CHAPTER I
THE TWO FIRST FEDERAL EFFORTS
_The big repeal petition of 1876 started by National Liberal League: Comstock’s obscenity exhibit wins again: Sanger arrests crystallize growing movement for repeal of law: National Birth Control League founded March, 1915, first organization of the sort in the United States: Repeal bills drafted: Petitions circulated: Noted English sympathizers help._
Three years after Congress enacted the Comstock bill, thousands of citizens started a petition for its repeal. The number has been variously estimated at from 40,000 to 70,000. Comstock credits it with the latter figure in his book, “Frauds Exposed.” The petition was initiated and the signatures collected by the National Liberal League. There was much publicity concerning it, and mass meetings were held in various cities. It was presented to Congress, early in 1878 by a Committee of Seven, consisting of Robert G. Ingersoll of Illinois, Chairman, Charles Case of Indiana, Darius Lyman of Ohio, J. C. Smith of Massachusetts, Jonathan B. Wolff of New York City, W. W. Jackson of Washington, D. C. and J. Weed Corey of Penn Yan, N. Y., Secretary.
The petition was a comprehensive protest against the whole spirit and content of the Comstock laws, as un-American, unjust and unwise. Section 4 of the Petition read in part as follows: “Your petitioners further show that they are convinced that all attempts of civil government whether State or National, to enforce or favor particular religious, social, moral or medical opinions, or schools of thought or practice, are not only unconstitutional but ill-advised, contrary to the spirit and progress of our age, and almost certain in the end to defeat any beneficial objects intended.
“That mental, moral and physical health and safety are better secured and preserved by virtue resting upon liberty and knowledge, than upon ignorance enforced by governmental supervision.
“That even error may be safely let free, where truth is free to combat it. That the greatest danger to a republic is the insidious repression of the liberties of the people.
“That wherever publications, pictures, articles, acts or exhibitions directly tending to produce crime or pauperism are wantonly exposed to the public, or obtruded upon the individual, the several States and territories have provided, or may be safely left to provide, suitable remedies.
“Wherefore your petitioners pray that the statutes aforesaid may be repealed or materially modified, so that they cannot be used to abridge the freedom of the press or of conscience.”
The petitioners asked Congress for action on the petition, and the Committee of Seven requested a Hearing on it. After more or less prodding, the House Committee on the Revision of Laws, granted a Hearing. Comstock’s characteristic version of the insistence by the Committee of Seven on being heard, was: “After six weeks of plotting and scheming they at last secured a hearing.”
Comstock and Samuel Colgate, one of the earlier officials of the Society for the Suppression of Vice were the only ones appearing against the petition. Comstock described the event in his book “Traps for the Young,” and says that the House Committee reported its belief that the “statutes in question do not violate the Constitution, and ought not to be changed.” He also wrote of it in his letter of April 28, 1915, to Mrs. Clara Gruening Stillman, Secretary of the National Birth Control League, from which quotation was made in Chapter Two of Part One. This is the way he pictures it: “When the National Defense Association in 1876, secured a petition 2100 feet long, containing 60,000 names, and presented it to Congress, following it up with the most infamous attacks upon the efforts to enforce, all that was required, in the face of all their opposition, supported as they were at that time by the public press throughout the country, was to lay the facts before the Congressional Committees and submit to them the circulars which showed to them the system of the business then being carried on, cursing the boys and girls of this country and leading them from the paths of virtue, and both committees reported against any repeal or change whatever.” This decision of the Committee was made on May 1, 1878.
If it was true, as Comstock says, that the press of the country at that time was with the petitioners for the repeal, it is a point worth bearing in mind. Evidently the actual sight of a collection of smutty circulars describing sex depravity stampeded the Committee on the Revision of Laws in the same way that it had the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, when it reported favorably on the Comstock bill three years previously, so that it blotted out of mind every other consideration, except that obscenity must be made unmailable. It prevented any serious thought about the injustice of depriving the normal majority of access to scientific knowledge. All sorts of strange things are done under the impetus of alarm, and fear can upset the judgment of the best of men on occasion. But now that the country has had the benefit for over half a century of the fears which Comstock so successfully planted in the Congressional mind, the question is how quickly can there be a restoration of calm judgment, and of democratic faith in the people.
