The Subterranean Brotherhood by Julian Hawthorne

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But the system, inwardly rotten, crumbles; and in the interval remaining
before it falls, the devil is getting in some of his most strenuous work.
I know, and rejoice, that enlightened and magnanimous methods are
obtaining in some places; hearty and brave men, here and there, are making
themselves wardens of the good in men instead of exploiters of the evil.
But in most prisons--among them, in that one down in Atlanta, whence I
come--the devil is laboring overtime, conscious that his time is short.

The worst criminals there--as God sees criminals--are not the men in
branded attire who sit in their cells and slouch about their sterile
tasks, but men who walk the ranges in uniform, and who sit in the rooms of
managers; for the crimes of the former are crimes of poverty or of
passion, but those of the latter are voluntary, unforced, spontaneous
crimes against human nature itself. They are upheld in high places; they
are fortified by difficulty of "technical proof"; they are guarded by the
menace of the spy system, and of criminal libel; but there is some reason
to think that their term is near.

But let us return to that queer Antechamber of the Devil at the corner of
Centre and Franklin Streets.

There is a picture by that strange and unmatchable English artist of the
Eighteenth Century, William Hogarth, of the mad house in London know as
Bedlam. If he were here, he might draw a companion picture of the Tombs.
The one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, irrational, futile
place, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civic
attitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. There is
nothing intelligent, purposeful, trenchant or radical about it; it is
planted in ignorance and grows by neglect.

The keepers of it are good natured people enough, with a sense of humor,
and free from trammels of principle, official or ethical. Their greatest
severity is exercised toward those who stand outside the gates and crave
permission to visit their friends within; these find the way arduous and
beset with pitfalls of "orders," hours, and other mystic rites, except
where they blow in miraculously, enforced by some breath from on high.

The inmates themselves, meantime, get on quite prosperously, so long at
least as their money or money's worth holds out. There is no license or
aptitude on their guardians' part to club them for relaxation's sake, or
to kick them into underground dungeons for "observation" (you will
understand that term by and by), or in any manner to hold a carnival of
wanton brutality with them. The general idea is merely to keep them
somewhere inside the building for the appointed or convenient time; beyond
that, a liberal view is adopted of the conditions of their sojourn. They
can buy eats to suit themselves, and have them served to them in their
cells; they can hold communication with one another and with the outer
world; I suppose they might wear evening dress after six o'clock if they
wanted to. They are not victims of despotic and irresponsible power, and
this is not only good for them, but also for the keepers, who are not led
into the degradation and monstrous inhumanities which the possession of
such power breeds in regular prisons.

Most of these prisoners expect to get out before long, either to go on to
more permanent quarters, or to be liberated altogether; many of them
emerge with comparatively small loss of social standing; for, indeed,
highly respectable persons occasionally stray in here. The Tombs is not
regarded as a final or fatal misfortune in a man's career. Yet it has its
drawbacks.

Dirt is one of the more obvious of these; I might call it filth, but it
depends on how one has been brought up. The impurity, at any rate, is not
confined to the surfaces of the cells, floors and walls, but it creeps
into the current language, and permeates the atmosphere. I am convinced
that there never has been or could be a houseful of people who hear or use
fouler and more unremitting obscenities than are those which flow
sewer-wise and unhindered from the lips of many of this population.

It dribbles and exgurgitates, black and noisome, at the slightest
provocation--nay, at none whatever, but with the delight of the past
master and artist in verbal nastiness, anxious to display his erudition.
It is a corruption of thought and expression so foul and concentrated, and
withal so limited in its vocabulary and scope, that it fastens itself in
the ear by a damnable iteration which no diverting of the attention can
overcome; and it announces a depth of moral and mental debasement which
seems as far from human as from merely animal possibilities; it is of the
uttermost soundings of Tophet, and would probably be modified by
fresh-heated gridirons even there.

This speech, or verbosity rather--for it has none of the logic or
continuity of mortal utterances--does not continue uninterruptedly during
the day, but observes special hours, when the guards are paying even less
than their usual attention to the vagaries of their charges. Of these
periods, the hours of early dawn are the most fertile.

