Woman of Valor (45 page)

 

Sponsorship by a physician seemed especially meaningful to the lawyers advising Margaret, in view of a little-noticed ruling of 1930 in the United States Circuit Court in the Second Circuit in New York. The case,
Young's Rubber Corporation v. C. I. Lee & Co. Inc
., involved two competing manufacturers of condoms in an accusation that one had pirated the trademark of the other, and it established the underlying legality of interstate commerce in contraceptives. Judge Thomas Swan ruled broadly that the transport of contraceptive articles was legitimate if they were to be used when “prescribed by a physician for the prevention of disease or for the prevention of conception, where that is not forbidden by local law.” This doctrine of intent actually contradicted the ruling rendered only four months earlier by Swan's colleague, Augustus Hand, in the challenge to the Comstock definitions of obscenity in printed matter brought by Mary Ware Dennett over the confiscation of her sex education pamphlet. Yet even in retreating from Hand's “reasonable construction” principle, Swan offered another significant reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century statutes. Hand's liberal reading made possible a frank discussion of sexuality and contraception, and, since exemption provisions for physicians and druggists already existed in most states, Swan's decision opened the way for the vast expansion of the commercial contraceptive market that occurred during the Depression under the protection of intent to control venereal disease and promote feminine hygiene.

In 1931, the United States Post Office actually promulgated regulations for the implementation of the Swan ruling through case by case authorizations to manufacturers. And in 1933, in
Davis v. U.S
., a federal judge in the Sixth Circuit in Washington again offered protection to a wholesale distributor of contraceptives, citing both Judges Swan and Hand. Margaret then briefly considered whether her legislative campaign ought to be abandoned altogether, since the Congressional action she sought would do little more than codify these judicial and administrative actions. She went ahead anyway, at the encouragement of her own lawyers, on the justification that laws are secure only when made by legislators, not by judges and postmasters, and in the conviction that the lobbying would have educational value, whatever its outcome.
²⁶

Her immediate strategy was to have Senator Hatfield lobby his colleagues on the hill about the critical need to clarify the rights of physicians and pharmacists under the new court and post office rulings. As governor of West Virginia, however, Hatfield had passed a coercive sterilization law, and he proved to be more interested in the eugenic implications of birth control than in its larger virtues. He turned out to be useful only as a participant in private negotiations that Margaret then initiated with the same representatives of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington who had so strenuously objected to Senator Gillette's bill a year earlier.

As one doctor to another, Hatfield gained the confidence of a man by the name of Dr. Joseph J. Mundell of the Georgetown University Medical School, who regularly advised the NCWC on the medical aspects of legislation. In a private meeting with Mundell and Margaret, he then modified the language of the original Gillette bill and convinced Mundell that it would serve only the most narrow professional uses possible. Mundell, in turn, then assured John Ryan that clear, legal authorization of contraception would make doctors more comfortable about prescribing it to married women, but would also make possible more effective regulation of the vending machine and drugstore contraceptives available to the unmarried. Ryan was widely considered the official “censor” of all political positions taken by the Catholic hierarchy in this country, and his willingness to consider modifications in the language of the legislation was viewed as a major breakthrough.

This delicate bill-drafting session actually followed earlier, confidential meetings among NCWC staff, Mundell, Ryan, and Margaret's personal representative, a somewhat mysterious figure by the name of James Joseph Toy, who turned up in Washington in 1931 and volunteered his services to the National Committee. A former United States Army colonel, trained as an industrial engineer, Toy had lost some real estate investments in the early years of the Depression in California, and like many entrepreneurs in those circumstances, then tried his luck at the quick profits of commercial contraception, where he developed his knowledge and awareness of the birth control issue. Offering to help Margaret if she covered his expenses, he was first sent into the field as a representative to doctors. Once having proved himself, he was then employed as an emissary to John Ryan. A businessman, military man, and practicing Catholic, Toy seemed a valuable ally.
²⁷

