Chapter IV
THE HEARINGS ON THE CUMMINS-VAILE BILL AND
THE AFTERMATH
Delay in arranging hearings analogous to delay in sponsoring bill: Joint Hearings by Senate and House Judiciary Sub-Committees held on April 8 and May 9, 1924: Mr. Vaile in opening remarks pleads for restoration of American freedom to acquire knowledge, which was taken away 50 years ago: Birth rate in United States proves that people want to get some information in spite of law: Catholic speakers discuss birth control, not the bill: Wages of government employees quoted as reason for passing bill: Prof. Field shows historically that suppression does not suppress: Mrs. Glaser argues for freedom for scientists to learn and teach regarding control of human fertility: Mrs. Carpenter shows how Federal law operates to prevent Chicago Clinic: Prof. Johnson gives eugenic view-point: Hearing reopened at request of Catholics: Lengthy irrelevancies: Congressman Hersey heckles the witnesses: Report of Senate Sub-Committee a sop to the workers for the bill: Unique effort to get vote of full Committee before adjournment, as aid to reducing inhibition in next Congress.
The Hearings on the bill, and the circumstances connected with them offer further light upon the workings of the Congressional mind, or rather the reaction of Congressional feeling concerning this subject. With all due allowance for the fact that the Congressional calendar is always “crowded” and that most legislation in the nature of things under the present system may, and usually does, move very slowly, there has been every evidence that the impulse to postpone committee consideration and action on this bill as long as possible was most compelling in the Judiciary Committee of both Houses. It was a replica of the hedging about sponsoring the bill, which had characterized the few preceding years, when the various desired sponsors “passed the buck” by saying at the beginning of a session that they were so very busy getting their “important” projects started they could not stop to consider taking on this measure too, and toward the close of a session they were similarly so driven finishing up their “important” projects that they couldn’t think of anything else, and in the middle of a session they were just as able to find “alibis” as at any other time. As Senator Cummins has repeatedly said, “The men dislike the thing so!”
The last introduction of the bill was made fairly early in the first session of the new Congress, that is on January 30th. Yet it was not until the middle of March that the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee could be persuaded to appoint the necessary sub-committee in order that a hearing might be held. And it was not till a week later still that the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee decided as to which of the three standing sub-committees he would refer the bill. The first Hearing was held on April 8th, jointly by the Senate and House sub-committees as a time saving arrangement. The Sub-committee chairman declined to ask their committees for a vote on reporting the bill until after the testimony given at the hearing should be printed. Weeks of delay followed before the printing was achieved. During this time it became obvious that some plan was holding things up and presently it appeared. The hearing was to be reopened at the request of the Roman Catholics. At the first hearing the chairman had made the usual inquiry, “Is there any other opponent of the bill that desires to be heard?” There was no one. The opposition had exhausted its resources with five speakers, so the hearing continued with the testimony of the remaining four out of the ten speakers in favor of the bill.
At the second hearing which did not come till May 9th no new points were made, but a very long paper was read elaborating the Roman Catholic arguments against birth control and emphasizing the fact that the Catholics were not willing to trust their own people if access to contraceptive information were made lawful. This delay carried over consideration of the bill by the sub-committee so late into the session that they claimed it would not be possible to make a report and have it acted upon by the full Judiciary Committee previous to adjournment. And the relief of some of the members over once more putting off action on “the birth control bill” was plainly evident. This relief was covered (in many instances unconsciously so) by all sorts of argument which was quite irrelevant to the bill, but which served well enough as a means of making the question seem vastly complicated and one over which a conscientious law maker must ponder long and hard. In the strenuous effort which was made to secure at least a committee report before the adjournment of Congress, the following appeal to stick to the point was sent by the Director of the Voluntary Parenthood League to every member of the Judiciary Committee:
Judging by conversation with members of the Judiciary Sub-Committee, there seems to be a great temptation to discuss the Cummins-Vaile Bill emotionally rather than logically. As all the members are lawyers, I hope it will not be taken amiss to urge that, at the meeting to decide on reporting the bill, the discussion will be strictly limited to the Law points.
I respectfully venture this suggestion because of the short time remaining in which to act during the present session, and not because the ramifications of the subject of the bill are not important. They are indeed. And we, who are specially voicing the public need for this bill are, in common with the members of the Sub-Committees, deeply interested in the problem of population, sex education, the morality of the young, and all other questions allied to the control of parenthood. But we realize that they are outside the practicable and legitimate field of legislation. They are problems in sociology and education. They therefore should not be entangled at this time with the very simple reasons for reporting out this bill at once.
