Woman of Valor (54 page)

Indeed, in 1942, committing itself to child spacing rather than absolute limitation, the organization, through a membership referendum engineered by Rose, officially changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Margaret vigorously objected to this decision. While she had been among the first to market family planning as a tie-in to the New Deal, she was attached to the birth control nomenclature as a matter of sentiment and worried that the alternative concept, though perhaps friendlier, had none of the force or conviction that made the cause interesting and important, especially to women. The word “control,” as she once defined it, meant “power to regulate,” but just what did “planning” mean? “Family planning for what, for summer vacations?” her niece Olive liked to ask in jest. The change of name was symbolic to Margaret of a weak and spineless leadership, yet she was no longer in a position to enforce her will, though, as in the past, the new federation was largely dependent for its livelihood on donors she had recruited.
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In 1940, Albert and Mary Lasker had pledged $25,000 to the federation for four years, with the provision that their contribution be matched by two comparable gifts. Enchanted by Margaret personally, and convinced of the central importance of birth control to the country's economic and social vitality, the Laskers could not understand why the movement continued to beg for money. They encouraged a bolder fund-raising effort, but the only donations that came in of any substantial size were from Sanger admirers like Doris Duke Cromwell and assorted members of the Rosenwald and Rockefeller families. Mrs. Cromwell gave $15,000 with the express provision that it “be expended under the supervision and at the discretion of Mrs. Sanger,” while Arthur Packard of the Rockefeller staff also defended Sanger against the innuendo of Rose and his staff. Some people find her “uncooperative and lacking the best judgment of any idea that is not her own,” he wrote in a memorandum to his files, but “I have always found her judgment to have a rather good foundation in fact.”
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Rose did streamline Planned Parenthood's tangled bureaucracy and vastly improved the relationship of the national office with its affiliates, but Margaret and Mary Lasker could never forgive him his cautious personality. They had little patience for what they viewed as a caretaker approach to the job and openly challenged his reluctance to establish a higher public profile—to exhibit “more of the crusading spirit, more fire, and more fight,” as they put it to him directly in one of their last meetings. Rose, on the other hand, was maneuvering Planned Parenthood to serve as an unofficial agent of government in cooperation with public health programs and had recruited a public health service official to become medical director. To this end, he believed in the virtue of walking softly and provoking no further controversy, especially with the Catholic Church. Much to Margaret's chagrin, he had the board adopt a policy saying it would avoid religious controversy and emphasize only the health and social values of family planning. As Americans mobilized for war, he was also anxious that the organization not seem unpatriotic by encouraging a low birthrate. Whether a more militant approach would, in fact, have made greater inroads is impossible to determine. Certainly the coming of World War II gave new energy to the argument that American women ought to have more babies. Catholic journalists, in particular, stepped up their attack on “the woman's movement” and on the birth control movement for encouraging women to be “shirkers,” and Margaret was identified personally as a “communist” and “anarchist.”
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What is more, family planning advocates confronted an absence of resources for domestic initiatives of any kind that was even more devastating to their cause than the government's prior lack of will or fear of reprisal. Under Rose and his successors during the 1950s, Planned Parenthood foundered as it struggled to rid itself of a belligerent feminist reputation and to establish institutional credibility in a postwar era dominated by pronatalist sentiment, family values, and a tradition of urban social welfare voluntarism in which Catholic institutions steadily increased their influence. Having substantially raised its standards for affiliation, the federation actually ran fewer clinics in 1960 than it had twenty years earlier. It would rebound only as a result of technological advances in contraception, expanded public assistance, and a resurgent feminist movement.
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As the nation turned its attention away from domestic social issues during the war, Margaret retreated to Tucson where a voluminous correspondence kept her in touch with what was going on in birth control affairs, not just in New York, but around the world. With two sons serving in the military, she also had a high personal stake in the war's outcome. What is more, she was engaged intellectually and emotionally in foreign affairs as a result of her frequent trips to Europe and Asia. She spoke with the authority of an eyewitness to the pressure of internal population growth on the rise of expansionist, fascist militarism in Germany and Japan. In so doing, she anticipated the link between population and world peace that captured the attention of United States policymakers in the postwar era, and she prepared herself for it. Always one to be where the action is—never allowing herself to fret for long about an obstacle in her path—she turned her attentions abroad.

