Liars (6 page)

At first, the matronly woman in her early forties steps back to allow the visitors inside. But after scrutinizing the men, she has second thoughts and quickly moves to block their entry. There is an instant of silence, cut only by the splash of sleet on the stepping stones outside.

Behind the woman, the curious eyes of several children on the steps probe silently.

“Is the boss in?” one of the men asks.

“No, but I'm looking for him any minute.”

“
We want something to eat,” the man says expectantly.

Not wavering in her command of the threshold, the woman stands for a moment longer, considering but silent. She is accustomed to these types of visitors: tramps and vagabonds, the “knights of the open road” who travel between New York City and odd jobs in the country.

Over the years, hundreds of men and dozens of children have found sanctuary in the house, with free access to food, milk, and
warm beds, as well as glasses of whiskey always favored by their host. Anne has always borne it patiently, quiet in the wisdom that, despite having eleven children of their own, the Christian upbringing of her husband—which has evolved into the open adoption of socialism in the waves of reform sweeping the Eastern seaboard—simply wouldn't allow him to turn away the needy.

They are living, breathing adherents of the social gospel. Jesus, they believe, has commanded them to share their property. That includes their home on a cold night like this. Were her husband here and not out of town on business, Anne knows he would admonish her for having second thoughts about inviting them in with a smile. Yet every instinct tells her to turn these men away.

Sensing the hesitation, and without further ceremony, the men push past Anne and into the house, heading toward the kitchen. On the stairs, one of the family dogs barks, and Margaret, the eldest of the children, strains to hold the hound back from its protective instinct.

Leaving the door open, Anne bristles and moves defensively toward the foot of the stairs, declaring crossly, “How dare you come into this house!”

Ignoring her, the men begin searching for food. One throws open cupboards while the other stuffs rolls into the pockets of his trench coat. On a small desk near the stairs, Anne notices her husband's tools—a hammer and a chisel.

She looks up at little Margaret on the steps, takes a deep breath, and turns back to the men.
“Toss! Beauty!” she shouts, beckoning the two dogs to come to her side. Hearing the fear in her voice, the dogs bark and snarl, leaping down the steps, lunging past the children and onto the backs of the men ransacking the cupboards.

Anne turns toward the stairs with a stern, desperate message. “Margaret, you keep those children there, no matter what occurs.”

The children watch their mother charge forward to chase the men away. The dogs snarl and bite; the men throw punches, food, and utensils to fend them off. Anne swings the hammer at one of them, landing a blow on his cheek, only to have him smash her across the face with the back of his clenched fist. She falls hard to the floor, just as the other man lands a kick in her side.

The children cry out from the stairs, “No, Mother!” One of the dogs is felled with a blow from the hammer that Anne drops. The other retreats to the corner and barks and growls as the men grab what food they can and scamper out the door.

For an instant after they leave, it is impossibly silent. Snow and sleet splash in through the open door and onto the floor, mixing with spatters of blood and milk that spilled during the fracas.

On the stairs, the children cry quietly. Following orders, Margaret comforts them but doesn't allow any to venture down, even to see if their mother is still alive. Time passes. The lone candle burns down and dies out.

As he approaches the home, Michael notices there are no lights in the windows. He sees the front door hanging open and immediately senses that something is very wrong.

He runs and lunges through the door, slipping to the floor in his haste. On his knees, he crawls to his wife, who is lying in a pool of blood.

Her breathing is raspy, and her body is cold to the touch, but she is alive.

“Margaret!” he yells toward the stairs. His daughter leaves her post at the top landing and crouches next to him.

She fetches a wet cloth from the sink, and they begin to clean Anne's wounds. Michael shakes his wife lightly, trying to wake her. “Get the whiskey,” he instructs his daughter. She obeys and brings the bottle from a drawer in his desk.

Margaret helps to hold her mother's mouth open as her father
pours a dram into it. For a second, nothing happens. Then Anne coughs and gurgles and opens her eyes. She shivers in his arms as he holds her.

•  •  •

Anne developed a case of severe pneumonia over the ensuing days, turning a lifelong battle with tuberculosis into a crisis. From that day forward, she often had to lean against a wall or a counter to battle frequent bouts of coughing and labored breathing, and she endured seasonal cases of pneumonia, forcing bed rest off and on for the rest of her life. In the years that followed, vagrants coming to the Higgins household would only be served at the door and only if Michael was home.

Margaret acted as full-time nursemaid to her mother until Anne eventually died a few years later. Throughout those years of bringing her mother food and water, changing her bedclothes, and holding her while she was wracked with coughing fits, Margaret never forgot the lowly, evil men who had brought her mother to this state. The fear she endured that night had turned into hatred. And then into a blinding rage. She never forgave them. And she eventually dedicated her life to making sure that people like them—and anyone who, in her judgment, shared any of their undesirable traits—would be driven out of existence.

•  •  •

Victims of rape or violent assault often experience lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a form of psychological panic that closes off part of the human brain where reason is processed. Margaret Sanger's experiences as a child, witnessing the attack on her mother and encountering hundreds of other vagrants who had boarded in her own home because her father believed it to be a moral duty to help, are classic examples of events that trigger
PTSD. The consequences can be varied, but they almost always include a powerful combination of ongoing shame, fear, and guilt.

