Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  On the morning of November 11, the conference began, and for two long days, professionals delivered prepared lectures promoting contraception as a vital panacea for women, especially poor women whose high birth rates brought about poverty and frequently led to life-threatening abortions and even infanticide. Freedom for women was a vital plank in the conference’s platform for traditional family life, linked to concerns about children’s well-being: women who were free to make choices about how many children to bear would ostensibly be better, more loving mothers. Monogamous marriage was “the most important institution in any community” and the home the “backbone of the state”—the very foundation upon which the nation must be built. Happy marriages required purposeful rather than unplanned reproduction.19 This traditionalist child- and home-centered message—a focus on the family and most especially poor families, for the sake of America’s future—was an ever-present theme of the conference and the activism that surged in its wake.20

  Yet concern for the family often mixed with other social and nationalistic aspirations, caught up in the eugenic ideas then common among the white middle and upper classes. Controlling reproduction could ensure happy marriages for all, and for many, it was also a way to reshape the population. Birth control supporters frequently articulated a hope that the movement would aid in reducing the birth rates of “foreign,” “defective,” and “unfit” groups so that they would not come to outnumber healthy Anglo-Saxons. Birth control was not only about female emancipation, then; it was also about controlling the racial makeup of the nation, often quite overtly. Both ideals—women’s freedom and racial improvement—seemed to many American-born whites in this period to share a common basis in science, and countless numbers believed that eugenics held the key to a better future for the nation.21

  Sanger invoked eugenics in her own first formal address to the gathering, noting that the “healthy and fit elements of the nation” carried the burden of the unfit, who were increasing at a dangerous rate. Both nationally and globally, “the masses of the unfit” had propagated to such an extent that they had to be warehoused in “palatial residences for the unfit, for the insane, for the feeble-minded—for those who should never have been born.” Poverty, imbecility, delinquency, crime, and even war were some of the troubles resulting from a “weakened and deteriorated race”; the solution was to stop such misery at its source.22 Sanger tapped into common fears, then prevalent among the white upper class, that immigrants, African Americans, and other “others” would soon subsume the entire white race in America. The future of civilization itself, then, appeared to rest on the success of birth control programs, in the United States and abroad.

  But this negative eugenics program was far from the only driver of the movement; in fact, advocates were deeply conflicted about questions of coercion that surrounded birth control. Most participants at the First American Birth Control Conference were concerned that global overpopulation was “a menace to the peace of the world” and were enthusiastic about birth control to alleviate this problem.23 But there was an active debate about choice and coercion. While clearly advocating methods of controlling the unfit, most participants expressed the general view that, as one put it, “we are advocating Birth Control only for those who want it.” Birth control should be “an individual matter,” a “choice,” many professed. Sanger herself spoke fervently of motherhood being “the function of dignity and choice, rather than one of ignorance and chance.” Physicians, sociologists, psychologists, and more spoke explicitly about birth control as a matter of personal preference that must be guided by sound morals as well as scientific principles.24

  Like Sanger, many speakers expressed a deep concern for women, those who were poor no less than those who were well-to-do, who had been destroyed by the demand that they serve as baby machines; indeed, several argued strenuously that women’s subjugation was a causal factor in the “unfitness” of many children who had been born unloved and were poorly cared for in infancy and childhood. Virginia C. Young, an Episcopal deaconess long committed to practical mission work among women and the poor, detailed this view in her own address, “Problem of the Delinquent Woman.” She insisted she was there “to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves,” for she lived and worked among streetwalkers, incarcerated prisoners, and other women treated as “flotsam and jetsam,” above all “the City Negro and the City Prostitute”: “all of them potential mothers, many of them already mothers, and most of them so badly-born themselves that they might often be said to have been ‘damned into the world.’” Young promoted the “distinctly spiritual values underlying this movement” for birth control: devotion to a world in which all children were wanted, every citizen was loved, and each person felt equally called to “a fostering of all that is beautiful and worthy and precious for the strengthening and enriching and glorifying of human life.” Until women were freed from subjugation, children who were unwanted, unloved, and unfit would continue to be born and suffer lives of misery.25

