased only on prescription from
a doctor. Meat was reduced to half a pound a week for each person, but I
had no ration card. A neighbor of the Rockers obtained some bread for me
and gave me her potatoes although she and her three lovely daughters had
only rice as a substitute. I was in tears over her generosity.
For months many families had existed on nothing but turnips. They ate
turnip soup, turnips raw, turnips mashed, turnip salad, turnip coffee,
until their whole systems revolted physically against the sight of
turnips. The contact with other persons in trams, halls, churches, even
streets, was nauseating; in a few minutes the fumes of turnip from their
bodies was so offensive that they became almost unendurable to
themselves.
I went into a two-room home, clean but overflowing with ten children,
five born since the War, starvation horribly stamped on their faces. The
oldest was twelve—still too young to work. The father, a locksmith, had
no job. All were living on a hundred marks received every week from
Government Unemployment Insurance. It was now Saturday, and not one
crumb or morsel remained to tide them over until the next payment on
Monday. They had eaten no breakfast, no dinner, and the father had gone
to the woods to search for mushrooms to keep them alive.
Even men who had employment were working only three days a week,
averaging a hundred and fifty marks for a family, and marks were fifty
to the American dollar. The best food had to be given to them because
they were the earners. Women were the real sufferers; they had to go
without or subsist on what they could scrape together. They nursed their
babies beyond two years to supply milk, and all their time was occupied
in a constant hunt to find nourishment for the older ones.
I heard countless stories from mothers who had been tortured by watching
their children slowly starve to death—pinched faces growing paler, eyes
more listless, heads drooping lower day by day until finally they did
not even ask for food. You saw a tiny thing playing on the street
suddenly run to a tree or fence and lean against it while he coughed and
had a hemorrhage. Others like him were dying of tuberculosis from lack
of eggs, butter, and milk—so many cows had been sent to France. Yet they
came up to me and offered to sell their prescriptions thinking that I,
as a foreigner, had money to buy them; they themselves had none for
these luxuries.
The old-fashioned warrior who entered with the sword and killed his
victims outright had my respect after witnessing the “peace conditions”
of Germany.
The Quaker food stations admitted only children who were ill and only
mothers who were more than seven months pregnant or who were nursing
babies less than four months old. The spectacle of one of these women
bringing two or three of her brood, not sick enough to be regularly fed,
to share her own soup was too sad and overwhelming to bear. Those in
charge of the distribution wanted each mother herself to eat for the
benefit of her unborn child or nursing infant, and were already crowded
to capacity, feeding three and four hundred at a time on cocoa and rolls
made from white flour. But they could not bring themselves to exclude
the little scarecrows with large, starry eyes, pipestem legs, and hands
from which the flesh had fallen until they were like claws. On one of my
visits the “sister” had them stand up and then asked, “Where have you
been?”
“To America,” they chorused.
“What have you to say?”
“We love America. We thank America.”
I did not instantly comprehend, but it was explained to me that they
called the station _Amerika_ in token of their gratitude.
To account for the sorry state in which they found themselves the
Germans were groping to fix the blame either within their country or on
some foreign power. All seemed of the opinion that had the United States
not entered the War, none would have been victor and none vanquished;
this, they said, would have meant a lasting peace. Yet they felt little
animosity towards us. What there was had been largely wiped out by the
aid of the Hoover Commission. Furthermore, they still hoped we might be
an influence in loosening the Treaty chains which kept them helpless and
bound. When I asked them why they had accepted the humiliating terms at
Versailles of which they complained so bitterly, they replied they had
been told that, had they not done so, vast territories which supposedly
had been mined would have been blown up and huge populations would have
been annihilated.
The military party accused the Socialists of having stabbed them in the
back and brought about defeat through the leadership of such pacifists
as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had paid with their lives;
the Socialists and workers regretted they had not united with Russia
and, combining their own scientific and technical knowledge with her raw
materials, conquered the world and thus molded all civilization to their
ideals.
Both classes sincerely believed that France wanted to destroy them
utterly. I saw something of the reason for their feeling one day when a
tram stopped to let off passengers, and a French automobile filled with
French officers, instead of halting the prescribed number of feet away,
plowed right through, knocking down two people and never even pausing to
see what havoc it had created. The spectators gazed at the bodies lying
there waiting for the ambulance. They did not dare shake their fists,
but anyone could tell from the pitch of their voices, their expressions
of passion and anger, how bitter was their resentment.
The women broke down all the reserves of my emotion. They had been at
one time the most advanced in Europe, politically, economically, and
socially, and, although they had had to work harder at the gymnasiums
than the men because higher marks had been required of them, they had
been really on a par. But now a frightful retrogression had occurred.
Working women had been forced down to a state beside the lower animals;
they had become drudges in the fields in place of draft horses. I saw
one who could not have been past twenty-five carrying a huge basket of
vegetables strapped to her back, the weight of which threw her forward
so that I expected any minute to see her go on all fours.
An impressive and tragic poster by Käthe Kollwitz was displayed on
various corners. It showed a woman with head thrown back, eyes closed,
arms crossed over breast, and was captioned simply, “Waiting.” The human
figures you saw on the streets looked out of eyes dried by suffering and
deepened by hunger. They had no faith, no hope, no philosophy; they were
resigned to love or hatred, peace or war, a living death or a sudden
end.
Throughout Europe, governments were clamoring for bigger populations;
France was offering bonuses for large families. “Our babies are dying;
give us more babies.” Among European labor groups only the syndicalists
of France had recognized excessive population as detrimental to the
working classes.
The deficiency in Germany of two million lives sacrificed in the War had
been made up by the thousands returned from Alsace-Lorraine, from the
former province of Posen, and the deportees from England, France, and
Italy. There were not nearly enough positions to go round. Yet the
nationalists, who had tried to cover the bitter pill of imperialistic
ambitions with a sugar-coating of patriotism, still estimated the world
in terms of numerical greatness and women as mere machines in the cradle
competition of human production. Even the German Socialists, following
in the footsteps of Marx, opposed Malthusianism vigorously in and out of
season.