Part 18

I was almost startled that so many of those from whom I hoped for co-operation should turn out in such numbers. Walter Lippmann said, “This will kick the football of birth control straight across to the Pacific.” And, indeed, the social agents, like the plumed darts of a seeded dandelion puffed into the air, scattered to every quarter of the country; thereafter, to the West and back again, I heard echoes of the meeting.

During the previous weeks in various cities it had been hard to be alone a minute. Women with the inevitable babies kept calling on me in hotels and so did men setting out to their jobs early in the morning, carrying their lunch boxes. I was so mentally weary with strain that it seemed I must get away from humanity for a little while if I were to retain my sanity. Worst of all was the ever-present loneliness and grief—the apparition of Peggy who wanted me to recognize she had gone and was no longer here.

I slipped into St. Louis two days ahead so that I could be by myself, registering at the Hotel Jefferson and asking not to be disturbed. But the telephone rang before I even had my suitcase unpacked; a reporter had seen my name at the desk and requested an interview. I replied I could not give it; I was not in St. Louis so far as he was concerned. Saying to myself, “Good, I’ve escaped that,” I went to bed. But next morning a ribbon on the front page of his paper announced I was “hiding” in the city. In my ignorance I had violated the etiquette observed by welcoming committees, and mine was highly indignant. I had little rest.

Among the group of backers was Robert Minor, an old friend, formerly an outstanding cartoonist on the New York _World_, who had been dropped because he had refused to draw the kind of pictures about Germany his employers wanted. It had been arranged that I was to have the Victoria Theater Sunday night, which had already been paid for in advance so that the meeting could be free. However, at a quarter to eight when we arrived, the building was in total darkness and the doors were locked. The proprietor’s office was closed; he was not at home; there was no means of finding out anything. Actually, he had temporarily effaced himself because he did not wish to admit that he had been threatened with a Catholic boycott of his theater, and had been promised protection against a possible suit for breach of contract.

At least two thousand people had gathered and were filling the air with catcalls, hisses, hurrahs, cries of “the Catholics run the town! Break in the door!” Minor urged me to stand up in the car and give my speech, but without its proper setting I was lost; here was a type of battle needing an experienced campaigner. Although I did not feel adequate, I began, but my voice could not surmount the uproar.

I was barely under way when a police sergeant reached up and seized my arm. “Here now, you’ll have to come down. You can’t talk here.”

“Speech! Speech!” yelled the crowd. “Go on.”

But the owner of the car, to my great relief, started his engine. I sat back in the seat with a thump and off we went.

The incident had repercussions. The Men’s City Club, regarding the event as a blot on the fair name of the town, asked me to speak at their luncheon the next day, and I promised to wait over. Although forty Catholics then resigned in a body, St. Louis would not be coerced, and more than a hundred new members joined immediately.

William Marion Reedy, owner and publisher of the famous _Reedy’s Mirror_, had been at the closed theater. He printed a cartoon showing the Capitol of the United States with a papal crown on it, stated editorially that the Pope was now dictating to America what it should hear and think, and emphasized the consequent dangers to the country if any religious group were allowed such domination. “No idea let loose in the world has ever been suppressed. Ideas cannot be jailed in _oubliettes_,” was his peroration.

After I had left the Middle West and reached the Rocky Mountains the atmosphere changed. I was struck even by the attitude of the bellboys and waiters at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. In New York you were served by trained foreign men and boys—Italian and French. Here they were American-born, blue-eyed, fair-complexioned, strong-jawed. Without bowing or obsequiousness they brought your food and carried your bags as if doing you a favor. You hesitated to give them a tip, though, as a matter of fact, they never refused it.

I loved Denver itself. It seemed to me the women there were the most beautiful I had seen—fresh, charming, alive. They had long had the vote and used it effectively. Because they believed in Judge Ben Lindsey’s juvenile court, they had kept him in office in spite of the concerted antagonism of picturesque but corrupt politicians.

Although Judge Lindsey had bitter enemies in exalted places, he had loyal friends also. When Theodore Roosevelt had stopped there in 1912 on his Western Swing, the Judge was facing opposition. The city fathers did not want to include him as a substantial citizen on their platform committee of welcome. Roosevelt peered vainly about among all these bankers and business men. “Where’s Ben Lindsey?” he asked.

“We don’t talk about him around here.”

“Don’t we? Well, he’s a friend of mine. I shan’t say a word until Ben Lindsey comes and sits on this platform beside me.”

Nor would he speak until Lindsey arrived; everybody had to wait.

It was a high point for me at this time, so soon after my own court appearance, to have Judge Lindsey preside at my meeting. Formerly my listeners, with the exception of Indianapolis, had been chiefly of the working class. Here they were wives of doctors, lawyers, petty officials, members of clubs.

