In Portland, the winter of 1934 was the toughest season. The Great Depression had settled down on the ordinary citizens and on corner-store merchants with a cold grimness. Everyone in town read about it in the morning papers, as if they needed to: the city’s relief rolls, already swollen for three years, got bigger still that winter. But Ruth Barnett did not suffer in 1934. She was quick to admit that the circumstances bringing down her neighbors weren’t half bad for an abortionist.
The fact was, the sad demographics of the Depression heightened the demand for Ruth’s services and for the services of abortionists everywhere. With one-quarter of American workers out of a job, thousands of young couples felt pressed to put off marriage, if not always sexual relations. Married men, mortified and degraded by unemployment, deserted their wives in record numbers in the early thirties. Men and women with the resources to weather grim times knew that one more baby could destabilize delicate family strategies for survival.
In the depths of the Depression, a woman could get pretty desperate waiting for her period, all the more so because everybody seemed to be pointing fingers censoriously in those days, at “relief babies” who garnered state subsidies, and especially at their mothers, who should have known better. A young woman with a toddler on one hip and an infant on the other could easily evoke disgust, or resentment. People might whisper about her, calling her a slattern or a sow. A woman with too many children and too little money wore her poverty and her sexuality in public as twin failings.
Portland had just begun to notice the thawed response to birth control that was seeping through some liberal Protestant churches in the thirties, and that was taken up as a cause by well-heeled, reform-minded women and fringe New Dealers. Those who came to the Broadway Building looking for Ruth Barnett, though, were rarely victims of contraceptive failure in those days. Most of them had no contraception, except perhaps a crude device such as a pessary or some homemade business like the gob of lard that Ruth’s mother used. But these women knew they had to do something to protect themselves from the finger pointers and to protect their other babies from hunger. Some knew they had to get rid of the pregnancy to stave off their husbands’ wrath.
Like Alice Hawksworth, who felt forced to get three abortions between December 1934 and November 1935, these women were deeply distressed that they couldn’t control their pregnancies, especially when times were so hard. Alice was beside herself the third time she had to go down to the abortionist’s office. “I was in tears and I said I was back again and how miserable I felt and everything. And my little boy had a cold, and in fact both my little boys had colds and there wasn’t nothing I could do for them. I told the doctor that I hated to have to come back for another operation, but I felt like I couldn’t have another child right then. I had two little babies and not enough to go around and I had such trouble the time before, with the Caesarian.”
Ruth was prepared to do her part for the Alice Hawksworths of Portland. Years later she described her sense of purpose in the Depression years. “There was plenty of work and I loved it. I was young and strong and my health was good. I liked the income, naturally. But most of all, I liked what I was doing. In spite of my patients’ tears and anguish, I toiled in a happy climate because here, in my surgery, came the end of tears and anguish.”
Three events helped set Ruth up particularly well in 1934. Early in the year was the purchase of Maude Van Alstyne’s practice for two thousand dollars down, plus what Ruth considered to be reasonable monthly payments. Ruth now had her own office and her own clients after fourteen years as an apprentice. Equally important, she had her own official credentials, having completed the naturopathy course she had taken at Dr. Watts’s urging.
The third event that shaped Ruth’s life in 1934 was the arrival in Portland that summer of Reg Rankin, a California man with some very big ideas about setting up an abortion syndicate. The story of Mr. Rankin’s role in the abortion business must move into the foreground here because it is so arcane and so revealing at once.
The syndicate that Rankin set out to create, and in fact did create between 1934 and 1936, is a classic artifact of the confluence of the Depression and the criminal status of abortion, and an emblem of how criminalization put women everywhere in danger.
As a man on the make, Rankin correctly perceived abortion to be a growth industry in the mid-thirties. He had a good understanding of how things were for women desperate not to be pregnant in hard times. He recognized, in addition, that one person’s desperation was another’s golden opportunity. Indeed, a man like himself was aware that when an illegal but unofficially tolerated service is in very high demand, there is a great deal of money to be made, with relatively little risk, by supplying that service. Rankin, who was a businessman, not an abortionist, determined that the opportunity was particularly attractive because the group he aimed to serve was enormous, it was exclusively female, and to one degree or another, every female seeking the service would be in a state of shame. This was a very appealing target population indeed for a shady dealer like Rankin. Since their own stake in keeping the abortion secret would be so high, his clients would not be likely to turn on him, or turn him in.
In sum, Reg Rankin had a very strong sense in 1934 that he could step into the abortion arena and use the plight of desperate women to his own considerable profit. From the beginning to the end of his adventures in the abortion trade, Rankin usually thought of himself as providing a quality service. But the details of his transactions—with abortionists, clients, and others who crossed his path, including Ruth Barnett—demonstrate above all that the laws criminalizing abortion created space for thugs to prey mercilessly on unwillingly pregnant and defenseless women.
In some ways, although he himself never performed an abortion, Rankin is more perfectly the product and personification of the illegal era than so-called back-alley practitioners like Ruth Barnett. Although for some the odor of illicit cash clung to Ruth, her heart was invested in helping, and her skill made this possible thousands of times over. Rankin, on the other hand, was a middle man, a crude opportunist who used the law and the circumstances of desperate women, in a time of economic dislocation, to slake his greed.