The new Birth Control Federation has “eliminated the kickers and consolidated the boosters,” she had written in 1939 to her old friend George Plummer of the Rosicrucian Society, where she had long ago entrusted her spirit. “For myself I feel that twenty-five years is long enough to carry the baby, and so I want to give the younger generation the opportunity to push the cause over the top, and now within the next few years I hope to do a little research into my own individual life and to see which way this individual should go.”
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If she had lost her appetite for people and politics at home, and they for her, still, the whole world beckoned.

F
rom her safe harbor in Tucson, Margaret kept up a steady correspondence during the war with friends in London, whose plight she felt deeply. More than once, she remarked of her relief that Havelock Ellis had not lived to experience the terror of a second European conflict, but far from its corridors, she also seemed uncharacteristically disengaged. There were intermittent moments of commitment, to be sure: some help for George and Juliet Rublee, who were trying to evacuate Jewish friends from Germany; a contribution at the request of Lillian Hellman for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain; care packages of money, tea, cookies, canned goods, and other provisions for H. G., Hugh and Janet, the Drysdales, and Françoise, and still later, offers of peaceful shelter far away from the German bombings there.

She certainly kept herself current with foreign affairs. Entries in her journal between 1938 and 1941 remark on the historic occasions of Chamberlain's audience with Hitler, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the formal declaration of hostilities by England and France, the controversy over Lend Lease and, of course, the fateful Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yet, so deep was her dread of the carnage of war, and so intense was her contempt for Winston Churchill—whom she held personally responsible for the worst manifestations of British arrogance in India—that she could only resign herself to the inevitability of American involvement on behalf of England and its Europeans allies. Though she grew increasingly alarmed by the Nazi threat, she would never bring herself to endorse American participation outright, as her more belligerent friends like H. G. and Juliet were pressing her to do.

“So it has come to pass as many Pro British Americans have wished & prayed it to be,” she wrote in her journal, after the radio carried the fateful news of December 7, 1941. “Nation after nation will now join in this madness & God only can keep hearts true.”
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For Margaret, World War II simply confirmed the failure of progressive reformers like herself who had tried for so long to stimulate interest in peaceful, scientific principles of planning for control of population, natural resources, and economic growth. She put most of the blame for this predicament on the shoulders of men but was willing to let women share some responsibility. Invited to join a 1940 Centennial Congress celebrating the political and social advancement of women, she responded contemptuously that it hardly seemed that emancipated women had gotten the world very far at all. She took the opportunity to chide the conference organizer, the now elderly Carrie Chapman Catt, for the continued unwillingness of the organized woman's movement in the United States to support birth control as a fundamental right, and she must therefore have been surprised and grateful several months later when Catt's colleague, Alice Paul, sent warm congratulations on the occasion of a celebration for birth control. Margaret in return agreed to lend her name to the advisory council of Paul's National Woman's Party, but when the group did nothing further to make its support official, she complained again to Nora Stanton Barney, the activist granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that organized women “really are so smugly satisfied with appearances and make no effort to achieve the reality” of equal rights with men.

