Part 26

At a meeting of the Communist Party I was introduced to Mrs. Erich Mühsam who, with her husband and their friend Landau, had gone to the front and distributed leaflets to call the boys back home. Landau, a gentle soul who so believed in the goodness of man that he had pleaded with the soldiers to be brothers and not to take life, had been kicked and clubbed to death by the White Guard, which had afterwards marched to the Mühsam apartment and, when they could not find anybody there, had wrecked it with machine guns. Fortunately for the Mühsams they were already in jail.

Though the Revolution was supposed to be over, Erich Mühsam was still imprisoned. In every country during such upheavals thousands are cast into jail and, unless some other upheaval occurs to get them out, they remain there; many pacifists in the United States were not freed until long after the Armistice.

In 1928 I saw Erich Mühsam—every inch a poet, an artistic and delicate organism, almost helpless-looking. In 1935, under Nazi rule, he was returned to a concentration camp—a hangover on the black list.

The account of his fellow prisoners ran something like this: One afternoon he had been told to “report at headquarters and bring a rope.”

“Where can I find a rope?”

“I don’t know. Get it!”

“They’re going to kill you,” he was warned as he started out, still lacking a rope.

“Oh, it’s just one of their jokes—a form of torture.”

“You may be right; you’ve scarcely lifted a voice.”

But that evening his comrades discovered him dangling by the neck from a beam. They said he could never have climbed up himself and that, furthermore, he had been beaten to death before he had been hung there.

Nevertheless, officially he had committed suicide.

I met in Germany probably a hundred thorough-going conservatives and only one Mühsam, and yet he it was who stood out spectacularly.

My own interests were keeping me busy enough. I finally found that the formula I was seeking was made in Friedrichshaven, on Lake Constance. I initiated a correspondence with the chemist, asking him to come to Munich, and enclosing stamps to make sure of his reply. He could not make the journey but, instead, invited me to Friedrichshaven.

All the passengers on dismounting at the station seemed to have someone to meet them except myself. I noticed a smallish man with what appeared to be bangs under his hat, front and back, standing on the platform and holding a tight bunch of wild flowers wrapped up in a newspaper, a matching one in the buttonhole of his coat, but as far as I could see he was serving no special purpose there. I went to a hotel, and in a very short while the little man himself arrived, having identified me as the American lady he had come to greet. His quaint bouquet was my welcome to Friedrichshaven.

The chemist, with his father and brothers, ran an unpretentious factory which, in addition to other products, was making the contraceptive in the form of a jelly. It had been put out before the War, then dropped, and was now just starting up again and beginning to find a market in Germany. He feared to let me go near his establishment, suspicious that America might steal his formula. But he showed me a picture of it, and gave me a few sample tubes, saying I could obtain others from his sister, who was going to act as his agent in New York. Thus was inaugurated a new phase in the movement—the use of a chemical contraceptive.

I had letters of introduction to several people in Russia, and had hoped to be able to go there, but I had commenced handing out my extra dresses, underwear, stockings, shoes in Berlin; my friends had so little and were so generous that I could not endure it, and now, in the face of an approaching winter of hardship, without wardrobe and no prospect of securing one or even sufficient food, I had to abandon the Russian plan.

I had talked clinic, clinic, clinic while I was in England. Having myself been convinced, I wanted the Neo-Malthusians also to believe that it was a better way than advice through literature. A few of them were assembling to meet me in the Netherlands, and thither I turned my steps. As soon as the train north was over the border, cream was brought and delicious fruit; the contrast between one side and the other was too obviously brutal and awful. It almost made me ill to see so many delicacies in the Dutch shop windows when children in Germany were starving.

With the Drysdales, to Amsterdam came Dr. Norman Haire, Australian born, a gynecologist who had settled in London, sensed the public interest in birth control, informed himself thoroughly on the subject, written a great deal about it, and become prominent in the movement, advocating contraception from his Harley Street office.

As Dr. Haire and I went around visiting clinics we found that the countless stores where contraceptives were sold had fitting rooms in back with midwives in charge. They did not maintain the old Rutgers standards. I was disappointed to see the deterioration which had taken place since 1915. During the reorganization period of Europe the tendency, under Russian influence, was for young laborites to be in charge of things, and they aimed to turn out Dr. Rutgers and the Dutch Neo-Malthusians and put clinics, which were dedicated to the workers, on a strictly utilitarian basis. Here as elsewhere they could agitate and tear apart but lacked executive ability. The new board, composed mainly of laymen, did not realize that such technical knowledge and experience was required as only a physician like Dr. Rutgers possessed. He was a sad and unhappy man, profoundly discouraged over the odds against which he had to struggle.