When I dwelt in the environs of the city, it was my fortunate habit, in
summer, to awake at dawn, just before sunrise, when the wide pasture
outside my window was still obscure with the shadows of night, but the sky
had begun to kindle with the splendors of day. In a group of darksome
trees beside a little stream two hundred paces distant a song thrush was
wont to trill forth the holy soul of awakening nature in such a paean of
deathless Pan as inspired John Keats to utter the melodies of his magic
ode. It consecrated the footsteps of the approaching sun, and the hearer
was borne back on its swelling current to those pure early aeons of the
human race, when love was the lord of life and innocence went forth
crowned with rapture.

For this hymn of the primal gods was now substituted the hideous strophes
and antistrophes of the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one
performer after another took up the strain, to and fro and from upper to
lower tiers of cells, one awaited some seismic cataclysm to put an end to
it and them; and the pauses of it were punctuated by bursts of dreary
laughter, applausive of the incredible gushings of blighting depravity.
They were the heralds of the prison day--the tune to which its steps were
set. After it was over--when the yawning keeper had rattled the bars and
threatened a twelve-hour close confinement to the perpetrators--one was
amazed to identify with the latter persons outwardly in human shape,
instead of malformed and sooty fiends from the bottomless abyss. I doubt
whether anything to range with this occurs in any other criminal cauldron
in the world; and therefore, with stopped nostrils, have I tried to give
some faint adumbration of its character.

The head keeper of the menagerie I saw but once or twice; he was of
Falstaffian proportions, with a clear and steady masculine eye and a
demeanor of genial and complacent authority. He knew what and when to see
and not to see, and had his own measure of the legalities and the
proprieties. Little gusts of investigations and reforms passed by him as
the eddying dust of the street sweeps by granite skyscrapers. "_J'y
suis--J'y reste!_" was his motto. The subordinates had a general Irish
complexion to my feeling; they were there to gather tips under the
humorous guise of marshals of order. They were affable and easy, going as
far as they could with only so much show of resistance as might lend more
value to their yielding.

The prisoners were as heterogeneous as the contents of a rag-picker's
auction. Yet they associated with little friction, herding uniformly kind
with kind, only rarely lending themselves to transient ructions. They
played little jokes on each other; a fat and serious captive was sitting
of an evening at his cell door, absorbed in the perusal of a wide-spread
newspaper; a gnome-like passerby in the corridor lit an unsuspected match,
and suddenly the newspaper was a sheet of flame.

There were uglier spectacles; we had among us a fresh murderer, who after
killing his wife had retained grudge enough against her to hack off her
head. He kept darkly to his cell, sitting hour after hour with his head
leaning on his hand, and eyes unswervingly downcast. His crime was not
popular in that company, and none sought his companionship. At the other
end of the scale were dazed, foreign creatures, guilty of they knew not
what, gropingly and vainly striving to understand and to make themselves
understood. There was the scum of the gutters; and there were men of
intellect and high breeding, arming their hearts to resist shame and
despair, and bending to soften the plight of children of misery below
them.

The soul of the new comer blenches and shivers occasionally as he
contemplates the grisly, crazy scene, and thinks of all that menaces the
women at home. And when, in the visiting hours, the women come and stare
palely at the faces of those they love between the bars, wishing to cheer
them, but appalled and made giddy by the abject and sordid horror of the
solid fact, those who stare back at them and try to smile feel the grating
of the wheels of life on the harsh bottom of things. But a man's manhood
must not give way; there must be no triumph over him of these assaults and
underminings of the enemy. Soul gazes at soul; but the talk is superficial
and trivial. He is drowning in the gulf, and she stands yearning on the
brink, but there shall be no vain outcries or outstretched arms. It is a
condition wrought by men, not countenanced by God, and the spirit must
command the flesh to endure.

Punch the button and listen once more to the refrain--"You should have
thought of that before!" But can our posterity ever be induced to believe
that such inhumanities could have been committed in the divine name of
Law!

