summed up the medical evidence for birth control. “A doctor who has this
information (prevention of conception) and does not give it cannot help
feeling he is taking a responsibility for the lives and welfare of large
numbers of people.” The Reverend Charles Francis Potter, founder of the
Humanist Society of New York, discussed the moral phase. “The bird of
war is not the eagle but the stork.” Professor Roswell H. Johnson, then
at the University of Pittsburgh, stressed eugenics. “Most intelligent,
well-informed people ... are so determined in this (spacing children)
that no laws yet devised succeed in forcing a natural family, which is
about eighteen children, upon them.” Rabbi Sidney Goldstein dealt with
religious aspects. “The population is not made up of those who are born
but is made up of those who survive.” Professor of Sociology Henry Pratt
Fairchild spoke from the economic point of view. “We human individuals
cannot break laws of nature. We can, however, choose which of her laws
we see fit to obey.” Mrs. Douglas Moffatt announced that the
twenty-seven hundred members of the New York City Junior League were
overwhelmingly in favor of the bill.
The next morning the opposition began by trying to prove that we who
advocated birth control, a Russian innovation, were seeking to pull down
motherhood and the family as had been done in Russia. The Honorable Mary
T. Norton, Representative from New Jersey, made the astounding assertion
that the happiest family was the big one, and that a large percentage of
the great men and women of this country were born poor; this was a
blessing since it fired them with ambition. And she mentioned Abraham
Lincoln, whose birthday had been but two days before. I was particularly
outraged by hearing statements from other witnesses that the American
Federation of Labor was against us, that the American Medical
Association was antagonistic, and that the Methodist and other churches
were going to help defeat our bill. Speaker after speaker representing
Catholic organizations repeatedly hurled such dramatic tirades as, “I
ask you, gentlemen, in the name of the twenty million Catholic citizens
of the country, to whose deep religious convictions these vices are
abhorrent, and of all those to whom the virtue of a mother or a daughter
is sacred, to report unfavorably on this diabolical and damnable bill!”
It was difficult to gauge the impression that was being made; you could
only sense that the response was one of feeling. These dogmatists,
harking back to the Dark Ages, summoned to their aid the same arguments
that had been used to hinder every advance in our civilization—that it
was against nature, against God, against the Bible, against the
country’s best interests, and against morality. Even though you proved
your case by statistics and reason and every known device of the human
mind, the opponents parroted the line of attack over and over again; in
the end you realized that the appeal to intelligence was futile.
On occasions like this the inward fury that possessed me warmed from
coldness to white heat; it did not produce oratory, but it enabled me to
move others. The way to meet the opposition was to keep emotions in hand
and, at the same time, without stumbling or fumbling, to let them go.
Every word I said was calculated and thought through, not in advance,
but as it came along. I did not react this way often, but I did that
day.
When my ten minutes for rebuttal came, I knew that emotional speed was
required. Nevertheless, I first knocked down their false assertions:
that the birth control movement had originated in this country during
1914, long before anyone had ever heard of Bolshevism; that the
objections of the American Federation of Labor had referred to the
repeal bill of 1925, quite different from the doctors’ bill now under
discussion; that the American Medical Association had taken no stand,
but two of its most important branches, the Neurological and Woman’s
Medical, had gone on record in our favor; that Dr. C. I. Wilson of the
Methodist Board had denied his church was opposed, and, in fact, its
ministers had worked unofficially for us. “When someone says that the
happiest families are the largest ones, and that the world’s great
leaders have been of large families, I would like to call to your
attention that the great leader of Christianity, Jesus Christ himself,
was said to be an only child.” Here the Catholics crossed themselves and
muttered, ‘Blasphemy!’
“These opponents have had the laws with them, the wealth, the press, and
yet they have come today to say they are afraid of the morals of their
people if they have knowledge, if they do not continue to be kept in
fear and ignorance. Then I say their moral teachings are not very deep.
Mr. Chairman, we say that we want children conceived in love, born of
parents’ conscious desire, and born into the world with sound bodies and
sound minds.”
