More Mapping Margaret Sanger

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Maps, speeches

Sanger traveled by train on her 1916 national tour. (Library of Congress)

We always knew that Margaret Sanger was a busy woman, but now we are beginning to see just how active she was.  We had first started thinking about the idea in 2012, when we started the “Margaret Sanger Slept Here” series of blog posts, which aimed to show the breadth of her travels and highlight some of the more interesting places where she stayed.  Robin Pokorski blogged about a map she created of Margaret Sanger’s New York that highlighted the places she lived, spoke, and worked.

With the help of interns Yvonne Garrett and Tori Sciancalepore, who helped design the project, and Jackie Collens, Kaitlin Hackbarth, Madeline Moran, Allie Strickland, Vidhi Vakharia, and Laura Filion, who continued inputting data, we used Google Fusion tables to create a geographic representations of Sanger’s public appearances. We began by using an existing Microsoft Access database used to track documents in the digital edition. We excluded articles, which had no place associated with them, and focused on speeches, press statements, and interviews. We exported relevant records into a spreadsheet and imported that into a Google Fusion Table.  We added a field for Location, and a URL. Yvonne and Tori went through the speeches and other public statements, adding places to the table when possible. We tried to get specific addresses when possible, but in some cases had to just input a city name. The URL entered matched the item in the Fusion Table to that speech in the digital edition.

A sample of the spreadsheet that underlies the map.

Once all the documents were added, we decided to go back and enter all the events that we knew of, whether or not we had a copy of the speech that was given. We keep an extensive Chronology, also in Microsoft Access, which has almost 5,000 entries, culled from clippings, correspondence and other research. We did not want to dump this database into the Fusion table because it would duplicate the records we already had in the Fusion table, an it has many entries that don’t have a location associated with them. Also, many of our chronology entries just indicate what Sanger was in, but have no other details. So we began entering only those entries that discussed specific events. These come from correspondence and diary entries, as well as discussions of Sanger’s doings in the press, the Birth Control Review, and other journals, and from scrapbooks. This work is still continuing but we are starting to see the results.

We wanted users to be able to distinguish between the speeches that they could read–in the Speeches and Articles Digital Edition–and those that were just map points. We added the field “Pin Color” to the spreadsheet, selecting the ever imaginative green dots for speeches that we have, and red ones for those that we do not.

When a reader clicks on a dot, it opens up a label which provides the title of the speech, the date, the location, and our notes. If we have the speech you can click through to see it.

As it is filling in, the map provides a interesting sense of the range of Sanger’s travels. You can see that her northern-most speech was in Stockholm, while the most southerly was in Singapore.  As you might expect, the United States is liberally dotted with entries, with emphasis on the Northeast and Midwest, where birth control organizing was most advanced. We can see her three-month tour or India, and her groundbreaking tour of Japan, Korea, and China in 1922. We can also see that she never spoke in the Southern Hemisphere.

The breadth of Sanger’s travels. (Click on image to go to the Fusion Map)

What also makes this map special is that it is interactive.  You can zoom in and out, and by using filters, you can determine which entries are mapped.  By focusing in on Manhattan, for example, we see exactly where Sanger spoke in the city.

Here are Sanger’s Manhattan speeches (Click on the image to get to the Fusion Map)

By limiting the map to the dates April through August 1916, we can see her first national speaking tour taking shape.

Sanger traveled to the West Coast and back in 1916. (Click on the image to get to the Fusion Map)

Sanger disembarking in California in 1937. (American Airlines)

As we continue to vicariously travel the globe, adding Margaret Sanger’s travels to the map, we hope that you will find it a useful resource.

If you know of any Sanger speeches in your neighborhood, and they are not on the map– please let us know by sending a clipping or other report to the Project.

Go to the MAP!

 

 

Address at the Hotel Brevoort, January 17, 1916

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1916, birth control, brevoort hotel, Brooklyn, Brownsville clinic, margaret sanger, reproductive rights, speeches, Woman Rebel

There is never an easy path to becoming a national icon, and Margaret Sanger’s was no different.  While many would say that “no press is bad press,” it was probably not in Sanger’s best interests to be jailed just as her birth control movement was taking shape.  While her famous monthly, Woman Rebel, was first published in March of 1914 and was then banned from public mailing, her trial concerning the publication was continuously postponed until January of 1916.  The day before her trial, a large crowd of people was privileged enough to hear Sanger deliver a short but powerful speech at the Hotel Brevoort.

A 1954 photo of the Brevoort Hotel shortly before its demolition.

