A confession regarding my partial research and incorrect conclusions 37 years ago
Human Life Review, Winter 2022
GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER 2021
GEORGE J. MARLIN, MARGARET COLIN, MARVIN OLASKY
ABORTION IN HISTORY, ABORTION IN HOLLYWOOD CULTURE, GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER
OCTOBER 7, 2021
HONORING
MARGARET COLIN AND MARVIN OLASKY
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Marvin Olasky:
Marvin Olasky joined us via ZOOM
Thank you, David. I will treasure being called a Great Defender of Life, even though the great is an exaggeration. Back in 1990 I profiled two great defenders who had recently written articles in Human Life Review—Henry Hyde and Nat Hentoff. They were men of character but they were also characters, unique individuals.
Henry Hyde was a devout Catholic. His inner office in Washington was very neat and tidy. It included one portrait of Thomas More, two busts of Abraham Lincoln, but three statuettes of Don Quixote. He knew that keeping the Hyde Amendment would always be a battle. He was ready to joust.
The office of Nat Hentoff two miles south of here was extremely untidy. He reviewed jazz albums when they were on vinyl, and threw many on the floor. You had to walk carefully to avoid going crunch, crunch. He was an atheist but he could not accept killing babies.
It takes all kinds of people to make a movement. The pro-life movement is filled with reputable people. But sometimes, in God’s mysterious providence, unborn children benefit from disreputable people. That’s the story I want to tell you tonight. It’s the first time I am telling it publicly.
Until three weeks ago I thought I’d give you the talk I’ve given at many pro-life gatherings over the years. It’s an OK stump speech. But we’re only several blocks from Broadway. You deserve more than a road show.
So, this is the world premiere of some research in progress. It’s not a smooth presentation but you will be the first people to learn the truth about someone I turned into a Great Defender of Life. You will learn that the results were great, even if he wasn’t.
The story is also worth telling because this month is the sesquicentennial—the 150th anniversary—of the conviction of an abortionist who was the villain in the drama.
Here’s some backstory. In 1986 I was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. My wife had founded the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center two years before. We had just had a young woman going through a crisis pregnancy live with us for nine months. That story had a happy ending. So I wanted to write about abortion. I also had to publish a bunch of journal articles to get tenure.
The solution: I wrote academic journal articles about newspaper coverage of abortion over the years. In doing so I could praise pro-life people. I don’t know if that would be possible now, but it worked. One person I brought to life was a reporter named Augustus St. Clair. I didn’t realize then that it was only his name sometimes. His day job put some abortionists in jail. I didn’t realize then that his night work could have caused some abortions.
In 1871 he wrote a great series of articles about abortion called “The Evil of the Age.” If you look him up on the internet, you’ll find articles that are probably there because of my research: He had largely been forgotten. I made him a two-dimensional hero—but while researching the new history of abortion that I’m writing, I have seen the third dimension.
Here’s what I now understand to be the real story, in brief. William Augustus Doolittle Jr., later known as Augustus St. Clair, is born in New York in 1839. At age 19 he marries a beautiful woman, Mary Byington, also 19.
At age 20 William Augustus becomes the rector of an Episcopal church in Yonkers. Too much too soon. He fights with the congregation. The vestry demands that the bishop remove him. The bishop complies. Doolittle is bitter and becomes a Congregational minister. He and his wife have three daughters by the time they’re 26, in 1865.
Then in 1867 he’s gone 150 miles north and is pastor for a half-year at First Baptist Church in Hoosic Falls, near the Vermont border. He doesn’t last long because he becomes sexually involved with the wife of a deacon. He eventually confesses.
William Augustus Doolittle legally changes his name to Augustus St. Clair. He becomes a newspaper reporter in Troy and then Newburgh, N.Y. in 1870 and 1871. According to court documents, he becomes sexually involved with a Mrs. Jenny Erkenbrach. The New York Sun reports she is “a woman of unusual personal attractions.”
Let’s review. Fired from at least two pastoral jobs. Caught in at least two adulteries. But he’s picked up some journalistic experience. The summer of 1871 is extraordinarily busy at the New York Times. On July 12 Northern Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics clash on Eighth Avenue. Members of the National Guard start shooting. Three Guardsmen plus more than 60 civilians, mostly Irish laborers, die.
