Portside

Ham-Handed Police Action with Overtones of Religious Intolerance Helps Turn a Little-Known Cause into a Mainstream Political and Civil Liberties Issue

ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE YEARS YEARS AGO, ON NOVEMBER 13, 1921, a squad of New York City police inadvertently created two storms blowing in opposite directions – one was a windfall of excellent publicity for legalized access to information about birth control, and the other was a storm of very bad publicity for the NYPD.

The result was six months worth of major news stories about the brand-new American Birth Control League, which generated a tsunami of political and financial support leading to the League’s incorporation “to conduct a campaign of education for the purpose of repealing, by lawful means, existing State and Federal statutes hostile to information and access to birth control.”

In a very short time a movement that had been envisioned by radical feminist Margaret Sanger went from being extremely controversial to being widely supported. Two decades later, the League changed its name to Planned Parenthood.

November 13, 1921, was the third and last day of the Manhattan conference where the League was founded. An event that had for two days received a minimum of public attention was suddenly front-page news because the police, without warning, decided to prevent the day’s meeting from starting and, when Sanger and another of the meeting’s leaders refused, arrest them for disorderly conduct.

When the police forcibly removed Sanger and Mary Winsor, a member of the League’s National Council, from the stage of Town Hall in Manhattan’s Times Square, a mob scene unfolded, as more than a thousand conference goers were herded out of the building onto West 43rd Street. As Sanger later said, getting arrested unexpectedly for attempting to preside over a peaceful meeting was “unpleasant, to say the least,” but it also uncovered a mother lode of better publicity than money could buy.

Two days after the arrests took place, almost all of New York City’s many newspapers played up the story that the “raid” had been ordered by New York’s Catholic Archbishop. The report that the police had acted at the Archbishop’s behest made it impossible for the Mayor to avoid ordering an investigation.

Hardly had the mayoral investigation begun than a judge dismissed the disorderly conduct charges against Sanger and Winsor “for a complete lack of evidence.”

But the dismissal of the charges didn’t answer the more important question of what had motivated the police, so the investigation continued. In the attempt to get to the bottom of that, investigators required the testimony of one of the League’s wealthy and socially prominent supporters, Juliet Rublee, who was married to Washington lawyer and presidential advisor George Rublee.

On December 2, Juliet Rublee, who was a close friend and financial supporter of Sanger, testified about the section of New York’s penal code concerning the dissemination of obscene material or information, which the police claimed to have been enforcing when they padlocked Town Hall. When she finished quoting the law and saying that she disagreed with it, police in the room immediately arrested her for violating the law she had just criticized. The result was another mob scene receiving front-page coverage.

Several days later the charge against Rublee was dismissed for lack of evidence. After two months of obfuscatory hemming and hawing by the police, they admitted that all three of the arrests ought not to have occurred. The Archbishop’s role in the affair, or lack of it, was never explicated.

Three months later, when the American Birth Control League acquired the status of a New York State corporation, it was well on its way to being the leading organization advocating for the reproductive rights of women in the U.S. https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/town_hall_raid/

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