Nonetheless, my English friends were converted to the idea of clinics, and Bessie Drysdale and Dr. Haire planned to open one soon in London.

_Chapter Twenty-three_

IN TIME WE ONLY CAN BEGIN

“_Enough, ’tis the word of a Grand Bashaw; You needn’t to bother about the law. He told me they wasn’t to speak at all, You don’t need a warrant to clear a hall. He told me to tell them to stir their stumps; When ‘Clubs!’ is the order, then clubs is trumps. What else would it be when I’m just a cop And he is a Reverend Archbishop?_” ARTHUR GUITERMAN

In confirming my conviction in 1918, Judge Frederick E. Crane of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York had for the first time interpreted the section of the state law which permitted a licensed physician to give contraceptive advice for the “cure or prevention of disease”; and, further, he had taken from _Webster’s Dictionary_ the broad definition of disease as any alteration in the state of body which caused or threatened pain and sickness, thus extending the meaning of the word far beyond the original scope of syphilis and gonorrhea. But, never satisfied, I wanted women to have birth control for economic and social reasons.

Therefore, in January, 1921, Anne Kennedy and I went to Albany to find a sponsor for a bill which was to change the New York law. It was not only a question of amending it, but also a means of educating the public, of explaining our cause through the medium of legislation. Months of preparation were required, hours of tramping the floors of State buildings at Albany, interviewing one person after another, securing promises of help, breaking down hostility.

When people said that women who would not have children were selfish and preferred lap dogs, I replied, “All right. Then it is better for the children not to be born.” That type of woman should die out biologically, just as did the different species that were caught in the mire and slime and could not reproduce themselves. It is a principle that applies to human beings also, that they must work through their environment in order to survive.

As soon as you could get out of people’s minds what birth control was not, they almost invariably said, “Why, yes, certainly, that sounds reasonable.” Many of the lawmakers themselves believed that the measure might be of great benefit, but the party whip cut too deeply.

Birth control was once described by Heywood Broun as dynamite from the point of view of the politician. If he supported it, he might lose votes; if he opposed it, he might lose votes. “There is nothing a politician hates more than losing votes. He would much rather the subject never came up.”

One assemblyman from Brooklyn at first agreed to introduce our bill and then wrote, “I very much regret, but after consulting with some of the leaders of the Assembly, I have been strongly advised not to offer your bill. I am told it would do me an injury that I could not overcome for some time.” Another refused on the ground of “levity from his associates.” But a few years later we found a young, courageous legislator who introduced a bill and secured hearings. Although it was defeated, the atmosphere was clarified.

Mrs. Hepburn, who had been in the suffrage movement early and had been one of the sponsors of Mrs. Pankhurst’s tour of the United States, now lived in Hartford, Connecticut. Although the mother of six, including the actress, Katherine, she retained her youthful face and figure, being almost like a sister to her children, playmate and companion for them at tennis, golf, and swimming. Young men asked her to dinner with the same pleasure that they asked her daughters.

Closely associated with her was Mrs. George H. Day, Sr., a grandmother in 1921. She always came from Hartford for every Board meeting of the League and, in turn, her house was a place of refuge for poor, worn-down friends of causes. They could go there and be ministered to by a staff of servants and come back, rested and rejuvenated.

With two such seasoned campaigners to back us, we carried our legislative activities into Connecticut, the only state where “to use a contraceptive” was a crime—as though it were possible to have a policeman in every home! A mere six years had elapsed since the movement had begun; consequently, that we were now able to get a hearing was in itself a triumph. Nevertheless, no easy task faced us; so much red tape had to be broken through. But here at Hartford we did succeed in finding an introducer who could hold his own under ridicule. Then we had to educate him, feed him with facts—medical, social, historical—so that he could defend his bill.

A young priest stood forth as our chief opponent, basing his objections on the laws of nature, which he claimed were contravened by birth control. Fortunately the committee had a sense of humor. In my ten-minute rebuttal I was able to answer the “against nature” argument as Francis Place had done a hundred years earlier. I turned the priest’s own words on himself by asking why he should counteract nature’s decree of impaired vision by wearing eyeglasses, and why, above all, was he celibate, thus outraging nature’s primary demand on the human species—to propagate its kind. The laughter practically ended the “unnatural” thesis for some time.

In New Jersey another attempt was made. The law there allowed doctors to give information for “a just cause,” but they were fearful of including minor ailments under this interpretation. The bill introduced at Trenton had a hearing, but it also failed to pass.