  At last, on November 13, it was Sanger’s turn to deliver her long-awaited culminating lecture at the conference. Arriving at the Town Hall that evening, the famous woman thrust her way through a boisterous crowd to the entrance door. But instead of entering triumphantly, Sanger found the doors locked against her—an attempt by Manhattan police to halt the meeting. When the doors opened to let out the crowds already gathered inside, she was whisked up by adoring and indignant fans and propelled to the stage, where she made repeated attempts to convene the meeting and address the promised lecture subject, “Birth Control: Is It Moral?” to no avail. Within minutes, Captain Thomas Donahue had physically seized her, escorted her offstage, and arrested her along with fellow activist Mary Winsor. Officers paraded the women to police headquarters while hundreds of Sanger supporters defiantly sang “My Country ’Tis of Thee” in their wake. Sanger could not have staged a more dramatic episode to publicize her cause—or, as it soon turned out, to highlight what she now perceived to be the gravest threat to American liberty and women’s freedom: the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

  Sanger and Winsor spent the night in jail before a court magistrate released them without charges the next morning for lack of evidence, and the police disruption of the meeting made front-page news for days.26 The most explosive story appeared on November 15 in the New York Times, “Birth Control Raid Made by Police on Archbishop’s Order.” The first sentence put it bluntly: “The police suppression of the birth control meeting at the Town Hall Sunday night, which culminated in the arrest of two of the speakers after they had refused to leave the stage, was brought about at the instance of Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes of this Roman Catholic Archdiocese.” Hayes’s secretary, Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, had been present at the meeting, and reporters put the pieces together from there: Sanger had invited the archbishop to the meeting, the archbishop’s office had sent a complaint to police headquarters, and the monsignor met up with Donohue at the meeting to induce him to shut it down.27 The legal reasoning for halting it was shaky—hence the police acted extralegally—but church leaders believed it was morally justified. The conference conveners rescheduled the meeting on birth control’s morality for November 18, as Sanger worked tirelessly to stir public indignation toward the Catholic leaders’ bullying tactics.

  At stake in the ensuing skirmish over public discussion of sexual morality were the limits of liberty as well as religion’s role as a help or hindrance to democracy. Rivals debated what sort of religion was compatible with American freedom, an issue that had long percolated in American culture. But unlike the period in which Comstock’s directives loomed large, in the wake of women’s suffrage many were concerned with how religion would or could accommodate women’s newly gained rights. Sanger’s allies and a broad swath of birth control supporters believed that such rights included the freedom to speak publicly about contraception; religion could not rightfully restrict that privilege. Sanger’s ouster and arrest at the hands of those who apparently felt
otherwise bestowed these issues with new urgency.

  In a public statement printed in the Times, Sanger informed readers that Catholic leaders, including the renowned John Ryan, had spurned an invitation to debate her publicly at the conference’s closing session (travel expenses defrayed), in favor of surreptitious sabotage. Sanger made sure to note that the offer still stood. She continued, “I am inviting Archbishop Hayes, or any representative he wishes to send, to the meeting next Friday night. We hope the Archbishop will attend or be represented to present the Catholic Church’s side of Birth Control.”28 In advertising these invitations to conservative religious figures, Sanger suggested that she extended the privilege of public debate even to those unwilling to extend the same courtesy to her; the birth control cause, she proposed, had nothing to fear from open examination of all sides of the issue. Catholic leaders’ refusal to debate Sanger publicly, while pressuring police behind the scenes to silence her, cast them as both timid and undemocratic.

