Abortionist, page 16
Indeed, the prosecution had made its case. After a short deliberation, the jury found all the defendants but two—Rankin’s brother-in-law and a woman more or less arrested by mistake—guilty on various combinations of the counts. It is notable that in fifteen days of testimony, the issue of the unborn child, its potential life, its rights, was not a recurring theme or even a concern. The trial was about displaying the practices of a criminal syndicate, just as if it had been a bootlegging syndicate or a group of gamblers on trial. The difference, of course, was that in Rankin’s operation, the client bought a chance to efface the wages of sex, and the clients were all women. So in addition to displaying the low-down tactics of a group of men willing to use the law to line their pockets, the trial provided a venue for displaying the sexuality and the vulnerability of women. Regarding the latter, the trial was an unqualified success.
But in the end, the jury’s verdict was not the last word on the fates of some of the syndicate participants. Rankin himself made a few gestures toward appealing his conviction. He retained a lawyer and filed the necessary documents in the fall of 1936. In January 1937, though, he dropped his appeal and entered San Quentin. The three female defendants, Violette Pelligrini, Grace Moore, and Lillian Wilson, were permitted to file applications for probation, as was Mr. Shinn, Rankin’s right-hand man.
Among the defendants who did not enter prison by the end of 1936 were William Byrne and the three doctors, Jesse Ross, James Beggs, and Valentine St. John, all of whom vigorously appealed their convictions to the State Supreme Court. The chief contention of all four men was that if the testimony of individuals who were accomplices to the syndicate’s crimes—people like De Gaston and Laura Miner, and the women who had sought criminal abortions—were excluded, the evidence was insufficient to warrant conviction.
To be sure, the law was settled in California that a person could not be convicted of a crime upon the testimony of an accomplice unless that testimony were corroborated by other evidence that connected the defendant with the crime in question. What’s more, Section 1108 of the California Penal Code specifically stated that the testimony of a woman who sought an abortion was tainted. It said, “Upon a trial for procuring or attempting to procure an abortion, or aiding or assisting therein, or for inveighing, enticing or taking away an unmarried female of previous chaste character, under the age of 18 years, for the purpose of prostitution, or aiding or assisting therein, the defendant cannot be convicted upon the testimony of the woman or with whom the offense was committed, unless she is corroborated by other evidence.”
The identity established here between prostitutes and women seeking abortions was important not only in revealing the basis of the law’s objection to abortion. The connection also shaped the outcome of the case because eventually this provision of the law did work to the benefit of the three doctors who appealed their convictions. On November 26, 1937, the Supreme Court of the state of California denied the strenuous efforts of the L.A. County D.A. to prove that the evidence against the medical trio was abundant and untainted. The Supreme Court found that the only substantial evidence amassed against the doctors had been offered, inadmissibly, by accomplices—the women who had received abortions and others involved with the syndicate. Consequently, the court decided, “Applying the foregoing rules to the instant case, we find with reference to the appellants Beggs, Ross, and St. John, that, after eliminating entirely the testimony of their accomplices, the record is completely devoid of any evidence even slight, which connects or tends to connect any of them with any of the crimes of which they were convicted [and] the judgments as to these appellants must be reversed for the foregoing reason.”
Whether or not the State Supreme Court’s decision in the Rankin case was an expression of solidarity between legal and medical professionals, the decision was consistent with the trial outcomes in abortion cases across the country during the illegal era: doctors were almost always exonerated on one grounds or another, especially if the charges did not include murder, and sometimes even if they did. In the Rankin case, community morals were outraged by the conspiratorial nature of the syndicate, but the court’s decision suggests that professional ethics could absorb and tolerate abortion-performing doctors. After all, in 1936, perhaps as many as one thousand “therapeutic abortions” were performed by doctors at L.A. County Hospital, a number that would plummet to one-tenth that many in less than twenty years.
