“Do you make the decisions?”
“That’s my job. If any seem objectionable I send them on to Washington.”
I was horrified to find this adolescent in a position which permitted him to pass judgment on such serious matters, but I was able to reassure him; the course we had adopted would in no way interfere with retaining our second-class mailing privileges.
Many of the buyers of the Review had been disappointed because it contained no practical information. “I have your magazine. All in there is true but what I want to know is how not to have another baby next year.” Thousands of letters were sent out explaining that the Review could not print birth control information. Nevertheless, some of the appeals, particularly from women who lived on lonely, remote farms, were so heart-rending that I simply had to furnish them copies of Family Limitation, though urging them to go to their physicians.
Every once in a while I had a telephone message to come down to the Post Office at an appointed hour. I did so, wondering and uncertain. Was the interview to be about the Review, Family Limitation, or what?
The official in the legal department whom I always saw, fatherly though not old, used to say, “Now, Mrs. Sanger, you’re still violating the law by sending your pamphlet through the mails. If you keep this up they’ll put you in jail again.”
I objected, “The Government and I had this out years ago. The Federal case was dismissed.”
“It never can be settled while we get these protests.”
To prove the Post Office was not having such an easy time of it, he pulled open a drawer and inside was a little pile of pamphlets and letters from religious fanatics, self-constituted moralists of one kind or another, women as well as men, who had received their copies and then complained. He showed me envelopes addressed to the Governor of New York, to the President of the United States. I studied the handwriting to see whether I could recognize it as identical with any that had come to me. Perhaps the postmark was Wichita, Kansas; there could not be many from a town of that size, and presently I remembered the request. It was a shattering thing to see that drawer. I had been earnestly trying to aid despairing mothers, and had been betrayed.
“Here’s this proof against you, Mrs. Sanger. What are you going to do about it?”