Woman of Valor (14 page)

The institution most closely identified with Tannenbaum's activities was the Ferrer Center Association, or the Modern School as it was also known. It was founded in 1910 by anarchists and other radicals in New York to commemorate Francisco Ferrer, the freethinker and educational reformer, whose execution at the hands of Spanish monarchists in a Barcelona prison a year earlier had provoked an international outcry. Ferrer had set out to free Spanish peasantry from the yoke of illiteracy and blind faith by setting up a network of schools in the countryside whose goal was to educate the masses for participatory, democratic rule. With his death he became a martyr to free thought. Established as his legacy, the International Modern School Movement emphasized improvisation, experimentation, and social awareness in the classroom, intending to prepare a new generation for leadership roles in a free and cooperative society. With its roots in political, economic, and anticlerical insurgency, however, it quickly became more than an educational experiment in keeping with such contemporary innovators as Montessori, Piaget, and Dewey.

In New York especially, the Ferrer Center established itself as a local forum for labor and cultural radicalism. In addition to its program for children, the school featured evening courses for adults with Goldman and Berkman, Tresca and Flynn, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Rose Pastor Stokes speaking on Socialist theory. The realist painter George Bellows and the young modernist Man Ray gave art lessons. Eugene O'Neill and Theodore Dreiser taught writing, and Margaret lectured on sexuality and family limitation. Long active in the Ferrer movement, the Sangers had enrolled their son Stuart in Will Durant's class at the day school in 1911. By 1913, the center had relocated from Greenwich Village to East 107th Street, a neighborhood that was home to many immigrant laborers and radicals, and it again provided a community for Margaret and the children when they returned from Paris and lived briefly uptown.
²¹

The imprisonment of Frank Tannenbaum and the harassment of labor militants in New York, however, shattered the millennial spirit of the Ferrer Center just as it began to destroy the golden age of rebellion in a larger sense. In March, the second of two Union Square rallies coordinated by a Ferrer committee to defend Tannenbaum was disrupted by police brutality and arrests. The following month came the massacre of thirteen women and children at Ludlow, Colorado, when a fire erupted after National Guardsmen clashed with striking miners. The human toll grew to 74 before the strikers finally gave up in December of 1914. The stock of the company involved was controlled by a publicly callous and indifferent John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the smoldering remains of the historic struggle would haunt his family for decades to come. In May, the Ferrer Center sponsored a protest in Tarrytown, New York, home of the Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills, which again ended in a confrontation with the police and more arrests for disorderly conduct. And through the spring continued demonstrations and threats in front of the Standard Oil headquarters at 26 Broadway foreshadowed the later street protests of the Depression and of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.

Sometime in June at the Ferrer Center, a conspiracy was launched by Alexander Berkman and a group of young militants to blow up the Rockefeller home in retaliation for Ludlow. On July 4, while the association was holding its annual Independence Day picnic in New Jersey, a bomb accidentally exploded in a Harlem tenement, killing three young men and a woman. The dead were immediately identified with the Ferrer movement, and the plot on the Rockefellers was uncovered. A dramatic memorial service in Union Square the following week attracted an estimated crowd of 15,000 to 20,000, many of them wearing red and black revolutionary armbands and singing the Internationale. But as newspapers sensationalized the story throughout the summer, those in the movement who disavowed violence became alarmed and began to break ranks. The Ferrer Center and other radical gathering places came under continuous police and press surveillance. Within a year, the resignations of prominent moderates and financial supporters, together with internal divisions believed to have been spawned by government agents and spies, resulted in a decision by the Ferrer leadership to abandon New York altogether and establish a Utopian residential colony and school called Stelton in rural New Jersey.
²²

 

