Woman of Valor (46 page)

 

Finding herself spurned by the White House, Margaret took herself back to Capitol Hill. But Congress was consumed by the historic agenda of the first 100 days of the New Deal and never even got around to a hearing on birth control. The following year, with attention still focused on economic issues, public works and relief, she could inspire no better sponsor in the Senate than Daniel Hastings, a freshman Republican from Delaware, whose virulent opposition to the New Deal later cost him reelection. Walter Pierce, however, an enthusiastic, liberal Democrat from Oregon, who was insulated from local Catholic political pressure, was sponsor in the House, where the measure was finally scheduled for committee hearings in January of 1934.

In her 1934 testimony Margaret compiled evidence that birthrates in households on relief were close to 50 percent higher than those with at least one worker still employed. She pointed out that a quarter of a million children had already been born on public assistance, a figure clearly intended to shock federal legislators and administrators still struggling to comprehend the full cost of evolving social welfare policies. She argued that with so many married women entering the work force, reliable contraception was paramount. Always eager to incorporate the most current intellectual fads into her arguments, she called for a program of scientific “family planning,” akin to what was being advanced in agriculture and industry. Her proposal was twofold: she asked the government to authorize birth control instruction for all families enrolled in relief and recovery programs and also demanded that a reasonable allowance for every child in need be provided. It was only sensible, she argued, that a society willing to subsidize children in need would help make contraception available at the same time.

In taking the position that birth control could help relieve the Depression, Margaret tackled the contrary opinion that the country's reduced rate of population growth was, in fact, at the root of its economic woes. By 1934, the fear of a declining United States birthrate, long advanced by economists like Louis Dublin, had been incorporated into an overriding economic explanation for the Depression. From an earlier emphasis on differential fertility rates, this school of thought turned its attention to a theory of “underconsumption,” which viewed the country's economic collapse as the result of an insufficiency of purchasing power brought on, first, by the skewed income distributions of the boom years of the 1920s, and, second, by the static rate of national population growth. According to this argument, economic recovery depended on guaranteeing American workers a decent minimum wage along with other forms of income security, while also encouraging them to have more babies. By 1933, the overall national birthrate was below replacement level at 18.4 per thousand, and just about everyone was deferring marriage. All the more reason, perhaps, that conservative religious thinkers were reluctant to legalize contraception. By 1938, there would be only 1.5 million recorded marriages, as opposed to ten times that number a decade earlier, though by then the birthrate had begun to rise again to pre-Depression levels.

John Ryan forcefully advanced the Dublin position at the House hearings in 1934. “If we are not well on the way to recovery from this depression by the time any considerable number of children could be born, after the enactment of this bill, then we better get ready for something else in the social order, or a social revolution,” he warned. Mrs. Sanger's idea of discouraging births among the unemployed is simply “fantastic,” he concluded. Margaret had never once talked about coercive contraception, only of voluntary programs, but Ryan tried to scar her as an opponent of social justice, and this theme was echoed by the powerful Cardinal Hayes in New York.

Margaret, however, held the upper hand in this round. In reply, she submitted testimony from Wesley C. Mitchell, the economist who had headed the prestigious President's Research Committee on Social Trends under Herbert Hoover, along with Robert S. Lynd and other prominent social scientists. They minimized the significance of the decline in the overall birthrate, arguing instead for the importance of achieving a well-balanced population by class, region, and economic sector through the most democratic spread of contraceptive information possible and attacking restrictive legislation that interfered with the work of birth control clinics and propagandists.
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Still, linking birth control and relief was a risky business. It made sense on genuinely humanitarian grounds but also served to advance the interests of individuals and groups motivated by fear, prejudice, and unabashed elitism. Indeed, some of the more conservative eugenicists, who had long opposed birth control reform, finally changed their minds during the Depression on the practical grounds that it hardly made sense to argue for more children for the middle and upper classes at a time when most Americans could not afford to feed the ones they already had. In 1933, the American Eugenics Society formally endorsed contraception and joined Margaret's campaign, taking care, however, to define its objectives more carefully as the promotion of policies “to advance hereditary endowment without regard to class, race or creed.” Nevertheless, a member of the organization, Guy Irving Burch, then volunteered his services in Washington, where he baldly wrote a letter on official birth control stationery admitting that he had worked for many years to prevent the American people from “being replaced by alien or negro stock, whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among others in this country.”

Burch was confiding his views privately, but similar sentiments were also being expressed by the American Birth Control League, with which Margaret was identified in the public mind, even though she had long severed her official ties. The same organization that had rejected a proposal to move closer to eugenicists in 1928 was now proclaiming: “The overproduction of the unfit is driving the American middle-class out of existence. Most serious of all, in the cradle of that second baby that many intelligent, middle-class parents hoped some day to have lies the dependent child of the prodigal proletarian. And usually not all that its foster-parents can do for him through welfare agencies and special classes, through camps and courts and clinics, can make him into a fine citizen.” This was far afield from the argument Margaret made when she demanded that birth control be incorporated into national programs of social security and relief.
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Mounting ideological tensions within the birth control movement itself were apparent during a conference, Birth Control and National Recovery, that Margaret convened in Washington to coincide with the 1934 hearings. Nearly 1,000 people attended at her invitation, representing a broad spectrum of liberal and conservative viewpoints. The group as a whole made the plea that the country abandon its fascination with economic and population growth and called on President Roosevelt to legalize birth control and assume the obligation of providing it through public health and social welfare programs. Repeated attempts to set up appointments with the President, however, were once again rebuffed, even as Margaret pointed to studies showing that millions of American women were dying needlessly from the complications of self-induced and illegal abortions.

