by Andrew Marr
So, one day in 1922, Mrs McCormick went shopping. She headed off on a liner for a four-month trip with three large trunks and five suitcases, apparently intent on snapping up rather large amounts of the latest European fashions. Her family owned a château in Switzerland, overlooking Lake Geneva. It had been a famous gathering-point for Enlightenment intellectuals. Posing as a doctor, Katharine now ordered large quantities of diaphragms from French and Italian manufacturers to be sent to the château, while she bought a lot of dresses and coats. Next, she hired local Swiss women to sew more than a thousand diaphragms into the clothes, which were then tightly packed into her luggage, now comprising eight trunks. She then imperiously marched her contraband past French and US customs officials, delivering them by truck to the Sanger clinic.
Were that all, it would have been a significant contribution to the birth-control movement, which McCormick continued to quietly fund, though soon Sanger also married a rich man, an oil baron, and would have no further money troubles. But it was far from all.
In 1947, Stanley McCormick died. Nobody could have asked for a better wife: Katharine had looked after him devotedly, lavishing his family money on gardeners, servants, doctors and musicians to make his self-torturing life a little easier. Given the belief that insanity was hereditary, his illness may well have contributed to Katharine’s decision to have no children of her own; and that in turn would have sharpened her interest in contraception. Now he was gone, his family wanted some control over the huge fortune, but Katharine was still rich almost beyond imagining. What could she do with the money? She wrote to Sanger. Both women were now in their seventies; but their reconnection would be even more significant than their original meeting.
On 27 October 1950, Sanger replied to the letter from McCormick in which she had offered Margaret financial help: ‘I consider that the world, and almost our civilization for the next twenty-five years is going to depend upon a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles and amongst the most ignorant people.’ The eugenic note was not a slip of the pen. She went on to add that ‘now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them’.18 McCormick and others would get her off that hobby-horse, but for both of them the key thing was to find that ‘simple, cheap, safe’ answer.
A few months after receiving Margaret’s letter, Katharine McCormick arranged a dinner in New York with a research scientist from Massachusetts who looked strikingly like Einstein, but who was actually a world expert in mammalian eggs. If anyone could find that answer quickly, Gregory Pincus was the man. How much would it cost? $25,000, he thought. In fact McCormick would spend nearly $2 million. Soon both Sanger and McCormick, those formidable elderly ladies, were hovering over Pincus in his Massachusetts lab.
Pincus was not working alone. A gynaecologist called John Rock had been studying progesterone, a key hormone in fertilization which helps ensure the body does not produce multiple pregnancies. So had two other scientists, a young Jewish refugee from Vienna called Carl Djerassi, and Frank Colton. None of these had it in mind to produce a contraceptive pill; synthetic hormones were the big new thing at the time, in great demand by the drug companies. But Djerassi, while working in Mexico, synthesized a drug that was much stronger than natural progesterone and could be taken orally. It was initially intended to combat severe menstrual bleeding, but it would be key to the success of what would soon be called simply ‘the Pill’.
Pincus was already famous, or notorious, as the man who had fertilized rabbit eggs in a test-tube, earning himself the ‘Dr Frankenstein’ label in newspapers and causing waves in the scientific world. Before the war, Harvard had denied him tenure – Pincus thought, because he was ‘a self-advertising Jew who published too soon and talked too much’.19 He set to work on his new task, then in 1952 bumped into one of the men who had been studying progesterone, again not in order to prevent pregnancy, but this time in order to help infertile women. Though he was a devout Catholic this man agreed to work with Pincus, helping him towards the breakthroughs that would lead to an oral drug which Colton and Djerassi would refine. Plenty of hurdles had to be cleared en route, but after a successful clinical trial, at a conference in Tokyo in 1953 Pincus announced what they had achieved. And . . . nobody took any notice.
The commercial struggle to test and produce a saleable product took years, but the Pill was finally unveiled on 11 May 1960 as a contraceptive. Few innovations have made as big an impact on as many people. How much more effective was it than other methods of contraception? A detailed study in 1961 found the failure rate from condoms was high, 28 per cent; from diaphragms even higher, nearly 34 per cent, and from vaginal suppositories, 42 per cent. With the Pill, it was less than 2 per cent.20 Women voted yes: in its first year, four hundred thousand Americans took it. By 1965, it was estimated that a quarter of all married women under the age of forty-five in the US were taking it; by 1984 the worldwide estimate was up to eighty million.21 It is important to remember that modern science is all about collaboration, shared achievement and serendipity, rather than about a single genius leaping naked from his bath, yelling ‘I’ve got it!’
