Fighting for Life

by S. Josephine Baker

  Disgusting, of course. But that is politics. No doubt that story made such an impression on me because when I heard it I had also had a long time of being under fire. It is, to me, a remarkable story and ties me up with no less a person than Mayor John F. Hylan, “Red Mike” himself.

  Mr. Hylan came into office as mayor in 1918 as a reaction to John Purroy Mitchel’s famous reform administration. Previous to his election I had never seen the man in my life. After a chance to study him at close range, I agreed with the newspaper editorial which commented about him that “if his ability had been equal to his courage, he would have been a great mayor.” A huge, handsome, red-haired giant whom I was prepared to like, even though there was little possibility that he would ever mean anything more to me than a shadowy figure down at City Hall who would, like all other mayors, always be in the papers for one reason or another. As Commissioner of Health, Mr. Hylan appointed Dr. J. Lewis Amster, a highly respected, honest and capable physician from the Bronx. That sounded fine. But the day after Dr. Amster took office, I found that Mayor Hylan was going to mean a great deal to me during the next years. The Commissioner sent for me, shook my hand and then, almost blushing:

  “I don’t know what this is all about,” he said, “but I have strict instructions from the Mayor to dismiss you at once.”

  I had to make him repeat it before I could grasp what he had said. Then I asked why on earth the Mayor should want me dismissed.

  “I don’t know,” said Dr. Amster. “There’s no explanation, just an order to get you out of the Department at once.”

  The man was so patently telling the truth, so obviously just as bewildered as I, that I had to accept the situation and fight.

  “But you can’t dismiss me just like that,” I said. “I’m under civil service. You’ll have to investigate my conduct in office and prefer charges against me.”

  There was nothing for Dr. Amster to do but report my defiance to those higher up. They instructed him to keep right on with the battle to throw me out by hook or crook. The poor man evidently bothered his superiors a good deal about it—until at last he secured for me a vague inkling of what it was all about.

  “The Mayor says,” he told me, “that you once worked for the Rockefellers and that you are still in their pay and he will not stand for having a capitalist spy in his administration.” (It must be remembered that Mayor Hylan was not a Tammany figure—he was backed by Tammany in the election, but primarily he was the candidate of William Randolph Hearst who was going in at a great rate for muckraking the interests at that time.) Dr. Amster was quite pleased, as he might well have been, to have turned up a plausible reason for the way the Mayor was hunting my scalp—he thought it made a kind of sense out of a lunatic situation. I hated to disappoint a nice man, but, on this basis, the thing made less sense than ever, as I told him. I had never worked for the Rockefellers—the only payroll I had ever been on was the city’s.

  We parted, each more bewildered than ever. Presently, as the prodding from higher up grew more and more pronounced, Dr. Amster could stand it no longer. He called me in again and said:

  “I’m going to resign. And it is mainly on your account. I’ve asked about you in all directions and everybody says you’re all right. You may have some enemies, but I can’t find them. And by this time I don’t see why I should look any farther, no matter what the Mayor wants. So,” he said, holding out his hand, “I’m out. Good luck to you.”

  I shook that hand very heartily indeed. It was a really fine gesture. To have been Commissioner of Health, with all the prestige and power that position carried, and then drop it because you were asked unreasonably to persecute an under-official whom you had never known before—that was real integrity.

  In appointing the next Commissioner Mr. Hylan outdid himself in his own peculiar way. The story was that he met on the street a man he knew who was accompanied by the late Dr. Royal S. Copeland, then an eye-specialist with nothing whatever to do with politics. The friend introduced Dr. Copeland to the Mayor—the Mayor took one look at him and said: “I like your looks, Doctor. The Commissioner of Health has just resigned—how would you like the job?” Dr. Copeland made the obvious answer that he knew a good deal about astigmatism and cataracts but nothing whatever about public health work. “What of it?” said Mr. Hylan. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you? Think it over—the job’s yours if you want it.” Dr. Copeland thought it over, telephoned the Mayor the next day that he would like the job if it were still open—and so started on a political career that finally landed him in the United States Senate with a well-deserved reputation as the biggest vote-getter in New York State. That was the one constructive result of the Mayor’s unrelenting efforts to eject me from my well fortified position.

  Within a few days Dr. Copeland took over the Commissioner’s post and the game of “Get Dr. Baker” was resumed along exactly the same lines, again with the Mayor insisting that I was a Rockefeller spy and nobody else able to understand the situation at all. By this time Mr. Hylan had added the detail that I was a product of the Mitchel administration, which he loathed, and that was another good reason for getting rid of me. I explained at length to Dr. Copeland that I knew none of the Rockefellers, had never seen a cent of their money, and had originally been appointed, not by Mayor Mitchel but in 1901 when R. A. Van Wyck was Mayor. I convinced Dr. Copeland but neither he nor anyone else could convince the Mayor that he was wrong. Then the Mayor took the battle into his own hands and, for over two years, my time was wasted, my disposition frayed and the Bureau’s work demoralized by this unwarranted persecution.

