Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  A blistering editorial in the New Republic, a periodical that had long favored legalizing birth control, made this connection even clearer, insisting that Archbishop Hayes’s behind-the-scenes enlistment of the police as “puppets” for the suppression of free speech could have easily gone unexposed, had Sanger not been “so courageous a woman” or the magistrate who dismissed her case not “upright.” The writer, likely TNR editor Herbert Croly—a friend and supporter of Sanger—pointed out that Hayes’s protest was the church’s clearest and most public sign yet of wholesale opposition to birth control, and that these positions (anti–free speech and anti–birth control) were deeply linked. “Birth control is obnoxious to men and women of obscurantist mind,” he wrote, and the effort to deny public discussion of the issue showed the weakness of its case. Catholics opposed divorce too, after all, but American lawmakers did not think they needed to abide by “natural law,” much less suppress discussion of the topic. Gleefully, this writer noted that the archbishop’s failed tactics of suppression had only strengthened Sanger’s cause and that, consequently, “the outlook for the birth control movement is brighter than it ever was.”43

  Hayes continued to stand at the center of the birth control movement’s spotlight, exhibit A for what, to critics, was so awful about the Catholic Church: its insistence on “compulsory maternity,” its romanticization of suffering and refusal to ameliorate the miseries that followed upon “unregulated breeding,” its dogged claims of the “unnaturalness” of contraception, the forced obedience to arbitrary dogma, its reliance on thought control and denial of the right of people to think for themselves, its imposition of sexual abstinence on the priesthood, and its aim of suppressing sexuality writ large among the human population.44 Sanger’s critiques circulated widely as, together, Woman and the New Race and The Pivot of Civilization—two works that elaborated these claims in detail, along with her own felt persecution at the hands of Catholic leaders—sold 567,000 copies between 1920 and 1926.45 Catholic leaders had “worked miracles of publicity that would have been impossible to a regiment of press-agents,” she later wrote; she reveled in making that point every chance she got.46

  The First American Birth Control Conference and the Town Hall raid, as it came to be known, launched a decade of tumultuous religious conflict over contraception. Popular support for birth control grew, and many religious leaders sought to clarify, revise, or rethink their positions on contraception. Sanger’s own role was never uncontroversial, and many distanced themselves from her more radical pronouncements. But there is little doubt that both her outspokenness and the very fact of having her speech stifled prompted many to reconsider their attitudes no less than it spurred Catholic critics on the other side. American church leaders knew of Sanger’s loathing of their patriarchal suppression of women; indeed, their apparent involvement in the Town Hall raid suggested how dangerous Archbishop Hayes feared her to be.

  Sanger persistently framed the debate as one about bedrock American values, particularly free speech and American democratic principles of equality. The Catholic Church could preach what it wanted to its own people, but turning doctrine into law was antidemocratic.47 She berated church authorities in Rome for irresponsibly encouraging the uncontrolled breeding of poor and rich alike, resulting in enormous and interconnected social evils that weakened the nation, such as poverty, prostitution, low wages, child labor, and war. Over and over again, she built on the theme—already developed prior to the conference but immeasurably aided by the Town Hall raid—that Christian hierarchs were mulish obstacles to change who, “for the sake of an outworn dogma of submission,” would shamelessly wreck the lives of women by calling on them to “breed, breed, breed” and “condemn their progeny to pain, want, disease and helplessness.”48 The full and equal citizenship of American women, only recently earned at the ballot box, was at stake.

  The most important effect of the Town Hall episode, with Sanger’s arrest front and center, was that it directly situated sex at the center of a widely publicized and very public debate. Sex itself was a subtext in a much vaster quarrel about the meaning of American ideals. Questions of free speech and democratic deliberation, religious authority and the power of the state, the limits of liberty and women’s emancipation: all were now, more explicitly than ever before, linked to publicly disputed norms of sexuality and reproduction. Cherished sexual values were subjected to frank and open examination, if not entirely denuded of euphemism. Sanger’s arrest helped her to make not just a moral argument for contraception but also a political argument for contraception—or at least for the right to talk about it. With this argument, she recast contraception advocacy from something radical into an all-American pursuit, and opposition to birth control as fundamentally anti-American.

  The fracas following Town Hall accelerated a war between competing religious authorities and modes of moral advocacy, one that started in high circles of leadership but would soon permeate the pews and disperse widely into the American citizenry. Sanger linked claims about morality and about sex with claims about politics, casting those who disagreed with her about sexual matters as both immoral and un-American. By doing this so successfully, Sanger—perhaps more than any other figure before or since—drew the battle lines employed by religious and political leaders in the long national war over sex. In years to come, the emerging disagreements between Protestant and Catholic leaders evident during the Town Hall raid controversy would widen. Even as they increasingly diverged and looked on each other with disdain, if not contempt, the Catholic and Protestant views of sex shaped themselves into newly settled dogma.

