1920 (25 page)

A FEW YEARS LATER, IN
1920, came what was in a sense the most important twelve months in Margaret Sanger's life, even though her name was absent from the press. It was, rather, a year of preparation for the project to which all of her life so far had been leading, the work to which the rest of her life would be devoted.

By night, she worked alone, sketching floor plans, compiling lists of supplies and services, using the notes she had taken in the Netherlands to help her decide on the number of employees she would need, what training would be required of them, and what their precise duties would be. She had had no legal training, but she skimmed law books, trying to decide what limits would be placed on her vision by the police. She was determined to miss no details. She might not be able to stay within the law, but that was the law's fault, not hers. Still, she would observe its boundaries as closely as possible.

During the day, she and her colleagues undertook a project no less important, searching the streets of Brooklyn for a place to house an enterprise more ambitious than a mere birth-control clinic. They had very specific needs: size of building, size of rooms, space for overstuffed chairs and other comfortable furniture in the waiting room, sufficient storage space, a welcoming atmosphere. When they found an office that was conveniently located and large enough for them to refurbish to suit their needs, they signed a lease and eagerly went to work.

Without any professional assistance, the women remodeled and redecorated, cleaned and painted, keeping the windows open to air out their stuffy new home, even though the air that drifted into it was hot and seldom provided a breeze. They filled the shelves and bookcases with all manner of printed material, including a complete collection of
Family Limitation
issues. In the cupboards, some of which they had to build themselves, were a variety of contraceptive devices; diagrams to demonstrate the proper means of insertion were attached to the walls. The search
for the proper personnel began in earnest. The number of volunteers was overwhelming.

The group behind the facility, founded by Margaret Sanger, was the American Birth Control League. It would eventually be known as Planned Parenthood.

SANGER WAS A CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE,
not only for her own time but for all time. It was more than just her deliberately provocative writings, more than just her support of anarchists like the notorious Emma Goldman and her part-time lover Alexander Berkman, the latter of whom tried to kill robber baron Henry Clay Frick during the notorious Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel strike of 1892. She proudly regarded both as friends, even though Goldman would never speak publicly about birth control. Unlike Sanger, she found the topic too controversial, too likely to attract the authorities, and, in her case, too much of an invitation for deportation hearings. It was, almost surely, the only topic about which Goldman felt such reticence.

But even more inflammatory was the fact that Sanger's study of the various means of birth control led her, in time, to embrace the eugenics movement. She and her fellow supporters

sought to prevent the propagation of the genetically “unfit,” meaning the mentally retarded and chronically criminal. Influenced by these ideas, many states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws that fell mainly on the impoverished and racial minorities. Upholding a Tennessee law, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking for eight members of the Supreme Court, supported sterilization in the 1927 case of
Buck v. Bell
with the declaration that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

There was, and remains, a certain logic in trying to dissuade the genetically unfit from reproducing themselves, especially in large numbers and, as Justice Holmes said, over too many generations. But it is the most delicate of issues, and must be addressed with forethought aplenty and much care and gentleness. The young educator Harry H. Laughlin,
however, found the matter more simple than I have stated. It was, to Laughlin, simply “[t]o purify the breeding stock of the [human] race at all costs.” And then there was the physician W. Duncan McKim, whose book
Heredity and Human Progress
found that those of impure breeding stock were guilty of a capital offense. McKim, in what he deemed to be an expression of tenderness of his own variety, suggested that “the surest, the simplest, the kindest, the most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of the high privilege, is a gentle, painless death.”

It did Sanger no good to be publicly associated with people like this.

YET HER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE
freedom of women to enjoy sex without risk of motherhood, combined with the Nineteenth Amendment, brought a sense of empowerment to half of the American population that had never known such a feeling before. Especially to poor women, those who had never had access to, or even knowledge of, birth control previously, Margaret Sanger became something of a saint.

The office of the American Birth Control League opened to the public in 1921. The first women to enter did so warily. A few others trailed behind, just as wary, looking around for policemen or other government officials. These officials had decided, though, that although they could shut down the place temporarily, it would soon open again. It would close but then open, close and open—eventually, the law would come down on the side of the women; and their efforts, which would be time-consuming and expensive, would be for naught.

Before long, the initial entrants on that first day were followed by dozens more, a floodtide of feminine humanity desperate for services available to them for the first time ever. Among them, at the top of the social ladder, were members of the National Birth Control League, the Committee of 100. They were joined by garment-makers and seamstresses, housewives and store clerks, government employees and secretaries, spinsters and schoolteachers, maids and washerwomen, and even a few men, many of them immigrants, accompanying their wives or girlfriends, providing support, all of them amazed that a place like this existed and was willing to change their lives free of charge.

Sanger did not work at the office that first day. Rather, she stood at the door and watched, a proud witness to what she had done so much to create. She was surprised at the number of people who had turned out, surprised at their courage as they sat or stood in lines before virtually every desk in the office from opening to closing. There were no arrests, not a law officer anywhere in sight, not even Mrs. Whitehurst.

In one way or another, all who had availed themselves of the American Birth Control League's counsel and merchandise expressed their gratitude to Sanger as they left, for so heavy a burden finally lifted. She nodded, smiled—more in relief, it seemed to many, than gratitude. “The real hope of the world,” she had said on one occasion, “lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.”