Margaret could not have negotiated very well on her own. However hard she tried, she could never seem to contain her irreverence. In testimony on the Gillette bill in 1931, she identified Christ as a fine example of an only child, and in a special issue of
The Nation
devoted to the birth control controversy the following year, she made a mockery of the natural law doctrine in
Casti Connubii
. She wrote:

John Ryan would probably never have consented to direct discussions with Margaret, and it appears he did not at first understand that Colonel Toy was her employee. By Toy's account, Ryan did not desist when told the facts, though he needed assurance that she was neither a fanatic nor a profit seeker, but rather an “idealist” whose goal was to bring contraception under stricter medical control. Ryan authorized Dr. Mundell as his agent to redraft the bill, and in light of the extreme delicacy of these maneuverings, he also recommended that Edward F. McGrady, the chief lobbyist for the American Federation of Labor and a prominent Catholic who would later become an assistant secretary of labor in the Roosevelt administration, be asked to quietly pass new voting instructions to Catholic members of the House and Senate. Toy quoted Ryan as saying:

Father Ryan had long espoused orthodox church doctrine on contraception, but on most other social matters he was a confirmed liberal. Educated in economics and sociology, he wrote extensively endorsing such then progressive ideas as minimum wage legislation, unemployment and health insurance, social security, public housing, and labor's right to organize. He would become a prominent political spokesman for Franklin Roosevelt. And, by 1937, Ryan would break publicly with his superiors in the church hierarchy when they refused to endorse the New Deal's historic child labor legislation on the grounds that it constituted undue governmental interference in family matters. Even on birth control, according to the Catholic historian John Noonan, though Ryan avoided any innovation beyond endorsing the rhythm method, “he did not like to be more rigorous than he felt constrained to be by authority.”
²⁹

What happened following Ryan's meeting with Colonel Toy, and subsequent interviews with Mundell, McGrady, and Ralph E. Burton, a Catholic Congressman, is undocumented. It may have been that in this instance, as in the subsequent labor legislation dispute, superior authority did intervene, forcing Ryan to retreat from his earlier commitment. Certainly the hard line of Cardinal Hayes in New York would have carried greater weight than Ryan's views. And, of course, the interim developments with respect to the rhythm method may have been a consideration. Even though the conversation was taped and transcribed, it is also possible that Toy somehow misrepresented Ryan, or perhaps revealed the transcript to some unacceptable party, leaving no recourse but public denial. The sudden mobilization of Catholic constituencies in opposition to the bill may also have forced Ryan to rethink his position on the grounds that even the smallest appearance of defeat for the church could no longer be tolerated. While he was negotiating privately, such powerful groups as the National Council of Catholic Women and the Knights of Columbus either wrote or testified against the bill. One speaker, representing the International Federation of Catholic Alumni, baldly charged that birth control organizations were servicing and being financed by young, promiscuous people.

Whatever the reasons, on May 2, 1932, William Montavon of the NCWC's Legal Department wrote an emphatic denial of Colonel Toy's version of what had transpired. Dr. Mundell's efforts were repudiated, and the Hatfield bill, like its predecessor, was branded “immoral—destructive of fundamental relations of husband and wife and child, [and] consequently destructive of the family on the right order and dignity of which the whole welfare of human society rests.” Ryan's own testimony marshaled his standard arguments against Malthusian doctrine, though they carried less weight in light of his endorsement of rhythm. He also emphatically rejected the suggestion that legislation would allow for more effective regulation of commercial contraceptives, the argument that had been discussed privately. The bill was narrowly defeated in committee after hearings in May, when the contemplated agent of compromise, Edward McGrady of the AF of L, refused to support any measure that the church officially denounced, though he did admit that this one was “not so sweeping or objectionable” as its predecessor. Morris Ernst was actually relieved. Though he recognized the public relations value of a detente with the Catholic Church and had encouraged Margaret in her lobbying efforts, he was concerned that the compromise bill would have been more restrictive than recent court decisions rendered the existing law.
³⁰

