"Margaret Sanger and the Modern School," #19, Fall 1998.
Supporters and detractors alike have had a difficult time trying to fit Margaret Sanger into a particular school of thought or radical group during her formative years in the pre-World War I Greenwich Village renaissance. She later told friend and biographer Harold Hersey (and he paraphrases here) that her "feeling of strength" came from "certain leaders of the radical movements, not from the radicals as a whole." (Margaret Sanger: The Biography of a Birth Control Pioneer, unpublished mss., 1938, p. 101) And indeed when reflecting on the roots of her activism, Sanger usually referred to specific personalities of that era – Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood, Carlo Tresca, Eugene Debs, among many others – rather than Socialists, single tax proponents, feminists, etc. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear to us as we select, transcribe and annotate documents for the first volume of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger that she was more deeply entrenched in leftist activities and especially in the anarchist movement than has generally been thought. This is most clearly evident in her relationship to the Modern School, a small, experimental, educational institution in New York, founded and operated largely by anarchists, which provided Sanger with a greater intellectual training ground and network of radical support for initiating the birth control crusade than, arguably, any other radical element or organization.
Like many aspects of Sanger's early life, her association with the Modern School has received only cursory analyses from birth control movement historians and Sanger biographers. Until historian Paul Avrich's The Modern School Movement was published in 1980, little had been written about the Modern Schools in America. And one important link between Sanger and anarchism, arising from Sanger's affiliation with the school, has only recently been established through the Project's annotation research on Sanger's early writings and correspondence (see "Yeânnis Revisited," ).
Francisco Ferrer established the first "Escuela Moderna" in Barcelona in 1901 in an attempt to liberate education from the controlling interests of the church and state. The school succeeded and led to other branches before the government, in 1906, shut them down and implicated Ferrer in a plot to assassinate the King of Spain. In 1909 the state pressed trumped-up charges of insurrection against Ferrer following violent street uprisings in response to Spain's colonial war in Morocco. After a mock trial in October of 1909, Ferrer was found guilty and executed by firing squad.
Ferrer's death spurred international protests and widespread interest in his work. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman founded what would become the first Modern School in the U.S. in 1910 when they started the Francisco Ferrer Association in honor of the martyred educator. In 1911 the Association established the Ferrer Center and Modern School at St. Mark's Place in New York, where for ten months it conducted small adult classes and Sunday lectures on social issues before moving to a larger space on East 12th Street. There the center created a Day School for children and enlarged its other programs.
Margaret and William Sanger, having moved from the suburbs around 1911, were newly immersed in the Greenwich Village bohemian life and saw in the Modern School the type of progressive education they wanted for their children. It emphasized free-thinking, independence and self-development, and it refrained from imposing structure or discipline on the child, seeking instead to follow the child's lead, his or her natural inclinations and interests. The school also responded to issues related to sexuality, evolution and other topics that the public schools feared and fumbled with. The Sanger's enrolled their eldest child, Stuart, in the Day School in January of 1912. He joined eight other pupils, mostly children of anarchists, in a class led by Will Durant, later to become the famous interpreter of philosophy for the masses. Both Grant and Peggy Sanger would also attend Modern Schools prior to Peggy's death in 1915.
The Ferrer Center and Modern School quickly became an important hub of radical life in New York. Even when it moved to its final New York location at East 107th Street in October of 1912, it continued to attract a cross-section of radical writers, artists, journalists, educators and activists. The writer Jacques Rudome remembered:
Others who delivered lectures or were
associated with the School and Center
included the writers Jack London, Manuel
Komroff, Eugene O'Neill, Lola Ridge,
Mike Gold and Upton Sinclair; and the
artists John Sloan, Max Weber, Man Ray,
Rockwell Kent, and Robert Minor. The anarchist, Harry Kelly, one of the
school's founders, wrote "the place seethed
with animation and debate of vital issues,
and no cause was too poor nor too radical
or delicate to be denied a
hearing." Opened daily,
the Center, writes Avrich,
". . . was a place where
radicals could come to
hear lectures on social or
literary topics, to discuss
the burning questions of
the day, to see new plays
. . . to listen to concerts .