William Byrne, however, was another story. The men and women who came to court and testified about his activities were mostly the same crew that testified against the doctors, that is, accomplices according to the law. But unlike the doctors, Byrne could not convince the state’s highest court that his claim of tainted testimony was valid, and in the end, the court defined his situation entirely differently. Byrne was not a doctor. He could not claim medical expertise or draw on established collegial relations with other professionals to protect himself. In fact, his professional status was his undoing. As an investigator who consorted with his criminal targets, he had violated the public trust in the most fundamental way. There were no gray areas in his case, and the Supreme Court judges had no trouble dismissing his appeal.
Early in 1938, Byrne joined Reg Rankin and George Watts in San Quentin. Each man had been sentenced to a term in excess of ten years by an angry Superior Court judge, Arthur Crum. According to the Los Angeles Times, which followed the case closely, Crum “meted out the severest possible penalty by providing that the sentences on each of the five counts must run consecutively and not concurrently.”
It is impossible to know much for certain about the activities of Watts and Byrne once they were incarcerated. Ruth Barnett wrote that her old mentor Watts died in San Quentin, but her account of this period is untrustworthy. What is known, however, is that Reginald Rankin, like most men convicted of the crime of abortion, did not stay behind bars for more than a fraction of the time Judge Crum intended.
By the summer of 1940, Rankin was out of jail, apparently unrepentant and unreformed. He was, in fact, busy trying to resurrect his former business, but on new terrain. Following an adage that advised, “If you can’t do it at home, go to Nevada,” Rankin had settled on Reno as a promising venue for an abortion clinic.
Rankin knew about Reno’s reputation as a haven and an opportunity for all sorts of men who’d served time elsewhere. It was a small city in 1940, with no more than twenty-three thousand residents, but the word was that there was always room in Reno for a guy with shady ideas about how to turn a buck. The welcoming hand extended to Al Capone, for example, was legendary. When the gangster was scouting prospects in the Truckee River town, the mayor answered inquiries from his front men genially. “Al Capone is welcome in Reno as long as he behaves himself,” he said. Later, Bugsy Seigel, too, made his headquarters there before moving across the state to Las Vegas. One person who observed Reno closely in those years explained why the city was so hospitable to such types. “The city police force increased in size, improved in equipment, and vanished from the scene of any important misdoings. The average citizen was living in a community of gangsters, bought politicians, thugs, and bootleggers, a community in which ancient bums had been pensioned into police uniforms.”
Reg Rankin had reason to believe that Reno was a city that not only would tolerate a man in his business, but that needed him. After all, it was a town that built a big share of its economy on the trade in women’s bodies, and where that was the case, abortionists had a ready-made clientele of some size. One Nevadan described Reno in those years as a “modern amalgamation of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Hell,” where prostitution was a business “on a supermarket scale.” The Stockade and The Bull Pen were the places to procure choice female flesh in 1940, and the two joints attracted locals and visitors alike. Common knowledge had it that The Stockade, particularly, catered to the tastes of travelling salesmen on the San Francisco-Salt Lake City route, and to businessmen from all over California. Years later, an historian recalled drily that the immense gross earnings both places produced proved unequivocally that “there were distinct possibilities in the area of unconventional approaches to attract visitors” to Reno.
Along with prostitution, gambling was entering its commercial heyday in Nevada. The year before Rankin showed up in town, William Hurrah opened his Tango Club on Douglas Alley, and a number of entrepreneurs followed. Reno was jumping as it pulled in a certain kind of man who associated money and short-term pleasure. The fact that nine thousand divorces a year were processed in Nevada during that era, the lion’s share in Reno, added to the transient flavor of the place and to the population of women who might be carrying pregnancies they could not manage. Rankin knew all this when he laid out his plans from San Quentin.
Between July and November 1940, Rankin put a great deal of effort into setting up an abortion business in Reno. First, he assembled a team of men to whom he could assign duties, just as he had six years earlier in California. As for him, he took on the familiar jobs of scout and strategic planner. He went to Reno in the first part of July and met with a real estate man who showed him office space appropriate for what Rankin called his “finance business.” Later in the month, Rankin dispatched Paul Cushing, a San Francisco man, to sign a five-year lease for space in a downtown office building. Rankin had approved the terms of the lease, which called for a seven-room suite in exchange for a monthly rental fee of two hundred dollars.