(A brief résumé of the reasons followed which is not given here because a similar and more comprehensive one is to be given later.)
Congress might be excused for not repealing these defunct laws long ago, on its own initiative. But now that large numbers of citizens have, for five years, been definitely asking Congress to act, there can be no tenable excuse for not making an immediate and favorable report.
But the temptation to postpone decision and to befog the issue with irrelevancies won for that session, and the bill had to go over to the short session the following December.
The Hearings Report gives many significant side lights as to the psychology of those who appeared for and against the bill, and of certain members of the Judiciary Committee. It is impracticable to quote lavishly here from the seventy-nine pages of the document. But a few of the remarks which bear most pertinently on the salient points for the bill and some which indicate the attitude of the committee members may well be noted.
The members of the Senate Sub-Committee were Senators Spencer of Missouri, Norris of Nebraska and Overman of North Carolina, and the members of the House Sub-Committee were Congressmen Yates of Illinois, Hersey of Maine, Perlman of New York, Larson of Minnesota, Thomas of Kentucky, Major of Missouri and O’Sullivan of Connecticut. Senator Spencer presided.
Mr. Vaile in his opening remarks said: “These bills do not propose any new or strange legislation, and these bills themselves do not propose to teach birth control.” He was at once interrupted by Mr. Hersey who asked, “You said that this is no new matter. Is there any legislation of this sort that has been passed hitherto?” To which Mr. Vaile replied, “The legislation on this matter consists of our statutes classifying contraceptives as obscene of themselves. We are the only country in the world having this legislation. We did not have it prior to 1873. The bill, therefore, proposes no new or affirmative doctrine. It simply proposes to make lawful what was lawful in the United States prior to 1873. It does not propose to do this by any new or affirmative legislation, but by simply striking those provisions from five sections of our Penal Code.”
“Let me, at the outset, refer to a question which immediately bobs up in the minds of everybody with whom you discuss this subject. They say, “It will promote immorality.” Let me ask the committee, in all fairness, if the morality of this country is strikingly superior now to what it was before 1873. You can not pick up a daily paper, you can not go into a church, you can not hear a subject of public morals discussed to any great length by any speaker but what you will be advised that we are at a lower stage of morals than we were 50 years ago. Fifty years ago we did not have such a statute on our books. Certainly the insertion of this proviso in our statutes has not noticeably increased the morality of the United States. It is common knowledge that methods of contraception are used by the educated, the well-to-do classes of the community. Would anybody say that these classes are conspicuously less moral than those who can not obtain this information and have no knowledge of it? I think that would be a great reflection on many people, with certainly a highly developed civic consciousness, people prominent in every good work of the community, all of whom as a matter of common knowledge, of which this committee can take judicial notice, do have and use this information....
“I submit, in all fairness, by merely removing the provisions which we put into the code 50 years ago, and which did not exist theretofore, we won’t be rushing on a downward path, so far as we can judge by our own experience of that of any other country.
“Now, that raises another question. Is lack of knowledge the best method or even a safe method to prevent vice? Would you insult your daughters by insinuating to them that it is only because they can not get such information as this that they remain good? Of course you would not. Why, then, pass that insult to every other daughter in the United States?
“And, furthermore, if this knowledge can be obtained, though unlawfully—and we all know that it can be obtained unlawfully, or at least without the sanction of law—if it can be obtained, why, then, merely to make it illegal is a very poor way to protect anybody’s morality, because they can certainly get the information.”
At the close of his remarks Mr. Vaile introduced the writer, who in turn introduced the other witnesses for the bill. Her own remarks included the following:
If agreeable to the gentlemen of the committee, we will divide the testimony that we will present to you under two different categories. One, the direct reasons for the passage of this bill from the point of view of law and the rights of citizens. The other bits of testimony that we are ready to present to you if you desire and if agreeable to you, are certain evidences that the utilization of this knowledge in this country and throughout the world has tended toward racial and individual welfare.
This is not logically and directly speaking necessarily an argument for the passage of this bill, but it is distinctly reassuring, I should say, to Congress when it stands for this measure, to know that the action is in harmony with what has been generally considered by all impartial observers as something which makes for race progress and race betterment.