After the failure of this petition, many years elapsed before any concerted effort was again made to have Congress correct the Comstock blunder. In the meantime, of course the laws were increasingly broken and increasingly unenforced, so far as the circulation of contraceptive information was concerned. Comstock utilized the laws for his campaign to suppress fraud and general obscenity, and he occasionally included a prosecution against someone for giving contraceptive information, but that offense, per se, and uninvolved with obscenity or liberalism, formed a very small part of his total activity. However it was two of these latter arrests which touched off the spark that flamed into what has been called in late years, the American birth control movement. These were the arrests of Margaret Sanger and of William Sanger, her husband. In September, 1914, Mrs. Sanger was indicted on nine counts under the Federal law, for mailing her pamphlet on family limitation. Mr. Sanger was arrested the following January, by means of Comstock’s decoy system, for giving away a single copy of the pamphlet, as already described in Part One of this book. Previous to Mrs. Sanger’s arrest, there were many people who had become tremendously interested in her activity and who were deeply stirred by her righteous indignation that the poor mothers among whom she had worked as a district nurse, were without any sort of adequate scientific information on the control of conception, and by her burst of generous impulse when she determined to get the information to the working people on a large scale, no matter what the laws forbade, and no matter what hardship it might involve for her. Some of the specially interested people helped Mrs. Sanger with funds for her project and by securing mailing lists and so forth. She compiled such information as she could find, and a very large edition of the pamphlet was sent out. She then went to Europe in order to find out more about contraceptive methods in Holland and in England, and to publish some new revised pamphlets before facing trial under Federal indictment.
During this period the conviction was rapidly growing in the minds of many who had been moved by Mrs. Sanger’s gallant zeal, that the time had come to remedy the situation fundamentally by organizing a movement to get the laws revised. Mrs. Sanger’s arrest added greatly to the strength of this conviction. To tolerate the necessity for a succession of martyrdoms such as appeared likely to occur as the sequel of Mrs. Sanger’s spirit and her notable defiance of the law, seemed folly, if by dint of vigorous concerted effort the laws could be changed, so that no one would have to brave martyrdom. This conviction crystallized into action in New York City in March, 1915, when a meeting was held at the home of Mrs. Clara Gruening Stillman at which the National Birth Control League was organized. Mrs. Sanger was then abroad. On her return shortly afterward, she was invited to be a member of the Executive Committee of the League. She declined, stating that she did not think it wise to be officially a part of any organization, as she was likely to have to go to jail, and she did not want her mishaps to involve the activity of others, also that she felt it to be her particular function to break the laws rather than to spend effort at that time in trying to change them. Her point of view was characteristically expressed in her leaflet called, “Voluntary Parenthood,” which was published by the League. Describing her feeling at the sight of the suffering due to unintended and unwilling motherhood, she said, “I felt as one would feel if, on passing a house which one saw to be on fire and knew to contain women and children unaware of their danger, one realized that the only entrance was through a window. Yet there was a law and penalty for breaking windows. Would anyone of you hesitate, if by so doing you could save a single life?”
The declaration of principles adopted by the National Birth Control League read as follows:
“The object of the Birth Control League is to help in the formation of a body of public opinion that will result in the repeal of the laws, National, State or local, which make it a criminal offense, punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both, to print, publish or impart information regarding the control of human offspring by artificial methods of preventing conception.
“The Birth Control League holds that such restrictive laws result in widespread evil. While they do not prevent contraceptive knowledge of a more or less vague or positively harmful character being spread among the people, these repressive laws do actually hinder information that is reliable and has been ascertained by the most competent medical and scientific authorities, being disseminated systematically among those very persons who stand in greatest need of it.
“This League specifically declares that to classify purely scientific information regarding human contraception as obscene, as our present laws do, is itself an act affording a most disgraceful example of intolerable indecency.
“Information, when scientifically sound, should be readily available. Such knowledge is of immediate and positive individual and social benefit. All laws which hamper the free and responsible diffusion of this knowledge among the people are in the highest degree pernicious and opposed to the best and most permanent interests of society.”