Rankin’s story eclipses Ruth Barnett’s for a time because throughout the mid-thirties, while Ruth quietly performed abortions day after day and lived it up at night, Rankin was building an unsavory abortion empire on terrain where women were not safe. At the end of the decade, Rankin fulfilled his long-standing intention of pulling Ruth Barnett into his employ, but when the entrepreneur showed up in Portland in 1934, the person he came to town to see was Ruth’s Dr. Watts.
Watts had been performing abortions in Portland, only lately with Ruth’s help, for forty years. To the casual observer, the doctor was like many abortionists of his era. A regular physician and married man with respectable roots in his community, he turned gradually to performing abortions when his lady patients showed up in the office with steady regularity asking for the service, and other doctors, eager for a colleague who would accept referrals, heard through the grapevine that he was willing. But Albert Watts was distinguished from the run-of-the-mill doctor-abortionists who broke the law but remained within the profession in the decades after the turn of the century. He was different from the others because no one whispered around town that Dr. Watts was a drunk or a pervert or a man with skeletons in his closet. More important, Watts was special because he’d developed a highly effective vacuum aspiration technique for performing the operation, a way of doing his business that left him, after thousands of abortions, with an absolutely clean record of successes, and no unpleasant encounters with the law.
Rankin came up to Portland from Los Angeles looking for Watts because his grandiose plans called for a medical man who knew what he was doing. Rankin was the sort of operator who prided himself on knowing where there was a buck waiting to be made, and just now, Watts figured in his plans. Earlier, in the 1920s, when fat wads of money were changing hands among land speculators and builders, insurance agents, and surveyors of water rights in Los Angeles, Rankin’s particular niche had been second-guessing property assessors. He called himself a “tax factor,” or, in more up-to-date terms, an “evaluation engineer,” and passed around brochures describing himself as the director of a company known “for twenty years in general property tax assessment appraisals and adjustments.” His special skill was helping taxpayers lighten their burden.
Rankin’s enterprise was a fringey sort of effort, but there were years when it produced a good income. It was the sort of business that required Rankin to learn his way around town and become savvy about who was who. Over the years, the “evaluation engineer” became particularly skilled at determining who to pay off to clear a way for his profits. But when the Great Depression put a damper on assessed values and on most business opportunities in southern California, Rankin found he had had enough of scrounging up clients for his services in what he called the “tax racket.”
By the early 1930s, he had a better idea, an idea that felt more up-to-date, a sure winner. He decided to go into the abortion business, to become a sort of abortion factor, as it were. Rankin was a married man and also a man-about-town who liked to have girls on the side. So he was well aware of what a continual and frustrating effort it was for the ladies to keep from getting pregnant. He was also aware that more women were trying harder than ever to keep from having babies as times stayed tough. Rankin figured that in hard times the abortionist made out, and the abortionist’s handler could make out even better.
As a tax man, Rankin specialized in knowing the right bureaucrat to pay off. His acquaintances also included bookies, bootleggers, pimps, and abortionists, the kind of professionals who needed specialized help to prepare their tax returns. With characteristic bravado, Rankin once informed a high-placed California official that he handled the tax records of practically all the leading abortionists on the Pacific coast. That was how he met Dr. Watts in Portland.
Criminal abortionists tended to know each other in the 1930s. They knew who was good and whose botched cases they had to clean up after. When Rankin decided that abortion was the business for him, he tapped into the network, and all his sources spoke well of Watts, touting especially his method and his good sense. In the summer of 1934, Rankin travelled up to Portland to visit the seasoned practitioner. He wanted to talk to Watts about his big plans for a high-class abortion syndicate, with offices from Seattle to the Mexican border, each one staffed by a doctor who’d been trained under Watts. He wanted to see if the older man had a taste for going in with him.
That summer Dr. Watts was sixty-eight years old. He listened to Rankin and he was tempted. His colleague Dr. Van Alstyne, several years younger than he, had just given up her office. Van Alstyne herself had told Watts that it was time for the next generation to take over their work in Portland. She said she was well pleased that Ruth Barnett would succeed them. True, Ruth wasn’t a doctor, but they both knew that the younger woman had extraordinary skill and the termperament to do the job, and after all, Watts had been her teacher. Maude Van Alstyne said that he knew better than anyone what Ruth could do.
Watts was surprised that Rankin’s idea did not make him feel old and tired and ready to go home to bed. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Rankin made him feel important. He was pleased that abortionists down in San Francisco and even Los Angeles, and up in Seattle, had all said he was the man Rankin needed. Rankin told him that he had heard from other doctors that Watts knew more about doing abortions than the rest of them put together. He was the abortion king, the teacher, the expert. Rankin make Dr. Watts feel energetic and eager for the future.
Rankin was careful to let Watts know that he had all the right contacts and that he had already arranged for all the protection the syndicate needed. “There’s no risk to speak of,” said Rankin. The California man also talked a great deal about money, and Watts was attentive. Ruth heard that some of this talk, and she didn’t like it. One afternoon she joined the two men in Watts’s office, and listened to Rankin spin his tales about the vast sums they would rake in. Watts had told Ruth that Rankin was a good man, a great humanitarian in fact, who believed that every woman had the right to an abortion. But Ruth formed her own opinion that day. She left the two men still talking, and went back to her office fearful for Watts. She saw her mentor under the influence of a man she considered “glib and smoothly aggressive.” Ruth listened that afternoon for Rankin’s sentiments about the plight of women, and she came away convinced that Watts read the man wrong. “He may have been a humanitarian,” she concluded, “but all he talked about was money.”