To begin with the logic, which is less human but possibly more convincing to a committee made up exclusively of lawyers; the continuance of the five statutes which this bill proposes to amend seems to us not tenable, either on grounds of justice or public policy, because first, the majority of the people do not approve of the suppression of knowledge of the regulation of parenthood by the control of conception. When I make this somewhat dogmatic statement I offer to you the best and most conclusive proof there is, namely, the official figures on the birth rate of our country. The birth registration area, if I am correctly informed, covers 22 States, but presumably the population of those 22 States is of about the same character as the population of the remainder of the States, and therefore the birth rate, so far as is recorded, is an exceedingly valid argument.
The birth rate for the country, averaging those States, stands at 22.8 a thousand. A birth rate that I might call natural, that is unguided by the mind of man and simply resulting from instinct and physical impulse, would run from 50 a thousand up, and 50 is an exceedingly conservative figure. Therefore, family limitation by intention has already long been in the world, and for a very long period, in spite of the fact that we have maintained for half a century laws which theoretically keep our entire population in absolute ignorance.
No citizen, so far as I know, has yet come to Congress and said this to his Representative or Senator: “Will you please keep these present laws as they stand now? I personally consider the control of conception rightly classed as indecency. I have no knowledge on the subject, and I don’t want any. Moreover, I wish my ignorance legally perpetuated because I do not think I should be trusted with it. I need to have my Government protect me from the temptation to misuse it.”
No citizen, I take it, has thus far come to you with that plea on his own behalf. The protests—and you have received some against this measure—have seemed to be wholly on the ground that access to this forbidden knowledge would be dangerous for somebody else, not for the people who themselves protest. Unless it can be proved that there are more citizens who deliberately ask to be kept in ignorance than there are those who want access to this knowledge there can be no justification for not passing this measure. In view of the proof which the birth rate gives, that the majority believe in, because they achieve family limitation, it is hardly likely that those who want to be kept in ignorance can be anywhere near a majority. Asking that others be kept in ignorance is not a valid argument for any legislation.
The abuse of knowledge should be handled in some other way than attempting to maintain ignorance on the part of the population. The present laws as they stand are predicated on distrust by the Government of the mass of its citizens, which is an intolerable principle for laws in a supposed democracy. It is a principle, for instance, which no Member of Congress would care to expound, I think, let us say, in a pre-election campaign. Fancy a Senator or Congressman making a campaign address in which he would state that he deemed his constituents too weak morally to be trusted with scientific knowledge about sex matters. It is incredible. We do not ordinarily cast a wholesale insult upon our fellow citizens. We think too well of the average American to do that, and certainly no such insult should be found in our laws.
Reverend John A. Ryan, speaking on behalf of Catholics in general said:
We regard these practices about which information is proposed to be given as immoral—everlastingly, essentially, fundamentally immoral, quite as immoral as adultery, for instance, or rather a little more so, because adultery, whatever may be its vicious aspects, does not commit any outrage upon nature, nor pervert nature’s functions.
We maintain that these practices are detrimental to the family; that they are not in the interest of better families; that they mean the promotion of selfishness within the family and a great reduction in the capacity to endure, the capacity to face hardships, the capacity to do little things, to do the things of life without which there is no consistent achievement or any kind worth while.
Dr. Lawrence Litchfield, former President of the State Medical Society of Pennsylvania, testified that he had
practiced medicine for 36 years. I have been interested in international movements for the control of and the abating of venereal diseases, child labor, and tuberculosis. All of these problems for the benefit of the human race bring us back one after another to the necessity for intelligent birth control. The human race has the same right and need for scientific development that other animals have. We have many laws and many books and many theories that control the breeding of animals, but the breeding of human beings is left entirely to chance.
Senator Spencer: Is there any law in Pennsylvania against a physician freely communicating to his patients?
Doctor Litchfield: Yes. If a patient of mine whom I believe would be seriously injured by not having the information to prevent conception wrote me for such information I am legally unable to send it to her. If she comes into my office and the doors are locked, I tell her what I think is wise.
Senator Spencer: Do the doors necessarily have to be locked?
Dr. Litchfield: The information can not be given publicly.
Senator Spencer: But I mean, there is no law in Pennsylvania is there, which prevents a doctor from communicating information of this sort to his patients?
Dr. Litchfield: There is, as I understand it. I might say, further, as a side light on this question, last summer in Europe my wife and I found a book which we read and thought would be a very good thing for our young married daughter to have, and I decided to import some of these books and give them to my patients who were recently married. I send an order to England and received an answer that the book could not be imported, because it was regarded as obscene.