  The Mayor filled my office with investigators, combing through the files, asking everybody questions, looking mysterious and getting sadly in the way. They found nothing. He went around and asked about me from all the big medical societies, state and county—and, prod as he might, they gave me a clean bill of health. It was all done quietly, but the newspapers got wind of it and there began to appear hints that, if the Bureau of Child Hygiene, which was by all odds the most popular activity of the whole Department, was not let alone, trouble would commence. The Commissioner of Accounts’ office gave me a thorough going-over. I was called up before ex-Judge David Hirshfield in private and semi-private hearings in which he went far out of his way to be unpleasant. Then the Civil Service Commission took me in hand using gentler but equally fruitless methods. Then they passed me over to the City Chamberlain for more weeks of defensive warfare. And all the while the office was full of investigators so it was impossible to get my work done even when I had time and energy. They finally got into such a state of frustrated bewilderment that they could only grunt when I would offer to help them if they would only tell me what they were looking for.

  “Just give me a lead,” I would say when a new one appeared, “and maybe I can turn up something for you. I’ll be glad to help—this is boring me to death and I want it over with.” They had an unhappy time, poor souls, forced by reasons that never existed to go on looking for something that wasn’t there.

  Fortunately this was in 1919, when the Bureau was pretty well organized along its main lines, so it could stand the strain of demoralization and curtailed appropriations and all varieties of political sabotage without going absolutely to pieces. And it was heartening to see how the press and private organizations rallied to my aid as word spread that I was under fire. There were impassioned editorials and front-page stories warning the Mayor that public opinion would not stand for interference with my work in the Bureau. Things like this, to quote from the New York Globe and thereby blow my own horn a little: “The main reason that more than nine hundred in every thousand of our babies survive their first year is that a woman of rare intelligence looks after them. Dr. Josephine Baker for many years has done a bit of work that has meant a great deal to the city and to the nation, as well as to educate every man and woman in the duties and privileges of existence.” The county medical societies and the New York Academy of Medicine, with whom I had so
often crossed swords in the past, passed resolutions of unqualified endorsement for my work. So did many private welfare societies—there was hardly a day when the papers did not have some such red-hot shot to fire across the Mayor’s bows. Individuals of all kinds came to see me to offer help and finally a group of mothers whose babies had been cared for by the Bureau marched in a group to the Mayor’s office to protest against his incomprehensible behavior. It all added up to irresistible pressure, and after weary months of this bad dream, the Mayor relaxed his efforts and I started picking up the pieces at the Bureau.

  The explanation came presently. One day Dr. Copeland telephoned me, saying that the Mayor wanted some pictures of himself holding a baby—election time was coming near, I think—and wouldn’t I arrange a collection of babies at one of our baby health stations? I went there myself at the appointed hour to make sure things went smoothly. The Mayor came in with Dr. Copeland and Dr. Copeland presented me nervously: “Mr. Mayor, this is Dr. Baker, the head of the Bureau of Child Hygiene.”

  The Mayor shook hands unenthusiastically, saying:

  “How do you do, Dr. Davis?”

  Things began vaguely to dawn on me:

  “I’m not Dr. Davis,” I said; “I’m Dr. Baker—Dr. Josephine Baker.”

  He gave me a puzzled glance and looked away.

  “It’s all right, Dr. Davis,” he said and picked up a baby.

  I gave Dr. Copeland one look and rushed into the back room where I could laugh by myself. When I spoke of my theory to Dr. Copeland, who knew the Mayor far better than I did, he agreed with me absolutely. All of this time the Mayor had been persecuting me under the delusion that I was somebody else—Dr. Katharine Bement Davis, who really had been appointed Commissioner of Corrections by Mayor Mitchel, had been employed by the Rockefeller Foundation. I suppose that, since she had had the bad luck to be the only woman in a public job who had ever penetrated Mr. Hylan’s consciousness, it followed that, whatever anybody said, or my birth-certificate certified, I, as a woman in a public job, would always be Katharine Bement Davis so far as he was concerned. It still gives me an uncanny feeling to think of it. Skeptical readers may disbelieve that story if they wish, but it is unqualifiedly true.

  A minor—extremely minor—consolation for all the trouble caused by Mr. Hylan’s insistence that I was somebody else consisted of the huge amount of publicity the Bureau received—column after column of it, all heart-warmingly laudatory and highly useful. I had to be something of a press agent in this job, because the more the newspapers mentioned the Bureau, the better luck we would have with the politicians in getting funds and cooperation. Publicity was our best defense against budget-cutting and inter-departmental sniping, and, as a natural result of our willingness to oblige, reporters came to count on us for copy. And babies are good copy, Heaven bless them. The emphasis, of course, was always on the Bureau, its work with mothers and children, its achievements and ambition. But the fact that there was a woman-executive at the head of it apparently making good and blazing trails where men had never bothered to explore was a fine angle and did no harm at all.

