Abortionist, page 9
In July 1934, Watts and Rankin made a verbal agreement to form a partnership, and later in the fall the two men drew up a contract representing their agreement. The contract provided that Rankin would receive fifty percent of the net profits from the business, in consideration for acting as Watts’s “business, financial, accounting and tax agent in both his professional and private business.”
Before Watts could leave Portland, though, and begin work on Rankin’s project, the entrepreneur insisted that Watts find a replacement for himself in the Broadway Building. One didn’t walk away from an established business, Rankin insisted, without taking one’s profit. Watts’s solution was to turn everything over to Ruth, outright and clear. He felt grateful for her assistance and her companionship, and he admired her skill. But Rankin was adamantly opposed. It wasn’t that he didn’t admire the woman, too. In fact, Ruth remembered later that Rankin flattered her repeatedly in 1934, as he was in the process of taking Watts away. Once Rankin was sitting up on the table in Watts’s surgery, and he caught Ruth’s arm as she crossed the room. He pulled her close and purred, “Dr. Watts tells me you’ve got the finest touch of anyone he knows. We want you in our organization, too, as soon as we begin to expand. We’ll open a clinic for you that will make this one look like a broom closet.” Ruth liked the compliment at the time, and she always remembered it. Despite herself, she responded to Rankin’s touch and his big, bold images. But this time she looked away, and only said enough to let him know that she would stay where she was.
Rankin didn’t want Ruth to handle Watts’s office, because she wasn’t a doctor. In his scheme, each of the offices he was aiming to set up had to be headed by a physician. His come-on to Ruth notwithstanding, this point was crucial and, for now, nonnegotiable. A doctor in the office, a doctor’s name on the door, made everything safer, more legitimate looking. With a real doctor in charge of every office, there would be no problems, Rankin thought, in arranging for protection from both the medical standards people and the cops.
Dr. Watts was inclined to do things Rankin’s way. And he felt satisfied that Ruth’s practice was well set up for the present, now that she had Van Alstyne’s clinic. He was convinced that Ruth would never hurt for clients; he knew that many of his former patients would seek her out the next time they wanted an abortion. They’d feel more comfortable with her than they would going to a new man in the building, even if he were a friend of Dr. Watts’s.
By mid-summer of 1934, the old abortionist began to arrange his affairs in preparation for moving down to L.A. The first thing he did was write to two old friends, Dr. Harry Houston in Bandon, Oregon, and Dr. Jacob Hosch over in Bend. He explained that henceforth he would be involved in “certain practices” that would necessitate his presence in California “at least a large part of the time.” He said that just for now, Ruth Barnett was taking care of his office, but that he was turning to his friends for a long-term solution.
Then Watts laid out his proposition. He wrote, “I am now desirous of getting someone to take hold of the Portland office on a permanent basis, and one which I believe should have a California license so that the offices can be operated on an interchangeable basis which would allow the respective parties a change and the possibility of vacation. It would be necessary for whomever took the office to come here for awhile and become familiar with a very special technique which has been developed. Owing to relations with you in the past and the fact that you are familiar with my activities, together with the further fact that you have a California license, it has occurred to me that you might be interested. I might add,” wrote Watts in closing, “that the office will be operated under my name.”
Watts didn’t mention abortion, but the nature of his offer was unmistakable. Dr. Houston found the proposition interesting, and he communicated with Watts about various details over the summer and into the fall. By the end of October, the doctor declared himself ready to come to Portland.
For a short while in early November, by which time Rankin, back down in Los Angeles, was becoming most impatient to have Watts with him full-time, the plan seemed to be unravelling. Houston was having trouble, in the depths of the Depression, selling his pharmacy in Grant’s Pass, and couldn’t make a final commitment to Watts and Rankin before that was accomplished. In the meantime, however, he had been willing to come to Portland and place himself at Watts’s elbow to learn the doctor’s “very special technique.” Watts had put Houston to work at once doing abortions, while he stood by to assess the man’s competence. Houston watched the master at work for several days until he was ready, as Watts wrote Rankin, to be put in charge of an office at any time. In the meanwhile, however, Ed Stewart, who had for years run the biggest office of all the abortionists in the Broadway Building, was edgy about a new man moving in. Stewart let Watts and Rankin know that nothing could be finalized without his okay.