Once a farm property, the Hotel Brevoort was erected in 1845 across from the Brevoort family mansion.  In business for over 100 years, the hotel was home to many colorful people, including “Congressmen, Senators, Mexican and Turkish heads of state, past U.S. presidents, army generals, and even Prince Arthur”.  Even Mark Twain, who lived nearby the hotel, frequented its barber shop run by long-time barber Henri Grechen.

Sanger gave her speech at a dinner held in her support.  Although the speech was short, it had a powerful impact on the hundreds of people, men and women, who came to show their support for the original Woman Rebel.  It had the air of a proud woman, ready to become a martyr for her cause as a way of extending her voice to those she had not yet reached in her travels.  She praises her supporters, saying that “all our great and modern thinkers have advocated it!  It is an idea that must appeal to any mature intelligence”², placing them on a pedestal of higher society.  Sanger understood that some of her audience members did not fully agree with the method she was using to spread the information of safe birth control, and addressed this in her address:

I know that physicians and scientists have a great technical fund of information–greater than I had on the subject of family limitation – Margaret Sanger, Hotel Brevoort Speech

and goes on to ask her audience members to carry on her work in the way they saw fit.  Not because, I believe, she anticipated never returning from prison or exile, but because she wished, upon her eminent return, that there would still be a movement in the United States fighting for the freedom and safety of women’s bodies.

In the end, the government dropped the charges against Sanger.  The death of her daughter, Peggy, just a few weeks before her trial date led prosecutors to believe that jailing Sanger would brand her as martyr, and decided to avoid the bad press that came with prosecuting a grieving mother.  By not being jailed, Sanger was able to start a birth control clinic in October of 1916 in Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States.  Sanger was jailed for 30 days for opening the clinic, but her jailing led to a court ruling in the reformation of the law that prohibited the dispensing of contraceptive information, and restricted it to allow professional doctors to become legal distributers.  This culminated in Sanger opening the first legal birth control clinic in 1923 at 104, 5^th Avenue, and the beginning of mass distribution of information to women in need of a family planning strategy.

——–

The complete Hotel Brevoort Speech:

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=128167.xml

New York Times on the Hotel Brevoort Speech:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50D10FD3B5B17738DDDA10994D9405B868DF1D3

History of the Hotel Brevoort:

http://westviewnews.org/2012/07/brevoort-in-the-village/

Looking Back at the Town Hall Raid

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Censorship, speeches, Town Hall

Town Hall, ca. 1933

Ninety-one years ago, Margaret Sanger and the newborn American Birth Control League scored a publicity coup when, on the request of New York’s archbishop Patrick Hayes, the New York City police department suppressed a public meeting on birth control.  This event put the birth control movement and its leader on the front pages of New York papers and won the support of many of New York’s liberal elite.  The Town Hall raid serves as an example of how Sanger’s media prowess turned what could have been a crushing blow for the new organization into a public relations triumph that featured the hubris of a Roman Catholic Archbishop.

The Town Hall, at  123 West 43rd Street, was opened in January 1921 by the League for Political Action, a pro-suffrage group, as a venue for educational meetings, lectures, concerts, and poetry readings. Sanger had booked the hall for the final session of the First American Birth Control Conference (held November 10-13), an historic gathering of prominent scientists, physicians, demographers and eugenicists, as well as social workers, birth control advocates and socialites. During the first two days of sessions, the attendees discussed the global ramifications of birth control and its potential to lessen the major social ills of the world at the Hotel McAlpin. The conference also launched the American Birth Control League (ABCL) to promote birth control through education and lobbying.

Margaret Sanger, ca. 1922

In 1944, Sanger looked back at the Town Hall Raid when asked by a high school girl “What do you find to do with yourself these days, Mrs. Sanger, now that your fight for birth control has been won?”

After I’d assured her that the “fight” was still very much in progress I thought back to the days when it had been just that. Birth control, fifteen, twenty years ago was a lurid and sensational topic. Issues were clear cut and direct. The very term was one not mentioned in polite society, thanks to Anthony Comstock who had Congress classify it with “obscene, and filthy literature” in the legislative ban against it. Our struggles lacked the dignity they have today. Back in 1921, Harold Cox, brilliant member of the English Parliament and Editor of the Edinburgh Review was to speak with me at that early forum of free speech, Town Hall. Our subject was “Birth Control: Is it Moral?”

This final keynote address was to be open to the public. However, as Sanger told it:

With astonishing directness Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, through his emissary Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, closed the meeting before it even opened. We had grown accustomed to opposition, from the combination of the Comstock group even after his death, with the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but never had the interference been so brutally direct before. Time and again theatres, ballrooms where I was to speak were ordered closed before the meeting could be held. In city after city this occurred during the years, 1916, ‘17 and ‘18, but the climax was the now famous Town Hall incident which raised the issue throughout the country.

