The Mansion of Happiness (25 page)

In 1926, Sanger, with colleagues at the
American Birth Control League, met with sixty senators and twenty congressmen, and seventeen members of the Judiciary Committee, urging the decriminalization of contraception. They didn’t make much headway. (Mary Ware Dennett, of the Voluntary Parenthood League, had pointed out, when she lobbied the New York State Legislature in 1924, that the very men who refused to change the law had wives who broke it: congressional families had an average of 2.7 children.) Notes from the interviews, summarizing the remarks of legistators, read like this: “Knew nothing of the subject,” “Has no literature on the subject.” Senator
James Reed from Missouri told the lobbyists, “He believes that Birth Control is chipping away the very foundation of our civilization. He believes in large families, that women should have many children and that
poverty is no handicap but rather an asset.” Arizona senator
Henry Ashurst told Sanger, “He did not wish to discuss the question with us. Stated that he had not been raised to discuss this matter with women.” Spurned by legislators, Sanger turned more of her attention to gaining the support of doctors. By 1930, the American Birth Control League was overseeing fifty-five birth control clinics in twelve states and twenty-three cities. Contraception had become more of a medical issue than a legislative one. And, by now, so had parenthood.
³¹

Sanger continued abrasive and impatient, and often reckless and heedless. She also continued to court eugenicists; at one point, the American Birth Control League even proposed a merger with the American Eugenics Society (the society was not interested).
³²
But Sanger was unpopular with eugenicists because she was also a socialist, and eugenicists were more commonly laissez-faire conservatives, which is among the many reasons Sanger was at odds with her own organization. A survey conducted of nearly a thousand members of the American Birth Control League in 1927 found its membership to be more Republican than the rest of the country. In a successful bid for respectability as a reform akin to prohibition, the league had attracted to its membership the same wealthy women and men who joined organizations like the Red Cross, the Rotary Club, and the Anti-Saloon League.
³³
The next year, Sanger was forged to resign as the league’s president; its members objected to her feminism.

Clara Savage Littledale courted much the same Rotarian audience, filling the pages of her parenting magazine with expert advice, offered by the day’s leading psychologists and doctors and educators and scholars. But this she did with a twist: she turned her authorities into amateurs. “The staff sits up nights throwing scientific words out of the articles submitted by college professors,” she explained. She also domesticated her experts. If the magazine “publishes an article by a Ph.D.,” she said, “it hastens to explain that said Ph.D. has a baby or if the Ph.D. is a man that he is the uncle of a dear little tot.”
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Littledale was making this up as she went because, at the time, science reporting was new. Before the First World War, journalists generally didn’t report on science. After the war, scientists tried writing for newspapers and magazines, attempting to explain the value of their work, but most of them
weren’t any good at it. The number of scientists writing for a popular audience fell, while the number of journalists specializing in science writing rose. And so did the prominence and prevalence of stories about science.

Science didn’t become the explanation for everything by happenstance. In 1920, a chemist named
Edwin E. Slosson founded a wire service, the
Science Service. Initially financed by the newspaper publisher
E. W. Scripps, the Science Service was later sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Research Council. Its purpose was to promote scientific research by feeding stories to newspapers and magazines, which, at a moment when
Time
was becoming a news aggregator, was a good plan, with eager takers. The Science Service, Slosson said, would not “indulge in propaganda unless it be propagandas to urge the value of research and the usefulness of science.” By 1930, it reached a fifth of the American reading public.
³⁵

As science writing grew, it established certain conventions of reporting and prose; certain sorts of stories took shape. An emerging specialty of science journalism was the hair-raising account of a disease that threatens to destroy the human race. Littledale brought that genre into writing about parenting. In her hands, the conquest-of-disease story came to define writing about parenting.
³⁶
Disease stories made good copy. They also sold advertising, especially for hygiene products, like Listerine (first sold over the counter in 1914), Lysol (marketed, in 1918, as an anti-flu measure), Cellophane (1923), and Kleenex (1924, sold as a towel for removing makeup until a consumer survey revealed that people were using it to blow their noses).
³⁷
As
George Hecht and
Clara Savage Littledale knew very well, these were excellent products to sell to parents.