Mrs. S. J. Bronson, Secretary of the Voluntary Parenthood League spoke for the bill from the practical standpoint of the wage earner, and said in part:
Congress need look no further than to the vast arm of Government employees to find ample reason for the immediate passage of this measure. The human story revealed in the pages of dry figures of the official register is most compelling. It shows that in the Federal civil service alone there are 548,531 employees. The addition of State and municipal employees would carry the figure into the millions for the whole country. There seems to be no official statement of what the average Government salary is; but the director of the Voluntary Parenthood League has made an illuminating estimate by taking 100 names in alphabetical sequence from the directory in the official register. (It does not include Members of Congress, the Army or Navy, or post-office employees.) These hundred employees includes clerks, guards, charwomen, draftsmen, attendants, teachers, firemen, laborers, machinists, accountants, customs inspectors, watchmen, foremen, supervisors, a harness maker, a seamstress, and a judge. The average salary proves to be $1605. There were only 5 who get over $3000, and there were 18 getting below $1000. It is a fair guess that any other 100 names taken from the book at random would tell about the same story.
Now, is it fair play for the Government to retain laws which try to keep its own direct employees in utter ignorance as to how to regulate their families somewhere in proportion to their earnings? As the Government can never provide unlimited wages for its servants, it ought at least to allow them legal access to the knowledge by which they may, if they choose, safeguard themselves against unlimited families.
Please also bear in mind some representative facts about non-Government wage earners. In the peak of what was called war prosperity the average wage in the shipyards was only $1411, nearly $300 short of the standard set by the War Labor Board. The average wage of the railroad workers in the same period was $1137. Dr. P. P. Claxton, former commissioner of education, gave $630 as the average school teacher’s salary in 1918. The average weekly wage of the New York factory workers before the after-war slump was $23.10, and in 169 sorts of factory work in Massachusetts during the first year of the war only a little over one-seventh of the adult males were earning about $25 a week.
At the same time health authorities agree that a growing child should have a quart of good milk a day. Also that there is no adequate substitute for milk. At 15 cents a quart the bill for milk alone for six children would be over $6 a week. Of course, a man earning $25 a week can not provide that and all the other necessities too, and so his babies are puny. Or if they pull through it is at the expense of the parents’ vitality, or else charity steps in to save them. And when the children reach adolescence, the age when most of all they need alert, intelligent parents, the father and the mother—especially the mother—are worn out and dull, unfit to take a strong hand in rearing a race that will have brains and brawn and character.
The point I urge is fair play for the millions. These, and other millions to follow, will for an indefinite period make up the actual majority in this country. They can not be left out of consideration. They are “the people.”
We are bound to believe that on the whole they are decent, normal, responsible folks, who naturally love children and want as many as they can wisely rear; but they can not afford so very many, nor have them so close together that the family welfare depreciates beyond redemption. That parents and children should be crushed by the very things which ought to be the cause of their deepest happiness is too ironic. Congress surely has the heart to look at this matter humanely.
All too often young married couples start out in life with an inadequate income even for the preparation of the first child, and the young wife finds she must continue working for the first year at least in order to help meet the expense which the birth of a baby involves. No decent, self-respecting woman wants to become the object of charity.
Gentlemen, I ask you in particular to bear in mind the great army of these young married people, who are facing life and parenthood with high hopes and ambitions, and who have no background of financial security, with nothing but their individual earning power to safeguard themselves and their children. It is somewhat the fashion nowadays to decry the young people, and doubtless some of the worry is warranted, but also there are unnumbered thousands who long for and are working for everything that is fine and beautiful, including families of sturdy, well-born, and well-bred youngsters who will make the next generation. On behalf of these young people I beg you to enact this bill, so they may have free and proper access to whatever help science can give them in the vital task that is ahead of them.
The Secretary of the National Council of Catholic Women, Miss Agnes G. Reagan, claimed that the bill requested Congress “to open the gates that information ruinous to Christian standards of family life may stream through the mails and flood the land.” She asserted that birth control methods are “all contrary to the moral law and forbidden because they are unnatural,” that they were “intrinsically wrong,—as wrong as lying and blasphemy.” As to the effect upon young people, she said:
I speak from a rather wide and perhaps a sad experience in investigating conditions among young people who have become delinquent, and in many cases their delinquency was due to the fact that they could secure at the present time information concerning such practices; and that that information will certainly be much more widespread if this bill should be passed no one who has had dealings with young people has the slightest doubt. The United States in opening the mails to this sort of literature will do something that would be fatal to our young people.
