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…

Then the governor signed the pardon and dark rumors went around that clemency had come too late. There was a mad rush among the reporters to see who could get the first interview from the released prisoner, who would take her dying words.

“She’s not to be released until eleven to-night,” the Sun reporter said… “There’s four of us. We’ll work together and if one gets the story first, he’s to call up the others when he gets back to the office.”

One reporter chose the Twenty-third Street ferry house where the Department of Correction landed their prisoners from the island. Another took the Fifty-ninth Street ferry. Another heard Mrs. Burns was to be brought to the Central Hospital and took the train uptown.

“And I’ve got a hunch on sticking around her home,” decided June, and proceeded to the artistic little apartment on the west side… June, as a radical and reporter for the socialist press, was treated with more familiarity than other reporters and when she lifted the brass knocker that night, she was ushered into that more intimate room of Mrs. Burns. Mr. Waldor, the long-haired young poet whom she had met at Joel’s, was there alone, dismally trying to arrange huge bunches of yellow daffodils in green vases. Having failed in trying to establish a magazine of new verse he was at present acting as secretary to the Birth Control League…

 “Miss Henreddy, if you knew how my heart bleeds for that noble woman who has sacrificed her life for the cause—

“Good Lord, you don’t mean to say that she’s dead,” June burst out, more overcome at the idea of a big exclusive story for the paper than with pity for the fate of Edith Burns.

“No, but she’s dying.”

“Rot! That’s newspaper talk. You know she isn’t dying. You don’t really think she’s seriously ill, do you?”

“According to the reports of her doctors, she is in a very serious condition,” said the young poet with dignity.

“Yes, and both of her doctors are radicals and will give out misleading reports for the benefit of the League. The newspapers are making a big story of it just because there isn’t a murder on hand to serve up in headlines every night. I don’t think five days of hunger-striking could hurt anybody. The only way she’s suffered is from forcible feeding and that must be uncomfortable to say the least. Use your common sense, Waldor, if you have any. And you know she’s going to be brought here tonight rather than to any hospital. Otherwise why would you be here making a fire and putting daffodils around? …And don’t try any of your sob tactics on me, because you know I quote you and the doctors with the understanding that you’re faking. Save that for the capitalist press.”

… June… hoped to goodness Mrs. Burns would arrive on time so that she could telephone the story to the paper before twelve. She had no patience with poets or with long hair. And she had no patience with the League when they over-reached themselves in providing sensational stories for the press. She thought of the other three reporters tramping around in the cold, waiting for a first interview with Mrs. Burns.

Two hours passed and she was beginning to philosophize on the idiocy of modern newspaper work, to wonder whether it were not rather debasing work, when she heard a taxi hooting downstairs. Immediately she was as full of glee as a child playing a game. She raced with Waldor down the stairs, raced across the curb to the taxi where the two doctors who were on the case were helping Mrs. Burns, somewhat pale and languid, out of the car. She got her interview in three sentences (the most interesting one of which was that Mrs. Burns’ teeth had been knocked out while being forcibly fed) and raced to the telephone across the street. It was ten minutes to twelve and she had been just in time.

Day, Dorothy, The Eleventh Virgin, Part Two, Chapter 1, The Catholic Worker,  http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/875.html

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And in 1938, a decade after her conversion, she was as hard on herself as she was on Sanger and Byrne.

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“My work during that winter [1916-1917] was to cover strikes, peace meetings, and food riots. Margaret Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, tried to open a birth-control clinic in the slums of Brownsville and were promptly arrested. Ethel Byrne was sent to Blackwell's Island (now called Welfare Island) [now called Roosevelt Island] where she started a hunger strike. It was the first time a woman had ever hunger struck in this country, although the suffragettes in England had used this technique, and the newspapers made much of it. I was assigned to the story, and for the next couple of months my job was to write up these women as martyrs in a holy cause and to paint harrowing pictures of the suffering of Ethel Byrne in jail and after her release. As a matter of fact, she was not on a hunger strike very long. Actually she did not suffer from her hunger strike and she was perfectly well and strong when she was released from jail, a release that was effected by the strike; but my job was to paint a picture of a woman at the point of death. I did not realize until I had been on a hunger strike myself that she was not as weak and ill as she and her doctors claimed, so I wrote the stories as the editor desired them. Just the same, I realized that I was distorting the truth, and it sometimes irked me that my job was always to picture the darker side of life, ignoring all the light touches, the gay and joyful sides of stories as I came across them.”

Day, Dorothy. From Union Square to Rome,

Chapter 7 - Reporting. 1938, pp. 71-89. The Catholic Worker Movement. http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/Reprint2.cfm?TextID=207.

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All Dorothy's articles appear in my upcoming book "An Eye For Others, Dorothy Day, Journalist: 1916-1917."