  CATHOLIC OFFICIALS HAD SOUGHT TO quiet Sanger’s advocacy of contraception by saying such discussion was inappropriate. Paradoxically, the clergy’s efforts to silence her and—when she was not silenced—their subsequent rebuttals of her position actually provoked leaders to speak more loudly about sex than ever before. This was surely an inadvertent effect of the attempt to prevent the Town Hall meeting from taking place, which aimed at ceasing public discussion altogether. After that event, clerical authorities who had worked hard to show that American Catholics were just as virtuous and patriotic as other Americans, found themselves on the defensive in this conflict, and those at the top of the US hierarchy were forced to defend church doctrine to large-scale audiences of often suspicious non-Catholics.

  By the early 1920s, after several long waves of European immigration, there were approximately twenty million Catholics in America, comprising about 20 percent of the population. But while Catholic people were very much a minority, the numbers had increased by about eleven million in the past forty years, and the Roman Catholic Church was the largest single religious body in the nation.49 To many non-Catholics, its political influence was outsized and worrisome, and many feared that Catholics ultimately wanted an American theocracy based on church doctrine. These fears were especially profound in urban areas with large Catholic populations—such as Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and above all New York, the largest and reputedly wealthiest Catholic archdiocese in the United States at the time—where local bishops could wield tremendous political power.50

  This was certainly the case with Archbishop Hayes in New York. As a fairly new archbishop in 1921—he had risen to the post in March 1919—Hayes was perhaps best known as one of the creators of the National Catholic War Council (NCWC), the first permanent organization of Catholic bishops throughout the country (later renamed the National Catholic Welfare Conference). In this role, Hayes was one of the four American Catholic bishops who signed the progressive “Program of Social Reconstruction,” written by John Ryan. For leaders like these, birth control was the very opposite of a social justice issue: as Ryan wrote in a scathing letter to one birth control proponent who had the audacity to solicit him for money and membership in the American Birth Control League, “I had much rather give the money to an organization for the training of prize-fighters. It would aid in the development of at least some manly and human
qualities.”51 Fighting birth control was a fight for the poor, as they saw it; and they surely resented the fact that Sanger and her allies had framed the Catholic position in such different, wholly negative terms—as an authoritarian grab for power and the wholesale repression of women’s rights.

  In a public statement outlining his opposition both to the conference’s public forum and to birth control more generally, Archbishop Hayes spoke as “a citizen and a churchman, deeply concerned with the moral well-being of our city,” and he argued that his “protest against the use of the open forum for the propaganda of birth control” was in no way sectarian but for the welfare of the larger public. Hayes declared that he spoke for nearly a million American women, not counting the “thousands of other indignant women and distressed mothers” who were shocked by the public discussion of “a subject that simple prudence and decency… should keep within the walls of a clinic.” But like Ryan, he also showed agreement with some of the eugenic appeals of birth control, adducing evidence from those he deemed “distinguished scientists” concerned to head off “the impending deterioration of the race.” Hayes cited the recent New York meeting of the International Congress of Eugenics for its emphasis, “if the race was to be better born,” on such goods as monogamous marriage, “more children in the families of the well-to-do as a moral duty,” and “better safeguards against the marriage of imbeciles and insane.”52 Far from refuting any of this eugenic language of a “better born” race, Hayes concluded, “Human experience confirms all this.” His conclusion made a similar appeal to nativist, eugenic fears of the demise of the American (white) race, particularly the upper classes: “May Divine Providence inspire America to fix its canon against self-slaughter at the very source of human life, lest the sacred and highest end of the family—mother and child—vanish from our homes, and the stranger, alien to the American ideal, who, however, obeyed God’s command to increase and multiply, enter to possess the land.”53

  Catholic teaching staunchly opposed basic assumptions of the birth control movement, and Catholic leaders at this time sought to refute what they deemed Sanger’s malicious misrepresentations of their moral priorities. According to Catholic doctrine, contraception distorted God’s plan for a holy Christian marriage by interfering with the sexual act between husband and wife and preventing the natural possibility of conception. That teaching was simply nonnegotiable (outside of what would later be termed the “rhythm method”). Catholic leaders also opposed the movement’s advocacy of women’s freedom to own and control their bodies. To traditional Catholics, women did have a moral duty to preserve and uphold traditional values; they were not supposed to create a “new sex morality” quite distinct from church teaching, as Sanger would have it.54 Feminine submission in marriage and motherhood (or, alternately, in the chasteness of the convent) was a divine duty, not a relic of the past. Moreover, just because the clergy forbade birth control did not mean the church was imprisoning its own people by means of fear, ignorance, and a merciless doctrine of submission to authoritarian leadership. Church leaders understood the ideas they were up against in terms of the very definition of womanhood which the birth control movement threatened to upend.

