America’s Most Hated Woman

By Ann Rowe Seaman

(Continuum)

Chapter 11 ˜ “You got your wish, Spider”

Shortly after the boys were installed back in school in the fall of 1962,

Madalyn was hauled into court for her barking dogs. She said it was a lie by her neighbors because she was an atheist.

“Aw, baloney!” said their through-the-wall neighbor, Grace Bamberger. “She kept the dogs on . . . the porch and they’d bark all night. And she kept chickens in the yard—we had maggots crawling up into our windows. We had to call the health department! Yeah!”

As the homeowner, Pup was listed on the warrant, which upset him so much he had a heart attack. Madalyn’s activities had brought vandals, newsmen, and police to their doorstep—and now court summonses. She had received hate mail that shook him to the core.

“I’m gonna put a gun up your ass and blow the crap out between your eyes.”

She received a photo, smeared with feces, of herself and Lena coming out of court, and a page with the word “kill” cut and pasted all over it.

“Somebody is going to put a bullet through your fat ass, you scum, you masculine Lesbian bitch!” They said Bill looked like a queer, that she was a slut and a bitch that had given birth to a bastard. She was told that leprosy, cancer, and blindness were too good for her. Nicer writers called her a “big crude brawling peasant” and said she would die of her own poison. They said she should go to Russia, that she was wicked and a Communist.

She received a long poem: “I dreamed that Mrs. Murray died, and no one but the Devil cried.” It went on about how there was no service at her gravesite (a prophecy that turned out to be true).

A bizarre radio report that Madalyn had been burned to death in a car wreck had almost caused Pup an earlier heart attack.

Neighbors interviewed by the FBI described Madalyn as “a constant agitator in the neighborhood” who had “expressed disloyalty to the United States. [Her] father, mother and brother live in constant fear of her and the parents have expressed their opinion that [she] is mentally unbalanced.”

“The parents, the Mayses, were nice people,” said Mrs. Bamberger. “They were upset by the way she was doing. Mr. Mays, oh, he used to tell my father, ‘this girl is gettin’ into so much trouble!’ ” Her parents confided in the family doctor, who also suggested Madalyn needed psychiatric help.

To the doctor, minister, and neighbors, Lena presented the face of convention along with her husband, bemoaning her wayward daughter. She kept silent when Madalyn berated her for political ignorance or abused her in front of visitors. Garry DeYoung remembered, “Lena was a typical grandmotherly type, very nice, didn’t like all this conflict. She was full of platitudes—‘there’s two sides to every story, Garry.’ ”

Yet Lena hovered over the basement committee meetings, chatting and serving refreshments, and they all loved her. She was gracious and charming, and loved entertaining, while Pup stared dourly at the television, oozing disapproval.

Mrs. Bamberger liked Lena, and when she saw her welcoming guests that everyone said were Pinko anarchists, she settled the contradiction with a popular Cold War explanation: Madalyn “brainwashed her mother. And the kids.” They never closed their windows, and “she used to yell at her son a lot . . . He’d holler, ‘Leave me alone!’ Billy—she brainwashed him. And she always used to have a glass of wine in her hand, and her mother, too. Out on the front porch. I guess it was wine. Maybe it was vodka! Yeah!”

Lena’s role as omega female was her bond with this restless daughter, who reached for something beyond a bloodless, conventional existence, just as Lena had done in her own youth. Madalyn wouldn’t fritter away her God-given promise as Pup had done. She’d make something of the family name, like Gus Scholle had.

Though she comforted and stood by Pup as a wife should, Lena supported her daughter. They commiserated over their humble circumstances, brought off magical Christmases together; Lena even welcomed her daughter’s recounting of Deep

Throat one night after Madalyn had seen it in town. In the evenings, mother and daughter savored the progress of the prayer case over their tea and Southern Comfort. Lena helped with the printing and mailing of newsletters, in addition to running the household and caring for the children to free Madalyn for the Cause.

The barking-dog incident was an early flowering of the style that attracted and bewildered Madalyn’s followers. In her newsletter, she wove it into a web of persecution that, as usual, drew on the truth—and was a classic model of her need to create an environment in which she felt in control.

The snarled tale began months before, when she’d pressed charges against some Woodbourne boys for assaulting Bill. The judge dropped the charges, by Madalyn’s account, because the boys were Christians. When she drew the same judge for the dog incident, she refused to enter his court, saying he was biased. He had her arrested, threatened to have the dogs killed, and set a punitive bail. When her lawyer insisted he recuse himself, he surprised them by agreeing. But the replacement judge, in ignorance, had her arrested for refusing to answer the original summons.