“What of the sex relationships between husband and wife in these normal self-respecting families, now on public relief,” asked University of Pennsylvania Prof. James Bossard. “Shall they add further to their misery and their imposition upon the public treasury by having children at its expense, or shall they become the celibates of the New Deal?” The query was probably not ill-intended, but it provoked an unfortunate response. One openly racist Southern delegate raised his concern that prevailing differentials in fertility rates would one day produce an inferior “colored” nation, an accusation that prompted Dr. Ira S. Wile, Margaret's friend and supporter from New York, to point out quickly that the black birthrate, like the white, had already materially diminished. In another session, discussion about the growing burden of the poor on the more fortunate provoked a sharp warning from Rachelle Yarros of Chicago. “I hope this conference won't stress the privileged classes,” she said to the amusement of the assembled crowd, “because we don't know who they are, and if we know now, we probably won't five years from now.” Margaret's friend from London, Ettie Rout, soon made the same point in a sarcastic, private letter. “I'm glad they now believe in birth control,” she wrote, referring to the eugenicists at the conference, but “eliminating them will improve the race!”

The conference closed with an inspirational dinner featuring the venerable feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, making a final public appearance before she died, along with the aviator Amelia Earhart, who had more recently established herself as a national figure of heroic proportion. Overall, it generated windfalls of positive publicity and well-informed lobbyists, who made calls to key committee members on Capitol Hill.
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In fact, opinion makers in both politics and the press appeared to understand the difference between the kind of birth selection some eugenicists supported and Margaret's advocacy of a more universal and democratic program of birth control. And regrettably enough, blatant expressions of bigotry and racism were tolerated far more in America sixty years ago than they are today. Indeed, there is no evidence that the birth control cause suffered politically because of the expressly classbound, or even racist, viewpoints of some of its advocates, despite the attack launched on these grounds by prominent Catholics.
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What is more, the church was itself vulnerable on the issue of prejudice, despite the undoubtedly genuine protestations of John Ryan. Far more influential than he was Father Coughlin, who returned to the birth control issue over and over again on his broadcasts in the early months of 1934. Coughlin was becoming increasingly strident and incoherent in these years and had already lost his credibility at the White House. He claimed that the proposed birth control law would make marriage “nothing more than a legalized bed of prostitution,” and also kept calling for more babies and more mouths to feed, not fewer. He derided the airs of “the birth control ladies,” but was himself openly biased. Although his most flagrant racism and anti-Semitism came later, he warned at this point that the dissemination of birth control information would make the United States lose its Anglo-Saxon and Celtic majority.
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Quietly, the Roosevelt administration joined forces with John Ryan and other Catholic officials in Washington to try to restrain Coughlin and blunt his influence. Margaret does not seem to have known of these efforts, but she too decided to take a conciliatory approach toward more moderate voices in the church. Rebuked by several of her own supporters for religious baiting in the past, she began to speak of the great significance of the new rhythm doctrine and encouraged all those who acknowledged the “principles and benefits to be derived from family limitation” to support her campaign in Washington. After all, as she put it, she was supporting a “permissive” not a “coercive” bill, which would simply legitimize a variety of contraceptive methods. What is more, Leo Latz's use of the public mails to advertise and distribute rhythm constituted no less a challenge to federal Comstock prohibitions than the activities of partisans of artificial methods. At one point she did investigate an idea advanced by the intrepid birth control pioneer, Blanche Ames of Boston, that the birth controllers sue Latz and the Chicago Archdiocese in order to establish a judicial test case on this question, which would have been guaranteed to make headlines. But her lawyers advised her that the post office could defend the validity of distinguishing between information on natural and artificial contraception, and she quickly dropped the matter.
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At the House hearings in 1934, she found herself in the curious predicament of praising the Catholics while watching them argue among themselves. She introduced Leo Latz's book on rhythm as evidence of ecclesiastical approval of the principle of birth control and reason for support of her bill, but Dr. Mundell of Georgetown then took exactly the opposite view, citing scientific confirmation of the natural sterile period as a reason that legalization of artificial birth control methods was no longer at all necessary. William Montavon of the NCWC, however, subsequently wrote to the committee contradicting both Margaret and Mundell, by claiming that the “official” Catholic position opposed all contraception and condoned the use of the sterile period only in the most extreme circumstances. Meanwhile, Protestant and Jewish clergymen testified that legal birth control would sanctify and secure marriage, the family, and the home.
Time
magazine's coverage made a mockery of the whole debate, and with all the confusion on who exactly stood for what, the committee reached no consensus.

“The word I got from the House is that it will be necessary for us to fight,” Margaret confided to Blanche Ames when the hearings were over. “The Catholics are not only going to accept for themselves all the privileges and rights of the Mails and Common Carriers, but they are going to fight us to the death…we must be ‘wiped out'.”
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Thinking there was no more hope, Margaret could not have been more surprised herself when at the conclusion of its own hearings in March, the Senate Judiciary Committee, with only its three Catholic members voting in the negative, agreed to send Sen. Daniel Hasting's bill to the floor. Getting a birth control bill out of committee was a historic development. A victory in the Senate would have had no legal effect in itself, but might have increased the likelihood of a favorable outcome in the House the following year.

Like the original Comstock prohibition sixty years earlier, the reform measure was not calendared until the final day of the session on June 13, 1934, and when it came up for a vote, there were some 200 bills ahead of it. Hazel Moore expected that in the confusion of the day, opponents might simply overlook the measure. She positioned herself in the Senate gallery, tense but prepared for the extraordinary moment. At her insistence, the sponsor stood ready on the floor if, by chance, any objections were raised when the bill was called. His presence, however, turned out to be unnecessary. The birth control bill was read three times and then passed by voice vote, without debate.