Rankin did not strike Watts this way. The doctor saw promise in the man’s eyes, and admired his acumen and drive. Watts knew he couldn’t work forever, and now was a good time, he thought, to bring in his last big bundle of cash before he called it a day.
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.
Rankin’s twenty years as a “tax factor” left him with an appreciation of the need to prepare the ground for profit. He understood that this meant cultivating proper allies and arranging for protection. In the fall of 1934, while he was waiting for Watts to come down from Portland, Rankin began to look about for a well-placed collaborator, and he also began to boast. An L.A. pharmacist who ran into Rankin at the time described him as “a very bold and very busy man who knew what he was about.” He remembered that Rankin came to see him and “he had no hesitation in bandying about the names of state and county officials. He had no hesitation in saying he dominated the narcotics division of the district attorney’s office and the State Board of Medical Examiners and some other offices, too.” A doctor whom Rankin called on during the same period recalled him boasting that it had cost him sixty thousand dollars in San Francisco and thirty thousand in L.A. to “fix things.”
Rankin carried himself with savoir faire and, according to many of his contacts, he had charm. He projected know-how and success, and it wasn’t long before his search for a strategically located partner was rewarded. The man he found was William Byrne, an employee of the California Board of Medical Examiners. Byrne had been a special investigator for the board for seven years when he ran into Rankin. By this time he was bored with earning his meager living by stalking misbehaving chiropractors, malfeasant osteopaths, careless abortionists, and other assorted practitioners accused of violating the state medical practice act. He was ready to step up his income, and when Rankin came to see him, Byrne let the entrepreneur know that he was for sale.
Beginning in the fall of 1934, Byrne began to perform services for Rankin. He first made himself useful by arranging to have murder charges dropped against an abortionist whom Rankin had picked to head one of his offices in southern California.
About the same time that Rankin began wooing Dr. Watts in Portland in July of 1934, he also started to pay a series of calls on one Paul De Gaston in his bungalow on Harold Way in Hollywood.
Rankin considered De Gaston an exotic specimen, but well qualified to join his enterprise. Indeed, De Gaston was an unusual type. He’d been raised in China, where he was born in 1892, by a Swiss mother and a French father who was a missionary doctor. In China Paul received what he called “private tuition,” though his mother often took him on trips to England and Germany to further his education. After a prolonged trip to Leipzig in 1908, where Paul studied chemistry, his father determined that the young man was ready to begin his studies in medicine. To that end, he was sent to Paris in 1911. The ordinary course of study to obtain a medical degree from the Sorbonne in those days was nine years. But Paul De Gaston was bright and his courses abroad had prepared him to finish the program in only five. When he graduated in the spring of 1916, De Gaston later told Rankin, “I got ambitious at the first recruiting station I saw in April 1916, so I volunteered in the French army. I was in such a hurry that I left Paris without my diploma.” Soon after the war was over, he came to the United States and over the next fifteen years pursued the main chance in a style that Rankin could recognize.
De Gaston lived in those years in Portland, Maine, and in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and points in between. He served briefly in the U.S. Army, tried briefly to become an executive in the steel business, attempted numerous sales ventures, and then arrived in Hollywood in 1925 with plans to become a movie star. His worldly flavor was initially interesting to several directors willing to cast him in bit parts to see what he could do. But apparently De Gaston could not do much in this line, and soon enough directors and would-be actor alike knew that he did not have a future in the entertainment business. Still, he stayed around on the fringes, occasionally getting jobs in musical stage plays or travelling with small acting troupes. During the fourteen years between 1916 and 1930, Paul De Gaston never practiced medicine. In fact, he never touched a surgical tool of any kind in all those years. Nevertheless, in order to support himself, he began in the early thirties to perform occasional abortions.
In June 1934, Rankin heard De Gaston’s name from one of his many knowledgeable friends and went to see him, hoping the man would contribute in one way or another to the fledgling organization. As the doctor remembered it, Rankin told him that he knew De Gaston was an abortionist. He said, “We are doing the same work. I have a proposition for you. Maybe you would like to take a little vacation from your business, and we will do your work. Then we will give you half of whatever comes in while you are away.” De Gaston was not interested in this offer, but when Rankin came back the next month and offered him his own abortion office in Hollywood, with half the proceeds, De Gaston accepted. Rankin continued to visit periodically during the summer, until the deal for De Gaston to open up the Hollywood location was completed on August 8th.
Two days later, on August 10, 1934, Marion Eilert, a hairdresser, died at De Gaston’s house after having an abortion. De Gaston was promptly arrested on three charges: murder, abortion, and practicing medicine without a license. Over the next eight months, De Gaston’s crimes were aired in several courtrooms, but the man was never convicted of any crime, despite the fact that Louise Eldridge, the young woman who had brought Marion to the abortionist, testified to an excruciating set of details regarding the event.
De Gaston was exonerated despite the additional fact that William Byrne, in his capacity as investigator for the State Board of Medical Examiners, made a report on the death of Marion Eilert to the city attorney of Los Angeles. The report included the information that on the day of the woman’s death, De Gaston called Louise Eldridge at her office after the abortion to allay her worries about Marion. He told her, reported Byrne, that the girl was all right and in good condition. He said she had been unwell the night before, after the abortion, but that she was back to normal now. Then De Gaston said something threatening to Louise that she didn’t understand. After assuring her that everything was okay, he now seemed to be implying that the situation was far more complicated. He said, “She is all right, but if they hang me I will shoot you first.”