I was more than delighted to have an audience which had the power to change public opinion. The “submerged tenth” had no need of theories nor the proof of the advantages of family limitation; they were the proof—the living example of the need. It was vitally important to have reflective hearers who not only themselves used contraceptives, but who advanced thought through literature, discussions, and papers. To them I was telling the story of those millions who could not come, and trying to relate it as I knew it to be true. Stimulating them offered the best possibility of getting something done.

Judge Lindsey invited me to sit on the bench with him the next morning, and I watched enthralled the way he handled his cases. The familiar court method was punishment, and the more punishment the better. But he operated on the new psychology. For instance, he attempted to inculcate a sense of responsibility in one boy who had disobeyed his mother and run away from school, by showing him his indebtedness to her, how he should be helping rather than causing her grief.

The same tactics were employed in the case of Joseph, charged with assault on his wife, Nelly, who stood silently in the background, shawl over her head. Lindsey read the evidence, then said, “Joseph, come over here.”

Joseph stepped nearer, appearing somewhat guilty, as men of his status usually did when they came into court.

“What’s this I hear about you? Why did you strike Nelly?”

“She made me mad,” Joseph mumbled.

“Joseph, turn your head and look at your wife. Look at her! Look!—thin, pale, weak, and you a big strong man striking that delicate little woman. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to beat Nelly? You who promised to love, honor, and protect her?”

The reprimanding lasted fully two minutes. Finally tears began to spring from Nelly’s eyes and to run down her face. She moved forward, took Joseph by the hand, and said, “Oh, he’s not so bad, Judge.” Joseph then embraced her. Instead of punishing him, which would in effect have also been punishing Nelly, Judge Lindsey put him on parole to report back in two months’ time, and husband and wife went out arm in arm.

One of the hardest things for a judge in a lower court to combat is the prejudice of the police against those who already have records. Judge Lindsey, when a case came up before him, never took the word of the ward heelers, but had his own secretary, employed and paid by him, go to the home and investigate, and he held the case until this had been done. But I thought then that either Judge Lindsey was heading straight for trouble, or Denver had a kingdom of its own where freedom reigned.

A similar attitude of liberality prevailed on the far side of the Rockies. In many places where I had previously spoken, policemen had been stationed at the doors. Occasionally they had even come to the hotel to read my speech, as at St. Louis and Indianapolis. But in Los Angeles officials of all the city, even the representatives of the women’s police division, met me at the station or called on me in a friendly way.

I was still as terrified of speaking as in the beginning; I used to wake up early in the morning, sometimes before it was light, and feel a ghastly depression coming over me. I realized it was the impending lecture which was so affecting me, and I waited in trepidation for the hour. My physical illness did not grow better until I was on my feet and well into my subject.

Though this was my first visit to the West, I had no time for scenery. Whenever possible I traveled by night and arrived during the day, and by this stage of my trip I was seemingly always tired. The dead grind went on and on, an endless succession of getting off trains, introductions, talking to committees, pouring yourself out—and nothing happening. Physically and psychically it was one of the lowest periods of my life.

Someone in San Francisco did a lovely thing for me. I never knew who she was, but at the end of one meeting she picked me up in her car and swept me away into a forest of huge, tall trees where the sun broke through. There she left me for fifteen minutes in the midst of a cathedral of great evergreens with the sky overhead and myself alone. I have never forgotten the peace and quiet.

I found the West Coast a lively place. Ideas were being constantly thrashed out. Every discourse had a challenging reception. Emma Goldman had been there year after year and had stirred people to dare express themselves. All sorts of individuals catechized you, and if you were not well grounded in your subject you were quickly made aware of your ignorance. The Wobblies spent hours in libraries, not only keeping warm, but trying to find points on which to attack the next lecturer who should come to town. Often those most eager were considered cranks—on diet, free trade, single tax, and free silver—so familiar that their rising was hailed with groans. I never minded having questions asked, though everything I knew was questioned. It was as well for me that, in addition to my Malthus, I knew my Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, my Henry George, Marx, and Kropotkin. It seems to me that today the tone of audiences has deteriorated; queries rarely have the same intellectual grasp behind them.

My welcome at Portland was delightful. The sixty-year-old poet, C. E. S. Wood, dapper and gracious, made a practice of greeting personally women speakers, dedicating poems to them on their arrival, and sending bowers of flowers to their hotel rooms. The City of Roses did much to entertain its visitors.

Here I was invited by a church to address its congregation following the evening service. I had not been very well in the afternoon, but I promised over the telephone to be there if I could. I was late and the meeting had already begun. As I slipped in at the rear I heard the chairman refer to me as a Joan of Arc. Entirely too many Joans of Arc were floating about in those days. Not wishing to be a disappointment I turned right around and walked back to the hotel. Since no one had ever seen me, both my entrance and exit went unremarked.

