Woman of Valor (59 page)

The Williamsburg conference nonetheless resolved to establish a permanent organization to address the population question “at a high level of professional competence and public esteem,” and following a year's worth of continued discussion, the Population Council, Inc., was founded, with research and education as its stated purposes. The demographer and former U.S. Army official, Frederick Osborn, moved over from the United Nations to take charge under the direction of a board that included Rockefeller, Notestein, Parran, and other notables from government and academia who would give the population issue substantial credibility. Since this was to be a mobilization of professionals in fields where few women were represented, there were none on the board, nor on any of its advisory committees, though one, an assistant treasurer, did serve on the administrative staff. Nor was any sensitivity apparent at this juncture to the fact that no non-Westerners, and no people of color, were included in the decision making.

A few of the participants were privately skeptical. Marshall Balfour, formerly a regional director for the Rockefeller Foundation in the Far East, worried that the objectives of the new organization were too grandiose and—perhaps aware of the restraints on Rockefeller family giving—wondered where the money was going to come from. Bill Vogt also questioned the sole emphasis on scholarship, suggesting that “if we are to wait until all the data are in before taking action we shall find human beings piled up like cordwood.”

In its first three years, however, the Population Council would authorize close to $400,000 in research grants in demography, and just under $100,000 in medical research, quickly establishing its institutional credibility and quietly laying the basis for subsequent technical assistance and medical research on a far grander scale. Every dollar of this initial support came from J.D.R. III personally, so his brothers could not be implicated, but the total substantially exceeded his entire family's aggregate contribution to birth control efforts during the prior three decades. Family gifts to the domestic and international Planned Parenthood organizations would continue, but only in insignificant amounts.

The first annual report of the Population Council did acknowledge a debt to prior initiatives in population research by the Milbank Memorial Fund, the Scripps Foundation, the National Committee on Maternal Health, and the United Nations, but again no reference of any kind was made to Margaret or to Planned Parenthood. The council would jealously guard its autonomy from “propagandists” on the grounds that only as an avowedly scientific organization, steering clear of controversy and dedicated to the narrow proposition that unchecked population remained an impediment to economic growth, could it hope to make itself eligible for major grants from controversy-shy institutions like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.
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When Margaret actually learned of Williamsburg—or what she may have thought about the news—is not clear. A passing reference to J.D.R. III in a 1953 letter to Clarence Gamble advises that trying to raise money for international work from him was a waste of time but blames the problem on unsupportive Planned Parenthood officials in New York—perhaps, sadly, proving the wisdom of Arthur Packard's observation that she had lost the capacity to work cooperatively or even to see things clearly. What is clear is that by refusing, for the time being, to fund the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Rockefeller staff made its weak assessment of the organization's future into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1954 and again in the following year, Dana Creel, who succeeded the retired Arthur Packard as the family's principal philanthropic adviser, advised Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., that Margaret's international work would probably never get off the ground and could not be recommended as a good charitable investment, while tactfully reminding them of their son's new competitive venture in the same field. Knowing of the long history of personal relations between Margaret and the senior Rockefellers, however, Creel, after checking with Population Council staff, did authorize a gift of $22,000 to help send delegates to an IPPF conference in Tokyo. It would do no harm, he explained, and would be “a nice thing to do for Mrs. Sanger.”
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While all this was going on, Margaret was spending much of her time in Tucson, quite literally willing her body to repair itself through her daily courses of spiritual meditation and through intermittent indulgences in just about every health fad then known. She exercised to improve her circulation. She fasted on juice. She explored various diets, including yogurt, wheat germ, and honey, a concoction then just gaining notoriety as health food. She took at least thirty units a day of Vitamin E, and on learning that papayas are particularly rich in restorative substances, she had them shipped directly from Hawaii.

Still, there was plenty to make her heart ache. Her own situation distressed her no more than that of her adored son, Grant, who suddenly found himself overwhelmed by acute depression. Years of ignoring deeply buried anxieties and insecurities had finally caught up as Grant struggled to make a success of his medical practice and to support a large, demanding family. Angry and despairing of the future, he apparently confronted his mother with his problems during vacations they spent together in Tucson in March of 1953, and at Fishers Island in July. There is no record of what exactly transpired between them, but Edwina wrote following his return from Tucson to say that he looked better but “is not anymore cheerful about life in general & the income tax didn't help much.”

Long accustomed to tolerating turmoil in Stuart's life, Margaret could simply not find room to accommodate it in her younger son. With characteristic optimism she tried to ensure Grant's happiness by relieving economic stress. She sent checks for the children and for household improvements and helped arrange for a trip of rest and relaxation in Europe, convincing herself that he suffered from no disease that some sightseeing in Spain or golf in Scotland could not cure. Tortured by far more elusive demons, however, Grant abandoned his private surgical practice in Westchester County in 1954 and took a less demanding post as a clinical professor at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. Edwina inherited some family money, so the children were well provided for. The more significant loss was one of spirit, for like his father before him, Grant never completely recovered the resolve and enthusiasm of his youth.
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What his mother couldn't deny, however, she simply kept herself too busy to worry about. Sumiki Kato Ohmori, the stepdaughter of Shidzue Kato, lived with Margaret in Tucson during 1953 and recalls her as warm, genuine, and generous. The two women spent hours together reading
The New York Times
aloud for practice so that Sumiki could improve her English, and they also practiced cooking Western style. Margaret lavished a motherly affection on the young Japanese girl, held numerous parties and receptions in her honor, and paid all her living expenses.
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Margaret was also enjoying the flattering attentions of a new biographer. Lawrence Lader, a young Harvard graduate and contributer to
The New Yorker
and
Esquire
, spent parts of the winters of 1953 and 1954 with her in Tucson and Santa Barbara, and though he found her totally absorbed in her own mythology, he couldn't help being swept up by her powerful drive and feeling. She was still quite a handsome woman, by his recollection, very attentive to her hair and her skin, but her most memorable quality, by his telling, was her voice. With her eyes sparkling and her head half-cocked in a characteristic pose, she was able to captivate him for hours at a sitting with intricately woven and often very funny tales of her dramatic past. She also gave him access to many of her papers at the Library of Congress and at Smith.