The whole thing was nerve-wracking but was part of the experience we gained. And, furthermore, whenever we had hearings, the local work progressed much more rapidly as a result. Nothing was lost, however expensive the plowing and sowing. Apparent defeats were victories in the long run.

It then seemed to me from glancing over current clippings and publications that people all over the world were discussing birth control. The English Baron Dawson of Penn had been Court Physician to Edward VII and had continued in this same post during the reign of George V. But he had broader interests, too. One of the great events in the history of the movement was his speech at the Church Congress at Birmingham in answer to the doctrine promulgated by the Bishops at Lambeth that sexual union should take place for the purpose of procreation only:

Imagine a young married couple in love with each other being expected to occupy the same room and to abstain for two years. The thing is preposterous. You might as well put water by the side of a man suffering from thirst, and tell him not to drink it. Romance and deliberate self-restraint do not to my mind rhyme very well together. A touch of madness to begin with does no harm. Heaven knows life sobers it soon enough.

His speech caused an immense sensation throughout England. Headlines and streamers announced, “King’s Physician asks Church to sanction birth control.” The deduction was that His Majesty was endorsing it, and stolid Britishers were all agog at the idea that Buckingham Palace was now talking about the subject; it was hinted Queen Mary was not over-pleased.

On this side of the Atlantic Major General John J. O’Ryan, who had commanded the Twenty-Seventh National Guard Division, lectured on overpopulation as a cause for war. Frank Vanderlip, once Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and later President of the National City Bank, had just returned from Japan, proclaiming that population must be controlled because some countries could no longer feed themselves. Here was an army man on the one hand, and a financier on the other, unprimed, uncoerced, even uninvited, speaking out of their independent experiences. They were voices in the wilderness, oases in the desert, and certainly encouraging historical landmarks.

Among uneasy experts the sentiment was growing that population pressure in Japan would soon create an inevitable explosion. Indeed, one of the familiar arguments in the United States brought forward against birth control was the “menace of the Yellow Peril,” by which was meant specifically, Japan. What folly to reduce our birth rate when Orientals were multiplying so appallingly fast that the downfall of Western civilization might soon be looked for! India and China were teeming indiscriminately, but their peoples were feeble, inert, and diseased; whereas the Japanese were being reared under German health traditions, were ninety-seven percent literate, and were technically equipped for battle.

Naturally I was eager to learn as much about this situation as possible, and welcomed the opportunity to meet the Nipponese friends of Gertrude Boyle, who had married a gentleman of Japan. They always appeared in pairs or groups of three, four, five at a time, talking busily in asides with each other while I exchanged opinions with one. They were helpful in furnishing me with unpublished facts; the older, conservative, nationalist, militarist party advocated greater numbers, but the young, liberal intellectuals, many of whom had attended Occidental universities, could see the clouds already lowering on the horizon and hoped the storm could be averted by controlled population growth. Atro, a reporter on a New York Japanese paper, had been supplying the last-named group, which in Tokyo called itself Kaizo, meaning reconstruction, with clippings about birth control, and several of my articles had been printed in their publication.

The women’s point of view was graphically described to me by the Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto, daughter of the head of the great Hirota clan and wife of Baron Keikichi Ishimoto, a young nobleman who had put in practice his ideals of service. This charming, youthful and gracious matron, tall for her race and equally beautiful by our standards, very smart in her American street costume, had in 1919 come from her own land where suffrage for women was still mentioned in awed tones. She had studied our language at a Y.W.C.A. business school, and in three months had performed the extraordinary accomplishment of mastering it sufficiently to speak, write, and even take dictation in English.

We quickly became friends and she at once foresaw the possibilities of birth control in bringing Japanese women out of their long suppression in the family system. She said she intended to form a league immediately upon her arrival in Tokyo, and did so in 1921.

During that year also clinics were started in England. That of Marie Stopes proved popular, although instruction, given by a midwife, was limited to mothers who had already had at least one child. Shortly afterwards Dr. Haire and Bessie Drysdale, with Harold Cox as chairman of a lay group to finance the work, established Walworth Center, which had a fine gynecological thoroughness and set an example which later clinics in England followed.

It was high time clinics were started in the United States as well. After the Crane decision I had anticipated that hospitals were going to give contraceptive advice. But in 1919, under Dr. Mary Halton’s direction, two women, the first with tuberculosis, the other with syphilis, had been taken from one to another institution on Manhattan Island. All had refused such information, although most had agreed that the patients, if pregnant, could be aborted. The officers in charge had said they were obliged to protect their charters, and the staff physicians their licenses and reputations.