While Byrne was preparing and presenting his report on Eilert’s death, he was simultaneously getting rid of the evidence. As he explained later, Rankin told him that the best way to handle the situation was to make sure none of the state’s witnesses (except Eldridge) wanted to appear in court. Rankin told Byrne, “Naturally, then they will have to dismiss the whole thing.” Implementing Rankin’s directive, Byrne set out to put the heat on the doctors and druggists who had sent cases to De Gaston, ensuring that no other state witness besides Eldridge appeared at the trial, and thus ensuring acquittal.
After De Gaston was, indeed, acquitted of the murder and abortion charges, he faced a second trial for practicing medicine without a license, a charge he wanted to fight. But Rankin advised him, with a surprising show of delicacy, that it would be “in poor taste” to fight the medical charge, and not to worry, he and Byrne could fix it up for a couple of hundred dollars. This time, he said, they would see that the case was postponed when it came up for trial, they would then get it postponed again the next time, and finally the case would be dismissed. Once again, Byrne took care of the details, and by mid-winter 1935, De Gaston was free to join Rankin’s stable. The doctor lost no time making himself useful. Between February 20, 1935, and the end of that month, after Dr. Watts had observed and approved his technique, the man who had just lately caused Marion Eilert’s death performed forty abortions in the Signal Oil Building at 811 West Seventh Street in downtown Los Angeles.
De Gaston’s legal troubles had not bothered Rankin. Despite Marion Eilert’s death, Rankin remained eager to employ De Gaston and, in fact, now saw the doctor’s difficulties as an opportunity to create a special tie between himself and the abortionist. He figured that now he could buy De Gaston’s services very cheaply, in exchange for the “legal assistance” he and Byrne had provided.
The fact was, Byrne’s handling of De Gaston’s case had been both savvy and timely from Rankin’s point of view. Without Byrne’s intervention, the foreign doctor may well have gone to jail. Yet in these years, it was standard practice for a physician-abortionist, even one with a death on his hands and no license, or with other problems equally troubling, to be given what may charitably be called the benefit of the doubt.
It was not only in Rankin’s orbit that such things could be arranged, or only in California where opportunities were golden. All over the country in the illegal era, doctors could arrange for the intervention they required when abortion was involved. In Brooklyn, for example, one year after De Gaston was acquitted of all charges associated with Marion Eilert’s death, another doctor who caused the death of a woman was charged with filing a false death certificate and forging hospital records in an effort to cover up his part in the fatality. The death certificate stated that the woman had died of “fibronyoma uterus contributory to vasomotor collapse.”
The case against this doctor couldn’t have been stronger. In the days before he was indicted, the doctor admitted to investigators that he had performed the abortion and had made out a false death certificate. At his trial, three gynecologists, including Dr. Charles Gordon, who at the time was Chairman of the Kings County Medical Association, and the Chairman of the County Committee on Maternal Welfare and the Director of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Kings County Hospital, all testified that the cause of the woman’s death was a botched abortion. Nevertheless, this doctor too was acquitted at trial and resumed his abortion practice at once.
In addition to fixing the legal process, there was a second sort of service William Byrne was able to provide his partner as the abortion venture was getting off the ground. In 1934, he began to pay visits on small-time practitioners up and down the Pacific coast, to let them know that their practices were now a subject of interest to Mr. Rankin. When Byrne visited the offices of abortionists like Dr. Simon Parker who’d had a medical practice in Long Beach for twenty-three years, he reminded the doctor that he was an investigator for the California Board of Medical Examiners. He explained to Parker and all the doctors he called on that Reg Rankin and his associates had taken over the abortion business on the coast. He made it very clear that any doctor who intended to perform abortions in the region henceforth had best become one of Rankin’s boys or be prepared to be put out of business.
Doctors like Simon Parker and John Folsom in Oakland were impressed with special agent Byrne’s sincerity, and they agreed to become Rankin’s employees. In fact, these abortion doctors were just a few of the many practitioners around the country in the Depression years who were subjected to these kinds of pressures.
In the illegal era, state anti-abortion statutes provided lucrative opportunities not only for a West Coast thug like Reg Rankin. On the contrary, opportunities flourished everywhere because abortion was illegal and in demand in all parts of the country. In New York City, for example, an East Side dentist, Dr. Abraham Ditchik, performed a similar service in 1934 for State Assistant Attorney General Sol Ullman. Ullman was the Attorney General’s designate to the New York State Committee on Medical Grievances, a group of ten doctors who heard and decided all charges of malpractice against physicians. Ullman sent Ditchik out to visit, threaten, and extort substantial sums of money from practicing abortionists around the state. A review of Ditchik’s activities in the thirties included details of his meetings with many abortion doctors. One such doctor was Henry L. Blank, who met with the dentist in September 1934. Ditchik told Blank that a complaint had been lodged against him with the Medical Grievance Board and that he would take care of it for ten thousand dollars. Ditchik hinted strongly that he was on familiar terms with Sol Ullman. He also said that if Blank did not pay, he would lose his license. The abortionist was inclined to believe Ullman’s emissary, so he agreed to pay sixty-five hundred dollars, two thousand down and the balance in monthly installments. Ditchik assured Blank that the money was going directly to Ullman and that sixty-five hundred dollars bought two years’ protection. Any complaints brought against Blank for the next twenty-four months, he said, would be disposed of. In addition, the dentist agreed to advise the abortionist of the way the Medical Grievance Board worked and to warn him of impending visits by investigators. Over the next two years, Blank was visited by representatives of the Board several times, but no complaints were filed against him.
