Woman of Valor (44 page)

Margaret was pivotal to every aspect of this operation, but nowhere was her influence more directly felt than in crafting its message. During the 1920s she had emphasized constituency development and institution building over public relations, with predictable results. As an index to popular thinking, for example,
The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature
for 1925 through 1928, years she was also spending much of her time abroad, lists only thirty-one articles on birth control, the majority of them about the activities of Catholics and other opponents. Between 1929 and 1932, however, when she reassessed priorities and embarked on a deliberate strategy to combine propaganda and organization in order to educate public opinion, three times the amount of magazine coverage was produced, and a similar turnaround in daily reporting on birth control can be observed. Though she engaged in no antics so theatrical as the arrests and hunger strike of her days as a radical, she did go to great lengths to make headlines.

In March of 1931, for example, she produced front-page national coverage for hearings on a birth control bill in the United States Senate. Hoping to keep the story alive, she then traveled to Atlanta to debate Richard Russell, chief justice of the Georgia State Court and the father of seventeen children, one of whom had just been elected governor. The national wires also covered this event, declaring Margaret the winner. Back in the papers when her book came out in September, she again made the front pages later that month by tying birth control to the banking crisis and calling for a “two-year holiday” on babies for rich and poor alike. Captioned photos identifying Margaret as “attractive” and “fashionable” invariably accompanied these stories, and the overall tone and placement of the reporting about birth control improved.
¹⁶

The movement's image was also immeasurably enhanced by the presence in Washington of Katharine Houghton Hepburn of Hartford, who joined the National Committee as legislative chairman. Long a loyal soldier for suffrage and birth control in Connecticut, Kit Hepburn was married to a physician active in social causes. Like Margaret, she was also a girl from the hills of Corning. Her grandfather, in fact, had been the founder of Corning Glass, but she was not herself a woman of substantial means, and stock market reverses left her unwilling even to cover her own expenses when she accepted Margaret's invitation to volunteer for the National Committee. That year, however, Hepburn's daughter and namesake was embarking on a stage career in New York and in Washington, and she'd soon made her historic film debut as the wholesome ingenue who fumbles her way to stardom in
Morning Glory
. When the young Katharine Hepburn won an Academy Award for this performance, the association of the name with birth control became far more valuable than anything money could buy.

Hollywood would reach the peak of its influence during the 1930s, with an average weekly audience of 85 million, but this extraordinary power was ordinarily directed toward preserving traditional values, not upsetting them. Katharine Hepburn was something of an exception. In
Christopher Strong
, a 1933 film made by Dorothy Arzner, the most successful and outspoken female director of the era, she starred as an aviator who kills herself after becoming pregnant by a married man. Even so, there was vehement protest from studio management when the redoubtable young Hepburn then told a reporter that she stood behind everything Margaret Sanger had to say. “I'd have spanked her if she hadn't,” her perplexed but obviously pleased mother joked in a scribbled response to Margaret's enthusiastic note of thanks for the endorsement.
¹⁷

 

Yet neither Hollywood glamour, nor the harsh reality of the Depression from which Hepburn's trademark films were intended to provide escape, was able to effect concrete political movement on the birth control question. An implacable Congress hardly budged even after a reasonably skillful assault by Margaret and her colleagues. The National Committee, with its disciplined, hierarchical organizational structure, had a substantial advantage as a lobbying institution over the loosely confederated American Birth Control League. When needed, thousands of supporters could be marshaled at short notice to make themselves heard. Within two years, a speakers bureau had lined up forty-one individuals for appearances before 858 civic and religious forums, social welfare associations, and women's groups in 319 cities and 26 states. Volunteer organizers spread an even wider net in the field, and, eventually, eight paid staff members were also sent out. In 1931, the organization claimed only 1,000 backers from Alabama to Wisconsin. By 1935, more than 50,000 individual endorsers had signed on, and more than 1,000 resolutions had been secured from groups representing a broad range of viewpoints. By the time the National Committee closed down in 1937, it would claim the direct endorsement of more than 12 million people across the country. In the single small town of Easton, Pennsylvania, for example, sponsors included a medical society, various women's clubs, the Social Service League, the Parent-Teachers Association, and the local chapter of the Socialist Party.
¹⁸

The National Committee's phalanxes of volunteers, in turn, produced a steady barrage of mail. Margaret's combined staffs in New York and Washington were processing as much as 15,000 pieces of mail per month by 1932, while constituent letters and petitions also poured in steadily to key members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. “Let every mother in this land help me fight to change vicious laws which condemn us to conditions our Government would not impose upon a farmer's cattle,” she entreated in the solicitation to poor women that was paid for by the Milbank Fund. And the responses she provoked provided the kind of material that would under less controversial circumstances propel almost any politician into action.