On her own, Margaret spoke out against the increased hazards of sex discrimination during the war and for the need to protect the rights of women replacing male workers on the home front. During the summer of 1940 she visited Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park to talk about a national health training program for women, an idea she had already proposed to various administration officials, encouraging them to train civilian women as nurse's aides, nutritionists, and in other skills that would benefit American citizens, help advance military preparedness, and not incidentally, promote the dissemination of contraception. In response, however, she received what appears to have been little more than a form letter from some minor government bureaucrat, who compounded the slight by misspelling her name. There was no federal money, and no broad institutional support, for the kind of expanded domestic health initiative she envisioned. All available health-care funds were being channeled to serve the troops abroad. Ironically, the greatest interest in her ideas came from the left, and after the
The Daily Worker
published an article she wrote on these subjects, she received a friendly middle-of-the-night phone call in Tucson from her old radical friend Marie Equi.
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The only real passion Margaret ever seemed to muster for the war effort derived from her hope that the Allies, if victorious, would punish the Roman Catholic Church for its apparent collusion with Mussolini and the Fascists. H. G. Wells shared her intensifying paranoia about the ties of the Vatican to the Axis powers and about the divided loyalties of American Catholics, who were in a position to influence the Roosevelt Administration's foreign policies. In 1943, Wells wrote
Crux Ansata
, a short polemic recapitulating an intellectual critique of Catholicism and its irrationalities that he had first published in his
Short History of the World
. He also then went on to pose the thorny question of why Rome was being spared Allied bombing raids that were pummelling other European cultural capitals. Published on both sides of the Atlantic, the book sparked a biting controversy and provided the basis of the last surviving correspondence between Margaret and H. G., who died in London in 1946, also just short of the age of eighty.
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With the passing of some of her dearest friends—with the world wholly absorbed by the war—Margaret made the personal decision to “stick out” her marriage, as she blithely characterized the nature of her intent in a journal entry for 1940. She also observed that Noah had mellowed a bit, once he got used to having her around more, and she was finding him less irritable than in the past. Confronted with a wartime rationing of gasoline, the couple had moved from the Tucson hills to a grand house closer to the center of town and just a few doors down from the Arizona Inn. Summers, of course, were spent back in Willowlake, but to escape the mounting tension of the news from Europe, Margaret and Noah took a Caribbean cruise together in August of that year, and a trip to Nassau with George and Juliet Rublee the following spring, where Margaret inaugurated a birth control program in the local hospital and had tea with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

This turned out to be their last holiday together, for Noah's health declined markedly through 1942. Normally stoic, he began to complain of feeling weak during the summer at Willowlake, where he suffered the first of several strokes. Barely strong enough to return to Arizona in the fall, he spent the entire winter in bed, content to gaze at the lovely mountains in the distance. By Margaret's telling, she “was close to him the whole year…the household revolved around his every wish, his food and his comforts,” and they were alone together when he died peacefully in his sleep on June 21, 1943, just as he had hoped he would. In a conversation shortly before he died, he told her he could remember nothing about his life before she entered into it. “Only since I knew you have I lived,” is what she remembered him saying, an idealized rendering of the marriage, to be sure, but a comforting one that may have been true enough for an old man.
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Noah's body was cremated, and Stuart and Grant flew out to pay their respects, but none of the Slee children or grandchildren ever turned up. Though Jim Slee was living not far away in California, Noah had made no attempt at a reconciliation with his eldest son, or with his only daughter, Elizabeth Willis, who acknowledged the occasion only by sending flowers. What remained of Noah's great fortune in real estate and stock must have been put in Margaret's name already, and this left her with more than a comfortable income on which to live, though she was never the enormously wealthy woman she would have been had the Depression not taken its toll. Noah had been paying their living expenses from an annuity that expired when he died, and less than $500 was left in his estate when it was probated. Loans still outstanding to his children were apparently forgiven, and Margaret instead made several subsequent attempts to restore a cordial relationship.
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Even at his death, Margaret had surprisingly little to say about her husband. She had mentioned him only once in her
Autobiography
, when she casually dismissed him as the “generous man” she married despite his “foibles.” To Dorothy Brush, she acknowledged only that “22 years of
companionship
has made an impression & I shall find it difficult to go on the stage of life alone.” Brush did better at capturing the essence of the relationship in the remarks she delivered at a memorial service at Willowlake in September, when Noah's ashes were buried.

“Margaret was quicksilver,” she said. “You [Noah] never could quite catch her & she kept you always fascinated.…Without her, heaven won't be heaven for you, dear Noah.”