Professor James A. Field of Chicago University, speaking for the bill, gave some historic proofs that legal attempts to suppress knowledge, especially that connected with sex, only serve to stimulate thought, increase curiosity and promote education. He instanced the situation in England about fifty years ago when obscenity prosecutions were instituted for circulating two hitherto relatively unknown pamphlets (both as it happened written by Americans, “Moral Physiology” by Robert Dale Owen who was a member of Congress from Indiana, and “Fruits of Philosophy” by Dr. Knowlton of Boston). And then what happened? The case (against Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant) came before the greatest and highest court in England.
What would happen if the same high jurisdiction in this country took up a little pamphlet that nobody had heard of and such a pamphlet were taken up and challenged as destructive to public morals? Everybody would want to know what the pamphlet was all about. Well, that is what happened in England. There the pamphlet had sold to a small extent, really negligible in its extent, for 40 years. During the progress of the trial it sold to the extent of 125,000 copies.
The solicitor general prosecuted the case and admitted those figures. He apologized to the jury; he said the case was a mischievous case in its origin and bound to be mischievous in its results. He said he was really sorry he had anything to do with it.
The chief justice, in summing up, said everybody that had followed the case would agree on that, that no more ill-advised and injurious case had ever been brought before a court in his opinion.
A competent observer remarked that that prosecution had put the agitation forward by 25 years; and, in fact, so far as a great many people were concerned, it created the situation as an agitation. A great many people would never have known of it except for this and do not know that except as having this origin.
How about this country? There have been isolated cases, but so far bringing it to the attention of the people generally in the last ten years or so, that is due to what happened in New York within a decade. A nurse was working among the poor in New York and she was shocked to find that the mouths of physicians were stopped from giving advice to women about avoiding the sort of misery into which they had fallen. She found herself against the law. She started to publish what she thought were messages of health for women, but she found that was an infringement of the Federal postal laws, and her publications were suppressed. She then withdrew to England, which had passed this state of prosecution. She came back to this country with new enthusiasm, and before the storm was over she started a clinic. That was against the law of New York. Her sister was imprisoned in that connection, and they had a hunger strike, and all this appeared on the front page of the papers for 14 days or some such time, and the thing flared over the country. And out of that has come definite organization, definite propaganda, which I think quite frankly and calmly we should not have at all in this country if it had not been there was legal opposition against which people felt moved to organize. Now, what has this law, 50 years of it, and of the State laws that have copied it—what have they accomplished in this country?
They have not stood in the way of birth control, which is widely spreading, and a very widely approved practice; they have not stood in the way of the sale of instruments of birth control. I think it is fair to say that anybody that is aware of what is going on knows that traffic flourishes for whoever chooses to take advantage of it, in spite of the laws. But the law makes it relatively more difficult, for people who are without reputation or character to get the sort of information and medical advice, and sort of chance to think about these things for themselves which the other people have.
An exceptionally pertinent presentation of salient points was made by Dorothy Glaser, who spoke also for her husband, Dr. Otto Charles Glaser, who is the head of the department of biology at Amherst College:
It seems to me that there is a slight misunderstanding on the part of the various religious organizations here represented, especially the Catholics, about the Vaile bill, and I would like to discuss it from the scientific point of view. I feel that we only stand on our rights as American citizens on this proposition.
We do not object to the teachings of the Catholic faith on this subject for their own people. But we do feel that it is up to their own priests to advise them, instruct them, and keep them in order. They have no right to ask Federal aid to help the priests in matters of church discipline. I would make the same reply to any other sect. Suppose, gentlemen, that the Christian Scientists came to you and said that they could not keep their people from using doctors. Would you then pass legislation to do away with medical knowledge at the request of these Christian Scientists? We have no objection to their taking any attitude on this matter, but we do object to their method of forcing it on others. We wish to be free to create scientific values without their interference. This is very difficult in the field of birth control, because under the present law the scientist is not free to work in this particular field. In every other than the human species there is freedom. The United States Bureau of Fisheries have a corps of scientists who work across the road from us in the department’s laboratories at Woods Hole. They carry on experiments at Government expense with huge tanks of eggs and sperm. They limit the birth of the fish until such time as the temperature, season, and other environmental conditions are right, so that the young fish may have a square deal. But then America wants the best possible fish. The Bureau of Animal Husbandry is carrying on work in fertility, and I have a letter from Doctor Cole, the chief of this department, indorsing the Vaile Bill. Now, however, if some one is very much interested in problems of fertilization in his own species and wants to work in this field, to create new material for the use of the medical profession, what happens? He goes to his laboratory; and suppose he makes a discovery; if he then tells anybody, if he publishes what he has discovered, or whispers it through the keyhole, he is in the position of Galileo, about 400 years ago. He is likely to go to jail for giving his scientific knowledge to the world. In fact, the law tells him that it is obscene. He can, however, publish it in any other country in the world, except the United States.