Writing in
The Woman Rebel
, Margaret called the deaths of the young bomb makers an act of “courage, determination, conviction, a spirit of defiance.” The greater tragedy for the revolutionary movement, she claimed, was “the cowardice and the poisonous respectability” of those leaders who apologized for the incident. An article defending the assassination of industrial or political tyrants accompanied her militant commentary, and the paper carried an admonition to “Remember Ludlow.” Only three of the four criminal counts brought against her had to do with Anthony Comstock's obscenity statutes. The fourth accused her of using the mails to “incite murder and assassination,” but in later years, when questioned directly about this charge by a reporter for the
New Yorker
, she deliberately tried to cover it up.
²³

Margaret was arraigned in August and given six weeks to prepare herself for trial. Instead, she sat down and wrote
Family Limitation
, an unassuming pamphlet which, in straightforward language and with the aid of diagrams, explained the common forms of birth preventives employed furtively but often without confidence by millions of American women, and still unknown to many more. The pamphlet soberly weighed the relative merits and drawbacks of withdrawal, condoms, douches, suppositories, sponges, and plugs, and recommended as most trustworthy a rubber pessary widely used in Europe to block the cervical passage. It also presented women with political arguments for using contraception. Embracing the rhetoric of revolution, Margaret argued the economic benefit to the worker of small families. Finally, she made a special plea to women for the virtue of mutually satisfying sexual union consummated without awkwardness or haste. “Birth control must not be set back by the false cry of obscenity,” she wrote dramatically. “There must be no sentimentality in this important phase of sexual hygiene. Women must learn to know their own bodies.”
²⁴

At first Margaret refused to hire a lawyer, and friends and family alike expressed their alarm. Michael Higgins, she later claimed, encouraged her to flee with him for a “rest cure” upstate, while the free-speech advocate, Theodore Shroeder, recommended a psychoanalytic consultation. She was reminded that she had little experience as a propagandist, nor the money or social influence to arouse public support for her acquittal. What is more, news of the impending war in Europe was making headlines; public attention, if not prosecutorial interest, was turning away from the radicals.

When her trial came up in October, she did retain counsel but spurned his advice to plead guilty and negotiate her sentence and fine. Instead, she requested a further postponement, and when it was denied, decided to flee, prepared to live abroad until the political climate at home improved, in the style of the exiled British suffragist, Christabel Pankhurst, whom she admired. Stuart, already ten years old, was away at boarding school. Bill had returned to New York on hearing the news of her arrest and could be expected to watch over Grant and Peggy, who were temporarily lodged with friends in the Village. Fearing that an emotional farewell would break her resolve, Margaret apparently never even said good-bye to them.

Instead she boarded a midnight train for Canada, where contacts in the radical community falsified papers that provided her passage to Europe under an alias. From aboard the R. M. S.
Virginian
, the ship that carried her out of Montreal Harbor to the Atlantic, securely outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, she cabled Bill Shatoff, a radical New Jersey printer who was waiting to release 100,000 copies of
Family Limitation
, already addressed and bundled and awaiting distribution through IWW locals and other sympathetic groups. They were the first of thousands more that in subsequent editions circulated clandestinely for more than twenty years.
²⁵

Alone in her stateroom, Margaret speculated about the opposing pulls of reason and emotion in her life, a debate that she had carried on with herself since childhood. From as early as she could remember, she had felt herself torn between competing temperaments—“the two Me's,” she called them in her first autobiography, one deliberate and thoughtful, the other, intrepid and daring. The one cautioned restraint, the other urged her on to action and adventure. The one seemed weak, the other strong. The one she identified with her head, the other with her heart. The head told her to conform, the heart to rebel. Reason she now wrote, “is the accumulated knowledge of past acts of consequence. Emotion is that which urges from within without consciousness of fear or consequence—together they make up the perfect man.”

The focus of her concern then shifted to reveal more clearly what was on her mind. “The man who shouts loud about his liberal ideas finds the servile submission of his wife charming and womanly,” she continued, paraphrasing the manifesto she had made public in
The Woman Rebel
. “Virtue, marriage, respectability, they are all alike…the whole sickly business of society today is a sham. One feels like leaving it entirely and going about shocking it terribly.”