Far from any new gestures of reconciliation, the National Catholic Welfare Conference then dramatically intensified its opposition campaign. Mirroring Margaret's own public relations tactics, the organization distributed thousands of copies of a circular identifying birth control as a “national menace” through churches and other Catholic institutions. Catholic magazines editorialized against birth control, and the goal of overcoming the lobbying advantage of the birth control advocates by producing opposition mail in great quantities was handsomely achieved. Thousands of letters poured into Congress, and intimidation of birth control supporters also escalated at a local level. In New York City, for example, a well-known Catholic priest issued a press release demanding the removal of a local public school principal, who had allowed one of the doctors from the Clinical Research Bureau to give a presentation to a parents' association meeting, which included a detailed explanation of the diaphragm regimen. The release, accusing Margaret of “peddling immoral garbage,” provoked a public protest from Worth Tippy on behalf of Protestants, but the intimidation worked against local Congressmen known to have been leaning toward supporting birth control. Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, for example, later admitted to Margaret's lobbyists that he could not possibly be with them, because Catholics held the balance of power in his district and would surely defeat him. The window of opportunity for any political compromise with the Catholic Church had all but closed.
³¹

M
argaret retreated to Europe for much of the summer of 1932, where she renewed international contacts and then wandered around more or less aimlessly, finally settling down in a sanitarium in Switzerland for treatment of a lingering gallbladder ailment. She needed time to reassess her political strategy at home and to sort out personal concerns as well.

After Noah sold his company in 1929, he had put almost all of his money into the stock market and purchased his own seat on the New York Stock Exchange for more than half a million dollars, at the time one of the highest prices ever paid. His son, James, Jr., who had already left 3-in-One Oil for Wall Street, took charge of his portfolio, with some assistance from Stuart Sanger, who had also worked on the street for a brief time following his graduation from Yale. Many speculative investments were wiped out almost immediately in the great crash that year, but, fortunately, most of Noah's money had gone into industrials, railroads, utilities, and other blue-chip stocks that did not hit bottom until the Depression took firm hold during the winter of 1931-32. At that point Noah lost his seat on the exchange. During the bank holiday, the following year, when financial institutions were closed temporarily to avoid a run on deposits, he was devastated to find himself without even any cash. His banks were solvent, however, and he never liquidated what remained of his stock holdings, so that within a decade their value had been partially restored. But for the time being he had barely enough money to maintain his life-style and no longer considered himself a wealthy man. The losses seriously imperiled his sense of self-worth.

Like so many Americans of conservative inclination, Noah chose to view these reverses as evidence of personal failing and not of the more fundamental, structural weaknesses in the economy that underlay them. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he had children to blame for at least some of his troubles. Jim Slee and Walter Willis, a son-in-law, became scapegoats, first for having encouraged him to sell his company and then for his unfortunate timing in the stock market. He apparently never again spoke to them or his daughter Anne, or to a second son, Lincoln, with whom he had never been close.
¹

Margaret, by contrast, seems to have accepted Noah's losses with considerable equanimity. Money was the glue of their relationship, but it was not in the most basic sense the measure by which she judged an individual's worth, and his having less of it was hardly what diminished him most in her eyes. As to the impact on her own life and creature comforts, she wrote to Ellis of Noah's reverses, suggesting that her habits would need “drastic changing,” but claiming, however disingenuously, that she was “not afraid of the simple life for really I never got very far away from it in my
very own way
.” All the rich people she knew were learning to cut corners, and who knew better than she how to do so? She seemed far more concerned about what would become of Hugh and Janet de Selincourt, who had put their inheritance in the hands of stock speculators and lost everything. They were forced to rent out Sandpit, their only remaining asset, and with the loss of their home the personal freedom it symbolized seemed no longer possible to achieve. An entire way of life had been destroyed, and by comparison, her slightly diminished circumstances scarcely seemed significant.
²

Although she could obviously no longer count on Noah's money, Margaret continued to engage him in her work by writing good-naturedly of the trials and tribulations of supporting herself on the road and raising funds for the movement in such difficult times. Describing her many ventures at economizing in Europe in 1932, she assured him that she was doing just fine with less—that she had been unnecessarily self-indulgent in the past, protestations of independence that may only have made him feel worse. When his spirits flagged, she simply insisted that he boost himself up and not be sorry for himself or lonely without her.

