$500,000 Operation

"I had no dolls when I was little, and I'll have no children when I'm old. That's my story. That's all there is to it."

To the brown-eyed, full-lipped, barren girl of 21 who spoke thus in San Francisco last week, her personal tragedy was of first importance. But her statement also meant that, with her, one of the most distinguished ancestral heritages in U. S. history had come to an appalling end.

Manhattan-born in 1791 of English stock, shrewd, self-made Peter Cooper pioneered in iron manufacturing, built the first U. S. steam locomotive ("Tom Thumb"), promoted the first transatlantic cables, built one of the first big U. S. fortunes. An industrialist and inventor of genius, he won his most lasting fame by founding Manhattan's great free educational centre, Cooper Union. His creed:

"I have always recognized that the object of business is to make money in an honorable manner. I have endeavored to remember that the object of life is to do good." A college friendship cemented by twelve hours in an open boat after a ship wreck made lifelong partners of Peter Cooper's son Edward and Abram Stevens Hewitt. Together they took over the Cooper iron works at Trenton, N. J. and Partner Hewitt married Peter Cooper's only daughter, Sarah Amelia. Vastly successful in business, Abram Hewitt built the first U. S. open-hearth furnace, manufactured the first U. S. steel of commercial value, directed Cooper Union for 40 years as secretary of its board, helped smash Tammany's Boss Tweed and, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in 1876 led the fight to establish Samuel J. Tilden's claim to the Presidency. Abram Hewitt's career reached its climax in 1886 when, in a rousing personal victory, he beat Candidates Henry George and Theodore Roosevelt to become a great reform Mayor of New York City.

Abram Hewitt's son, Peter Cooper Hewitt, inherited and brought to full fruition the inventive genius of his Grandfather Cooper. The late, great Michael Pupin marveled not only at the imaginative brilliance of his mind but also at his extraordinary physical grace, especially marked in the deftness of his hands. Rich and unorthodox in his methods, he invented the widely-used mercury vapor lamp, discovered the basic principle of the vacuum-tube amplifier, made many an other prime contribution to electricity and radio. He also pioneered in the development of hydro-airplanes, speedboats, aerial torpedoes, heliocopters. He died in 1921. Peter Cooper Hewitt's only child was a daughter, Ann Cooper Hewitt, born in 1914 when he was 53. She was illegitimate until her father married her mother in 1918 after Mrs. Hewitt I obtained a divorce. By the terms of his will, Mrs. Hewitt II receives one-third of the income from a $1,300,000 trust fund, Ann Hewitt two-thirds--the daughter's share to pass to her children, if any, or to revert to her mother if she should die childless. In San Francisco last week Daughter Hewitt brought suit for $500,000 damages against Mother Hewitt, two physicians and a State psychologist. She charged that her mother, greedy for the whole trust fund income, had had her sterilized. From the fantastic miasma of charges and counter-charges which promptly enveloped the case, the following facts emerged undisputed. On Aug. 14, 1934 Mrs. Mary S. Scally, a State Health Department psychologist, examined Ann Cooper Hewitt in San Francisco, gave the 20-year-old girl a mental age of 11. Dr. Tilton Edwin Tillman, Mrs. Hewitt's physician, recommended that Ann be sterilized as feebleminded. On Aug. 18, suffering from appendicitis, the girl was taken to San Francisco's Dante Sanatorium. In the course of an appendectomy the surgeon, Dr. Samuel George Boyd, at Mother Hewitt's request and without Daughter Hewitt's knowledge, performed a sterilization operation.

Daughter's Story. "My life has been terrible," sobbed Daughter Hewitt last week. "I was locked up all the time. I never had any boy friends or friends of any kind."

Last week in Trenton, N. J., where the Hewitt trust fund is administered, it was revealed that Mother Hewitt had asked for a nine-month extension of time to account for some $400,000 of Ann's share of the income which she had received as her daughter's guardian during her minority. In her formal complaint Daughter Hewitt charged that her mother had squandered that money in gambling and high living at Deauville, Monte Carlo, Villa d'Este, Agua Caliente. She further charged that her mother had deprived her of an education, dressed her poorly, kept her confined, continually abused her. "She never had any affection for me, none whatsoever," moaned the girl. ''I can't account for it. I tried in every way to gain her love, but she never liked me. ... She would drink all night and drag me out of bed at 4 in the morning to tell me if I'd die she would have all my money. . . . I'd go to her room and she'd be drunk and mistreat me, throwing up to me that I was a love child."

Daughter Hewitt claimed that the mental test had been given to her while she was suffering from appendicitis, that Dr. Tillman had told her it was merely to see "whether her heart could stand the ether for the operation." Some of the questions & answers on which Psychologist Scally based her mental rating: Q. What is the longest river in the U. S. A. I don't know. Q. How many years are there to a Presidential term? A. Two. Q. Why did the Pilgrims come to America? A. To make a pilgrimage.

