1957 Mike Wallace/Sanger Interview

Here's an interesting archive video of Margaret Sanger trying to defend her views to Mike Wallace in 1957. She's clearly anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, and pro-sexual "liberation." Wallace reads a natural law argument from the Catholic Church against birth control and asks, "What's wrong with that"?  If a health and well-off couple marry and refuse to have children, is that ok? Sure.

"Divinity is within us," she says, and supposes she would call herself an Episcopalian by religion. "Is infidelity a sin?" he asks. She doesn't know. But birth control isn't, and the greatest sin in the world is bringing a child into the world who is diseased or can't be taken care of.

At the very end of the program, she announces she has been swayed by him on one thing, but it has nothing to do with birth control.

Comments

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Thanks James Kushiner for posting this video. Quite illuminating and instructive!

[Judy K. Warner]

At the time the interview was conducted, leftists had not learned all the techniques they now use. She didn't do very well when Wallace confronted her with a previous statement in writing contradicting what she just said to him. She could have said, "Oh, that's old news," or "That was taken out of context." She tried to minimize the contradictions but didn't look credible. She fidgeted too much; obviously she never had media training. She didn't know how to use ad hominem arguments effectively against the Catholic Church and other opponents. The left might well have used this interview to show people what not to do and to develop better plans.

The above was a joke. In those days you couldn't do these things because they weren't acceptable. Furthermore, Margaret Sanger was a fairly fringe figure, and there wasn't the huge market there is today for weirdness in the mainstream media. She had to try to act normal and put her views in normal terms. Wallace put her on the defensive the whole time, something he later did mostly to conservatives. He didn't bring up her views on eugenics and the unfit, though, which would have made the discussion more interesting.

[James Kabala]

Unfortunately, I don't think Sanger was a "fringe figure" anymore by 1957.

The Philip Morris intro was hilarious.