Of course, we can not agree with the point that has been made this morning, that it is an interference with nature, nor grant that that is a logical argument. For scientific discovery and all medicine is an interference with nature, as are electric lights and plumbing. In fact, it is when we do not know how to interfere with her that many of our worst calamities befall us. The flu came so suddenly that science could not help, and few of us enjoyed letting nature run her course. In the case of yellow fever the Government scientists stepped forward and through birth control of the mosquito, a rank interference with nature, removed one of the greatest menaces to the South.
Again, I would like to emphasize the right of every American to all the scientific information that we can give him and to insist that no group have the right to keep it from him. The scientist has not found that ignorance is bliss. Is it, then, unreasonable for him to ask why his Government, which stands for free education and the public-school system, should write into a law in this instance a faith in man’s ignorance about himself? I plead, then, for the removal of this law which would restrict man’s knowledge about himself. Have we not faith enough in the people to let them have such information as we possess, or are some fields of science to be kept for the favored few?
Of course, the point of restriction of experimentation, had it come up in other relations, would have been a serious thing for all of us. As an example, the man who discovered insulin, the only known control for diabetes, could never have made this discovery had he been prevented by law from having free access to the material and work done by others before him. There is much valuable material being published in European laboratories. If, however, any scientist or physician brings this material into our country for use in our laboratories that we may advance our knowledge in this field, he is likely to go to jail by reason of the fact that the law tells us it is obscene literature. It can only be done on the boot-legging basis.
We have at present students at Amherst going into all professional fields, many to medical schools, but they may not be given any information in relation to this subject, even though they may ultimately want to use it for the control of venereal disease among their patients. They, like the rest of us, must just find out what they can as best they may.
One other point I should like to touch on in regard to the scientific point of view: We hear a great deal about “interference with nature” and the “right of the child to be born.” To speak perfectly frankly, for a scientist this is nonsense, for in the light of the facts it leads to the reductio ad absurdum. I am sorry if I shocked the reverend father, who has just told us that these are things not even to be mentioned among Christians. The scientist must face all facts, sex included. The recent studies of bubonic plague in China have been unsavory and have been made at great personal risk. But some one must have the courage to face all of life, not selected sections of it.
It has been found that every human female has 3600 eggs and every male liberates 2,500,000 sperm at a time. Now, if the “right of the child to be born” means anything at all it must mean, then, the right of the egg to be fertilized, for it does not become a child until it does. Which, then, gentlemen, is the sacred egg? I would say that it is that egg which is fertilized at a time when both parents are in a position to give it a square deal; to give the child food, care, and the sort of environment which goes to the making of a decent American citizen.
I say again, we have no antagonism to the churches. The scientist would simply like to be left free to investigate his material and to put it at the disposal of all the American people, without church interference. We simply want the American people trusted with the best information that we can give them about this matter; that all, not some, may have the right to use it or not, as they see fit.
Mrs. Benjamin Carpenter showed how the precedent of the Federal law had been utilized by the courts to suppress the Parenthood Clinic in Chicago, even though Illinois has no State law prohibiting the giving of verbal information, as elsewhere described in this book. Her closing words were:
I ask you, gentlemen, is it not a shameful thing that when women are anxious to have children, and ask only for information as to how to space their children so that they can recover from one pregnancy before they are plunged into another one; or when they feel that they have had all the children they can possibly bring up as good citizens—and it is the women who bear the children—they want information, and it is refused them; in this twentieth century is it not shameful that any scientific information should be classed as obscene?
The point of view of the eugenicist was vigorously upheld by Prof. Roswell Johnson of Pittsburgh University, formerly investigator in experimental evolution for Carnegie Institute, and teacher of biology in the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University:
I wish to call your attention to the very great importance of this legislation for the future American racial composition. In my opinion only the immigration law and the projects for international comity can compare with this bill in so far as they affect the future of this American stock.
There are two kinds of children—welcome children and unwelcome children. This bill will reduce to an important extent the number of unwelcome children. It will increase to a considerable extent the number of welcome children.