  The press saw it her way, and the affair quickly became a story of Catholic cowardice and patriarchal bullying, transforming Sanger’s cause by adding and amplifying an anti-Catholic component to it. Subsequent reporting highlighted statements by birth control supporters that the “utter absurdity” of police attacking the meeting was “the very best that could have happened,” for the harassment motivated apathetic bystanders to awaken and fight the Catholic despots.29 Members of the conference committee stoked such sentiments by adopting a resolution that protested “the outrageous action of the police in closing the mass meeting, especially in view of the statements that the action was taken on the direction of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.”30 Many of the social elites making such charges were of the sort who, until very recently, surely would not have dreamed of discussing contraception in polite society, whatever they thought of the Comstock laws. A dramatic shift in conventional wisdom was underway regarding the importance of Sanger’s cause and her right to promote it.

  The venue of the police interference surely helped frame the debate. Finished only ten months before, the Town Hall had been built by the League for Political Education, an affluent group of suffragists and socialites intent to create a civic space devoted to open inquiry and discussion of assorted topics. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders had publicly united at the laying of the cornerstone in praise of free speech, democratic education, and what Rabbi Stephen S. Wise called “the religion of America,” all embodied in the new edifice and its activities.31 When the Town Hall opened in January 1921, the festivities lasted a full week. “YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE,” declared the plaque on the building’s façade, quoting John 8:32. Indeed, the building’s patrons, religious and secular, were confident that open inquiry would lead, inevitably, to the heights of emancipated civilization. Standing at the heart of Times Square—123 West Forty-Third Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway—the structure loomed tall, a monument to free speech more majestic than the glittering temples of consumer capitalism surrounding it. With its suffragist provenance, the building also stood as a proud symbol of women’s freedom, at least the freedom of those who were white, native-born, and well-situated. For those still skeptical of Catholicism’s compatibility with American ideals, wresting Margaret Sanger off that particular stage was nothing less than a strategy to muzzle democratic principles and stifle an emancipated woman.

  When Sanger finally delivered her lecture on November 18 at the Park Theatre, twenty policemen and an additional twenty private guards stood watch over a setting where, according to the New York Times, “fully 8,000 persons, men and women, struggled to get into a place that holds only 1,500.”32 The subject of Sanger’s address remained, “Is Birth Control Moral?,” but the event now supplied an opportunity to denounce the tactics of suppression used by church and police and to link these tightly with Catholic opposition to birth control writ large. The Episcopal priest of St. George’s Church, Karl Reiland, chaired the meeting as originally planned, and he publicly announced his “emphatic protest against the outrageous and unwarranted interference” that stopped the earlier meeting. Others spoke too—notably Harold Cox, an English journalist and former member of Parliament—and highlighted the moral values behind the birth control crusade while castigating Catholic pretensions to serving as arbiters of Nature and natural law.33

  Sanger’s speech was the main event. She addressed head-on the question of morality, contrasting her approach to that of her Catholic opponents and contending that the discussion of morality belongs not merely to theologians and scientists but to “the people,” and most especially those oppressed for centuries: women.34

  The church has ever opposed the progress of woman on the ground that her freedom would lead to immorality. We ask the church to have more confidence in women. We ask the opponents of this movement to reverse the methods of the church, which aims to keep women moral by keeping them in fear and in ignorance, and to inculcate into them a higher and truer morality based upon knowledge. And ours is the morality of knowledge. If we cannot trust woman with the knowledge of her own body, then I claim that two thousand years of Christian teaching has proved to be a failure.35

  In this, the speech of her life, Sanger threw the Catholic hierarchy’s accusations of women’s selfishness back against church leaders themselves. What was truly selfish and immoral, she argued, was to keep women down by force, rather than encourage their flourishing through knowledge. Church leaders gave few signs of being anything but power-hungry and cruel, in her rendering. Their disruption of the Town Hall meeting—“a disgrace to liberty-loving people, and to all traditions we hold dear in the United States”—was thoroughly in line with their suppression of women.36

  Sanger plainly believed that the Catholic Church embodied a patriarchal hierarchy that used fear and intimidation to demean and degrade women. She thus condemned Catholicism on the two grounds that mattered most to her promotion of birth control: the church’s treatment of women as slavish procreators and the threat of increasing race degeneracy if Catholics and nonwhites bore too many children. The right of a child “to be desired” was also crucial; indeed, controlling conception dignified the mother-child relationship and expressed a more civilized moral code of “greater forethought for others” and ultimately “a higher sanction for the value of life itself.”37 Female emancipation, the rights of children, and racial uplift were once again stitched together into a seamless whole, this one a protest against the Catholic hierarchy and a reassessment of what it meant to value life.