I admired robust, vital women; they appeared so efficient, and I regretted the fact that I did not give the same impression. I felt that way, but could not help resembling, as someone phrased it, “a hungry flower drooping in the rain.” If I were in a room with ten people and somebody came in who expected me to be present, she invariably approached the biggest woman and addressed her, “How do you do, Mrs. Sanger?” For a brief while I tried to make myself seem more competent-looking by wearing severe suits, but this phase did not last; for one thing, effective simplicity cost money and I did not have enough to be really well-tailored. However, the anonymity due to my appearance was, on the whole, fortunate. I was always able to go along any street, into any restaurant or shop, and seldom be identified, and this made it possible for me to maintain a relatively private life.

A dinner was given at Portland; the chairman, who had seen Susan B. Anthony and many other women with causes come and go, made a short speech of introduction. I rarely remember what people say on such occasions, but one of her statements has remained in my mind. “I would like to see Margaret Sanger again after ten years. Most movements either break you or develop the ‘public figure’ type of face which has become hard and set through long and furious battling. But her cause is different from any other I have ever known. I should like to see how she comes out of it.”

I have thought of this many times—how, if the cause is not great enough to lift you outside yourself, you can be driven to the point of bitterness by public apathy and, within your own circle, by the petty prides and jealousies of little egos which clamor for attention and approbation.

One of the first persons I met in the city was Dr. Marie Equi, of Italian ancestry and Latin fire. Definitely, she was an individualist and a rugged one. Her strong, large body could stand miles and miles on horseback night or day. She had been brought up in the pioneer era when medical work was genuine service. If cowboys or Indians were in fights, difficulties, jail, Dr. Equi was always on hand to speak a good word for them.

It was in Portland that I realized _Family Limitation_, which had been crudely and hurriedly written in 1914, needed revising. The working women to whom it was addressed needed the facts. It had served its purpose in its unpolished state, but the time had now come to reach the middle classes, for whom it required a slightly more professional tone. Dr. Equi gave me genuine assistance in this matter.

The wider the distribution of the pamphlet, the happier I was. Since it had not been copyrighted, anybody who wanted to could reprint as many as he wished, and I.W.W. lumberjacks, for example, transients without families who moved to California for the crop harvesting in the summer, often thus provided themselves with a little extra money as they journeyed from place to place. When they unrolled the blankets draped over their shoulders out dropped a half-dozen or so pamphlets.

An automobile mechanic of Portland had made one of these reprints and asked me whether he could sell it at my next meeting. I myself had never distributed _Family Limitation_ publicly, but if any local people wanted to do so, I had no objection. Accordingly the mechanic and two of his friends sold copies and were arrested. Their trial was postponed so that I could deliver my proposed lectures in Seattle and Spokane.

When these were over I came back to serve as a witness, and at another meeting held the night preceding the trial four more of us were arrested, Dr. Equi, two Englishwomen, and myself. I was tremendously gratified by seeing women for the first time come out openly with courage; over a hundred followed us through the streets to the jail asking to be “let in too. We also have broken the law.”

The city jail was nice and clean and warm. The girls, who were not locked in cells, scampered around talking over their troubles and complaints with Dr. Equi, and receiving condolence and wholesome advice in return.

The seven of us were tried together the next day. Two lawyers took upon themselves the responsibility of defending us, and they were splendid. We were all found guilty. The men were fined ten dollars, which the Judge said they need not pay; the women were not fined at all.

The papers made a great to-do about the affair but it was not a type of publicity of my choosing and did little to bring the goal nearer. The year 1916 was filled with such turmoil, some of it useful, some not. The ferment was working violently. Everybody began starting things here and there. Many radicals, some of whom I did not even know, were distributing leaflets, getting themselves arrested and jailed. Meetings were being held in New York on street corners, at Union Square, Madison Square.

You had to keep a steady head, to be about your business, to make careful decisions, to waste the least possible time on trivialities; it was always a problem to prevent emotional scatter-brains from disturbing the clear flow of the stream. The public, quite naturally, could not be expected to distinguish between purposeful activities and any others carried on in the name of the movement.

Emma Goldman and her campaign manager, Ben Reitman, belatedly advocated birth control, not to further it but strategically to utilize in their own program of anarchism the publicity value it had achieved. Earlier she had made me feel she considered it unimportant in the class struggle. Suddenly, when in 1916 it had demonstrated the fact that it was important, she delivered a lecture on the subject, was arrested, and sentenced to ten days.