The
germ theory of disease dates, more or less, to the 1870s. Pasteur developed a rabies vaccine in 1885, launching a global battle against infectious illness, a battle whose tremendous success would do so much to lengthen the average life.
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In the 1910s, “germ” became a household word, and ordinary people learned to blame germs, not God, for catastrophes like the
influenza epidemic of 1918—which killed more people than had died in the war. By the 1920s, scientists had developed a vaccine for diphtheria; other
vaccines, like the one for polio, would take decades, but hopes ran high. In
The Conquest of Disease
, professor of sanitary science
Thurman B. Rice predicted that the eradication of sickness itself was merely a matter of time.
³⁹

The master of the conquest-of-disease story was a bacteriologist turned journalist named
Paul de Kruif. De Kruif had taught at the University of Michigan and worked for the U.S. Sanitary Corps, attempting to isolate the gangrene bacillus. After the war, he turned to writing. In 1925, his collaboration with
Sinclair Lewis led to the publication of
Arrowsmith
, a novel about a young doctor fighting an outbreak of bubonic plague—the first medical thriller. The scientist, the
New Republic
noted in its review of the novel, now “sits in the seat of the mighty.” De Kruif coauthored the novel and received 25 percent of the royalties. In 1926, while Hecht and Littledale were at work developing their parenting magazine, de Kruif turned to nonfiction, publishing
Microbe Hunters
, a book of profiles of scientists, starting with Leeuwenhoek, who can see tiny things the rest of us can’t, things that are trying to kill us.
⁴⁰
The book, de Kruif wrote, is “the tale of the bold and persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death. . . . It is the plain history of their tireless peerings into this new fantastic world.”
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The coming plague was Paul de Kruif’s bread and butter. Very many of his stories were written for mothers. In 1929, he issued a warning in the lead article in
Ladies’ Home Journal:
“In American
milk today there lurks a terrible, wasting fever, that may keep you in bed for a couple of weeks, that may fasten itself on you for one, or for two, or even for seven years—that might culminate by killing you.” What was this dread malady?
Undulant fever. “At least 50,000 people are sick with it at this very moment,” their ailment virtually unknown to “their baffled doctors,” de Kruif wrote.
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The article, titled “Before You Drink a Glass of Milk,” scared a lot of mothers and sold a lot of magazines. Boasting of its success, the editor of
Ladies’ Home Journal
explained, “Nobody had ever heard of undulant fever before.”
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To sell a magazine about raising children, you have to convince parents that they need that magazine. They need it because, at parenting, they are amateurs. And they need it because their children are in danger. To sell that magazine every four weeks, those children need to be in danger every single month.

For a lesson in the anatomy of a panic, Hecht and Littledale didn’t have far to look. The year Paul de Kruif sounded the alarm about undulant fever, Americans fell into a frenzy over yet another disease no one had ever heard of before. “ ‘Parrot Disease’ Baffles Experts,” reported the
Washington
Post
, on page 3 of a paper that went to press the night of January 8, 1930, thrilling readers with a medical mystery that would capture the nation’s attention with the prospect of a parrot fever pandemic. Reports, cabled and wired and radioed across land and sea, were printed in the daily paper or broadcast, within minutes, on the radio: tallies, theories, postmortems, more to fear.
⁴⁴
Before it was over, an admiral in the U.S. Navy would order sailors at sea to cast their pet parrots into the ocean.
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There was talk of the mass extermination of all the birds in the Bronx Zoo. People abandoned their pet parrots on the streets. Every sneeze seemed a symptom. The story grew and grew. Almost as soon as it started, the panic was reclassified as a false alarm. But that sold papers, too. “U.S. Alarm over Parrot Disease Not Warranted,” reported the
Chicago Daily Tribune
on January 15, 1930.
⁴⁶
E. B. White filed a piece for the
New Yorker
, calling parrot fever merely “the latest and most amusing example of the national hypochondria.”
⁴⁷
He figured that the country was suffering from nothing so much as a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.
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The first American doctor to believe he had seen psittacosis had read about the disease in a Baltimore paper, probably the
Baltimore American
, which included a glossy Sunday supplement called the
American Weekly
, edited by
Morrill Goddard. “Nobody heard the word ‘psittacosis’ until the
American Weekly
printed a page,” Goddard boasted.
⁴⁹