The two Senators sat there in silence. The bill was killed, due to the
adverse vote of Senator Borah—who had not attended the hearings.
The next year, 1932, Senator Gillett was gone and a substitute had to be
found. Believing the first woman Senator would be on the side of her
sex, we asked Mrs. Hattie Caraway to introduce the bill. She said she
herself was interested in the subject, but her secretary would not let
her touch it.
Ordinarily Congressmen paid little attention to abstract arguments,
logic, or the humanitarian needs of outsiders. But they could be reached
through their constituents. One way of doing this was to get women “back
home” to help themselves directly by writing letters. This required
money. We sought it from a foundation which donated ten thousand dollars
earmarked for this special purpose. To the still continuing stream of
letters from mothers, requesting as always contraceptive advice, my
reply went, “I would gladly give you the information you ask for if the
law permitted. Your Congressman now has the opportunity to vote on this
bill. Send him a letter telling how many children you have living, how
many babies dead, how many abortions, what wages your husband receives,
everything you have told me,” and I enclosed an envelope, stamped and
addressed to their respective Congressmen.
While walking one day through the tunnel which connected the House with
the Senate, I stopped to ask a man my direction. He said, “I’m going
your way. Come along and I’ll show you.”
We fell into conversation. He informed me he was a Senator, and asked
what I was doing.
“I’m working on the birth control bill.”
“That’s funny. I’ve just had a letter from a woman five miles from where
I’ve lived most of my life. Listen to this.”
And he took it out of his pocket and read the history of the woman’s
abortions and operations. “I’ve never heard anything quite so awful, and
at the bottom she says, ‘You can help me by getting this law changed,
and Mrs. Sanger, who has the information, will send it to me if you get
the law changed.’”
These letters brought fine results. Through them Senator Henry D.
Hatfield of West Virginia was persuaded to introduce the bill. At the
hearing he described how as physician and surgeon and governor of his
state he had seen the free mating of the unfit, and had forced through a
sterilization law. We produced our usual array of experts, and the
opposition produced Dr. Howard Atwood Kelly, a famous gynecologist in
his day at Johns Hopkins, but now Professor Emeritus and very old, who
rambled discursively on morals; his was a state of mind if not of
reason. Dr. John A. Ryan, a member of the National Catholic Welfare
Conference, chose economics for his discussion. Neither spoke on his own
subject, but selected something on which he was not an authority.
The bill was killed in committee, and the one introduced by
Representative Frank Hancock of North Carolina in the House got into the
wrong committee so nothing happened.
Before you had seen it, the Congress of the United States loomed
impressively in your consciousness; you had a feeling, “This is the
greatest country in the world, this is its Government, I helped to send
these men here.” Then you watched Congress at work, listened to it, and
were disillusioned. A few years of sitting in the gallery and looking
down gave you less respect for the quality of our representatives, less
faith in legislative action, and you wondered whether those who had
already abandoned hope of obtaining relief in this way and resorted to
direct action had not, perhaps, the right idea.
The same arguments went on from year to year. A certain amount of
publicity was secured, a certain number were educated. Some of our
followers, in face of the evidence to the contrary, still were confident
that if the Catholics understood our bill they would not obstruct it.
They said Representative Arthur D. Healey of Massachusetts, a member of
the Judiciary Committee, although a Catholic was so liberal that if he
could once be made to see the reasons back of it he would cease being
openly hostile, and it might even get out of committee. Accordingly, I
went to his office; we talked at length, and again got nowhere. As I was
leaving this father of four said, in order to explain himself, “You see,
Mrs. Sanger, I’m just one of those unusual men who are very fond of
children.” I was inwardly convulsed at the thought that he considered
himself unusual and that we were all a lot of Herods trying to do away
with babies.
At first it seemed that I was to have greater success as the result of
my interview with Dr. Joseph J. Mundell, Professor of Obstetrics at
Georgetown University, who advised the Catholic Welfare Conference on
all their medical legislation. In a private session I conceded some
things in the bill; Dr. Mundell gave up certain others. The compromise
apparently suited everybody.