Now, if the individual himself will cooperate in this matter, why should we not seize on that opportunity?
We talk in the eugenics movement of coercive legislation, of sterilization, of segregation, and of the regulation of the marriage laws; but here is a case where the individuals themselves, many inferior individuals say, “I won’t have this child if you will show me how not to have it.”
So I urge you not to continue the present law, which will mean absolutely and certainly a large continued contribution of inferiors to our stock.
Gentlemen, this is an urgent matter. If you let this go over for two years, into the next Congress, you are bringing on a very large number of inferior births that can be avoided. You know the number that are concerned in the immigration bill now pending—367,000 a year; 367,000 a year is no more than you are dealing with here. Now, do you deliberately want to add to the American people 367,000 individuals, we will say roughly, who will be, on the average, inferior?
Mr. Hersey: How do you prevent that—how does this bill prevent that?
Mr. Johnson: This bill will make it possible for individuals who have difficulty in getting access to efficient birth-control literature to get it. At present 80 per cent of the married women are trying one way or the other to achieve birth control. The less-informed women are blundering along with inadequate methods that they employ for lack of better, but which they can not rely on. Therefore by throwing open the distribution of literature, putting this on a scientific basis, like any other science, anybody can go and get material from authoritative sources and thus make it possible for the individual of limited opportunities to get that reliable information.
Mr. Hersey: Do you not think that that information, if admitted, would be found by the bad stock and good stock just the same?
Mr. Johnson: Yes.
Mr. Hersey: And are you not getting the proportion of good stock really lower by this method instead of increasing it?
Mr. Johnson: No; I do not admit that. Take Wellesley graduates, for instance. Their birth rate is already very low. The existence of birth-control methods has already had its effect. The scientific group as a whole knows now relatively reliable methods. What we plead for is their improvement and equalization of methods throughout the population.
The American stock is getting worse to-day, in my opinion, and that is a very serious thing. But in view of the great disparity in birth rates which we have relatively between the superior and inferior stock—
Mr. Hersey (interposing): I want to know the practical side. You claim this bill will increase the population in the matter of superior stock and decrease it in the matter of inferior stock. Now, how can you accomplish this by this bill?
Mr. Johnson: It is accomplished in this way: If you decrease the proportion of inferiors in the population you increase the general economic and social welfare of the whole population.
Senator Spencer: You increase the relative number of superiors?
Mr. Johnson: Yes: and absolutely also. If we increase the social welfare, then the superiors are willing to have more children and will have more children. One of the things that prevents superiors from having more children is the excessive reproduction of inferiors.
The appraisal of the merit of any proposed legislation is often facilitated by an inspection of the objections offered to it, and by consideration of the circumstances under which the objections are made. But to reproduce here the whole fifteen pages of closely printed words that constituted the testimony of the chief opposition speaker for whom the Hearing on the Cummins-Vaile Bill was reopened a month later, would be quite as much of an imposition on the reader as it was upon the Committee who had to listen to it, and upon the government which had to print it. It is estimated that it costs 50 cents a word to print the Congressional Record. Reports cost presumably about the same. But in view of the grave inhibition as to action which afflicted the Judiciary Committee, it may be that they felt grateful rather than imposed upon, for the delay involved and the time consumed; it put off the responsibility of doing anything just so much longer. It may be significant that the Chairman of the Hearing said at the close of this interminable statement, “We are very glad to have heard from you,” and no such similar appreciation was expressed to any of the other speakers.
The circumstances under which this second hearing was held are noteworthy. It came on May 9th. Ten days previous it was discovered that the reports of the first hearing were all ready to print, but were being held on official order. On May 3rd the Director of the Voluntary Parenthood League was told by the Secretary of the Chairman of the House Sub-Committee that the Chairman of the full Committee wished some additional material added to the Hearing Report, and that the printing would be delayed on that account. As several written statements had been filed as part of the testimony which there had not been time to have read at the Hearing, the assumption was that this material was another such statement. But by May 7th it was learned that the Hearing was to be reopened on the 9th. There was no publicity on the announcement and it was only at the eleventh hour that Mr. Vaile himself was notified. Fortunately friends of the bill came on telegraphed call, to be on hand to answer the opposition or the queries of the Committee.
Another noteworthy fact in the circumstances is that the chief speaker for the opposition at this second Hearing was a young Catholic woman, a social worker, Miss Sara E. Laughlin of Philadelphia, who three years previously had joined the Voluntary Parenthood League, with professions of great interest. She had paid regular annual membership dues, which act, according to the membership blanks, constitutes endorsement of the objects of the League, the first of which is the removal of the Federal law which prohibits the circulation of contraceptive information.