With her husband finally gone, the “petty irritation & annoyances are wiped out,” Margaret later disclosed in the privacy of her journal. “Death removes them all. It wipes out the memories of the unreal. Only the goodness, kindness & loving things remain in my thoughts of J Noah. I'm glad of that.” It took several years alone, however, before she was willing to acknowledge him graciously in public, and before she ever once consented to identify herself as “Mrs. Margaret Sanger Slee.” Yet quite unlike Havelock Ellis after his wife's death, she never made too much of these posthumous gestures to social convention. She never mistook sentimentality for love.
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With so little emotion invested in her marriage, Margaret had few problems adjusting to life on her own. There were hundreds of telegrams and letters of sympathy demanding response, and Noah had scarcely been laid to rest, when she was called back East after Nan Higgins suffered a heart attack and then died suddenly in January of 1944. In Margaret's lowest moments, she had always relied on her older sister's resourcefulness, and this death, much more than Noah's, came as a great shock to her. Nan was buried next to his gravesite in the plot at Willowlake, and Margaret wrote in her journal of the “big spot” left in her life. Feeling especially bereft in New York City, a place she could not visualize without the sister who had been there whenever she needed her, she quickly returned to Tucson, her despair intensified by the fact that relations with Ethel Higgins remained distant and tense. Nan had been living in an apartment Margaret kept above the clinic on West 16th Street. Ethel moved in when she died, but the two surviving women saw little of one another. For all practical purposes, Margaret was without sororal affection for the first time in her life.

What is more, she was frantic with concern for Grant and Stuart, both of whom shipped overseas as military doctors in the fall of 1943. Grant joined the navy, went off on an aircraft carrier to the South Pacific and then commanded a casualty control ship. Stuart—despite a medical history of sinus troubles and a complicating tubercular infection—finally made it into the army, and served with the American invasion forces on the beaches of Normandy, where he rose to the rank of major. “Thank God they are trained to save lives not shatter them,” Margaret observed on first hearing of her sons' entering the service. But as the war dragged on, she found it more and more difficult to appease her persistent anxiety. “I've always said since Peggy's death that life could not hold me long if another of my children went before I do,” she wrote in her journal. “It is lonely. Lots to do. East-West with Pearl Buck. My painting & B.C. All big interests, but one gets a loneliness nevertheless.”
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Concern for the whereabouts and well-being of Stuart and Grant touched the wellsprings of her emotional life, and knowing that only one other human being in the world could possibly share her feelings, she reached out across the years to contact Bill Sanger, who was supporting his second wife and daughter by working as a humble architect on the staff of New York City's Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity. The letter she wrote him on this occasion was destroyed, along with the rest of her correspondence, but, as always, she saved Bill's long, if halting, response, which overflowed with sentiments very close to those she was feeling.

“How strange it all seems,” Bill wrote, “this meeting the final outcome of one's earlier view or ideal with the actual combat. This started out to be a war of invasion but it has reached the scope of world wide revolution.” Pausing to reflect on the perversity of Fascism, with its intent to annihilate the innocents—pious Jews, on the one hand, and idealistic Marxists, on the other—the letter then went on: “Yes that mighty brow of old Karl would have been all wrinkled up if he had lived to witness the events of these times.”

Bill reserved his most touching observations for personal matters—how he used to carry Stuart up Locust Hill in Hastings; how little Grant, all spruced up in a white corduroy suit, had once waddled into a neighbor's muddy lettuce patch; how Grant as a young man had come to see him from time to time, while Stuart resolutely stayed away. It was Margaret's apparent mention of Peggy, however, that aroused his deepest emotions.

“I have tried in the perspective of time to quiet the inward tears as the years rolled by; one had to steel oneself or go mad,” he admitted. “I am told that time heals all wounds—yes some—but there [are] those that will linger to the last moment of living memory.”

He went on with several disjointed references—from the furnishings for which Margaret and he had once shared great affection, to the eclipse of the art world in New York—and then closed his letter on a poignant note: “Grant & Stuart are in the service,” he wrote, “and now in my little corner I feel I am part of the big surge to win this war.”
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