By November 15th, Stewart had extracted certain guarantees from Rankin, and Houston had closed a deal on his drugstore. Everything was ready to go, and before Thanksgiving of 1934, Watts and his wife Alice had packed up and moved over a thousand miles down the coast to Los Angeles. Ruth kissed her one-time savior goodbye with uneasiness in her heart. “I was sorry to see him go,” she said. “He was a dedicated doctor as well as a good friend to me and I did not like his new associate. I could see trouble ahead for that sweet old man.”
Ruth Barnett knew that Reg Rankin talked a big game. But she could not see, or even imagine at this point, the full scope of the abortion empire that he and Watts began to build in the fall of 1934. Ruth could not visualize the big picture in part because she was a small-time operator, the glamour and the worldly patina, the steady stream of customers and the steady flow of cash notwithstanding. She had learned her craft from solo practitioners, and she emulated their style of practice. Like Dr. Griffs and Dr. Equi and Dr. Watts, Ruth worked in a proper downtown office. She was known to her medical and her lay colleagues and looked to them, increasingly, as a source of business.
As a matter of course, she had highly personal relations with her clients. She saw Mrs. Robinson in the office one day and then at a nightclub or at the grocery store or in Zell Brothers Jewelry Store on Morrison the next. She did an abortion in 1933 for Marilyn Woods, for example, after that woman had twin boys one year and a tiny premature boy the next. And then she operated on Marilyn again three years later when Mac Woods lost his job as a carpenter. Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Woods and the others knew where to find Ruth. They felt comfortable going to her office when they needed help. They had friends and relations who had sought out her services, as well. Ruth was familiar with her patients and she liked it that way. She thought that quality was near to the heart of being a good practitioner, and it made the work enjoyable, too. At the end of her life, Ruth remembered these days before the arrests and the danger, and she named the best part about being an abortionist: “I loved it when they put their arms around me, kissing me and thanking me.”
The tradition and the sentiments that shaped Ruth Barnett’s abortion practice couldn’t have been more at odds with what Rankin had in mind, and with what, in fact, he was able to accomplish in the next few years. A law enforcement officer, looking for the words to describe Rankin’s enterprise in 1936, used an apt figure; he called it “a chainstore business,” a tag that captured a great many of the entrepreneurial intentions of its founder. It also captured the shift away from local owners and community ties that all sorts of businesses, legitimate and otherwise, were undergoing in that era. Indeed, by 1936, Rankin and Watts were running abortion offices in three states—Washington, Oregon, and California—and nine cities—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Long Beach, and San Diego. The same law enforcement officer described Rankin himself as “the dominating and guiding arch-criminal” behind these offices. He might most aptly have called Rankin the arch-capitalist.
The fact was, the erstwhile “evaluation engineer” had spent years roaming the streets of L.A. in keen observation of modern business practices. Now he aimed to apply these up-to-date strategies in an effort to capitalize on the ever-growing demand for abortions.
In retrospect, Reg Rankin’s enterprise of the 1930s was a parody of corporate expansionism as practiced in his day. Like the kingpins of bootleg liquor and narcotics operations, Rankin based his moves on what he thought of as the logic of capitalism, and for a while the logic yielded results. His idea was to concentrate the abortion business on the West Coast so that it took on the form and functions of an abortion corporation, with himself at the helm. Rankin’s business plan was comprehensive. He intended to corner the market by creating a web of “companies,” a string of offices that together would form a vast regional network. He aimed for monopoly.
Rankin figured that even if he couldn’t get control of all the abortionists from San Diego to Seattle, he would have a say in who stayed in the business and who didn’t. The message he began to send around was bold and threatening, and he meant it to be. If you play ball with Rankin, okay. If not, you’re the competition, and Reg Rankin doesn’t like competition.