A report prepared in 1939 that detailed Ditchik’s activities included testimony from eight doctors who claimed to have paid the dentist $35,150 since 1933. The doctors gave Ditchik money after being told that payment was necessary if they didn’t want to be prosecuted by the Medical Grievance Committee for performing abortions. The report concluded that none of the doctors who paid was ever punished even though complaints had been filed against at least three of the eight. Two doctors who refused to pay up, however, were brought before the board and had their licenses suspended.
With the same climate prevailing on the West Coast, Rankin was emboldened to speak freely to the doctors he recruited, and to make both large demands and large promises. He told a doctor in Los Angeles, for example, that since his chain of offices was operating with the knowledge of the Medical Board there was absolutely no danger of prosecution, and the doctor should feel completely safe in referring clients to them. To underscore his claims, Rankin sent Byrne to the doctor’s office so he could hear it from the horse’s mouth.
In Seattle, Norman Powers, a physician and surgeon for thirty years, received Rankin at his office in the summer of 1935. He remembered that Rankin was charming at first. “Mr. Rankin told me that he was from California and that he wished to see me about entering into an association of doctors that he represented in California. The doctors had offices in different cities. He said I had been recommended to him, and now he wanted to find out if I would care to join the association. He told me he would take me down to California and introduce me to the various men in the association, and after I had seen the men and the various offices, then if I cared to make up my mind to join them, he would be glad to have me, and if I didn’t care to join, why I could consider the trip as a vacation, and he would take me down, pay my expenses and bring me back the same way. He said that if I did join, I would be paid a thousand dollars a month.”
Powers was, indeed, interested in the proposition, and he pressed Rankin for more information. Like the other doctors, he wanted the money, but the risk was a big concern. As always, Rankin insisted there was no risk. He promised “ample protection” and told Powers he need only speak to the other doctors down in California to find out how safe they felt. “He said he would introduce me to all the men so that I could satisfy myself that there was protection for the doctors.”
Rankin poured on the charm with Powers because he needed him right away in California, but other doctors in Seattle were not treated with such solicitude. On the same trip up north, Rankin saw a number of other practitioners. He chose one to be his man in Seattle, and put the heat on the rest to get out of the business or go elsewhere. The man he chose to run his operation was Eric R. Wilson, a doctor who had shared an office with Powers for some time.
Rankin’s first order of business after muscling his way into control of the abortion scene in Seattle was to bring in De Gaston to train Powers and Wilson in what he called the “Watts method.” De Gaston arrived in town in late June, still deeply beholden to Rankin and Byrne for having engineered his freedom. He was aware that paying back his debt entailed doing what they told him to do. It was less clear to him how long his bondage would last.
The first thing Rankin demanded when De Gaston arrived in Seattle was that he change his name. On the morning of June 26th, the two men met in the lobby of the Earl Hotel and Rankin told De Gaston to sit tight, right there in the lobby, and keep his mouth shut while Rankin went down to the King County Medical Society and checked up on what name was available for De Gaston to use in that city. De Gaston did as he was told, and later that day Rankin informed him that from now on his name was Dr. F.T. Read. As De Gaston remembered it later, Rankin said, “You are supposed to be from Glendale, California, and in case anybody asks you, you are a graduate from Bennett University in Chicago, a school that’s out of business.” Rankin added, “You don’t look much like that fellow Read, but no one’s going to know that around here.”
As Dr. F.T. Read, De Gaston spent the summer training Powers and Wilson and making trips to Portland to train Ed Stewart, as well. By August 1935, Wilson and De Gaston were set up in a suite of offices on the sixth floor of the Security Building in downtown Seattle as Rankin’s employees. Business was brisk, but none of the players was satisfied. Early on, Rankin sensed trouble from Wilson. He suspected him of fudging the numbers and holding back receipts. He also suspected that Wilson was undermining his control over De Gaston.
In September, Rankin and Byrne decided to take a trip up to Seattle to scope out the situation. Rankin wanted to find out if Wilson was a cheat, and Byrne had begun to think that maybe it was time to ease himself out of the medical investigator’s office in L.A. Maybe there were some opportunities up in Washington. Specifically, it seemed a good time to take over the M.A.C. office in Seattle, and he made the trip an opportunity to talk to the Washington State Director of Licenses about going in with him. Byrne told De Gaston that fall that it was not “good policy” to openly pay off the Director of Licenses in cash, but that “if he could be induced to join the M.A.C., he could get his payoff that way and leave everybody alone.”
Dr. Wilson, it turned out, was indeed not the sort of man Rankin considered a good soldier. With Powers out of the picture, Wilson’s abortion business was flourishing, and he was beginning to wonder why he should serve as Rankin’s man in Seattle when all the signs indicated he could do just fine on his own. During the September visit, Wilson complained about the paperwork, about Rankin’s management style, and particularly about the fact that the Seattle M.A.C. was not forwarding cash to him properly. In general, he made it clear that, from his point of view, the arrangement was not working.