This is also a story about capitalism. Had poor Stanley McCormick’s father not made a fortune from harvesting-machines, Katharine would not have had the money to go over to Europe and smuggle diaphragms home, or to bankroll Pincus in his search for the Pill. Had the US drug companies not been so keen on the profits to be made, they would have struggled less hard to develop synthetic hormones. Had America not become a rich consumer economy whose women expected greater freedom and were already experiencing the liberating effect of new machines in the home, the take-up of the new Pill would have been slower. Given the rapid advance of biochemistry at the time, it would certainly have happened eventually; though at another time, when Christian moralism was less influential in American life. In the 1930s, say, or indeed today, the Pill might not have been licensed so easily.
Certainly, without those two determined septuagenarians, it would not have happened when it did. One had started out as an anarchist and political radical, hoping for the downfall of American capitalism; the other was married to American capitalism. The Pill needed them both, the political agitator who challenged conventional thinking, and the quietly resolute financial backer. This unlikely partnership goes some way to explaining the underlying strength of American culture, its radicalism and its energy.
The Pill was morally controversial. It probably always will be. Many religious people, notably Roman Catholics, oppose contraception in any event, while others blame it for a radical loosening of traditional sexual morality in the 1960s and afterwards. It can have serious side-effects; add to that the fact that many women feel angered that less effort has been made to find an oral contraceptive focusing on the other sex, one that would stop men being able to fertilize eggs. All the same, this was a democratic technology, which people voted for by buying it. Because of it, women were for the first time easily and reliably able to distance sexual pleasure from the likelihood of pregnancy. A different relationship, between the body as a zone of pleasure and delight, and reproduction, became possible – something the young Sanger and her anarchist friends had talked about nearly sixty years before. The argument that the market can be as destabilizing for some as it is liberating for others, and as revolutionary as any state action, is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the Pill.
A War of the Empires
The First World War had been a European tribal war, which drew in other continents and peoples mainly on account of Europe’s empires. Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians and South Africans rallied to the British Empire’s summons. Germany’s attempt to conjure up jihad against the British in the Middle East helped bring the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and the Arabs, into the conflict. America joined in, as we have seen, because her own security seemed
threatened by both German submarines and Mexican intrigues. The countries of Europe were still so world-dominant that when they collided, the alarm was sounded almost everywhere around the planet.
The Second World War followed the same pattern – some historians have depicted it as the second half of a single conflict. It too began in Europe and sucked in much of the globe. But there was a key difference. Early German victory on the European continent humiliated the other European powers, weakened their empires and spread the war to Asia. It made it easier for a new empire, the Japanese, to rip through old colonies around the Pacific; it also meant the Japanese, already at war in China, were bound to come into conflict with America. Early German victories had another effect: they convinced Hitler that he was indeed a military genius and encouraged him to carry through his original dream and invade the USSR. This had the perverse effect of ranging the United States and the old European imperial powers, above all Britain, alongside their bitterest political enemy.
So though the Second World War is sometimes seen as the last great ideological war, a battle to ‘save democracy’, the inconvenient fact is that it was won partly by Stalin’s totalitarian regime, and could not have been won without it.
It would be more accurate to see this as the last great imperial war. Japan was trying to build an empire in China and Manchuria and on the relics of the British and Dutch Far Eastern empires (and hoped to include British India). The German plan was for the creation of a German empire in what had been central Europe and western Russia. Even Stalin, constantly attacking ‘imperialism’, had been in on the act. After abandoning world revolution for ‘socialism in one country’, he had updated Russia’s traditional imperial attitude. We have seen how in Ivan the Terrible’s time Russia engulfed Kazan and began to devour Siberia. This was followed by the invasion and seizure of the Caucasus and by the establishment of Russian hegemony over the Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya and Mongolia. The Russians regarded Finland, the Baltic states and much of Poland as naturally ‘theirs’ too; the Second World War began when the Russians were already fighting the Finns. Stalin’s vision of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics really signified Russian control over as much of this vast area as was militarily possible. He was even prepared to order the mass migration of entire peoples in order to subdue dissent. The national minorities had lower status, barely disguised by a folkloric veil of harmony; it was later said that in the USSR ‘the minorities dance’.
Finally, the forced engagement of the US after Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 led to America dominating half the world through a virtual empire, not of guardhouses and governors, but of nuclear firepower, proxy wars, commodities and finance. They ended up with a permanent military presence stretching from Japan to Western Europe; deeply involved in the politics of South America; and with large fleets that swiftly replaced Britain’s Royal Navy as guardians of Western influence. Still strongly hostile to the ‘old empires’ of Europe, American success in the war would be followed by a dramatic spread of American business, and by the emergence of the dollar as the world’s most important currency. All this was good news for those who breathed freely under the US shield, saved from the Communist-imperial vision. But others saw it as the moment of lost innocence when an American republic became the American empire.
