Woman of Valor (22 page)

Margaret's cautious decision to focus on birth control provided her partial shelter from the perverse politics of the war. She was never personally victimized, although her continued association with many radicals did bring her under the surveillance of the Lusk Commission, which was authorized by the New York State Legislature to clamp down on local subversives. This may explain why, in revised editions of
Family Limitation
, she deleted all references to birth control as a radical tool of direct action or as a dimension of women's sexual liberation. The toned-down pamphlet managed to remain in circulation and, according to a newspaper clipping from Rochester, New York, could be purchased at any reputable bookstore.

Once Margaret joined the League for Amnesty of Political Prisoners that mobilized to protest the Berkman and Goldman arrests, she was also tracked by federal intelligence agents, who recommended that she again be prosecuted under the Comstock Act for endorsing birth control in a promotional mailing. They were overruled by the local United States attorney, because he did not think he could obtain a conviction. But from this point on, Margaret remained under the watchful eye of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which emerged as a permanent legacy of these wartime surveillance efforts. The ever vigilant J. Edgar Hoover kept a file on her associations with Communists, civil libertarians, and other alleged subversives until her death nearly fifty years later. The file remained intermittently active, if rather innocuous, even as she steered the birth control movement away from partisanship and from any public association with the left.
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Margaret's conversion to political pragmatism also had deeper roots in a temperamental disdain for the ideological abstractions and sheer sentimentality that held together what remained of America's revolutionary fraternity after the war. Although she continued to venerate old heroes and solicit their support, she had little interest in elusive, wide-eyed dreams about the coming of a better world. She would write faithfully to Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood in prison and vote for Debs in the Presidential election of 1920 when he mounted a candidacy from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. For the rest of her life, she would cast her Presidential ballots for Socialist Norman Thomas, probably one of the few votes he received in the Republican precincts where she subsequently made her home. Yet along with the small financial contributions she sometimes remembered to send, these votes were little more than private, sentimental gestures. She would never speak about national political issues or contests in public, except on the two occasions, in 1928 and in 1960, when Catholics ran for President, and by keeping quiet, she, in effect, chose her sides and made her statement. Following the war, she would deliberately court a constituency for birth control among the nation's elites in business, the professions, and academia, never forgetting the lesson of her earlier experiences as a radical—that she would be judged by the company she kept.
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By the war's end, in any event, few of Margaret's old friends on the left remained in positions of national leadership or authority, and those who did disdained her priorities, as much as she abandoned theirs. Though repression had taken a heavy toll on radicalism at home, the successes of political and economic insurgents in Russia, parts of Europe, and South America heralded the promise of the long-awaited triumph of revolutionary Socialism abroad. For a brief moment before this progress gave way to the harsh realities of counterrevolution and repression, impetuous dreams of global advances replaced the narrower, practical objectives that had occupied many radicals before the war. To many of them, the concerns of American working women for economic and social autonomy seemed trivial by comparison.

In 1919, Bill Haywood enthusiastically wrote Margaret from his Kansas prison cell that “the glorious Red Dawn” was breaking and asked her to send him a copy of John Reed's recently published report on his arrival at Leningrad's Finland Station in
Ten Days That Shook the World
. No response survives, but it is clear that she maintained her interest in revolutionary movements abroad only insofar as they provided greater opportunities for women. “We are interested in the freedom of women, not in the power of the state,” she wrote in a subsequent issue of
The Call
, celebrating International Women's Day.

Some years later, Margaret solicited a short message from Rose Pastor Stokes for an international birth control conference she was mounting in New York. Stokes wrote back testily that the goals they had once shared could only be achieved “by working for the abolition of capitalism and for the establishment of Soviet Governments.” Margaret herself had long since abandoned that objective, yet she loyally included the statement in the published proceedings of the conference.
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Cautioned by Jonah Goldstein to keep a low profile pending the outcome of his appeal in the Brownsville case, and finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the war for attention, Margaret mounted only a few publicity initiatives in the months following her release from prison. She did realize long dormant theatrical aspirations, however, by playing herself in a silent film dramatizing her work among the women of the Lower East Side, which was produced with support from the women of the National Birth Control League. Arrangements were made for her to tour the country with the moving picture, until officials in New York City threatened to revoke the license of any local theater that showed it on the grounds that there was no “medical” justification for such propaganda. Local newspapers reported that “thousands” were turned away from the Park Theatre in Brooklyn, where a scheduled opening was canceled after an association of theater owners then officially banned the film as “unpatriotic.” Goldstein again went to court and won an injunction against these actions, but they were sustained on appeal.
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A second opportunity for national exposure occurred in October of that year when
Metropolitan Magazine
, a tony New York publication which featured such prominent writers as Sinclair Lewis and Edna Ferber, published a new attack on the birth control propagandists by its regular political columnist, Theodore Roosevelt. The former President was distressed over a recent study that had been made of the birthrates of Harvard and Yale men and opined that the country's best stock was dying out, because with an average of only 2.3 children, Harvard graduates like himself were not reproducing themselves in
sons
. (That daughters might carry forward the Crimson banner was apparently unthinkable.) He reiterated his standard lament that the kind of individuals who ought to replenish the American breed already had more than enough access to contraception, while the “submerged” 10 percent of the population who really needed it were not being reached.

