Woman of Valor (58 page)

That she was feeling much better for the moment is plainly evident from her report on a brief side trip to Paris for an interview with Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, a Frenchman, which was arranged by her old friend Angus MacDonald. By Margaret's telling, the allegedly progressive church official, though cordial, refused to concede that population growth was an international problem of any significance and insisted that all carnal relations between men and women should bear their accompanying burden of pain. In response, she took great pleasure in unleashing an unexpurgated version of her rather more dionysian sexual philosophy on him.
⁵

Back in the United States, with at least a fraction of her old energy restored, Margaret drove her old friend Mary Beard up to Scottsdale for a weekend with Frank Lloyd Wright, and later reported bemusedly to their mutual friend, Dorothy Brush, that Beard, though dowdily dressed and far too talkative, was delighted by the visit. Margaret then spent the better part of a year preparing for the Indian conference. From sun-filled terraces in Tucson and by the sea in Santa Barbara, she corresponded with volunteers in London, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Tokyo, and Bombay, all of whom had agreed to share responsibility for various aspects of the event. Out of the inevitable confusion and chaos, a program was finally agreed upon, lists of delegates and sponsors assembled, and small travel grants secured from foundations and individuals.

Scarcely a detail escaped Margaret's scrutiny. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his second wife, Martha, were vacationing at the Arizona Inn, so she invited them to tea and secured a token $7,500 contribution to pay the expenses of several American participants. She then reveled in securing an endorsement of the conference from Albert Einstein. “There is a school of thought, especially on the extreme Left, which holds that the fight against overpopulation can be waged successfully only by economic and technical help and not by a direct attempt to influence and educate people,” wrote the gentle physicist whose theoretical insights had so dramatically changed the course of world affairs. “I am, however, fully convinced that this attitude is dangerously one-sided. It does completely neglect the fact that progress of hygiene and medicine has completely altered the earlier precarious equilibrium of the quantitative stability of the human race.” Margaret gamely asked for permission to reproduce the quote in full. Yet, she was not just interested in assembling big names. She insisted on vetting the group. From a list of proposed delegates, she deleted the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead, claiming that in the early years, when Mead was climbing to fame, she had done nothing at all for birth control but “scoffed and giggled like an adolescent over the subject.”
⁶

 

Margaret's itinerary for October of 1952 routed her via ship from Los Angeles to Honolulu, where she arranged final details for the Bombay conference with G. J. Watumull and his American-born wife, Ellen. She then departed for an emotional return to Japan. Seven years earlier, following the war's end, she had written to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Allied Occupation forces, in the hope of acquainting him with Shidzue Ishimoto and the history of birth control's suppression there. Her letter proposed that Mac-Arthur establish a commission on the country's population pressures, but it received no response.

Ishimoto had spent much of the war in jail for espousing Socialist and pacifist doctrines in defiance of government policy. She'd finally divorced her husband and lost her one surviving son in battle, but her personal life was renewed when she met and married Kanju Kato, a fellow political detainee, who became a leader of Japan's postwar labor movement. In 1947, at the age of forty-eight, she gave birth to a daughter named Taki and wrote to Margaret that she hoped the baby would reincarnate the spirit of her own long-lost little Peggy.
⁷

The Katos were also prominent in the Socialist majority that came to power in Japan in 1946 and worked closely with the American occupation forces on an anti-Communist agenda of social and economic reform. Among their many concerns was the need for a state-supported family planning policy. Postwar Japan, like the United States and Europe, experienced a tremendous baby boom when its soldiers returned home, while, at the same time, its women were granted many social and political benefits they had long been denied, including the right to vote, to hold public office, and to organize in labor unions, circumstances that facilitated the election of Mrs. Kato to parliament. Faced on the one hand with an expansion of opportunity, and on the other, with widespread unemployment and housing shortages that made large families a burden, Japanese women quickly sought to control their fertility. With a density of population more than ten times that of the United States, and with reliable contraception in short supply, rates of illegal abortion increased to alarming proportions, and Japan became the first country in the world to legalize abortion and sterilization, in an effort to promote greater safety in the use of these procedures.