One bereft but still determined farm wife from Central City, Nebraska, who said she could not even afford her own stationery, scrawled a reply on the back of the form letter itself:

A correspondent from Temperance, Michigan, only twenty-one years old but already with two young children, wrote:

Armed with the testimony of the needy and the endorsements of the powerful, Margaret mounted a diligent lobbying campaign each year from 1931 through 1936. She hired a tough professional lobbyist from the American Red Cross by the name of Hazel Moore, who was skilled in the internal dynamics of Congress. Deeply committed to the cause, Moore taught Sanger, Hepburn, and legions of volunteers how to pursue potential sponsors and supporters. They worked together with unflagging determination for six consecutive legislative sessions. Little time was wasted on formal organization, one volunteer later remembered, but everyone worked hard. “Margaret, were she not so gentle except when frustrated, was rather like a lion tamer. She kept us each on our boxes until she needed us—then we jumped and jumped fast.”
²⁰

Moore was never afraid to let a recalcitrant legislator know just how many women could be lined up back home to oppose his reelection, if he voted the wrong way. Reporting to Margaret on a conversation with an objectionable Congressman, she observed:

Yet Congressional resistance to birth control proved subtle and complex. The hurdles were enormous. Despite the historic pronouncements of religious liberals, despite the indisputable economic need, the issue remained tainted for many politicians by its association with sex—a subject from which they generally shied away. It was perhaps especially so in this instance because Margaret Sanger, who had so much to say about it, was involved. Several distressed Congressmen indeed ejected her from their offices on claims of common decency. As the columnist Heywood Broun explained: “Birth control is in the eyes of politicians political dynamite. If they support it, they may lose some votes. If they oppose it, they may lose some votes. There is nothing a politician hates more than losing votes. He would much rather the subject never came up.”
²²

It took almost the entire term in 1931 to identify a single sponsor for a birth control bill. Five male physicians and five women then serving in the Congress were targeted as possible supporters, but each was able to come up with an excuse for not getting involved. The next approach was to legislators who might feel insulated from potential voter reprisal by a combination of their seniority and the safety of their districts, but once again there were repeated rebuffs. Finally, a lame duck was identified. Sen. Frederick Huntington Gillette, a seventy-nine-year-old Massachusetts Republican, agreed to sponsor a bill. Gillette had served sixteen terms in the House, where he rose to the position of Speaker, but he was planning to retire after a single term in the Senate.
²³

The measure made it through a hearing of a subcommittee of the powerful Judiciary Committee, where Margaret testified in its behalf. She declared birth control a “Mothers' Bill of Rights,” in an attempt to diminish anxiety about its sexual dimension, and emphasize its positive effects on the nation's high rates of maternal and infant mortality. J. Whitredge Williams, a supporter of the New York clinic and the prestigious chief obstetrician at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, then corroborated these arguments. Other speakers in support included academic and religious figures who also emphasized the individual and social benefits of the practice. Telegrams poured in from prominent opinion makers. Key members of the committee and of the Senate leadership were individually lobbied.

The
Congressional Digest
featured birth control reform as its lead story, and the potential of political reform seemed momentarily attainable, until the Catholic Church suddenly marshaled in force and sounded every possible alarm. Not just prudish politicians, but the substantially enhanced political sophistication and power of American Catholics stopped birth control reform in the 1930s. A determined minority was able to force its views on the entire country—not just in one city, state or region—and this was a development Margaret could not necessarily have foreseen.

A representative of the National Catholic Welfare Conference sounded uncannily like Anthony Comstock when he claimed Margaret's bill would open the “floodgates” to all kinds of pornographic and obscene literature. A second witness called the bill a subversive Soviet plot to undermine the morality of young Americans. Another deliberately confused contraception and abortion. At the NCWC's urging, the American Federation of Labor then also testified in opposition. Long petitions of protest were submitted to George Norris, the powerful chairman of the Judiciary Committee. And Margaret was again scapegoated with the charge that she was profiting from a commercial contraceptive venture somewhere in the Midwest, which was capitalizing on her name by calling itself the “Marguerite Sanger Company.” In the Catholic journal
Commonweal
, she was then identified as the leader of a subversive “revolution.”

When the Gillette bill died in committee, Margaret complained to Ida Timme in New York that the opposition was putting “terror and fear…in the minds of men.” “We must work, not stop, raise our voices and make the men down here feel our votes are important too,” she added. Timme copied the letter and sent it to key contributors.
²⁴

The following year, at the urging of ostensibly sophisticated lawyers at the firm of Covington, Burling & Rublee, a second bill was introduced by Sen. Henry Drury Hatfield. A powerless, freshman Republican from West Virginia, Hatfield was nonetheless a licensed physician and the former governor of his state, and it was hoped that he might diffuse the religious and moral opposition with medical arguments. In the House, a companion bill was filed by Franklin W. Hancock, a relatively progressive, second-term North Carolina Democrat, but, regrettably, he did little to help the cause when he acknowledged in public testimony that he had “reached no definite and determined view relative to its merits.” With such politically ineffective allies, Margaret had no real hope of victory. What is more, it was a Presidential election year, and the thorny question of repeal of prohibition was also on the legislative agenda. One Senator told Margaret that prohibition posed a far greater national threat than the Comstock laws. “This was quite logical from his point of view,” she then reported privately. “He never had to bear a child, and for him to do without a drink is a great hardship.” In public, however, she maintained a less cynical posture, claiming that she was laying a base for reform in the future, at a more opportune moment.
²⁵