His brashness undiminished, Rankin instructed Paul Cushing to take the real estate agent into his confidence and explain what the offices were to be used for. Cushing complied. Before the lease was signed, he explained to Norman Blitz, the real estate broker, that the suite would be used by doctors for the treatment of women’s diseases, and that abortions would be done on the premises. He hastened to explain further that the physician in charge, one Valentine St. John, was retired but had controlled many such clinics and was used to having the best doctors refer their patients his way. Cushing told Blitz that St. John had spent his lifetime developing his abortion method and the instruments used to perform the operation, and that doctors particularly liked St. John’s work because it was painless and safe. He said that St. John had trained many efficient young surgeons and, leaving out the mess that St. John had recently escaped in L.A., he said that the doctor had never had any trouble and had, in fact, been welcomed in any community he came to because doctors felt he was a “needed necessity.”
Having laid the groundwork for opening the abortion clinic in Reno, Cushing now asked Norman Blitz a question that reflected the murky status of abortion in the pre-World War II era. He asked if the real estate man thought that the medical community and the law in Reno would be receptive to an abortion clinic in their city. Blitz replied that if everything was as he described, he was sure Cushing, Rankin, and St. John would have no difficulty. Blitz remembered this part of the conversation. “I said the town and state were level-minded, and if the doctors approved of it, I didn’t think they would make any trouble unless they made some mistakes.”
Then Blitz gave Cushing a list of doctors in Reno who might be interested in sending patients to such a clinic. Maybe Norman Blitz was aware that the Nevada penal code stated that anyone who performed an abortion not necessary to preserve the woman’s life could be imprisoned for up to five years, and that if the fetus had quickened before the operation, the sentence might be ten years. Maybe Blitz was not aware of the law. But his answer made it clear that the idea of an abortion clinic in a building he managed and shared ownership of with a physician did not raise a warning flag in his mind.
After obtaining this degree of assurance, Cushing and Rankin went ahead with their plans. They engaged a contractor to renovate the suite of offices and brought Valentine St. John to town to look over the premises. The chances that the trio would be able to open for business by September were looking good, but one outstanding detail remained: St. John was not licensed to practice in Nevada. This was a problem because Rankin was adamant, as usual, that they must have a proper doctor in charge. Blitz volunteered to arrange for St. John to pay a call on Vernon Cantlon, a longtime Reno physician and surgeon, and a member of the State Board of Medical Examiners. The plan was that Dr. Cantlon would expedite St. John’s Nevada license.
Blitz, however, had sent the doctor to the wrong man. Vernon Cantlon did not think much of Valentine St. John that afternoon of July 20th, or of his foreign credentials. Sometime later, the Reno doctor remembered the details of the visit vividly. “We commented about news of local interest, and then Dr. St. John produced a container ordinarily used for diplomas and other credentials, and withdrew from the container several diplomas and other credentials; among them was a small credential which purported to show that Dr. St. John was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, London. I don’t remember all of the papers he showed me. Among them were a list of the publications he had, with an appalling number of papers he had written. Also there was some sort of notice that he had been a professor of surgery in one of the Balkan states. I don’t remember just which one it was, but I believe it was Budapest. Dr. St. John said, ‘Obviously this will prove I am qualified to practice,’ and he stated that he had performed over four thousand operations. I stopped him at that point and asked him if he had an American diploma from any American university of medicine, and he said no, that he did not. He intimated that it didn’t matter very much because he was obviously well trained enough. I said that I was sorry, that we were rigidly enforcing the rule in the State Board of Medical Examiners that no one could be licensed to practice medicine in the state of Nevada without an American diploma. He was somewhat upset by my remark and left.”