Yet, if she was rid of marriage, however strong the social sanctions against divorce remained, she could not so impetuously cast motherhood aside. “Dear Peggy,” she wrote, “how my heart goes out to you. I could weep from loneliness for you—just to touch your soft chubby hands—but work is to be done dear—work to make your path easier—and those who come after you.”
²⁶

W
hen Margaret posed for a passport photograph in 1914, her face was thin, her features finely chiseled, her eyes wide and soulful, her mouth full and alluring. A black rimmed cloche sat at a stylish angle on her head, framing a complexion striking in its purity. She wore a tweed woolen coat with a tattered fur collar that gave an unmistakably fashionable, if slightly bohemian, effect. She seemed pensive and disarmingly vulnerable. Charged with a felony, she was subject to extradition under federal law, and so she traveled under an alias, Bertha Watson, a coarse and rather unappealing name meant to convey a demeanor totally at odds with her own. She regretted the choice almost as soon as she had made it.
¹

The transatlantic passage to Europe in 1914 took a week or more, and as her ship steamed through rough and seasonably cold seas, she amused herself in innocent flirtation with a handsome businessman aboard, whose attentions she courted even as she mocked his bourgeois presumptions and condescending manner. An unaccompanied young woman, shrouded in mystery but still charming and undisputedly sensual, made unusual company on such a journey. Margaret, in fact, was so startled by the attention and admiration she received as a single American woman roaming around Europe that she drafted an engaging article about her experiences but never published it. When she went ashore at Liverpool on a bleak, rain-swept November day, she took full advantage of the situation and anxiously passed through customs with her counterfeit documents, assisted by her worldly shipboard companion.
²

Once settled in a small hotel, loneliness overwhelmed her as she had not felt it since her first homesick days at boarding school some twenty years earlier. She had to deal with the full force of the personal predicament she had created by fleeing and leaving her family behind. Toward Bill she felt surprisingly little remorse and, indeed, within a month's time, wrote him unequivocally ending their relationship and asking for a divorce. But the effort left her feeling “disconnected,” as she put it, a response she associated with the emotion of separating herself from other past involvements, like the church of her youth or later her faith in Socialism. This speculation conveys strangely little sentiment for a woman who was ending a marriage of twelve years at a time when divorce was rare, but it does reveal the surprisingly sober understanding that being a wife had provided an anchor for her own identity, not essentially different from the many other ways of defining herself that she had pursued intensely and then cast aside. She was now, once again, adrift.

By contrast, Bill wrote her with tender passion of his suffering, of wanting still to have her in his arms, to love and caress her. Christmas passed, and as he tried to entertain three bereft children in his painting studio, he longed for the warmth and festivity she had created on holidays past. “You are all the world to me,” he insisted in a letter that apparently crossed hers at sea.
³

Of the children, however, she wondered often and anxiously in her diary. Young Grant and Peggy were left temporarily in Greenwich Village in the care of Caroline Pratt, the progressive educator and founder of the City and Country School, and her companion, Helen Marot, who had recently resigned as executive director of the National Women's Trade Union League, where she had organized the historic dressmakers' strike of 1909-10 in the New York garment industry. Bill wrote Margaret that Peggy, confused and vulnerable in the wake of her mother's abrupt and incomprehensible departure, cried each time he visited and then had to leave again to go off to work. Weighted down by the new cast he had fitted for her leg, despite Margaret's protests that any action await her return, the unhappy little girl wanted to know if she could “fly to her mother on wings.” To ease her distress, Bill then took the children back, and their Aunt Ethel moved in temporarily to do the cooking.

There were occasional, stoic notes from young Grant in a self-conscious scrawl, assuring her not to worry about him, asking dutifully when she would be coming home. Stuart, alone at boarding school and uncertain of what the future held, betrayed an unmistakable sadness with his simple request for a photograph of his mother to hold on to in her absence. Earlier he wrote that he had mailed his Aunt Nan a bunch of flowers from the school garden. “I would have sent you some,” he added wistfully, “but you are so far away.”