So, at least 63 deaths. Meanwhile, the Times is in a big battle with Boss Tweed, the corrupt Tammany Hall master manipulator. Times editor Louis Jennings is looking for another way to poke at corruption. His regular reporters are busy. But look—here’s Augustus St. Clair hungry for work. Sure, let him spend a couple of weeks visiting abortionists. See what he can produce. That is Augustus St. Clair’s one shining moment. Here’s the headline and subhead of his story, published on August 23, 1871: “THE EVIL OF THE AGE. Slaughter of the Innocents,. . . Scenes Described by Eyewitnesses.” That last emphasis on eyewitnesses is important. St. Clair is not just spouting off, opining. He visited abortionists and reported what they said. He includes vivid specific detail: “Human flesh, supposed to have been the remains of infants, found in barrels of lime and acids, undergoing decomposition.”
The story would have been better had he included some human interest about what one of the women coming for an abortion looked like. Say someone—I’ll quote here—“about twenty years of age, of slender build, having blue eyes, and a clear, alabaster complexion,” plus “long blonde curls, tinted with gold.” Reporters from the 1830s on had used the looks of abortion seekers and adult victims as a way to generate reader involvement. The looks of that particular woman are relevant because three days after the publication of St. Clair’s big story, a baggage handler at the train station smells a horrible odor emanating from a trunk to be shipped to Chicago. He opens it and finds the corpse of that 20-year-old. The autopsy shows an abortion killed her.
The “trunk murder” receives coverage throughout the United States. Four days later St. Clair writes a follow-up story in the Times. Early in this story, not the first, he provides the description of the young woman that I read to you. Near the end of this story, he says he had happened to see her twice in the office of the abortionist who killed her. He finishes with a flourish, in italics: “I positively identify the features of the dead woman as those of the blonde beauty, and will testify to the fact, if called to do so, before a legal tribunal.” Well. Thirty-five years ago, I thought St. Clair seeing that particular woman was an unlikely coincidence, but in reporting, coincidences do happen. I tried to find out more about St. Clair but came up dry. You all know that the Times is now strongly pro-abortion, so its pro-life role 150 years ago was a good story. I went with it.
Last month, using the resources now available through the Internet, I took another shot at learning more about St. Clair. Something happens soon after St. Clair’s scoop that discredits him among New York journalists. The Brooklyn Eagle calls him “eccentric” and a “much-pulverized reporter.” St. Clair defends a corrupt government official in a way that leads some journalists to conclude St. Clair is corrupt himself.
That may have been a political dispute, but in October, 1872, St. Clair demolishes any remaining belief in his honesty when he testifies during a sensational murder trial. Famed businessmen Jim Fisk and Edward Stokes quarreled over a girlfriend, Josie Mansfield. Stokes shoots and kills Fisk outside a hotel about two miles south of here. After a mistrial, St. Clair, in a subsequent trial, shows up to testify that he saw a pistol in Fisk’s hand, so Stokes purportedly fired in self-defense.
Others did not see a pistol. The Boston Globe declares, “Those who claim to know the witness [St. Clair] say that he is not a man worthy of belief. . . . He would not hesitate to swear to more than he knew, for a consideration.” The Charleston Daily News says, “St. Clair’s story bears the strongest evidence of having been manufactured.”
19th-century illustration of the process of newspaper printing
The Vermont Gazette reports that four men from Hoosic Falls, where St. Clair had ministered—particularly to the deacon’s wife—were ready to swear “that they would not believe St. Clair under oath.” The Chicago Tribune, the Nashville Union, and others all say St. Clair is a liar.
St. Clair in 1874 snags a public relations job for the Liquor Dealers Protective Union of Brooklyn. He arranges travel and hotel reservations for booze dealers arriving at a state convention. In 1875 he is a toastmaster at a Long Island hotel. During the rest of the decade he writes advertising booklets for hotels, with words like these: “Visitors will experience complete satisfaction not only in respect to the refreshments they obtain, but in the charges they pay, and the handsome treatment they will invariably receive.”
In the 1880s he sometimes reuses the name Augustus Doolittle. He appears in this article from 1884: “Henry Van Bunckle, a traveling salesman living at Union Hill, N.J., on Sunday found his wife in company with Augustus Doolittle sitting on the piazza of Tallon’s Hotel . . . He gave Doolittle a severe thrashing and then drove away.”