  I was trying to maintain a paradoxical position. On the one hand, in the Department itself, I tried to make everyone forget that I was a woman. Outside, and for the purpose of making the Bureau well and widely known, it seemed to me fair game to get all the publicity possible. The woman angle was still “news” and reporters were almost daily visitors at my office. Once, the combination of a very hot afternoon, a harassed reporter and a story-hungry editor put me personally on the front page of almost every newspaper in the country and left me in the position of wishing I could run away to Patagonia to escape the headlines. On a dull and super-hot day in midsummer, this particular reporter wandered into my office and told me he simply had to have a story. Nothing of any importance was happening in the world and any story, no matter how unimportant, could be used. I had no ideas and neither had he; it was that kind of a day. Finally my eye fell upon a little leaflet which we had just printed containing advice to mothers about hot-weather care of the baby. This included, most inconspicuously, an item to the effect that the fewer clothes a baby wore during the hot weather the better off he would be; in fact that it was a good idea to take all his clothes off and let him play indoors on a sheet on the floor during the hottest part of the day. Every modern mother knows and does this, but it was a startling idea then. My reporter went away with his leaflet, pretty disconsolate. I do not know what story he turned in but I do know what the editor made of it and in that day and age it was considered sufficiently startling to be sent to as many other papers as possible.

  The next morning that particular reporter’s paper and all of the other morning papers blossomed out with front page stories headed “Back to Eve,” “September Morn” or equally intriguing titles. The story said that I recommended that all babies should go naked all summer and the idea was played up from every possible angle. Now that nudism has accustomed the public to all such ideas that story would not be worth printing. This, however, was many years ago, and it went all over the country like wildfire. All summer the newspapers played wilder and wilder changes on Dr. Baker’s recommendation of nakedness instead of straw hats and lemonade. At the end, they were running what, no doubt, were very daring cartoons for that day, of respectable gentlemen wearing only the most abbreviated shorts, walking down Fifth Avenue cool and cheerful with umbrellas between them and a blazing sun. It became known as the “September Morn” theory, produced elaborate humorous prophecies of the ruin of the cotton industry, was dinned into my ears until I was as frantic on the subject as ever Anthony Comstock was when he had the art-gallery prosecuted for displaying the famous picture in its window. I had never realized before how much an ingenious newspaperman could make out of how little when he had to.

  In fact I seemed to be haunted by the fantastic and bizarre in those early years. There was the nurse, new to the Bureau, who eventually called herself to the attention of her superiors by her curious habit of taking leave of absence on both Christian and Jewish holidays. That is more or less routine in the New York business office, but in our work, where a skeleton staff had to be kept on, holidays or not, it was a matter for some comment. So I called her in, the next time she applied for a holiday, whether Yom Kippur or Easter I do not remember, and asked:

  “This is just a natural piece of inquiry, Miss So-and-so. You have been applying for both Christian and Jewish holidays. Just what is your religion?”

  “My religion?” she said. “Well, people always think it’s a little funny in a nurse. I’m a Christian Scientist, Doctor.”

  Personally, besides, I have occasionally got into remarkably bizarre situations due entirely to the fact that my father was named Baker and my middle name, which I used customarily, was Josephine. It was all right until after the war, when that sensational colored stage-dancer, whose name also happened to be Josephine Baker, became the sensation of Paris and all Europe. If I had been aware that a namesake of mine had become the reigning toast of the Paris music-halls the same summer I was planning to go abroad, I might have had my passport issued to “Sara J. Baker.” But I had no idea. And the consequence was that my summer in Europe was the quintessence of absurdity.

  It was bad enough in Paris, where that name in the hotel list of the Paris Herald brought flocks of the lady’s would-be admirers crowding into the lobby to stare at me and go away mystified. My room-telephone was besieged by all the milliners and dressmakers in Paris, insisting that Mademoiselle Baker always let them come to show her things and purchased very liberally. My increasingly frantic refusals to have anything to do with them probably gave the whole world of Parisian couturières the impression that Josephine Bay-ker-r-r-r had fallen on hard times. And then, when I left Paris for a couple of months’ traveling through Italy and Central Europe, I had the bad luck to choose a route about two weeks ahead of a tour which my alter ego was making. I got her mail in Palermo, Naples and Rome. In Vienna and Budapest I d
idn’t dare leave my right name when ordering something at a shop because, when I would return for a fitting, I always found a mob surrounding the store, waiting for a glimpse of the famous dancer. The climax came in Brussels. When I asked for my mail at my hotel there, the concierge said there was none. I was expecting an important letter at that address, so I insisted that he look again, and repeated my name as loudly and clearly and Frenchifiedly as I could. That brought the manager out of an inner office—he looked at me, blinked and asked my name again. I showed my passport to prove it. You never saw a man so crestfallen. But he did reach up into a special cubbyhole and produced my letter.

  “Ah, madame,” he said, “I put it there with my own hands so none but myself would have the honor of presenting it to the renommée Josephine Bay-kère-r-r-r-r—” And he almost wept as he gave it to me.