If Dr. St. John was somewhat upset by this turn of events, Rankin and Cushing were livid. Cushing blamed Norman Blitz for getting him to sign a lease by intimating that he would see to St. John’s license. A week after the meeting between Cantlon and St. John, Cushing wrote to Blitz about “the mutually misleading information you received and relayed concerning licensing of a foreign doctor.” He went on, “The difficulty lies in our absolute necessity of having a regularly licensed physician to act as titular head of the Reno offices. You will understand that the disappointment regarding St. John’s license was a considerable setback in our plans.” Feeling that Blitz owed him one at this point, Cushing made a request. “Efforts are now being made here to find a man eligible to receive a Nevada license for this purpose. In the interim, can you suggest any man in your locality who would, for a consideration, be interested in lending his name to the office? Naturally, such an individual would have no responsibilities other than those implied in the use of his license and name.”
Norman Blitz had nothing to offer Cushing and Rankin in this line. He simply continued to collect rent payments through the summer of 1940, though the offices in the Lyons Building sat idle. In the last part of August, Reg Rankin found himself still committed to opening an abortion clinic in Reno, but without the key ingredient—an abortionist. So at this point, he turned to an acquaintance. He turned to Ruth Barnett.
When Rankin made his proposal to Ruth late in the summer of 1940, she accepted. First she agreed to join him in San Francisco to consider the details of his plans for a Reno clinic, and then she agreed to go to Reno for the purpose of performing abortions. It is difficult to know today what had changed since 1934. Back then she had been adamant that Rankin leave her out of his schemes. She was happy where she was, she had said, in the Broadway Building in Portland, the new owner of Dr. Van Alstyne’s practice, the beneficiary of Dr. Watts’s training and his loyal clientele. It is difficult to know for sure why Ruth accepted Rankin’s proposition, mainly because she took some trouble to efface the episode from the story of her life. She did not want her daughter to know what happened in Reno, nor anybody else. The fact is, from 1952 until the end of her life, Ruth Barnett wrote and rewrote versions of her life as an abortionist, and always she omitted the events of 1940 in Reno.
It is possible, however, more than fifty years later, to piece together some speculations about why the Portland abortionist took up with Rankin when she did, and also to imagine why she altered her life story to erase the episode. To do so reveals the kinds of calculations an abortionist was compelled to make in the illegal era and the kinds of pressures that shaped her professional life. It also reveals the kind of danger that conditioned Ruth’s private life in those days. It was not the same danger that stalked and nearly killed Diane McDermott or that threatened Laura Miner. But the act of altering one’s life story suggests anxiety and fear. The extent to which Ruth could not tell the truth about her life, even though the point of the autobiography she wrote was to expose the abortionist as a good woman, tells us something of the forces that broke her control over her life in those days and beyond. To paraphrase Carolyn Heilbrun, in the fall of 1940, Ruth Barnett was trapped in a script that she didn’t write and could never write about, and that begins to describe her danger.
In the early 1930s the abortionist had plied her trade in the context of the Depression. The traffic flowing through Ruth Barnett’s office reflected the length of the unemployment line, the lines at the soup kitchen, the crowd at the Salvation Army. But by 1940, things were changing. Portland was creeping out of the Depression as the country began to prepare for war. Within a few years, over two hundred thousand youthful migrants would arrive to take jobs in the war industry there, a demographic event that would boost Ruth’s practice enormously in years to come. In 1940, the locals themselves, still disproportionately middle-aged, were feeling the economy warm up. The Commercial Iron Company got the city’s first federal contract for shipbuilding that year, and Alcoa opened a reduction plant to produce aluminum ingots in Vancouver, just across the Willamette River from Portland. Every week things looked better, and more growth was expected. In a hopeful climate—even with the clouds of war forming on the horizon—many women who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant were not as beset by fear and desperation as they would have been a few years earlier when money was so scarce. The men were going back to work, and women had not yet become the welders and riveters they would become soon. For the moment, Portland felt almost flush, as if the best of the prosperous 1920s were coming back home. But by 1940 the conditions of home life had changed in one way, at least, that had direct implications for Ruth’s business.
