Dorothy Day Meets Margaret Sanger

While the special features writer for The New York Call, 19 year-old Dorothy Day covered the imprisonment and release of Margaret Sanger’s sister, Ethel Byrne [January-February, 1917]. Dorothy’s interviews were with Margaret Sanger, rather than Ethel who was kept away from the press. Dorothy’s complicity in promoting these two “Birth Control Martyrs” at the behest of her employer, her distortion of the truth, was a painful memory for years to come.

Seven years after covering the story, still years before her conversion, in her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, Dorothy gives a candid look at these events using the thinly-veiled Mrs. Edith Burns as the birth control martyr being covered by June Henreddy of The Clarion.

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Then came those thrilling days after Mrs. Edith Burns had been taken to Blackwell’s Island and started her hunger and thirst strike. The first prisoner in America, the Clarion pointed out, to hunger strike for a cause… Even the capitalist press was aroused and printed headlines on the condition of Edith Burns. One afternoon she was dying. The next afternoon the jail doctors vehemently denied the report. As a matter of fact, they said, it was all bluff and the prisoner had probably secreted cakes of chocolate on her person when entering the jail with the intention to strike. Five days and there were rumors of brutal treatment. Four men, the papers reported, had held the frail little woman to the bed while nourishment was being poured down her throat through a tube. They clamored for the governor to take action and pardon her. Birth control as an issue was disregarded. The important fact was that an American woman was being brutally treated by jail authorities and it was up to the chivalric American press to object…

The Tact of Margaret Sanger

Mike Gold, Dorothy Day and Louis Weitzenkorn all worked together at The New York Call and were friends. On June 5, 1917 all young single men were required to register for the draft. Weitzenkorn registered and was drafted. Gold chose not register and eventually had to flee to Mexico.

It’s entirely possible that Dorothy was at the party that Gold describes below since she was a friend of Weitzenkorn. Further, she admits to spending a lot of time with Mike Gold that summer and fall and Dorothy was also well known by Margaret Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne.

There was always people, our friends coming or going, drafted, assigned to some place they had to report, some fort… I remember one night at the home of the fellow named Louis Weitzenkorn. He was the editor of a column, a literary column in the Daily Call, the socialist newspaper, and he wrote poetry. He had a good, warm, living feeling for literature and all of us used to write in his column. I wrote poems and one of my brothers contributed poems. We were up in his house,… he had just been drafted and he was going into the army. He did not choose to resist or to run away, or do any of the usual things to get out of the horrible chore of killing half the world to save your exploiters.

He was going and one of his guests that night was Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, and her sister Ethel, a trained nurse and we were having a few drinks and talking and discussing the war and in the course of our discussions I suddenly saw that Louis Weitzenkorn had become very serious and Margaret Sanger was sitting there and she was holding his hand and looking into his eyes and she was very serious and we all stopped and asked what was happening and Margaret Sanger … who evidently believed in spiritualism and all that stuff, the return of people from the grave, and she had just asked Louis to promise her that if he was killed in the war, he would come back and tell her about it. And this poor guy, he turned a little pale for a minute but it was not a very pleasant thought on the eve of his going into the army. But he laughed and took another drink and promised her faithfully that he would come back.

Copied from transcripts of tapes made in preparation for a unpublished biography of Mike Gold which I found among the Mike Gold Papers at the University of Michigan.