Over the next 15 years St. Clair apparently picks up some short-term editing jobs in Elmira, New York City, and St. Joseph, Missouri. He briefly does some public relations work in 1898. Census reports show him as still married in Mount Vernon, N.Y., but his wife often appears as “head of household.”
When she dies in 1906, her obituary (as Mary C. Doolittle) says, “Four daughters survive her.” It says she “was at one time considered one of the most beautiful women in Westchester County.” It says nothing about a husband. St. Clair was still alive, though: He died in 1915 in Brooklyn and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
The facts of St. Clair’s life make me doubt the truthfulness of the dramatic ending to his second story: “I positively identify the features of the dead woman as those of the blonde beauty, and will testify to the fact, if called to do so, before a legal tribunal.” If he had improbably seen her, that detail would probably have been in his first story.
Here’s another clue: Police arrest the abortionist whose operation led to the young woman’s death. Prosecutors have to prove her presence in the abortionist’s house. They do so, but the case is not a slam dunk. You’d think St. Clair’s testimony would be crucial—if prosecutors think he’d be a credible witness. It seems they do not. He never testifies.
It also seems the New York Times within a few months decides he is not credible. I do not know whether St. Clair’s name change and his adulteries had anything to do with that. I suspect editors, once they have time to ask hard questions, become suspicious. That’s what happened a generation ago when Washington Post editors took a closer look at the stories of Janet Cooke, and New Republic editors looked closer at the stories of Stephen Glass. Coincidences do happen, but when a story seems too good to be true, it usually is.
But, so what? I have about four minutes left to answer a key question: “Who cares what happened 150 years ago?”
First, I do. I got it wrong. Yes, 35 years ago it was hard to read lots of old newspapers without traveling all over, but a journalist should always admit and correct mistakes. One reason I did not ask some hard questions: I assumed a good guy on life issues would be good. Not necessarily so.
I also thought a reporter and an editor who produced pro-life stories would be pro-life. But to the best of my knowledge, St. Clair never wrote anything about abortion before 1871 and never did again. His editor, Louis Jennings, wrote one good pro-life editorial headlined “The Least of These Little Ones”—but I read last month a book about America he wrote just before becoming editor of the Times. In it he says nothing about abortion.
Nevertheless, Jennings and St. Clair had a big pro-life impact. New laws and compassionate programs emerged. A series of prosecutions commenced. Some abortionists went behind bars, although usually for not very long. Others were scared straight. Publishers put out more books about abortion, including one in 1875 by Elizabeth Evans, The Abuse of Maternity. She documented postabortion syndrome.
I suspect the Times published “The Evil of the Age” because Jennings wanted to show one more way in which city officials were corrupt. Abortionists regularly bribed police and prosecutors to leave them alone. Jennings talked with a hungry freelancer, Augustus St. Clair, about getting a story with all the right elements: human interest, crime, corruption, vulnerable women, death.
Such stories are still all around us, but they are no-fly zones at major newspapers. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a dramatic series about abortionists in 1988. To my knowledge no one has done it again during the past 33 years. As the dead push up through the soil, reporters say “Nothing to see here.” In July 1990 one brave journalist, David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times, documented massive press bias in a 4-part series. Little has changed since then, but major newspapers don’t admit it.
In 2013 major media had another chance to take abortion seriously. Jurors, after a lengthy trial, convicted Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell for murdering just-born babies. The evidence of killing tiny humans with scissors following botched abortions was grisly, but the Media Research Center found that during the 55 days of the trial, ABC ran 70 segments on shocking criminal cases but nothing on Gosnell.
A vibrant story like “The Evil of the Age” shames much of modern journalism: Now, abortion ideology overrules opportunities for dynamic streetlevel reporting. But it also shames our entire crazy culture. The Me Too movement has had some good effects. Men should not inappropriately touch women, let alone go much further. But what about a man who impregnates a woman and then says “get lost,” or tosses on the bed a few crumpled-up bills and an abortionist’s address?
We need those who truly are great defenders of life. We also need ordinary reporters and editors who don’t turn their backs on extraordinary stories, just because they are ideologically inconvenient. And I thank all of you who have not turned your backs on the least of these little ones.