The high incidence of abortion was so disturbing that Mrs. Kato encouraged Margaret to tour Japan in order to arouse interest in preventive birth control measures. General MacArthur, however, was particularly sensitive to the issue, for fear that any appearance of interest by the Americans in controlling Japanese fertility would be misunderstood. Arrangements were made for the publishers of Tokyo's largest newspapers to extend a formal invitation to Margaret, so there could be no doubt of her sponsorship, but on August 30, 1949, word was received from a ranking member of General MacArthur's staff that, despite this gesture, military clearance for Mrs. Sanger would be denied.

The incident provoked front-page newspaper coverage in both countries, and a column of protest from Eleanor Roosevelt. Long letters of dissent followed, but MacArthur held firm and was widely quoted as saying that birth control was a matter for the Japanese people to decide themselves. He later claimed in a letter to Charles Scribner, then chairman of the board of Planned Parenthood in America, that any interference by the Occupation might be viewed as “genocide,” and rather contemptuously advised American birth control activists to concentrate their energies at home in Massachusetts, instead, where birth control activity was still illegal. Years later, however, Mrs. Kato took a less benign view of the general's motives, insisting that MacArthur overemphasized the issue of coercion in response to Catholic pressures and out of concern for his own Presidential ambitions in the United States.
⁸

Prevented from traveling to Japan, Margaret defiantly raised funds in the United States to help her friend open several birth control clinics there. She also made arrangements for Clarence Gamble to oversee a field trial with simple contraceptives in a rural district. When American jurisdiction finally ended late in 1951, however, she was determined to make her long-anticipated trip and waited anxiously as her efforts to secure a visa were delayed while intelligence agents conducted an extensive security check, once again assembling the same old long list of her allegedly incriminating associations with Communist, Socialist, and civil libertarian causes. The file was sent off to U.S. Army and Navy officials in Japan, but there is no record of any follow-up.

Margaret's triumphant return featured a welcome in Yokohama from a group of fifty women in ceremonial kimonos bearing a wreath of golden chrysanthemums, which received widespread press coverage. The Sanger party then met with representatives from the government and the press, held round-table discussions for radio broadcast in Japanese and over the Voice of America, and visited birth control clinics established at a village school some miles outside the central city and at a welfare center in Yokohama. An automobile tour of several Tokyo slum districts drew hundreds of people out of their homes as sound trucks bellowed out the Sanger name, with its eponymous reference to “birth control” in Japanese. Notes in Margaret's handwriting for a speech from this trip make a strong plea for the benefits of birth control over abortion and also challenge the Japanese people, whom Margaret so greatly admired, to turn their backs on war. “You have a tremendous opportunity to apply your ancient wisdom, your strength of mind and body to the problems of 20th century Japan,” she wrote, “and you may be a new force, guiding and strengthening the community of nations.”
⁹

Though comfortably housed at Frank Lloyd Wright's luxurious Imperial Hotel, which had only recently been vacated by the Occupation forces, Margaret was understandably exhausted by this schedule. From Japan, she then took what was still an adventurous and strenuous flight by passenger plane to Bombay. Just the last leg of the trip alone, from Ceylon to Bombay, took more than half a day of flying time. During stopovers in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, and on the tranquil island of Ceylon, she and a party that included Abraham Stone, Edna Rankin McKinnon, and her sister, the Congresswoman, conducted preliminary meetings with local officials interested in birth control.