In 1934 identical bills were introduced in Senate and House, the latter
by Representative Walter M. Pierce, Democrat, who as Governor of Oregon
had burned his political bridges by vetoing a bill which permitted
parochial schools. Since he had nothing to lose, he did not have to play
politics.
Hatton W. Summers of Texas was chairman of the hearing. Our side led
off, again specialists in each line covering the vital points. Rabbi
Edward L. Israel of Baltimore made an impassioned plea. “And I say,
gentlemen, if this thing we are now advocating is not morally right, let
us stop being hypocrites and, in its place, put a law on our statute
books that will drive contraceptive devices out of your homes and mine.”
Here John C. Lehr of Michigan, sitting back in his chair with thumbs
hitched in his suspenders, declared pompously, “As a member of this
Committee I want to go on record there have never been any
contraceptives used in my home. I have six children, too.”
Malcolm C. Tarver of Georgia interrupted, “You don’t mean any member of
Congress has used anything of that kind, do you?” His surprise was
obviously genuine.
The proponents of our bill, even elderly women, had stood while
delivering their testimony. But when Father Charles E. Coughlin entered,
cheeks very pink over his black collar, a chair was placed for him,
because as a representative of the Church he would not stand before a
representative body of the State. He began talking at random, “I have
not heard one word of the testimony these ladies and gentlemen have
produced, and my remarks are not addressed to them now, because I can
easily handle them over the radio Sunday after Sunday.... You,
gentlemen, you are married men, all of you, and you know more about it
than I will ever know.” Here he arched his eyebrows into a leer. “The
Chairman, I understand, is a bachelor like myself.... We know how these
contraceptives are bootlegged in the corner drug stores surrounding our
high schools. Why are they around the high schools? To teach them how to
fornicate and not get caught. All this bill means is ‘How to commit
adultery and not get caught.’”
Some of our sympathizers walked out of the room. Two Congressmen left
the table. But we were a polite, well-behaved group that shrank from
scenes, and, though furious and indignant, we allowed him to conclude
his half-hour of grossness.
I could hardly believe my ears when Dr. Mundell, who shortly before had
helped us formulate a bill which he said was satisfactory to him, rose
and deliberately betrayed us by stating there was no need for
legislation whatsoever, because a recent scientific work—by which he
meant _Rhythm_—had shown that fertility in women could be reckoned with
almost mathematical precision.
In the rebuttal Dr. Prentiss Willson testified that the theory of the
cycle of sterility had no medical standing. Then came my turn. I had in
my pocket a copy of _Rhythm_, and quoted from it. Under the heading of
procreation it asked whether married people were obliged to bring into
the world all the children they could, and then made answer:
Far from being an obligation, such a course may be utterly
indefensible. Broadly speaking, married couples have not the right
to bring into the world children whom they are unable to support,
for they would thereby inflict a grievous damage upon society.
I told the committee that apparently the only distinction in the pros
and cons of the birth control question was that the method we advocated
was a scientific one under the supervision of doctors; that of the
Catholics had not been proved scientifically and was open to any boy or
girl who could read the English language.
Nevertheless, the bill again died in committee.
The Senate hearings on the bill, introduced by our old friend Daniel O.
Hastings of Delaware, did not come until March. We presented our
advocates, among them a miner’s wife from West Virginia, the native
state of two members of the committee, Hatfield and Nealy. She was a
perfect illustration of the type which most needed birth control. When
she had finished a Catholic woman asked her, “Which of your nine
children would you rather see dead?”
“Oh, I don’t want to see any of them dead. I love them all; but I don’t
love those I haven’t had.”
Her reply was just right; it could not have been better.
Vito Silecchia, my former coal and ice vendor from Fourteenth Street,
also made his way to Washington and told his simple story. His wife had
come to me when pregnant with her fourth child, and I had said I could
do nothing for her until she had had her baby. Now, many years
afterwards, she had no more than the four. Vito reasoned his case as a
man, “I am a Catholic myself. The Catholics say we should have much
children. I say different. I say it is not good to have too many
children. You can’t take care of them.” He ended by describing the
mother of six who lived next door to him. “I told her, ‘I will take you
to a place. It is a wonderful place.’ She does not know the English
language. Therefore, she has never come up to see Mrs. Sanger, but she
will—but she will!”