. . to study art . . . It was
a place to learn the
English language, to
study French or Spanish
or Esperanto, to dance,
drink tea, and talk for
hours on end." (Paul
Avrich, The Modern
School Movement,
Princeton University
Press, 1980, p. 111) The Ferrer Center, Avrich writes, was far more than an
educational institution, it became ". . . a center of propaganda
for anarchists, socialists, I.W.W.'s [International Workers of
the World] and syndicalists." The school raised funds to
support anarchist causes around the world, organized protest
meetings and helped with strike support. During the
Lawrence, Massachusetts strike in 1912, Sanger reached out to
families associated with the
School and found temporary
homes for children of striking
workers whom she had escorted
on the train to New York. (Avrich,
p. 90) For Sanger, who lacked an
intensive formal education, the
Ferrer Center provided an
unconventional liberal arts
education paired with a kind of
job-training center for leftist
activists. At a time when Sanger met
resistance among the patriarchal
I.W.W. and Socialist Party to her
persistent appeals to include
women's sexual liberation in their
agenda, she found a welcome
audience at the Ferrer Center. She
gave lectures on the limitation of
offspring and organized "mothers'
meetings" to discuss birth control
(Avrich, p. 132). She also became
associated with a core group of
Ferrer School members who later
contributed their expertise to her
crusade. Bill Shatoff, a printer
and Ferrer Center fixture, printed
Sanger's Family Limitation "after
hours when his shop was supposed to be closed." (MS,
Autobiography, 1938, p. 117). Journalist Leonard Abbott, one
of the founders of the School, raised money and helped
organize legal assistance for Margaret Sanger during her
Woman Rebel trial in 1914-1915, and for William Sanger after
he was arrested for giving a copy of Family Limitation to one
of Comstock's undercover agents in December of 1914.
Gilbert Roe, a Free Speech League lawyer and original
member of the Ferrer Association, also offered Margaret Sanger legal council on several occasions, most notably following the Woman Rebel indictments. Many others helped, from artist Rockwell Kent who designed a birth control symbol for Sanger (it appears on the back of this newsletter), to Arthur Samuels, the treasurer at the Modern School, who
collected radical literature and birth control information while in Europe
for Sanger to use in designing the Woman Rebel. The Modern School is
also most likely where Sanger met a Greek anarchist and publisher named
John Rompapas, who may well have provided Sanger with seed money for
launching the Woman Rebel. Their torrid affair accelerated Sanger's
separation from William Sanger, and brought her into even closer quarters
with New York's anarchist community. Sanger became intimately associated
with the roots of the Spanish Modern
School movement when she fled to
Europe in the fall of 1914 in an
attempt to avoid imprisonment over
the Woman Rebel indictments. In Liverpool, where her ship
docked, she met Lorenzo Portet, who she described as ". . .
once companion to Francisco Ferrer and now heir to his
educational work . . ." (Autobiography, p. 123). Portet had
worked side-by-side with Ferrer from 1896 to Ferrer's death in
1909, organizing the Modern Schools and leading other
republican activities against the state. Portet then taught
Spanish at the University of Liverpool and continued to work
for educational reform in Spain. Sanger and Portet forged a
close friendship that quickly developed into a love affair.
They traveled the continent together, and Portet escorted
Sanger through Spain and taught her the history of the Modern
Schools. After visiting Ferrer's grave, she wrote to her oldest
son that she "tho't of you & was proud that my Stuart had
attended the first Ferrer School in America." (MS to Stuart
Sanger, March 29, 1915, MSM S1:407). Sanger wrote
in her journals and later in three published articles about her
travels in Spain, including the presence of "shadow-men,"
secret service agents who stayed a few steps back of Portet
and any of his companions. A hindrance to their privacy, the
"shadow-men" helped on one occasion to thwart a robbery of
Portet and Sanger by a group of young thieves. ("Portet and Ferrer, Part II"
MSM C16:105) In 1916 Portet offered to
find Sanger employment in Paris where he worked part of the
time, but he died the following year of tuberculosis, evidently
before Sanger had made a firm decision. Sanger's association with the Modern School ended even
before the tragic death of Portet. In 1914, the Ferrer Center
Day School had moved to a new
site in Stelton, New Jersey (the
Ferrer Center remained in New
York until 1918). In November of
1915 her daughter, Peggy, died of
pneumonia she contracted while
attending the Stelton School along
with her brother Grant. Soon after
Peggy's death, Sanger moved
Grant to another school and
appears to have cut many of her
ties to the Ferrer group, possibly
blaming the school's rustic,
unheated buildings for Peggy's
illness. (Avrich, p. 238) The Stelton School thrived for a
period in the 1920s and had many
ups and downs until it finally
closed in 1953. The Ferrer Center
in New York received a terrible
blow, literally, when a bomb
exploded in a nearby apartment
building in July of 1914. Three
anarchists who were regulars at
the Center were killed while
preparing the bomb that was
apparently meant to be set off on
John D. Rockefeller's estate in
Tarrytown, N.Y. The Center never
regained its status as a focal point for New York radicals and
was constantly hounded by police before it closed in 1918.
But the educational experiment was, on the whole, largely
successful. The Modern School movement in America
produced close to twenty other schools across the county and
established a model for libertarian education that has
influenced many other progressive education efforts since. There are few individuals or events in Sanger's life in the
years leading up to World War I that do not intersect with the
radical school and cultural center. And as we uncover more
information about Sanger's early radicalism, it is becoming
ever more apparent that her ties to anarchism, the driving force
behind the creation of the Modern School, are far more vital to
her understanding of radical history, protest movements, and
strategies for achieving radical reform than a majority of
scholars have suggested, or that Sanger herself ever
admitted.
Revised: November 14, 2002