  Following Sanger’s performance, opponents rose to air their views. Archbishop Hayes had not responded to her invitation to speak that evening, but other critics were on hand, most notably Canon William Sheafe Chase of the Garden City Episcopal Cathedral. Chase issued a fiery condemnation of the reformers’ ostensible atheism, calling them “deficient in moral and psychological insight” and preoccupied with “outward and material progress.” Their “vague humanitarianism without God” caused them to resort to “mechanical means” for race betterment, when they ought instead to be “educating souls in self-control.”38 For the birth control advocates on hand, Canon Chase, known for his activism on behalf of Prohibition and censorship, was an heir to the reviled Anthony Comstock. Indeed, Chase represented an extension of Comstock’s model of anti-obscenity activism: he went on to fight obscenity in the movies through his Federal Motion Picture Council, and he also worked assiduously to oppose the sex education materials distributed by reformers, objecting vociferously to any mention of female sexual pleasure. Chase exemplified the continuing skepticism among some Protestants toward the sorts of moral arguments made by Sanger, even as the tides began to shift around them.39

  After the critics concluded, Sanger got the final word. She responded to their advocacy of sexual self-control over birth control by noting that the nation’s laws robbed married women of the very right and possibility of sexual self-control, placing the decision for sex entirely within th
e realm of men. Those laws plainly had to change, Sanger declared, and the American woman “must have control over her own body.” Men too needed the right to control procreation; this was a freedom not solely intended for women. Above all, Sanger advocated a freedom that was to be in service to marriage, not debauchery—to love and fidelity against the painful circumstances that led to adultery and marital breakdown.40

  Sanger’s final comments aimed specifically at the notion she took to be central to the Catholic position: that the sole purpose of sex was for the procreation of children. Calling that argument “perfectly absurd” because it reduced humans to the level of animals, she pled for sex as the “sacred” and “beautiful” expression of love between two people, even when they did not intend to have children. “I contend that they can go into that relationship with the same beauty and the same holiness with which they go into music or to prayer.”41 Calling sexual power that which “gives us spiritual illumination,” Sanger echoed sex mystics from Alice Stockham and Ida Craddock to Edward Carpenter and D. H. Lawrence, who sought to raise sex from the gutter in which they felt Comstock and Catholics had thrown it.

  In the immediate wake of the Town Hall raid, church leaders—well acquainted with Sanger’s notoriety and radicalism—hardly leapt to her defense. The Christian Century, the weekly organ of American mainline liberal Protestantism, appears to have simply ignored the raid altogether; in 1921, the topic of birth control remained too delicate a subject for open and public discussion in the Protestant churches. That would rapidly change, however, spearheaded by the explosive revulsion for what seemed to the mainstream press to be Catholic prudery and anti-American authoritarianism. So successfully did the tide turn after Sanger’s public ouster from the Town Hall that even many who had heretofore opposed her cause rallied sympathetically to her defense, marking a sea change in the news coverage of Sanger, birth control, and the Catholic hierarchy. An editorial in the Outlook, a widely read weekly news journal, made the point clearly, saying that while editors were “not in sympathy with Mrs. Sanger’s methods” and “very doubtful about the good taste and wisdom of discussing the subject of birth control… in a public hall before a popular audience,” the “violent” and “brutal” behavior of the police warranted protest as “a dangerous and, we think, illegal violation… of the fundamental right of free speech guaranteed by the United States Constitution.”42 The event tapped into old Protestant trepidations about tyrannical church control of civic issues—an issue that, in the press coverage, virtually trumped discussion of the sexual issues at hand. Freedom itself, more than chastity, appeared to be the moral value most clearly threatened in this dispute.