Woman of Valor (47 page)

Moore, not knowing whether she was “alive or dreaming,” rushed into the Senate cloak room to confirm what had transpired, hardly able to believe it. In her brief absence from the gallery, however, the bill was then abruptly recalled by unanimous consent at the request of Sen. Pat McCarran of Nevada, soon to make himself known as a prominent Catholic anti-Communist, who had voted against it in committee.

As described in a later private account, an irate Moore then rushed back downstairs, grabbed the sergeant-at-arms of the Senate and confronted McCarran, yelling:

Later in the day, demanding an explanation of why Senator Hastings had not objected to the recall, she was assured that tradition in the chamber demanded such courtesies—and that the measure would probably never have passed in the House, in any event.

“But why couldn't every man in favor have jumped to [his] feet and shouted ‘No,'” she then asked, answering the question for herself with a personal observation that served as a fitting epitaph for the long and fruitless lobbying enterprise: “But men are men,” she wrote, “and Senators are Cowards.”
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Political defeat took its toll. The high personal price Margaret was paying had been particularly apparent during a recess in the first New Deal Congress, in March of 1933. Exhausted and exasperated by the continued failure of her efforts, she'd phoned Noah in Fishkill and suggested that he treat her to a week's holiday in Bermuda. His response, as she subsequently remembered it years later in an interview, was positively vitriolic: “She was wasting her life on a cause no one cared about, except a bunch of nuts,” he screamed, while he remained alone in a big house with only servants as companions. “He might get sick, he might die in the night, who would care? She should take her vacation alone and not bother to come back!”

By this account of many years later, Margaret remained unfazed by this tirade, hung up the phone, booked a train reservation to New York, and then with a coworker set off surreptitiously for a week in Nassau in the Bahamas. She proudly paid for the trip out of her own money, and only when she was safely aboard ship wrote her husband to reveal her destination. Several contemporary letters also survive to verify the accuracy of what she remembered: “Be cheerful,” she wrote Noah in a viciously patronizing tone. “Go to your club a few days a week. Go to visit your friends, take in the movies and a good play or two…be happy over what you have had and still have in the way of love.”

Unbeknownst to her at the time, Noah had actually calmed himself and booked passage for the two of them to Bermuda. Expecting to find her at the boat despite his telephone outburst, he went down to New York the following morning and then sailed alone when she failed to turn up for the scheduled departure. A week later the two returned to Willowlake within several hours of each other, with Margaret determined to pack up and leave permanently in response to his recriminations. But Noah apparently salved his wounds, and they reunited over laughter, tears, and a fine bottle of French champagne.

“I opened the door to see the handsomest man I ever saw in a velvet smoking jacket, smoking a pipe by the blazing fire, the police dog at his feet,” she recalled with no apparent awareness that the story was hardly flattering to either party. He looked up and said only, “Hello darling, did you have a good time?”
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Yet all was not forgiven, and, characteristically, more was at stake than Margaret willingly acknowledged, accounting, perhaps, for the unabashed insensitivity of her recollections. While the chronology of her private life is not precise for 1933, it is clear that sometime during the year—possibly before the reported contretemps with Noah—she had begun her first new love affair in many years, this one with a New York businessman by the name of Angus Sneed MacDonald. Trained as an architect at Columbia University, MacDonald owned a company that designed, manufactured, and erected iron book stack constructions for the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and other such major institutions. Like Noah, he was enterprising and successful, but he could not have been more different in personal temperament. Much closer to Margaret herself in this regard, he was incurably impulsive and romantic—and he loved to dance. Recently divorced and feeling lonely, he apparently walked into the offices of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York to make a contribution and found himself seduced by more than just a worthy cause. He saw Margaret on and off through the summer of 1933, whenever she came down to the city on business from Willowlake.

“I long to talk and laugh and nestle close in your arms,” she wrote him in August, but then she kept breaking appointments to meet, her unpredictability only intensifying his interest. “I'm no pal at all Angus dear,” she warned him. “I'm a wild Irish Will of the Wisp and can't ever be counted on beyond your sight.” However much she demurred, she was obviously happy to have found a suitable lover—one who also happened to reside on this continent, at long last—for she was again feeling lonely and misunderstood. The Wantley circle had provided a sustained illusion, but, in reality, only an intermittent emotional anchor to compensate for the detachment she felt from her marriage, and it was now lost forever. Hugh and Janet de Selincourt were completely broken in spirit by the collapse of their finances. Harold Child had finally gone off and remarried, and age and illness had taken its toll on him. H. G. Wells, who had never been more than a carefree diversion in any event, was also absorbed in a new relationship, though at least, he still traveled to the United States on occasion and always made it his business to see Margaret.

The accomplished and debonair MacDonald, on the other hand, would pursue her intensely for two years more with moonlit dances, amorous letters, flowers, and her favorite champagnes, often delivered anonymously to her home—making her feel young and heady with desire once again. She became flagrantly careless about the relationship, openly teasing Noah on one occasion, when he began to suspect that something was going on, chastising him in no uncertain terms when he dared to pry into her private papers, and then laughing with her lover about her incredibly callous behavior. She told MacDonald that she loved him best, but would never compromise her public stature by divorcing for a second time. “I still want to fly or climb difficult heights and be moving onward and upwards toward the unknown,” she tried to explain. “[I'm] not a peaceful or restful person to know at all.” In turn, he called her “the greatest woman that ever lived (and the most loveable) and the most impossible.”
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In the fall of 1933, while the affair with MacDonald was still heated, Margaret took a three-week holiday in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. She told her husband that she wanted to have time alone with Grant before he returned to medical school, so that she could get to know him better as an adult, but Juliet Rublee, who would have known of the dalliance, also came along for part of the time. On September 18, the anniversary of their marriage, Margaret wrote and told Noah she missed him, assuring him they would never again be apart on that day, a promise that turned out to be as hollow as it always had been in the past.