For the time being, Rankin took steps to placate Wilson, including allowing him to buy in as Rankin’s partner for about nine thousand dollars. But even as a partner, Wilson continued to complain, writing to Rankin almost daily in Los Angeles. In November, Rankin suddenly agreed to sell Wilson the Seattle operation outright. On November 20th, Rankin and Wilson signed this bill of sale, representing Rankin’s departure from the city: “For value received, the undersigned [Rankin] hereby grants, bargains, and sells to E.R. Wilson, all of his right, title, and interest in and to the business and professional practice conducted at 306 and 309 Securities Building, 1904 Third Avenue, Seattle, Washington, together with all of the furniture, equipment, instruments, and other things of value in said office. Also all equipment in the office formerly occupied by W. Norman Powers, excepting one Autoclave and two hot water boilers, situated in said premises.” The transaction was officially witnessed by Paul De Gaston, whose name was not mentioned in the text of the bill of sale but whose services figured in the bargain. As De Gaston put it later, “I was sold with the office to Dr. Wilson.”
Rankin was willing to sell out to Wilson late in 1935 because he was sick of the doctor’s bellyaching and of the daily letters that made him “so damn sore” he wanted the man out of his life. Rankin was all-around testy that winter. He told an associate, “I can’t take the aggravation anymore, and I am going to get out and sell all the offices to the various doctors as soon as I can.” But the money was still good, and Rankin did not walk away from its source easily.
In fact, as soon as he sold the Seattle office to Wilson, he began to regret it. The very night he signed the bill of sale, Rankin summoned De Gaston to the Olympia Hotel in downtown Seattle and warned him that the deal was not quite as sewn up as it had looked earlier in the day. Sitting in the hotel lobby with De Gaston, he leaned close to the man he had just sold away to Wilson, so their foreheads almost touched. He said, “Now Mr. Wilson has bought the business and don’t be surprised what will happen. I am going to pull you out of there, and I am going to get that office back with gravy on it.” De Gaston was appropriately unsettled. He tried to find out just what Rankin meant and how he was going to accomplish it. He pressed Rankin and was rebuffed. “He told me not to ask any questions but not to be surprised as to what would happen.”
Over the next couple of weeks, Rankin continued to toy with De Gaston. By now the entrepreneur wasn’t so sure that he wanted to get out of the abortion business, and he felt the need to remind De Gaston and Wilson that, despite the sale, he was still a player. He wrote De Gaston letters frequently and fully expected him to show the contents to Wilson. Rankin used threatening, mobster-type language in the letters, calculated to keep his former employees on edge. In late December, Rankin warned Wilson through De Gaston that the doctor’s show of independence was a bit much, and that he was “laying himself wide open for a good wallop.” Rankin let De Gaston know that Wilson’s efforts to go out on his own in Seattle and down in L.A. were dangerous and unacceptable. He wrote, “I know about what Wilson has in mind, and if I were you, I would egg him on to give me all the grief possible as it gives me all the more excuse to take a good crack at him.” Feigning solicitude, Rankin warned De Gaston that he himself was not safe. While checking up on the Long Beach office, he penned a brief note to the unlicensed doctor in Seattle. “There is one thing, you must be very careful of yourself,” he wrote. “You must keep completely out of the picture. I have a man watching every move you make.” And he concluded, “It looks like there is going to be some real fun.”
Six weeks after the sale, Rankin was still stewing about Wilson, about the profits going into Wilson’s pockets, and about losing the fealty of the man whose neck he had saved a year earlier. In mid-January 1936, Rankin made another trip to Seattle, this time to finish off the Wilson business with a masterful stroke. Again he summoned De Gaston to the Olympia Hotel. Later De Gaston remembered, “He told me to hurry over. It was very important. I did not want to go, but Wilson said I must. I went up to his room and he was sitting on the bed with a girl next to him. The first thing he said when I walked in was, ‘I am going to have you arrested.’ He said he had been weeping tears ever since he sold the practice because he heard we were doing a land-office business. His hand was on the girl’s thigh while he said this to me, and he was pinching her thigh with every word. He said that he hadn’t received all the cash that was due him from that office, but I said he didn’t have another dime coming to him. He kept on pinching the girl’s thigh and then he said he had only one more thing to say to me and that was that he would have me arrested and he would have Dr. Wilson arrested, too. I asked him what for, but he didn’t say. He just motioned for me to go.”
Rankin was a man who liked to use a threat, and his threats were rarely idle. Indeed, De Gaston and Dr. Wilson were arrested the next day. The charge was conspiracy to perform an illegal operation. A week later, Rankin pulled Dr. Powers out of the Long Beach office where he’d been placed on August 1st, and sent him back to Seattle to resume his practice there. Rankin was in his element: pulling strings, shuffling doctors, playing with the law. By seeing to it that Wilson was removed from the playing field, Rankin was able to pocket everything Wilson had paid to buy him out. Plus, Rankin now had an office in Seattle again, staffed by a doctor who was in his employ.
All the while that Rankin was engineering maneuvers in Seattle, he was carrying on similar activities in San Diego, L.A., and the other cities where he had abortion offices. For example, Jesse Ross, an L.A. abortionist, sold his practice to Dr. Watts and Reg Rankin in September 1934 and became Rankin’s employee. A month later, Rankin placed another physician-abortionist, Dr. James Beggs, in that office and kept him there until March 1935, when he moved Beggs over to the Oakland office that Rankin had just bought from Dr. John Folsom. When Beggs was shifted out of the L.A. office, Rankin brought in Dr. Houston, who had been running the San Diego clinic since Rankin had brought him down from Portland. This was how Rankin liked to run the business. He moved the practitioners around at unpredictable intervals, so the doctors understood that their salaries and their fates were tied to Rankin and to the syndicate, not to the community where they worked or to their clients or the clinic staff.