The National Birth Control League then, constituted the first organized and sustained effort in America to concentrate on the repeal of the specific prohibitions regarding the circulation of birth control knowledge. The petition to Congress in the seventies, had included contraceptive knowledge in its protest, but was not circulated for that reason alone. It was a protest against the general content of the Comstock laws. The National Birth Control League at once set about the publication of literature urging the repeal of the laws, and circulated petition slips for the amendment of both State and Federal laws, which read as follows:
_TO THE STATE LEGISLATURE_
As a voter of this State, I hereby urge you to secure the amendment of the penal law, so that giving information concerning methods of birth control by the avoidance of conception may no longer be classed as a crime in the laws of this State.
Name ...............................
Address ..........................
_TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES_
As a voter, I hereby urge you to secure the amendment of the Federal Penal Code so that the transportation of information concerning methods of birth control by the avoidance of conception may no longer be classed as a crime in the laws of this country.
Name ...............................
Address ..........................
A committee of three lawyers, members of the National Birth Control League, drafted the amendments which the League advocated for the Federal statutes and for the New York State statutes. The provision was similar in both cases. It first removed from the obscenity statutes the words “preventing conception” wherever they occurred; then added a clause to the effect that information as to or means for the control of conception are not, per se, obscene or of indecent use. For Section 211 of the Federal law, this added clause read as follows: “But no book, magazine, pamphlet, paper, letter, writing or publication is obscene, lewd or lascivious, or of indecent character, or non-mailable by reason of the fact that it mentions, discusses or recommends prevention of conception, or gives information concerning methods or means for the prevention of conception; or tells how, where, or in what manner such information or such means can be obtained; and no article, instrument, substance or drug is non-mailable by reason of the fact that it is designed or adapted for the prevention of conception, or is advertised or otherwise represented to be so designed or adapted.” (The statutes with the proposed amendments in full are given in Appendix No. 5.)
It was not only within the United States that interest in amending our laws grew apace. The matter got the attention of a very thoughtful and distinguished portion of the British public also. When Mrs. Sanger was in England, she met Dr. Marie C. Stopes (subsequently the founder of the first birth control clinic in England) who was deeply indignant at the situation threatening Mrs. Sanger by virtue of the American law. This feeling found expression in a letter which Dr. Stopes wrote and sent to President Wilson, and which was signed by several other well known English citizens. It reads as follows:
September, 1915.
To the President of the United States, White House, Washington, D. C.
SIR:
We understand that Mrs. Margaret Sanger is in danger of criminal prosecution for circulating a pamphlet on birth problems. We therefore beg to draw your attention to the fact that such work as that of Mrs. Sanger receives appreciation and circulation in every civilized country except the United States of America, where it is still counted as a criminal offense.
We in England passed, a generation ago, through the phase of prohibiting the expressions of serious and disinterested opinion on a subject of such grave importance to humanity, and in our view to suppress any such treatment of vital subjects is detrimental to human progress.
Hence, not only for the benefit of Mrs. Sanger, but of humanity, we respectfully beg you to exert your powerful influence in the interest of free speech and the betterment of the race.
We beg to remain, Sir, Your humble servants, (Signed by): Percy Ames, L.D., F.S.A., Sec., Roy. Soc. Liter., London William Archer, Dramatic critic and author Lena Ashwell, Actress Manager Arnold Bennett, Author and Dramatist Edward Carpenter, Author of “Towards Democracy,” etc. Aylmer Maude, Author of “Life of Tolstoy” Gilbert Murray, M.A. Oxford, LL.D. Glasgow, D.Litt. Prof. Greek, Oxford Marie C. Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D., Fellow and Lecturer, U. Coll., London H. G. Wells, B.Sc., J.P., Novelist.
In this connection it may be added that the nine Federal indictments against Mrs. Sanger were presently dropped. Whether it was due in part to the weight of such messages as this, is not definitely known. But the fact remains that the prosecution for the most forthright, intentional and wholesale defiance of the Federal law that had ever been undertaken up to date was not carried through to a conclusion. A fair interpretation of this act would seem to be that the government itself did not deem the Comstock laws in this regard, as worth enforcing.