She spent much of 1934 without him, though in what was surely an effort at rapprochement, she did bring him to Washington for that year's round of lobbying for birth control reform. They found a lovely old house to rent with charming antique furnishings and a lovely yard, and they took it over Noah's objections about a faulty furnace and other impracticalities. No sooner did the Congressional session end in the spring, however, than she was off to London—then on to Truro for a brief summer holiday, while Noah for reasons unclear went to Woodstock, New York, and the house at Fishkill was rented to help pay the bills.

In July she and Grant left again for Europe, en route to Moscow, where they met up with H. G. Wells and his son, Kip. Noah met her in France on her return, but later that fall, she took Stuart out to Tucson, Arizona, to recuperate in the dry desert climate from an operation he had to correct a chronic sinus infection. Again Noah stayed behind. They reunited in Florida in December.

The following two years brought more of the same. Noah reconciled himself to being alone, while Margaret occupied herself with other interests and a renewed commitment to the birth control cause at home and abroad. They were together at length only for holidays. MacDonald finally gave up on her and married someone else, but he remained Margaret's close friend and occasional lover for years thereafter, and even as they grew older, she was able to rekindle his ardent passions whenever they met. Her capacity to disarm the men who loved her apparently did not diminish with age. Years later, his feelings scarcely moderated, he wrote: “Please understand that you are far and away the most important feature of my life. All else are details that must be made to fit in where they belong in proper order.” And on another occasion: “Glorious Margaret, without your loving coming into my life it would have been drab and hardly worthwhile. You have the god-like power to touch a soul and make it bear better fruit than seemed possible!”
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Indeed, as she grew older and needier, Margaret refused all the more adamantly to compromise her personal freedoms or to put aside her public obligations in order to be with Noah or any other man. Yet far from thinking of herself as selfish in this regard, she accused her beleaguered husband of insensitivity to the stress and complications of her own predicament and said that if she was to be constantly misunderstood, she would have to keep far away from him even more. She would simply no longer tolerate his interference with anything she wanted to do.
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In all ways, then, Margaret seemed curiously emboldened by political defeat. The intransigence of Congress and the President infuriated but did not deter her. Instead, she vowed to maintain a presence in Washington, replicating the tactics of the suffragists, who had ultimately made themselves such a nuisance that Congress broke down and enfranchised women, in part just to be rid of them. To this end, she picked up a key endorsement in 1935 from the General Federation of Women's Clubs, whose New York membership had given birth control a critical boost in 1920. This time, however, the parent organization spoke for 2 million women nationwide.

Birth control also got the nod of the Young Women's Christian Association, sister organization to the very institution that had so many years earlier given Anthony Comstock his start. Even more important, perhaps, Margaret's legislative progress spawned a separate but complementary lobbying campaign by a committee of physicians funded by the Rockefeller family. This National Medical Committee proved no more successful than she on Capitol Hill, but it did succeed in convincing the still timid and noncommittal American Medical Association to sponsor a long overdue inquiry into the birth control issue. She was less successful herself with the American Nurses Association, which turned down a birth control endorsement at its annual convention. “Ah, self-control! Why don't you advocate that?” the association's prim president asked privately, when she reluctantly met with a birth control lobbyist.
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In February of 1935, Margaret also scored a crucial public relations victory by securing free radio time in New York to broadcast the closing program of a birth control fund-raising dinner. A major media breakthrough came again several months later when the Columbia Broadcasting System lifted its long-standing ban and gave her national air time for a talk on family planning. “The time has come for us to think of Family Security through Family Planning,” she said, calling for support of legalized birth control on the simple grounds that it would secure the health of mothers, the earning power of fathers, and the well-being of children. The talk elicited hundreds of letters of appreciation and requests for information, none more eloquent than the brief note of a Brooklyn woman who paraphrased Roosevelt: “We need women like you to open the eyes of blind statesmen regarding the true position of long-suffering womanhood in our country,” she wrote. “It's about time the ‘forgotten woman' was remembered.” Of course, there were dissenters, as well, including two men who equated Sanger's speech with the defense of “thievery, racketeering, murder or prostitution.”
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Yet even as she spoke, birth control bills put before the 74th Congress were tabled in committee without so much as a hearing, while her lobbyists worked to stop a bill, introduced by Postmaster General James Farley, that was intended to protect consumers from fraud by cracking down on the transport of unregulated commercial contraceptives. As a prominent political operative among Catholics, Farley was a reasonable target of suspicion among birth control advocates, who feared that his efforts might also jeopardize the judicially guaranteed right of legitimate physicians and clinics to mail contraceptives.

Margaret again tried to reach the President personally, asking that he consider a new, measured approach to birth control, by creating a “population bureau” for the study of the effect of fertility patterns on “public health and social conservation.” She received no recorded response but did not attack the Roosevelt administration publicly. Her restraint may have been influenced by Wells, who had spent a private evening in the White House in 1934 and come away especially impressed by the President's peculiar ability to at once maintain an open and flexible mind toward new ideas, while, at the same time, keeping “in constant touch with political realities and possibilities.” Margaret and H. G. had been in Russia together immediately after that interview with Roosevelt, and Juliet Rublee, still a Washington insider, was also encouraging her to deal with the administration quietly and confidentially, at least until the election of 1936.
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