Most of her testimony was discussion of the morality of birth control rather than the question of the right of the citizen to have access to the knowledge, which is the point of the bill. It was a general denunciation of the birth control movement and the procedure of its advocates. The following excerpts are characteristic of the whole:
Miss Laughlin: Mr. Chairman, in this instance I am representing the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae. That organization is exactly what its name implies—a federation of the alumnae of the Catholic academies and colleges of the United States and some other countries.
I am here to-day because I am in the position at present of chairman of the bureau of girls’ welfare in that organization, and therefore I must be concerned about such matters of public welfare as are involved in this bill.
Because of a difference in training and a belief in the conserving value of a decent reserve, we are not nearly so vocal as the proponents of this bill, but see it as our duty to become more so, as it seems that this is necessary to safeguard the moralities which we believe to be involved in this question.
Partly through the activities of the Voluntary Parenthood League and the Birth Control League, sex relations and allied subjects were removed from their proper place in medical textbooks and necessary instruction in right conduct by proper authorities to each new generation, and have become in many quarters matters of general conversation even in mixed gatherings. As a professional social worker who has dealt with a number of girls, I can not state too strongly the unfortunate effect of this general stimulation of discussion of sex matters, about which everybody admits from a scientific point of view very little is known.
Just as we have never shirked considering any phase of human nature when human interests were to be served, we do not now evade our obligation to state publicly our point of view on the proposed measure, however much we regret the necessity.
You are asked to “redeem the United States from the odium of being the only country to penalize birth control as indecency.” We think this is not an odium, but shows a wise concern for the mental and moral health of our people. We think it preferable to the English problem of recalling indecent and improper literature after it has once been released.
We do not advocate the dissemination of this knowledge any more than we would advocate the dissemination of doses and methods of administering deadly poison. This sort of knowledge is in the possession of all physicians. We do not feel that we are discriminated against because it is not made readily accessible to us.
You are told that doctors advocate the passage of this bill because they are not told about the control of conception in a medical school, and their patients keep asking them for this instruction. You are told frequently, too, that doctors are giving this instruction. Yet you are told that they do not have it.
You are told that “millions of self-respecting parents resent the legal insult by which the information as to control of conception is made unmailable.” We ask you to give your attention to the millions who are grateful for this provision, because they are convinced of the grave danger which would attend its removal.
If we were concerned only for our own welfare, we would not raise our voices now in opposition, but by refusing to discuss the measure lend our passive assistance to its enactment.
We belong to an organization which has stood the test of time better than any other organization the world has seen.
Mr. Yates: Meaning—
Miss Laughlin: Meaning the Catholic Church. We could assume, therefore, if we could be guilty of such callous indifference to the effect on our fellow citizens, that this was a providential measure intended to enable us to inherit the earth. Following this line of reasoning, we could conserve our efforts and devote our time to keeping our people as free as possible from this pernicious propaganda, and reap the material rewards. Such a procedure would be contrary to the spiritual and ethical principles we have accepted, and abhorrent to any body of Christian people.
I can not, as the organization proposing this measure presumes to do, speak for millions, but I can speak from personal knowledge of hundreds of mothers in whose homes I visit year after year in the course of work with their children. They do not want this information for their own use, and they do not want it circulated to be used as an insidious snare for their children when they have reached maturity.
Compare this last statement about not speaking on behalf of millions, with the seventh item from Miss Laughlin’s testimony quoted above in which she asks the Committee to consider “the millions” who are, she asserts, “grateful for this provision” in the present law which denies them access to knowledge.
Compare also her statement of her individual experience with “hundreds of mothers” who “do not want this information” with the experience of both the New York and the Chicago Clinics, in which the proportions of Catholic women who request contraceptive instructions is sizable. The New York Clinic reports the percentage as thirty-two, and the Chicago Clinic as thirty. However, any divergence of testimony that there may be as to whether Catholics want or will utilize contraceptive information is rather beside the point so far as Congress and the bill are concerned. The issue is not as to whether individuals or groups want this knowledge but as to whether anyone who does want it shall have his right to get it recognized by law.
The Chairman of the Hearing allowed a rebuttal to the Catholic testimony by the Director of the Voluntary Parenthood League to be filed as part of the Hearing report. It reads as follows: