by Dawn Raffel
What could they possibly do? They put the newborn in a shoebox. And then they rode the streetcar to the fair. The woman who found a place for the baby would have been Maye; the physician who’d save her life was probably Julius Hess; and the man who’d shake the couple’s hands and offer reassurance was undoubtedly Martin himself.
Karen Steinicke Rasmussen would ride the streetcar to the concession four times a day, to breast-feed her daughter.
Meanwhile, plans for the fair’s Better Baby competition were already under way.
* * *
—
On the opposite coast, Sloane Hospital in Manhattan was gripped by a strange contagion. Nurses and doctors were falling ill, with headaches and weakness, fever and diarrhea. No one understood it. At last, the source was rooted out in the hospital’s kitchen. Not the food. The cook. Mary Brown, she called herself. Her real name, Mary Mallon. The health department knew her as Typhoid Mary, a carrier who didn’t get sick. Mary had already been ordered never to work in a kitchen. She knew she shouldn’t have been there, but the pay was better than working as a laundress. After this infectious misadventure, in which two people died, Mary was arrested. She was quarantined for the rest of her sad life.
* * *
—
Mary Isabella Segner, Maye’s mother, was nearing the end. She had lived with Maye and Martin from the time of their marriage. No, she had probably never imagined that her daughter would make a match like this one, to a Jewish showman. Living on the midway, in the midst of clowns and freaks. Yet her son-in-law was good to her. She had been welcome everywhere the couple went. And she loved the child, Hildegarde.
Mary Isabella wrote her last will and testament in San Francisco. In it, she left one hundred dollars to Isabella Russ, her granddaughter by Maye’s sister, Frances, who had already died. She left another hundred dollars to Hildegarde. All the rest she bequeathed to Maye, “who has at all times been most kind, loving, and considerate of me,” she wrote. Excluded from her will was her other child, Charles, “not, however, out of any lack of love or regard for my said son, but as an evidence of my appreciation to my daughter for her many years of loving kindness to me.” Charles A. Segner was a prominent newspaperman in Indiana. Married with children. Given the Segner and Couney families’ later apparent estrangement, he might not have taken this turn of events entirely in stride.
* * *
—
While Maye grieved the impending death of her mother, Martin was upset about something else. The fair ended in December of 1915. Rather than tear down a fully equipped facility, Martin wanted to donate it to Associated Charities for the care of the city’s preemies. San Franciscans could save these babies if they wanted to; he’d demonstrated how. And yet, at every turn, he faced resistance.
Some of his patients were foundlings or children of the overburdened poor. Sometimes nobody claimed them after the show was over, and they went to orphanages, where no one was going to love them. But did that mean the city ought to simply let them die?
First came the memos insisting that the building be demolished. It sat on private property and the owner wanted it back. But what about the incubators themselves? These were expensive machines. Would no one accept them? Round and round he went with the pencil-dragging bureaucrats.
He couldn’t even give the machines away.
* * *
—
The Couneys were still in San Francisco when, on the final day of February 1916, Mary Isabella died. Her will went through probate in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and was filed in the fall, with Maye pocketing $1,580. Just enough cash to secure a down payment for a property: 3728 Surf Avenue in Sea Gate. Beautiful, exclusive (and quietly, mildly, anti-Semitic) Sea Gate abutted Coney Island, but it was a gated enclave. Captains of industry. Socialites and titans, with white-glove summer homes. In the years to come, the Couneys would live in elegance, along with Aunt Louise. Martin’s cousin Isador Schulz would also move in, and never move out.
ONE VERY SHORT LADY
Nedra was seventy-four years old when I found her thanks to Facebook. Her mother-in-law, Anna, was the baby who had arrived at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in a shoebox. Nedra filled me in on the rest: After Anna’s parents brought her home, they raised nine more children.
Anna, when she married, took the last name Justice. She bore three living babies, and a stillborn. Her son was Nedra’s husband. “She was a very short lady,” Nedra Justice said of her mother-in-law, who’d lived to be eighty years old.
Later, I learned that the eugenically perfect winner of the Better Baby competition died of tuberculosis a few months after the fair.
Part Three
THE BLACK STORK
NO-MAN’S-LAND
New York City, 1917
The men had shipped out to fight in the Great War. Some of Martin Couney’s earliest patients were among them; one would earn the Croix de Guerre. Julius Hess, though not young, went overseas as a major. In France, Pierre Budin was dead. Alexandre Lion disappeared—his last known show was in the aughts.
That left the littlest citizens in no-man’s-land. It wasn’t just that the world was focused on the war; the entire approach to birth was in transition. With obstetrics becoming a more sophisticated specialty, middle-class American women were increasingly giving birth in hospitals instead of staying at home. But obstetricians didn’t have much time or inclination to fuss over weaklings, and the nascent field of pediatrics hadn’t quite gotten to them. They fell between the cracks, where they died.
* * *
—
All the world loves a baby! At Coney Island and in Atlantic City, Martin’s patients thrived and so did his business. Women, in particular, kept coming back for a feel-good dose of medical-grade cuteness. One woman would end up visiting the Coney Island concession every week of the summer for thirty-six years.
Slowly, Martin and Maye would acquire the trappings of wealth, in keeping with the neighbors. Crystal goblets on the table, chandeliers casting prisms of light. Sterling-silver chargers under each fine china setting. A servant (live-in) in the kitchen, and a chauffeur (as a matter of safety: Martin did his best, but he was known to be a menace at the wheel). Diamonds for her, black poodles for him. Plenty of room for Little Miss Couney and Aunt Louise and cousin Isador to live in shiny ease.
Martin polished his spiel. He liked to cite the names of famous men who’d entered the world too early:
Sir Isaac Newton
François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Napoleon Bonaparte
Victor Hugo
Charles Darwin
And who would know the difference if, in spiffing things up, he burnished his credentials? If he said he’d studied in Paris with Pierre Budin, it would strengthen the case he was making to the city’s doctors, and cause them to take him more seriously. If he said it was he who’d shown the incubators in Berlin, if he claimed he had European degrees, if he said he’d invented his machines—who was getting hurt? The way the world was, there was nobody checking. Not a soul to contradict him. The truth was, the care the babies got was every bit as good as it would have been if all those credentials were real, and better than any hospital. (One doctor, writing in The Journal of the American Medical Association the previous year, announced that “incubators are passé” and “it is a fact that practically all prematures entrusted to institution care die.”)
But Martin was starting to paint himself into a corner, albeit a well-appointed one. With the culture changing, he must have felt he needed the credentials—yet anyone believing they were genuine might judge him more harshly. If he had truly been the protégé of Pierre Budin, if he had been educated in Leipzig and Berlin, then it would certainly seem self-serving and exploitative to persist in showing babies on the midway. Why not—at the least—publish clinical results, as John Zahorsky
had done? Why not do what Julius Hess was doing, regardless of the frustrations?
Martin Couney had no other recourse. To an extent, like almost anyone of a certain age, he had worn himself into a groove. Too, Maye and Louise had devoted the better part of their lives to this. And money is addictive. But the bottom line was this: He had the means to save thousands of babies, who otherwise were doomed. If he quit, they would die.
What he was offering wasn’t only treatment; it was public propaganda on behalf of preemies.
Propaganda mattered in a war. Later, he could have added Sir Winston Churchill to his spiel.
* * *
—
In Chicago, someone else was making propaganda, only his was deadly. Harry J. Haiselden, M.D., was the head of the city’s German-American Hospital. Until now, the public had seen two prongs of eugenics. One, at least in theory, was “positive”—it focused mostly on the prevention of birth defects, and prenatal and baby care. The Better Baby contests were an example of this. The second, “negative,” prong involved the elimination of “undesirable” births. Before it was over, the horrors of involuntary sterilization would be visited on sixty thousand people in twenty-seven states, including African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, people who had committed petty crimes, and individuals with disabilities or mental illness. American eugenics would influence the Nazis, who admired it. Not content to stop at selectively preventing birth, several American eugenics leaders raised the possibility of killing certain newborns. Dr. Harry Haiselden unveiled the third prong of the trident. He denied lifesaving treatment to infants he deemed “defective,” deliberately watching them die even when they could have lived. In some cases, the traumatized parents were in agreement; in others, he had to persuade them to believe that their children were better off dead. He wasn’t the first or only doctor to intentionally allow a child to die, but he was the first to call the press. He eagerly displayed dying babies to journalists, in addition to writing his own articles for the Chicago American.
Doctors all over the country lined up on both sides of this fight, as did prominent Americans. Helen Keller, the first blind and deaf person to earn a college degree, famously advocated for the disabled, yet she agreed with Dr. Haiselden. In Chicago, attempts to prosecute him and revoke his license failed. The Chicago Medical Society would finally succeed in stripping him of membership, not for letting his patients die but for publicizing his cases.
Meanwhile, frightened parents were writing to Dr. Haiselden, begging him to do something about their very disabled children. They had almost nowhere to turn for help, and now they had been convinced their sons and daughters were dragging down the human race.
* * *
—
The movie was called The Black Stork. Released in 1917, it starred Dr. Haiselden, coolly playing a character based on himself, in a story loosely based on a real case. In the silent, captioned film, the newborn is afflicted with an unidentified genetic disease. His mother is upset—to be expected—but she accepts the doctor’s wisdom after a vision of her child’s miserable future on this earth: a life of insanity and crime. When a nurse tries to hand the doctor his operating apron, he sternly refuses her. Chastened, she turns and walks away, leaving the infant to die alone on a table. The dead child eventually levitates into the arms of Jesus. One 1917 newspaper advertisement read “Kill Defectives, Save the Nation, and See ‘The Black Stork.’”
Later retitled Are You Fit to Marry?, the movie played in theaters for years.
* * *
—
The obstetricians sending babies to a sideshow felt uneasy with the spectacle. The parents, too, had their reservations. But what else could they do? In New York, as the years went by, newborns would be coming from Midwood, Zion, Bellevue, Boro Park Maternity Hospital, Long Island College Hospital, Kings County Hospital, and other Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan institutions. Over in Jersey, they were arriving from Atlantic City Hospital, as well as the private homes where they’d been born.
Martin Couney’s patients didn’t have severe anomalies; they were simply early, underdeveloped. But the cultural undercurrent was clear—anyone imperfect, anyone who might grow up with an impairment, wasn’t worth saving.
* * *
—
The fire this time began with a cigarette. Midways were notorious for burning, and in August of 1917, a Luna Park ride called the Toboggan, next door to the incubators, burst into flames. This time it was Louise, with another nurse and a couple of cops, who carried all eleven babies to the safety of a hotel.
The incubator show went on: It reopened in Steeplechase Park. And unlike Dreamland, Luna Park survived. Before his career ended, Martin Couney would return. As things played out, the flames of hell might not have sufficed to keep him away.
A CHARMED LIFE
The New York Times death notice read: “Appleton—Jean Dubinsky. June 19, 1919–January 3, 2015. A woman of valor, courage and principle. Starting life as one of Dr. Martin A. Couney’s famous Coney Island incubator babies, she went on to lead a life of drama and high excitement, participating in some of the most important social and political issues and events of the 20th Century.”
I had already spoken with several of Martin Couney’s patients, but I had just missed this one. As I read on, I learned that her father, David Dubinsky, was president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Among the people she’d met were General George C. Marshall, Bernard Baruch, Pope Pius XII, John Dewey, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Pablo Casals, Marian Anderson, Orson Welles, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Rockefeller, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia had officiated at her first wedding; her second had been to Shelley Appleton, secretary-treasurer of the ILGWU. “Her mind was remarkable to her final days,” the obit read.
In other words, I could have called her the week before.
* * *
—
Jean Appleton’s daughter, Ryna, who’d written the obit, is a slim, soft-spoken woman. She sat with me at her kitchen table in Manhattan, where she referred to photographs, mementos, and an oral history her mother had done toward the end of her ninety-five and a half years.
Weighing two and three-quarter pounds when she was born in a hospital, Jean was supposed to go to the Coney Island incubators. But an aunt got wind of it, objecting. “My mother’s formidable aunt Rose, the proprietress of the famous Dubin’s Bakery in Brooklyn, went to the hospital and attempted to grab the baby and take her home,” Ryna said. “There was a struggle.” Baby Jean wound up in the show, but not before Martin Couney was warned to keep an eye out for Aunt Rose.
* * *
—
Iunderstood my survival was rather miraculous,” Jean Appleton told the oral historian. “At a party, I might tell people, ‘You never met anyone else who people paid ten cents to see.’”
Her mother took her back for a visit once, when she was about seven. “I remember a very courtly, Old World–looking man and a very cheerful buxom lady,” she said.
Ryna had no way of knowing whether that cheerful, buxom person was Louise or Maye, or someone else. But in thinking about her mother, she felt that the incubators had a lasting effect on her personality. “She liked the idea that even at birth, she was something of a ‘celebrity.’” She had a will to survive and claim her own destiny.
At the age of five, Jean traveled with her parents to Russia. This was 1924. She saw children sleeping in the streets, and children drunk. A man was dragged and shot—presumably because he had taken a jar of jelly. When someone asked her, “What does your father do?” she replied, “He makes strikes.”
“That,” Ryna told me, “was my mother’s first speech.”
Later in life, Jean developed her own passion, apart from her parents’. She knew plenty of famous designers, but none who’d paid much at
tention to jewelry—in particular, its cultural and historical significance. She started a program at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and founded the American Society of Jewelry Historians.
Ryna described her mother as “elegant and vital.” She was “well read, a student of history, a Francophile, and interested in the new.” In her final years, she used an iPhone, an iPad, a computer, and an e-reader.
What Jean Appleton said in her tenth decade was, “I had a charmed life. It was my Arcadia.”
THE RISE AND RISE OF JULIUS HESS
Chicago, 1922
Julius Hess, back from the war, was embarked on a life-and-death mission. Hard as it would have been to miss the arrival of Martin Couney in Chicago way back when, it would have been impossible not to notice the murderous exertions of Dr. Harry Haiselden. Not every preemie would grow up unaffected by its birth; some would have physical or intellectual disabilities. And often enough, prematurity was caused by syphilis, which carried the stigma of “bad breeding.” Someone needed to defend these children, fast.
Having created his own machines, Julius Hess’s next salvo was to write a book. Premature and Congenitally Diseased Infants, published in 1922, contained hundreds of pages of case studies, diagrams, photographs, charts, graphs, and X-rays, the solid earth beneath Martin Couney’s airy verbal flourishes. Hess made the distinction between “preemie” (born preterm) and “weakling” (full-term but underweight with difficulty thriving), although the words were tossed about interchangeably in general public discussion. He was fighting for both, and he left no ground uncovered. Primary causes were cited, which, in addition to syphilis, included poverty, illness, stress, and multiple births (twins and triplets). Development of critical human organs was interrogated in detail. Diseases, and feeding, and heat, and nursery design were analyzed, along with every conceivable protocol, including what oughtn’t to go in the wet nurses’ mouths: aromatic vegetables, unripe and acidic fruit, fried meats, rich pastries. (Not a word regarding beer, which a certain young showman had once endorsed.)