For the first time the Senate sub-committee reported out the bill and it
was put on the unanimous consent calendar. The last day of the session
came, June 13th. Over two hundred were ahead of it, but there was always
hope. One after another they were hurried through and then, miracle of
miracles, ours passed with no voice raised against it. The next one came
up, was also converted into law, another up for discussion, tabled.
Twenty minutes went by. Suddenly Senator Pat McCarran from Reno, Nevada,
famous divorce lawyer though an outstanding Catholic, came rushing in
from the cloak room and asked for unanimous consent to recall our bill.
As a matter of senatorial courtesy Senator Hastings granted his request;
had he not done so Senator McCarran would have objected to every bill he
introduced thereafter. It was summarily referred back to the committee
and there died.
In 1935 we took the fatal step of having it voted on early in the
session and it was promptly killed. The whole year’s labor was lost. The
following winter, when I was in India, Percy Gassaway of Oklahoma
introduced a bill in the House, Royal S. Copeland of New York, in the
Senate, by request; neither one reached a hearing.
Another line of attack on the Comstock law was to try for a liberal
interpretation through the courts. Among the products shown at the
Zurich Conference in 1930 had been a Japanese pessary. Pursuing the
clinic policy of testing every new contraceptive that appeared, I
ordered some of these from a Tokyo physician. When notified by the
Customs that they had been barred entrance and destroyed, we sent for
another shipment addressed to Dr. Stone in the hope that it would then
be delivered to a physician. But this also was refused, and accordingly
we brought suit in her name.
After pending two years the case finally came up for trial before Judge
Grover Moscowitz of the Federal District Court of Southern New York.
Morris Ernst conducted our claim brilliantly, and January 6, 1936, Judge
Moscowitz decided in our favor—the wording of the statute seemed to
forbid the importation of any article for preventing conception, but he
believed that the statute should be construed more reasonably. The
Government at once appealed and the case was argued in the Circuit Court
of Appeals before Judges Augustus N. Hand, Learned Hand, and Thomas
Swan, whose unanimous decisions were rarely reversed in the Supreme
Court.
In the fall of 1936, while I was in Washington getting the Federal bill
started again in advance of Congress’ meeting, news came that the three
judges had upheld the Moscowitz decision and had added that a doctor was
entitled not only to bring articles into this country but, more
important, to send them through the mails, and, finally, to use them for
the patient’s general well-being—which, for twenty years, had been the
object of my earnest endeavor.
The Government still had the right to appeal inside of ninety days.
Therefore, I was not unduly jubilant. We had had so many seeming
victories that melted away afterwards.
But long before the period of grace had expired, Attorney General
Cummings announced to the press that the Government would accept the
decision as law, and, with commendable consistency, the Secretary of the
Treasury sent word to the Customs at once that our shipments should be
admitted. It is really a relief to be able to say something good about
the Government.
In the face of the court decision there was little point at this time in
continuing the Federal campaign. The money for closing it up came
through a most unexpected and affecting channel. About a year after I
had seen Viola Kaufman at the California Conference in 1931, I received
a letter from her asking me please to write out the form in which I
would like any money left so that she could designate it in her will. I
took her clear, concise note to my attorney who suggested that, since
organizations were many and might go out of existence at any moment, it
would be wiser to have the bequest in my name to be dispensed for any
purpose within the movement I saw fit. I answered her to this effect and
she replied, “I am now passing over to you in my will whatever I
possess.”
I considered that the only courteous thing to do was to have Anna
Lifshiz, who was living in Los Angeles, go to see Miss Kaufman. The
address was in the Mexican district, in the poorest, most dilapidated,
run-down section. In patched clothes she came to the door of her house,
in which there was hardly any furniture. She was formal and rather cold.
Anna merely explained the reason for her call was that she knew Miss
Kaufman as one of our subscribers. She wrote me, “That poor creature
hasn’t money enough to keep body and soul together.”