From the first, it was clear that ideology would take second place to national self-interest. The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 settled the fate of Poland, which was invaded and divided up the following month. From then until the end of 1941, a period of nearly two and a half years, the United States managed to stay out of the war. But for about two years, until the surprise (to Stalin) invasion of the USSR in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Soviets and Nazis were working uneasily together. As the military historian Max Hastings reminds us, this enabled Hitler’s armies to receive huge material help from the Soviet Union: ‘Supply trains continued to roll west until the very moment of the invasion; the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were largely fuelled by Soviet oil; the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats had access to Russian port facilities.’22
So from 1939 to 1941 the war was confined to a relatively limited area. It was essentially a duel between those old Great War enemies, the British and French on one side and the Germans on the other; but this time the French had been knocked out. Had Hitler been able to invade Britain in 1940, or found some other way to force the British to sue for peace, the war might have ended there.
If that had happened, we would today be less dominated by America, and Soviet Russia would have stayed essentially behind her earlier borders. The entire continent of Europe would not have been under direct German control. Spain’s General Franco had spurned a full-scale military alliance with Hitler, which, given the help he had received during the Spanish Civil War, seemed wary to the point of ingratitude. Mussolini’s Italy was an ally, but not a carbon-copy. Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland stayed neutral. Greece, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia might have remained altogether untouched by the fighting. Would so many Jews have died? Would cities like London, Hamburg, Dresden and Coventry have stayed untouched? Outside Europe, had the British sued for peace it would probably have led to the swift collapse of her empire. Churchill thought so. India might well have come under Japanese control. The US, isolationist, would presumably not have acquired the atomic bomb so early, since to do so relied on British and emigrant Jewish scientists as well as on a huge industrial effort to beat Hitler’s scientists.
Such musings belong to speculative novelists, however, because the British leader refused to sue for peace; because Britain prevented a German invasion; and because Hitler’s thinking, the way he had constructed Nazi Germany, and his personality in the end rendered his attack on the Soviet Union inevitable. His rhetorical universe was founded on a conflict between Germanism and Jewish Bolshevism, and his offer to the German people was of a great new empire that would make them rich and secure, and that could only come about via the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would have been better for him to have humbled Churchill first; but eventually he had to turn towards Moscow. In Mein Kampf, Operation Barbarossa was already visible on the horizon.
Britain’s defeat of the Luftwaffe in the late summer and autumn of 1940, which has become an almost Arthurian or Shakespearean myth-story for the modern British, meant more than just frustrating the invasion. It meant that when the US joined the war it could pose a direct threat to Germany, not just to Japan. Roosevelt had dodged and prevaricated as he tried to help Britain with aid and old destroyers, while soothing an American public still hostile to war. However much Americans warmed to the plucky Londoners during the Blitz, the thought of plunging into a new world war to save the British Empire was not a popular one.
In any case, Germany was not the most obvious enemy. Japan’s war against China had made the Tokyo militarists the most hated figures in Washington. And Japan had tried to briefly attack Siberia but had been pushed back by the Russians; her high command now believed the American oil embargo necessitated her driving south, with a view to winning a big enough Pacific empire to give her security against the US. The notion that Japan might actually conquer the continent-sized United States was of course always absurd, but her rulers still thought that sufficiently dramatic military successes would intimidate Washington into an early peace. Tokyo assumed – as did most observers – that Hitler was bound to be victorious in Europe.
It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that something like the Pearl Harbor attack was bound to happen. The devastatingly successful torpedo-bomber assault on the US Pacific Fleet, which sank four battleships and many other vessels, was, at a technical and operational level, a feat of military genius. It certainly kept the Americans at bay while the Japanese armies swept through South-East Asia. It was also, however, an act of strategic idiocy. It showed how little Tokyo’s politicians and military chiefs understood America. It brought the world war to the Pacific and made the eventual defeat of Japan inevitable. And because Britain was still holding out, s
till connected to the US by the lifeline of the Atlantic and still supported by the formidable resources of her empire, it made US entry into the war against Hitler plausible in a way it had not been the day before the Japanese warplanes struck.
Some leaders instantly understood all this. Churchill telephoned Roosevelt for confirmation of the attack. The US President told him that ‘we are all in the same boat now’ and Churchill later recorded his visceral, emotional reaction: ‘So we had won, after all.’ Interestingly, Hitler completely misread the event, delighting that Japan was now on Germany’s side: ‘We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally that has not been conquered in 3,000 years.’23 As for the Americans, her entry into the conflict merely confirmed Hitler’s belief that Germany faced a worldwide Jewish threat.
The history of the Second World War is, of course, the history of battles, of leaders and their strategies, of planes and tanks and armies. It can be recounted in a series of place names that resound and will continue to rumble for a long time to come – Warsaw, Dunkirk, Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk, Singapore, Midway, Okinawa, Nagasaki. It is composed of ‘battles’ which in earlier times would have comprised entire wars – the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, the Battle of the Pacific. The first generations of postwar historians and memoirists emphasized the titanic role of leaders such as Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Rommel, Tojo and Zhukov, and focused strongly on the equipment used, the fighters and bombers, the battleships and tanks, the rockets and radar. They were followed by historians who put more emphasis on the slaughter of civilians and cities, and the failures of judgement.