Rankin also thought it was a good idea for his doctors to maintain a low profile. No single doctor was associated for long with any of Rankin’s nine locations, and none of the nine offices had an occupant-practitioner’s real name painted on its glass door. It was one of Rankin’s many regulations that the sign on the office door should read, “Dr. Watts’s Medical Clinic.” Unlike the patients who particularly sought out Ruth Barnett in Portland, the women who moved through Rankin’s syndicate took whomever they got, and the point was that they not know who that was.
Rankin was a busy man in 1934 and 1935, moving up and down the coast between San Diego and Seattle, seeing to the staffing and financial details of his empire. But he had tasks to attend to even beyond these. Rankin had to make sure there was a steady flow of women showing up at each clinic if his offices were to turn a healthy profit. He had to make sure that word of his clinics got around, and he did not believe in depending on the word-of-mouth recommendations, passing from woman to woman, that many doctors relied on. Nor could he depend too heavily on the tradition of doctor-to-doctor referrals that fueled the practices of many abortionists. After all, he moved his doctors around so often that a local gynecologist might be leery about sending a woman to a stranger. Instead, he mounted an extensive marketing scheme that incorporated a variety of approaches.
Most formally, Rankin pressed every abortionist whose business he purchased to sign a contract that included a seller’s vow to act as a feeder. For example, when Watts and Rankin acquired Dr. Folsom’s office in Oakland on March 9, 1935, Folsom, as the “vendor,” agreed to the following: “The said vendor agrees that on the payment of the residue of the said purchase money as hereinabove mentioned, he will introduce and recommend the said purchaser to his patients, friends, and others, as his successor, and will use the best endeavors to promote and increase the prosperity of the said practice or business. To his end, the vendor shall transfer all business to the purchaser and shall at all times recommend the purchaser as capable.” In addition, Dr. Folsom was pressed into agreeing that he would desist from practicing “gynecological surgery” in eight specified cities for five years without the written consent of Rankin. Finally, Folsom consented to “furnish the purchaser with a list of names and addresses of all contacts or parties which constituted a source of supply of prospective patients.”
Rankin collected these promises from the abortionists he bought out and then put his people into the field to call in the referrals and to drum up more. In the spring of 1935, after De Gaston had completed his stint in the Signal Oil Building but before he was shipped up to Seattle, the boss sent him out on a mission to do what Rankin called “detailing doctors.” In the past, De Gaston had had experience looking for abortion clients, but his efforts when he was in business for himself were strictly penny-ante. In those days, he simply went out on Hollywood Boulevard, and as he put it, “I passed the word along until I got one.” In 1935, under Rankin’s direction, his efforts were more comprehensive and more professional.
Now De Gaston was to call on scores of doctors in Marin County and as far south as Carmel, Salinas, and Santa Cruz, soliciting their “gynecological work” for the San Francisco office. In addition, he was to go to all of the Rankin-controlled offices in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas to see that every abortion patient was provided with a referral card. Rankin explained, “Sometimes these girls travel and in case they go up and down the coast and need the same service again or their friends need the service, they will know where to go.” The card De Gaston handed out listed offices in the Signal Oil Building in Los Angeles, the Guarantee Building on Hollywood Boulevard, the Ocean Center Building in San Francisco, the Tapscott Building in Oakland, and the Broadway Building in Portland. De Gaston worked hard and his efforts brought in business, but Rankin’s system of soliciting business did not stop there.
In late 1936, a law enforcement officer described the syndicate’s system of solicitation as “well planned and well-thought-out, careful and comprehensive.” At the time, the officer was thinking particularly of the work of Beatrice Bole, a sometime office nurse, sometime solicitor employed by Rankin. Bole was assigned a vast territory in southern California where she visited doctors’ offices “under the guise of selling medical instruments. She would secure entrance to a physician’s office in a comparatively innocent manner and then she would propose to the physician that he send pregnant women to the nearest office. She would promise the physician a split or cut or commission of from fifteen to fifty percent of the amount ultimately secured.”
Sometimes Beatrice Bole did not bother with the pretence of comparative innocence. There were certain practitioners she visited again and again, and with these men she was straightforward. Generally these visits were to chiropractors, osteopaths, and a physician or two, all of whom had run afoul of the law in the recent past. Beatrice felt this group was unlikely to be offended by her overtures. One such person was a Dr. H.N. Tatum, chiropractor, who described his work, in the parlance of the day, as that of a “drugless man.” Tatum first met Beatrice Bole in 1935, when she picked his name off a list William Byrne had drawn up to chiropractors he had run in for practicing medicine without a license. Byrne had run Tatum in three times—in 1931, 1933, and just recently in 1935—for violating Section 17 of the State Medical Practice Act. In total, the chiropractor had spent forty-nine days in the state penitentiary for his offenses.
At first, Bole made brief visits to Tatum’s office, merely leaving packets of advertising cards with the chiropractor and urging him to make the cards available to his patients. But over time, Bole became more persistent and pressed harder. When she visited Tatum at home in December 1935, the man was under indictment once again, and Bole implied that if Tatum was forthcoming with referrals, it would mean something to William Byrne, his accuser.