In Hackensack, N. J., Dr. Lawrence Martin Collins, senior resident of the New Jersey State Hospital for the insane, declared that he had given Daughter Hewitt a thoroughgoing examination only last November, found her entirely free of mental taint. She could, he said, speak & write French fluently, speak Italian, and had read Shakespeare, Dickens, various histories and a book called The Philosophy of Life. "It is my belief," said he, "that this young girl has been conditioned during her early formative years by an unwholesome environment, and that any intellectual deficiencies which may be present are due not to any pathological defects, but to the lack of development of her intellectual faculties."

Mother's Story, Born Maryon Andrews, Mother Hewitt has since 1902 been married successively to a rich California doctor, a Manhattan broker. Inventor Hewitt, a British baron, a Newark, N. J. lawyer. She has lost one husband by death, two by divorce, two by annulment. After her divorce, year ago, she resumed the name of Hewitt. Last week she was registered in a Manhattan hotel as "Baroness d'Erlanger." To her daughter's monstrous charges against her, Mrs. Maryon Andrews Bruguiere Denning Hewitt d'Erlanger McCarter replied with a blanket denial of everything except the fact of sterilization. She made affidavit that she had always lavished love and luxury on her backward daughter, that Ann's lack of education had been her own wilful fault. She had been dismissed from various schools "for various reasons," from one Philadelphia school "because of an incident too scandalous to mention." Always Mother Hewitt had striven to break "certain unfortunate little habits" in Ann. A statement from the attending physician supported her assertion that Ann had been born two months prematurely, weighing only 3 1/2 lb., in the feverish Paris of August 1914, that only exceptional motherly care had kept her alive. How could she be accused of seeking her daughter's income after she had spent large sums to establish Ann's legitimacy in court when Father Hewitt's brothers and sisters contested his will? Furthermore, her daughter's chief charge was absurd since neither of them could ever touch the trust fund principal, which was reserved eventually for Cooper Union.

After hinting of the horrendous things she could tell if it were not for her desire to protect Ann's reputation, Mother Hewitt revealed "with hesitancy and regret" one of her daughter's delinquencies. At 17, said she, Ann had planned to elope with their chauffeur, written him shocking letters which unfortunately could not be produced in evidence since they were "of a character to justify their immediate destruction." Declared Mother Hewitt: "They contained locks of hair of Ann's and a great many references to things which should not be written about. I paid thousands of dollars in currency to secure these letters and to break up this infatuation. From time to time since that date, I have had to use special means for blocking what seemed to be infatuations on the part of Ann. Mostly these have occurred with men in uniform, regardless of their station." Back across the continent, from San Francisco, Daughter Hewitt snapped : "Mother has always felt that way about men in uniform, so naturally she expected me to. ... I was really forced to leave school because the fast conduct of my mother was open gossip. I could not gain entrance to good or fashionable schools because of her notorious past." Mayhem? In New Jersey it was revealed that Mother Hewitt had received some $9,000 of Daughter Hewitt's own income to pay for her sterilization. What surgical procedure had been used remained publicly in doubt. Commonest techniques of female sterilization are to remove the ovaries or to tie off or cauterize the Fallopian tubes. Ordinarily an abdominal incision is involved, though cauterization may be accomplished dangerously by entrance through the uterus. Drs. Tillman & Boyd stoutly maintained that they had respectively recommended and performed sterilization because Daughter Hewitt was feebleminded, declared their action was an everyday occurrence. "I didn't worry about the legal aspects of the thing," said Surgeon Boyd, "figuring a mother had the right to request such an operation, since the girl then was a minor."

After San Francisco legal authorities had suggested that they might have to show medical grounds for the operation, affidavits by Drs. Tillman & Boyd were discovered in New Jersey which asserted that after they had Daughter Hewitt on the operating table for an appendectomy, they discovered serious disturbances of her other organs which necessitated sterilization. Surgeon Boyd admitted that only a few weeks ago he had inserted in his private record of the case the words "organs infantile." Daughter Hewitt's attorney wanted to know why, if only an appendectomy was anticipated, Surgeon Boyd had made his incision in the centre of her abdomen instead of on the right side.

Last week California authorities were at sea concerning the legal aspects of Ann Cooper Hewitt's case. The State's 23-year-old sterilization law applies only to inmates of prisons and asylums. The legal adviser of the State Board of Medical Examiners was of the opinion that any parent may have a minor child sterilized, that the child's only recourse is to sue parent and physician within one year after attaining majority. Ann Hewitt's was the first such suit he knew of. At week's end an Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco offered, if Daughter Hewitt would back him up, to charge Mother Hewitt and the two physicians with mayhem, a felony punishable by one to 14 years imprisonment.

Of the heritage which joined with that of Peter Cooper, Abram Hewitt and Peter Cooper Hewitt to produce her, Ann Cooper Hewitt last week made the following affidavit, which was promptly confirmed by oldtime San Franciscans: "While my mother has always boasted of her Southern aristocracy, she was the daughter . . . of a horsecar driver in San Francisco who lived in a flat over a corner grocery store when she was a girl."

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