Sanger managed to get inside Town Hall when the doors were opened to let members of the audience leave.

I wedged my way in a side entrance under the arm of a protecting officer who mistook me for one of the “press.” Harold Cox had by this time managed to reach the platform. An officer barred the platform steps to me. Harold hauled me up beside the steps, grabbed a bunch of flowers from a bewildered messenger boy and shouted to the audience, ‘Don’t leave! Here’s Mrs. Sanger,’ thrusting the flowers which were to have been presented as a grand finale into my hand.

The vast audience, many of them important doctors and scientists, who had begun to leave their seats, returned. I began to talk but could not be heard. Ten times I tried to speak forcing the police finally to do what I wanted, deny me the right of free speech by arresting me.

The incident escalated when the press reported that New York Archdiocese had pressured the police to shut the meeting down. A representative of Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes telephoned police headquarters shortly before the meeting, and the Archbishop sent his secretary, Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, to meet with Captain Donahue. Sanger had invited Hayes to the meeting, hoping that  a Church official would rebut her claim and provide good fodder for the press.  She may even have hoped that her invitation would stimulate Church interference.

Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, ca. 1922

Dineen defended the suppression in the daily papers: “Decent and clean-minded people would not discuss a subject such as birth control in public before children [he claimed four children were present at the meeting; they turned out to be four Barnard College students with “bobbed hair and short skirts”] or at all.” The police action was necessary, he added, because birth control “attacks the very foundations of human society.” (New York Times, Nov. 15, 1921) Archbishop Hayes issued a statement a week later claiming that “The laws of God and man, science, public policy, human experience are all condemnatory of birth control as preached by a few irresponsible individuals. . . .” He then referred to the recent Eugenics conference in New York as evidence of a scientific repudiation of birth control, as it promoted the fertility of the “better born.” He even went so far as to recite a startling anti-Christian, eugenic directive that “more children from the well-to-do” was a “moral duty.” (New York Times, Nov. 21, 1921) Although Dineen and Hayes admitted that a call was placed to the police in opposition to the meeting, they refused to acknowledge their power to guide or manipulate the police department.

The mass meeting to discuss “Birth Control – Is It Moral?” was rescheduled for November 18 at the Park Theater. Once again Sanger invited Archbishop Hayes, along with Catholic University sociologist, Monsignor John A. Ryan, and John Sumner, head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Only Hayes sent a representative. The meeting took place without incident.

What did Sanger take from her victory?

We had the hierarchy to thank for so publicizing our meeting that the second held shortly after, at the big Park Theatre in Columbus Circle was packed fifteen minutes after a single door was opened. Two thousand people, many of whom had never heard of birth control before Cardinal Hayes gave it nation-wide publicity, stood outside clamoring to get in, even climbing up the fire escapes. Orators were haranguing from soapboxes, men were pounding each other with their fists. Paulist fathers sold anti-birth control pamphlets.

The press kept the birth control publicity alive for weeks, the New York Times going so far as to headline the fact that Archbishop Hayes had closed the meeting. The most conservative papers were placed in the trying situation of defending birth control advocates or endorsing a violation of the principle of free speech, which ‘must always find defenders if democracy is to survive.’”

The hierarchy had turned a simple unheralded meeting into a cause celebre, giving our movement more publicity than it could have acquired in years of proceeding simply and scientifically on its way impeded.

__________

For more details on the incident, see The Town Hall Raid, published in the MSPP Newsletter Spring 2001. For the complete text of Sanger’s recollections of the raid from 1944, see “Birth Control Then and Now.”

“Enter to Learn, Go Forth to Serve.”

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higher education, keane college, margaret sanger, reproductive rights, speeches

Keene college lore credits Margaret Sanger with giving them the college’s motto, “Enter to Learn, Go Forth to Serve,” during a  speech at the college.

According to the verbal history, Principal Wallace Mason invited Sanger to speak to the students at Keene in 1912, when she was known for being a public health nurse and social reformer. At this time the school was known as Keene Teaching School.  During this speech Sanger told the women who attended the school that it was time for them to “enter to learn and go forth to serve.”

Mason liked this statement so much that he got the faculty’s approval to paint it on the west wall of the auditorium as the school motto. Later, it was inscribed on the Alumni Gate as a gift from the classes of 1910-1925.

Although we do not have a record of the speech itself the project does have evidence that Sanger spent time at Robert Pearman’s house, which was located near the college in new Hampshire, during the summer of 1912. The aforementioned speech at Keene may have occurred during this visit.

Sources:

Keene State Today

A Closer Look at 100 Years