Informed of the error, he quickly corrected it, but that didn’t make headlines in Madalyn’s newsletter. What did was the persecution, the false arrest, the biased judge. It raised money. Some readers began to suspect that, though she was gutsy and all her actions could be justified, her affairs were frequently so snarled that it seemed she might be creating the chaos. She would defy a court order on some basis which she gambled would later be ruled valid, and in the meantime set in motion related actions whose outcome would conflict with that of the original defiance, whether she won or lost. And, win or lose, she could make a credible case for discrimination or harassment.

She seemed to thrive on these tortured imbroglios, which some dismissed as attention-seeking. But she had learned that an outright strategy of confusion and chaos often serves well the person at the center of the web.

Pup’s heart attack seemed to sober Madalyn. “Grandfather had a serious operation [where] they took veins out of his leg, and after that she stopped her rhetoric about him,” said Bill. But Pup would not live to see his daughter’s greatest triumph.

He saw the first phase, on October 8, 1962, when the Supreme Court agreed to review the combined Murray and Schempp cases—a huge triumph that brought dollars in the mail. Three months later, father and daughter argued one morning. Pup’s heart surgery was not long behind him, and before she drove off to see a donor, she hissed that she wished he’d drop dead of a heart attack.

When she returned, Lena greeted her. “You got your wish, Spider.” Pup, 69, had collapsed in the supermarket and died.

Bill remembered his mother reacting with such callousness that at first he thought she’d killed him herself.

“She wanted to spend the absolute minimum on the burial; she told me to make the funeral arrangements. What was I, 16? I called the undertaker and I told him, well, we had to have a cheap funeral, and then she went up there and said, ‘he doesn’t know what he’s talking about’ and spent thousands of dollars after she had told me to do it.”

It was Lena who was behind Madalyn’s change of heart. She demanded that her husband of more than 50 years be embalmed, that he have a decent casket, that he be allowed to lie in a funeral home, and that his service be properly observed with printed notices and a service by a minister. It seemed to shatter Madalyn’s hard wall of anger at him, and release a flood of guilt and remorse.

She sat in the funeral home for three days, talking aloud to Pup. She couldn’t stop crying, Bill said. After he was buried, she sat at the grave for hours in the rain.

Lena and Irv consulted an attorney about having her committed.

Bill was confused. “The relationship was so incredibly bizarre. Constant outward hatred for that man, and then when he died . . . she sat on his grave and cried for hours.”

But it hardened her even more against religion. She blamed the hate mail; she later said she’d like to publish it all someday under the title “Letters From Christians.”

There was little question Madalyn was devastated by her father’s death, but she was soon writing her followers that the movement had killed him, that not a single visitor showed up at the funeral home. That broke her heart, she wrote. There weren’t even enough men to act as pallbearers.

However, these emotional blandishments didn’t work on everyone.

“I wonder if you have noticed unusual things concerning the Murrays,” wrote Eldon Scholl, Walter Hoops’ colleague, a month after Pup’s death. A “lack of financial report on her court case” was his main concern; and he was dismayed that Madalyn apparently planned to use any overage in donations to start new activities like an atheist radio station, magazine, and retirement home. She had the wrong idea about the freethought movement if that was what she planned—he anticipated some kind of “action” against her for “making a bid for something more than honest freethought activity.”

It was just the kind of niggardly, constipated thinking that infuriated Madalyn when she found out. What business was it of his, the kind of movement she wanted to build? He seemed to be saying he’d try to cut her off at the knees if she departed from his idea of “honest freethought activity,” that a retirement home or magazine for atheists couldn’t possibly fit that description. She would soon fall out with troglodytes like she considered Scholl, Hoops, and their ilk to be.

In fact, soon after Pup’s death, Madalyn wrote Walter Hoops an astonishingly hostile letter. A onetime supporter of hers, Lee Meriwether, had been given the Rationalist of the Year award she was expecting to get. He’d done nothing for freethought, and shame on Hoops, she wrote, for selling him the award just because Meriwether promised to donate the $5,000 back to the American Rationalist Federation after he died. “I can’t believe that you groveled that much for $5,000.”

“You know where I stand and I know where you stand,” she concluded. “I accept your offer to be associate editor of the [American] Rationalist.”

He immediately withdrew the offer. “After your case has been decided, we shall tell our readers what you are doing to the freethought movement of this country.”

Furious, Madalyn replied that nobody ever heard of Hoops anyway. “Print anything you like . . . When you have finished we will see the big splash you make in your little pond.”

And she was right.

On February 26 and 27, 1963, Murray v. Curlett was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, and Abington Township v. Schempp on February 27 and 28.

Madalyn and the boys stayed for the whole show, and when they got home, she reported, they found a broken window, snapped-off azalea bushes, and Bill’s ham radio antenna bent to the ground. Garth came home crying, saying everyone at school hated him, they snatched his cap and lunch box, pushed him, and called him names. Some boys threatened Garth and Bill at a drugstore; Bill swore out a warrant, but the judge dismissed the case, as there was no law against verbal abuse or swinging a rosary under Bill’s nose. However, Madalyn said, she did succeed in getting a patrol car parked in front of the house all night. And the FBI launched a search for a letter writer who mailed repeated, detailed death threats.