The Family Planning Association of India, a voluntary association, officially hosted the Bombay conference under the able, if imperious, direction of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a past president of the All India Women's Association and wife of a local Brahman banker who had served as India's first ambassador to the United States. Prime Minister Nehru did not attend but did send his vice-president to deliver an inaugural address firmly establishing the government's endorsement of population control but offering no new financial support. Margaret and several other dignitaries dined at the Prime Minister's residence, and the conference delegation of some 500 individuals from more than a dozen countries was, in turn, entertained by the mayor of Bombay and other municipal officials. The government was already providing birth control services through some 106 clinics organized as part of a publicly funded maternal and infant care program, and Margaret was especially pleased to present a $2,500 check collected by friends in Tucson to fund one additional facility. She was also the conduit for small grants for clinic services from Clarence Gamble, the Watumulls, and her old friends at Ortho Pharmaceuticals, but this hardly made a dent in the need.

The historic significance of securing official government participation at Bombay cannot be underestimated, but absent comparable initiatives elsewhere, international family planning advocacy had no choice but to remain for the time being a voluntary enterprise. As a result, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was officially chartered at Bombay in order to unite the handful of autonomous family planning associations already at work in their respective countries. As a symbolic bridge between East and West, Lady Rama Rau and Margaret were together designated as honorary chairmen, and plans were laid for subsequent meetings in Sweden and Japan.
¹⁰

 

At the urging of Iphigene Sulzburger, the formidable wife and mother of the publishers of
The New York Times
and a longtime admirer of Margaret's, the proceedings at Bombay received front-page coverage in America's newspaper of record, making it one of the first major stories to call attention to the world population problem. Margaret's efforts to stimulate further interest in her new organization, however, were soon complicated by the endeavors of John D. Rockefeller III, who had also just returned from a trip to Asia convinced that the world's future political and economic stability would depend on controlling its population—that population control would have to precede economic development and not the other way around. Wary of the controversy surrounding American birth control propagandists, however, he cautiously charted an independent course.

The Rockefeller Foundation, where his family had consolidated much, though by no means all, of its charitable giving, seemed the logical place to launch a population undertaking. The foundation was at this time concentrating its resources on international initiatives in public health and agricultural reform, and there was good reason to worry about the potentially extreme demographic consequences of such an agenda. J.D.R. III was the only one of the five Rockefeller brothers who served on the foundation board, but as a man of gentle and courteous demeanor, he refused to impose his priorities on officials there who were reluctant to compromise existing programs by spending money on new ones that few believed would work, in any event. They also feared that support for population control, even if handled with caution, would provoke opposition in countries with a strong Catholic influence where the foundation had already invested. The latter consideration raised an even more personal one. Nelson Rockefeller was sowing the seeds of a career in politics and needed to be protected from the potential sanction of Catholics at home.

Hoping to tred lightly, J.D.R. III asked the National Academy of Sciences, a research organization with which his family's charitable enterprises had long been associated, to sponsor a private meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, where a group of distinguished individuals might quietly consider the international population issue. The list of invitees included demographers, such as Frank Notestein and Frederick Osborn, along with scholars in the related fields of public health, economics, anthropology, and sociology from the nation's most prestigious think-tanks and universities—men like Robert Merton, the Columbia sociologist, George Corner, the Johns Hopkins embryologist, and Thomas Parran, the former surgeon general. All were white and male, until someone added the names of two women to a second solicitation, a Dr. Dorothy Swaine Thomas of Philadelphia and Irene Tauber of Princeton's Office of Population Research.

The discussion at Williamsburg reflected the underlying suspicion of professional students of the subject about the merits of organized birth control intervention, though Kingsley Davis, then a young and relatively unknown sociologist doing work on India at Columbia, did stress the important contribution that educated elites had made in calling attention to the problem and in conducting basic research. No mention by name was made of Margaret Sanger, however, nor of her activities in America or abroad. William Vogt of Planned Parenthood, who had also been included at the last minute and was the only participant at Williamsburg with practical experience, argued that the incorporation of contraception into publicly assisted maternal health programs was at least worth a try, but even this modest proposal received no endorsement from the assembled group, most of whom believed that expenditures on Western-style family planning programs would be worthless.
¹¹