Anything depending on the organized medicine is hard to put over; though individual doctors may break away, in the long run most medical progress proceeds by group action.

Since the hospitals were laggard in this matter, I decided to open a second clinic of my own. It was to be in effect a laboratory dealing in human beings instead of mice, with every consideration for environment, personality, and background. I was going to suggest to women that in the Twentieth Century they give themselves to science as they had in the past given their lives to religion.

In addition to the usual rooms I planned to have a day nursery where children could be kept amused and happy while the mothers were being instructed. A properly chosen staff could enable us to have weekly sessions on prenatal care and marital adjustment. Gynecologists were to refer patients to hospitals if pregnancy jeopardized life; a specialist was to advise women in overcoming sterility; a consultant was to deal with eugenics; and, finally, since anxiety and fear of pregnancy were often the psychological causes of ill health, a psychiatrist was to be added. I intended, furthermore, that it should be a nucleus for research on scientific methods of contraception; domestically manufactured supplies of tested efficacy could not, at that time, be procured.

Because organized medical support was lacking, I tried to see what could be done with individuals, writing to various doctors to inquire whether they were willing to sponsor such an undertaking. Several asked me what methods I was recommending, but Dr. Emmett Holt, then the outstanding pediatrician of New York, whose book, _The Care and Feeding of Children_, was the bible of thousands of mothers, invited me to come to his office; before making any endorsement he wanted to know more about it.

I packed up all my European supplies and showed them and explained them to Dr. Holt, who had called in also an obstetrician and a neurologist, Dr. Frederick Peterson, for the discussion. The usual attitude of the child specialist was, “Our living depends upon babies. Why should we advocate limiting the supply? The more the merrier. If you cut down, you’re taking our maintenance from us.” But Dr. Holt said, “A thoroughly reliable contraceptive would be a godsend to us. If the family cannot afford a nurse we must rely on the health and strength of the mother to keep her baby alive. If pregnancy can be postponed for a few years, not only the baby who has been born, but the baby who comes after is much more likely to survive.”

Dr. Holt lent us his name, one of the first important physicians to do so, thus setting an example which eventually others followed. Five or six men and women doctors agreed to stand behind the clinic.

But I had to have more than verbal approval. Unless the clinic were to be conducted by a doctor with a New York practicing license, it would not be there to stay. In early autumn I brought together an interested group to discuss the possibility of a location on the East Side near Stuyvesant Square, and Dr. Lydia Allen de Vilbiss, whom I had met at the Indianapolis social workers’ conference, was going to form her own medical committee behind her and build it up. On the basis of her promise, I signed a year’s lease for a small suite of rooms at 317 East Tenth Street, from which a dentist had just moved out, appropriately situated on the ground floor in a densely populated section.

The legislative activities and planning for a clinic had taken much of my attention during the year, but the central theme was the determination to hold the First National Birth Control Conference, November 11–13, 1921, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. I timed it purposely to coincide with a meeting of the American Public Health Association, hoping that if we could only convince these officials of the need for birth control, they would use it in their own work.

In addition to the health aspect, we planned to treat of population and also have a doctors’ meeting on methods and technique. But “flaming youth” was having its fling, and the great clamor of the moment was directed towards the moral issue. Opponents were constantly hurling the statement that immorality among young people was to be the inevitable fruit of our efforts. This I did not believe. I knew that neither morality nor immorality was an external factor in human behavior; essentially these qualities grew and emerged from within. If the youth of the post-War era were slipping away from sanctioned codes, it was not the fault of birth control knowledge any more than it was the fault of the automobile, which made transportation to the bright lights of the city quick and easy. Immorality as a result should not be placed at the door of Messrs. Ford or Chrysler.

In order to have a free and fair hearing we proposed a large open meeting to wind up the Conference, and invited ministry and clergy of all denominations, including Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, who was the spokesman of the Catholic Church in New York.

The movement was older in England and had already established its dignity there. Consequently, the presence at the Conference of such an outstanding Englishman as Harold Cox was certain to carry weight. To persuade him to take the sea voyage I sailed for Europe. When I arrived in London I found him unwell, and his doctors at first refused him permission to travel. Under the circumstances it was very fine of him to promise to come. J. O. P. Bland also said he would look in on the Conference if only to give it his blessing. He was a dark-haired, witty, amusing North-of-Irishman who had lived much in the Orient and become an authority on Far Eastern matters, an internationalist in all his thinking. He was one of those who always helped to hold up your right hand.