I am not qualified to write the epic of the Devil's Antechamber; I abode
there but ten days, as we reckon time. On a cool and clear Easter Sunday
morning the summons came to go forth to further adventures. Accompanied by
three deputies, but free of the Henkel handcuffs, we passed the gates and
trod the sunny pavements. Not a cloud in the blue sky, nor a taint upon
the pure wings of the free air. None that saw us pass suspected our
invisible fetters. Yet to me at least the thought that had ministered to
me in the actual courtroom and prison, that the fetters were a dream and
freedom the reality, was not accessible then. The absence of physical
bonds seemed to render the imprisonment more, not less undeniable.

But we stepped out briskly, and breathed while we might.

III

THE ROAD TO OBLIVION

Five of us stood on the platform of the Pennsylvania station; one stayed
behind as the train moved out. He was the answer to the question, "_Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes?_"--"Who shall watch the watchman?" Our two
marshals were to see that we did not escape; he was to see that they saw.
But his function ended when the departing whistle blew. He was a lean,
pale, taciturn personage in black; Marshal Henkel had perhaps substituted
him for the handcuffs. There was nothing between us and freedom now but
our brace of tipstaves, the train crew, the public in and out of the
train, the train itself moving at a fifty mile an hour pace, the law, and
our own common sense. Moreover, we had decided to see the adventure
through. Something more than nine hundred miles, and twenty-six hours, lay
between us and Atlanta.

The elder of our two guardians was a short but wide gentleman of
forty-five, of respectable attire and aspect, as of one who had seen the
world and had formed no flattering opinion of its quality, yet had not
permitted its imperfections to overcome his native amiable tolerance. He
was prepared to take things and men easy while they came that way, but
could harden and insist upon due occasion. Human nature--those varieties
of it, at least, which are not incompatible with criminal tendencies--was
his "middle name" (as he might have phrased it), so that in his proper
social environment he was not apt to make social mistakes. This
environment, however, could not but be constituted, in the main, of
convicts either actual or potential; and there was probably no citizen,
however high his standing or spotless his ostensible record, who in this
official's estimate might not have prison gates either before him or
behind him, or both. To be able to maintain, under the shadow of
convictions so harsh, a disposition so sunny, was surely an admirable
trait of character.

His assistant in the present job was still in the morning stage of his
career; a big, red-headed, rosy-cheeked, and obtrusively brawny youth of
five and twenty. He might be regarded as the hand of steel in the glove of
velvet of the combination. He may have carried bracelets of steel in his
rear pockets; but his associate earnestly assured me that such was far
from being the case. "I don't mind telling you the truth, Mr. Hawthorne,"
he confided to me with a companionable twist of the near corner of his
mouth, "I'd as soon think of cuffs, for gentlemen like you two, as nothin'
in the world! Why, it's like this--as far as I'm concerned, I'd just put a
postage-stamp on you and ship you off by yourselves--I'd know you'd turn
up all right of yourselves at the other end! That's me; but of course, we
has to foller the regulations; so there you are!" And the ruddy youngster
stretched his herculean limbs and grinned, as who should say, "Cuffs!
Hell! What d'yer know about that? Ain't I good for ten of yer?"

As the comely Pennsylvania landscape slid by, my friend of a lifetime and
I looked out on it with eyes that felt good-by. For us, the broad earth,
bright sunshine and fresh air were a phantasmagoria--we had no further
part in them. From college days onward, through just fifty years of life,
we had traveled almost side by side, giving the world the best that was in
us, not without honor; and now our country had stamped us as felons and
was sending us to jail. It had suddenly discovered in us a social and
moral menace to its own integrity and order, and had put upon us the
stigma of rats who would gnaw the timbers of the ship of state and corrupt
its cargo. The end of it all was to be a penitentiary cell, and disgrace
forever, to us and to ours.