You could make a parenting panic work the same way. The
New York Times
, where
Harold Littledale was an editor, cheerfully greeted Clara Savage Littledale’s magazine as “First Aid for Parents.”
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It was first aid for ills it invented. The magazine raced from one panic to the next while, in its pages, selling products that might save children’s lives (not the lives of poor children, which were in some peril, but the lives of the children of the anxious affluent). Littledale couldn’t possibly report on panics like parrot fever; those came and went too fast for her production schedule. But she did her best to create a new panic every month. In June 1930, just after the parrot fever panic, she ran, alongside ads for Lysol, plenty of disease stories, like “How to Guard Against Colds and Flu,” by the New York Public Health Service’s
Shirley Wynne, who had been much in the news during the parrot fever panic.
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More pointedly, Littledale ran pieces that turned children’s everyday experiences into clinical symptons: “Thumbsucking: Its Dangers and Treatment” and “Have Your Children the Daily Bath Habit?” and “How Well Do We Protect Our Children?”
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There was more to worry about than colds and flu. What would become of children who sucked their thumbs or who didn’t
get soaped up every day? They might succumb; they might fail; they might die. So much to worry about, so little time; the magazine, and microbe hunters, had answers. And then, a few months later, you could run a piece about how thumb sucking wasn’t so bad after all.

Within a year of
Children
’s first issue, Hecht and Littledale had changed the magazine’s name, to the
Parents’ Magazine
, which made much sense, since all this business about parenthood had very little to do with kids. As Littledale would explain in 1930,

This almost passes for a definition: Parenthood is being so inept that you’re a danger to your own children. “Our want of knowledge is nothing short of criminal,”
Stella Crossley wrote in “Confessions of an Amateur Mother.”
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That, at least, was the premise of Littledale’s magazine, and its price.

By 1931, the
Parents’ Magazine
boasted two hundred thousand subscribers.
⁵⁵
Littledale, however, was frustrated. She wrote a prodigious amount of fiction, odd and rather terrifying stories, many about love gone wrong. She sent them to dozens of magazines, but her efforts to publish them met with little success.
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Her own magazine, though, kept growing. Its vast readership carried Littledale into broadcasting; she was heard on NBC radio from 1932 to 1943, her show filling Emily Post’s noontime slot on Wednesdays, Miss Manners’s day off. “I Am a Failure as a Mother” she titled one of her talks.
⁵⁷
She administered advice by the anecdote. “Fathers Are Parents, Too!” was her answer to a letter from a listener who wished he knew his children better. Littledale’s advice was often perfectly sensible. Grown-ups should enjoy living with children, she liked to say, but they shouldn’t live
for
them. She didn’t much like spanking; she thought kids needed to learn
to do things for themselves; she wisely told the listener who said she was a failure as a mother, “One way to be a failure as a mother is to overplay the role.” She had six rules for dealing with kids: be fair; be polite; be there; don’t wobble; don’t pretend to be perfect; and don’t be too serious. On more particular matters, such as how to handle a crying baby, Littledale’s advice, like her magazine, followed parenting fashion, which changes as often as the length of hemlines.
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Urgent social issues that affected how very many Americans raised their children—segregation and hunger, for instance—had no place on Littledale’s list of parenting problems.