She had done just that; and as a result her own business, small and controversial when it started, would grow unceasingly in its size and impact on society as the years went by. Eventually, the cause to which Sanger, Mindell, and Byrne had devoted their lives would prove well worth their commitment. One day a crime; a later day the cultural norm.

C
HARLES PONZI WOULD CELEBRATE THE
Fourth of July in 1920 in a grander fashion that he had ever, in the most avariciously luxurious of his dreams, imagined.

His wife, however, was not as enthusiastic. Rose Ponzi, her husband's one and only and ever, “was tiny, at four foot eleven just the right size for him, with rounded curves that defied the stick-figure fashions of the day. She had luxurious brown hair, lively dark eyes, and skin as smooth as Gianduja cream [chocolate with thirty percent hazelnut].” Several weeks earlier, perhaps feeling that the end was approaching and he wanted to leave something tangible behind, Ponzi announced he would build a castle for his Rose, and not one of his castles in the air. She declined; like him, she came from a poor village in Italy, and it was the simple things of life that made her comfortable. He insisted; it was the expensive things of life that made him salivate, the luxuries of the American promise so long deferred. Again she said no. He begged her to let him show his love in his way, and finally they agreed to
compromise; the result, however, favored the husband much more than the wife.

The Ponzis bought a house already erected in Lexington, Massachusetts—less than a castle, certainly, but Charles immediately began to add on and rebuild. Employing dozens of workmen seven days a week, Ponzi supervised construction of a living room so large that it took several seconds to notice the grand piano in a corner. Neither of them played. Behind it was the entrance to a sunroom and, directly opposite, a fireplace with a bearskin rug in front. Persian and Oriental rugs covered the rest of the hardwood floors; chairs and sofas upholstered in damask and velour bordered the rugs; and a $5,000 kitchen, which was more than the cost of many entire dwellings at the time, was powered by gas, a rarity for the era. Tending to the Ponzis' needs were a gardener, a butler, and a cook, although Rose, unhappy about the latter, gave her a lot of nights off. She would peel her own vegetables, thank you. She would prepare her own pastas and stews, clean up her own messes, supervise her own shopping.

In truth, Rose was unhappy about much in her new home. It was like a museum, one that few people visited, and she was one of the items on display, one that few people ever saw. She did not complain; she knew that her husband was bathing her in materialism because he loved her, but she could not understand what had happened. So unexpected was Charles's sudden wealth, so excessive—where had it come from? Surely two people didn't need so much. Unlike most of her countrymen, she had just found the American dream come true, but to an extreme that left her shaken and confused. Shouldn't the dreams of more Americans come true instead of those of just one couple, a couple now so drowning in excess that they had bought a piano simply as decoration?

What had happened to her sweet Charles? She was puzzled by his behavior; he seemed so unlike the man who had courted her and won her heart.

Then again, maybe they would one day have a couple of children who could play the piano. They certainly tried enough times. They did not need the services of Margaret Sanger and associates; they needed the opposite.

As Michael E. Parrish relates, “By July 4, 1920, according to some estimates, Ponzi's company was raking in a cool $1 million each week. … Ponzi was mentioned in the same breath with Columbus, Michelangelo, and Marconi.”

ACCORDING TO
THE AMERICAN CHRONICLE:
Six Decades in American Life, 1920–1980
, twelve new words or phrases were added to the English language in 1920. One of them was “profiteer.” It is perhaps fair to say that Ponzi was as responsible for its inclusion as anyone else.

He did not, however, remain a profiteer for nearly as long as he had anticipated. He was sued twice in 1920 for dubious business practices; and although he won both cases, one of them a libel judgment that provided him with a whopping award that started out, before appeals, at $500,000, the more cautious among his investors were becoming more cautious still. They began to pull their money out of the Securities Exchange Company, or at least some of it, fearing that Ponzi was not as legitimate as he seemed. Yes, they reasoned, he had been legally vindicated in the two cases, but where there's smoke. … Sometimes it just takes a little longer to see the fire, and during that time, as the flames ignite beneath the surface, a great deal of damage can be done.

Fortunately, Ponzi had more than enough revenue on hand to cover the small number of defecting clients, and his ability to pay them, promptly and profitably, reassured his remaining investors. All seemed well. Actually, all seemed better than well, as the July 24, 1920 issue of the
Boston Post
printed a favorable article on Ponzi's firm, and the result was even more clients than there had been before the two lawsuits, the most ever.

But despite the
Post
's history of favorable coverage, there were doubters on the paper's staff, and they occupied prominent positions. Both assistant editor/publisher Richard Grozier and city editor Eddie Dunn believed that, what seemed too good to be true was in fact too good to be true, and this was never more accurate than in the world of finance. It was time, they decided, to look more deeply into the Securities Exchange Company than the paper had ever done before. On July 26, just two days after the latest encomium, the
Post
published an article
by Clarence Walker Barron, “recognized internationally as among the foremost financial authorities of the world.” Under a headline that ran …

QUESTIONS THE MOTIVE BEHIND PONZI SCHEME

Barron Says Reply Coupon Plan Can Be Worked Only in Small Way