Woman of Valor (53 page)

Though self-consciously an experiment in social engineering, the Negro Project, as it was called, was expressly altruistic, and not racist, in intent. The project framers voiced concern that the country's largest minority population was being left out of locally administered public health efforts altogether and promoted as an alternative a “unique experiment in race-building and humanitarian service to a race subjected to discrimination, hardship, and segregation.” The project proposal proclaimed, “Birth control, per se, cannot correct economic conditions that result in bad housing, overcrowding, poor hygiene, malnutrition and neglected sanitation, but can reduce the attendant loss of life, health and happiness that spring from these conditions.”

Margaret was especially pleased to be involved in this effort to improve the quality of life and create opportunity for women and families often left out of existing social welfare initiatives because of race. The “Negro question,” she predicted in a letter to Albert Lasker in 1942, would be “foremost on the country's domestic agenda” once the war was over. As in the past in Harlem, she was also sensitive to issues of racial self-determination and worked to involve black clergy, educators, and doctors in positions of leadership in the project, so as to temper racial divisions and any concern, as she wisely anticipated and candidly admitted in private, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

The advisory council for the project included W. E. B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women and a Roosevelt appointee and friend of the First Lady, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and other prominent leaders in the community. Still, there was simply no way to avoid the fact of endemic racism among many activists in the birth control movement, let alone among the white public health officials in the South on whom the success of any voluntary effort ultimately depended. The problems Margaret confronted in trying to bring contraceptive service to blacks only underscored the need for a public health initiative removed from the arbitrary and unaccountable control of local and privately subsidized leadership. Help from the President was crucial, though Margaret cynically reminded Mary Lasker in a private letter during the 1940 campaign that the Roosevelts had disappointed them many times before and suggested she also bring the subject before Republican Wendell Willkie. Margaret was especially incensed when the President, reaching for votes in the election of 1940, agreed to send an official United States emissary to the Vatican.
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Mrs. Lasker, however, did not share this suspicion. She was, indeed, no less enthusiastic about Franklin Roosevelt than she was about Margaret Sanger, whom to this day she unequivocally identifies as the most important woman of the century and the most important individual influence on her own life. And along with her well-connected husband, Albert, Mary Lasker was always eager to put political influence, as well as money, to work on birth control's behalf.

The White House meeting she helped convene on March 5, 1941, included representatives of the Public Health Service, the Children's Bureau, and the Department of Agriculture. Dr. Parran was unable to attend but sent his wife in his place as a conciliatory gesture. Margaret also sent a representative. The discussion was abstract and inconclusive but did secure a commitment from Mrs. Roosevelt to speak to the President about the matter, although as she later reminded Mrs. Lasker, “He knows that both Dr. Parran and Miss Lenroot are very anxious to have him take the rap on anything that is done about giving this information because they realize that there will be certain repercussions from the Catholic Church.” This reservation aside, Mrs. Roosevelt, presumably with her husband's consent, then instructed Dr. Parran to establish a formal mechanism for reviewing state requests for information about “child-spacing” programs.

New procedures were announced the following October, but this action alone did not resolve the matter, and a second meeting on birth control took place at the White House on December 8, 1941, the day following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and just as war was being declared. Mrs. Roosevelt could not attend this time, nor could Margaret, but Edna McKinnon and Morris Ernst were there and made it clear that birth control activists would stand for no more obstructions. They wanted the cooperation of federal health agencies, especially among blacks in the South. Katherine Lenroot spoke up, insisting that “inclusion of birth control would jeopardize her other programs of maternal and child welfare,” and citing the Congressional repudiation of Shephard-Towner in 1929 as a precedent. But the Washington D.C. obstetrician, Prentiss Wilson, who also attended, cautioned her to remember “at whose board we are sitting and under whose roof.” He assumed Lenroot would cave in to White House pressure. “I consider this a most historic occasion and the most significant event in the history of the movement since the birth of Margaret Sanger,” he added.
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Within two months, Dr. Parran issued a statement of his intent to approve state-initiated family planning programs, although he was careful to distinguish this gesture from active propaganda for birth control on the part of his own agency, and he insisted on a low-profile approach without publicity, until the extent of local interest could be measured. Lenroot first asked lawyers in her department for further clarification of her rights, and only after they expressed doubt that she could unilaterally oppose the White House, would she finally yield to its will and to pressure from public health officials, who were by then anticipating an increased need for reliable contraception from women working in vital war industries. In May of 1942, assured that Lenroot would not impound Social Security funds, the U.S. Public Health Service officially authorized a policy of “child spacing for women in war industries, under medical supervision.” This small initiative opened the door to cooperation with the voluntary birth control movement and permitted a few public health programs initiated by the states to move ahead with official sanction.
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In the fall of 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt contributed $10.00 in response to a fund-raising solicitation signed by Margaret. She refused to accept a proposed award from birth controllers several months later, however, telling Mary Lasker, “There is no use antagonizing people at this time.” The two friends corresponded frequently on the subject, and Mrs. Roosevelt extended a cautious salute to the birth controllers on their “extension of adequate maternal and child care health services” in 1943. But formal ties with the birth control movement were not established until after the President's death. Mrs. Roosevelt then lent her name as a sponsor of various international family planning initiatives, and Margaret, in turn, sent her a letter of appreciation in 1952: “It is amazing how many outstanding people in many walks of life who have the courage to stand by their ideas will hesitate, owing to the pressure of the Roman Catholic Church in this country, to give expression to their convictions and views on the question of population,” she wrote. “But you have always been known for your courage—and especially for having the courage of your convictions and opinions—and for this, you have millions of friends throughout the world.”

Still, all was not forgiven, and if Eleanor was excused, Margaret could not so easily overcome her resentment of the coalition Franklin Roosevelt built as a result of his capitulation to Catholic pressure. Continuing to cast her Presidential ballot for Norman Thomas, she would vote locally for Republicans after the war and forever disclaim Democrats who surrendered to Catholic influence.
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Contraceptive initiatives in U.S. Public Health programs never advanced very far, but the nation's armed forces did sell or freely distribute as many as 50 million condoms a month on military bases during World War II. Inaugurated as a security measure to contain the spread of venereal disease, this undertaking constituted the lone federal initiative for birth control of any real substance to emerge from a decade of political lobbying. Military largesse with respect to contraception, however, did not extend to women. Official regulations regarding sexual conduct by enlisted women were stringent. The navy delayed distribution of a film on sex hygiene made for women and canceled production of another one on birth control, a situation Margaret protested to no avail.
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The continued prospect of government support in this period, however, did serve as an important catalyst to internal organizational initiatives within the voluntary birth control movement. In 1939, citing the need for a unified force to petition the government and resist the Catholic Church, Margaret reunited with the American Birth Control League under the umbrella of a new entity called the Birth Control Federation of America. Her clinic in New York was struggling to continue to deliver services while vying with the American Birth Control League as chief lobbyist, cheerleader, fund-raiser, and sponsor for programs and clinics elsewhere in the country. It could barely meet its costs. Competition between the two organizations had been especially venomous since Margaret wooed Clarence Gamble away from several of his prior affiliations with the league and cajoled him to put her employees on his payroll as field workers in North Carolina. Likewise, the Rockefeller family and other common donors were fragmenting the impact of their contributions by splitting them between the two separate organizations.
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Reconciliation of the warring factions after a decade of suspicion and animosity was not easy. Margaret resented the unabashed bigotry of many of her adversaries at the American Birth Control League, believed emphatically that she had accomplished far more than they during the split, and knew for certain that she had raised more money. She demanded at least a token gesture of deference from women whom she referred to in private as “drawing room lizards.” The reunion took more than a year of negotiation and required the intervention of an outside mediator from John Price Jones, Inc., in New York, the same management firm that earlier in the decade had so cavalierly dismissed her unique abilities and importance to the cause. This time the consultants acknowledged that the birth control cause could not possibly advance without her name, and she conceded a lack of interest in remaining in charge day to day. What is more, she could interest no woman among her own supporters in taking her place. Always one to hog the limelight, she had prepared no orderly succession. A committee comprising representatives of all interested parties—the league, the Clinical Research Bureau, and the National Committee on Maternal Health—named her as honorary chairman of the new organization and placed Richard N. Pierson, M.D., formerly head of the league, as active president of the new board of directors. D. Kenneth Rose of John Price Jones took over as national director.

“Our minds are miles apart in most things,” Margaret admitted privately of these men, but “spirtually I have left the front and joined the ranks.” Within months, however, she was busy drumming up more lobbying and fund-raising ideas and rebuking the new leadership for once again capitulating to alarm about the country's population decline by issuing a statement encouraging reproduction among the mentally and physically sound. “For us to start that kind of sentiment is just going to put the weapons in the hands of our opponents and soon the whole birth control movement will be sliding backward or into the Hitler and Mussolini phobia,” she insisted. This was nothing more than “cheap twaddle.”
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Nor did it escape Margaret's notice that the ascendence of men to positions of leadership in the movement reflected a deliberate change of strategy away from propaganda directed principally toward women. A new generation was determined to face the fact, as Rose himself put it, “that most pivotal groups upon which advancement of birth control is dependent are controlled by men, such as Federal and State legislatures, hospital boards, public health boards, etc.” This was, of course, a polite way of saying what had been said before—that the voluntary birth control movement would only be taken seriously if men were put in charge. Rose and his new board also determined that after years of Depression-deferred marriage and overall fertility decline, the organization would benefit from a less belligerent image. “Birth Control,” in his opinion, was simply too much of “a fighting word.”

The new timidity was never more evident than in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1940, when Margaret was scheduled to speak at a Congregational church to inaugurate a citizens' initiative challenging the state's restrictive birth control law. The church closed its doors to her under pressure from businessmen on its board who were fearful of an economic boycott by local Catholics. Episcopalians, Methodists, the YMCA, and other civic organizations then followed suit, and municipal authorities refused to provide a public facility for a meeting. The situation looked hopeless until a young female organizer for the local Textile Workers' Union intervened. Margaret spoke in an old Socialist meeting hall, in front of a mammoth campaign poster for Franklin Roosevelt, a setting familiar enough to her, but hardly so to the largely elite membership of the state's birth control league. She then continued her tour without incident in eleven more cities.

Fifty thousand signatures were collected for the initiative petition, and a referendum was put on the ballot in 1942. Public opinion polls showed overwhelming support, even among Catholic voters, but the measure was defeated under a barrage of opposition orchestrated by the Archdiocese of Boston, which claimed the legislation would establish state control over childbirth and would legalize abortion. Margaret was incensed that birth control officials in New York did almost nothing to support the reform effort. Fearing further controversy, they also took no action when her autobiography was removed from the Boston Public Library under the alleged jurisdiction of the state obscenity laws.
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