Being free of Noah's money actually gave her a new sense of liberation and rekindled her energy for work. Determined to support herself with substantial lecture and writing fees, she had new challenges to meet, and since Noah was no longer paying the bills, she also felt less of an obligation to be with him. He, in turn, made fewer demands on her time, perhaps not yet realizing exactly what this meant. They would, in fact, spend much of the remaining decade apart, their relationship sustained principally through frequent correspondence—Margaret's letters once again reflecting her capacity to idealize the marriage, so long as her husband remained a comfortable distance away. Their separations grew more and more prolonged as age, infirmity, and economic adversity intensified Noah's sanctimonious qualities and his many odd personal habits, creating a situation that would have tried the patience of just about any wife. Yet, the longer they were apart, the warmer, chattier, and more affectionate Margaret seemed to become. She would address him as “Dear Love,” or “My Lovely Dearest One,” or “Darling Noah,” and often sign the letters with his name of endearment for her—“Lovingly,” or “Devotedly, Margy.”
³

Noah spent winters with Margaret in Washington during the legislative seasons, but by and large he seemed absorbed in his own economic concerns and reconciled to his wife's absences. Evidently, he also occupied a good deal of his time alone, attending to the books of the clinic in New York and of the new federal lobbying organization. Piles of correspondence survive to testify to his obsessive concern for the administrative detail of her work. He drove Margaret's subordinates crazy with his frequent demands for accountings of travel expenses, postage, phone calls, office supplies, and the like—there was no item too petty for his personal scrutiny. “Watch the pennies,” was his favorite dictum. As far as her personal needs went, however, he continued with considerable extravagance to send baskets of fruit or bottles of champagne to her departing ship cabins, and flowers to her faraway hotel rooms.
⁴

Noah's estrangement from his own children seems to have intensified his emotional stake in Margaret and her sons. There was a warm family Christmas together at Willowlake in 1932, decorating a ten-foot outdoor pine by the side of the sleeping porch. By Margaret's enthusiastic description, its trim of silver and blue decorations became even more perfect when covered with silver frost. Devastated by the tide of events that left him unemployable, Stuart then left New York and traveled through the South and West for several years, with his mother and stepfather continuing to pay his bills. Grant, in the meanwhile, went on from Princeton to Cornell Medical School.
⁵

 

Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 focused the nation's attention on reform and renewed Margaret's optimism about passing birth control legislation, at least for the moment. Before Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1928, his wife, Eleanor, had served on the board of the American Birth Control League. She'd also spoken in 1931 at the testimonial of the American Woman's Association that honored Margaret, but by that time her husband was a contender for the Democratic Party's nomination for President, and her vocal support of birth control received several unfavorable notices in the press. From then on, as she freely admitted, her position on the subject was something she simply never discussed, though she was continuously linked to the issue by reproving Catholic editorialists, nevertheless.
⁶

Margaret faithfully voted for Norman Thomas once again in 1932, but she was inclined to support Roosevelt after he won in a landslide, and she confided to Ellis that both her sons had gone Democratic. Noah voted for Hoover, she admitted, but she had no use for the breed of rugged individualism Hoover represented and much preferred Roosevelt, whom she described as “an organizer…[he] will be more agreeable & will consult all kinds of people.”

Her immediate intention was to lead a prestigious delegation to call on the new President when he took office in March of 1933, but it quickly became apparent that she would not be among those whose counsel was sought. An April letter from Roosevelt's appointments secretary politely regretted that “to accomplish his recovery objectives, the President is working under tremendous pressure, and we are, therefore, confining his appointments to matters having to do with the recovery program and legislative measures affecting it.” One by one, members of the Roosevelt circle who had previously supported birth control formally severed their ties and refused to speak out on the issue. Harry Hopkins resigned from the board of trustees of the clinic in New York when he went to Washington to administer relief programs. Elinor Morgenthau, wife of the Secretary of the Treasury and a neighbor of the Slees in Fishkill, admitted that she had little patience with persons afraid to stand for their own convictions but then reminded Margaret of the violent letters she had received when her support was made public in the past and refused to allow the use of her name any longer, so as to avoid further controversy. Samuel Rosenman, Presidential adviser and speechwriter, who had sponsored Margaret's first birth control bill in the New York State Assembly, also refused to help. Only Anna Ickes, the imperious first wife of the Secretary of the Interior, continued to identify freely with the birth control lobby, refusing to be daunted by what certainly had the appearance of an unwritten administration policy. Her husband, however, whose agency then ran the government's public health programs, did not.
⁷