Two years went by. I was in Washington, preparing to start for Boston
for a meeting when a messenger boy delivered a telegram from the
director of the General Hospital at Memphis, Tennessee, requesting me to
come at once; Viola Kaufman was dangerously ill with pneumonia and
asking for me. I looked up trains; it would take forty-eight hours, and
so I put in a long-distance call to the director, who told me she had
died during the night.
“What was she doing in Memphis?”
“We don’t know. The Salvation Army brought her in to us. She has only a
little cash tied up in a handkerchief. We can’t do anything without you
because you’re the beneficiary.”
The undertaker also wanted an order from me, and, since her executor, an
officer of a bank in Los Angeles, had gone on a fishing trip, I arranged
the details for her cremation. She had ordered that her remains be sent
to me and when they arrived the clinic staff came up to Willow Lake and
we held a little memorial service of gratitude and respect, spreading
the ashes over the rock garden.
To everybody’s astonishment Viola Kaufman had about thirty thousand
dollars in Los Angeles realty. But it took a year and a half to settle
the estate and by this time everything was at the lowest ebb of the
depression. We received approximately twelve thousand dollars. I have
never looked at the obituaries for the last twenty years without hoping
to read that someone has willed a million dollars for birth control, but
the only legacy ever bequeathed us was that saved from the meager
earnings of this schoolteacher, Viola Kaufman, who herself lived in
poverty.
With this money we wrote finis to the Federal legislation. Of the old
organization all that was left in Washington was a secretary to read the
_Congressional Record_ daily—a watchdog to report any bills proposed
which would make it necessary for us to jump into action to combat them.
Six years of this work had cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
It had also meant strain and worry beyond anything I had ever
attempted—never being able to detach myself from it whether Congress was
in session or not, always on the alert to discover any new person
elected who might be favorably disposed. Now and again it had been
discouraging; you could exert yourself to the utmost with pleasure if it
were a matter of convincing a person and watching his mind being pried
open, but here, over and over again, you saw this same conviction, yet
he reverted to the same fears and refrained from doing anything.
However, the process of enlightening legislators had also unclosed the
eyes of an enormous number of organizations. First to approve publicly
had been the National Council of Jewish Women. Eventually more than a
thousand clubs—civic, political, religious, and social, including the
General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Y.W.C.A., local Junior
Leagues—in all representing between twelve and thirteen million
members—had given their endorsement. And, more important than anything
else, the public had been educated persistently, consistently away from
casual and precarious contraceptive advice into the qualified hands of
the medical profession.
Dr. Dickinson had been appearing regularly at American Medical
Association meetings, keeping the question constantly alive. But not
until Dr. Prentiss Willson had formed a national body of doctors in 1935
to carry on legislative work had there been any action. One had stirred
up; the other organized.
I was at Willow Lake one June morning of 1937 when I saw spread across
the newspaper in double column the glad tidings: the Committee on
Contraception of the American Medical Association had informed the
convention that physicians had the legal right to give contraceptives,
and it recommended that standards be investigated and technique be
taught in medical schools.
In my excitement I actually fell downstairs. To me this was really a
greater victory than the Moscowitz decision. Here was the culmination of
unremitting labor ever since my return from Europe in 1915, the
gratification of seeing a dream come true.
These specific achievements are significant because they open the way to
a broader field of attainment and to research which can immeasurably
improve methods now known, making possible the spread of birth control
into the forlorn, overpopulated places of the earth, and permitting
science eventually to determine the potentialities of a posterity
conceived and born of conscious love.
_Chapter Thirty-five_
A PAST WHICH IS GONE FOREVER
Parenthood remains unquestionably the most serious of all human
relationships, the most far-reaching in its power for good or for evil,
and withal the most delicately complex. I always tried to secure my
sons’ confidence by being honest with them, treating them as though they
had intelligence, and expecting them to use it. For the sake of
companionship it was essential to be honest, no matter what the cost.
Fortunately, the younger generation is not crumpled up when sharply
confronted with the truth. They have cut through the regard to their
feelings until they can say extraordinarily blunt things to each other
and yet not be hurt. And with this they have invented a new language;
they can “take it.”