When the officers had gone, father came through the door of the adjoining room where he had been reading the paper. He put both arms around me and said, “Your mother would have been alive today if we had known all this then.” He had applied my recital directly to his own life. “You will win this case. Everything is with you—logic, common sense, and progress. I never saw the truth until this instant.”
Old-fashioned phraseology, but father was at last convinced. He went home quite proud, thinking I was not so crazy after all, and began sending me clippings to help prove the case for birth control—women who had drowned themselves or their children and the brutalities of parents, because even mother love might turn cruel if too hard pressed.
My faith was still childlike. I trusted that, like father, a judge representing our Government would be convinced. All I had to do was explain to those in power what I was doing and everything would come right.
August twenty-fifth I was arraigned in the old Post Office way downtown. Judge Hazel, himself a father of eight or nine children, was kindly, and I suspected the two Federal agents who had summoned me had spoken a good word on my behalf. But Assistant District Attorney Harold A. Content seemed a ferocious young fellow. When the Judge asked, “What sort of things is Mrs. Sanger doing to violate the law?” he answered, “She’s printing articles advocating bomb throwing and assassination.”
“Mrs. Sanger doesn’t look like a bomb thrower or an assassin.”
Mr. Content murmured something about not all being gold that glittered; I was doing a great deal of harm. He intimated he knew of my attempts to get Family Limitation in print when he said, “She is not satisfied merely to violate the law, but is planning to do it on a very large scale.”
Judge Hazel, apparently believing the charges much exaggerated, put the case over until the fall term, which gave me six weeks to prepare my answer, and Mr. Content concurred, saying that if this were not enough time, I could have more.
The press also was inclined to be friendly. Reporters came up to Post Avenue, looked over the various articles. They agreed, “We think the Government absolutely wrong. We don’t see how it has any case.” Unfortunately, while we were talking, Peggy, who had never seen a derby before, took possession of their hats and sticks, and in the hall a little parade of children formed, marching up and down in front of the door. One of the gentlemen was so furious that I hid Peggy in the kitchen away from his wrath. As he went out he remarked, “You should have birth controlled them before they were born. Why don’t you stay home and spend some thought on disciplining your own family?”
I had many things to do which could not be postponed, the most important among them being to provide for the children’s future. This occupied much of my time for the next few weeks. Temporarily, I sent the younger two to the Catskills and Stuart to a camp in Maine, arranging for school in the fall on Long Island.
Defense funds were always being raised when radicals got into trouble to pay pseudo-radical lawyers to fight the cases on technicalities. I was not going to have any lawyer get me out of this. Since my indictment had not stopped my publishing the Woman Rebel, through the columns of the September issue I told my subscribers I did not want pennies or dollars, but appealed to them to combine forces and protest on their own behalf against government invasion of their rights. That issue and the October one were both suppressed.