Margaret saved the letters, starved for the children's affection and for news from home, but the outbreak of war in Europe only served to complicate communications that were not always reliable in the best of times. Mail took weeks, and sometimes months, to reach her. “How lonely it all is,” she wrote. “Could any prison be more isolated—any confinement more solitary—than wandering around the world separated from the little ones you love, from their childish prattle, caresses, whisperings and quarrels?” Yet, at the same time, she took delight in her newfound freedom, in having the time to “get acquainted with myself, to reflect, meditate and dream.”
⁴

She spent the better part of her first days alone as a conventional tourist, finding solace in the tranquillity of Liverpool's well-ordered neighborhoods with their quaint brick row houses and small, well-kept business establishments, a respite from the disarray of Manhattan's teeming residential and commercial districts. In the evenings she sought out companions at the Clarion Café, a local gathering place for activists and intellectuals. Leafing through the register there, she was delighted to discover Bill Haywood's familiar signature along with the names of such prominent British freethinkers as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Indeed, she arrived at the Clarion, on the evening of her first day in Europe, just in time for an informative Fabian lecture on the war. An enthusiastic rendering of Nietzsche later restored her own rebellious conviction and purpose. She reveled in the poetry, if not in the often elusive meaning of the text, and copied down the aphorism since recited by legions of kindred rebel spirits: “Men and women must be Gods unto themselves and stop worshipping at the shrine of other egos.”
⁵

At the Clarion she made the acquaintance of a courtly Spaniard who was teaching at the University in Liverpool and living in exile, because of a long association with the legendary Francisco Ferrer. The man was Lorenzo Portet, and on Ferrer's death he had been named executor of all international literary rights associated with publications of the Modern School. Margaret made only casual reference to Portet in her diary, but the few characteristics she noted about him dramatically changed the course of her European sojourn. He was “vigorous, full of confidence and quick to understand,” she wrote, exactly the qualities she had found wanting in her husband. He also happened to be married, but that did not for the moment concern her.
⁶

Lorenzo Portet was, by Margaret's description, a dignified man of middle height and weight, “a born teacher and natural protestor whose spirit flames in protest at every injustice…. There is an alertness about his glance which sums one up with an accuracy that is not always pleasant.” He was born in 1871 in a village just outside Barcelona, the only surviving son of Catalan farmers who sent him to the university to become a barrister. Swept up as a student by Spanish republican enthusiasms, he rebelled against family, church, and monarch, and struck out in search of the more open society of Argentina. Returning from Buenos Aires after five years, he found himself a target of the wholesale arrest of radicals that followed nationalist uprisings in Spain in 1896. He fled to Paris and there met Ferrer, who was also living in exile, making his living teaching Spanish while also feeding stories about the various atrocities of the Spanish monarchy to the foreign press. Portet traveled back and forth to Spain, carrying Ferrer's message that the nation's political regeneration depended first upon education and social organization. When Ferrer was executed in 1909, Portet organized the formal demonstration in France that sparked an international protest. Portet was arrested during a demonstration in front of the Spanish embassy in Paris and expelled again, this time fleeing to England.
⁷

He and Margaret apparently became lovers immediately. She extended her stay in Liverpool, and there was a romantic sightseeing trip to a rural village in Wales. Portet followed her to London, and they met again in Paris, where he ran the Ferrer-inspired publishing venture that exported the literature of Spain's political and cultural revolution and, in turn, translated censored titles from other countries and smuggled them into Madrid. In the spring of 1915, he was permitted to return temporarily to Spain, and they spent seven weeks together touring Rationalist schools in the countryside that held on tenuously as legacies to Ferrer's resistance to government and church.