Ben Reitman, who used to go up and down the aisles at meetings shouting out Emma Goldman’s _Mother Earth_ in a voice that never needed a megaphone, was also arrested when the police found on the table of her lecture hall in Rochester several books on birth control. One of these was by Dr. Robinson, who had hastily published a volume purporting to give contraceptive information. The unwary purchaser discovered when he came to the section supposed to give him the facts for which he had paid his money that the pages were blank and empty.

Of far greater interest to me was the decision of Jessie Ashley, Ida Rauh, who was Max Eastman’s wife, and Bolton Hall, a leader in the single tax movement, to make test cases on the grounds that the denial of contraceptive information to women whose health might be endangered by pregnancy was unconstitutional since the Constitution guaranteed each individual the right to liberty. These three had themselves arrested on birth control charges. They were all three convicted and given a choice of fines or terms in prison. They paid the former, announcing that they would appeal, but, most unfortunately, as it turned out later, they did not carry through their intentions.

A sympathetic thing if not a wise one was being done by a young man in Boston named Van Kleek Allison, who started handing out leaflets to workers as they emerged from factories. Early in the summer he gave one to a police decoy, was arrested and sentenced to three years. Dear old Boston, the home of the Puritan, rose in all its strength and held a huge meeting of protest on his behalf.

This was the occasion of my first heckling. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, named Goldstein, began belligerently to fling questions at me. It was not in the sense of trying to find out the answers, but as though he had them wrapped up in his own pocket and were merely trying to trap me, and he, in turn, had his answers ready for mine. But after my Western experiences I was not unprepared and was aided, furthermore, by other members of the audience who spoke in my defense when he became almost insulting.

I never made light of questioners and never judged any question too trivial or unworthy of an honest response. I believed that for each person who had the courage to ask there must be at least twenty-five who would like to know, and I have never assumed anyone was seeking to trick me into giving illegal information, even though his inquiry might appear as intended to confuse me or be vindictively thrust at me. I usually replied, “That’s an interesting point. I’m glad you raised it,” and then proceeded to discuss it as best I could.

Another heckling in Albany resulted in a joyous reunion. Somebody in the audience insisted my work was unnecessary. I would ordinarily have paid no attention, not considering the statement at all personal. But there arose a lady, wearing a high lace collar propped up with whalebones, and a hat that sat flat on her head, a ghost out of my school-girl days. “I am acquainted with Margaret Sanger,” she stated. “I have slept with her, I have lived with her, I have worked with her, I have delivered her, and I have named my baby for her.” Here was dear old Amelia come to champion me. Her type of dress had remained the same as fifteen years before, but so had her loyalty and wit. The lecture over, we went back together to her home in Schenectady; she hauled out from the attic scrapbooks and photographs and snapshots taken at Claverack, and we sat on the floor and rocked with laughter until three in the morning.

When I returned to New York after my long trip I took a studio apartment in what seemed like a bit of old Chelsea on Fourteenth Street way over between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Gertrude Boyle, the sculptress, had the one below me, and my sister Ethel moved in above. Occasionally father came down from Cape Cod to spend some time with us.

Although it was never quite warm enough, because it lacked central heating, it hardened me physically, and the open fireplaces, stoked incessantly by expansive and voluble Vito Silecchia, the Italian coal vendor, kept the air fresh and clean. The lovely high ceilings, the tall windows, and the broad doors flung wide between the rooms, gave an atmosphere of space, and the marvelous carved woodwork was a joy. The windows in the rear were draped with light yellow curtains, reflecting an illusory glow of sunshine. Above one of these grew a Japanese wistaria vine; whenever I looked up I saw this little bit of spring.

_Chapter Seventeen_

FAITH I HAVE BEEN A TRUANT IN THE LAW

“_If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her only die from bearing; she is there to do it._”

MARTIN LUTHER

In the fall of 1916 whoever walked along the corridor of the top floor of 104 Fifth Avenue could have seen the words “Birth Control” printed on the door leading to an office equipped in business-like, efficient manner with files and card catalogs. Presiding over it was Fred Blossom, the perfect representative. He had told me at Cleveland he was tired of ameliorative charity and, wanting to do something more significant, had offered six months for this work. Now indefatigably he wrote, spoke, made friends, and, most important, raised money. His meals were limited to an apple for luncheon and a sandwich for dinner; he seldom left the office until midnight.

Like a vacuum cleaner Blossom sucked in volunteers from near and far to help with the boxes and trunks of letters which had come to me from all over the country—one thousand from St. Louis alone. As long as I had had no stenographic aid I had been able only to open and read them and put them sadly away. At last with fifteen or twenty assistants the task began of sorting these out and answering them. The contents almost invariably fell into certain definite categories, and I instituted a system so that such and such a paragraph could be sent in response to such and such an appeal.