Margaret's enthusiasm for Roosevelt quickly soured. “I'm getting sick of this stupid country,” she would write Ellis by December of 1933. “Roosevelt ‘experimenting' with peoples' existence, killing pigs, burning wheat, destroying provisions & the necessities of life, while welfare councils & Community Chests are driven crazy in an effort to feed starving millions.” Her real concern, however, seemed less with the chaos of these initiatives than with the constituencies the President was courting. “He's losing the people's confidence,” she continued. “Only the Irish Catholics & Southern Democrats are blind to the national disaster pending unless he stops experimenting and gets in gear.” The apparent influence of urban Catholics in the emerging New Deal coalition aroused her to new heights of paranoia: “The class who have built up & supported the finest of arts & the cultural movements are impotent,” she added with uncharacteristic bitterness. “Those who are grabbing it from them with the assistance of the govt. are concerned only with their cheap pleasures and will let culture, education rot or be taken over by the Hierarchy from Rome.” Several weeks later she observed: “What depresses me more than the economic situation is the rise of the power of the Catholics in the Dem. party. Priests having tea at the WH.”
⁸

Margaret was understandably confused by the struggling Roosevelt administration's policies, and its attentiveness to individuals like the popular Catholic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin of Detroit, who was gaining a tremendous following by playing on popular fears and by invoking nostalgia for a simpler, more provincial era in the nation's past. (Coughlin had, in fact, been banned from CBS for addressing a host of sensitive subjects including birth control, but he then found an even larger audience through his own national hookup, and he was invited to the White House in the early days of the administration.) Yet whatever her private doubts, she carefully constructed a whole new set of public arguments for birth control tied to the enthusiasm for reform being generated by the New Deal. She was determined to embrace some of Roosevelt's thinking, even if he would have no part of her.

As the New Dealers would themselves discover, the Depression was having a decidedly sobering effect on the social behavior of Americans. Even as the redoubtable Ethel Merman belted out the libertine anthem of Cole Porter's 1934 Broadway hit, “Anything Goes,” the temper of the times turned increasingly conservative. Behavior once considered routine suddenly became a rare indulgence. Marriages were postponed. Birthrates plummeted. Women went to work, their opportunities expanded by public employment initiatives, but more than ever, they worked only to help families whose very survival and solidarity seemed in jeopardy. Their concerns as individuals were being set aside, and established arguments for birth control as a fundamental right of women lost salience as a public issue. Birth control needed a revised marketing strategy.

Always the pragmatist, Margaret responded to the Roosevelt administration's decision to try to enlist women in the recovery effort. No sooner had Mrs. Roosevelt and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins launched a campaign called “It's Up to the Women,” than Margaret repositioned her birth control campaign as an instrument to diminish human misery and reduce the staggering economic burden created by the Depression. This canny maneuver might have succeeded, but the Catholic lobby then acted quickly in response, leaving Roosevelt little choice but to capitulate to a key constituency. The new President and his principal domestic advisers knew better than to antagonize a unified church over legislation that was not yet viewed as a priority by all women or by many social theorists. The sometimes irascible Harry Hopkins, for example, had incurred his own share of ecclesiastical wrath in New York years earlier while working in the municipal government, where he investigated contract mismanagement in Catholic and Protestant welfare agencies. Having recently left his wife and three children in New York after a well-publicized love affair, Hopkins may also have felt personally vulnerable to religious attack. Nor can the President's own sensitivity on these grounds be discounted, given the problems in his own marriage that have since been so well-publicized.
⁹