But was the disgrace ours and theirs? When you kick a mongrel cur it lies
down on its back and holds up its paws, whining. But the thoroughbred acts
quite otherwise; you may kill it, but you cannot conquer it. We would not
lie supine under the assault of the blundering bully. Disgrace cannot be
inflicted from without,--it can only come to a man from within. And the
disgrace which is attempted unjustly must sooner or later be turned back
on those who attempted it; the men whom our country had deputed to handle
the machinery of law had blundered, and had convicted and condemned those
who had done no wrong. I had never felt or expressed anything stronger
than contempt for any particular persons actively concerned in our
indictment and trial--the pack that had snapped and snarled so busily at
our heels. Till the last I had believed that their purpose could not be
accomplished,--that the nation would awake to what was being done in the
nation's court, under sanction of the nation's laws. The public must at
last realize the moral impossibility that men who had all that is dearest
to men to lose, should throw it away for such motives as were ascribed to
us--ascribed, but, as we felt, not established. And when the public
realized that, thought I, they would perceive that the shame which the
incompetent handling of the legal machinery aimed to fix on us must
finally root itself not in us but in the public; since the world and
posterity, which, more for our names' sake than for our own, would note
what was being done, would not distinguish between the employee and the
master--the country and the country's attorneys, and would hold the former
and not the latter accountant.

I was mistaken; the public took the thing resignedly to say the least. And
though I consented to no individual animosities--for individuals in such
transactions are but creatures of their trade, subdued to what they work
in, like the dyer's hand--I could not so easily absolve the impersonal
master. The fault inhered of course not in any grudge of the community
against us, but in the prevalent civic neglect (in which, in my time, I
had participated with the rest) of duties to the state, theoretically
impersonal, but which cannot proceed otherwise than on personal accounts.

Man is frail; but, next to sincere religious conviction, no principle
exists so strong to control him as _noblesse oblige_--the impulse to keep
faith and to deal honestly imposed not by his individual conscience alone,
but by the pure traditions of his inheritance. The man who has the honor
of his forefathers to preserve--an honor which may be a part of the
nation's honor--is a hundred-fold better fortified against base action
than is the son of thieves, or even of nobodies. The latter may find
heroism enough to resist temptation, but the former is not tempted; he
dismisses the thing at the start as preposterous. It is no credit to him
to put such temptation aside, but it is black infamy and treachery to make
terms with it. If he do make terms with it, no punishment can be too
severe--though I take leave to say that the external penalties which state
or nation can inflict are trivial compared with those deadly ones which
torture him from within; but before crediting him with having yielded, the
state or nation should not merely assume his innocence--a stipulation
which our law indeed makes, but which is notoriously disregarded by
prosecuting attorneys--but should weigh and sift with the most anxious and
jealous scrutiny anything and everything which might appear inconsistent
therewith. A son of a thief who steals does but follow his inborn
instinct; but a thief whose ancestors were gentlemen is a monster, and
monsters are rare.

In England and the other older countries, the principle of _noblesse
oblige_ still has weight with the public as well as with the individual;
here, the welter of democracy, which has not evolved into distinct human
form, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see a
scoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate the
public mania for success in the form of concrete wealth which multiplies
inducements to crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish acceptance of
such inducements, with the result that while in its practical life it
rushes in one direction, it erects in its courts a fantastic counsel of
perfection which points in a direction precisely opposite. Our law tends
not merely to the penalizing of real crimes, but to the manufacture of
artificial ones; and the simple standard of natural or intuitive morals is
bewilderingly complicated with a regimen of patent nostrums, conceived in
error and administered in folly.

Sitting in the car window with my friend, I revolved these things, while
the sunny landscape wheeled past outside, and our guardians chewed gum in
the adjoining section. After all was said and done, amid whatever was
strange and improbable, he and I were going to the penitentiary in the
guise of common swindlers. A pioneer on the western plains, in the old
days, riding homeward after several hours' absence, found his cabin a
charred ruin, his property destroyed, his wife lying outraged with her
throat cut, his children huddled among the debris with their brains dashed
out. Sitting on his bronco, he contemplated the immeasurable horror of the
catastrophe, and finally muttered, "This is ridiculous!"

"This is ridiculous!" I remarked to my companion; and he consented with a
smile; when language goes bankrupt, the simple phrase is least inadequate.
"We may as well have lunch," he said; and we rose and journeyed to the
rear of the train, sedulously attended by our deputies. The spontaneous
routine of the physical life is often a valuable support to the spiritual,
reminding the latter that we exist from one moment to another, and do
wisely to be economical of forecasts or retrospects. We journeyed back,
through innocent scenes of traveling life, to the smoking compartment,
which happened to be vacant; and under the consoling influence of tobacco
our elder companion sought to lighten the shadows of destiny.