Rankin had another group of principles, a set borrowed from Henry Ford: standardize, homogenize, rationalize. The way it worked in his business was that all the abortion offices had to be as nearly identical as possible. Rankin wanted the same layout, the same furniture, the same surgical tools laid out in the same pattern in all the surgeries. All the abortionists were to be doctors, all were to be trained by Watts, and no matter which office any one of them was assigned to, he would be able to find his way around and take up the work in a minute. Every office followed the same procedures, medical and clerical. The receptionists were trained according to Rankin’s method. Every aspect was to be uniform and interchangeable, including the doctors themselves.
The office Rankin controlled in San Diego, for example, was run in the same way as all the others. Rankin himself trained the office nurse. She was to greet women when they arrived, find out how far along the pregnancy was, and set the price for the operation. The fees were the same as Ruth Barnett’s: for two months or under, the standard price was thirty-five dollars, for two-and-a-half months, forty dollars, and for three months, fifty dollars. As it worked in practice, the fee scale was merely for guidance. Nurses understood that Rankin wanted them to get as much as they could for each case. They also understood that their boss was very strict about the bottom line: a minimum of twenty-five dollars for each procedure had to be retained by the office. If a woman had been referred by a druggist or a doctor, he was due anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of the amount the patient paid, a cost that had to be figured in.
The nurse was to collect the money and then have the woman sign a consent form that read like this: “I hereby declare that I am at this time freely and voluntarily applying to Dr.—for treatment. I believe my condition demands immediate medical and surgical attention and therefore give consent to such treatment as the doctor may determine in the premises; that I have read the above statements and am fully aware of the contents thereof, and state that I believe the same contains a true statement of my physical condition.” Rankin was emphatic that under no circumstances should the name of the doctor be filled in. One of his employees explained the strategy: “In case there was any complaint, they would put some other doctor’s name in so that the patient couldn’t testify.”
It was also the nurse’s job to take down the woman’s name and address on a white printed slip and fill in data about whoever referred her to the office. Next, the nurse prepared the patient on the operating table, and at the last minute, called in the doctor to perform the operation. Rankin counseled his doctors to proceed cautiously at this point. One doctor said, “Rankin told me never to take a case that had some semblance of infection. He told me never to operate on any woman who had been tampering with herself. He didn’t want to have any trouble. He wanted all the cases to run smoothly. The point was, I should make sure nothing was wrong with the woman before I got started.” Another of Rankin’s doctors expressed the same principle more bluntly: “If a girl is in the least bit sour, just send her home.”
If everything was in order, the doctor opened the woman’s vagina with a speculum, administered a local anesthetic, and then dilated the cervix. Using a curette, the doctor scraped the woman’s womb. The final step was Albert Watts’s innovation. He trained all his men—as he had trained Ruth Barnett—to complete the abortion by using water suction to draw all the “residue” from the uterus. Each office was equipped with a hose running from a faucet in the surgery to the operating table. A metal catheter was attached to the hose and placed inside the uterus. Then water was run through the hose to create a vacuum, and all the remaining products of conception were suctioned out.
Once the abortion was completed, the office nurse in San Diego, just like all the other nurses, had additional duties. She was to keep all the money collected from patients in the office safe until the end of the day. When the office closed, she was to take the cash to the bank and deposit it in an account held in Rankin’s name. She was also instructed to send duplicate deposit slips to Rankin’s associate in Los Angeles, a banker named Joseph O. Shinn, along with the sheaf of personal data slips on all the women who had come in that day. Generally, the nurse and the doctor assigned to the San Diego office had little direct contact with Rankin. Paychecks came in the mail every week, always signed “R. Rankin by J.O. Shinn.” In the normal course of things, Rankin came down from L.A. to inspect the office once or twice a month at most.