With delight, Madalyn recounted how her opposition took a pounding from the justices. Her attorney, Len Kerpelman, received the most flack from Justice Potter Stewart, the only dissenter in the Regents’ Prayer case. When his challenges made Kerpelman stammer—asking exactly where in the First Amendment this “wall of separation” was that he kept citing—and he got Kerpelman to admit that the overwhelming majority of parents wanted their children to participate in the prayer, the other justices broke in and rescued Kerpelman with questions that set up his desired answers.

“With the setup in the Supreme Court at that time, yes, I was just a figurehead,” Kerpelman said later. “I felt that very much when I made the argument. It was a good argument, but they knew a lot more about what they were doing than I did.”

Madalyn didn’t report it, but the crux of the argument was reached when Justice

William O. Douglas said that if the majority wanted a “religious leaven” worked into its affairs, it should be the people, not the government, who did it. The schools’ lawyers replied that that was exactly the case here; the people had worked a religious leaven into their affairs, and the government was trying to work it back out.

Not long after the arguments in DC, the Maryland legislature tried to pass a bill requiring a moment of silence in school each morning. The bill scolded the Supreme Court for “taking away the right of a free people to give some brief and nonsectarian acknowledgment of . . . their God.”

Madalyn told her readers she found it shocking and scandalous that the legislature would reprimand the Supreme Court, as if it were some kind of secular sacrilege to criticize those nine men—though she had no reverence for them, or any authority.

Meanwhile, support was coming in from the wilderness: a Texas mother protested when her children were made to report on Mondays whether they had attended church the day before; a tax-the-church movement arose in Michigan; a teacher in New Jersey had his class say the Pledge the pre-1954 way; an Ohio high school district banned baccalaureate exercises (this was later overturned by angry parents).

Mailed along with Madalyn’s February 1963 newsletter was a profile of the new organization Eldon Scholl had fretted about: Other Americans, Inc. It was subsuming the Maryland Committee for Separation of Church and State, and the venerable Freethought Society of America was moving from Philadelphia to Baltimore, where Madalyn would become editor of its magazine, the Free Humanist.

Her ambition was soaring: Other Americans would build local chapters and hold national conventions and have a seven-year plan; it would build its own university, administrative campus, printing plant, radio station, summer camp for kids, swimming pool, home for the aged—the urban renewal projects sweeping the country were creating a windfall of land for the Catholic Church to gobble up; why shouldn’t atheists have some of it? She would file test cases, sell books and products, start a glossy, militant magazine, run ads in every freethought journal in the country. She reported pledges already coming in for her dream. Would they support this? Would they pay monthly dues? Subscribe to the magazine? Volunteer? And send names of others she could write to?

She wrote them to expect trouble when the decision came down. Tapes, films, and interviews were already being prepared for the big day, and lecture tours planned for the months after; 16-year-old Bill would be speaking, too.

As for her, she wrote, she was struggling personally. The boys need clothes, they needed groceries and rent, postage and ink and envelopes. “I cringe” at asking for money, but couldn’t they please keep the family going for another month or so? “Our morale sags from time to time. We are all too human, too.”

She enclosed an “architect’s drawing” (in her own hand, from her drafting days at Martin Aircraft) of the atheist Administration Center and Retired Freethinker Cottages in the woods to be built on the “fine real estate” in Stockton, Kansas, donated by Carl Brown.

Cynics said she was targeting rich, lonely oldsters with her repeated references to a home for the aged. Kerpelman affirmed, “She was always carefully constructing a sucker list . . . there seemed to be more than an occasional . . . old guy with a lot of money, with chaotic ideas in his head about anarchy . . . these people are way out in their beliefs. And their intensity, I mean, when they hook onto something, they’re like bulldogs, they have one idea for their whole life, and everything revolves around that. Well, she had a knack for finding well-off people who were like that.”

By the end of April, a retired stonemason, Gustav Broukal, had bought her a press for her brochures, stationery, booklets, flyers, and the new magazine, American Atheist. She was tireless, writing hundreds of letters a month, taking speaking engagements, and putting out large mailings.

On her 44th birthday in April 1963, Life magazine published a letter from her that would become widely quoted: atheists “find God to be sadistic, brutal, and a representation of hatred, vengeance. We find the Lord’s Prayer to be that muttered by worms groveling for meager existence in a traumatic, paranoid world.”

It revealed, said Bill, “Mother’s talent to infuriate people with acid-coated words.” It was the prelude to a courtship that would last all her life, in which she drew to herself the hate, fear, and poison of her culture that would shake nickels and dollars out of the pockets of the disenfranchised and the idealistic.