Lader spent more than two years on his book project, interviewing just about everyone he could find, with the notable exceptions of William Sanger and Ethel Higgins, who both resolutely refused to talk. But having placed herself in the hands of an acolyte, Margaret then found it necessary to disavow the results.
The Margaret Sanger Story and The Fight for Birth Control
, as the book was ploddingly titled, is a reasonably well-researched and documented work, but Margaret had retained the right to edit the final manuscript, and it wound up recapitulating many illusions from her autobiographies and also creating some new ones. She quite clearly used Lader, for example, to correct the slight she had suffered in Havelock Ellis's memoir, and the book leaves the reader with the incorrect, but unmistakably deliberate, impression that Ellis had been the great love of her life, a situation that caused the hapless Françoise Cyon no end of consternation and all but brought an end to the long friendship between the two women. Deeply hurt, Françoise claimed that the book pictured Ellis as “a fool, a parasite and myself as having been handed over your leavings in his affection.”

The essential problem with the Lader book, however, is less its factual inaccuracies than its sentimental excess. Dorothy Brush put it best when she accused Lader of enveloping Margaret in “clouds of gush,” and Margaret herself disavowed the finished product, admitting candidly at one point that Lader hadn't balanced her finer qualities with her “pigheadedness and stubbornness,” while complaining elsewhere that the manuscript was a portrait of “Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale.” Yet never once did she acknowledge her own contribution to these distortions.
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Margaret was also preoccupied during these years by a dramatic breakthrough in the field of contraceptive research, for which she was indirectly responsible. Though little progress had been made toward the development of a biological contraceptive, the possibility of immunizing the female body to fertilization with antigens derived from plants remained under investigation. With developments in the fields of endocrinology and steroid chemistry, the pursuit of an artificial agent to inhibit female fertility suddenly began to look more and more promising.

During the 1920s the innovative, Rockefeller-supported Bureau of Social Hygiene had funded a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, under the sponsorship of the National Research Council. Among its accomplishments was the discovery and isolation of estrogen, the principal hormone secreted within the female ovaries, which is responsible for changes in the uterine lining that permit adaptations necessary for reproduction. Subsequently, scientists at the University of Rochester also identified progesterone, the hormone secreted by the ruptured egg sack of the ovary and later by the placenta, which allows the uterus to accept and maintain the fertilized ovum. The therapeutic applications of hormone extracts to stimulate conception in cases of natural sterility were quickly recognized, but the costs of producing the substances from animals proved prohibitive. By 1943, however, an American chemist working in Mexico, and building upon his earlier research with steroid substances derived from plants, had successfully synthesized progesterone, using the roots of a wild Mexican yam. By this time a Columbia University researcher had also discovered that beyond its applications in sterility cases, the therapeutic administration of steroids can inhibit ovulation by, in effect, tricking the body into a state of pseudo-pregnancy. With this determination, the various scientific principles necessary for the manufacture of synthetic hormonal contraceptives existed. But still missing were the motivation and the money necessary to assemble them in a manner that would safely work for women.
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The two came together in 1953 at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, founded by Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Hudson Hoagland. These two intrepid survivors of academic politics and tenure rejection at Harvard had first found their way to nearby Clark University and then, with the backing of a prestigious board of directors, struck out on their own as scientific entrepreneurs. The early success of their enterprise rested on their expertise in steroid research, which was thriving as a result of grants from the federal government, assorted voluntary agencies, and the drug industry. Great interest in steroids had been generated, however, not for the purposes of contraceptive research, but for the alleviation of diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, which is caused by a malfunction of the adrenal glands.

The Worcester Foundation had lost out in a fierce competition to synthesize cortisone cost-effectively on behalf of its principal benefactor, G. D. Searle & Company, a drug manufacturer in Illinois, which then refused Dr. Pincus's proposal for the development of a hormonal contraceptive. In the interim, however, he had identified two highly motivated women who were prepared to help him in this new venture.

At the urging of Abraham Stone, Margaret first met Gregory Pincus in 1951 and soon thereafter introduced him to Katherine McCormick, an old friend and occasional birth control contributor, whose husband had just died and left a substantial inheritance from the International Harvester Company. The McCormicks had been married since 1904, shortly after Katherine graduated as one of the first two women to receive a degree in science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After showing great promise in the management of his family's business, however, young Stanley McCormick suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered, and his wife was forced to find a new focus for her life through her philanthropy. She first heard Margaret speak in Boston in 1917 and then helped her smuggle diaphragms into the United States. In 1927, she also entertained the delegates to the World Population Conference at her lavish château in Geneva.

Trained in biology, McCormick developed a special interest in contraceptive technology and research, but during the many years she corresponded with Margaret about developments in this field, she was also spending a great deal of time and money searching for a cure to her husband's schizophrenia. This inevitably led her to endocrinologists at Harvard who were investigating the possibility that some kind of malfunction of the adrenal cortex might cause the disease by producing a hormonal deficiency, which undermines the body's ability to deal with stress. Quite by coincidence, these Harvard scientists became collaborators of Hudson Hoagland's own clinical research with mentally ill patients at the Worcester State Hospital, though they were never able to develop an effective therapy.
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