Up in Los Angeles, Shinn and Rankin made all the financial and strategic decisions for the business: typical business decisions about whom to hire, where to open the next office, how much to pay staff, how much to pay for protection. They worked well together, and in the summer of 1935, after Rankin realized that opportunity was once again knocking, the two men decided to branch out by establishing a credit arm of the business. Rankin told one of his doctors that summer, “At first I thought it would be fine to have a little office, a hole in the wall, down the hall or something from each of the abortion offices, where people could go to pawn their jewelry—watches, rings, like that—if they were short on cash. But now, I figure, we’ve gotten big. We can do better.” Rankin’s idea of doing better was a little scam operation he called the Medical Acceptance Corporation. He told a doctor in Seattle how it worked: “When a girl comes to the office and she doesn’t have the cash, why, the first thing is to find out if she’s working steady and what her salary is. Then if the operation she needs calls for fifty dollars, well, make it sixty and send her over to the M.A.C. office.”
Hundreds of transactions later, the L.A. county prosecutor explained the workings of Rankin’s Medical Acceptance Corporation more fully in open court. He said, “Let’s take a case. A woman would come to one of the offices, we will say the Hollywood office in the Guaranty Building, seeking an abortion. She didn’t have the cash. She would be sent by the office nurse to the Signal Oil Building where the Medical Acceptance Corporation maintained an office on the same floor and immediately adjoining the offices where the abortions were performed in that building. There this woman would be interviewed by some employee, usually Mr. Creeth, the manager. The nurse would give the woman who went there a card having upon it some symbol indicating the price agreed for the abortion. If the price was fifty dollars, Creeth, by the time he got through with the woman, would have a note from her for around seventy-five dollars. Creeth would lead the woman to believe that he was merely financing the bill; that he was sending the money to the doctor to take care of the bill and that the amount over and above the fifty dollars to be paid to the doctor represented the profit to the Medical Acceptance Corporation. But this was not true. The Medical Acceptance Corporation was merely an agency of this entire proceeding. No money changed hands by these transactions. Collateral would be taken by Creeth and then Creeth would telephone the office nurse, telling her everything was okay, to go ahead, and the woman would go ahead and have her abortion.”
Rankin would not have argued with the prosecutor’s characterization. He defined himself as a businessman, and he was clear-minded about the fact that profit was the name of the game. He never doubted that he shared the fundamental belief of other businessmen that a good profit margin depended on the client’s naiveté, and in this case, on the client’s desperation as well.
Rankin also banked on the weak position of his staff. Most of his doctors and their female assistants were people squeezed particularly hard by the Depression. That was the reason most of the men and women around Rankin found themselves in the business of criminal abortion to begin with. And once they had begun scraping wombs in secret, they were in a position, of course, to be squeezed by the law. Rankin presented himself as the answer to their problems: by allying with him, they could earn a good living. In the meantime, Rankin would take on the job of neutralizing the law. That was, in essence, all Rankin promised. He didn’t review his business philosophy with the doctors and staff whom he set up in San Jose and Long Beach and the other offices. He just put them to work.
It is unknown whether Rankin was familiar with the notions of Frederick Taylor, the man who introduced “scientific management” to the business community in that era. But in retrospect, Rankin’s methods of running his abortion clinics at least suggest that he planned his venture along the lines followed by the chainstore magnates and manufacturing tycoons whose workplaces were reshaped by Taylor’s ideas in the 1920s. Taylor preached a few basic tenets; he expressed his cardinal principle this way: “The law is almost universal—not entirely so, but nearly so—that the man who is fit to work at any particular trade is unable to understand the science of that trade without the kindly help and cooperation of men of a totally different type of education, men whose education is not necessarily higher but of a different type from his own.” Taylor argued, most famously, that a man fit to make his living handling pig iron was by definition not fit to understand how best to handle pig iron. Rankin applied the essence of this axiom. From his point of view, he had the moxie to achieve something big, and the contacts to boot. He couldn’t do an abortion himself. But neither could his abortionists on their own parlay their skills into an empire. Rankin aimed to supply what Taylor called “kindly help and cooperation.” In Rankin’s case, this meant “deskilling” the doctors. He collected their experience as diagnosticians and practitioners, their experience as small businessmen running medical offices, and replaced all that with standardized practices and interchangeable physicians. He transformed professionals into workers, and told the workers they would all profit from the transformation.