Margaret's
Autobiography
recounts their Spanish escapade with a transparent innocence. She also kept a journal of the trip, and so we know that they sipped wine in cafés, took in the drama of a bullfight, the charm of a whitewashed mountain village, and the romantic splendor of a seaside Mediterranean vista—all the while tracked by government agents who followed Portet whenever he set foot on Spanish soil and amused her with their dignified manners and solicitousness, even as they carried out their surveillance. When it rained, these shadows took out umbrellas to shield her; when her hat blew away in the wind, they ran after it; when some petty thieves saw her cash a check at a local American Express office and threatened to rob her, they intervened and arrested them. She laughed at the absurdity of this situation even as she deplored so flagrant an invasion of her rights and privacy. In May, she returned to London with the intention of reclaiming her children in Canada and then rejoining Portet and working in Paris.
⁸

If she needed an excuse for wandering about Europe with a lover, she found it in the one communication from Bill that had managed to reach her expeditiously. The letter carried news that he had been framed by a government agent and was subsequently arrested in his New York studio for handing out a copy of his wife's
Family Limitation
pamphlet. His arraignment was attended by Anthony Comstock himself. Bill was angry that Margaret had been writing him at the studio, and claimed that her letters led to his entrapment, but as always his hopeful affections modulated his tone. He encouraged her to remain abroad and leave the murky
Woman Rebel
indictments unresolved until he stood trial on what now presented itself as a clear-cut challenge to the constitutionality of the Comstock prohibition on birth control.
⁹

This was not entirely a welcome development. Margaret could not be confident that public attention to Bill's defense would necessarily carry over to her own, though it would most certainly absorb financial support from the New York radical network, which she was counting on to sustain her in exile. For a time, in fact, she tided herself over by waiting on tables in a London tearoom. Moreover, she felt considerable personal frustration, for by becoming involved in her work, Bill seemed to believe that he had found a way to heal the divisions between them. He begged not to be “excommunicated” from her life. When his trial was set for April, she went off to await the outcome in Spain and learned only on her return to London in May that procedural appeals of the judge's decision to deny a verdict by jury were causing continued postponements. “Bill had to get mixed up in my work and make it harder,” she complained to her sister Nan from Barcelona.
¹⁰

In a series of articles for the magazine of the Modern School in New York, Margaret described how the church suppressed the imagination and initiative inherent in native Spanish character. In this juxtaposition of nationalist and anticlerical sentiment, she sounded much like an exuberant Michael Higgins talking about the Irish. Though she made no effort to conceal her public association with Portet in her writing, she did go to some lengths to keep its private dimension discreet, assuring Nan in a letter from Spain that she was the guest of Mr. Portet
and
his wife. Margaret lived a profoundly unconventional life, but unlike the more comfortably flamboyant Emma Goldman, traditional social sanctions always governed the public image she projected, if not her actual behavior. Beyond a small group of intimates that did not include her family, she carefully cultivated an appearance of propriety. She was particularly sensitive about her conduct in Europe, because letters from New York gave her the impression that Bill was accusing her of deserting her children. Once she became a celebrity, this deliberate subterfuge about her personal relations also kept open doors to public acceptance and acclaim. Nelle Dick, an English woman who was active in the Ferrer Movement and knew Portet when she was young, recalls that he too masked a revolutionary temperament with fastidious manners, much as he concealed his gun beneath an impeccably tailored suit. Still, she says, everyone in the Ferrer circle knew about his love affair with Sanger.
¹¹

Only a few telegrams survive as evidence of a sustained affection after Margaret returned to the United States in 1916, but they clearly indicate that an ever-devoted Portet anticipated her immediate return, a development precluded by World War I. In Paris during the summer of the following year, Portet died suddenly of tuberculosis, a disease he had apparently long endured, since Margaret had visited him in a sanitarium while in Europe. The common ailment may have been an additional bond between them. In 1919, well after there had been other admirers, she confided her continued preoccupation with him in sorrowful diary entries, and several years thereafter, when she finally returned to Europe, she recalled him longingly in personal letters. For years she could not bring herself to return to Paris, the city with which her memories of him were most intimately bound.
¹²