The fear comes from not having control or the power to stop the event from recurring, and the shame and guilt come from not being able to stop it.

Sanger's own description of the attack against her mother is surprisingly short, but it is told in the first person, so we know that she was at home and personally witnessed it. Absent from the short narrative, however, is any mention that Margaret herself stepped in to stop it or to help her mother in any way, even after the attack was over and her mother lay unconscious and bleeding on the ground. It wasn't until her father returned home that Margaret had dared to come downstairs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sanger became a passionate advocate for abortion, eugenics, and forced sterilization of both men and women (with particular focus on minorities, such as African-Americans and Chinese immigrants). Her desire to rid the world of what she saw as troublesome underclasses that produced violent vagrants is probably a direct result of her childhood experiences and the shame she must have felt over her inaction.

Merriam-Webster defines
eugenics
as “a science that tries to improve the human race by controlling which people become parents.” Eugenics research, funded by America's elite industrialists, was carried out by scientists dedicated to the perfection of the human race. Their work influenced a generation of progressives and socialists—including Adolf Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, and, of course, Margaret Sanger.

As Sanger grew older, she became an early and earnest supporter of this diabolical science, a field that formed a pillar of the early progressive movement in its fixation on manipulating genetics to “perfect” humanity. In words that might well be approved
by Hitler or David Duke, she wrote this about her plans for humanity:

The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics. The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments
under government medical protection and segregate.

Sanger believed in
a policy of “race improvement,” once saying that it was necessary to create a “race of thoroughbreds.” In 1926, she even saw fit to present her views before a women's chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which led to “a dozen invitations to speak to similar groups.”

Sanger also believed that families with too many children (remember, she was one of eleven kids) posed an unnecessary hardship on the rest of society. “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its members,” she wrote in 1920, “
is to kill it.” (It's worth noting that Planned Parenthood claims that this quote is out of context, that it is really about the rising infant death rate among large families at the time. Let's assume they're right—does that make this statement OK? It's merciful to have a child and then kill it just because there is some percentage chance that it might die anyway?)

Sanger is perhaps best known as an early, staunch advocate of birth control, including abortion, and as the founder of the organization that would eventually grow into Planned Parenthood (its original name was more honest: the American Birth Control League). But the reasoning behind her zeal was deeper and darker than simply a disregard for individual human lives. Sanger
believed that contraception, especially preventing birth among certain undesirables, was better for the human race as a whole.

In 1922, she wrote:

Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble minded. Many become criminals. . . . Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of
those who should never have been born.

Despite these radical views, Sanger is, to this day, a progressive hero.

In 2009, Hillary Clinton proudly accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. “Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award,” Clinton said. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously,
her courage, her tenacity, her vision.”

For a singular moment, Clinton told the truth. She admires—as she said in her own words—this racist, bigoted, self-appointed deity who saw fit to decide who should get the gift of life.

♠

The difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practical difference.

—WOODROW WILSON

The North Atlantic

April 19, 1912

For four excruciating days, a lone ship plowed the waves through fog, darkness, and rough, freezing seas. It sped toward a cursed patch of icy sea four hundred miles south of Newfoundland that had recently echoed with the desperate screams of twenty-two hundred souls.

The CS
Mackay-Bennett
, a two-thousand-ton cable-repair ship berthed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had been overhauling a communications cable linking Canada and France when it received the White Star Line's desperate plea for aid. It embarked immediately after its macabre cargo—embalming supplies for hundreds of floating corpses and a hundred empty coffins—was aboard. This time, there
was no cable line in need of urgent repair. This was a mission of recovery and retrieval. This was a search for death.

The April 15 sinking of the British luxury liner RMS had claimed more than fifteen hundred passengers and crew, chiefly because the
Titanic
, this grand, state-of-the-art vessel, sumptuously appointed with all manner of luxuries and modern conveniences—from a squash court to a lending library to a Turkish bath—had simply not carried enough lifeboats for everyone on board.

The dead who wore life vests bobbed on the ocean like human buoys. The
Mackay-Bennett
recovered 306 corpses, far more than the number of caskets it carried. The bodies included that of a nineteen-month-old English boy named Sidney Leslie Goodwin; Isidor Straus, the seventy-seven-year-old owner of Macy's Department Store (his wife's body was never found); and a well-dressed, light-haired, fifty-year-old man whose shirt collar and gold belt buckle bore the initials
J.J.A.

He was, the crew later learned, John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man aboard the
Titanic
and, in death, the richest man now aboard the
Mackay-Bennett
.

As the elegant
Titanic
capsized, Colonel Astor, a Spanish-American War veteran, had ensured that his pregnant eighteen-year-old second wife, Madeleine, her nurse, and their maid had safely boarded a lifeboat. “Might I be allowed to go with her?” the multimillionaire had asked a ship's officer. “She is in a delicate condition.”

“No, sir,” the officer had replied. “No man is allowed on this boat or any of the boats until the ladies are off.”