When Tatum had occasion to recall his final encounter with Beatrice Bole, the details remained vivid in his mind. He said, “Well, she came to the door and I opened the door and she spoke to me and I asked her in. The first thing she said to me was, ‘Is there anybody here?’ And my wife spoke up and said, ‘One of my daughters is working and the other one is in school.’ And Mrs. Bole said, ‘Well, it doesn’t make any difference who hears what I have to say. I am so well protected it doesn’t make any difference.’ I asked her to have a seat and she sat down and began by saying, ‘Well, I am still on the mission of soliciting work for the same people.’ She was telling me that I should send patients to Dr. Watts and the rest of them. She wanted me to see that they guaranteed no prosecution for me. And she told me they had their thumb on the district attorney’s office, the sheriff’s office, and the police department, and that those fellows didn’t dare make a move.
“Mrs. Bole said that the prices range from fifty dollars to three hundred dollars.” Then Tatum remembered that Bole made an effort to convince him of the high-quality care those sums purchased. “She said the long-term patients were sent to a home. There were graduate nurses there to take care of them, and physicians and surgeons, too. I asked her what she meant by long-term patients, and she said anyone who came in after three and a half months they sent to this home. Before that they were taken care of in the office. She was talking about seven and a half and eight months. So I says, ‘Mrs. Bole, do you mean to say that such as that is going on?’ And she says, ‘Yes.’ And I says, ‘What in the world do they do with babies seven and a half or eight months old, they are livable babies?’ And she says they have a way of doing away with them, running them through the sewer.”
Dr. Tatum was not a young man when Beatrice Bole came to see him, and he viewed himself as a man of experience, a man who’d partaken of life. But this was hard to believe. He looked hard at his visitor and said, “How do you get away with such work as that?” Beatrice Bole was a cool as a cucumber. “We pay off the Medical Board,” she said. Dr. Tatum remembered that he was thunderstruck. Byrne had come after him for some trivial little infraction, and here these people were flushing little babies down the sewer. He said, “Do you mean to tell me, Mrs. Bole, that you pay off such men as Dr. Pinkham and Mr. Will Maloney and those men, members of the California Medical Board?” And she said, “No, we pay off Bill Byrne.” “And I says,” Tatum recalled, “if you do that, you certainly have a lot of protection.”
Beatrice Bole wound up her sales pitch that afternoon with a word to the wise, and she made herself plain. “If you will just send a few cases to us,” she said, “we will assure you that your case will be squashed. I will talk to Bill for you, and you will be glad you met me, I can say that.”
In the mid-1930s, the findings reported in an investigation of criminal abortionists in major cities in the United States confirmed Reg Rankin’s sense that all his hard work and all the aggravation he endured would yield him a good return in the Depression years, such a good return, in fact, that only the captains of industry could provide a comparison. “Yearly incomes,” the report stated, “would be in the same numerical brackets with earnings of heads of large corporations.” Few clues remain to the annual earnings of Watts and Rankin and their professional staff in those years, but the scraps of information that have survived verify the report’s contention. A private accounting kept by Dr. Jesse Ross, the L.A. abortionist bought out by Rankin, shows earnings of $4,885 for 1935, $3,400 of which he was paid by his boss. The rest he earned from “private fees.” As for Watts and Rankin, they did quite a bit better. In both January and February of 1936, each of the men made profits of approximately twelve thousand dollars, earnings surely in a league with those of the business tycoons Rankin had set out to emulate. By contrast, the salary range of the average worker in the U.S. in 1934 and 1935 was five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars per annum.
For a time, Rankin directed the syndicate with a slick sense of purpose. His three-man team did well for him, and for themselves. Shinn managed the money, Byrne took care of the legal angle, and Watts, of course, provided the medical expertise. They were loyal, they were good at what they did, and Rankin was satisfied with this part of the business. Throughout 1934 and 1935 and much of 1936, as he bullied nurses, threatened doctors, and cajoled landlords into leasing him prime space, Rankin was proud to be succeeding in a tough man’s world.
It was a fact that the tough man’s world that Ruth Barnett had caught a glimpse of back in the summer of 1934, when Rankin lured Watts away from the relative simplicity of the Broadway Building, had little in common with the world known by her or by most female abortionists at the time. It was a world that turned on the exercise of power and the willing use of the instruments of power: know-how, money, and threat.
Rankin’s worldly experience had prepped him for ruthlessness and prepared him for business. He knew how to recruit the personnel he required and how to create a web of professionals. He understood the use of branch offices and how to move his human resources around advantageously. Man-to-man, he could make promises; he could seduce and intimidate doctors with an ease that would have been surprising if it weren’t for the hard times that clouded lives in the early years of the Depression.
Rankin built conduits to well-placed bureaucrats and petty law enforcement types. He wasn’t fearful or uncertain when he dealt with the law. He was brash and bold. He knew about the power of contracts and forced everyone he served or who served him to sign long, dense documents stipulating reciprocal obligations regarding patently criminal activities. Finally, he was not afraid of the “almighty dollar,” and was neither too loose with it nor too tight. Unlike Ruth Barnett, for whom money was the fun part, for Rankin it was the power part. He understood the process of capitalization and understood what it yielded. He knew just how and when to buy people out and how to change them into wage earners and hirelings. He understood the value of credit and of the corporate form. He knew how to run a scam.
There was no sentimentality in Rankin’s repertoire. He was motivated by enthusiasm for the main chance. As one might expect, Rankin’s use of criminal abortion to pursue the main chance was no gift to women.