"You gentlemen," he said, uttering smoke enjoyingly through mouth and
nostrils, "don't need to worry none. It's like this: the judge figured to
let you off easy. He's bound, of course, to play up to the statute by
handin' you your bit, but, to start with, he cuts it down all he can, and
then what does he do but date you back four months to the openin' of the
trial! All right! After four months you're eligible for parole on a year
and a day's sentence, ain't yer? Your trial began on November 25th, and
to-day is the 24th of March. That means, don't it, that you make your
application the very next thing after they gets you on the penitentiary
register to-morrer! Why, look-a-here," he continued, warming to his theme,
and becoming, like Gladstone as depicted by Beaconsfield, intoxicated with
the exuberance of his own verbosity, "it wouldn't surprise me, not a bit,
sir, if you and your mate was to slip back with us on the train to-morrer
evenin', and the whole bunch of us be back in little old New York along
about Wednesday! That's right! An' what I says is, that ain't no
punishment--that's no more'n takin' a pleasure trip down South, at the
suitable time o' year! An' I guess I been on the job long enough to know
what I'm talkin' about!"

We guessed he knew that he was talking benevolent fictions; and yet there
was plausibility in his argument. The law did not allow parole on
sentences of a year or under, but on anything over one year, a convict was
eligible, and our sentence of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonth
therefore brought us within this provision. In imposing that extra day,
the judge could hardly have been motived by anything except the intention
to open this door to us; and although the regular meeting of the parole
board at the prison was not due just then, we were informed that an extra
meeting might be summoned at any time. The board consisted of the warden
of the prison, the doctor, and the official who presided at all parole
board meetings at the various federal penitentiaries throughout the
country,--Robert LaDow. The law declares that a majority of the board
decides the applications that come before it; and as two members of the
board make a quorum, it seemed obvious that the warden and the doctor of
Atlanta Penitentiary would serve our turn--if they wanted to. Mr. LaDow,
of course, might be appealed to by telegraph if expedient.

Turning the thing over, therefore, with the cozening rogue in front of us
drawing our attention to the buttered side as often as it appeared, we
could hardly avoid the conclusion that there was a possibility of his
being right. We might be required to remain in Atlanta barely long enough
to don a suit of prison clothing and to have our bertillons made, and
forthwith make a triumphal return home, with our scarlet sins washed white
as snow. Of such an imprisonment it might be said, as wrote the poet of
the baby that died at birth,

"If it so soon was to be done for,
One wonders what it was begun for,"

but it would not be the first thing that we had noticed in Federal
administration of justice which might have been similarly criticized.

My allusion to this subject here is only by way of leit-motif for a
thorough discussion hereafter. The juggling with the parole law, by the
Department of Justice and the parole boards, is one of the most
indefensible and cruel practical jokes that "the authorities" play upon
prisoners. It caused two deaths by slow torture while I was at Atlanta,
as shall be shown in the proper place; and there is no reason to suppose
that the percentage at other prisons was not as large or larger. The
sufferings short of death that are due to it cannot be calculated. A
practical joke?--yes; but there is a practical purpose back of it. The
miserable men who are practised upon by this means, helpless but hoping,
are led to believe that they may buy freedom at the price of treachery
to their fellows. Can it be credited that a convict in his cell, with
perhaps years of living death before him,--you do not yet know what that
means, but if I live to tell this story, you will be able to guess at
its significance before we part--will refuse the opportunity offered to
end it at once in return for merely speaking one or two names?--a
convict--a creature outlawed, crushed, damned, dehumanized,
despised,--can we look from him for a heroism, a martyrdom, which might
shed fresh honor on the highest name in the community? I confess that I
would not have looked for it a year ago, and I doubt whether you look
for it now. But, I have to report, with joy in the goodness and
selflessness in men whom you and I have presumed to look down upon, that
in very few instances that I have heard of, and in almost none that I
know, has a convict thus terribly tempted even hesitated to answer--NO!
But many an old and cherished prejudice will begin painfully to gnaw its
way out of your complacent mind before we are done.

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