As a sure measure of her enhanced public profile, Margaret was given space in the magazine to respond. Her speeches in those days often alluded to Roosevelt by referring to the large number of requests for birth control information she had received from women in his hometown of Oyster Bay, New York, an audience teaser that would invariably provoke laughter and applause. Colloquy with the former President in a prestigious magazine, however, demanded a more reasoned response, and in the pages of
Metropolitan
she soberly disputed his low estimate of the nation's levels of poverty and gently encouraged him to consider the merits of quality over quantity as a general principle of family and social life. She seemed uncharacteristically tentative in her arguments, also venturing a rather contorted argument, which harkened back to Emma Goldman, about the adverse effect of the “social and economic complexities of modern life” on the ability of women to bear and raise children.
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Through the year she also devoted herself quietly to the business of publishing the
Birth Control Review
. Wary of all the squabbling and divisiveness she had experienced in radical politics, she conceived the magazine as an alternative to a national birth control organization. She would maintain it as her forum and leave the tedium of recruiting support, building programs, and raising funds to the twenty or so local birth control leagues that had been established in response to her 1916 tours, some by radicals, some by middle-class women and reformers, others an amalgam of the two that was only possible in the years before World War I heightened class tensions.

Ideological neutrality became impossible in these changed times, however, and in its first issue of January 1917, the
Review
evidenced Margaret's lingering radical orientation. During an appearance in Cleveland the year before, she had met an enthusiastic young charity worker and Socialist by the name of Frederick Blossom, who followed her to New York and took charge of putting out the magazine while she devoted herself to her clinic defense. Blossom addressed a cover letter enclosing the inaugural number of the
Review
to our “Dear Comrades,” and after pledging to challenge “Jesuitical bigotry and Comstockian prudery,” closed with the provocative salutation: “Yours for more freedom—for everybody.” A manifesto in the February number, signed by Sanger, Blossom, and Elizabeth Stuyvesant, the social worker who had also worked in the clinic, read in part as follows:

Subsequent issues also reneged on Margaret's promise of political neutrality by defending pacifism and mocking the war effort. She couldn't seem to contain herself. When she published an editorial defense of pacifism, imploring women to protest conscription in order to demonstrate they would not be made “handmaidens of militarism,” copies of the paper were confiscated by government censors, though without apparent follow-up. A cartoon lampooning the war machine for encouraging the breeding of more soldiers escaped the censors' eyes, as did another showing two young children greeting a veteran with the caption “Judge Returning Home After Sentencing a Birth Control Speaker to Six Months Is Met by His Two Children, Ages Three and Six.”
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Frederick Blossom possessed an intelligence, sophistication, and charm that Margaret admired, but he did not remain in her employ for very long. They disagreed immediately over the war, with Blossom taking the position that the United States was obliged to defend England and France. Margaret also resented Blossom's interest in self-promotion. When she came out of jail, she was frankly unwilling to share what limelight remained for the birth control issue. Believing that she and her sister had made incomparable sacrifices for the cause, she demanded strict deference. By June of 1917, Blossom had moved on to work full-time as a Socialist Party organizer.

Subsequently, Margaret also accused him of deceit in connection with
Birth Control Review
revenues, for which he could not account. Funds intended to cover a year of publication were expended on the first three issues, and for the remainder of the year, she pursued him with cordial determination to explain discrepancies in the books. He politely put her off, and in exasperation she asked Jonah Goldstein to take the matter quietly to the district attorney, a move that was seen by party comrades as an unforgivable breach of solidarity. Claiming that she only took this step to give Blossom a scare and force him to respond, she dropped the charges when he asked a committee of Socialists to intervene and arbitrate the controversy. It turned out that about $1,000 was in dispute, not an inconsiderable amount for the time. When the committee exonerated Blossom (admitting, nonetheless, that the financial records he had kept were insufficient and unclear), Margaret called the investigation a whitewash and disassociated herself from all who supported it. Her only vindication was that Blossom himself broke with the Socialists shortly thereafter and later came under suspicion of the IWW for being a government agent, charges that were never proved.

Billy Williams, a Socialist and former Kansas City reporter who had come East to pursue a passion for radical causes, offered her a $500 contribution to replace the Blossom losses and promised to try to raise ten times that amount or more. Still other party activists, such as Cerise Carmen Jack, the wife of a prominent Harvard University professor, publicly defended her actions. Yet, there is no doubt that the incident was a sign of her developing disillusion with the left and of her increased dependence on others for support.
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