  While the Catholic position did not exactly harden, in this climate it gathered passionate intensity for a robust defense. Reasonably enough, Catholic leaders took full advantage of the birth controllers’ anti-Catholic rhetoric for their own ends. As they worked to stoke lay Catholic indignation at Sanger’s persistent ill treatment of them, they harnessed that anger for the cause of sexual morality. A 1923 article by Paulist father J. Elliot Ross, published in the popular Catholic World, was typical. Ross, citing Tertullian to the effect that “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of new Christians,” consoled readers that “persecution is good for the Church.” That apparently universal truth boded well in the present context, since, Ross noted, a “bitter campaign of vilification” against Catholics was raging. For over a year, accounts had been coming in of anti-Catholic discrimination: public schools were terminating Catholic teachers, for instance, and it seemed to some as if a wholesale Protestant boycott against Catholics were being waged. Formerly lax and lukewarm Catholics were not only now shoring up their faith and renewing their interest in the church but growing more activist on the issue of birth control. “Persecution brings out a latent faith,” Ross assured readers, “just as war brings out a latent patriotism.” And not only that: the anti-Catholic campaign had drawn in many non-Catholics as well. Ross concluded on a gleeful if bloodthirsty note: “If they would only be goaded into giving us a few real martyrs, if they would actually kill a few Catholics because they were Catholics, converts would roll in like a great tidal wave.”55

  Less than two and a half years after the First American Birth Control Conference, on March 24, 1924, Archbishop Hayes rose to the rank of cardinal. The Vatican appointment seemed clearly indicative of Rome’s approval of Hayes’s public defense of the faith against the sort of emancipatory freethinking agenda represented by Sanger. An apparent favorite of Pope Pius XI—a writer for Time magazine in 1935 noted that the pope called him caro fratello (“dear little brother”)—Hayes remained in that post for the rest of his life, mostly refraining from the sort of public confrontation he had earlier executed with Sanger.56 But he did speak out against birth control when he deemed it necessary, as when he deduced non-Catholics were once again misrepresenting the Catholic position and delivered a sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral emphasizing his regret and uncomfortable embarrassment at addressing this subject “to good, clean people like you.” Nonetheless, the “Prophets of Decadence” were loudly preaching this “perversion” of the reproductive faculty, and therefore it was “impossible for me to remain silent.”57

  It is no small irony that what spurred Catholic leaders to speak more directly and vigorously in public about contraception than they had likely ever done before was Sanger’s activism. Later observers have agreed that Sanger had greater success than church leaders in informing Catholics of their own church’s position on contraception. And since it was untenable to allow her such leeway to educate their flocks, Sanger and the birth control movement forced Catholics to speak when they, like Hayes, may have wished to remain silent. That is, while Catholic leaders would say that American culture was changing (and declining) while the church remained a fortress of natural, long-promulgated law, Sanger herself in fact impelled the church to speak loudly about sex.

  And not only loudly: later observers would note that it was largely due to Sanger’s public notoriety and activism that the Catholic Church developed its stance into an inflexible position that ultimately “eviscerated nuance,” as one put it: a refusal to differentiate between beliefs about natural law, human life, God’s authority over sex, and the value of suffering compressed these into “a tightly woven rhetorical package,” such that Catholics “lumped contraception, forced sterilization, euthanasia, and abortion into the same abhorrent category.”58 By this logic, access to contraceptives was basically equivalent to these other evils, and allowing it led to what editors at the Catholic periodical Commonweal warned would be “the ultimate destruction of human liberty at the hands of an absolute pagan state.”59 This equivalency position, with its dire political overtones, was a position that many outside the church increasingly found inexplicable, rigid, and antiquated. That seemingly inflexible Catholic standpoint combined with the fame that rapidly accrued to Sanger in the wake of the First American Birth Control Conference essentially transformed the feminist leader into one of the most famous and effective activists in the nation’s history.60

  In February 1926, the director and executive secretary of Sanger’s American Birth Control League, Anne Kennedy, had a private meeting with Patrick J. Ward, who was employed by the National Catholic Welfare Conference. That “unlikely political encounter,” as one expert called it, revealed the “widening gulf between Catholic and Protestant perspectives on marriage” less than five years after Sanger’
s ouster from the Town Hall stage. In an urgent memorandum to his superior, Father John Burke, concerning this meeting, Ward first dismissively listed Kennedy’s reasons for favoring birth control. “Little new in her statement of the case. Advanced the usual stock arguments of economic conditions, being practical, spacing children, mothers’ health, the right of people to ask and physicians to give medical information, etc., etc.” Plainly, the “stock arguments” of Kennedy and Sanger carried no weight with Ward or his priestly leader.61

  Then Ward got to the real shocker: