University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: CONVICT CULTURE IN THE FIRST ERA OF MASS IMPRISONMENT, 1919-1940

ALEX TEPPERMAN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To my wonderful wife, the best dogs in the world, and others

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would be remiss not to begin by thanking Dr. Jeffrey Adler, my advisor and academic mentor since 2011. Dr. Adler has given me more of his time and patience than I have had any right to expect and has been an outstanding intellectual steward for seven years. He was the first person I made contact with at the University of Florida when I inquired about transferring from the University of Rochester in 2009 and it has been my great pleasure to develop as a scholar under his tutelage. Dr. Joe Spillane has similarly been a powerful force in my development, serving at various times as my teacher, my advisor, and my career counselor.

Success has many fathers and I would like to acknowledge other UF faculty members who have been critical to my success. Dr. Elizabeth Dale has been a continuously supportive presence in my time at Florida, not only serving as a valued committee member, but as a frequent and effective advocate for my best interests while

Graduate Coordinator. Dr. Ben Wise was my much-needed square peg, pushing me toward considering fiction and poetry as constructive elements of academic work (I have often thought about J. Alfred Prufrock in the last two years, much to my benefit as a historian). Similarly, Dr. Jodi Lane's insights about the nature of academia, research, and job hunting have always been candid, hilarious, and constructive.

In addition to my University of Florida community, I cannot emphasize enough the influence Rosemary Gartner and Ashley Rubin have had on my academic development. Rosemary took me on as a student at the University of Toronto's Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies at a time when I felt disillusioned by academia.

I will never be able to repay her fully for helping me rediscover my intellectual curiosity.

As for Ashley, I made the life-changing decision to reach out to her in 2013, when we

met for a ten minute conversation at the SSHA annual meeting. Space limitations and my natural disposition prevent me from explaining in any meaningful detail how critical that decision was, and how important Ashley has been to my development as a scholar in the years I have known her, but I could not have succeeded in the academy without her support. For that reason and others, she will always be a dear friend.

Learning is not always a top-down experience, of course, and I have taken as much from my peers at the University of Florida Department of History as from any faculty member. I could not ask for a better community in which to learn, and I would like to give specific kudos to Mallory Szymanski, Chris Woolley, Rob Taber, Adrienne

DeNoyelles, Andrew Welton, Kyle Bridge, Lexi Baldacci, Michael Gennaro and Alana

Lord, Amanda Beyer-Purvis, Brenden Kennedy and Erin Zavitz, Brandon Jett, Johanna

Mellis and Greg Mason, Elyssa Gage, Matt Simmons, Derek Boetcher, Matthew White,

Jennifer Lyon, Nick Foreman, and the first two friends I made within the department,

Chris Salamone and Matthew Delvaux. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge the incredible experiences I have had knowing Hazel Phillips, Paul Ortiz, Katheryn Russell-

Brown, Steve Noll, Sean Adams, and Michelle Campos, as well Michael Jarvis at the

University of Rochester and Rick Halpern at the University of Toronto.

Lastly, as always and above all else, my wife Elena deserves all of the love and admiration I could ever afford her and more. And double for the dogs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 9

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 11

ABSTRACT ...... 12

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 14

Literature Review ...... 24 Methods and Sources ...... 28 Outline ...... 31

2 THE OLD NEW PENOLOGY: REIMAGINING THE PRISON, 1870-1940 ...... 35

The New Penology ...... 36 Brockway's Reformatory ...... 40 Progressive Penology ...... 42 New and Enduring Practices ...... 45 New York's Ambitious Failure ...... 48 A Very Modern Crime War ...... 53 World War One Fallout ...... 53 Anti-Crime Measures and the Punitive Turn ...... 56 Crime Commissions ...... 58 Federal Law and Order ...... 60 Federal Laws and Policies...... 63 The Great Experiment ...... 64 Crime Fighting in the Great Depression ...... 66 Penal Adaptations in the 1930s ...... 67 Finding the Capacity of Capacity ...... 69 Laying Off Prison Labor ...... 74 Conclusion ...... 79

3 DOWNWARDLY MOBILE MEN: CONVERGING AND DIVERGING PRISONER EXPERIENCES IN THE FREE WORLD ...... 83

Free World Identities ...... 86 Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity Behind Bars ...... 87 Moving Within the System ...... 91 From Place to Place In American Life ...... 96 Interwar Urban Life ...... 99 The Crisis of Pluralism...... 103 The New Americans ...... 105

The Great Migration ...... 108 The American Prisoner Class ...... 110 Class, Work, and Unemployment ...... 111 Convict Work Histories ...... 113 Divided Brotherhood ...... 119 Race and Ethnic Divisions in the Workplace ...... 119 Labor Identity Behind Bars ...... 127 Conclusion ...... 130

4 YARD WORK: THE IMPORTANCE OF PRISON RECREATION SPACES ...... 140

Muscular Christianity and the Playground Movement ...... 145 Sport and Americanization ...... 151 The Evolution of Prison Sport and the Recreation Yard...... 154 Developments in the Late Nineteenth Century ...... 157 Breakthroughs in the Early Twentieth Century ...... 159 Sports, Recreation, and the Interwar Prison ...... 161 The War on Coddling ...... 165 Baseball, The Penitentiary’s First National Pastime ...... 169 The Origins of Organized Prison Baseball...... 172 Marketing the Prison with Baseball ...... 176 The Racial Politics of Prison Baseball ...... 178 The Culture of the Yard...... 182 Making Due Together ...... 184 Space for Intimacy ...... 188 Conclusion ...... 192

5 THE SIGH OF THE OPPRESSED CREATURE: INMATE REBELLION, 1929- 1940 ...... 198

The Age of Revolutions, 1929-1940 ...... 201 Viral Rebellions ...... 206 The Optics of Resistance ...... 209 Reading Rebellion ...... 212 The Right to Leave Prison ...... 213 A National Debate ...... 217 The Banality of Radical Rebellion ...... 220 Moving Language ...... 221 Learning to Code ...... 225 Rightness ...... 228 Theory and Practice ...... 231 Behavioral Changes, Big and Small ...... 233 The Leavenworth Strike of 1941 ...... 237 On the Eve of Infamy ...... 238 A Motley Crew ...... 240 Prison Classmates ...... 243 Conclusion ...... 246

6 CONCLUSION ...... 253

A LIST OF ARCHIVES ...... 260

B LIST OF NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES ...... 261

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 263

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 294

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

2-1 34 Largest Prison Populations in the United States, 1915 and 1929, By 1929 Population ...... 82

3-1 Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number ...... 132

3-2 Diversity of Country and Selected Major Prisons, By Race and Nativity, Using the Meyer & McIntosh Index of Ethnic Diversity...... 132

3-3 Leavenworth Demographics (%) ...... 132

3-4 Auburn Demographics (%) ...... 133

3-5 Angola Demographics (%) ...... 133

3-6 Common Systems Represented in Folsom Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment ...... 134

3-7 Common Systems Represented in Angola Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment ...... 134

3-8 Common Systems Represented in Auburn Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment ...... 134

3-9 Common Systems Represented in Leavenworth Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment 135

3-10 Countries With Significant (1%) Immigrant Representation Within Select Institutions ...... 135

3-11 Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Folsom (1919-1940) ...... 135

3-12 Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Leavenworth (1919-1940) ...... 136

3-13 Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Auburn (1919-1940) ...... 136

3-14 Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Angola (1919-1935) ...... 136

3-15 Breakdown of Occupations By Category, New Mexico State Prison (1919- 1940) ...... 137

3-16 Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Western State (1919-1940) ...... 137

3-17 Breakdown of Occupations By Category and Prison (1919-1940)...... 137

3-18 Race Breakdowns By Institution (1919-1940) ...... 138

3-19 Leavenworth Immigration, By Census Year ...... 138

3-20 Auburn Immigration, By Census Year ...... 138

3-21 Western State Prison, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period ...... 138

3-22 New Mexico State Prison, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period ...... 139

3-23 Angola Prison Farm, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period and Proportion of All Offences ...... 139

3-24 Auburn State Prison, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period ...... 139

4-1 Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number ...... 196

4-2 Yard Infractions, Percentage of Population and Race ...... 196

4-3 Yard Infractions, Percentage of Population and Age Cohort ...... 196

4-4 Yard Infractions, Percentage of Population and Sentence Length ...... 196

4-5 Leavenworth and Auburn Infractions and Yard Infractions ...... 197

5-1 Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number ...... 248

5-3 Trends in Sentencing, By Prison and Period ...... 250

5-4 Trends in Offence Type, By Prison and Period...... 250

5-5 Breakdown of Conduct Infraction Types, By Prison and Period ...... 250

5-6 Breakdown of Angola Conduct Infraction Types, By Period ...... 251

5-7 Breakdown of Auburn Inmate Infractions, By Age Cohort ...... 251

5-8 Breakdown of Leavenworth Inmate Infractions, By Age Cohort...... 251

5-9 Breakdown of Auburn Inmate Infractions, By Race ...... 251

5-10 Breakdown of Leavenworth Inmate Infractions, By Race ...... 251

5-11 Breakdown of Inmate Infractions, By Prison and Sentence Length ...... 252

5-12 Breakdown of Auburn Inmate Infractions, By Offence ...... 252

6-1 Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number ...... 259

6-2 Sample Data on Prison Tattoos, 1919-1940 ...... 259

6-3 Most Common Tattoo Themes, 1919-1938 ...... 259

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

NASB RG129 Records of the U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, CA 1938-63 (RG AZWF 1938- 129), National Archives at San Francisco, San Bruno, CA 1963

NAKC RG129 Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Penitentiary LVCF 1895- Leavenworth 1895-1957 (RG 129), National Archives at Kansas 1957 City, Kansas City, MO.

NASE RG129 McNeil Island Penitentiary, Records of Prisoners Received, 1887- MIPR 1887- 1951 (RG 129), National Archives at Seattle, Seattle, WA. 1951

NYSA ICFACF Inmate Case Files, Auburn Correctional Facility, 1914-1956, New 1914-1956 York State Archives, Albany, NY

PHMC S15.128 Pennsylvania, Descriptive Lists, 1887-1954, Prison Population RG 15 WSP Records, Western State Penitentiary, Series 15.128. Department of 1887-1954 Justice, RG 15. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, PA

NMSA PCRIF Prison and Correctional Records, Inmate Files, 1905-1958 (1970- 1905-1958 006), New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe, NM

FS LSPR CIR Louisiana State Penitentiary Records, 1866-1963, Correctional 1866-1963 Institution Records Family Search. Salt Lake City, UT

CASA R136 California, Department of Corrections. Folsom State Prison ICF 1879-1949 Records, 1879-1949, ID #R136, Sacramento, CA

CASA R135 California, Department of Corrections. San Quentin State Prison PRSQ 1850- Records, 1850-1950, ID #R135, Sacramento, CA 1950

IAHS CRC Iowa, Governor. Consecutive Registers of Convicts, 1867-1960. 1867-1960 Iowa State Historical Society, Des Moines, IA.

TXSA DCJ Convict Record Ledgers, 1849-1954; Texas Department of Criminal CRL 1849- Justice, 1849-2004; Texas State Library and Archives, Austin, TX 1954

ACAEO American Correctional Association Archives. ACA Executive Office. Alexandria, VA.

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: CONVICT CULTURE IN THE FIRST ERA OF MASS IMPRISONMENT, 1919-1940

Alex Tepperman

August 2018

Chair: Jeffrey Adler Major: History

The interwar period (1919-1940) saw the United States’ greatest ever expansion of prison populations to that point. The combination of a national crime panic, growing fears of Communist saboteurs, the reemergence of nativist and white nationalist movements, a barrage of new federal laws, the resurgence of national temperance, and the continued decline of rehabilitative penology put unprecedented numbers of people into overcrowded prison warehouses. As incarceration rates skyrocketed throughout the

1920s and 1930s, the Great Migration, a national economic depression, continued advances in mass transportation, and other push and pull factors moved economically marginalized groups around the country in search of work. As a result, itinerant men frequently found their way in and out of local jails, state prisons, and federal penitentiaries throughout the nation.

The diverse male populations that moved about the country, weaving through the penal landscape, inadvertently made prisons more racially, ethnically, nationally, and religiously heterogeneous. The forced closeness of interwar prison life also helped break down social distance, as convicts of different backgrounds spotted overlapping cultural traits in one-another, developed shared norms and values, and collectively

resisted their shared antagonist, the administration. Between 1929 and 1941, this resistance took the form of the largest wave of national prison uprisings in American history. Tens of thousands of men of all races and ethnicities engaged in massive displays of resistive engagement at 51 different institutions throughout the Great

Depression, demanding more lenient treatment, better food, privileges, and other concessions.

Historians tend to situate discussions of a national convict identity in the Prisoner

Rights Movement of the 1960s, though some earlier discussions speak to the presence of middle-class organizers in federal prisons throughout World War II. In the interwar years, however, the forced closeness of mixed populations, the development of a

"Convict Code," and the resulting wave of coordinated riots signified the emergence of a national convict culture and political ethos by the 1930s. This project advocates moving historical discussions of national convict culture back at least two decades, situating that notion in the fluid, complex, and cooperative environments of the interwar prison.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

On May 23, 2011, the United States Supreme Court formally acknowledged the dangers of penal overpopulation, as the Brown v. Plata decision saw the highest court in the country call on the state of California to reduce its prison population to 137.5% of design capacity at most. Within two months, as if the Supreme Court’s ruling validated radical convict agitation, Golden State inmates organized the largest coordinated inmate strikes in decades. In July, 6,600 inmates at 13 California prisons undertook a three- week hunger strike to protest excesses in solitary confinement and, in July 2013, many of the same inmates organized a hunger strike for 29,000 prisoners across the state, comprising approximately 15% of the entire California prison system. Soon, those efforts crossed state lines and, in September 2016, 24,000 inmates from 24 states undertook a coordinated labor stoppage to protest forced prison labor, poor pay, and substandard living conditions. The prisoner rebellions quickly splintered and spread, as correctional centers in Massachusetts, Delaware, Kansas, and the Carolinas saw violent uprisings of their own in 2017.1

1 "A Supreme Court Ruling on Prison Crowding," New York Times, May 31, 2011, A22. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (1634238981); "California Inmates Fast to Protest Isolation Cells," New York Times, July 8, 2011, A16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (1620486825); Michael Montgomery, “Prison Officials Say Conditions Will Improve, Inmates Ready to Strike Again,” National Public Radio/KQED, accessed May 1, 2018. https://www.kqed.org/news/37436/officials-prison-isolation-units-focus-of-reform; "On Day 2, California Prison Hunger Strike Has 29,000 Participants," Contra Costa (CA) Times, July 1, 2013, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (1399525217); "They're In Prison and They're On Strike: More Inmates Protest Dismal Conditions By Refusing To Work or Eat," Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2016, A1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (1834705996); "Fire, Riots Triggered at El Dorado," Topeka (KS) Capital Journal, November 2, 2017, 1, accessed May 1, 2018. https://www.questia.com/newspaper/1P4- 1958430791/fire-riots-triggered-at-el-dorado; "Thin Ranks Raise Risk for Prisons," Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2017, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (1905347376).

This recent wave of inmate rebellion was not an aberration, as several such periods dotted twentieth century penal politics. Between 1951 and 1954, for instance, the country grappled with dozens of riots, the most famous being the inmate takeover of

Michigan State Prison in 1952. The most widely remembered period of sustained rebellion, however, stretched from the late 1960s to the middle of the 1970s, during which American convicts made international news at New York's Auburn Prison in 1968 and Attica Prison in 1971, California's Soledad Prison in 1970 and San Quentin Prison in 1973, and Texas's Huntsville Unit in 1974.2

Those events have occupied a central place in historical discussions of the

American prisoner as a political actor over the last four decades and, much as the ongoing crisis of mass imprisonment has framed the uprisings of recent years, the inmate rioting of the 1960s and 1970s symbolized the importance of ideas that reached beyond the walls of the prison. Events such as the Attica and Soledad rebellions, couched as they were in legal and revolutionary language, emerged out of the Civil

Rights Movement and aimed at alleviating material deprivation, reversing racially discriminatory practices, and promoting legal reform in representation and parole.3 That the organizers of the national prison strike of 2016 dedicated their work stoppage to the

2 Some of the more significant works on this subject include Bert Useem and Peter Kimball, States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots, 1971-1986 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Vintage Books, 2017); Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); William Harper, Eleven Days in Hell: The 1974 Carrasco Prison Siege in Huntsville, Texas (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2004).

3 There is a very large literature on racial politics within the American prison, prisoners’ rights, and the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the most significant monographs in the field are Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Attica uprising of forty-five years earlier was both fitting and ironic, then.4 It was fitting because the Attica uprising continues to hold immense power in popular and academic discussions of inmate resistance, including Heather Ann Thompson's 2017 Pulitzer

Prize-winning for Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising in 1971 and Its Legacy, which

Vintage Books published in the wake of the coordinated strike’s national headlines. It was ironic, however, given that the uprising at Attica was largely a response by Black inmates to the dogged racial discrimination in the still-segregated New York prison system. Alternatively, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) that planned and executed much of the 2016 strike, with the aid of the Free Alabama

Movement, was passionately intersectional, aligned as it was with the modern incarnation of the socialist Industrial Workers of the World.5

The powerful image of Attica strikers, fists raised and hackles up, still graces the

IWOC's website as a tribute to the revolutionary spirit of the 2016 movement.6 However,

Attica differed significantly from more recent agitations. The death of the activist George

Jackson, the rise of the Nation of Islam within prisons, and the strength of radical Civil

Rights activism contextualized the Attica uprising as a deeply racialized activity.7 The most recent wave of inmate rebellions, on the other hand, emerged out of the conscious acknowledgment of a common inmate experience that reached across demographic

4 IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (website), accessed May 5, 2018, https://iwoc.noblogs.org.

5 Ibid.

6 Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (website), accessed May 5, 2018, https://incarceratedworkers.org.

7 For work on the causes of the Attica uprising, see Malcolm Bell, The Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Cover-Up, and the Pursuit of Justice (New York: Grove Press, 1985); Tom Wicker, A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975).

difference, even if it also emphasized the deep importance of entrenched racism in the criminal justice system. The “all for all” spirit of 2016 was catholic in its approach, deliberately involving inmates of all types. In certain important ways, the 2016 strikes more closely resembled a wave of prison uprisings that preceded the Attica uprisings by nearly half a century.

The Great Depression (1929-1941) saw the longest extended period of prison disturbances in American history, with at least 51 major uprisings that destabilized institutions at the local, county, state, and federal level. Beginning with major rebellions at New York’s Clinton and Auburn Prisons in 1929, inmate uprisings swept through prisons across the country. From the urban northeast to the Deep South to the Pacific coast, from the supposedly impregnable confines of Alcatraz Penitentiary to Newark's easily breached Essex County Detention Home, from Illinois's modernist Stateville

Correctional Center to Philadelphia's aged Eastern State Penitentiary, inmates around the United States burned down buildings, took hostages, staged sit-down strikes, and shut down prisons en masse. Far from impotent expressions of generalized anxiety, prisoners often accompanied these shutdowns with clear, written demands and grievances for greater privileges and protections, signs that the rebellions of the 1930s were fully realized political acts.8

There are a number of possible explanations for why the mass uprisings of the

Great Depression do not occupy academic and popular discussions of prisoner rebellion to the same extent as the disturbances of the 1970s. The fact that the 1930s exists as a more distant memory than the 1970s may mean the Great Depression feels less

8 See Chapter 5 for a thorough discussion of this subject.

present to many Americans. Relatedly, the fact that the earlier rebellions occurred outside of the broader framework of the Civil Rights Movement may contribute to a relative lack of attention, as the events remain less thematically familiar to modern audiences who still feel the political legacy of the mid-century push for racial equality in the age of Black Lives Matter. Perhaps most critically, however, is that, despite having many of the elements of a political movement, inmates of the Great Depression did not seem to always see themselves as actors in a broader political struggle. For that reason, they did not promote dynamic figureheads, cultivate reliable allies in the press, or develop clear means for sustaining their efforts over time through mass media and the courts. Rather, their efforts organically snowballed on a grassroots level and, once

World War II began, mostly fell apart. The few academic accounts of Depression-era prison rebellions have, in turn, struggled to contextualize penal politics of the time.

Some have even argued that the dozens of coordinated riots of the 1930s were pre- political outliers, and that the formation of a national political identity among convicts did not emerge until the Second World War. Such a view, however, supposes that the origins of a collective prisoner identity emerged out of a small cohort of middle-class conscientious objectors who inhabited federal prisons throughout the mid-1940s, and that the prison strikes of previous generations were spontaneous and atomized, notions that the historical record seems not to reflect.9

9 Marie Gottschalk makes the most direct case in this regard, stating that, prior to World War II, inmates "did not have a message – or the means to deliver a message – that would resonate politically with a wider audience beyond the prison gates.” Alternately, “conscientious objectors…tended to be more educated, politically active, and ready to challenge prison authorities on a number of fronts, especially race relations. Militant conscientious objectors fought back in prisons using nonviolent resistance." Gottschalk's powerful and significant monograph was not the first work to make this case, but its claims are indicative of the common sentiment about inmate politicization in American prisons. Marie Gottschalk,

This project argues for the existence of a national convict identity that facilitated the massive prison uprisings of the Depression. This identity developed out of the unique penal culture of the interwar period (1919-1941), a confluence of social, cultural, and historical factors made American prisons dynamic, heterogeneous, and social spaces throughout that time. Interwar inmate culture was both deeply rational and highly ideological, focusing on easing what Gresham Sykes called "the pains of imprisonment."10 It stressed the collective adoption of contracultural behaviors, systematic cooperation among inmates, and the maintaining of a variety of codes, norms, and mores that promoted the interests of all inmates, regardless of race or ethnicity, over those of the administration. This affiliative culture, which inmates developed in bits and pieces around the country over the interwar period, did not totally break down the racial and ethnic animus that inmates brought into the prison from the free world, nor did it seek to do so. It did, however, create a wide variety of practices and principles that allowed inmates to engage in a collective culture throughout the country despite their differences. The national convict culture of the interwar period promoted trading, communication, and rebellion, linking peoples who might feel animosity toward one another in the free world by directing inmate concerns toward pragmatic, not ideological, ends.

Historians have generally placed issues relating to racial and ethnic conflict at or near the center of American prison histories, an understandable impulse given the

The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 170, 171.

10 Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 [1958]), 63.

dominant role of race in the history of American penology. As with so many elements of the American past, however, the primacy of race among prisoners was general but not hegemonic. The many silences, lapses, and lags in racial and ethnic animus between prisoners, during which men of dissimilar backgrounds worked together, also deserve consideration.11 This project does not go so far as to suggest that inmates of the 1930s shared modern notions of pluralism or multiculturalism, or that they strove for racial understanding and compassion. Rather, it works from the assumption that race and ethnic conflicts did not present a monolithic millstone that weighted prisoners' every action and consideration. Inmates of different backgrounds could trade together, play together, and rebel together because they were rational actors and had more to gain through co-conspiracy than through strict self-segregation. Furthermore, within the total institutions of the interwar period, racial and ethnic separation was often an unaffordable luxury for administrators who ultimately had to allow unprecedented levels of contact between inmates of different races and ethnicities, thereby pushing together unalike groups and making the prison more diverse than society itself.

The notion of crossing cultural, ethnic, and racial lines as a tool of diminishing otherness is not a new or remarkable idea. The sociologist Emory Bogardus first published his findings on the existence of, and solutions to, "social distance" in 1925, having located a direct correlation in Los Angeles between the amount of interpersonal experience subjects had with dissimilar racial or ethnic groups and how much sympathy or animosity they had for that population. For nearly a century, sociologists have

11 Coretta Phillips, The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations Among Prisoners (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ben Crewe, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

explored and updated Bogardus’s interwar findings, most famously with Gordon Allport's

Intergroup Contact Theory, which argued that regular interaction with social outgroups lessens intergroup animosity, a notion recent sociological research has affirmed through robust empirical testing.12 This project does not assume that the forced closeness of prison life during the interwar period undid free-world social programming, of course, but it does argue that the sociological literature on otherness suggests that, within a total institution where residents share common deprivations and a common enemy, intergroup hostilities are likely to diminish.

The unique circumstances of the interwar period leant themselves especially well to decreasing social distance, indirectly encouraging inmates to cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. The fact that the interwar period was America's first era of heavy overincarceration was one important factor, as a 60% increase in prison populations resulted in dire overcrowding throughout much of the country. Such conditions put inmates into close physical contact in dining halls and sleeping quarters, leading to both increased fighting and intimacy. The accompanying staffing and funding issues that afflicted prisons also created a set of conditions in which inmates of all types shared in similar material deprivations. As a result, prisoners found unity in their suffering and shared administrative foes. The wide-scale adoption of recreation yards in the second and third decades of the twentieth century provided shared space, and budget restraints and overcrowding ensured men could mix freely and trade covertly in these poorly

12 Emory S. Bogardus, "Measuring Social Distance." Journal of Applied Sociology, 9, no. 2 (1925): 299- 308; Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1993 [1954]); Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, "A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, no. 5 (2006): 751-83.

surveyed areas. That they belonged to similar social classes also helped bridge distance, as inmates overwhelmingly arrived at prison from society's economic margins and could relate to each other on that level. Packed into close quarters in which they suffered together, prisoners had opportunities to develop coping strategies based in their common needs, overlapping values, and shared experiences.

While convicts increasingly mixed within prison, they also mixed across institutions due to slow, organic changes in both free and unfree populations. The economic marginals who populated interwar prisons were hypermobile in the free world, regularly moving from state to state and landing in a variety of prison systems throughout their lives. Additionally, the rapid development of the federal prison system, which septupled between 1910 and 1940, increased the rate at which convicts from around the country met. This combination of mobility, rising recidivism, and a surging federal population expanded the variety of prison systems in which inmates served throughout their lives, and diminished regional differences in convict culture. At major prisons in states with heavy internal migration, and in federal institutions, which drew from all around the country, convicts came together, shared their cultures and experiences, and split apart. The continuous appearance of men from disparate regions of the country, and of those region’s prison cultures, had a homogenizing effect on national inmate life, establishing common convict values and practices and spreading news across long distances. For example, by the 1940s, sociologists uncovered elements of prison vernacular and slang in nearly identical forms throughout the nation.

These behaviors spoke to a common set of inmate norms and ideals they identified as the “Convict Code,” indicating the spread of a national penal culture that was critical to

the wave of inmate resistance that rocked American prisons throughout the Great

Depression.13

Ethnic and racial divisions remained a significant part of prison life throughout both the 1920s and 1930s, but extant case files indicate that inmates, as rational actors, were not so slavishly beholden to rote chauvinism they could not regularly, if temporarily, set their differences aside in the interest of material gain. This project employs the term "knuckling" to describe the ways in which inmates who lived in different, even oppositional, social spheres in the free world created partnerships based in shared experiences, working-class notions of masculinity, common material deprivations, and diminished social distance within the confines of the prison. By describing inmate cooperation as contingent, temporary, and limited to the penal sphere, "knuckling" provides an alternative perspective to two prevailing views. First, it questions mid-century social scientists and wardens’ positivistic "melting pot" notions that viewed cooperation as the natural outgrowth of penal mixing. It also splits from the more recent historical notion that prisons served to duplicate free world animosities, dividing inmates along race and ethnic lines in a form that reflected the formal and informal racial segregation common to civil society.14

13 See Chapter 5 for a broader discussion of this issue.

14 Mid-century works on prison culture tended to assert that inmates had a great capacity for cooperation, minimizing the importance of race and ethnic divisions. Major works of this type include Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 [1958]); Lewis Lawes, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing (New York: The New Home Library, 1932); Clinton Duffy, The San Quentin Story (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950); and Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (New York: Rinehart, 1958 [1940]). Alternatively, in recent decades, American penal historians have framed the development of convict culture as no less raced than American society itself, with some major works on this subject including Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994); Kelly Lyle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Drawing on the analogous image of the twisted end points of the metal fabric of a chain link fence, then, convict "knuckling" describes the ways in which interwar inmate communities occasionally formed strong connections in opposition to the prison administration by way of small, tightly connected points of common cause.15 Just as the holes in a chain link fence make for a porous barrier while providing immense tensile strength at the fence's points of contact, interwar inmates maintained a great many divisions, but they facilitated powerful cooperative resistance and dynamic circumventions of prison rules based on certain acute, intersecting concerns and desires regarding legal rights and privileges.16 This project looks at the powerful links that connected inmates, considering what policies gave them reason to “knuckle” together.

Literature Review

This project emerges from, and contributes to, a variety of historical literatures relating to American imprisonment, the convict experience, and the behavioral adaptations of marginalized peoples to social stressors. In addition to the rich historical literature on the development of the American prison, the reformatory, and the

15 Knuckling builds upon Emile Durkheim’s “organic solidarity,” which asserted that modern societies can never harbor monocultural identities. Durkheim argued urban, industrial societies must develop bonds of interconnectedness determined by difference, even if that difference creates conflict on the individual level. While the city proved the ideal social petri dish for Durkheim, the multicultural prison provides another compelling example of the process. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 [1893]), 68.

16 The notion of a "middle ground," in which different cultures might meet in common cause, is well-trod ground at this point. Important insights into pluralism and intercultural exchange have already found significant success in the fields of Native American, Atlantic, and American labor history producing outstanding insights into how disparate populations created limited, contingent relationships, grounded in physical closeness and common political and economic concerns. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

penitentiary, it draws liberally from the growing study of American imprisonment during the interwar period.17 This project is also part of a corpus of work on the American inmate that focuses on prisoner experience from the bottom up. The most important influences on this project regarding historical convict perspectives are Rebecca

McLennan's The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the

American Penal State, 1776-1941 and the original inspiration for this project, Larry

Goldsmith's "History From the Inside Out: Prison Life In Nineteenth-Century

Massachusetts."18

Outside of the purely American context, this project speaks to the recent trend toward rich descriptions of historical prison populations on the global stage. Among other works, it draws conceptual inspiration from Peter Zinoman's The Colonial Bastille:

A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940, Carlos Aguirre's The Criminals of

Lima and Their World: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935, and Patricia O'Brien's trailblazing work on historical prison communities, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons

17 Two especially important works for the interwar period are Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). There are too many standout works in the history of the American prison to effectively cover here, but some of the most exceptional works include David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Hawthorne: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2002 [1980]); Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Blake McKelvey, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1977). Elizabeth Hinton and Naomi Murakawa have produced especially important contributions in recent years, though their works focus on mid-century developments. Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2017); Naomi Murakwa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

18 Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Larry Goldsmith, “History from the Inside Out: Prison Life in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 31, no.1 (Autumn 1997): 109-25.

in Nineteenth-Century France.19 Additionally, it looks to transnational and Atlantic histories of cultural negotiation, exchange, and syncretism, particularly Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the

Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Richard White's The Middle Ground:

Indians: Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, and Lisa

Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents.20

In addition to historiographical works, a large collection of sociological, social psychological, ethnographic, and anthropological studies have informed this project’s basic conceptual model. Some of these works, such as Donald Clemmer's The Prison

Community, Hans Reimer's "Socialization in the Prison Community," and Gresham

Sykes's The Society of Captives: Study of a Maximum Security Prison function as first- hand accounts of mid-century prison life, as well as important insights into the prisonization process. Contemporary works, such as Ben Crewe's The Prisoner Society:

Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison, Hans Toch's Living In Prison:

The Ecology of Survival, John Irwin’s “Reflections on Ethnography,” and Coretta

Phillips's The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations Among

19 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Carlos Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850-1935 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Patricia O'Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 [1982]).

20 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Regions, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

Prisoners offer critical phenomenological insights into the inner worlds of those living within modern prison confines.21

Given that imprisonment is not unique as a traumatic condition, this project also employs a variety of sociological and anthropological works relating to catastrophes, coping, secondary adjustments, resistance, masculinity, and total institutions as perspectives through which to view various elements of the prison experience. The works of Erving Goffman, Kai Erikson, Howard Becker, James Scott, E.P. Thompson, and Clifford Geertz have proved invaluable in this regard.22 Norbert Elias and Eric

Dunning's Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, Guy

Standing's The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, and Emile Durkheim's The

Division of Labor in Society have proven most central, however, providing critical inspiration for understanding the connectedness of masculinity, class, and segmental bonding.23

21 Hans Reimer, "Socialization in The Prison Community," Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association (1937): 151; Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (New York: Rinehart, 1958 [1940]); Hans Toch, Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival (Washington: American Psychological Association, 1992); John Irwin, “Reflections on Ethnography,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 16, no.1 (April 1987): 41-48.

22 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2009 [1961]); Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994); Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 2012 [1963]); E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present 50 (1971): 76-136; Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," Daedalus 101, no.1 (Winter 1972): 1-37.

23 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest For Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (New York: Blackwell, 1986); Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016); Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 [1893]).

Methods and Sources

The methodological foundation of this project is a set of 12,069 inmate case files, more than one-third of which are not regularly available to researchers.24 Because of the large number of records still protected under federal privacy laws in this dissertation, all of the inmate names are pseudonyms, though their prison numbers remain unchanged. As this is a national study, it draws on records from five major state prisons and the country's largest interwar federal penitentiary. These files, which include information about sentencing, current and past offences, behavioral records, health histories, religion, family life, occupational history, and sometimes conduct infractions, provide an outstanding basis for drawing aggregate pictures of inmate communities.

They are also valuable as sources of what one might call "micro narratives," as they include a wide variety of evocative anecdotes of two to four sentences, describing some element of a given inmate’s life in either the prison or the free world. Such narratives most often describe crimes, behaviors within the prison, or work and family life. The funneling method, a common practice in critical ethnography, serves as the primary means of reading these micro narratives phenomenologically, winnowing the findings down over time until common patterns and themes emerge from the records. For especially rich micro narratives, in which a life history or conduct infraction is uniquely powerful or descriptive, census records and news archives offer additional context and texture.

24 Both the Federal Archives and the New York State Archives provide dispensations for academics working with their materials to employ sensitive material on the proviso that scholars keep the identities of the subjects confidential. While most of the inmates in this project are no longer protected by federal privacy laws, I have chosen to use pseudonyms for all of the subjects for the sake of consistency.

The state prison records, from institutions in New York, Pennsylvania, California,

New Mexico, and Louisiana, represent a variety of major regions throughout the country and provide critical context to the two institutions of central importance to this project,

New York's Auburn Prison and the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

Those two institutions were especially representative of the broader changes of the interwar period, as they were large by the standards of the time, regularly holding between 1000 and 2000 inmates, though neither was so large as to be an outlier.25 Both also functioned in the congregate penitential form, which was the most common managerial style of the time, and both struggled to adapt to the rapid prison population growth of the 1920s. Lastly, the two were among the very first sites of the Depression

Era prison rebellions in 1929.26

In addition to Auburn and Leavenworth, this project considers New Mexico State

Prison, Pennsylvania's Western State Penitentiary, California's Folsom State Prison, and Louisiana’s Angola Prison Farm, institutions that provide insights into the prison communities of the Mid-Atlantic, Deep South, Mountain West, and Pacific Coast regions.27 To add additional narrative texture regarding life in prison, the Alcatraz

25 California’s San Quentin, Michigan State Prison, and the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus would be examples of such outliers. Each regularly held 4000 to 5000 inmates throughout the 1930s and faced additional problems in controlling colossal groups with which even major institutions like Leavenworth and Auburn would not have had to contend.

26 At the New York State Archives in Albany, the Inmate Case Files collection for Auburn Correctional Facility, 1914-1956 (hereafter NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956) provided a total group of 21,252 records for the years 1919 to 1940, ranging from #30038 to #51290, from which I drew a random sample of 2776 total inmate case files. At the National Archives in Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri, the Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Penitentiary Leavenworth 1895-1957 (RG 129) collection offered 45,517 total records for the years 1919 to 1940, ranging from #13923 to #59440, from which I drew a random sample of 2045 records.

27 For the New Mexico, Pennsylvania, California, and Louisiana records, I used the holdings at Ancestry.com, which source directly from a wide variety of state records that cover the interwar period. The New Mexico State Records Center and Archives at Santa Fe, New Mexico hosts the “Prison and Correctional Records, Inmate Files, 1905-1958 (1970-006)” collections, the records ranging from #4316

Penitentiary Warden's Case Files from the National Archives at San Bruno offer the most richly descriptive case files in the country and add invaluable information about former Leavenworth inmates.28 For circumstances in which inmate case files do not include particularly important forms of information, such as Leavenworth’s absence of nativity data, this project looks to Texas's Huntsville Unit, the Iowa State Prison at Fort

Madison, California's San Quentin Prison, and the United States Penitentiary at McNeil

Island for supplementary information.29

In addition to inmate case files, warden correspondence, and end-of-year records from state and federal archives, this project employs a wide variety of primary sources relating to shifting discourses on prison management among elites. In particular, the

American Correctional Association archives in Arlington, Virginia provides an extensive

to #10375, from which I took a random sample of 1553. The Western State files originate from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and I drew a sample of 1840 randomly selected files from a collection of 12,880 total, ranging from #10203 to #B7464. The Folsom files are from the “California Department of Corrections, Folsom State Prison Records, 1879-1949 ID#R136” collection at the California State Archives, from which I drew a random sample of 1457 inmate case files from a total collection of 10,981 total (#12469 to #23450). The FamilySearch organization in Salt Lake City, Utah, hosts the “Louisiana State Penitentiary Records, 1866-1963, Correctional Institution Records Angola,” for which they have an interwar yield of 14,575 total files, from which I took a random sample of 2398.

28 Not all of the Alcatraz prisoner records yield valuable information, but I recorded all of the interwar era files that survive intact. These records came from the “Warden’s Files, Records of the U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, CA 1938-63 (RG 129)” collection, hosted at the National Archives at San Francisco, located in San Bruno, California. For the 549 records from the 1934 to 1941 period, I recorded 516 (number 33 through 549).

29 I took random samples from these institutions’ interwar files. Having visited the Texas State Library and Archives in Austin, Texas, I recorded the “Convict Record Ledgers, 1849-1954, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 1849-2004” collection for Huntsville Unit, taking a sample of 1820 cases from a total record collection of 52,559 (#43361 to #95920). For the rest, I used Ancestry.com. The San Quentin records, which stretch from #32244 to #65929, permanently reside in the “California Department of Corrections, San Quentin State Prison Records, 1850-1950, ID #R135” collection at the California State Archives in Sacramento, California. I took a random sample of 1848 case files. The National Archives at Seattle host the “McNeil Island Penitentiary Records of Prisoners Received, 1887-1951 (RG 129)” collection, from which I took a random sample of 2088 from a total of 9,943 (#3302 to #13245). For Iowa’s State Prison at Fort Madison, I drew from the “Iowa Governor, Consecutive Registers of Convicts, 1867- 1960” collection from the Iowa State Historical Society, Des Moines, Iowa. That collection provided a total sample of 6,984 interwar inmate cases (#12010 to #18994), from which I drew a random sample of 2088.

backlog of publications, covering the ongoing discussions among prison managers, policy makers, and intellectuals throughout the entirety of the interwar period.30

Additionally, a wide variety of monographs, textbooks, and academic journals provides valuable academic insights for the period, as did online newspaper archives.31

Outline

The national convict culture of the interwar period emerged out of wide-scale changes in penal philosophy over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For that reason, Chapter 2, "The Old New Penology," begins with an overview of the late- nineteenth century’s emergent New Penology, a Progressive Era push to ease the more repressive elements of the American prison by mitigating isolation and introducing reformative programming based in social science. Over the three decades preceding

World War One, administrators attempted to harmonize humane prisoner reform and institutional peace, a balance made practically impossible by a post-war crime panic that effectively upended prison management throughout the country. The 1920s saw a national public disenchantment with rehabilitative projects, as Progressive states throughout the country passed a wide variety of draconian sentencing policies and embraced punitive “machine gun” criminology on the federal level.32 In turn, most

30 The archives at the American Correctional Association offices are not organized in a traditional fashion, so systematic citation is more difficult. The most valuable resources from the ACA archives are the back issues of the organization’s two signature trade publications, Prison World and Prison Journal, for which there exist no full collections elsewhere, either in hard copy or microfiche.

31 This project employed the Newspaper.com and ProQuest Historical Newspaper databases to collect a total of 433 articles about prison sports from the years covering 1919 and 1941, as well as earlier pieces as necessary. This was the product of a Boolean search through each database using the terms “prison OR penitentiary” and “sport OR sports OR games OR baseball OR football OR boxing” and a specified date range of January 1, 1919 to December 31, 1941.

32 Alexander Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the American Reformatory-Prison Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 128; Michael Willrich, “Chapter 6: Criminal

prisons increased dramatically in size, extending well beyond their design capacity by the Great Depression. This was especially true on the federal level, as that system increased sevenfold between 1910 and 1940, due to a federal law-passing spree in the

1910s and 1920s, the most notable example taking the form of national temperance laws.33 Incarceration reached unprecedented levels by 1930, and only worsened over the following decade, as ever-more Americans found themselves behind bars at the height of the Great Depression. Overcrowding in prisons, combined with inadequate sleeping areas and the disintegration of productive convict labor, destabilized prison environments. With those changes, most of the residual successes of the New

Penology faded away.

The enormous populations of the interwar prison were not only idle and crowded, but they were amazingly diverse, both by the standards of the historical American prison and by those of the interwar United States more generally. As Chapter 3, "Downwardly

Mobile Men," explains, the prison was one of the most heterogeneous institutions in the country. It brought together economically marginalized and working-class men from a wide variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds into a single institution that purposefully diminished residents’ material dissimilarities. Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of the high levels of mobility among young American men, discussing their movement around the country throughout over the first decades of the twentieth century. It then moves on to the ways in which unemployment, urbanization, recidivism, the Great Migration, and

Justice in the United States,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America v. 3 eds. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 199, 200.

33 Margaret Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850-1984 (Rockville: Westate Inc., 1984), 30.

other major social, cultural, and political phenomena of the 1920s and 1930s served to both mix free populations throughout the country and to push and pull men around the nation, leading them into a wide variety of prison systems, indirectly flattening out regional differences.

Chapter 4, "Yard Work," considers the evolution of the recreation yard, the most critical prison space for the development of a shared inmate culture. Chapter 4 begins with a discussion of the role of Muscular Christianity, the Playground Movement, and

Americanization efforts in bringing recreation into the Progressive sphere. It then considers how sport and exercise took on a critical importance in prison management, despite the fact that most prisons’ architectural layouts intentionally limited convict interaction. The creation of the recreation yard not only signified dramatic changes to the use of penal space, but is also went against the nineteenth-century impulse to individualize the prison experience, allowing large numbers of convicts to regularly mix in large, poorly monitored areas for the first time. The invention of the recreation yard, then, was the result of not only of the growing popularity of sport throughout the country, and the corollary belief that athletic recreation might better prisoners morally. It was also part of a growing understanding on wardens’ and administrators’ parts that yards were managerial tools, space-efficient means by which they might get inmates out of their overcrowded cells. The unintended consequences of these spaces, however, included the recreation yard’s emergence as the largest prison area in which men from all different sections of the institution could meet, conspire, and trade with little oversight or fear of reprisal.

Chapter 5, "The Sigh of the Oppressed Creature," looks more closely at the rash of rebellions that overtook American prisons between 1929 and 1941. The Great

Depression saw groups of hundreds, even thousands, of inmates at institutions all around the nation engage in sit-down strikes, hostage takings, arson, vandalism, and other behaviors aimed at destabilizing the prison. While the press reported prisoners’ clearly articulated demands, though, penologists, academics, and politicians misread the situation by not taking inmates' grievances at face value. Chapter 5 dissects the gradual changes in the nature of inmate rebellion over the interwar period and reflects on how major uprisings were symptomatic of broader behavioral changes among convicts throughout the interwar years. The project concludes with a discussion of a failed 1941 strike at Leavenworth Penitentiary that, in bringing together an amazingly diverse group of organizers who directed their efforts toward achieving the same material gains, symbolized the uniquely pluralistic nature of Depression Era prison uprisings and of interwar prison culture more broadly.

The shared culture that convicts developed between the World Wars certainly had limits, and even the common deprivations of prison life could not just dissolve the hostilities men held toward racial, ethnic, and cultural others in the free world. Inmates were also not so simple, however, that they were wholly unable to work in common cause. In this way, the convict culture of the interwar prison was tethered to present-day notions of "tolerance," a willingness to accept the other as a partner, co-conspirator, or workmate, though perhaps not always as a friend or an equal.

CHAPTER 2 THE OLD NEW PENOLOGY: REIMAGINING THE PRISON, 1870-1940

Throughout the interwar period, the field of corrections was as mercurial as any branch of American criminal justice. Politicians, academics, and practitioners alike improvised their way through the era, bridging the gap between turn-of-the-century New

Penology and the mid-twentieth century medical model with a variety of experiments, stopgaps, and concessions. While penologists still debated and experimented with some aspirational, high-minded programs throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the period's initiatives leant toward the pragmatic, and the optimism of the preceding generation gradually receded.

The United States landed ever-greater proportions of its population behind bars between the World Wars and, in doing so, glutted prisons. Overcrowding arose because of ambitious new state and federal laws throughout the period, as well as a series of attitudinal shifts within government, the press, and the general public toward proper responses to lawbreakers. This made it difficult for even the most well-meaning penologists to pursue reformative programming in their cluttered, underfunded institutions. On a managerial level, interwar penology leaned away from the idealistic and toward the practical by necessity, even as the growing fields of criminology, sociology, and social work produced a generation of scholars sympathetic to the reformative ethos of the New Penology.

Chapter 2 argues that the interwar prison was uniquely unstable, a messy transitional stretch in which wardens, politicians, and administrators balanced a mixture of reformative, experimental, and reactionary impulses. This ambivalent moment bridged Progressive Era efforts, which had focused on uplift through education, work,

and play, to mid-century models that stressed individualized and medicalized treatment.

Ultimately, the tension between ideal and reality defined the interwar period, as prison administrators and policy makers of the time struggled to maintain high-minded

Progressive ideals while grappling with a crime panic, Red Scares, Prohibition, and the

Great Depression. Destabilized by the political tumult of the time, prisons buckled under the weight of severe overcrowding, underfunding, and a broader societal ambivalence toward inmate rehabilitation.

Chapter 2 begins with an overview of some of the major developments in criminal justice throughout the half-century following the Civil War. It then considers the state of

American penal thought at the onset of World War I and discusses the extraordinary circumstances behind the growth of both state and federal prison populations during the

1920s and 1930s. It looks at the ways in which different levels of government juggled the national crime war alongside the social and cultural realities of the period, including heavy state building and the economic collapse of the 1930s. Finally, it examines two of the most significant administrative issues facing wardens and guards throughout the period, extreme overcrowding and the disappearance of prison labor.

The New Penology

The forward-thinking, aspirational ethos that academics and prison administrators came to call "The New Penology" stretched back to the mid-late nineteenth century. The Civil War not only left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, disabled, traumatized, and displaced; it also showed the prison at its most violent and regressive. Prisoners of war suffered in the brutal Confederate camps at

Andersonville, Georgia and Salisbury, North Carolina, as well as in the Union’s repurposed facilities, which included converted state institutions such as New York’s

Elmira Prison and the Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus.1 Elmira quickly shrugged off its reputation as a site of penal brutality, somewhat ironically taking up the mantle as the country's most important site of enlightened penal experimentation by the 1880s.

The post-war era welcomed a national reconsideration of the nature of punishment and reconciliation. In 1867, New York state took on prison reform, as Dr.

Enoch Wines, Secretary of the New York Prison Association, and Dr. Theodore Dwight toured 18 carceral institutions around the country. The two men found the country’s prisons, for the most part, totally ill-suited to humane treatment and inmate uplift. Wines and Dwight believed that the prison had descended into an instrument of mere punishment, whereas its primary purpose, supposedly, was to reform. There was "not a prison in America that makes the reformation of prisons its supreme aim," Wines and

Dwight told the New York State legislature, and they suggested the state reconsider its own prison system.2 The state accepted their argument and established the New York

Prison Association.3

While Wines and Dwight's work in New York preceded it, the symbolic origins of modern correctional innovation on the national level may, in fact, belong in 1870. That year, three of the country’s most prominent scholars of imprisonment--Wines; Franklin

1 There does not exist a particularly rich literature on Civil War prisons. The first important work on the subject was William Hesseltine, ed. Civil War Prisons (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1962). More recent significant works on the subject include Michael Gray, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001); and James Gillispie, Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2008).

2 Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight, Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada: Made to the Legislature of New York, January, 1867 (New York: Van Benthuysen & Sons, 1867; archive.org, 2018), 287, https://archive.org/details/reportonprisonsr00corruoft.

3 Alexander W. Pisciotta, "Scientific Reform: The 'New Penology' at Elmira, 1876-1900," Crime & Delinquency 29, no. 4 (1983): 614.

Sanborn, editor of the Journal of Social Science; and Zebulon Brockway, superintendent of Michigan House of Corrections--arranged the first National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline in Cincinnati to discuss national prison reform. Future President of the United States Rutherford B. Hayes hosted the event, which brought together most of the nation’s preeminent penal theorists, all of whom shared the goal of upending the dominant punitive prison models of the time.4

Brockway, in a turn of phrase that summarized the spirit of the event, deemed common penal practices around the nation as based in a “mystic morality,” rooted in Christian cosmology that mutated the early penitentiary’s goal of reforming the soul.5 Too often, the organizers believed, prisons sought to reengineer the inmate’s spirit by targeting the body, employing chaining, whipping, and other brutal behaviors to promote piety and behavioral change. Wines, Sanborn, Brockway, and their colleagues rejected this overreliance on corporeal violence. The organizers laid out a clear set of reformative principles that revolved around the notions of proportionality, fair treatment, and resocialization, ideals that retained a central place within penal policy discussions for the half-century to follow.6

The Congress set forth a clear mission for correctional reform via 37 aspirational goals that they called their "Declaration of Principles."7 Admittedly, the "New Penology,"

4 Ibid, 614; Thomas Blomberg and Karol Lucken, American Penology: A History of Control (Hawthorne: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000), 70.

5 Blomberg, American Penology, 71.

6 American Correctional Association, “Declaration of Principles Adopted and Promulgated by the 1870 Congress of the National Prison Association,” accessed January 12, 2018, www.aca.org/aca_prod_imis/docs/Exec/1870Declaration_of_Principles.pdf.

7 Ibid.

a term commentators later used to characterize their approach, was most popular with a relatively small cohort of intellectuals and practitioners, with the general public remaining partial to more punitive models of imprisonment.8 Nonetheless, the Congress maintained an importance disproportionate to its size and influence, as the National

Prison Association shaped the trajectory of the field of corrections throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9 New Penologists did not view the penitentiaries of their time as the tools of Christian moral reform that eighteenth century innovators originally intended, but as spaces that actively harmed and diminished their wards.

Rather than striped uniforms, lockstep marching, rules of silence, and frequent isolation,

New Penologists pushed for a universal standard of treatment for all inmates that they would not necessarily base on Biblical notions of moralism. Even though such notions of morality still framed their views on issues of decency and uprightness in a broader sense, they championed measurable outcomes and offered up a wide variety of new ideas regarding rehabilitation, classification, and bureaucratization. In short, they saw the ideal prison as an open-ended, flexible tool for bettering inmates through socialization.10

8 The notion of the “New Penology” was an invention of the 1910s. The term emerged partly out of a series of impactful writing that included Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Penology,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 46 (1913): 4-7; and Joseph Byers, “Prison Reform: Address of the President of the American Prison Association,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 6, no. 6 (1916): 872-884. Some of the outstanding secondary works on the New Penology are Alexander W. Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the American Reformatory-Prison Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1996) and Philip Jenkins, “Temperance and the Origins of the New Penology,” Journal of Criminal Justice 12, no. 6 (1984): 551- 565.

9 Today, the organization, known as the American Correctional Association, continues to serve as a major professional organization for penologists and policy makers.

10 Some of the more effective surveys of Progressive Era penology include Blomberg and Lucken, American Penology; Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression; David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Hawthorne: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2002 [1980]); Joseph F. Spillane and David B. Wolcott, A History of Modern American Criminal Justice (Los

Brockway's Reformatory

Zebulon Brockway's quarter-century tenure as the Superintendent of Elmira

Reformatory in Elmira, New York was the most famous and impactful examples of the

New Penology in practice. Brockway began his administrative career in 1848 and had introduced notions of work release and indeterminate sentencing to the Detroit House of

Correction as early as 1861. From 1876 to 1900, he attempted to transform Elmira in the image of a college or hospital. In 1877, he set forth an act to the New York State

Government that endorsed a wide variety of new reformative measures. He argued that policies stressing individualized treatment, indeterminate sentencing, and parole classifications could transform dangerous criminals into upstanding Christian gentlemen.11 As the historian Alexander Pisciotta described it, Elmira inmates under

Brockway’s guidance were to emerge from the institution as "hard-working, law-abiding lower-class citizens."12

Brockway practiced what social scientists of the time deemed the new "prison science." He replaced the "brute force" style of management, popular with preceding generations, with aspirational notions. He promoted self-esteem and rehabilitation through moral consistency and empowering practices such as academic and industrial education, religious instruction, and mild discipline.13 Brockway's most enduring

Angeles: SAGE, 2013); Blake McKelvey, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1977); Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000).

11 Pisciotta, "Scientific Reform," 616.

12 Ibid, 616.

13 The most authoritative discussion of Brockway is undoubtedly Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression. Brockway himself wrote extensively about his philosophies on prison management. Zebulon Brockway. Fifty Years of Prison Service: An Autobiography (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1912);

innovation may have been the updated “mark system,” for which he drew inspiration from Scottish naval officer Alexander Maconochie. As Governor of Norfolk Island, an

Australian penal colony, Maconochie offered his wards the opportunity for early release through consistent good behavior. For his part, Brockway regimented the system, allowing Elmira inmates the opportunity to accrue up to nine marks per month, a maximum of three each for proper and constructive behavior at school and labor, as well as for general deportment.14

In addition to the mark system, Brockway presented the public with the image of a humane and charitable Elmira through creative programming. To promote deference to authority, nationalism, religiosity, hard work, and discipline, Brockway introduced a variety of light sports and education programs, as well as a rigorous martial training and marching regimen that reflected the behaviors and values of the total institution

Americans most admired, the United States Army.15 Elmira was an enormous success, insofar as it inspired dozens of states to open their own reformatories throughout the country before the end of World War One. There existed only six such institutions aimed at young adults by 1890, a number that leapt to twelve by 1901 and eighteen by 1913.16

Zebulon Brockway, “The American Reformatory Prison System,” American Journal of Sociology 15, no. 4 (1910): 454-477.

14 John Moore, “Alexander Machonocie’s Mark System.” Prison Service Journal 198 (November 2011): 39-40. Maconochie published extensively on his own prison management style. Alexander Maconochie, The Mark System of Prison Discipline (London: Mitchell and Son Printers, 1859).

15 Beverly Smith, “Military Training at New York’s Elmira Reformatory, 1888-1920,” Federal Probation 52 (1988): 33-34.

16 Attapol Kuanliang, “Reformatory Movement” in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, ed. Jay Albanese (Hoboken: Wiley, 2014), accessed January 3, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj107.

As with so much penal experimentation, Elmira was a mixed bag. By 1893, investigators found that Brockway had been practicing flogging, solitary confinement, and handcuffing his wards to walls--all of which ran contrary to his "enlightened" and

"humane" ethos. In light of these revelations, and under pressure from the state,

Brockway submitted his resignation on July 31, 1900.17 The scandal did not cast the superintendent as a hypocrite or monster, however. In fact, states throughout the country employed reformatories at higher rates following Brockway's ouster.18 The

Elmira scandal did underscore the limitations of the New Penology, though, by emphasizing that the reformatory, no matter how enlightened its superintendents and guards claimed to be, was still a prison.19 In subsequent decades, the ideals of peace, order, moralism, and strenuous activity existed in tension, as a generation of penologists, inspired by Brockway and his ilk, took up penal experimentation.

Progressive Penology

Brockway, Wines, and others’ pioneering works did not immediately change the landscape of American corrections, as the everyday practice of penology evolved in fits and starts. This was due in part to the fact that correctional policy was frequently reactive, responding to shifting societal needs and desires rather than actively forming public sentiment. In addition, the penal experiments of the late nineteenth and early- twentieth century, like other Progressive Era projects, brought together disparate groups whose values sometimes existed in contradiction. The correctional breakthroughs of the

17 Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression, 108.

18 Pisciotta, “Scientific Reform,” 626.

19 Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression, 4; Pisciotta, "Scientific Reform," 616-619; See also Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

1890s through 1910s uneasily balanced the notions of moralism, rationalism, and scientism, serving as a testament to the broader ambivalence of Progressivism.

The precise definition of "Progressivism" remains unclear even today, as the movement brought together a diverse array of communities who did not always serve the same purposes or work in common cause. In fact, Progressive constituencies often butted heads over conflicting interests and views. In her work on Progressivism and the rise of the surveillance state, Jennifer Fronc listed off a dizzying collection of public- minded institutions and groups who historians might include under the Progressive umbrella:

Philanthropists, club women, black business owners, social scientists, suffragists, temperance activists, settlement house workers, socialists, members of organized labor, those affiliated with religious organizations… good government reformers, eugenicists, anti-obscenity activists, and free speech advocates.20

Those communities might combine efforts occasionally, but the through line joining them as one was weak.21

One of the common elements of the Progressive ethos was the desire to control and regulate society through policies based in systematic observations. This differentiated the movement from other efforts based primarily in the moral suasion of kinship groups, the coercive power of military strength, or atomized self-sufficiency.

20 Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4.

21 Fronc employs the term “social activists” to describe Progressives who employed an “instrumental pragmatism” but “who did not share the same social vision.” Because Progressives tended to approach the prison as something that required reimagining, heavy alterations, and additions, but not as something that required replacing, Chapter 2 will discuss Progressive “reformers” in the penal sphere, with the understanding that prison reform was only a slightly more cohesive project for Progressives. Fronc, New York Undercover, 4-5.

Though it found footing in some agricultural and rural areas, Progressivism drew most of its energy, money, and people power from major urban centers such as New York,

Chicago, and Boston and managed to blend seemingly disparate forces: a language of development and analysis, traditional notions of Protestant evangelism, technological optimism, good government reforms, and bureaucratization.22 In neighborhoods, universities, and government offices across the country, Progressive social activists attempted to use local, state, and federal bodies to merge and disseminate policies anchored in what they viewed as rationalism, moralism, and scientific inquiry. In turn, they grew the federal government between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from 95,000 civilian employees to 230,000 in 1900 and 430,000 on the eve of the United States's entry into World War I.23

Universities came to play a significant role in the professionalization of

Progressive criminal justice by the early twentieth century as politicians and practitioners sought out new forms of expertise and research.24 The American Social

Science Association found a foothold in schools throughout the country by 1890, offering courses on criminal justice and corrections in institutions ranging from the Ivy

22 In his work on the Populist movement, Charles Postel showed the continuities between Populism and Progressivism, showing how the "callused-handed" former group met with the "university-groomed" latter over a common faith in the expanded role of government in promoting modern innovations in American life. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5, 271.

23 John W. Chambers, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 289. Historians have not landed on a precise definition of Progressivism yet, but some of the works which come closest are Michael E. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

24 Progressives also employed this data to oppressive ends, especially concerning race. The best study of this subject is Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Leagues to state universities to private research institutions to liberal arts colleges for both men and women.25 Soon after, sociology programs at the Universities of Chicago,

Indiana, Southern California and elsewhere turned out trailblazing community and field studies, thereby producing a literature on social disorganization and urbanization that provided the bedrock of much of the emergent field of criminology. These innovators found more institutional nurturance in 1910 with the founding of the American Institute of

Criminal Law and Criminology, as well as with the publication of the first issue of the

Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology that same year.26

The discipline of criminology's rapid development not only provided reformers with the scientific language necessary to push hesitant legislatures toward new projects, but its growth ensured that the United States would retain an important place in global discussions of correctional science. By 1910, American criminologists established a uniquely positivistic perspective at the Eighth International Prison Congress. At the event, the European-majority Congress declared rehabilitative treatment suitable “only for young offenders and moral degenerates,” outvoting the optimistic Americans who asserted that reformative programming was suitable for all adult felons.27

New and Enduring Practices

The evolving fields of sociology, criminology, social work, and social psychology provided Progressives with a variety of analytical tools and arguments in reimagining the prison. Building upon the new literature, academics and penal practitioners

25 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 46.

26 Ibid, 46.

27 Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 124.

increasingly argued that criminal offenders suffered from psychic maladies or social pathologies that penologists could address in controlled settings. Brockway's Elmira experiment, along with the reformatories that followed, had provided some proof of concept that prisons could provide treatments that met offender's unique needs while also stressing proper socialization. Progressive penologists across the country, then, took to training inmates to return to free society, having adopted and tweaked a wide variety of approaches to admitting, sorting, and treating inmates in search of a perfect rehabilitative cocktail.

Throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, prisons evolved into spaces where, as Rothman explained, inmates “learned to play the game according to the rules.”28 Working from the notion that crime and deviance were the result of poor socialization and structural disadvantage, penologists engaged with elements of the new social science. One of the more widespread trends of the period saw prisons around the country incorporating extensive psychological testing for both male and female inmates. Joliet and Ohio State Penitentiaries were among the earliest sites for

Lombrosian experimentation, as administrators in those institutions tested theories of innate criminality and "criminaloid" tendencies.29 In an effort to better sort and track their wards, prisons also employed fingerprinting and the Bertillion System of inmate tracking, both of which allowed administrators to identify convicts and ex-convicts systematically through unique attributes and markings.30

28 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 126

29 Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 192, 197.

30 Elizabeth Dale, Criminal Justice in the United States, 1789-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 104. For a fuller discussion of this subject, see Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Jane Caplan and

Two of the Progressive Era's signature criminal justice innovations, both of which had their origins in turn-of-the-century experimentation, fully flowered in the years immediately preceding the interwar period. One was indeterminate sentencing, which saw courts offer adjustable sentence lengths to allow compliant, rehabilitated inmates early leave while keeping hold of more obstinate inmates who needed additional treatment. By 1900, the Congress of the National Prison Association voted unanimously to endorse indeterminate sentencing, a reflection of the practice's popularity among criminologists, though prison administrators used open-ended sentences with some trepidation.31 In 1904, only 15% of new inmates received indeterminate sentences, a number that rose to 37% by 1910. Only with the end of World War I did indeterminate sentencing become a widespread practice in American criminal justice, however, with

55% of all state and federal prisoners serving indeterminate sentences in 1923.32 The region stretching from Delaware in the northeast, Florida in the southeast, Texas in the southwest, and Kentucky in the northwest most enthusiastically adopted the practice throughout the 1910s. In all, the West South Central, East South Central, and South

Atlantic Census Bureau Regions increased their use of the practice by more than 800% between 1910 and 1923.33

Indeterminate sentencing worked contingently with the other major innovation of the period: parole. On the eve of the twentieth century, only 20 states had some sort of

John C. Torpey, eds. Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

31 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 73.

32 Margaret Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850-1984 (Rockville: Westate Inc., 1984), 42-43.

33 Walker, Popular Justice, 122; Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 44.

parole system in place, but that number increased to 44 by 1922. By 1939, only Florida,

Mississippi, and Virginia offered no such form of early release.34 State and federal governments' financial impulses to avoid building new prisons were one reason for their increased use of parole in the early twentieth century, as administrators and bureaucrats sought ways of clearing out space within increasingly crowded institutions.

The federal prison system was especially concerned about space, given that the

Department of Justice only controlled three penitentiaries prior to the interwar period, despite an extraordinary increase in federal lawmaking throughout the 1910s. While the federal government enacted "good time" allowances as early as 1867, rewarding prisoners who engaged in peaceful and constructive behavior, the federal government did not enact a formal parole system until 1901. By 1923, 60% of inmates who left federal institutions did so on parole.35

New York's Ambitious Failure

As ambitious as many penal reformers of the 1910s were, practical and political limitations often scuttled their accomplishments. New York, a leader in aggressively instituting therapeutic reforms, provided a glimpse into the difficulty Progressives confronted in realizing their innovations. Penologists looking for successful prison models rarely got an opportunity to implement radical changes within a major state prison, so Thomas Mott Osborne's experience as Warden of Sign Sing Prison in New

York offered a sense of Progressive penal experimentation in action.

34 Blomberg and Lucken, American Penology, 113-4.

35 Peter Hoffman, History of the Federal Parole System (Washington: GPO, 2003), 5-7.

Osborne founded the Mutual Welfare League, based on successful examples of therapeutic reform he had witnessed years earlier. The League's conceptual birth stemmed from an experience Osborne had in 1896 as a member of the Auburn Civil

School Board. Serving as a trustee at George Junior Republic, a privately funded school for juvenile delinquents in Freeville, New York, Osborne noted how administrators allowed their charges a high level of self-governance and that this seemed to produce remarkable institutional peace. The youths seemed sophisticated and self-sufficient, capable beyond their years, and able to work and live within the residential treatment center in general harmony, a takeaway Osborne would keep in mind going forward.36

In 1913, after serving as a Democratic Party activist, Mayor of Auburn, and as the publisher of Auburn's left-leaning newspaper, Osborne turned his full-time attention to prison reform. Having finished reading Donald Lowrie’s popular memoir My Life in

Prison, Osborne contacted New York Governor William Sulzer, a personal friend, who named Osborne as the chairman of the State Commission on Prison Reform. Then, with the help of Warden Charles Rattigan, Osborne checked into Auburn Prison for a week as “Tom Brown, Inmate 33,333X.”37 There, he hoped to see what life was really like for inmates. “Some Progressives went to live in the slums," Rothman explained, whereas

"Osborne went to live in prison.”38 Osborne felt appalled by the conditions in which he

36 Alfred McCoy and Francisco A. Sacarano, eds. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 118; Spillane and Wolcott, A History of Modern American Criminal Justice, 100.

37 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 118-119; For information on Osborne’s life, see Peter Scharf and Joseph Hickey, “Thomas Mott Osborne and the Limits of Democratic Prison Reform,” The Prison Journal 57, no. 2 (1977): 3-15; Howard Davidson, “An Alternative View of the Past: Re-Visiting the Mutual Welfare League (1913-1923),” Journal of Correctional Education (1995): 169-174.

38 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 119.

found Auburn inmates living and his subsequent 1914 memoir, Within Prison Walls, made an impassioned case that existing prison regimes were overly cruel, unnatural, and ineffective.39

Newspapers throughout the country publicized Osborne’s experiences via serial publication of his memoirs. As a result, Osborne found himself the nation’s most famous prison reformer. He leveraged that reputation into an appointment from Sulzer to

Warden of Sing Sing, the state’s largest maximum-security institution, a position that provided him with the opportunity to use the lessons he gleaned from the George Junior

Republic to reform the state’s adult populations. Osborne anticipated that a form of inmate self-governance he called the Mutual Welfare League would govern day-to-day prison life and limit the necessity for administrative intervention into inmate affairs.40

Osborne hoped inmates would take some ownership of their own rehabilitation by electing a board of delegates from the broader prison population who would work with the administration. The prison body would also elect an executive board to oversee the smooth functioning of the prison community. According to Osborne’s protégé, and future

Federal Bureau of Prisons head, Austin MacCormick, the primary aim was to bring the

“‘gang’ spirit, whose essence [was] loyalty to the local group, into a spirit of loyalty to the larger group which [constituted] the prison community.”41 The League, Osborne hoped,

39 Thomas Mott Osborne, Within Prison Walls: Being a Narrative of Personal Experience During a Week of Voluntary Confinement in the State Prison at Auburn, New York (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922 [1914]). For more information on Osborne's development and broader importance in penological circles, see Joseph F. Spillane, Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Eileen McHugh, Auburn Correctional Facility (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2010); Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

40 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 120.

41 Spillane, Coxsackie, 17

would create not only good prisoners, but good citizens, simulating life in the free world through an inmate organization that would endow convicts themselves with the power to handle work assignments, leisure, and inmate grievances.42

While Osborne did not get more than a few years to manage the League's creation and promotion, he did see some indicators of success before leaving his post.

He noted, for instance, a simultaneous 10.8% increase in the sale of inmate-made products between 1913 and 1914 and a 57.3% drop in the number of inmates the prison treated for wounds due to violence during that same period. Osborne and his supporters framed the Mutual Welfare League as an immediate success, arguing they had created a pleasant and sociable atmosphere less prone to disturbance and more conducive to productivity.43 While Osborne may have overstated that success, the League effectively offered proponents an opportunity to see the radical model of prison organization function as planned.

Unfortunately, because Osborne ran into trouble with local politicians and civic leaders, his time at Sing Sing was always tenuous. Vehemently anti-Tammany and frequently brusque toward local and state politicians, Osborne left himself little room for error. As a result, he stood on shaky political ground. His many opponents framed each disturbance or institutional hiccup as a referendum on Osborne's wardenship and, by late 1915, Ossining's District Attorney indicted him for perjury and neglect of duty.

Osborne temporarily left his office to fight the charges full time and, while he successfully rebuffed all criminal accusations, he resigned his post soon after, unwilling

42 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 121.

43 Walker, Popular Justice, 130.

to wage continuous, grueling political battles going forward.44 Osborne's tenure at Sing

Sing had petered out in a little over eighteen months and his experimentation was far from an unqualified success. Furthermore, inmate self-governance never found significant traction outside of the Northeast and largely disappeared by the Great

Depression.45 Ultimately, whether the rise and fall of the Mutual Welfare League was a partial success or a compelling failure was a matter of perspective. Either way, however, its collapse was as much a referendum on Osborne himself as it was on the quality of the program.

The Mutual Welfare League, which could perhaps have continued functioning in a modified state within a more welcoming political environment, had bumped up against the unique political and managerial issues of running a penitentiary during the interwar era.46 In the 1920s, inmate-run institutions might have found long-term success if they promised stable placidity behind bars, but every prisoner strike, riot, or disturbance that fell into the public's purview undermined Osborne's experiment by insinuating that non- authoritarian means of oversight were incapable of keeping order. The actual differences between Mutual Welfare League prisons, such as Sing Sing and Auburn, and institutions that employed more traditional forms of oversight and governance did not suggest that one form or the other was more prone to prison uprisings, however. It

44 Spillane, Coxsackie, 18-19.

45 Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 211; Walker, Popular Justice, 130.

46 Even after Osborne left, however, the Mutual Welfare Leagues at both Auburn and Sing Sing lived on for over a decade. Osborne, meanwhile, established another League at his new post as warden of the Portsmouth Naval Prison in Kittery, Maine.

was the power of perception that ended the Mutual Welfare League, auguring the paranoia about crime that defined criminal justice in the 1920s.

A Very Modern Crime War

Osborne's ouster at Sing Sing reflected shifting attitudes toward Progressive penal experimentation by the end of World War I. The First World War was a hinge of modernity, signaling a symbolic evolution for the political, social, and economic realities of millions across the world, including within the United States. In Europe, the historian

Modris Eksteins remarked, the massacre at Verdun, the unstable peace at Versailles, and the creation of Germany's fragile Weimar Republic represented a post-war modernist impulse, elevating innovation to "the principal urge of our time."47 This was also true, in a modified form, for the United States. The increasingly rapid expansion of rural electrification, mass culture, automobile-based transport, and other social, technological, and cultural changes upended old orders of everyday life and wrenched the nation into a new political and cultural epoch.

World War One Fallout

The United States exhibited a national paranoia throughout World War I, conjuring the American legacy of suppressing political radicals that reached back as far as the Jefferson administration. This sentiment turned up in the federal government's censoring of mail, jailing of suspected saboteurs, and close monitoring of newspaper publishing.48 The scope and residual effects of such actions became especially

47 Modris Eksteins. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), xvi.

48 There is a great deal of literature on this subject. Some of the more exceptional works include David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press,

apparent near the war’s end. Though the United States was only engaged in World War

One from 1917 to 1919, the fall of the Russian monarchy to Bolshevik insurgents during the conflict, and the subsequent Red Scare following on the heels of the war’s conclusion, helped spark anti-communist and anti-anarchist paranoia among the

American public, press, and political elite.49 This fear of insurrectionists not only continued in one form or another for much of the rest of the century, but it fueled a wide variety of public initiatives that set the tone for numerous policies, including the

Department of Justice's anti-radical division.50

In reflecting on the immediate post-war period, Elizabeth Dale noted that the end of the war brought with it “a variety of potentially-destabilizing social forces…including a series of major general strikes, anarchist bomb plots, urban race riots, and a more generalized anxiety about Communist insurgency.”51 This unique moment saw a variety of political actors within both the federal Department of Justice and state and local governments move toward a broad reimagining of correctional institutions and their role in controlling political radicals. One of the key actors was A. Mitchell Palmer, the

Attorney General of the United States from 1919 to 1921 and the architect of a series of

2004); Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).

49 Michael Willrich, “Chapter 6: Criminal Justice in the United States,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America v. 3, eds. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 199, 200. Also see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press on Demand, 2008); Kim Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001).

50 For information on the FBI’s early anti-radicalism, see Mark Ellis, “J. Edgar Hoover and the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919,” Journal of American Studies 28, no.1 (1994): 39-59; Michael Belknap, “The Mechanics of Repression: J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau of Investigation and the Radicals, 1917-1925,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order 7 (1977): 49.

51 Dale, Criminal Justice in the United States, 120.

‘Palmer Raids’ that deployed dozens of sting operations against suspected leftist agitators throughout the country. Palmer’s raids complemented more localized anti- radical attacks, including initiatives by New York’s Lusk Committee, which the state organized in the summer of 1920 to investigate seditious activity and which conducted raids on the Rand School, the International Workers of the World, and a variety of other private organizations.52

While the Department of Justice and much of the public welcomed the raids as a necessary government regulation of post-war unrest, the political climate of the post-war period also emboldened the sorts of revolutionary activities and societal instability that

Palmer and his allies claimed to be fighting. Such events in 1919 alone exemplified this point. That year, the anarchist Italian national Luigi Galleani sent letter bombs to

Palmer, John D. Rockefeller, and other public figures; Massachusetts Governor Calvin

Coolidge directly intervened in the Boston Police Strike; and a pair of general strikes in

Seattle and Winnipeg, a Canadian city 70 miles north of the border, ground those major cities' workforces to a halt.53 Perhaps most striking in its symbolism was the lunchtime bombing at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in New York City in 1920, an attack that killed 33 people, injured 200, and destroyed the House of Morgan. That act of

52 Dumenil, Modern Temper, 224.

53 Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1037. For information on some of the major strikes of the period, see Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, When the State Trembled: How AJ Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Rosalind Russell, A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike (New York: Beacon Press, 2005); Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Postwar Struggles, 1918-1920 (vol. 376 International Publishers Co., 1987), 63-64.

terror, whose perpetrators remained undetected, targeted one of the nation's most recognizable emblems of modern capitalism.54

Due to these events and others like them, many average Americans accepted the notion that political saboteurs posed a clear and present threat to national security.

This anxiety about the breakdown of state control led Solicitor General James M. Beck to declare in 1921, with no evidence to speak of, that the nation was experiencing a

“wave of crime [that had] no parallel since the eighteenth century.”55 Beck's claim, whether quantifiably true or not, captured the tenor of a country struggling with a new era. In turn, state and federal governments passed dozens of laws in the coming decade that served to further marginalize Catholics, Jews, Blacks, labor organizers, urban dwellers, and other groups who, in challenging the image of the country as a nation of White, Anglo-Saxon, small-town, native-born, middle-class Protestants, did little to alleviate the paranoia of the country's leading politicians.

Anti-Crime Measures and the Punitive Turn

Beginning in the 1920s, state governments moved toward more punitive sentencing, a partial cause of the rapid growth of America’s prison populations. New

York led the United States in the advent of harsh sentencing, passing an array of severe

54 See Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

55 Quote from William Edward Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 [1958]), 73; There are many substantial works on American politics and culture in the 1920s, though the best is likely Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). Other outstanding works on this topic include Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016); Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Willrich, "Criminal Justice in the United States"; Fronc, New York Undercover.

measures in direct response to public anxieties about crime. The state enacted so- called “Baumes Laws,” named after state senator Caleb Baumes, the head of New

York's Crime Commission. The set of 22 hyper-punitive measures framed longer sentences as the proper response toward habitual law breaking, thereby treating many offenders as threats to society. This marked a shift away from the Progressive frame that viewed offenders as individuals whose behavioral traits needed adjustment, and it fundamentally changed the nature of criminal justice for both those already incarcerated and for the newly convicted by codifying unprecedented levels of penal severity.

Measures ranged from narrowing procedural rights to limiting parole opportunities to mandating life sentences for any offender that the state found guilty of a fourth felony, the last of which removed all discretion from the hands of the trial judge.56

The Baumes Laws undermined or minimized three longstanding suppositions about the nature of penology: that most offenders would eventually leave prison; that the prison would not accumulate a significant number of hopeless “lifers”; and that every prisoner had the opportunity, at least in theory, to earn their early discharge through good behavior.57 In fact, the Baumes Laws, and the broader punitive philosophies accompanying them, completely undermined Progressive ideals that had been so important to prison systems a generation earlier. The new perspective marginalized those long-standing, high-minded expectations that grounded criminal justice in rehabilitation, as opposed to punishment. Twenty-three states, including California,

56 Laws of the State of New York, One Hundred and Forty-Ninth Session v. 1 (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1926), 805-06. The laws themselves were Ch. 457, S. 1941 and 1943. For further insights into Baumes Laws, see Spillane, Coxsackie; McLennan, Crisis of Imprisonment; Willrich, "Criminal Justice in the United States"; McGirr, The War on Alcohol.

57 McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment, 451.

West Virginia, and Michigan, followed New York's lead, copying many of the Baumes

Laws's measures, whereas other states' leaders adopted bits and pieces of the provisions.58

One of the broader philosophical changes throughout the early twentieth century that enabled policies such as the Baumes Laws was the growing belief in the "habitual offender." A notion that legal scholars and members of government developed to describe recidivists who the state viewed as pathologically criminal, states passed most of the country's habitual offender laws in the decade immediately following World War I, as 23 states implemented such laws between 1919 and 1929. Lawmakers believed that, by taking habitual criminals out of society for good, society would not have to worry about continuous victimization at the hands of a small group of dangerous or irredeemable offenders. Unfortunately, regardless of politicians and administrators’ rationales, removing “good time” provisions that rewarded compliant recidivists presented a managerial nightmare, as it took away the few carrots prison keepers could dangle about in hope of maintaining order and quelling rebellious activity behind bars.59

Crime Commissions

Municipal, state, federal, and private agencies undertook a wide variety of studies in the 1920s and early 1930s as a means of understanding the crime wave they believed had upended the nation.60 While not the first of its kind, the 1922 Cleveland

58 Willrich, "Criminal Justice in the United States," 205.

59 Ronald C. Kramer, "From 'Habitual Offenders' to 'Career Criminals': The Historical Construction and Development of Criminal Categories," Law and Human Behavior 6, nos. 3-4 (1982), 280.

60 Crime commissions predated World War One by a number of decades, as the state of New York had created the Lexan Committee to investigate New York City policy as early as 1894, though that was a very different project. See Daniel Czitrom, New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Foundation Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice set the professional standard for modern crime commissions. Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School, and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter led the Foundation's inquiries into urban crime, a study that constituted the most ambitious modern, systematic study of an entire justice system in the country's history. Frankfurter claimed that the project’s broader implications were ultimately national, as “the deep-seated causes for this condition – rooted as they are, in modern industrialism and in the prevalent standards of the community…will be found in other cities throughout the country.”61

Thirty-five local and state governments employed major crime commissions throughout the 1919 and 1931 period. These built upon an older Progressive faith in using careful analysis to find enlightened methods for combating crime and societal disorder. Historian Lisa McGirr noted how “concerned private citizens and businessmen bankrolled some of these studies, state legislatures funded others, and all drew on longstanding networks of “good government” reformers – from civic-oriented businessmen, judges, and lawyers to policy-oriented social scientists.”62 The crime commissions were also not restricted to urban centers or cradles of Progressivism, as the state governments of Georgia (1924), Missouri (1926), Kentucky (1926), and Virginia (1931), along with civic leaders in Memphis, Tennessee (1928), also engaged in exploratory reflection.63

61 Felix Frankfurter, et al. Criminal Justice in Cleveland: Reports of the Cleveland Foundation Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice in Cleveland, Ohio (Cleveland: Cleveland Foundation, 1922), vi.

62 Kramer, "From 'Habitual Offenders' to 'Career Criminals,' 280; Dale, Criminal Justice in the United States, 103; Walker, Popular Justice, 152; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 195.

63 Spillane and Wolcott, A History of Modern American Criminal Justice, 147-8.

The studies, for the most part, served as both earnest efforts at institutional reform and as public relations efforts during a period of heightened concern about crime. Raymond Moley, Chair of the National Crime Commission, described the two central objectives: “to formulate intelligent remedies [for criminal justice issues] and at the same time develop the public interest necessary to the improvement of conditions.”64 For his part, Frankfurter characterized the Cleveland Study as a

“fundamental effort at self-criticism” for both the city and criminal justice policy makers, as well as an effort to engage the public.65 That these studies actively reached out to the public was not an act of political cynicism either, as the involvement of community members in addressing social ills reflected an enduring remnant of the Progressive ideology out of which the crime commissions evolved. That the commissions dropped off as the Great Depression escalated, however, indicated broader changes in criminal justice that made more-aspirational projects less tenable.

Federal Law and Order

The federal government funded its first crime commission in 1925, but its most impactful and far-reaching study began in 1929 with the establishment of the National

Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, which Americans colloquially referred to as the Wickersham Commission, after its chairman George Wickersham.

The federal government endowed the body with substantial funding, employing a panoply of academics and practitioners to help the Department of Justice better

64 Raymond Moley, State Crime Commission: What They Are and How They Should Be Organize, 1926 (Albany: New York Crime Commission, 1926). Quoted in Esther Conner, “Crime Commissions and Criminal Procedure in the United States Since 1920 – A Bibliography – January 1920-June 1927,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 21, no. 1 (Spring 1930), 135.

65 Frankfurter, Criminal Justice in Cleveland, v-vi.

understand why national alcohol prohibition, and criminal justice initiatives throughout the country more generally, had not been more successful in quelling crime, reforming habitual criminals, and easing public fears regarding law breaking. Taking on a broad set of topics, the Commission interrogated both state and federal law enforcement and corrections. They paid careful attention to issues of policing, detention, and corruption, as well as to crime causation, sentencing, and rehabilitation. Having provided a series of reports throughout 1930, the study concluded in 1931 with stinging rebukes to various criminal justice agencies, including a pointed set of critiques against prison administrators' growing acceptance of crowd control as the default stance toward prison management.66

The commission’s evaluation of the national penal landscape, which focused on the overuse of blunt, punitive measures, ran up against strong public sentiments that privileged punishment and incapacitation. J. Edgar Hoover, a Department of Justice bureaucrat who rose from the role of A. Mitchell Palmer's assistant to Director of the

Bureau of Investigation in 1924, was the most prominent federal employee of the time to support the more-popular punitive ethos. Hoover developed a “tough on crime” public persona and engaged in frequent chiding of intellectuals. He emerged as the interwar period’s most famous public critic of framing prisoner rehabilitation as a primary correctional goal.67 Hoover echoed much of the public when he described the

66 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 220; National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, ed. George Wickersham, v. 9, Report on Penal Institutions, Probation and Parole (Washington: GPO, 1931).

67 Willrich, "Criminal Justice in the United States," 210. For more information on J. Edgar Hoover’s ascendancy, see Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2001); Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

Department of Justice's social workers and criminologists as weak “sentimentalists” who did not understand that the prison’s role was to dole out retribution and deterrence. He eagerly denounced what he called the “cream-puff school” of criminology, those “whose daily efforts turn loose upon us the robber, the burglar, the arsonist, the killer, and the sex-degenerate.”68 Between Hoover and Wickersham, early 1930s onlookers found a federal government divided against itself on issues of criminal justice generally and, in particular, on correctional philosophy.

Paradoxically, while Hoover gave off the public persona of an anti-intellectual populist, he was also a thoughtful reformer. He valued “tough talk” and simple solutions to complex criminal justice issues while also spearheading some of the country’s most ambitious social-scientific data collection projects. Hoover’s office developed a variety of innovative practices during the interwar years, including a Fingerprint Division that held traceable identifications for more than 23 million Americans; training schools for aspiring federal agents; and a Uniform Crime Report (UCR), a systematic study of crime data from hundreds of municipalities representing millions of Americans.69 Hoover proposed the UCR to congress on March 4, 1929 in the hope of better facilitating the federal government’s crime war by standardizing the collection of crime statistics. By January

1930, the FBI published the first UCR, along with a report entitled Fugitives Wanted By

Police, providing the social scientists Hoover so often critiqued with invaluable information for better understanding patterns of criminal offences throughout the

68 Barnes and Teeters, New Horizons in Criminology, 454-455.

69 Pliley, Policing Sexuality, 133; Michael Maltz, “Crime Statistics: A Historical Perspective,” Crime & Delinquency 23, no.1 (1977): 32-40.

nation.70 As important as Hoover was throughout this period, however, he was only part of a much larger expansion in federal criminal justice efforts.

Federal Laws and Policies

Federal government expenditures on crime control quintupled between 1920 and

1930. Homer Cummings, Attorney General throughout most of the 1930s, justified this fact by averring that Americans were “engaged in a war that [threatened] the safety of our country…a war with the organized forces of crime.”71 As the government took on crime fighting with especial vigor, federal lawmaking and correctional responsibilities grew as well. The minute number of prison inmates interred for federal law violations at the turn of the century increased at an unprecedented rate following a slew of aggressive federal anti-crime measures in the 1910s. By the end of the interwar period, the federal government housed the largest prison inmate population of any single correctional system in the country.72

Prior to the interwar period, the federal government had been a follower, not a leader, in the fields of criminal justice and corrections. The federal prison population was, for most of the nation’s history, small enough not to require dedicated prisons and the Department of Justice chose simply to rent space in state prisons and county jails for its few offenders. Around the turn of the century, the federal government finally built a trio of new penitentiaries and passed a variety of far-reaching new policies in the

1910s, beginning with the passage of the Mann White Slave Traffic Act (1910), which

70 Pliley, Policing Sexuality, 132-133.

71 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 213.

72 Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 38.

declared it a federal crime to transport a woman across state lines for the purposes of enabling prostitution. Subsequent legislation, such as the Harrison Narcotic Act (1914), the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act (1919), and a smattering of other less impactful measures brought thousands of additional lawbreakers under federal oversight. By the late 1910s, federal crime fighting and corrections had entered a new era.73 By 1930, the

Wickersham Commission reported, federal special agents spent the vast majority of their time investigating offences relating to the White Slave Traffic, National Motor

Vehicle Theft, and Volstead Acts, along with a sizable number of National Bankruptcy

Act violations. The rest of their attentions went to a potpourri of offences including antitrust laws, impersonation of government officials, illegal possession of government property, and thefts of interstate shipments.74

The Great Experiment

The 1919 Volstead Act was one of the most far-reaching public policies in the country’s history, as temperance advocates pushed for the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution with assurances to undecided members of the public that “90 percent of adult criminals were whiskey-made.”75 The prohibition on the production, distribution, and sale of “intoxicating beverages” transformed not only American social life, but also the nature and scale of federal law enforcement and imprisonment. The movement came at an enormous cost, as one-third of federal prisoners were serving a sentence

73 John W. Roberts, ed. Escaping Prison Myths: Selected Topics in the History of Federal Corrections (Washington: American University Press, 1994), 7.

74 The Supreme Court upheld the Mann Act in Hoke v. United States (1913), claiming that Congress may wield police power to regulate individual morality.

75 Thomas R. Pegram, "Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 1 (January 2008): 101

for an alcohol-related crime by 1930, the government having set a reported 2,278 agents and a support staff of nearly 2,000 more to work toward upholding “the great experiment.”76

While prohibition retained significant support in some areas of the country, the policy collapsed by the early 1930s. Even with every state in the country, other than

Maryland, offering financial support, temperance enforcement remained underfunded, with New York repealing its code as early as 1923. By 1927, twenty-eight states allocated no money whatsoever to the project.77 The inadequacy of temperance enforcement doomed the experiment even before the onset of the Depression, as the measure’s advocates may not have fully anticipated the animosity ethnic and racial minorities, as well as working class populations in general, harbored toward the policy.

The passage of the Constitution's twenty-first amendment in 1933, which repealed national temperance, signaled a return to a particular sort of normalcy, as well as a further retreat from Progressive policies. Prohibition was surely the country's most ambitious experiment in Progressive programming, as well as one of its last, an attempt to combine Christian moralism with secular Americanization efforts. Temperance advocates had launched a renewed push into homes and social spaces of the working class, fueled by a bold belief in crime prevention based in identifiable social factors, such as alcohol use. The federal government’s failure to reengineer immigrant groups'

Old World attitudes toward liquor, then, represented the broader collapse of Progressive

76 McGirr, War on Alcohol, 206.

77 Pegram, "Hoodwinked," 101. In addition to Pegram’s article and McGirr's War on Alcohol, some of the other, more informative works on national prohibition include Pegram's Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000) and Michael Lerner's Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2008).

impulses in lawmaking. As the sociologist Joseph Gusfield described it, "the fight for prohibition represented the attempt of the 'old middle class' from rural areas and smaller communities to enforce their norms" through "coercive reform." The ability of the country's urban and non-English immigrant communities to defeat the measure signified a major blow to a population Gusfield characterized as a "doomed class."78

Crime Fighting in the Great Depression

By the 1930s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and federal law enforcement in general, embraced a distinct character that extended beyond a policy-focused approach and advocated for new ways of viewing criminality and law enforcement.

Hoover, with one eye toward marketing himself and his agency, declared his own War on Crime in 1933, an early instance of his office showing autonomy from the

Department of Justice.79 He identified kidnapping, racketeering, and bank robbery as the three most pressing criminal justice issues of the period because they threatened to undermine the economic stability of the nation. Bank robbery, in particular, captured the public's imagination: in 1926, the New York Times reported on forty-three major bank robberies in five states alone (Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Indiana).80

Such heists, which went on throughout the remainder of the 1920s and much of the

1930s, inspired a certain level of romanticism about crime, elevating men such as Clyde

Barrow, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger to the status of folk hero among those

78 Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986 [1963]), 4.

79 Pliley, Policing Sexuality, 184.

80 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 191.

segments of the country most harmed by banking policies during the national economic crisis.81

The idea that the public might turn violent thieves into modern-day Robin Hoods troubled Hoover and his ilk, who waged a propaganda war against the notion of glamorous criminal lifestyles.82 In addition to a strong pushback to bank robbers,

Hoover's office also pushed for the development of a variety of other new laws and punishments. By the mid-1930s, Congress complied, passing the Fugitive Felon Act,

Bank Robbery Act, Kidnapping Act, National Firearms Act, and National Stolen Property

Act, all in 1934.83 On the eve of the Second World War, the Progressive impulses of the

1910s had largely given way to the harsher, less-nuanced "machine gun" criminology of the 1930s.84

Penal Adaptations in the 1930s

Administratively, most states had abolished anachronistic practices such as striped uniforms, lock step marching, and silent systems of eating and labor by the mid-

1910s. Yet criminologist Frederick Haynes wearily noted in 1935 that the new punitive

81 For more information on bank robberies of the time, see Paul Musgrave, “A Primitive Method of Enforcing the Law: Vigilantism as a Response to Bank Crimes in Indiana, 1925-1933,” The Indiana Magazine of History (2006): 187-219; William Simpson, “A Bienville Parish Saga: The Ambush and Killing of Bonnie and Clyde,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 41, no.1 (2000): 5-21.

82 In a canny piece of counter-marketing, Hoover's office also promoted a new breed of federal agent, the "G-Man," as a romantic and celebrated figure. Dozens of films, books, comics, and magazine articles featured G-Men over the following decades, beginning with the 1935 Warner Bros. feature G Men, starring James Cagney.

83 For information on the development of federal law during the 1930s, see Kathleen Brickey, “Criminal Mischief: The Federalization of American Criminal Law,” Hastings Law Journal 46 (1994): 1135; Gerald Ashdown, “Federalism, Federalization, and the Politics of Crime,” West Virginia Law Review 98 (1994): 789; Richard Posner, The Federal Courts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

84 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 192; Pliley, Policing Sexuality, 184.

ethos of the period required an ever-more-brutal treatment of inmates. “We might have continued to treat crime by the constructive methods that developed from 1900 to

1920,” Haynes lamented, but “instead we chose to return or rather drifted back to the older routine of severity and repression.” 85 The prisons of the 1930s were, simultaneously, the product of penal modernism borne of Progressive activity and of ideological retreat from the Progressive mission.

The continued presence of Progressive principles in American corrections was largely a product of momentum. For the most part, cash-strapped Depression Era state and federal governments chose neither to continue to innovate nor to reverse course.

Instead, they simply elected to juggle the defining elements of the moment: underfunding at all levels of government, prosecutorial zeal befitting a continued War on

Crime, and chronic prison overcrowding. Under such conditions, prison administrators and politicians could not afford to act ideologically. This is not to suggest that prison systems were static during the 1930s and frozen until the Second World War upended society once more, as the penal landscape did continue to shift. The changes of the

1930s were largely reactive, though, as administrators negotiated the immediate needs of the moment and deferred future-focused innovations.86

The clearest example of the trend of Progressivism-by-default was the fact that states around the country increasingly adopted parole despite its enormous unpopularity. Public servants surely grasped the implications of a 1934 Gallup poll that

85 Haynes, Criminology, 298; Kramer, "From 'Habitual Offenders' to 'Career Criminals'," 276, 287.

86 Ethan Blue’s Doing Time in the Depression and Rebecca McLennan’s The Crisis of Imprisonment provide two of the more thorough discussions of the absence of major penological innovation in the 1930s.

found 82% of United States adults believed parole should be more strict and granted less frequently.87 The institutional perspective offered a much different reality: reducing parole, along with probation, would have meant keeping reams more inmates under direct institutional observation at prohibitive expense. For that reason, by 1936, 46 states authorized the use of parole, a practice that made up more than four-fifths of releases within 15 states.88 This was not an expression of prison administrations’ deep beliefs in human betterment, but a sign that correctional systems would employ unpopular means of easing prison populations or decreasing expenses out of sheer necessity. Such was a result of the critical overcrowding of the time.

Finding the Capacity of Capacity

The Depression Era saw unprecedented growth in the national prison population, the trend toward heavy over-incarceration well underway by 1930. Rates of imprisonment dropped slightly between 1910 and 1923, despite the supposed post-war crime wave, before rising significantly throughout the next two decades. Federal prison populations saw particular growth throughout the period, as per capita inmate populations doubled between 1910 and 1923, and nearly quadrupled by 1940, ascending from just 2.8% of the nation’s inmates in 1910, to 11.6% by the eve of the

Second World War.89 This change necessitated a massive expansion in prison building throughout the 1930s, when the Department of Justice placed new, high-capacity men’s

87 Joan Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61; Spillane and Wolcott, A History of Modern American Criminal Justice, 96.

88 Edwin H. Sutherland and J. Thorsten Sellin, eds. Prisons of Tomorrow. American Academy of Political and Social Science 157 (1931); Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 121; Blomberg and Lucken, American Penology, 113-4.

89 Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 30.

penitentiaries at El Reno, Oklahoma; Graterford, Pennsylvania; and Chillicothe, Ohio to complement the existing institutions at Leavenworth, Kansas; Atlanta, Georgia; and Fort

McNeil, Washington.

Even the Big House style of imprisonment, an architectural form specifically designed to accommodate vast numbers of inmates, was insufficient in scale by the end of the 1930s. By the Depression, the nation’s largest institutions grappled with significant overcrowding, holding an average of approximately 2,500 inmates. These complexes offered up direct challenges to the conventional wisdom of early-to-mid- century criminologists who argued that any one institution, regardless of its physical size, could only capably handle between 500 inmates (a view common to European criminologists) to the Wickersham-endorsed maximum of 800.90 At the highest bound,

Harry Barnes and Negley Teeters estimated that an especially large prison could accommodate 1,200 inmates while also maintaining some effective programming.91

Regardless of any specific disagreements over population maximums, Depression-Era criminologists tended to believe that holding multiple thousands within the same prison would critically undermine an administration’s ability to fulfill their reformative goals.

Perhaps because the physical ‘bigness’ of major state prisons seduced some administrators into believing they could develop efficient, factory-like systems of confinement, rates of incarceration increased most quickly in larger prisons. The population of the 34 carceral institutions throughout the nation that held 1,000 or more inmates increased by an average of 76.9% between 1915 and 1929, whereas the

90 Harry Barnes and Negley Teeters, New Horizons in Criminology: The American Crime Problem (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1943), 484; National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 234.

91 Barnes and Teeters, New Horizons in Criminology, 485.

national prisoner population increased 30.7% between 1910 and 1930.92 On the eve of the Great Depression, the nation’s largest institutions were growing more than twice as quickly as the national prison population, housing an average of 937 more prisoners in

1929 than they held before America's entry into the First World War.93

Michigan led the nation in overcrowding throughout this time, functioning at

178.6% capacity across all institutions, with the state's Ionia Correctional and Jackson

State Prisons each tripling in population throughout the interwar period. The federal penitentiaries at Leavenworth and Atlanta also tripled between 1920 and 1940, whereas

Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus and California’s San Quentin State Prison topped out at over 4,000 inmates each, with those states operating at 154.1% and 162.2% capacity, respectively.94 Some administrators may have considered that, with the right layout and resources, they might manage hulking populations, perhaps like the River

Rouge plant, in which tens of thousands of men worked each day. Unlike Henry Ford’s

92 Unfortunately, only the Handbooks of American Prisons provide reliable inmate counts of individual prison populations for the early twentieth century and even those counts mostly go back only to 1915. See: Austin MacCormick and Paul W. Garrett. Handbook of American Prisons, 1925. National Society of Penal Information (New York: Putnam, 1925); Austin MacCormick and Paul W. Garrett. Handbook of American Prisons, 1926. National Society of Penal Information (New York: Putnam, 1926); Austin MacCormick and Paul W. Garrett. Handbook of American Prisons, 1929. National Society of Penal Information (New York: Putnam, 1929); Austin MacCormick. Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories, v. II: Pacific Coast States (New York: Osborne Association, 1942); William Cox, Lovell Bixby, and William Root. Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories v. 1 (New York: Osborne Association, National Society of Penal Information, and the Welfare League Association, 1933).

93 See Table 2-1.

94 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 11. The turn toward the Big House model was consistent across the country, in spite of extreme differences throughout the country in both the sort of inmate different prisons might hold and the differing lengths of the average sentence by state or region. Throughout the 1920s, 47% of Leavenworth inmates served sentences of under two years, a number that dropped to 42.4% in the 1930s. However, only 9.2% of Auburn inmates served under two year sentences during the 1920s, a number that would drop to just 6% in the 1930s. Moreover, 19% of Auburn inmates were serving sentences of between 10 and 20 years, compared to just 2.4% of Leavenworth inmates. See Table 3-1.

colossus, however, most American prisons were nineteenth century undertakings that did not anticipate the need to house thousands of men at a time. Furthermore, the fact that inmates never left the prison made the crowding more challenging, as prisoners received no emotional or mental respite from the institution.

The Wickersham Commission offered up a critique of prison overcrowding through some pointed hyperbole, noting that, in Pennsylvania’s Eastern State

Penitentiary, where three or four men regularly inhabited rooms designed as “singles,” inmates had “less room per prisoner in some of the cells than a dead man has in his coffin.”95 In similarly massive state institutions, Wisconsin and Minnesota had hundreds sleeping on cots in corridors during the winter and in tents outside during the summer.

In 1930, a New York State investigation noted that Auburn prisoners often slept in double-deck cots in corridors, a practice the officials deemed “intolerable.”96 On the opposite end of the country, the California State Parole Board similarly denounced the

"jamming of prisoners into every attic, basement, and cell.”97 As early as 1927, only 15 state institutions self-reported their population as under capacity, with average overcrowding registering at 19.1% above maximum for all prisons and reformatories.98

Both inmates and prison administrators decried the state and federal willingness to overpack prisons as both impractical and morally objectionable. The Wickersham

95 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 9.

96 Ibid, 12.

97 Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 196.

98 William Cox, F. Lovell Bixby, and William Root. Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories v. 1 (New York: Osborne Association, National Society of Penal Information, and the Welfare League Association, 1933), 1047-1050; Prisoners In State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1927 (Washington: GPO, 1928), 7-8.

Commission meticulously noted the problem of shrinking physical spaces, working from the New York Department of Corrections’ minimum requirements for cell size of 364 cubic feet of air space. The Commission found that 58% of cellblocks did not even meet that modest threshold, whereas slightly over 12% of the nation’s prison cells provided inmates with fewer than 200 cubic feet of air space. Unsuitable by the state standards of

New York, this amount was less than a third of the minimum space required under federal prison mandates.99

This severe cloistering demanded a great deal of prison building throughout the period, as architects proposed ever-greater warehouses in which to keep ballooning numbers of inmates. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover requested $6.5 million from

Congress to go toward expanding federal facilities, fearing that overcrowding was a

“direct cause of outbreaks and trouble.”100 Unfortunately for the inhabitants of the nation’s many prisons and jails, however, Hoover was far too penurious in his request and neither federal nor most state governments were prepared to commit the resources to meaningfully alleviate issues of overcrowding. Only a massive post-war decrease in per capita incarceration rates made the American penitentiary even modestly livable again.101

99 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 10-11.

100 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 201.

101 In response to this federal chiding, the state engaged in a prison-building project throughout the interwar period aimed at easing the overpopulation of older prisons. This project resulted in a myriad of new institutions, including Attica Prison, which one New York Times article scathingly referred to as “a convicts’ paradise,” replete with “beds with springs and mattresses, a cafeteria with food under glass, recreation rooms and an automatic signal system by which convicts will notify guards of their presence in their cells.” "Attica Prison to be Convicts' Paradise: Each Prisoner Will Have Spring Bed and Radio With a Cell to Himself," New York Times, August 2, 1931, E5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (99157918). That Attica would later come to serve as the country's most infamous state institutions only goes to prove how suspicious non-Progressives were of penal innovation.

Laying Off Prison Labor

Perhaps administrators could have better navigated the critical overcrowding of the Depression Era prison if they had opportunities to teach inmates a trade, keep them busy, and allow them to earn a small paycheck. However, evaporating opportunities for productive convict labor was a significant theme of American penology throughout the

1930s. A variety of state and federal policies strictly limited the amount and type of available work prisons might have afforded to convicts, a product of a continuous conflict between organized labor, prison administrators, and private businesses. The onset of the Great Depression made prison industries especially soft political targets.

Diminishing work behind bars, increasingly codified in state and federal laws, greatly damaged inmates' opportunities to pass time productively. As a result, opportunities for inmates to become what Rebecca McLennan described as “appropriately Americanized citizen-laborers” disappeared.102 The New Penologists had believed that labor instilled in inmates a variety of middle class Protestant values, including hard work, deferred pleasure, and self-control.103 Its loss, then, had an enormous effect not only on the day- to-day functioning of American prisons, but also on their reformative aspirations.

The loss of work during the early twentieth century occurred in fits and starts between 1885 and 1923. Prison labor shifted almost completely away from for-profit lease and contract systems over those four decades, as prisons went from renting out inmates to private contractors within the state to using forms of work that did not put

102 McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment, 195; Gordon Hawkins, "Prison Labor and Prison Industries," Crime and Justice 5 (1983): 85-127.

103 Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression, 17.

prisoners in direct competition with the free market.104 Leasing and contracting occupied two-thirds (66%) of all prison workers in 1885, a number that dipped to just 12% by

1923, whereas the combination of not-for-profit state-use, state-account, and public works took up 81% of employed convicts by the early 1920s. Alternately, in 1885, only four rural states (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Maine) employed their inmates in public work projects alone, with another eleven states engaging in a combination of public works and private contracting. By 1923, 30 of the country’s 48 states engaged their convicts solely in public works-based activities.105 Some of those 30 states were also in the Deep South, where governments had employed a racialized mode of legalized pseudo-slavery, convict leasing, for the half century following the Civil War.

Despite the ongoing popularity of convict leasing until the mid-1920s, however, even the

South moved toward public works-based prison labor by the end of the 1920s, joining the rest of the country in struggling to put their prisoners to work in the 1930s.106

104 Prison labor of the period generally broke down into six different forms: In the contract system, the state fed, clothed, housed, and guarded the offender, and workers produced goods for the free market. The piece-price system was similar to the contract system, but inmates received pay based on what they produced, not on the amount of time they spent working. The public-account system was also similar to the contract system, but the state not only took care of the inmate, but it provided the raw material, equipped the factory, and disposed of the product in the open market. The state-use system was similar to the public-account system, but prisons only disposed of goods to public agencies and institutions, never in the free market. The public works and ways system was similar to the state-use system, but prisoner labor only went toward public works and ways, not toward producing goods. Finally, the lease system saw prison authorities enter into a contract with a lessee, who agreed to receive prisoners, house them, feed them, clothe them, and prevent their escape. In return, the lessee put prisoners to work and the State received a set sum.

105 Convict Labor in 1923 (Washington: GPO, 1925; Fraser Federal Reserve, 2018), 19-69, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0372_1925.pdf; National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 14-15.

106 There exists an incredibly rich historical literature on convict leasing, with some of the more effective works including Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (London: Icon, 2012); David M. Oshinsky, "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997); Vivien M. L. Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida's Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London: Verso, 1996); Howard

The end of for-profit prison labor was the result of a generation of sustained attacks by pro-labor politicians, unions, and crafts guilds who felt that convicts, who could toil for non-competitively low wages, undercut the sale of their labor and goods on the open market. This was a reasonable critique, as a 1923 Department of Justice report noted that 53 of 104 prisons reported offering inmates no compensation for their labor.107 Prison pay differed widely among prisons, but was generally well below market rates. In 1928, for instance, two-thirds of laborers in American prisons made fewer than

25 cents per day, or approximately one-quarter of a living wage, with half of non- contract laborers making under 15 cents.108

The most effective attacks on federal prison labor came midway through the interwar period, when Congress adopted three measures that curtailed the prison goods economy. These already existed in some form within dozens of state governments prior to 1920. First, the Hawes-Cooper Act (passed in 1929, it took effect in 1934) prohibited state institutions from selling most convict-produced goods outside of the state from which they came. The Ashurst-Sumners Act of 1935 followed, making the transportation of prisoner-made goods across state lines illegal. The 1936 Walsh-Healy Act virtually eliminated any meaningful free market labor on the federal level by prohibiting federal contracts in excess of $10,000 for any materials produced by convicts.109 By 1940, the

Gill, "State Prisons in America—1787-1937," in Penology: The Evolution of Corrections in America, eds. George Killinger, Paul Cromwell, and Jerry Wood (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1979), 60-86.

107 Convict Labor in 1923, 14-15, Quoted in Nathaniel Freeman Cantor, Crime and Society; an Introduction to Criminology (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1939), 308.

108 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 92.

109 For more on the history of federal laws regarding prison industry, see Diane Dwyer and Roger McNally, “Public Policy, Prison Industries, and Business: An Equitable Balance for the 1990s,” Federal Probation 57 (1993): 30; John Conley, “Prisons, Production, and Profit: Reconsidering the Importance of

federal government and most state legislatures had effectively prohibited the sale of prison goods on the open market.

To make matters worse, the dwindling demand for prison-made goods combined with rising prison populations meant that opportunities for inmates to work suffered a disproportionate decline. In 1928, 27 prisons, housing a total of 36,798 inmates, reported 16% unemployment, with two institutions failing to employ over 50%, three hovering between 30% and 50%, and six more juggling unemployment in the 20% to

30% range.110 As a result, many prison administrators set their wards to work on meaningless tasks, or put multiple men on tasks designed for one. In 1930, only five state prisons were able to put all their inmates to work with some combination of state- use production and custodial tasks, while only 30% of state prisons could offer any sort of education in the skilled trades.111

With more than 25% of the 1928 state prison population sitting idle, New York struggled to keep inmates busy.112 Having abolished the use of a contract labor system by 1890, New York had used convicts only to produce goods for state use for decades.

Male state prisoners assembled brooms, furniture, bed frames, baskets, clothing, blankets, and license plates. Yet even that modest model of prisoner employment gave

Prison Industries,” Journal of Social History 14, no. 2 (1980): 257-275; Stephan Garvey, “Freeing Prisoners’ Labor,” Stanford Law Review (1998): 339-398.

110 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 14-15.

111 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 14-15. This last point was of particular significance, as vast majority of prisoners on both the state and federal level entered prison as either semi- or unskilled workers. In New York, a study of 3,814 incoming inmates found 12.1% identified as simply ‘unskilled’, and 18.4% were laborers. This trendheld throughout the nation. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 87, 94-5.

112 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 14.

way under the weight of political pressures and economic restraints. By the onset of the

Great Depression, state inspectors found that the prison shops of Auburn, Sing Sing, and Clinton were antiquated, costly, and largely unsuitable for prisoner labor, producing very little and requiring extraordinary cost and effort to maintain.113

The disappearance of opportunities for productive convict labor was important, but it also served as a symbol of a broader crisis facing the therapeutic model of corrections. The lack of work and skills training caused administrators significant concern. For example, Sanford Bates remarked in the wake of the wave of prison uprisings in 1929 that “no serious prison riot has yet taken place in an institution where all the inmates have been provided with steady and productive labor.”114 Bates’s comments presaged the Wickersham Commission's official findings, which noted that prisons with work opportunities saw fewer conduct infractions, and which found that the removal of work created a vacuum for inmate energies that the prison could not otherwise fill.115

The Bureau of Prisons’ creation of a complex system of state-use and custodial tasks for inmates under federal custody in the 1930s was one attempt to fill the gaping void of prison work. The body established Federal Prison Industries Incorporated (FPIC) in late 1934, an ambitious project aimed at stimulating prison factory work that did not

113 New York State Commission of Prisons: Annual Report of the State Commission of Prisons (Albany: Commission of Prisons, 1926), 112. The New York State Commission of Prisons noted that “the shifting population has resulted in fewer competent tradesmen and the present population is not only a larger one but consists entirely of untrained men,” (112) and this de-skilling of nineteenth century industrialism met with the strict restrictions on prison production to create an environment in which an ever-decreasing amount of labor was available to an ever-decreasingly-qualified workforce.

114 Haynes, Criminology, 296.

115 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 34, 36.

challenge production in the private sector during the Great Depression. The goal of the federal prison make-work projects was not to teach inmates valuable skills for use in the free world or to “Americanize” the diminishing number of foreign-born inmates, but simply to abate rising tensions behind bars. As a result, federal institutions placed convicts in a wide variety of jobs, covering janitorial work, groundskeeping, food preparation, routine maintenance, highway construction, forestry projects, assistance to federal agencies, and the production of office furniture, military apparel, eyewear, draperies, and other products for government use. With administrators spreading inmates thinly across an array of tasks and purchasing equipment and raw materials from private sector traders for many of those undertakings, the Bureau of Prisons briefly stanched some of the widespread idleness within its system.116 Though the FPIC was moderately effective at busying prisoners’ idle hands, however, few states followed the federal government’s lead and

America’s inmates remained largely understimulated.

Conclusion

In 1933, the United States was firmly invested in its War on Crime, operating approximately 4,300 correctional institutions, 2,500 of which were county jails and workhouses, along with 109 state prisons, prison farms, and reformatories.117 Despite the disparity in the number of short-term jails compared to long-term prisons, most incarcerated persons not held in pre-trial detention were, on any given day, living in state and federal institutions rather than local or county ones. The total number of persons remanded to state or federal prison leapt from 29,710 in 1910 to 66,013 in

116 Roberts, ed. Escaping Prison Myths, 10-11.

117 Edwin H. Sutherland, Principles of Criminology, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1939), 420-1; Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 235.

1930 and, though the national population grew by only 33.1%, the country's prison populations more than doubled. Along with chronic overcrowding, declining opportunities for productive inmate labor, and disappearing funding for reformative programming, such conditions reflected the extraordinary transition of American imprisonment in the period between the Progressive Era's New Penology and the

Second World War.118 As the aspirational programs of the Progressives gave way to the dynamic capitalism of the Roaring Twenties and the emergency relief efforts of the

Great Depression, the focus of the American penitentiary shifted. Interwar prisons went from serving as laboratories of Progressive experimentation to spaces for containing troublesome populations and, finally, to warehouses for growing numbers of homeless and chronically unemployed men.

Some of the broadest changes in penological thought and practice played out in the 1920 exchange of power at New York's Sing Sing Prison, one of the country's best- known penitentiaries, as Thomas Mott Osborne handed over control to Lewis Lawes.

Osborne, the most famous warden of the 1910s, was a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive, having drawn his inspirations for bold, grand programmatic innovations from the insights and practices of men such as Zebulon Brockway and Enoch Wines. Lawes, who became the most famous warden of the 1920s and 1930s, often spoke to the importance of reforming and bettering his wards, but he was ultimately a manager, not an innovator. As Joseph Spillane noted, because "the goal of social justice would be more or less fully eclipsed by that of institutional stability" by the 1920s, one might best

118 Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850-1984 (Rockville: Westate Inc., 1986), 37.

understand Lawes's twenty-one-year tenure at Sing Sing as "predicated on the managerial notion that reform was merely a helpful instrument of control."119 Lawes believed, above all else, in the peace, order, and security of his institution. The fact that the Great Depression would actually constitute one of the most tumultuous periods of

American penal management was ironic indeed.

119 Spillane, Coxsackie, 19.

Table 2-1. 34 Largest Prison Populations in the United States, 1915 and 1929, By 1929 Population Prison 1915 Pop. 1929 Pop. Pop. Change (%) San Quentin State Prison (CA) 2327 4638 +99.3 Ohio Penitentiary 1701 4182 +145.9 Michigan State Penitentiary 994 3835 +285.8 Missouri State Penitentiary 2307 3828 +65.9 USP Leavenworth 1093 3561 +225.8 Stateville Correctional Ctr. (IL) 1724 3492 +102.6 USP Atlanta 885 3254 +267.7 Oklahoma State Penitentiary 1318 2937 +122.8 Ohio State Reformatory 1166 2770 +137.6 Virginia Penitentiary 2268 2453 +8.2 Folsom State Prison (CA) 1147 2177 +89.8 Eastern State Penitentiary (PA) 1463 2119 +44.8 Ionia Correctional Facility (MI) 600 2106 +251.0 Indiana State Prison 1181 2064 +80.2 Southern Illinois Penitentiary 1315 1951 +48.4 West Virginia State Penitentiary 1190 1931 +62.3 Kansas State Penitentiary 768 1798 +134.1 Auburn State Prison (NY) 1458 1754 +20.3 Sing Sing State Prison (NY) 1622 1708 +5.3 New Jersey State Prison 1423 1695 +19.1 Tennessee State Prison 1214 1685 +38.8 Pontiac Correctional Center (MI) 668 1567 +134.6 Clinton Correctional Facility (NY) 1387 1562 +12.6 Elmira Reformatory (NY) 1251 1324 +5.8 Minnesota State Prison 1153 1234 +7.0 Maryland Penitentiary 1018 1214 +19.3 Great Meadow Corr. Facility (NY) 632 1137 +79.9 Iowa State Penitentiary 635 1132 +78.3 Anamosa State Penitentiary (IA) 675 1102 +63.3 Western State Penitentiary (PA) 951 1074 +12.9 Washington State Penitentiary 807 1051 +30.2 Colorado State Penitentiary 752 1039 +38.2 Total (34 Institutions) 41441 73300 +76.9 Average 1219 2156 Sources: William, F. Cox, Lovell Bixby, and William Root. Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories v. 1 (New York: Osborne Association, National Society of Penal Information, and the Welfare League Association, 1933), 1047- 1050.

CHAPTER 3 DOWNWARDLY MOBILE MEN: CONVERGING AND DIVERGING PRISONER EXPERIENCES IN THE FREE WORLD

The United States was, in 1919, a remarkably diverse country. An ethnic and racial pastiche, the nation's heterogeneity was the product of, among other things, decades of intense migration and immigration around the turn of the twentieth century.

Prior to the 1880s, most immigrants came to America from the familiar Protestant havens of Northern and Western Europe, as well as Catholic Ireland, but the latter years of the nineteenth century saw a cascade of peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe,

Latin America, and Asia make their way into the country. The presence of these "New

Immigrants," along with the movement of more than a million Black Southerners, who migrated across the country in search of work, fundamentally transformed the nature of

American life, culture, and politics. This was especially true in the urban Northeast,

Midwest, and West, the most common landing spots for these groups and the areas from which American prisons drew their largest populations.

Concerned by the country's changing demographics, major segments of the

United States' political elite in the 1910s and 1920s worked to stem the growing influence of immigrants, Blacks, Jews, and Catholics in urban communities. They pursued these ends through an array of legal and extralegal measures, including a national war on crime, the revivals of the Ku Klux Klan and national temperance movement, and other social and political measures that saw significant, if fleeting, success. These were mostly Pyrrhic victories, as the old guard could not turn back the clock. Immigration and internal migration, as well as major infrastructural, technological, and economic alterations to American life, had yielded irreversible changes to the social fabric of the entire country. No policy could meaningfully challenge the effects that

heavy urbanization had on racial, ethnic, and class dynamics throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, or on the wide-scale movement of Southern Black and Mexican workers throughout the 1920s. Furthermore, the epochal events of the Great Depression only underlined the failures of the old order, serving as the catastrophe out of which the urban, pluralistic, and modern New Deal Coalition emerged.

While many state and federal politicians pushed to diminish or halt trends toward diversity, the country was, in many ways, more culturally diverse at the end of the interwar period than it was at the beginning. Furthermore, the collision of these dynamic social forces with skyrocketing incarceration rates pushed together working-class men of differing racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds behind bars. Across the country's penal landscape, rising recidivism rates and the rapid movement of young, underemployed economic marginals meant a growing population of people serving time for petty financial crimes, especially robbery, larceny, and burglary, in a variety of state and federal prison systems.

A rapidly growing number of inmates were also recidivists who served sentences in numerous prison systems, and the more those convicts moved about the country, the more porous the divisions between state and federal prison systems became. Chapter 3 focuses on the heretofore-underappreciated extent to which prisons, in reflecting and magnifying the mobile nature of working class life in free society, had mixed racial and ethnic makeups. They did not necessarily serve as multicultural melting pots, but they were absolutely spaces of cultural plurality, areas in which dissimilar peoples shared the same living spaces on a scale not known elsewhere within the United States at the time.

In focusing only on the immense demographic, social, economic, and political changes

that shaped interwar America's dynamic and frictional diversity, Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for Chapters 4 and 5's discussions of the ways in which prison inmates negotiated and mitigated the overcrowded, heterogeneous nature of the Depression Era prison.1

“Downwardly Mobile Men” begins by discussing the national movement of recidivists between prison systems before considering who, exactly, prisons were mixing and what larger societal processes prisons were accelerating. Chapter 3 then considers the national movements of working class populations, the changing nature of

American immigration, and the importance of the Great Migration. It reflects on the ways in which a variety of populations, over time, increasingly came to share the same urban areas and how, in a variety of ways, the prison reproduced the diversity of the modern city. It ends with a consideration of the class affiliations of interwar prison populations and discusses how the changing nature of unionization and collective bargaining in the free world may have influenced the behaviors and outlooks of the working-class prison populations of the interwar period. This research draws on records from Auburn and

Leavenworth, as well as from the New Mexico State Prison in Albuquerque, Louisiana's

Angola State Prison Farm, Pennsylvania's Western State Penitentiary, and Folsom

State Prison in California. In doing so, Chapter 3 demonstrates some of the ways in which Auburn and Leavenworth reflected broader national trends.2

1 Chapter 4 discusses the ways in which interwar prisons often failed to separate their populations along race lines due to managerial and architectural limitations.

2 For each of the prisons this project discusses, I draw my conclusions from randomized samples of inmate case files covering the period stretching from January 1, 1919 to December 31, 1940. Due to institutional variations in density and size, samples range in size, but I have drawn samples that all fall within the 2.28 to 3.15 interval range, with a 99% confidence level. These files included: Auburn Prison (n=2776), from files #30038-#51290, confidence interval 2.28; Leavenworth (n=2048), #13923-59440, confidence interval 2.79; New Mexico State Prison (n=1546), #4316-10375, confidence interval 2.83;

Free World Identities

Despite institutional attempts to maintain the formal boundaries between races, state and federal prisons in the interwar period were among the most diverse social institutions in the entire country and, as this section will show, far more varied than the states or regions they represented.3 Interwar prisons tended to amplify urban heterogeneity, overrepresenting immigrants and people of color who, pushed to the edges of the labor market, more often turned to criminal economies. Leavenworth's population, for instance, was more racially mixed than the country on the whole, largely due to the significant presence of Latino and Hispanic inmates serving time for violations of the Drug Act, Immigration Law, and Prohibition Law.4 Similarly, the consistent overrepresentation of Black, Latino, Asian, American Indian, and foreign-born populations in Auburn Prison, Folsom State Prison, New Mexico State Penitentiary, and

Western State Penitentiary meant that each institution, for better or worse, had a variety of racial and ethnic presences, as opposed to just a few stray members of minority

Folsom Prison (n=1457), #12469-23450, confidence interval 3.15; Angola Farm (n=2035), #43361-95920, confidence interval 2.8. I was unable to calculate confidence level at Pennsylvania's Western State Penitentiary (n=1840), which I drew from the Pennsylvania, Descriptive Lists, 1887-1954. Prison Population Records, Western State Penitentiary, Series 15.128. Department of Justice, RG 15, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as the numeration for the selected period is inconsistent, starting at 10203 and ending at B7464. For a fuller description of archival sources, see Appendix A.

3 In the state of Louisiana, 62.9% of the state in toto was White and 36.9% was Black, though a random sampling of Angola Prison Farm inmates reflects a population that was 36.1% White and 63.8%. Given that this is an almost perfect inversion of the free world population, the notion of "diversity" within the prison remains stable, only with a different majority cohort. FSUT LSPR CIR.

4 Of the total Leavenworth sample population (n=2048), Drug Act, Immigration Law, and Prohibition Law violations made up 34.5% of the total number of charges that landed offenders in prison. This proportion was 70.9% for Hispanic and Latino inmates (n=186), with 59 Drug Act violators, 40 Immigration Law violators, and 33 Prohibition Law violators. NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

populations.5 While the greater presence of people of color within American prisons was clearly a sign of the entrenched, structural racial prejudice in state and federal criminal justice, it was also an engine of interculturalism and, ultimately, an openness to affiliation within prison communities.6

Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity Behind Bars

While the United States remained fairly consistent in its racial breakdown between 1920 and 1940, with whites (including Latinos and Hispanics) constituting approximately 90% of all Americans, Blacks approximately 10%, and Asians and Native groups cumulatively under 1% of the population, prisons across the country consistently reflected the overincarceration of Black Americans.7 The federal government did not begin tracking the racial breakdown of national inmate populations until 1926, but both the 1930 and 1940 reports on the race of prisoners showed heavy overrepresentations of Blacks, with that population rising from 22% of all inmates in 1930 to 28% in 1940.8

Naturally, representation varied by place, as Black inmates made up under 10% of some state prisons, such as the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla and

Wisconsin State Penitentiary at Waupun, whereas Southern prisons, such as Angola

5 See Table 3-18.

6 This project employs the Meyer & McIntosh Index of Ethnic Diversity, now commonplace in calculating the ethnic and racial diversity of college campuses, to calculate the diversity of the prison community. The formula is: Pr(same race) = Pr(Caucasian)2 + Pr(African American)2 + Pr(Native American)2 + Pr(Asian American/Pacific Islander)2 + Pr(Hispanic)2 + Pr(Multi)2 + Pr(IntNatl)2 + Pr(Unknown)2. Philip Meyer and Shawn McIntosh, "The USA Today Index of Ethnic Diversity," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 4/1 (March 1992), 51–58.

7 Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century (Washington: GPO, 2002; United State Bureau of the Census, 2018), 73. https://www.census.gov/prod/censr-4.pdf (accessed May 2, 2018),

8 Patrick A. Langan, Race of Prisoners Admitted to State and Federal Institutions, 1926-1986, (Washington: GPO, 1991; United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018), 5. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/125618.pdf (accessed May 2, 2018).

Farm and the Maryland Penitentiary, had majority Black populations of 63.8% and

57.6%, respectively.9 Similarly, Southwestern states incarcerated Latino and Hispanic people at extraordinary rates, given they were the predominant racial minority group of that area. Nearly two-fifths of New Mexico State Prison's population (39.3%) were

Latino or Hispanic, a group that made up just 1.5% of the national population in 1940.10

Not only did prisons' racial compositions differ from region to region, but the rippling effects of anti-immigration measures, the Great Migration, and the Great

Depression also changed prison populations between the 1920s and 1930s. Some institutions, such as New Jersey State Prison and Ohio Penitentiary, consistently broke down into an approximate 70-30 white-Black split, whereas other institutions saw extraordinary changes between what one might call the pre-Depression 1920s (1919-

1928) and the Great Depression (1929-1940). In West Virginia, for instance, the proportion of white inmates at the State Prison leapt from 67.4% to 76.6%, perhaps a reflection of the way rampant unemployment disproportionately affected the state's white-dominated coal and timber industries, thereby driving members of the white working class toward the economic margins.11

9 The Osborne Association, like the United States Census Bureau, considers Maryland a Southern state, despite this being a debatable notion given that Maryland is a border state. William F. Cox, Lovell Bixby, and William Root. Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories v. 1 (New York: Osborne Association, National Society of Penal Information, and the Welfare League Association, 1933), 303, 1006; Austin MacCormick and Paul W. Garrett. Handbook of American Prisons, 1926, National Society of Penal Information (New York: Putnam, 1926), 266, 589.

10 Cox, Bixby, and William, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories v. 1, 303, 1006; MacCormick and Garrett, Handbook of American Prisons, 1926, 266, 589; See Table 3-18.

11 MacCormick and Garrett, Handbook of American Prisons, 1926, 381, 464, 576; Cox, Bixby, and Root, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories, 1933, 499, 783, 975.

Auburn Prison saw the reverse of West Virginia, as the Western New York institution experienced a significant rise in Black representation, growing from just 9.9% in 1920 to 22% in 1940.12 Census records indicate that, over the interwar period,

Southern Blacks replaced Italian immigrants as Auburn’s largest minority population. In

1920, Italian-born inmates made up 18.2% of the population, and other foreign-born

(primarily European) inmates made up another 18.4%. These numbers plunged dramatically by 1940 to just 4% and 11.2%, respectively.13 Simultaneously, the proportion of American-born inmates not originally from New York State almost doubled between 1920 and 1940, escalating from 19.4% to 34.8%. The nature of Auburn's prisoners of color also changed, as 40.6% of those Black inmates who Auburn admitted in 1920 were New York natives, a percentage that dropped to just 17.8% in 1940.14

Effectively, Auburn's dominant ethnic subculture of the 1920s, Italian immigrants, cleared out and made way for Black migrators in the 1930s.15

12 United States Census Bureau, “1920 Census: New York, Volume 14, Cayuga County, ED 8. U.S. Census Bureau. 1921,” https://archive.org/details/14thcensusofpopu 1090unit (accessed August 12, 2016); United States Census Bureau, “1940 Census: New York Volume 16, Cayuga County, ED 6-26. U.S. Census Bureau. 1941,” https://1940census.archives.gov/ search/?search.state= NY&search. enumeration _district=626#searchby= enumeration&searchmode=browse &year=1940 (accessed August 12, 2016); United States Census Bureau, “1920 Census: Volume 14, Leavenworth County, ED 86-115. U.S. Census Bureau. 1921,” https://archive.org/details/14thcensusofpopu537unit (accessed August 12, 2016); United States Census Bureau, “1940 Census: Kansas, Volume 16, ED 52-28. U.S. Census Bureau. 1941,” https://1940census.archives.gov/search/?search.result_type=image &search.state=KS&search.enumeration_district=52-28#filename=m-t0627-01240-00942.tif&name=52- 28&type=image&state=KS&index=1&pages= 22&bm_all_text=Bookmark (accessed August 12, 2016).

13 During the interwar era, the foreign-born populations of both Auburn and California’s San Quentin Prison both hovered around 25%, with the largest proportions coming from Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America, followed by smaller residual European immigrant populations. See Table 3-10.

14 As Ethan Blue noted, throughout the Depression, foreign-born prisoners also dropped from 25% to 12% of California’s prison population, and Texas’ convicts went from 6% foreign-born to just 3%. Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 28.

15 This project considers "Southern Blacks" to be any prison resident born in the Census-designated "South" region, which includes Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina,

That Auburn Prison saw declines in immigrant populations only to have a different marginalized group fill that void was an exaggerated form of various trends common to prisons around the country. While the number of first-generation Americans as a percentage of the total population dipped from 13.2% in 1920 to 11.6% in 1930 to just 8.8% in 1940, Auburn's percentages dropped from 36.6% in 1920 to 15.2% in 1940.

Leavenworth, as a federal prison, was more representative of the country on the whole, dropping from a foreign-born population of 11.3% in 1920 to 7.5% in 1940, the consistently lower rates perhaps a result of the country’s far-reaching apparatus of deportation for undocumented immigrants.16 Most of the country's major prisons, however, tended to look one of two ways. Many took a form similar to New Jersey State

Prison, where the large native-born population declined between 1926 and 1933 from

30.4% to 21.5%, keeping foreign-born prisoners a smaller, but still significant, proportion of the total population. Many others looked like Angola, which had virtually no immigrant inmates prior to the national immigration rollbacks and dropped from just 1.5% in 1926 to a miniscule 0.8% in 1933.17

While Leavenworth and Auburn’s demographic makeups differed strikingly throughout the interwar period, they represented the same broader reality, that the interwar prisons' foreign-born populations dropped by somewhere between one- and

Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma.

16 Ethan Blue, "Strange Passages: Carceral Mobility and the Liminal in the Catastrophic History of American Deportation," National Identities 17, no. 2 (2015): 175-194; See Tables 3-19 and 3-20.

17 MacCormick and Garrett, Handbook of American Prisons, 1926, 389; Cox, Bixby, and Root, Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories, 1933, 499; Angola records aggregated from FS LSPR CIR 1866- 1963.

two-thirds between the 1920s and 1930s. The national foreign-born prison population declined by more than half between 1926 and 1935, falling from approximately 12% to

5% of all inmates 18 While the decline in the proportion of immigrants in prison remained fairly consistent across states, the regions of the world from which inmates arrived varied widely. In California's San Quentin, almost 10% of incoming interwar inmates arrived from Mexico, whereas 12% to 14% of the residents at New York's Sing Sing

Prison and Pennsylvania's Western State Penitentiary came from Italy, Austro-Hungary,

Russia, or Poland. In the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island, nativity was especially diverse, with significant populations from Mexico, Italy, Russia, China, and the

Philippines. That Chinese and Japanese nationals made up 5.7% of the penitentiary's population and Mexicans constituted another 5.4% was an indication of just how global the institution was, and how diverse the federal prison system was more generally.19

Moving Within the System

The diversity of the interwar prison did not end at the penitentiary’s gates, as a view from above unveiled a network of indirect connections between prisons in different states and territories. The combination of an extraordinary rise in incarceration rates throughout the interwar period along with the more general mobile nature of the men

18 Due to the inconsistent release of reports, this study uses publications from the Osborne Association, the National Society of Penal Information, and Bureau of the Census publications from the 1926, 1933, and 1935. Even though this effectively shrinks the interwar period to just seven or nine years, many of the broader changes affecting interwar prison populations during this time remain pronounced in the data. Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1926 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1929; Google Books, 2018), 31, https://books.google.com/books?id=7oEGAQAAIAAJ&pg =PP9#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed May 10, 2018); Leon Truesdell, ed. Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1935 (Washington: GPO, 1937), 33, 36.

19 See Table 3-10. This project has substituted San Quentin Prison for Folsom Prison, Sing Sing Prison for Auburn Prison, and McNeil Island Penitentiary for Leavenworth Penitentiary because Auburn, Leavenworth, and Folsom provide incomplete data on nativity and, for the purposes of this project, Sing Sing, McNeil Island, and San Quentin provide rough systemic approximations for those institutions.

who made up prison communities resulted in a large cohort of convicts who shuffled around the country in large numbers, constantly entering and exiting prisons in any number of regions. In the largest penitentiaries, wardens had to contend continuously with the presence of dozens of inmates who, at some point, either may have served together in other prison systems throughout the country or knew someone who did.

Effectively, the interwar period saw a nationalization of convict populations as, in repeatedly moving between prisons and prison systems, inmates carried not only their own thoughts, practices, and experiences, but also those of the men they met in the prisons wherein they had previously served. This created a bridge between different state prison systems, as well as between federal and state prison systems. Certainly, this exchange existed to some extent before the interwar period, but the conditions of the 1920s and 1930s expedited the circulation of prison inmates. The extreme growth of the federal system brought diverse groups together in unprecedented numbers, thereby functioning as a linchpin of a national convict experience. State and federal systems, taken together, created an interstate pipeline of repeat offenders who exported fragments of their own lives and local prison cultures to new institutional homes.

Auburn and Leavenworth's interwar inmate case files, taken as a whole, offer some critical insights as to the extent of convict movement and recidivism. Between

1919 and 1928, 5.7% of Auburn's incoming convicts had previously served in a non-

New York prison system, a number that rose to 13.3% during the Great Depression. At

Leavenworth, 12.7% of inmates who arrived between 1919 and 1928 had previously served within a non-federal prison system, a number that increased to 27.6% for the

1929 to 1940 period. Not only did the percentage of inmates with experience in a prison

from an outside system increase over the interwar period but, of those prison inmates who had previously served time elsewhere, the percentages of men who had served sentences in multiple distinct systems also increased. Leavenworth recorded 28.4% of its recidivists in the first half of the interwar period as having served sentences in at least two state systems, a number that grew to 64.2% for the 1929 to 1940 period.20

Auburn also saw an increase in the number of prisons their recidivists served in, though it was much smaller, as those inmates who had served in two or more non-New York systems increased from 12% in the 1919 to 1928 period to 15.8%. This was mostly consistent with national trends, as 29.9% of the country's prison population were recidivists in 1926, a number that leapt to 51.3% in 1935. Similarly, national rates of recidivists who served in two or more systems rose from 11.1 to 15.4%, a small-but- significant increase.21

These findings suggest that American inmates did not simply pass through the revolving doors of their home state's prisons, but served sentences in a variety of spaces around the country. The increasing diversity of inmates' penal experiences at

Auburn and Leavenworth reflected larger American prison realities, as state penitentiaries in Louisiana, California, and Pennsylvania show significant numbers of

20 Aggregated from NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956 (n=1840) and NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957 (n=2048).

21 Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1926, 26; Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1935, 30. The data on recidivism rates on the state level are very spotty prior to the 1920s, but the federal data is mostly complete and shows an amazing descent in first-time offenders throughout the twentieth century’s first half. In 1900, 90% of incoming federal inmates had no prior record, though that number dipped to 78% in 1915, 54% in 1935, and fell to 49% in 1940. Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850-1984 (Rockville: Westate, 1986), 166.

inmates who served in states.22 Aggregating the "prior records" data of inmate case files from Auburn, Leavenworth, Angola Farm, Folsom Prison, and Western State

Penitentiary, the connective web that indirectly and informally linked prison communities across the country emerges. At Auburn, inmates surely ran into familiar faces from the nearby Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio correctional systems, where significant numbers of inmates previously served. Similarly, Western State regularly held, on average, 20 or more inmates from New York and the federal prison system, and 60 or more from Ohio, at any given time. Angola regularly housed many former federal inmates at any given time, along with a dozen or so previously interred in Texas and

Arkansas.23

In Leavenworth, levels of cross-prison system contact were higher than they were at most state prisons, probably a result of federal prisons drawing populations from all reaches of the country. Inmates regularly came to Leavenworth after having spent time in Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, and California state prisons, as the penitentiary held an average of thirty to fifty "graduates" of each of the aforementioned states’ systems at any given time. Former residents of Michigan State

Prison, California’s San Quentin, and other colossal state institutions had a reasonably high chance of seeing an old friend or foe upon their arrival in rural Kansas. Convicts could also engage for the first time with men from the penal confines of faraway states.24

22 For the purposes of this argument, “significant” refers to 1% or greater representation within the inmate population of an institution housing 1000 or more inmates.

23 See Tables 3-6 through 3-9.

24 See Table 3-6.

Naturally, the number and variety of inmates housed in each state prison varied widely based on broad demographic factors and local criminal justice policies. In some instances, this made state prisons astoundingly diverse. California, the destination of millions of migrants and immigrants, arriving en masse on the Pacific shoreline or along

Route 66, saw astounding growth in both prisons and the free world throughout the interwar period. While the country as a whole grew by almost a quarter from 1920 to

1940, and New York swelled by nearly 30%, California more than doubled in population.

The state of California's prison population also more than doubled between 1920 and

1940, and Folsom Prison's population more than tripled, surging from 971 prisoners in

1918 to 2967 in 1940.

Perhaps because it served as a particular draw for desperate populations, the proportion of incoming Folsom inmates who were recidivists spiked from 40.8% for the

1919 to 1928 period to 71.5% during the Great Depression. The nature of California’s inward migration was also likely the reason for Folsom's remarkable makeup. Auburn and Leavenworth topped out at housing a few dozen inmates from any particular non-

New York or federal prison, respectively, at any given time. Folsom, however, regularly carried over 100 former residents of Washington and Texas state prisons, and more than 200 former federal system inmates at a time. In all, Folsom housed significant populations of men from eighteen different prison systems in significant numbers throughout the 1920s and 1930s.25 Given how many of their former residents showed

25 Folsom inmates also served in increasingly disparate varieties of prison environments as time went on, with 6% of inmates having served in two or more non-California prison systems between 1919 and 1928, a number that rose to 12.8% for the 1929 to 1940 period. Aggregated from CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949 (n=1457).

up in other states' prisons, institutions like USP Leavenworth and USP Atlanta, Folsom,

Auburn, Ohio Penitentiary, and Texas's Huntsville Unit served as some of the more important spaces of convict contact and redistribution, taking in inmates from one region before releasing them to another. Such institutions effectively served as "feeders" to one another, redistributing men as they traversed the country.

If the country’s largest state and federal penitentiaries brought heterogeneous populations together by inhaling and exhaling economically marginalized men, the question remains: why were these populations so mobile throughout the interwar period in the first place? The answer lies in the changing nature of American life throughout the early twentieth century, a time in which the locus of national culture moved from rural to urban areas following World War I. These changes were social, cultural, political, and, most importantly, economic responses to modern life.26

From Place to Place In American Life

Perhaps the most famous example of American mass migration in the early twentieth century was the climatologically disastrous Dust Bowl, an event that drove people out of farmlands in the Great Plains and Southwest regions and into more urban and industrial areas. Throughout the 1930s, three hundred thousand Oklahomans,

Texans, Kansans, and others, contending with both crop blight and a national economic depression, moved to the country's coasts and the Midwest. This exodus from rural family farms to unfamiliar agricultural and industrial regions captured the public's imagination, with Dorothea Lange’s photo Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of

26 Since 1910, the United State Census has defined “urban” as a community meeting the modest threshold of 2,500 residents.

Seven Children (1936), Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), and John

Steinbeck's dignified Joad family from Grapes of Wrath (1939) serving as three enduring examples of the way in which Americans understandably sympathized with that group. After all, "Okies" often left their homes in desperation, only to find hostility and suspicion elsewhere about the country.27 Given that the Great Migration of Black families out of the Deep South and into the unfamiliar and often hostile climes of the

North and Midwest was underway for decades by the 1930s, however, public interest in the plight of the Okies was surely, in part, also tied to issues of relatability. These were native-born whites giving up their family plots, and their losses represented the collapse of a specific, imagined American past.

The preceding decade, the 1920s, was one in which the cumulative migration, immigration, urbanization, and onset of mass culture created significant discomfort within the still-sizable white, small-town, Anglo-Saxon elite. Lynn Dumenil noted that

“native, Protestant, middle-class Americans dominated [the 1920s] – politically, culturally, and economically,” and many felt “held together by shared values and assumptions.” By the Great Depression, however, they also imagined they were losing

“a homogeneous society in which equality was real and democracy unchallenged.”28

27 The first half of the twentieth-century saw an extraordinary redistribution of the populace into new pockets of the country. Between 1900 and 1950, the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and California constituted four of the country’s five largest population gainers, while an additional fourteen states more than doubled in size throughout that time. Alternately, the Midwestern states of Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri, as well as the New England regions of Vermont and New Hampshire, made up the slowest-growing states. James Gregory, “Internal Migration: Twentieth Century and Beyond” in Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History, ed. Lynn Dumenil (New York: Oxford University Press 2012), 540-545; United States Census, 1890-1930; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

28 Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 202.

The presence of so-called “New Immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe,

Mexico, and Asia seemed to undermine their aspirations toward upholding a supposed cultural uniformity and national consensus. Similarly, the movement of Black Americans into new communities only added to the friction traditionalists felt with the increasing presences of Catholics and Jews. The response of the old dominant class was a powerful nativist and retrogressive resentment, highlighted by a series of policies that brought immigration and urbanization to virtual halts in the latter-half of the 1920s and the 1930s.

Ultimately, however, anti-modern impulses could not counterbalance the inconvenient truth that the modern state was a product of global and national forces borne of economic and political imperatives. Measures aimed at upholding or promoting lily-white Protestantism saw only temporary effects and failed to reverse the broader course of the country.29 Aside from concerted efforts to remove Mexican migrants, there also existed no effective mechanisms for deporting immigrants already in America, nor could the country move workers out of cities and back to rural areas, convert Catholics and Jews, or force a nineteenth-century moral coda onto a general populace embracing mass culture, consumerism, and other fruits of modern life. This was a losing effort for traditionalists from the offing, a failure of imagination that led the novelist Thomas Wolfe to title his most famous work, a meditation on the dangers of nostalgia and the evanescence of pre-Depression prosperity, You Can't Go Home Again.

29 Ibid, 202.

Interwar Urban Life

In 1920, a majority of Americans lived in areas the Bureau of the Census designated “urban” for the first time. The total rural population dropped from 54.4% of the nation in 1910 to 43.9% by 1930.30 Between 1890 and 1920, the country's urban population increased at least 29% each decade, though that growth slowed to 27.5% between 1920 and 1930, the most sluggish decade to that point. Urban growth almost halted completely between 1930 and 1940, though, as urban communities expanded by just 8%, still the lowest rate of single-decade urban population increase in the country's history. Accordingly, the percentage of Americans living in urban areas crept up from

56.1% in 1930 to just 56.5% in 1940 before picking up again in subsequent decades.31

The vigorous urban growth of the 1910s and 1920s, as compared to that of the

1930s, may partly be due to the availability of manpower and money for infrastructural development during the Depression. The two-decade stretch preceding the economic collapse brought with it major government investments in electrification and the construction of public roadways that more effectively joined town and country, city and suburb. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, for instance, provided state highway departments with matching grants for ambitious building projects. In turn, highway construction employed more men throughout the 1920s than any other public work.32

Not only did massive building projects connect disparate regions through easier trade,

30 Charles Sawyer, ed., Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789-1945: A Supplement to the Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington: GPO, 1949), 29.

31 United States Census Bureau, "Table 4. Population: 1790 to 1990," https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf (accessed March 27, 2018).

32 Dumenil, The Modern Temper; David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

but they also allowed six million Americans to drift into what Ernest Burgess, in studying the urban layout of 1920s Chicago, called the ‘commuter’ and ‘residential’ zones of

American cities.33 Even if Americans did not join dense urban communities, they regularly existed within what one might call cities' broader "spheres of influence."34

Road construction and the increasing influence of automotive technology brought workers to centralized areas of production and streamlined distribution These were central to the country's heavy pre-Depression urbanization, whereas the suffering economy of the 1930s could not maintain the growth of earlier decades.

This combination of mobility and urban growth meant a great many inmates of the interwar period looked like Lawrence S., who entered Leavenworth in 1940 at the age of 38 by way of the federal prison in Milan, Michigan. Institutional records described

Lawrence as a "big dealer," sentenced to an eighteen-year term for a Narcotics Act violation after selling morphine to a federal agent in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lawrence’s career as a petty criminal illustrated a common story of life on the economic fringes, as

Lawrence had followed in the footsteps of many American Jews, moving between communities as a trader of novelties and bric-a-brac, entering and exiting correctional

33 Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 [1925]); Dumenil, The Modern Temper; David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

34 The Mobility Studies literature of the 1970s established the persistence and ubiquity of American movement throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Some of the standout works on this subject include Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973); Peter Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860: A Study in City Growth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Michael Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). Howard Chudacoff provides an excellent discussion of this literature in "A Reconsideration of Geographic Mobility in American Urban History," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 102, no. 4 (October 1994): 501-518.

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institutions along the way. Chronically underemployed, he served jail time for at least eight vagrancy arrests between 1921 and 1933 in jails across the country, including

Louisville, Los Angeles, Jersey City, Jacksonville, and Kalamazoo.35

Lawrence’s plight was part of a larger experience for working-class men, as transient homelessness "masculinized" in the nineteenth century, the same time that unemployment emerged as a major social problem. From approximately 1875 to 1925, a young, male labor force regularly moved about the nation, serving in seasonal and irregular jobs that required significant "muscle power."36 This trend continued into the

1930s, even as urbanization slowed, thereby continuing older patterns of transient economic marginality. Skid Rows appeared in late-century urban centers to serve laborers who, uncommitted to families, traveled the country looking for work in agriculture, lumbering, public projects, and other seasonal jobs. These men were part of a population that Stephan Thernstrom identified as a permanent "floating proletariat" that, like most prison inmates, consistently lived near society’s economic margins.37

Sociological studies into the floating proletariat of the 1920s and 1930s offer some sense of the enormity of that group, though there exists no extensive national data that might totally clarify its size and composition. The most famous interwar study of itinerant homelessness was Nels Anderson's participant observation of tramps,

35 Some of the more significant works on tramps, hobos, and the "floating army of laborers" who made up Coxey's Army include Kenneth Kusmer, Down & Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Roger A. Bruns, Knights of the Road: A Hobo History (New York: Methuen, 1980).

36 Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7; Peter Rossi, Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 19-21.

37 Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians, 42

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hobos, and hobodom.38 Anderson's work was richly descriptive, but it only spoke to a subset of the itinerant male working poor who regularly bustled into and out of the interwar city. Mobile, economically marginalized men constituted an enormous population, however, that ballooned during the Depression, according to both city-level data and various national estimates.39 The Federal Emergency Relief Administration

(FERA) reported 125,000 men in its transient camps in 1933 and, that same year, the

Federal Transient Bureau estimated the country had between one million and one-and- a-quarter million total homeless peoples, or approximately one in every one hundred

Americans.40 On a municipal level, Herman Schubert's study of the Buffalo Transient

Center in 1933 indicated that, in the upstate hub, an overwhelmingly young (median age of thirty), unattached (89% single), and male (98%) population passed through town in search of work, with 59% having arrived on freight trains from Ohio, Pennsylvania, or another nearby state in the preceding few weeks. This was a straightforward reflection of the trends that also moved inmates between these same state prisons systems and, while Schubert’s study only considered Buffalo, Peter Rossi notes, "it's difficult to imagine some special characteristic…compared with, say, Cleveland or Milwaukee that

38 Prior to joining the University of Chicago's Department of Sociology, Anderson was a devoted adherent to hobo culture, traveling the country under the pseudonym "Dean Stiff” and his experiences with the itinerant poor provided him with a valuable participatory perspective. Anderson's work carefully outlined the foundational elements of hobo culture, including the central notion that self-identified hobos had a national, transportable culture, borne of a shared weltanschauung and based in both common need and political idealism. Anderson cited the prevalence of a "hobo code" and hobo's devotion to the radical political ideologies of the International Workers of the World as two important elements of the shared counterculture of hobodom. This identity had striking similarities to the social script interwar convicts called the Convict Code, which this project discusses in Chapter 5. Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961 [1923]), 44, 47.

39 There exist no trustworthy national statistics on the itinerant homeless, either historically or in the present.

40 Samuel E. Wallace, Skid Row as a Way of Life (New York: Harper & Ross, 1968), 21; Rossi, Down and Out in America, 21-2.

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would have produced markedly different results."41 The constant city-to-city movement of the young, unattached, and economically tenuous men who made up the majority of

American interwar prison populations was indicative of the continued importance of urban areas throughout the period, even as their growth slowed.

The Crisis of Pluralism

Cities were the start and end points for many immigrants, migrants, and marginalized groups throughout the interwar years, as America's urban multiculturalism was the legacy of, among other things, the arrival of 26 million immigrants into the

United States between 1870 and 1920. Prior to the 1880s, white immigrants were mostly Northern and Western European, and almost half were skilled workers. Between

1880 and 1930, however, more than 80% of the largely Southern and Eastern European arrivals were unskilled.42 Arrivals from Italy, Russia, Greece, and other "swarthy"

Europeans predominantly settled in urban areas, where they found help adjusting to

American life within ethnic enclaves. By 1920, 36.1% of New York City residents, 29.9% of Chicagoans, and 32.4% of Bostonians were first generation Americans.43 By 1930, one in ten Americans self-reported as foreign born and one in five claimed at least one foreign born parent. As the historian David Kennedy explained the country's largest

41 Herman Schubert, Twenty Thousand Transients: A One Year's Sample of Those Who Apply for Aid in a Northern City (Buffalo: Emergency Relief Bureau, 1935).

42 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 61, 65.

43 Campbell Gibson and Emily Lennon, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 1900 (Washington: GPO, 1999), 71.

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cities had evolved into "polyglot archipelago[s] in the predominantly Anglo-Protestant

American sea" by the interwar period.44

The intense anti-immigrant sentiment of the 1920s and 1930s that followed was a sign of the immense fear and anger about the changes to society these populations represented. Millions of Americans supported demographic engineering through major alterations to immigration policies, particularly the reversal of "open door" practices and the prevention of more non-citizens arriving from undesirable areas of the globe.

Unfortunately for nativist America, however, the country had no plan or mechanisms for the mass deportation of millions of European and Asian immigrants.45 The implementations of restrictive immigration policies and heavy Americanization efforts were weak bureaucratic responses to broad, global trends that already defined

American life.46 Matthew Frye Jacobson noted that industrial trade routes crisscrossed the world's oceans by the mid-nineteenth century, defining new Atlantic passages:

An international agricultural periphery whose economic life, communal fabric, patterns of indebtedness, customs of payment, cultivating and harvesting technologies, scales of production, conceptions of the market, and horizons of opportunity had all been pulled and transformed by the social and economic vortex of the industrializing center.47

44 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 14.

45 Blue, "Strange Passages," 176.

46 Desmond King provides valuable insights on the concerted "Americanization" efforts of the 1910s, when nativist fears of immigrant ethnic "others" began crystallizing as concerted national action. He notes that, on July 4, 1915, "150 cities celebrated Independence Day…as ‘Americanization Day,’" an event that grew to include 1,200 municipalities in 1917. Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 95.

47 Jacobson provides a vivid sense of the vast international networks that, between the end of Reconstruction and the country's entry into World War One, regularly shuttled Americans into foreign markets and non-Americans into the industrial centers of the United States. This was a "swath bounded by Chicago and St. Louis in the west; by Toronto, Glasgow, and Berlin in the north; by Warsaw, Lodz, and Budapest in the east, and by Milan, Barcelona, and Louisville in the south." Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 60.

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Even if the United States had not set out to create a multicultural identity, it was a fait accompli by the 1920s and restrictive immigration policies merely slowed cross-cultural mixing without undoing the realities of the day.48

The New Americans

In 1920, more than 36 million of the country's 106 million white inhabitants were first- or second-generation Americans, and only half of foreign-born inhabitants were naturalized citizens.49 Federal political leaders, lawmakers, Americanization committees, and voters, fearing a "mongrelization" of white, Protestant America, committed significant efforts to reduce foreign admissions to the country through a series of federal policies. Not unique to the interwar period, nativist policies regarding immigration in the 1920s were only the latest version of earlier measures that disproportionately targeted Asians. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for instance, was one such action of that type. In 1903, the Anarchist Exclusion Act served as a backdoor restriction on Asian and Eastern European populations under the guise of preventing the admission of anarchists, epileptics, the destitute, and sex trade profiteers.50 In 1917, the federal government took its boldest step to that point, passing the Immigration Act, which laid out a formal Asiatic "barred zone."51

In 1921, the United States federal government, perhaps feeding off the paranoia wrought by the Palmer Raids and a variety of speculative reports about potential

48 Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 14.

49 Campbell Gibson and Dianne Schmidley, Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 1997 (Washington: GPO, 1999), 23.

50 Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882- 1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 2002): 36-38.

51 King, Making Americans, 236.

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Communist coups, prepared to expand its nativist policies even further. That year,

Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which used a “national origins formula” to fix the level of admissible immigrants per year at 3% of the total domestic population of that immigrant group in 1890. Even that minute fraction shrunk with the 1924 Johnson-

Reed Act, which readjusted admission rates down to just 2% and imposed an absolute numerical limit of 155,000 admissions per year, in contrast to the more than one million immigrants the country permitted in 1918.52 As a result, the total number of yearly new arrivals, having already decreased 34.8% between 1900 and 1920, diminished even more. The second wave of rollbacks saw a drop in immigration of 87.1% between 1925 and 1940, with the policies hitting some groups especially hard. Russian immigration declined 97.7%, perhaps isolating the United States somewhat from the upheaval of the

Communist Revolution, while the number of Korean immigrants the country admitted decreased 91.7%, dropping to a total of just 643 admissions throughout the 1920s.53

The heavy restrictions laid forth by the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts meant that more than half of the immigrants who arrived in the United States during the interwar period did so prior to 1925.54 Ironically, though, the federal immigration acts' exemptions of the Americas from these major rollbacks actually served to increase the

52 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 22-23.

53 Ibid, 12-13.

54 Between the 1920 and 1925, the United States experienced a net positive migration of 439,982 persons per year, 65.7% of whom came from Europe and 30.7% coming from the Americas. The period from 1925 to 1930 saw the country's net migration drop by almost half, to just 220,372 per year, which still accounted for more than two-fifths of the interwar period's intakes. As with urbanization, however, immigration fell to unprecedented lows in the 1930s. Between 1931 and 1945, the country experienced a net positive migration of just 13,123 people per year and, between July 1931 and June 1936, the United States saw an out-migration of 138,400 persons, the greatest deficit in the country's recorded history. Elliott Robert Barkan, And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society 1920 to the 1990s (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 44-5.

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presence of Latin American and Caribbean communities in the United States. So intense was the global immigration of the 1921-1924 period, and the huge arrivals of

Canadians and Latin Americans in the latter 1920s, that the percentage of foreign-born residents in the United States was actually higher in 1930 than in 1920.55 Mexicans came to constitute a particularly important, and ubiquitous, new group of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. Between 1900 and 1930, approximately 700,000 Mexicans immigrated into the Sun Belt states, filling out the region's agricultural labor force, as the national fruit and vegetable market relied on mobile seasonal laborers.56

In addition to altering the social ecology of states such as Florida, Texas, and

California through their extraordinary numbers, though, Mexicans also began working in manufacturing plants throughout the Midwest. By 1928, 11% of the industrial workers in the Chicago-Gary region were Mexican, as were thousands of others in cities such as

St. Louis, Detroit, and Pittsburgh.57 As with so much immigration and migration in the

United States, however, Mexicans faced significant hostility from native-born whites, not only in the workplace but in government. In 1929, the State Department refused visas to all Mexican laborers who did not have prior residence in the United States, a move that resulted in deportation and repatriation efforts throughout the 1930s. Ultimately, the

55 Barkan, And Still They Come, 23, 44, 45; Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), 287, 292.

56 As Ethan Blue notes, national efforts to employ a nationwide rail system to remove Mexican nationals from the United States flourished during the interwar period. The Immigration and Naturalization Service acquired its first train for the purpose in 1914, though the system ballooned to encompass 181 different trains by 1931, nineteen of which serviced the contiguous United States, joining Washington, California, Texas, and New York. Blue, "Strange Passages," 2.

57 Barkan, And Still They Come, 46.

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federal government sent 500,000 persons of Mexican ancestry to Mexico, though half of them were American citizens.58

Mae Ngai noted that such efforts were, like other immigration policies, no match for the demands of the international market. Employers' needs for people to work the

"factories in the field" meant that the Mexican presence in the United States remained strong and consistent, and undocumented migration became a growing feature of

Southwestern economic life throughout the 1930s and into the present.59 As a result, exclusionary immigration policies succeeded only somewhat. The proportion of foreign- born populations within both prisons and the country as a whole temporarily dipped over the interwar period and the percentage of the country that was foreign-born declined by nearly one quarter, from 11.6% to 8.8%. In absolute terms, however, the United States remained deeply heterogeneous, and the country would not register as large of a foreign-born population as it did at the end of the interwar period once again until the year 2000.60

The Great Migration

Just as itinerant laborers and immigrant families were central to the dynamism of the American city throughout the interwar period, so too were growing Black populations. Though not as pronounced during the interwar period as today, Black

Americans remained one of the most overrepresented groups in prisons throughout the

58 Ibid, 47.

59 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 13; John W. Chambers, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

60 Dianne Schmidley, ed. Current Population Reports P23-206 Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States, 2000 (Washington: GPO, 2001), 8.

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1920s and 1930s, partly as a result of their rapid influx into urban areas throughout the earlier twentieth century.61 The Great Migration began in earnest around 1910, when

89% of American Blacks still resided in the South, growing in momentum after federal policy curtailed foreign immigration in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Southern Blacks migrated en masse to find factory work in the urban industrial Northeast, Midwest, and

West. By 1930, the number of Blacks who lived in the South declined to 78.7%, a number that continued to plunge throughout the 1930s before leveling off around

1970.62

While a majority of the nation’s Black population remained in the Deep South throughout the interwar years, those who migrated tended to relocate to urban industrial hubs. This resulted in an overrepresentation of Black people in cities around the country.63 The number of Black Americans living outside of the South tripled between

1900 and 1930, and more than 90% of those who settled in the Northeast and West ended up residing in urban areas such as Detroit, which saw an increase of 611.3% in its Black population between 1910 and 1920. Chicago and New York saw their Black populations more than double throughout the 1920s.64

61 Patrick A. Langan, Race of Prisoners Admitted to State and Federal Institutions, 1926-1986, (Washington: GPO, 1991; United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018), 5. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/125618.pdf (accessed May 10, 2018).

62 Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, To Ask for An Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2009), 8.

63 Ira Berlin notes how extraordinarily pronounced these patterns were in some areas. More than two- thirds of Cleveland's Black workingmen labored in factories and other industrial sites in the 1920s, whereas under one-quarter had attended to such jobs prior to World War I. Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Penguin, 2010), 154, 180; Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1983]), 2.

64 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Kennedy, Freedom From Fear; Stephen Robertson, Shane White, Stephen Garton, and Graham White, "This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s

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In their economic marginality, willingness to relocate, and frequent search for work, many Great Migrators were members of Thernstrom's "floating proletariat."

Auburn and Leavenworth case files contain numerous stories of men like James H., a single forty-one year old with a fourth grade education, who traveled about the country looking for work and supporting himself as a painter. James began his prison experiences in Alabama before moving on to Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, and New

York City, all non-Southern urban industrial centers with significant Black populations.65

The fact that Black inmates' records often showed men moving about the nation, picking up a wide variety of jobs as a means of making due economically, only goes to show the experiential overlap that so many members of the urban poor, be they native-born white, immigrant, or Black migrants, shared throughout this time.66

The American Prisoner Class

The frequent movement of economic marginals across the country and between prisons, made inmate populations their most racially and ethnically heterogeneous to that point. Prison populations were quite homogeneous when it came to class and occupation, however. Leavenworth and Auburn each housed throngs of chronically

and 1930s," Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (2010): 97-122; John Brueggemann, "Racial Considerations and Social Policy in the 1930s," Social Science History 26, no. 1 (2002): 139-177.

65 NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963, 580.

66 The arrival of Black immigrants from elsewhere in North America created a different racial dynamic in specific regions of the North and Midwest, as hundreds of thousands from the Caribbean found their way into the United States between 1920 and 1940. Throughout that time, approximately 40,000 immigrants from the West Indies arrived in New York City alone and, elsewhere throughout the northeast, Jamaicans, Black Cubans and Dominicans, and Latino peoples arrived in the thousands in cities like Chicago and Boston. This movement contributed to a unique cultural identity, as rural people from the South met with urban Northerners and Caribbean immigrants to create a multicultural identity within many urban Black populations. Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 4.

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unemployed and underemployed toilers rapt in an ongoing quest for paid labor that frequently led them across state lines. They comprised Dust Bowl farmers, Southern

Black laborers, and an array of men who made their way around the country in response to a variety of "push" factors. Even inmates who came from relatively affluent industrialized cities regularly found themselves moving around the country in an attempt to find work. Both the extraordinary macro level changes in the nature of men's work between 1900 and 1930 and the cratering economy of the Great Depression contributed to this situation, as the hypermobile, underemployed working-class dominated interwar prisons.67

Class, Work, and Unemployment

Many of the men imprisoned throughout the interwar period had contended with diminished economic opportunity throughout their early lives and reached adulthood on the eve of international economic collapse. Throughout the 1920s, unemployment rates mostly waffled between just three and six percent, though the Great Depression pushed unemployment up to almost 9% by 1930 and 14.6% in 1940, with a high of approximately one-quarter during the Depression’s nadir.68 Accordingly, those who ended up in prison tended to have uneven work histories, particularly as the American economy went through significant changes in the sort of work it afforded those with little formal education or practical training. Befitting a population of young, undertrained men,

67 U.S. Census Bureau, "Table XXII. Percent Distribution, by General Divisions of Occupations, of Gainful Workers 10 Years Old and Over, By Sex, For the United States: 1870 to 1930" in Comparative Occupation Statistics, 1870-1930: A Comparable Series of Statistics Presenting a Distribution of the Nation's Labor Force, by Occupation, Sex, and Age (Washington: Office the Census, 1931), 101. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-occupation/00312147ch2.pdf (accessed May 10, 2018).

68 Sawyer, Historical Statistics of the United States, 64.

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then, interwar convicts overwhelmingly gravitated toward accessible, transportable jobs with little barrier to entry. The fact that a majority of inmates also served sentences for instrumental crimes with clear economic rationales reflected the financial precariousness under which most inmates lived in the free world.69

Part of the unstable nature of working-class employment during the interwar period was due to the changing nature of the national economy at the time. Expanded roadways, ubiquitous rail, trucking culture, heavy electrification, and greater mass communication all meant that American labor shifted between 1920 and 1940, and many inmates were among those who did not have appropriate skills for new work and struggled within the developing economy. Some occupations, such as farmer, coal miner, carpenter, machinist, salesman, and clerk, remained among the country's most common jobs throughout the 1920s and 1930s, occupying more than a half-million men at a time. That the only two occupations to cross the half-million mark between 1920 and 1930 were "chauffeurs and truck & tractor drivers" and "retail dealers," however, was indicative of the new economic realities of the time.70 Jobs based in the production and distribution of mass-produced goods became central elements of the expanding consumer culture of the time and presaged other major changes in the nature of

American work.

69 See Tables 3-4, 3-5, 3-12 through 3-16, and 3-21 through 3-24 for more data relating to issues of work and class.

70 Bureau of the Census, 1920 Census: Number and Sex of Occupied Persons v. 4 Chapter 2, 35-43, accessed February 11, 2018, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1923/dec/vol-04- occupations.html (accessed May 7, 2018); Bureau of the Census, 1920 Census: Part II, Comparative Occupation, 1870-1930, 113-122, accessed February 11, 2018, https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/1870- 1930workers.pdf (accessed May 8, 2018); David L. Kaplan and M. Claire Casey, eds., Occupational Trends in the United States, 1900 to 1950. v. 5 (Washington: GPO, 1958), 8.

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As the interwar period wore on, men's labor shifted progressively away from farming and resource extraction, which were among interwar inmates’ most common occupations. Throughout the 1920s, the number of men cumulatively employed across the country in the fields of agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry; extraction of minerals; and manufacturing and mechanical industries dropped from 66% of the male workforce to just 52.8%. Alternately, the percentage of the male workforce employed in trade; domestic and personal service; clerical occupations; and professional service increased from 23% to 37.5%. This move from "dirty" to "clean" occupations, a shift that saw greater numbers of workers entering the service sector and office jobs, continued throughout the Great Depression. While the total male workforce increased in absolute numbers by just 3% between 1930 and 1940, the number of office workers rose 9% and those in the service sector increased by 29%. Alternately, farm managers and laborers dropped 10%, a fact likely due in part to the environmental blight affecting the Great

Plains.71

Convict Work Histories

Outside of the rural South, inmates around the country predominantly reported their primary occupations as some form of transportable, low-skill work. The most common job those men reported to administrators was "laborer," a catch-all term for one willing to do most any sort of unskilled odd job.72 The proportion of inmates who self-reported as laborers ranged from around 16% at Folsom Prison and USP

Leavenworth to over 30% of inmates at Angola Farm and New Mexico State. When

71 Sawyer, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 139, 140; Kaplan and Casey, Occupational Trends in the United States, 8.

72 See Tables 3-11 through 3-17 for more information.

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inmates specifically clarified a branch of unskilled labor, they most commonly reported

"driver" or "painter," and unskilled workers with more defined work identities composed an additional 10% to 18% of prison populations. Additionally, semi-skilled workers, who made their livings as cooks, barbers, carpenters, dry cleaners, and in other fields dependent on minimal levels of technical knowledge, provided a significant constituency, making up to a quarter of Folsom and Leavenworth's populations, as well as smaller-but-significant rates elsewhere.73 Altogether, a clear majority of inmates held primary occupations that did not tie them to a specific place and had minimal, if any, barriers to entry.74

Skilled workers, who made their livings as machinists, engineers, mechanics, and craftsmen constituted another significant segment of prison populations. These comprised between 15% and 26% of each institution, though the division between skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled was often hazy. Men's fluid professional identities and spotty work histories suggested the division between 'laborer' and 'mechanic', for

73 This project considers "carpenters" semi-skilled workers, despite the fact that the census statistician Alba M. Edwards identified them as "blue collar" laborers. Certainly "carpenter" is a vague enough term that it might refer to a rough laborer, but Jules Tygiel's "Tramping Artisans: Carpenters in Industrial America, 1880-90" makes a convincing case that itinerant carpenters of the turn of the twentieth century fit more comfortably into the hazy notion of "craftsman" or "artisan," with many serving as apprentices and masters. In Eric Monkonnen, ed., Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1984), 88-90.

74 In his study of mobility among Bostonians, Stephan Thernstrom, with minor modifications, employed occupational categories that Alba M. Edwards first devised in the 1930's. For the most part, my own coding of professions reflects Thernstrom and Edwards's decisions, though I chose to focus my groupings not on the prestige those professions would afford workers in free society. Thernstrom and Edwards had organized their hierarchies of professions along pay and status lines, whereas I chose to focus on the lifestyle that certain jobs would demand of workers, especially in regards to mobility, skill, and employability. For that reason, rather than breaking professions down into subsets of 'White Collar' and 'Blue Collar,' I have focused on ten groupings that serve to more precisely distribute the sorts of work common to interwar prison populations. These divisions, in turn, stress the network of skills and values inmates may have imported into prison with them. The professions are: Laborer/Miner; Miscellaneous Unskilled Work; Food Preparation; Machinist/Mechanic; Farmer/Farmhand; Barber/Clothier; White & Pink Collar; Artist/Athlete. Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians, 289-91.

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instance, was not always meaningful and, for that reason, those labels were indicative only of broad occupational trends, not straightforward divisions. Nonetheless, even a conservative estimate that assumes all self-reported mechanics, machinists, and plastic artists were categorically "skilled" would not challenge the notion that unstable occupations, self-employment, and seasonal and part-time work dominated the occupational lives of inmates. In all, 70% to 80% of prison populations self-reported as some form of unskilled, semi-skilled, or skilled worker who, in need of either an employer or market, might move about the country in search of work. “Farmer” presented the only occupation that tied inmates to the land in significant numbers, as more than one-fifth of Angola and New Mexico convicts reported agricultural jobs as their primary occupation, though many farmers were also functionally laborers (and vice versa), working on the land of others for seasonal pay.75

While the nature of their work differed from region to region, with relatively few farmers at Leavenworth and very few machinists at Angola, each prison population was, for the most part, populated by a mix of transient laborers, self-employed craftsmen, chronically or seasonally unemployed men, and low-paid service sector workers.

Regardless of where the prison was, inmates rarely worked in the "clean" sector of the country's growing office culture. Outside of especially rare occupations like "artist" or

"athlete," office- or retail-based occupations made up the smallest group within prisons.

75 Dividing jobs by their broadest categorization provides the most useful shorthand for understanding the general work cultures of each prison. Manual occupations (laborers, farmhands, and unskilled workers) were most common in Angola (70.9% of population's self-reported occupation) and New Mexico State (67.3%), populations with large numbers of racial minorities. Alternately, machinists, plastic artists, and skilled workers were more prevalent in Folsom (26.1%), Auburn (22.1%), and Leavenworth (22.4%), where white inmates made up large majorities. Additionally, Folsom (27.7%) and Leavenworth (22.4%) were home to disproportionately high semi-skilled workers and members of the service sector. For more information on these breakdowns, refer to Table 3-16.

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Clerks, merchants, bookkeepers, secretaries, and similar positions constituted around

15% of the prison populations in Auburn and Folsom, but they did not even make up 5% of the Angola and New Mexico workforce. Furthermore, the clerks who did find their way behind bars were overwhelmingly young and not the sort of middle-aged men who could have built up significant savings or equity. Rather, white-collar workers tended to be unmarried men toiling in relatively low-paying "pink collar" positions that required little formal education.76

While men on the economic margins made up the majority of all racial and ethnic groups within interwar prison populations, inmate levels of deprivation did vary in scale based on demographic factors. Only 10% to 20% of white inmates at any of the six prisons at hand self-identified as "laborers," whereas anywhere between 6% (Angola) and 18% (Folsom) of white inmates held white-collar jobs. Alternately, between 25% and 40% of Black inmates self-identified as laborers, with fewer than 5% of the Black residents of any given prison holding white-collar positions.77 Angola's Black inmates, residing within an institution that, in its strenuous racial segregation of residents, reflected the Jim Crow ideologies of the time, faced remarkable boundaries to professional success in the free world. An overwhelming majority, 82.4%, of the Black population worked in unskilled occupations or as farmers, whereas just 0.1% held a white-collar occupation.78 This was a magnification of realities in the free world, of

76 "Clerk" and "Salesman" were the two most common "white collar" occupations in Auburn and Leavenworth, with 47 clerks and 65 salesmen in the former, 85 clerks and 56 salesmen in the latter. NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

77 See Tables 3-11 through 3-16.

78 See Table 3-15.

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course, as 26.8% of Louisiana's native-born white male workforce found employment in clerical, professional, public service, or trade jobs, whereas only 6.9% of Black employed males worked in the same fields.79

New Mexico State Prison presented a slightly diminished version of the racial discrepancies at Angola. Of the Hispanics and Latinos who made up almost two-fifths of the prison's population, 83.3% were laborers, farmers, and semi-skilled workers, whereas fewer than one in fifty held a white-collar job.80 Again, these proportions mostly mirrored the free world. In 1930, 17.8% of New Mexico’s native-born white male labor force worked in clerical, professional, public service, or trade occupations, whereas only

5% of Latino, Asian, and American Indian employees could claim the same.81 The fact that prisoners of color received fewer opportunities in the free world to work outside of low-skilled work is by no means surprising. In a country in which both formal and informal racial discrimination guided cultural norms and employment practices, even the populations of the interwar prison, who generally shared in precarious employment and mobility, faced stratified levels of poverty and deprivation.

These divisions were not so great as to suggest non-relatable work experiences between groups, however, as even the relatively privileged native-born white Protestant

79 U.S. Census Bureau, “1930 Census: Classified Index of Occupations, v. 4 Occupations By States,” accessed January 6, 2018, https://www.census.gov/ library/publications/1933/dec/1930a-vol-04- occupations.html (accessed May 2, 2018).

80 See Table 3-16.

81 For Louisiana, the Census provides complete data on both the native-born white workforce (n=370,209) and the Black workforce (n=233,907); in New Mexico, the Census only provides data on the native-born white workforce (n=91,975) and "Other" (n=23,396). Alba Edwards, ed., 1930 Census: Volume 4. Occupations, by States. Reports by States, Giving Statistics for Cities of 25,000 or More (Washington: GPO, 1931; Bureau of the Census, 2018), 625-6; 1075-6, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/ decennial/1930/population-volume-4/41129482v4.pdf (accessed May 9, 2018).

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populations largely toiled in low-paid, unstable jobs. Accordingly, between 1920 and

1940, the typical prisoner of any race or ethnicity was under 30 years old, had only rudimentary reading and writing skills, and served a sentence for either robbery or a non-violent economic offense.82 The balance of these offences differed from prison to prison, but robbery, larceny, burglary, and breaking & entering, taken together, constituted the clear majority of offences at Auburn (60.4%), New Mexico State (56.2%),

Angola (61.6%), and Western State Penitentiary (60.0%). Similarly, nearly two-thirds

(63.7%) of the offences that landed Leavenworth's interwar inmates behind bars were for economic offences based in illicit economies with low barriers to entry.83 In the eyes of the Wickersham Commission, floating laborers and social marginals of different types brought shared economic experiences into the prison, explaining that prisoners “enjoy their poverty in common [which] goes to make the prison into a community. [Their] members are so closely bound together in their desperate poverty, their isolation, and their physical proximity”84 This truth may have solidified somewhat as the 1930s wore

82 While the relative disadvantage of Black and Latino prisoners in the free world made their lives generally more difficult, financial stability remained elusive for all prison populations. This was partly because all groups within each prison and across every racial group were far younger in the aggregate than the American population on the whole. As the cohort both in the early twentieth century aged into young adulthood, however, the percentage of national prison populations also rose. In 1910, 55.7% of the national convict population was under 35. By 1926, 62.7% were under 30, a number that dropped a little, to 59%, in 1935. Joseph Adna Hill, and Reginald L. Brown, eds., Prisoners and Juvenile Delinquents in the United States 1910 (Washington: GPO, 1918; archive.org, 2018), 401, https://archive.org/details/ prisonersandjuv00browgoog (accessed May 3, 2018); Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1926, 34; Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1935, 37.

83 See Tables 3-21 through 3-24 for data on the percentage of inmates interred for breaking and entering, burglary, larceny, and robbery.

84 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, ed. George Wickersham, v. 9, Report on Penal Institutions, Probation and Parole (Washington: GPO, 1931), 22; Nels Anderson, On Hobos and Homelessness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1923]); Steven Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); T.J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010).

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on, as not only did prisoners continue to share in similar forms of work in the free world and deprivation behind bars, but some also shared a new collective identity as union members.

Divided Brotherhood

As the historian Paul Street noted in his work on Chicago, Black laborers transformed from anti-union, "company loyal" strikebreakers in the 1920s to some of the most militant union members by the end of the 1930s.85 Ethnic and racial chauvinism did not disappear or become irrelevant to the lives of working-class men over the interwar period, and Chicago did not represent the nation in toto, nor did unionization serve as a perfect stand-in for the parameters of intercultural working-class affiliation.

The changing nature of racial politics within the labor movement, however, especially in a city as racially combustible as Chicago, did signify the ability of working-class men to create alliances based in common economic cause. To understand the impact unionization and collective bargaining might have had in connecting people in prisons, it is first imperative to consider how the interwar period created the conditions for interracial cooperation in the workplace.

Race and Ethnic Divisions in the Workplace

By the twentieth century, the United States’ flourishing manufacturing economy brought men of various ethnic and racial makeups together in working environments, shoulder to shoulder. They did not always share their spaces gladly, though, and remained separated in other aspects of their lives. Throughout the early twentieth

85 Paul Street, "The 'Best Union Members': Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago's Stockyards During the 1930s," Journal of American Ethnic History, 20, no.1 (Fall 2000): 19-20.

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century, in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, and Cleveland, factory employees slept, ate, played, and married within their own ethno-national tribes. As Lizabeth Cohen noted, workers' class affiliations remained secondary to their ethnic attachments in

1920, and "although Irish and German butchers, Slavic laborers, and Black migrants worked together…at the end of the day they headed home to worlds segregated according to race, skill, and ethnicity."86 This is not to say that workers were apolitical, but only that they anchored their political identities in their unique ethnic and racial worlds. This made transcending demographic divisions all the more difficult.87

Black, Latino, and Asian workers were strictly “othered” in many of these environments, as white employers and workers alike frequently treated those groups with open hostility. Factory owners habitually discriminated against Black laborers in both the hiring and firing processes, though they also relied on that population to serve as strikebreaking cudgels against white-dominated unions. This positioned Black laborers as enemies of unionization, though they found themselves in that role almost by default, having experimented with the unionization a generation earlier, most notably in the form of the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union. As Charles

Postel noted, “for a brief moment, white and black Populists succeeded in finding patches of common political grounds” when the “entry of the Alliance Movement into third-party politics led to politically driven experiments in biracial cooperation.”88 This tentative cooperation had mostly subsided by the dawn of the interwar era, however.

86 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 29.

87 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 51.

88 Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 176.

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Just as white Populists ultimately held tight to a sharp color line and separation of the races, so too did most unions throughout the early twentieth century.89 Black community leaders frequently expressed animosity toward unionization in the 1910s and 1920s, convinced that such bodies were racially discriminatory, a notion that white labor leaders did little to dispel.90 For their part, Latino and Asian workers regularly faced outright hostility and violence, especially in the West. White unions frequently claimed the willingness of those workforces to take lesser pay ultimately drove down all wages, leading the American Federal of Labor (AFL) to characterize Asian and Latin

American seasonal workers as "slave waves."91 Major unions and federations’ hostilities toward people of color greatly hobbled intercultural cooperation within the labor movement, though that trend began to turn by the 1930s.92

Gradual mixing created new relationships, especially in spaces in which workers relied on each other for safety and friendship. While employers had, for decades, tried to diminish the likelihood of inclusive collective bargaining by placing employees with unalike backgrounds, languages, religions, and beliefs alongside each other in the workplace, this began to change as early as 1914. That year, the Ludlow strikers, whose prolonged strike famously ended in tragedy, showed workers' immense adaptability within the resource camps of rural Colorado. The historian Thomas

Andrews found that "Greeks, Italians, Slavs, and 'Mexicans,'" crowded within the

89 Ibid, 174.

90 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 42, 45.

91 Wendy Wall, Inventing the American Way: The Politics of Consensus From the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22-3.

92 James R. Barrett, "Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago's South Side, 1900-1922," Journal of Social History 18, no. 1 (1984): 41.

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subterranean workspaces of the Ludlow coalfields, as well as in their union tent colony at Camp San Rafael, and forged a "moral economy" based in common concerns regarding safety and prosperity.93

The isolation and looming dangers of mineral extraction may have forced men together in the industrial towns of the Mountain West, but the laborers of the Northeast and Midwest were not so desperate. Instead, workers in areas such as New York,

Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee developed connections, in part, based in common interests and activities, as welfare capitalism served to mix working populations through activities outside of work hours. Cohen noted that, by the mid-1930s, "not only were people now likely to cooperate with persons of different ethnicities on the factory floor, but they might also deepen that relationship by playing with them on the department baseball team or chatting at the company dance."94 In turning work areas into social spaces, then, welfare capitalism weakened the Old World divisions that were so important to first-generation Americans and created common cultural spaces for second-generation

Americans to form relationships.

The shrinking divides between white ethnic groups in the workplace did not equate to an acceptance of Black populations in organized labor. The rise of mass culture weakened divisions between both Black and white workers, though, as well as between the native-born and foreign-born.95 Cohen noted that radio was a particularly

93 Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 2, 12, 171.

94 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 202, 204, 205.

95 As Chapter 3 has tried to emphasize, Black workers, and Black people in general, faced far greater systemic hardships than any segment of the white working class. To elide the struggles of all disadvantaged groups would mean erring in the same way University of Chicago Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton did when, in Christmas 1953, he made a speech about racial violence in the city and

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important tool of intercultural exchange because it allowed different ethnic and racial groups to main elements of their culture as it spread different ethnic and religious traditions along with new types of music. Cohen argued that modern entertainment and consumption did not constitute a “repudiation of [ethnic, national, or racial groups’] established social identities.”96 As a result, a wide variety of demographic cohorts in urban centers like Chicago engaged with radio, movies, and conspicuous consumption, thereby sharing similar American experiences.97 "By the mid-1930s," Cohen argued,

"workers, whatever their skill and whether born of immigrant or native parents, white or black, simply had more in common on which a united union movement could be built."98

Admittedly, it remains difficult to tell exactly how important broad cultural changes, such as the immense popularity of radio and cinema or the presence of welfare capitalism, had in the creation of a multiracial working-class culture.99 Nonetheless, some combination of racially mixed workplaces, innovations in union organizing, mass culture,

emphasized not that Black Chicagoans faced especial discrimination, but that their culture was not yet equipped for success in the industrialized North. Arnold Hirsch, Making The Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 182.

96 Lizabeth Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture in the Grassroots: The Experiences of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,” American Quarterly 41, no.1 (March 1989): 21-22.

97 As with the labor movement and other elements of American life, mainstream entertainment did not allow Blacks space within common culture quite as readily as other groups. Cohen does note, however, that Black Americans did make a significant imprint on American mass culture by the 1930s, with “Black jazz recordings, or black employment in chain stores [having become] a vehicle for making a claim on mainstream society that racism had otherwise denied.” Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture in the Grassroots,” 25.

98 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 324.

99 For more on the growing importance of mass culture, and especially of movies and radio in the 1920s and 1930s, see Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 2012 [1975]); Timothy Taylor, “Music and the Rise of Radio in 1920s America: Technological Imperialism, Socialization, and the Transformation of Intimacy,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 22.4 (2002): 425-443; Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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and welfare capitalism did combine to create a space for a common union identity. In fact, the 1930s were the most successful and racially diverse period for American labor to that time.100

At the same time that companies voluntarily brought workers together, major labor unions and federations looked for new ways to paper over longstanding racial divisions and create more cohesive, though not necessarily integrated, strike efforts.

Labor leaders mitigated the racism of American labor organizing unevenly across regions and industries, as the United Mine Workers (UMW) accepted all races from its

1890 founding onward and the International Workers of the World (IWW) recruited women and the unemployed into their ranks. Alternately, the American Federation of

Labor (AFL), the largest and most powerful federation of unions in the country, remained reticent toward racial integration through the early 1930s.101

For their part, Black workers’ acceptance of unions throughout the 1930s was part of a gradual turn, as a continued exploitation at the hands of employers led northern Blacks to reflect on how little their cooperation with management had actually earned them. At the same time, changes in union and federation policies opened up new organizing opportunities and the UMW began a policy in the mid-1920s mandating that all local federation election slates split their ballots along Black and white lines. That

"separate but equal" policy, though it reified the notion of racial separation, also created

100 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 206, 325

101 John Brueggemann and Terry Boswell, “Realizing Solidarity: Sources of Interracial Unionism During the Great Depression,” Work and Occupations 25, no. 4 (1998): 436-482.

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spaces for Black involvement among the federation’s less racially integrative constituencies.102

By the 1930s, the notion of racial inclusivity as a pragmatic innovation in labor organizing gained significant traction in the North and Midwest. The Congress of

Industrial Organization (CIO), which former UMW President John L. Lewis established in 1935, found immense Depression-era success by folding Black unions into collective bargaining efforts in the steel, meatpacking, and automobile industries.103 The CIO’s innovations were critical in the continued evolution of racial politics in American labor, the product of what Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake called a “crusading movement,” one “kept constantly before the membership by a vigorous left-wing minority.”104 As Eric

Arnesen noted, various Black unions, with railroad service workers at the fore, quickly became “active participants in labor’s crusade during the Great Depression” and, by

1943, over 400,000 Black workers had joined unions and federations.105

The continued entrenched racism of much of the American labor movement did put significant restrictions on the inclusivity of collective bargaining, an issue that saw clear expression in A. Philip Randolph's struggles in acquiring AFL validation for the

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.106 Black organizing flourished during the 1930s,

102 Rick Halpern, "Organized Labour, Black Workers and the Twentieth-Century South: The Emerging Revision," Social History 19, no. 3 (October 1994): 360, 364.

103 Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 145.

104 Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern Town (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1948]), 313.

105 Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 86, 249.

106 Cornelius Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 70, 129.

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however, often in spite of white resistance. As Cheryl Lynn Greenberg noted in her work on Harlem in the Great Depression, Black political organizers were more interested in fighting joblessness than in overturning the “prevailing racist customs” of the period.107

For that reason, Black workers accepted the AFL’s gradual adoption of Black unions in the latter half of the 1930s, despite lingering racial hostilities within some of its membership.

On a political level, the National Labor Relations Act helped promote some elements of cross-cultural cooperation by requiring unions to win majority votes to adopt measures. This meant that even resistant organizers had to reach out to the ethnic and racial minority groups within their number, marking a striking reversal from just a decade or two earlier. By 1940, the cumulative effects of these changes produced what Cohen referred to as the 1930s' "Culture of Unity" in organized labor.108 It would be altogether too strong a statement to say that the interwar prison also had a "culture of unity," but the evolution of American labor throughout the late 1920s and 1930s did suggest that working-class Americans entered prison with the capacity to accept an openness to intercultural affiliation. After all, many inmates observed this affiliation in person and, in some instances, even practiced it. Furthermore, the most marginal members of the

107 Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does it Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 96; Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color, 86.

108 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 324; Wall, Inventing The American Way, 25; This was also true on the white collar end of the spectrum by way of a change Olivier Zunz called "a silent social revolution" borne of a "major restructuring of social relationships" in the northern industrial society of the United States (3). As older generations graduated into a new managerial class of salaried personnel, social class gradually came to equal ethnic affiliation in terms of importance in life decisions. In an era in which expanding industrial complexes increasingly replaced small-scale factories and local businesses, workers could no longer expect ready employment through smaller immigrant-run shops. This was especially the case after the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, which drastically reduced the supply of immigrants from the old countries. Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1982]), 5, 8.

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working class, who had no relationship to organized labor, may also have seen value in intercultural partnerships, as Ethan Blue noted that "subaltern criminal economies [of the Great Depression] were often racially diverse, though hardly egalitarian," based as they were in "substantial cross-racial interaction."109 Like workers in the free world, prison inmates could negotiate, cooperate, and engage with each other while still maintaining distance.

Labor Identity Behind Bars

That the prison brought together racially mixed groups from society's economic margins meant that prison populations were, like unions, potential organizing cohorts.

Granted, most of the men in prison did not possess the experiences typical of the skilled workers and craftsmen who were the most reliable union members in the free world.

There were enough men with union experience within interwar prisons, however, to affect convict culture. As Chapter 5 discusses, some politically active inmates directly invoked the language and techniques of the AFL, CIO, and IWW, and it is therefore worth considering how often convicts engaged in union activity prior to their entering prison.

Inmate case files did not record union membership and, even if they had, it would have remained unclear who was a strong, enthusiastic supporter of collective bargaining and who was not. In lieu of official documentation on this subject, data on the tattoos of incoming inmates provides some insight into union involvement, as the AFL's

"clasped hands" emblem was one of the most common non-military images that men

109 Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 27.

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carried into the prison on their bodies. Given that the AFL was the country's largest federation of unions throughout the interwar period, and the UMW also used the clasped hands, the prevalence of that image provides a valuable, if imperfect, sense of the pervasiveness of union identity within the interwar prison.110

A review of the tattoos men had upon their entrance to the state prisons at

Pennsylvania, Louisiana, California, and New Mexico, as well as the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island, shows a demographically understandable distribution of clasped hands.111 One-in-ten tattooed inmates at Pennsylvania's Western State Penitentiary, which housed an especially large population of miners and machinists, had the emblem.

Between 6.1% and 7.3% of the tattooed inmates in USP McNeil Island, New Mexico

State Prison, and California's Folsom State Penitentiary also had that image upon their bodies.112 Alternately, at Angola Farm, a Black-majority prison in the union-hostile Deep

South, only 2.4% of tattooed inmates wore the clasped hands.113 Given that not everyone who was a union member or pro-union would have elected to imprint those

110 This project uses USP McNeil Island prisoner case files rather than those from USP Leavenworth to look for tattoo data, as Leavenworth did not systematically record that information. Luckily, because the federal system relied on only three penitentiaries throughout the interwar period, and each took in large, diverse populations, the data from one institution is like broadly representative of the other. Table 6-3 provides some sense of how common military images were. Anchors, USA flags, and eagles were among the most common images in the five sampled institutions.

111 Of the total sampled inmates with the clasped hands (n=96), 89 (92.7%) were white, with two Black, three Mexican, and one each Filipino and Indian.

112 At Western State, a significant proportion of the total population (n=1840) belonged to professions with heavy union presence. Miners made up 8.3% (153) of the population, whereas the only other prison in the sample to have a significant number of miners was New Mexico, with 3.7% (57 of 1545). Additionally, 12.9% (237) of the Western State inmates were machinists, mechanics, or engineers, also forms of skilled work with space for union activity. Folsom was the only prison with a more substantial number of men from those latter three professions, numbering 14.4% (210 of 1457).

113 While these numbers may seem modest, even the most common image – the heart – only appeared on between 10.6% (19 of 179 at McNeil Island) and 29.2% (35 of 120 at Western State) of all tattooed inmates.

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beliefs upon his person, interwar tattoo trends were only suggestive. To that extent, they leant some credence to the idea that the prisons of the 1920s and 1930s housed a significant number of inmates with experiences in organized labor.114

The presence of UMW-style "Colored Committees" within interwar prisons also reflected an element of pro-union ideology, as inmates set aside dedicated executive positions in prison strike efforts for Black workers.115 The 1919 edition of Frederick

Wines's influential Punishment and Reform spoke with some approval to the effectiveness of Auburn's Mutual Welfare League-sponsored "Negro Committee," a body that the Chicago Defender reported as having transitioned into the "Colored

Committee" by 1929.116 Writing about his own experiences as a convict at Ohio

Penitentiary, the memoirist James Winning noted that, in 1930, inmates planned a strike in the wake of the catastrophic fire that killed 322 trapped prisoners. Convict organizers not only invited the Colored Committee to participate in agitating against the administration, but they appointed the committee's head second in command of the resistance.117

114 The tattoo data comes from a random sample of convict case files, drawn from five prison archives throughout the period stretching from January 1, 1919 to December 31, 1940. The subject prisons are Western State Prison, PHMC RG15 S15.128 (n=1642), Folsom State Prison, CASA R136 ICF (n=1176), Angola Farm, FSUT LSPR CIR (n=1208), New Mexico State Prison, NMSA PCRIF 1970-006 (n=1040), and USP McNeil Island, NASE RG129 MIPR (n=1006).

115 The UMW was not the first organization to use colored committees, as that was a common practice in civic organizations. Peter Gottlieb, "Black Miners and the 1925-28 Bituminous Coal Strike: The Colored Committee of Non-Union Miners, Montour Mine No. 1, Pittsburgh Coal Company," Labor History 28, no. 2 (1987): 233-241; Richard Mizelle, "Black Levee Camp Workers, the NAACP, and the Mississippi Flood Control Project, 1927-1933," The Journal of African American History 98, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 511-530.

116 Frederick H. Wines, Punishment and Reform: A Study of the Penitentiary System ed. 3 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1919), 402; "Thanks From Auburn Prison," Chicago Defender, January 19, 1929, A2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (492213181).

117 James Winning, Behind These Walls (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), 249-50.

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At a certain level, Colored Committees merely upheld racial segregation, both in unions and within the prison. As Chapter 5 discusses, however, prison organizers were likely not choosing between a complete or partial integration of the races, but rather they were choosing whether to have any Black involvement at all. Despite the fact that unions and prison communities did not even attempt to undo the fundamental tenets of white supremacy, their collaborations were significant. That most white unionists and convicts had little interest in actively combating racism made the presence of cross- cultural cooperation, if anything, more remarkable, providing a clearer indication of how convicts approached organizing rationally and deliberately.118

Conclusion

The racial and ethnic diversity of state and federal prisons was not simply an incidental reflection of the Great Migration, immigration, and urbanization in the free world. Rising incarceration rates, the acceptance of extreme prison overcrowding as the new normal, and a variety of political and economic events, which pushed men around the country, all shaped the social ecology of the interwar prison. Penitentiary populations might differ in proportion from state to state, with some institutions housing greater or lesser numbers of Black, Latino, impoverished, transient, or foreign-born

118 In the period 1927 to 1929, 73.0% of strikers affiliated with the AFL. This number dropped to 65.4% in 1930 to 1933, then rose to 84.7% in 1934 to 1936 before bottoming out after 1937. The changing nature of collective bargaining tactics, union makeup, and labor law throughout the 1930s likely contributed to the intercultural nature of interwar prison rebellions, but it was not the primary cause. Nonetheless, as the racially inclusive CIO outpaced the AFL in organizing efforts in the late 1930s, it made striking a far more diverse activity. The vast majority of striking workers fell under the banner of the overwhelmingly white AFL between 1927 and 1936, but only 31% strikers were AFL members during the 1937 to 1941 period, whereas 60.9% of strikers were CIO members. The CIO's dominance in strike leadership over the last half decade of the interwar period suggested not only increased diversity but also increased tenacity on workers' parts, as that organization engaged nearly four times more of its members on average in strikes than the AFL did and, on average, held them out of work for almost three times as long. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 261, 262.

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inmates, but prisons were not islands unto themselves, and their regional divisions only weakened with time.

By the Second World War, diverse populations regularly bounced between overstuffed state and federal prisons, bringing fragments of their local cultures and mores with them. The penal communities of the nineteenth century, which held much smaller and less-diverse populations of local lawbreakers, gave way to new communities that were more mixed than the country as a whole. Chapters 4 and 5 will discuss the ways in which prisons served as unique sites of intercultural interaction and how inmates, while hardly transcending the racial and ethnic chauvinism of the time, broke down some of the social distance prisons sought to uphold and, through exploiting weaknesses in overtaxed institutions, worked in limited, and effective, common cause.

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Table 3-1. Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number Pseudonym Institution Inmate Number Lawrence S. Alcatraz 566 James H. Alcatraz 580 Sources: NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963.

Table 3-2. Diversity of Country and Selected Major Prisons, By Race and Nativity, Using the Meyer & McIntosh Index of Ethnic Diversity. Prison System Race Nativity United States (total) 18 20 Auburn Prison (NY) 20 40 Sing Sing Prison (NY) ~ 41 Angola Farm (LA) 46 02 New Mexico State 56 17 Western Penitentiary (PA) 34 30 Folsom Penitentiary (CA) 37 ~ San Quentin Penitentiary (CA) ~ 36 Leavenworth Penitentiary 40 ~ McNeil Island Penitentiary ~ 40 Sources: NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; McNeil Island Penitentiary Records of Prisoners Received, 1887-1951 (RG 129). The National Archives at Seattle, Washington, WA; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949; NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958; Iowa, Governor. Consecutive Registers of Convicts, 1867-1960. Iowa State Historical Society, Des Moines, Iowa; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963); PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954.

Table 3-3. Leavenworth Demographics (%) Prison System 1919-1928 1929-1940 Sentence: >2 Years 47.0 42.4 Sentence: 10+ Years 3.7 2.5 Offence: Non-Violent Economic 76.4 73.8 Offence: Violent 3.8 2.6 Age: Over 40 22.0 37.2 Age: Under 30 47.7 32.1 Race: White 76.3 76.7 Race: Black 11.9 13.4 Race: Hispanic/Latino 10.2 7.0 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

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Table 3-4. Auburn Demographics (%) Prison System 1919-1928 1929-1940 Sentence: >2 Years 9.2 6.0 Sentence: 10+ Years 26.8 28.3 Offence: Non-Violent Economic 48.1 43.6 Offence: Violent 44.7 47.9 Age: Over 40 16.0 17.3 Age: Under 30 55.4 54.6 Race: White 88.4 86.2 Race: Black 10.6 12.8 Race: Hispanic/Latino n/a 0.5 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

Table 3-5. Angola Demographics (%) Prison System 1919-1928 1929-1940 Sentence: >2 Years 26.2 35.8 Sentence: 10+ Years 19.7 14.9 Offence: Non-Violent Economic 43.2 45.0 Offence: Violent 53.3 51.2 Age: Over 40 29.7 11.4 Age: Under 30 70.4 69.1 Race: White 34.1 38.3 Race: Black 65.7 61.7 Race: Hispanic/Latino 0.2 0 Sources: FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963.

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Table 3-6. Common Systems Represented in Folsom Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment Prison System Total Per 1000 Federal 160 109.9 Washington 81 55.6 Texas 62 42.6 Arizona 50 34.3 Missouri 42 28.8 Illinois 40 27.5 New York 33 22.7 Oregon 32 22.0 Oklahoma 30 20.6 Colorado 28 19.2 Kansas 27 18.5 Nevada 25 17.2 Ohio 22 15.1 Montana 22 15.1 Michigan 20 13.7 Pennsylvania 19 13.0 Utah 19 13.0 Minnesota 15 10.3 Sources: CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949.

Table 3-7. Common Systems Represented in Angola Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment Prison System Total Per 1000 Federal 51 25.1 Texas 46 22.6 Arkansas 30 14.7 Sources: FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963.

Table 3-8. Common Systems Represented in Auburn Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment Prison System Total Per 1000 Pennsylvania 50 18.0 New Jersey 36 13.0 Ohio 32 11.5 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

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Table 3-9. Common Systems Represented in Leavenworth Inmates’ Prior Imprisonment Prison System Total Per 1000 Michigan 36 17.6 Oklahoma 35 17.1 California 32 15.6 Texas 31 15.1 Illinois 29 14.2 Missouri 27 13.2 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

Table 3-10. Countries With Significant (1%) Immigrant Representation Within Select Institutions Country of Origin SS NM SQ WS MI HU AF FM Italy x x x x Russia-Poland x x Austria-Hungary x x Canada x x Mexico x x x x Philippines x China x Japan x Key: SS: Sing Sing [NY]; NM: New Mexico State Prison; SQ: San Quentin [CA]; WS: Western State [PA]; MI: USP McNeil Island; HU: Huntsville Unit [TX]; AF: Angola Farm [LA]; FM: Fort Madison [IA] Sources: NASE RG129 MIPR 1887-1951; NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963; PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954; San Quentin State Prison Records, 1850-1950, ID #R135; Convict Record Ledgers, 1849-1954, Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, 1849-2004 (hereafter TXSA DCJ CRL 1849- 1954); Iowa, Governor. Consecutive Registers of Convicts, 1867-1960 (hereafter IAHS CRC 1867-1960); New York, Sing Sing Prison Admission Registers, 1865-1939 (hereafter NYSA PARSSP 1865-1939).

Table 3-11. Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Folsom (1919-1940) Occupation Type 1919-28 1929-1940 Total Laborer/Miner 18.7 14.6 16.0 Unskilled Work 11.8 12.6 12.3 Food Preparation 9.2 12.9 11.6 Machinist/Mechanic 14.1 14.6 14.4 Skilled Work 13.7 10.6 11.7 Farmer/Farmhand 3.2 3.4 3.3 Barber/Clothier 6.2 9.1 8.1 White/Pink Collar 15.1 14.4 14.6 Artist/Athlete 1.4 3.0 2.5 Other 6.6 4.9 5.5 Sources: CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949.

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Table 3-12. Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Leavenworth (1919-1940) Occupation Type 1919-28 1929-1940 Total Laborer/Miner 13.2 21.0 15.8 Unskilled Work 16.8 11.5 15.1 Food Preparation 6.0 4.9 5.6 Machinist/Mechanic 14.2 9.7 12.8 Skilled Work 9.5 9.7 9.6 Farmer/Farmhand 9.8 14.8 11.4 Barber/Clothier 5.3 6.1 5.5 White/Pink Collar 13.4 12.3 13.0 Artist/Athlete 2.3 1.9 2.2 Other 9.6 8.0 9.1 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

Table 3-13. Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Auburn (1919-1940) Occupation Type 1919-28 1929-1940 Total Laborer/Miner 22.9 24.0 23.5 Unskilled Work 17.2 17.8 17.5 Food Preparation 6.0 6.5 6.3 Machinist/Mechanic 10.9 8.8 9.8 Skilled Work 11.5 13.1 12.3 Farmer/Farmhand 5.5 7.3 6.5 Barber/Clothier 6.4 3.7 4.9 White/Pink Collar 10.1 12.2 11.2 Artist/Athlete 0.9 1.4 1.2 Other 8.7 5.3 6.8 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

Table 3-14. Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Angola (1919-1935) Occupation Type 1919-28 1929-1940 Total Laborer/Miner 40.7 28.4 32.7 Unskilled Work 14.3 14.7 14.6 Food Preparation 6.4 4.5 5.2 Machinist/Mechanic 8.4 7.5 7.8 Skilled Work 4.0 8.4 6.8 Farmer/Farmhand 18.1 26.5 23.6 Barber/Clothier 1.7 2.4 2.2 White/Pink Collar 2.4 2.4 2.4 Artist/Athlete 0.6 0.4 0.5 Other 3.4 4.7 4.3 Sources: FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963.

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Table 3-15. Breakdown of Occupations By Category, New Mexico State Prison (1919- 1940) Occupation Type 1919-28 1929-1940 Total Laborer/Miner 35.1 36.1 35.7 Unskilled Work 7.3 12.3 10.5 Food Preparation 5.7 6.1 5.7 Machinist/Mechanic 9.1 8.5 8.7 Skilled Work 6.9 5.6 6.1 Farmer/Farmhand 25.3 18.7 21.1 Barber/Clothier 2.8 3.8 3.4 White/Pink Collar 3.2 5.3 4.5 Artist/Athlete 0.9 0.5 0.6 Other 4.4 3.1 3.6 Sources: NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958.

Table 3-16. Breakdown of Occupations By Category, Western State (1919-1940) Occupation Type 1919-28 1929-1940 Total Laborer/Miner 32.4 39.4 33.6 Unskilled Work 18.1 8.9 14.9 Food Preparation 3.6 6.8 4.2 Machinist/Mechanic 13.8 8.9 12.9 Skilled Work 15.2 17.8 15.7 Farmer/Farmhand 5.3 4.0 5.1 Barber/Clothier 3.6 3.1 3.5 White/Pink Collar 5.7 4.3 5.4 Artist/Athlete 0.2 0.6 0.3 Other 4.0 6.2 4.3 Sources: PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954.

Table 3-17. Breakdown of Occupations By Category and Prison (1919-1940) Occupation Type Manual Service Mechanical White Collar Folsom Prison (CA) 31.6 27.7 26.1 14.6 Angola Farm (LA) 70.9 12.2 14.6 2.4 Auburn Prison (NY) 47.5 19.2 22.1 11.2 USP Leavenworth 42.3 22.4 22.4 13.0 New Mexico State 67.3 13.3 14.8 4.5 Western State (PA) 53.6 12.3 28.6 5.4 Sources: NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958; PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963; CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1954; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

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Table 3-18. Race Breakdowns By Institution (1919-1940) Institution White Black Hisp/Lat Other Folsom Prison (CA) 78.2 9.5 8.7 3.6 Angola Farm (LA) 36.1 63.8 0.0 0.1 Auburn Prison (NY) 88.8 10.9 0.0 0.3 USP Leavenworth 76.1 12.3 9.6 1.0 New Mexico State 54.0 4.1 39.3 2.5 Western State (PA) 78.2 21.8 0.0 0.0 Sources: NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958; PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963; CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1954; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

Table 3-19. Leavenworth Immigration, By Census Year Year Native Born Foreign Born 1920 88.7 11.3 1940 92.5 7.5 Sources: United States Census Bureau, 1920 Census: New York, Volume 14, Cayuga County, ED 8. U.S. Census Bureau. 1921. Web. 12 August 2016 https://archive.org/details/14thcensusofpopu 1090unit; United States Census Bureau, 1940 Census: New York Volume 16, Cayuga County, ED 6-26. U.S. Census Bureau. 1941. Web. 12 August 2016. https://1940census.archives.gov/ search/?search.state= NY&search.enumeration _district=626#searchby= enumeration&searchmode=browse &year=1940.

Table 3-20. Auburn Immigration, By Census Year Year Native Born Foreign Born 1920 63.4 36.6 1940 84.8 15.2 Sources: United States Census Bureau, 1920 Census: Volume 14, Leavenworth County, ED 86-115. U.S. Census Bureau. 1921. Web. 12 August 2016. https://archive.org/details/ 14thcensusofpopu537unit; United States Census Bureau, 1940 Census: Kansas, Volume 16, ED 52-28. U.S. Census Bureau. 1941. Web. 12 August 2016. https://1940census.archives.gov/search/?search.result_type=image &search.state=KS&search.enumeration_district=52-28#filename=m-t0627-01240-00942.tif&name=52- 28&type=image&state= KS&index=1&pages= 22&bm_all_text=Bookmark.

Table 3-21. Western State Prison, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period Institution 1919-1940 1919-1928 1929-1940 Breaking & Entering 16.5 13.6 19.7 Burglary 5.3 6.6 3.7 Larceny 19.7 21.8 17.4 Robbery 18.5 16.1 21.1 Total Econ. Offences 60.0 58.1 61.9 Sources: PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954.

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Table 3-22. New Mexico State Prison, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period Institution 1919-1940 1919-1928 1929-1940 Breaking & Entering 3.0 1.2 4.1 Burglary 9.8 10.1 9.6 Larceny 38.9 42.3 36.9 Robbery 4.5 3.0 5.4 Total Econ. Offences 56.2 56.6 56.0 Sources: NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958.

Table 3-23. Angola Prison Farm, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period and Proportion of All Offences Institution 1919-1940 1919-1928 1929-1940 Breaking & Entering 13.9 12.1 15.1 Burglary 16.4 15.8 16.8 Larceny 23.7 22.9 24.3 Robbery 7.6 5.6 8.9 Total Econ. Offences 61.6 56.4 65.1 Sources: FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963.

Table 3-24. Auburn State Prison, Convictions for Economic Offences, By Commitment Period Institution 1919-1940 1919-1928 1929-1940 Breaking & Entering n/a n/a n/a Burglary 19.8 19.6 20.1 Larceny 20.1 23.3 17.5 Robbery 20.5 16.8 23.5 Total Econ. Offences 60.4 59.7 61.1 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1954.

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CHAPTER 4 YARD WORK: THE IMPORTANCE OF PRISON RECREATION SPACES

Prior to the late nineteenth century, most of the modern, penitentiary-style prisons in North America and Europe sought to make incarceration a completely individualized experience.1 Keeping a prisoner in his or her own cell for the vast majority of each day was a central element of both the Auburn (Congregate) and Pennsylvania

(Isolate) models that dominated early penal organization, despite the clear dilatory effects such policies had on inmates' minds and bodies. The system’s origins in

Christian moralism and reform through penitence informed practices that denied prisoners spaces to leave their cells so that they might clear their heads, work their bodies, and speak to others. In effect, however, the understanding that prisoners might evolve for the better in an environment of monkish solitude ultimately served to diminish prisoners’ minds and hobble their bodies.2

By the mid-nineteenth century, the penitentiary keepers’ indifference toward exercise, recreation, and socializing with others worried onlookers on both sides of the

Atlantic, though European audiences expressed especial concern. In 1862, Henry

Mayhew and John Binny published their investigative report on England's Pentonville

Prison, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life, a work that

1 By the middle of the nineteenth century, most major industrialized nations had either a Congregate or Separate style penitentiary. England’s Pentonville, France’s Mazas, Germany’s Moabit, and Canada’s Kingston Penitentiaries are some of the more notable examples of the American model’s quick spread across the North Atlantic.

2 Some of the more effective discussions of the way in which prisons worked on a day-to-day level in the nineteenth century include Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Jennifer Graber, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons & Religion in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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provided the general public with grim depictions of prisoner life and evocative sketches of inmates wearing masks designed to deafen and blind them during their meager recreation time.3 The French artist Gustave Dore’s 1872 wood engraving Newgate:

Exercise Yard, which inspired Vincent Van Gogh’s famous 1890 painting Prisoners

Exercising, also vividly captured the monotonous, circular trudging of English inmates in a dark, tightly enclosed space. Both visual depictions highlighted the fecklessness of such undertakings and how disingenuous it was that prison administrators deemed those activities “exercise” at all. The most famous representation of nineteenth-century prison recreation, however, was Oscar Wilde’s 1898 semi-autobiographical poem “The

Ballad of Reading Gaol,” in which the author described exercise time: “Like ape or clown in monstrous garb, with crooked arrows starred. Silent we went round and round, the slippery asphalte yard, silently we went round and round, and no man spoke a word.”4 Outside of a few institutions on the vanguard of penal experimentation, recreation within the prisons of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe consisted of little more than an hour a week of silent pacing as a group, with participants often masked, tethered, and muzzled.

Such deadening conditions had not always predominated within correctional institutions. Before early-nineteenth century legal scholars, architects, and philosophers created the penitentiary as a means of reimagining the purpose and design of incarceration, the country’s small interred populations were mostly free to move around their jails, houses of refuge, and other institutions for criminals and social deviants. It

3 Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1862), 50.

4 Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (London: Sovereign, 2016 [1897], II.), 433.

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was not until the broad adoption of large-scale cellular prisons in the 1820s and 1830s that keepers made inmates subject to strict separation. By the Civil War, nearly every penitentiary in the nation had a variation on either the Congregate or Isolate system, meaning that enforced silence, private cells, and strictly regimented movement defined the country’s largest prisons. While isolation and separation remained the notional anchors of American penology throughout the nineteenth century, however, American prisons slowly adopted recreation yards, open spaces in which inmates could associate freely. The very existence of the recreation yard was an affront to longstanding forms of both Congregate and Isolate prison management, as it not only provided a space where administrators voluntarily exercised less control, but it served as an open area in which convicts, looking at their co-inmates as a whole, could more readily see imprisonment as a collective experience.

How did large, open, poorly surveyed play areas - spaces that ran in direct contradiction to the preceding century's penological dogma - become ubiquitous parts of most American prisons and penitentiaries in the span of just a few decades? Why did

American prisons, many of which still embraced Congregate-style notions of prisoner separation outside of work and meals well into the twentieth century, come to accept recreation yards as necessary and even desirable penal spaces? Why did twentieth- century prisons adopt recreation spaces, despite the fact such areas allowed inmates to engage in any number of contracultural activities? Ultimately, the recreation yard emerged as an imperfect negotiation of a complex array of desires and needs, a stew of good intentions, improvised solutions, and unintended consequences.

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Chapter 4 will discuss how penologists, administrators, and wardens came to acknowledge the importance of prison recreation and how those same people then invented the modern prison recreation yard. American prisons had spaces for limited group activities in one form or another since the early nineteenth century, but the modern open playscape, one that allowed casual mixing among inmates, was borne of both specific administrative needs and Progressive Era impulses. As with so many

Progressive innovations, however, reformers' best intentions also resulted in significant unanticipated consequences, as the yard presented a critical space for rebellious inmates, who forged a cooperative culture in the absence of the walls that formerly separated them.

Before considering the culture that inmates developed in these spaces, “Yard

Work” will look at the myriad political and managerial decisions that facilitated the creation of ubiquitous prison yards. This discussion will begin with an overview of the societal context that enabled Americans’ new enthusiasm for sporting culture in the early twentieth century. In particular, it will consider how Muscular Christianity and the

Playground Movement framed sport for political and civic leaders as a means of instilling middle-class values in immigrant and working-class children and adolescents.

By the early twentieth century, sport began to take the form of ‘civil religion’ in much of

American society, as Progressives imbued play with new importance as a moral pursuit, and as a powerful apparatus of Americanization and Christian training.5

5 For more on the rise of sport as a civil religion, see Craig Forney, The Holy Trinity of American Sports: Civil Religion in Football, Baseball, and Basketball (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2010); Joseph Price, ed. From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001); James Mathiesen, “From Civil Religion to Folk Religion: The Case of American Sport,” Sport and Religion (1992): 17-33; Nancy Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

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With the broader societal framework in mind, Chapter 4 considers how sport and recreation within the prison changed over time, shifting from an atomized, private experience in the nineteenth century to an occasion for interaction both with other inmates and with the free world in the twentieth. In particular, the evolution of the prison's actual physical spaces, especially the rising importance of baseball diamonds, not only changed the basic layout of the prison but also its management. Chapter 4 ends with a discussion of the ways in which the recreation yard served as a critical space for enabling contracultural behaviors within the prisoner community.6

A thorough study of the theoretical, managerial, and architectural evolution of prison sports and the recreation yard is critical to any understanding of the burgeoning inmate culture of the early twentieth century. The yard not only served as a play area, but it was a market, a meeting space, and a place for settling scores. It allowed men to hide in plain sight and it provided them with an opportunity to meet people they would not have crossed paths with otherwise. It was only through a serendipitous mix of factors, however, including major space concerns, a wave of Progressive penal experimentation, and a flowering national sports culture that the recreation yard became a standard element of American prison life in the first place.

6 While wardens and administrators around the country encouraged a variety of recreational pursuits for inmates, Chapter 4 will look only at sport and exercise, given that those seemed not only the most popular prison-sponsored activities among inmates, but they were the impetus for the expansion and development of recreation yard spaces. This is not to impugn or minimize the importance of art, music, drama, reading and writing, or voluntary schooling opportunities that prisons sponsored, but it is an acknowledgment that interwar administrators, inmates, and the public all spent a great deal more time discussing sport and exercise than any other recreational behavior in prisons. For that reason, any discussions of sports and exercise in the coming pages may serve to reflect, in some way, the broader importance of all recreational opportunities.

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Muscular Christianity and the Playground Movement

The civilizational concerns that weighed upon many Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inspired a wide variety of movements aimed at righting listless, weak men through exercise, sport, and other strenuous activities.7 In particular, the Playground Movement and Muscular Christianity solidified the notion among turn-of-the-century urban and institutional reformers that sport, in the form of adult-supervised parks, gymnasia, public school programs, extracurricular sports clubs, and other innovations, could uplift young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and, for the foreign-born and their children, provide Americanization training.8 While Western

Europeans were somewhat less blunt in their stated desires to use sport to create good workers and national subjects, reformers' general notions regarding the virtues of sport were broadly consistent in tone and content on both sides of the Atlantic.9

7 The best discussion of this cultural crisis is Gail Bederman’s Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For more on this subject, see Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

8 Progressive reformers believed organized athletics ingrained in children the values of “fair play,” obedience to authority, and regimentation from a young age, thereby making them more-compliant workers and citizens. Steven A. Riess, Sport In Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 1995), 150; Stephen Hardy and Alan G. Ingham, “Games, Structures, and Agency: Historians on the American Play Movement,” Journal of Social History 17 no. 2 (Winter 1983): 285-286; The British sociologist John Hargreaves noticed the same thing in Britain, as “bourgeois sporting organizations established political hegemony over popular and working-class culture, integrating the lower-middle and upper-lower classes into its cultural norms.” John Hargreaves, Sport, Power, and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 6-7.

9 The most prominent work on sport, character, and the nation in a European context comes from Pierre Bourdieu, a frequent commenter on the class nature of sport and leisure choices. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” Social Science Information 17, no. 6 (1978): 819-840. Other important works regarding class and sport include Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Eric Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence, and Civilisation (London: Routledge, 1999); Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 2014 [1971]).

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Muscular Christianity provided a critical theoretical framework for advocates of prison recreation, effectively tying notions of morality and lawfulness, long central to incarceration, to sporting culture in a way that made sense to the white, middle-class

Protestant gatekeepers of America's major social institutions. The specific notions of

Muscular Christianity found favor in local, state, and federal governments between 1880 and 1920. Gail Bederman situated the growing popularity of sport among Christian policymakers as a direct response to a perceived crisis of middle-class masculinity in

American society, one that framed men’s lifestyles as sedentary and stultifying. She argued that economic changes "had rendered earlier ideologies of middle-class manhood less plausible. Middle-class manliness had been created in the context of a small-scale, competitive capitalism which had all but disappeared by 1910," she argued, so strenuous exercise and team sports ascended through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to fill that void and took a central place in "the development of powerful manhood."10

In the three decades preceding World War I, beginning in England before migrating to the United States, members of the Protestant middle class approached a perceived growth in sloth and effeminacy among young men by adopting a new ideology of what constituted "manliness." They identified behaviors that promoted manhood and others that undermined it, believing that the excessive decorum of

Victorian values had feminized men over the preceding decades. Modern urban life had marginalized parishioners' natural virility by overstressing the innately feminine virtues of humility and selflessness. Furthermore, the church had not grappled with the ways in

10 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 15.

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which the white-collar work of modern society had changed men's bodies, making

Christian soldiers weak and aimless. If the body was to be strong enough to serve as a tool of spiritual uplift, men needed to regain the ruggedness of pre-urban, pre-industrial life.11

As was often the case throughout the Progressive Era, religious moralists combined their efforts with social scientists and political activists, framing Muscular

Christianity as an answer to a civilizational problem that extended beyond the bounds of the church. In the 1890s, Clark University genetic psychologist G. Stanley Hall and his former student Luther Gulick developed an evolutionary theory of play that tied sport and recreation to race. They stressed that children developed healthy bodies and complex motor skills through activity, and that such behaviors facilitated the development of neural centers in the spinal cord and brain, thereby enabling the development of a proper moral compass. Without sport, Hall and Gulick believed, white children risked devolving into a moral laxity that racial evolutionists viewed as more common to non-white peoples. Additionally, white men faced down the specter of

"neurasthenia,” a medicalized expression of Protestant America's crisis of masculinity that showed itself in the form of heart palpitations, depression, and other palpable physical symptoms. Progressive Era racialists such as Hall, Gulick, and Charlotte

Perkins Gilman often spoke of middle class torpidity as a health crisis, with neurasthenia the result of "excessive brain work" and civilizational strain from the decadence of middle class, white-collar life.12

11 Benjamin G. Rader. American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports (Edgewood: Pearson College Division, 2004), 106.

12 Rader, American Sports, 109-110; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 14.

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The coalition of religious and medical professionals who identified a lack of organized physical activity as central to the crisis they saw in American masculinity attempted to address this issue by embracing two of the most popular civic institutions of twentieth century American life, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Beginning around 1890, middle-class Protestants sponsored a wide array of boys' sports through public and private athletic leagues and play spaces, though the YMCA and the Boy Scouts were clearly the most visible and popular versions of Muscular Christianity in practice. YMCAs committed themselves to the general mission of "character building" through practices that asserted a variety of

American Christian values and helped boys ward off degeneracy through baseball and basketball leagues, calisthenics, and other activities.13 The YMCA was enormously popular in the United States, counting 243,050 junior members in 1921, though the BSA outstripped that number by a wide margin, engaging 391,382 scouts that same year.

Like the YMCA, the Boy Scouts emerged out of the church as an attempt on the part of founder Robert Baden-Powell, a former General in the British military, to instill vitality back into the young men of the Anglican Cadet Corps by teaching them martial skills.

Enthused by the opportunities the Boy Scouts presented, Gulick brought the program to

North America in 1910.14

The secular siblings of Muscular Christianity were the City Beautiful, Parks, and

Playground Movements, all urban-centric reforms focused on reimagining recreation within civic spaces. While the City Beautiful and Parks Movements had enormous

13 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 67; Rader, American Sports, 103, 106.

14 David Macleod, "Act Your Age: Boyhood, Adolescence, and the Rise of the Boy Scouts of America," Journal of Social History 16, no. 1 (December 1982): 5.

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influences on urban aesthetics, the country's experimentations with developing public playgrounds were central to Americans’ attempts at promoting morality through sport.15

Unlike Muscular Christianity, which spoke to popular worries about the spiritual poverty and creeping lethargy of modern urban life for a variety of age groups, the Playground movement exclusively addressed the needs of the young. Looking at the urban slums and tenements of America's metropolises, playground advocates embraced the notion that municipal and state government could better control the spare time of troublesome ethnic youths with designated spaces for play.16

Following some modest local forays into play area design in the 1890s that resulted in 11 of the country's 100 largest cities sponsoring public playgrounds by 1900, the movement took off.17 The 1898 establishment of the New York Outdoor Recreation

League signaled the start of heavy, sustained investment from local governments, charity groups, and private benefactors who not only founded playgrounds but also

15 The lineage of the Playground Movement runs directly through the Parks Movement and, for that reason, owed a debt to Frederick Law Olmsted. Most famous for designing New York City's Central Park in the 1850s and San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in the 1870s, along with a wide array of other outdoor leisure spaces, Olmsted served as the chief architect of the Boston park system from 1875 to 1895. In that capacity and others, Olmsted was an important figure in advancing the notion that parks and play areas might mitigate the alienating nature of city life. Olmsted was a sui generis figure in America, however, and his views on the role of parks as countermeasures to urban anomie did not have a direct influence on the Playground movement, even if the public spaces he designed did. Stephen Hardy, "Parks for the People: the Rise of Public Parks in Boston, 1869-1900," in Major Problems in American Sport History: Documents and Essays, ed. Steven Riess (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 152-57.

16 For more on the Parks and City Beautiful Movements, see Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982); Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); David Schuyler, The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986); Dorceta Taylor, “Central Park as a Model for Social Control: Urban Parks, Social Class and Leisure Behavior in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Leisure Research 31.4 (1999): 420-477.

17 Sarah J. Peterson, "Voting for Play: The Democratic Potential of Progressive Era Playgrounds," The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3, no. 2 (2004): 146.

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established increasingly high expectations for the quality of those areas.18 Prior to the twentieth century, most playgrounds represented little more than empty lots with rudimentary play equipment for preadolescent children. In 1903, however, Chicago's

South Park district allocated $5 million for the construction of 10 parks, replete with field houses and gender-specific gymnasia.19

In short order, playground advocates realized their national political potential with the establishment of the Playground Association of America in 1906, which brought together a coalition of social workers, Progressive activists, politicians, and local business and community leaders to advocate nationally for recreation spaces for youths.20 The organization saw quick success as, by 1910, more than three-quarters of the country's largest urban areas had playgrounds, the vast majority funded at least partly by local municipalities. This influence spread into small towns as well, as 259 cities of under 5,000 residents built playgrounds over the same decade.21 By 1917, 504 municipalities throughout the country boasted 3,940 playgrounds.22 This is not to say that the Playground Movement was a wholly selfless endeavor, or an absolute good, but playground funding was an important civic innovation, having explicitly established the

18 Riess, Sport in Industrial America, 25.

19 Rader, American Sports, 113.

20 Riess, Sport in Industrial America, 25-6; Rader, American Sports, 113.

21 Peterson, "Voting for Play," 146.

22 Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 177.

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importance of play in public life and having normalized the idea that municipalities should provide such areas through public funds.23

Sport and Americanization

One major goal of the Playground Movement was to provide recreational spaces that served to "Americanize" immigrants from a young age. To many Progressives, the cities and neighborhoods within which immigrants lived teemed with pollution, crime, and political radicalism. Those issues constituted what reformers of the time called the

"immigrant problem," a set of concerns that saw social activists conclude that

Americanization efforts were critical to transforming ethnic enclaves and brining immigrant groups into the national mainstream.24 Accordingly, Progressives began directing organized sport at adults, with welfare capitalists employing recreation yards and intramural leagues in attempts to realign immigrant workers’ priorities from ethno- cultural focuses to American ones.

Welfare capitalism was not wholly effective at extinguishing ethnic identity, though sport was a powerful tool of social cohesion. A wide variety of constituencies believed sport offered unique opportunities for group bonding, as even communities who opposed industrial capitalists and urban reformers’ bourgeois values understood the positive power of team sports to frame collective action.25 Labor groups, socialists,

23 Some of the more trenchant works on the Playground Movement include Benjamin Rader, "The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American Sport," American Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1977): 355- 369 and Peterson’s "Voting for Play." The most incisive discussion of social control and the Playground Movement in Stephen Hardy and Alan Ingham, "Games, Structures, and Agency: Historians on the American Play Movement," Journal of Social History 17, no. 2 (1983): 285-301.

24 David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 8.

25 Hardy and Ingham, "Games, Structures, and Agency," 286; Putney, Muscular Christianity; Seymour, Baseball: A People's History, 228. E.P. Thompson also discussed the relationship between sport, the state, and social control, arguing that industrialists' appropriation of folk sports and games were backdoor

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and communists all created club sports teams, baseball leagues, and track and field competitions to complement their regular picnics and party fundraisers.26 Ironically, sports even allowed immigrants to deflect Americanization efforts. Steven Pope argued

“German Turners, Czech Sokols, Polish Falcons and other ethnic athletic clubs maintained close ties to the nationalistic objectives of their parent countries, which obstructed assimilation and often clashed with the established social order.”27 Part of the reason for the enormous popularity of organized sport in the twentieth century, then, was that activists and agitators all along the American political spectrum saw it as a valuable form of influence and control. Sport was powerful enough to both serve as a cudgel of Americanization and as a means by which race- and class-based groups might challenge some of the dominant values and expectations of American culture.

Federal and state governments also came to see sport as an invaluable mode of bureaucratic organization and control throughout the late-nineteen and early-twentieth centuries. The American military began employing sport and athletics in the 1890s, integrating exercise and team activities into the lives of soldiers and sailors. Frequently faced with deploying thousands of men to bases and districts about the world where they had little to do, the military began employing instructors from YMCAs to train soldiers in combat and self-defense, and to engage them in organized play.28 By the

means of getting workers to reimagine free time and work processes. Edward P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past & Present 38 (December 1967): 95.

26 Steven Riess, “From Pitch to Putt: Sport and Class in Anglo-American Sport,” Journal of Sport History 21, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 164.

27 Steven W. Pope, “Negotiating the “Folk Highway” of the Nation: Sport, Public Culture, and American Identity, 1870-1940,” Journal of Social History, 27, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 330.

28 For a brief discussion of the role of the military and foreign policy in the lives of interwar inmates, see the Conclusion.

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onset of the First World War, the Army was one of the biggest promoters of boxing, wrestling, baseball, football, and basketball in the United States, with over 100,000 soldiers regularly participating in those activities. As the war went on, soldiers made up a growing constituency of organized sportsmen, as military brass increasingly viewed athletics as a useful means by which to build bodies and morale.29 In the end, claimed

Elliott Gorn and Warren Goldstein, foreign military interventions "helped prepare the nation for the sports boom of the 1920s" by providing a model for the future of mass sport participation and spectatorship, laying the foundation for public schools' adoptions of sports programs shortly thereafter.30

By the early twentieth century, the United States had an emerging, rich sports culture that found significant, and growing, purchase in the nation's most important institutions. Not long after President Roosevelt gave his famous 1899 speech on "The

Strenuous Life," innovators such as Walter Camp and Amos Alonzo Stagg convinced the patrician overseers of Ivy League colleges and major public universities alike that the brutal game of football was not only fit for the country's future leaders but was, in fact, a moral and respectable behavior.31 This willingness to make sport a major part of life, including in areas in which it had little pre-existing importance, was central to early-

29 Riess, Sport in Industrial America, 140, 164; Steven W. Pope, "An Army of Athletes: Playing Fields, Battlefields, and the American Military Sporting Experience, 1890-1920," The Journal of Military History 59, no. 3 (1995), 441-42, 446-47, 455; Rader, “The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American Sport,” 355.

30 Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 181.

31 Some of the better histories of college football include John Watterson, College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Ronald Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Robin Lester, Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

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century athletic culture. Even before radio turned major boxing, baseball, and football contests into national events, sport established itself as one of America's civil religions, or what Camp famously called the "folk highway" of American life.32

The Evolution of Prison Sport and the Recreation Yard

Much as Progressives carved out precious space within urban environs for the sake of establishing parks and playgrounds, the growing faith in sport, exercise, and recreation pushed prisons toward refiguring their own spaces. Penal architects established America’s two dominant prison styles in the nineteenth century's first four decades and neither form provided much in the way of open space for recreation and play. Furthermore, because the prison was difficult to retrofit for recreation, the adoption of prison policies that promoted play, exercise, and fitness meant administrators needed to radically reimagine penal spaces throughout the early-twentieth century. That prisons throughout the country ultimately settled on yard-based forms of mass recreation, despite all of the managerial and structural challenges that such a decision presented, was a testament to the value wardens and administrators saw in both organized sport and shared play areas.

Prior to the twentieth century, major American institutions either followed the

Radial or Auburn model, the former having drawn its inspiration from Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prison design. Featuring a central lookout in the middle of a circular prison block, from which guards and administrators observed their wards, Radial prisons housed inmates in rows of cells that stretched down long corridors and jutted out of the

32 Pope, "Negotiating the "Folk Highway" of the Nation," 330.

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central inspection center like spokes from a wheel.33 The most famous example of the

Radial style was Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which provided an evocative example of the restraints that older prison architectures placed on recreational activity. First opening as an Isolate-style institution in 1829, Eastern kept inmates in solitary confinement and provided them with opaque masks when they exited their cells, thereby preventing intentional or incidental inter-inmate contact. For exercise, each cell had a private, self-contained recreation area. This was not an economical use of space, but the state created the prison to accommodate an ideology, not machine- like functionality, as it initially prized isolation over all else.34

In reality, such "exercise" spaces were likely good for little more than letting inmates see the sky and feel the sun on their faces. Certainly, by the 1840s, Eastern

State and other Isolate prisons found that their growing prison populations made full- time inmate separation managerially untenable. Instead, having reconciled themselves to a more economical use of space, administrators reformatted their layouts, employing multiple shared exercise areas. To maintain the notion of separation, though, guards required prisoners to circle about in silence while wearing masks in a fashion similar to what Binny and Mayhew found at Pentonville. While the design was less popular in the

United States than elsewhere, Eastern architect John Haviland's model had a significant legacy, inspiring some of the nation’s largest prisons, including the New Jersey State

33 Giuseppe Di Gennaro, ed., Prison Architecture: An International Survey of Representative Closed Institutions and Analysis of Current Trends in Prison Design (London: The Architectural Press, 1975), 24; Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (London; New York: Verso, 1995 [1787]), 32.

34 Philip Klein, Prison Methods in New York State, a Contribution to the Study of the Theory and Practice of Correctional Institutions in New York State (New York: Columbia University, 1920), 177; Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 92.

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Prison in Trenton, the New Jersey Reformatory at Rahway, Michigan’s state penitentiary at Ionia, and Ohio Reformatory at Mansfield. Up until the mid-twentieth century, the Radial model was the most popular penitentiary design in the world, making shared recreation spaces with small numbers of carefully scrutinized inmates in multiple yards the most common means of allocating inmate exercise and play in both Europe and Latin America.35

While Radial prisons rose to international prominence throughout the nineteenth century, Americans tended to prefer the Auburn style. Having opened in 1818, Auburn provided barracks for individual sleeping by night and larger rooms for silent collective work and meals by day. Auburn architect Jonathan Daniels placed five tiers of back-to- back cellblocks (each cellblock had approximately 200 sleeping cells) into rectangular quadrants, along with a central building with a communal mess hall and chapel. He also set a hospital, power plant, and series of shops in between the cellblocks and the prison walls and, on the west end of the prison grounds, established a large garden, in which inmates spent their meager outdoor time. This more-open model inspired the majority of

American prisons, with some noteworthy examples being the state institutions at

Waupun, Wisconsin; Columbus, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Monroe, Washington, and Howard, Rhode Island.36 Overincarceration hastened a prison-building boom in the

1930s, but the Radial and Auburn layouts remained the two dominant forms of

35 Norman Johnston, The Human Cage: A Brief History of Prison Architecture (New York: Published for the American Foundation, Institute of Corrections by Walker, 1973), 32, 36; Johnston, Forms of Constraint, 75, 92, 139.

36 Johnston, Forms of Constraint, 138-9.

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American penitentiary design throughout the interwar era, and neither style leant itself particularly well to mass recreation.

Developments in the Late Nineteenth Century

Prior to the Civil War, there existed almost no free play in American penitentiaries. It was not until 1866 that an administrator at a major American prison introduced regular outdoor exercise. That year, Massachusetts State Prison Warden

Gideon Haynes allowed his wards something he called “freedom of the yard,” a practice that served as the seedling for the recreation yard's eventual ubiquity. Freedom of the yard simply saw Haynes and later wardens allow inmates some untethered, closely supervised time outside in an open space on holidays, meaning inmates only received the privilege a few times a year.37 As conservative as it was by modern standards, the experiment captured the imaginations of a few prominent penologists, including those of the New York Prison Association Commission, who invited Haynes to discuss his measures at the National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline.38 Even if the time they received outside was minimal and limited to "aimless milling about,"

David Rothman noted, “prisoners undoubtedly welcomed the right to march or walk as opposed to shuffle, and the right to talk to each other without fear of penalty.”39

37 Klein, Prison Methods in New York State, 177.

38 Ibid, 177.

39 Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 130-131. Like Rothman, Edgardo Rotman noted that the social aspect was centrally-important to freedom of the yard benefits, as the practice “allowed intercommunication and exercise during the break period,” (184), stripping away rules of silence and allowing for the eventual introduction of sports, movies, music, television, and radio into the twentieth-century penitentiary.

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The national adoption of freedom of the yard came in fits and starts, and it only reached the majority of the country’s state penitentiaries in the first decade of the twentieth century. Between 1870 and 1910, prisons around the country gradually extended free time outside on holidays and, in some cases, even provided inmates with regular exercise time, though free recreation periods remained exceedingly rare.40

Prisons did not start experimenting with organized play on a significant level until the latter half of the 1880s, and wardens and penologists only began a national discourse on the moral and practical value of employing athletic contests in the 1890s. Providing inmates the opportunity to mix without fear of rebuke was a tacit acknowledgment that the rule of silence that American penitentiaries employed over the preceding half- century was a too-blunt instrument, and that socializing and free movement, even if administrators limited it to just a few times a year, served as a net benefit to the prison.

Zebulon Brockway was the most prominent early adopter of organized inmate athletics. After managing the Detroit House of Correction, the Monroe County

Penitentiary near Rochester, New York, and Connecticut State Prison, Brockway took the reins of the Elmira Reformatory in Elmira, New York in 1876. Over the following quarter century, he experimented with a variety of programs that brought him national prominence as a penological innovator. He employed calisthenics and drilling for prisoners, though many of his military-style outdoor activities did not constitute sports or recreation as one might understand them today. Nonetheless, his policies promoted planned, outdoor, collective activity throughout the country. Eventually, Brockway came

40 Klein, Prison Methods in New York State, 177; Ralph Herre, “The History of Auburn Prison from the Beginning to about 1867,” (Ph.D. diss. Pennsylvania State University, 1950), 251-252; Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 401.

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to believe that, through baseball, track and field, and football, young men might strengthen their bodies and sharpen their minds while learning of the benefits of cooperation and communication.41

Brockway's early steps attempted to balance an enlightened model of reformative penology with a continued desire to maintain strict controls on inmate behavior, surely an attractive proposition to other wardens. However, the architecture of most nineteenth-century prisons impeded these plans. Single-person cells and personal exercise spaces specifically aimed to limit opportunities for free movement and casual socializing. By design, prisons stressed small, uniform limbic movements and a very limited range of vision for prisoners as they engaged in collective activities, thereby posing a major problem for innovators. Until the late nineteenth century, then, practical restrictions based on cost, security, and space severely curtailed recreation initiatives.

Those restrictions did not disappear, but new values clashed with the draconian practices of the past and forced managerial change.

Breakthroughs in the Early Twentieth Century

While corporate- and government-sponsored sport gained national popularity in the late nineteenth century, prisons did not adopt organized athletics in a meaningful way until the twentieth century. By 1900, a small number of prisons, mostly throughout the Northeast and Midwest, had tentatively adopted minor aspects of planned

41 Alexander W. Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the American Reformatory-Prison Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 24-5; Klein, Prison Methods in New York State, 179; Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 397-399; Blake McKelvey, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1977), 137.

41 Brockway, a former President of the National Prison Association and a seminal figure in the field of American penology, did not invent the notion of organized inmate recreation, but he did more than anyone else to popularize it in its early stages. Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression, 25.

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recreation, though newspaper stories from the turn of the century emphasized the infrequent nature of such events, as administrators usually reserved such activities for the Fourth of July. An 1899 report from the Wisconsin State Prison described the institution’s custom of giving inmates a once-a-year holiday that included baseball, boxing, and wrestling.42 A report from Michigan’s Ionia Penitentiary noted the

“comparative freedom” Fourth of July festivities provided, as the inmates participated in

“boxing, baseball, running, leaping and wrestling.” They also enjoyed “a dancing floor…laid upon the lawn [for] those terpsichoreally inclined.”43 Inmates could anticipate these celebratory days of respite once a year, but they were too infrequent to provide any long-term physical or psychological benefits.

Academic discussion of prison recreation was also infrequent at the turn of the century. In 1900, the American Prison Association discussed the issue of free time, sport, and exercise at its annual meeting, the theme of which was “Recreations and

Privileges as Aids to Prison Discipline."44 The APA's enthusiasm did not yield major changes, though the Playground Association of America revisited the subject in 1909, commissioning a report from its Committee on Play in Institutions. In their year-end report, the committee advocated for penologists and civic reformers to more rigorously consider the virtues of sports programs and designated play spaces in prisons. The

42 "Convicts’ Happy Day," Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, July 6, 1899, 6.

43 "Sport in the Prison Yard," Grand Rapids (IA) Herald, July 10, 1899, 4.

44 "Prison Association Meets," The San Francisco Call, September 25, 1900. Accessed May 5, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/78275239.

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Committee focused its attentions on more experimental reformatories and largely ignored massive state penitentiaries, however.45

The Playground Association offered five rationales for integrating play into the lives of inmates: play creates levity; play promotes physical development and therapeutic healing of disease; play promotes intellectual education; play promotes moral education and behavioral reform; and play promotes social education.46 This messaging paired neatly with the reformative penal ethos of time, as Frederick Wines, the former Secretary of the National Prison Association, noted in his influential 1910 treatise Punishment and Reformation that “recreation is both a diversion and a means of building up habits that will enable offenders to spend their non-working hours doing interesting and wholesome things.”47 Wines' beliefs regarding sport's potential positive effects may have been slightly more bullish than the average penologist’s expectations, but his views generally captured the period's growing faith in recreation.

Sports, Recreation, and the Interwar Prison

Areas of the country in which Progressive experimentation was more popular rapidly adopted prisoner exercise and sports throughout the 1910s. By the early 1920s, organized prison recreation was a staple of prison management throughout the country.48 Michigan State Prison Warden, and President of the American Prison

Association, Harry Hulburt announced at the 1921 annual meeting of the APA that

45 L.L. Neal, "Prison Reform-A Historical Glimpse at recreation’s Role," Therapeutic Recreation Journal 6, no. 3 (1972): 104.

46 Ibid., 104.

47 Wines and Lane, Punishment and Reformation, 347.

48 Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression; McKelvey, American Prisons, 261.

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“fresh air and outdoor entertainment please men more than tying up all entertainments to the chapel…the more you keep the men who are serving time out of their cells, the better men they make when released.”49 This belief in the eager and frequent use of recreation and sports programs was not especially optimistic for the time, as the

Wickersham Commission's own endorsement a decade later expressed even greater enthusiasm, asserting that “recreation, no less than labor, has its reconstructive value in a program of institutional treatment.” The Wickersham sentiment touched on both of the major goals of prison recreation: deploying sport and exercise to reform inmates and to better control inmate disquiet. Accordingly, the commission proclaimed that “every type of game and play that can be allowed within a prison wall may be made to pay dividends in terms of better conduct, better interest and less deterioration, and in the creation of new interests, possibly, for spare time after release.”50

Throughout the interwar period, wardens and administrators developed a wide variety of rationales for inmate sport and play. The paramount argument they presented to the public, always sceptical about prisoner luxury, was that recreations would defer inmates’ attentions and agitations, making them more-pliant subjects. San Quentin

Prison Warden Quentin Duffy argued for organized sport as an instrument of control, claiming it would serve as a cudgel, the punishment being “the loss of cherished privileges, for there is nothing in solitary but a man and his thoughts.”51 As prisons

49 Harry L. Hulburt, "Relation of Recreation and Amusement to the Prison Administration,” Fifty-First Congress of the American Prison Association (1921): 253.

50 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, ed. George Wickersham, v. 9, Report on Penal Institutions, Probation and Parole (Washington: GPO, 1931), 268, 270.

51 Seymour, Baseball: The People's Game, 407; Clinton T. Duffy, The San Quentin Story (Montreal: Pocket Books of Canada, 1950), 163-164.

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expanded and opportunities for work remained rare, administrators believed that organized sport could absorb inmates’ attentions, force them to prioritize obedience, and structure their sense of time. In the continuous struggle to cajole their wards, sport provided administrators with a tempting proverbial carrot.

Many prisons offered inmates the opportunity to take up a musical instrument, put on a play, write for a newspaper, or put their energies toward some other respectable activity. Organized sport was not only the most popular extracurricular activity with inmates, however, but penologists made strong claims regarding its particular power to reform. The Wickersham Commission asserted that wardens could

“supply to inmates a type of play which [would] refresh them physically and mentally and send them back to their daily work the better for it.”52 Sing Sing’s Lewis Lawes, the nation’s most famous interwar warden and one of the country’s most vigorous proponents of organized prisoner recreation, argued that prison sports and exercise could “re-create the man in prison.”53

This faith may have hit its apex during the Depression, as a variety of leading penologists spoke in unguarded superlatives about the absolute good of prisoner recreation. In 1932, Sydney Souter, the Superintendent of the New Jersey Reformatory, argued at the APA general meeting that “it is a well-established fact that supervised recreation in congested areas makes for crime prevention." He claimed that the adoption of prison sport yielded a 60% reduction of disciplinary cases at Wisconsin

State Prison, and that Wardens Stanley P. Ashe of Pennsylvania's Western State

52 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 269, 271.

53 Lewis Lawes, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing (New York: The New Home Library, 1932), 409.

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Penitentiary and Dr. Frank Christian of Elmira Reformatory found similar success in their own institutions.54 In 1935, San Quentin’s Warden Holohan similarly summarized the zeal of the time, telling his prison’s newspaper, The Bulletin, “no better influence could be brought to bear upon rehabilitation of the men than participation in contests of fair play and skill.”55 It only took a few decades to make prison sports and leisure indispensable parts of American penology.

By 1943, Eduard Lindeman of the New School wrote in the National Jail

Association’s “Prison World” magazine that “any society in which there is acceptance of modern theory of leisure can readily keep its rate of delinquency at a minimum provided it is willing to pay the cost.”56 Lindeman, Holohan, and Souter’s hosannas for prison sport did not equate to inmates receiving all of yard time they wanted. Even the most forward-thinking penologists and administrators placed a relatively tight cap on prisoners’ recreation time. Convicts remained trapped in their cells for the vast majority of their sentences, often entering for the night between 4:30 and 5:30 pm, only to emerge around 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning.57 Nonetheless, the difference in recreation privileges between 1890 and the interwar period was astounding, and interwar prison administrators throughout the country viewed organized sport, exercise, and recreation as invaluable tools to the proper functioning of the modern prison.

54 Sydney Souter, "A Recreational Program and Its Relation To Institutional Administration," Proceedings of the Annual Congress of Correction of the American Correctional Association (1932): 354-5.

55 Souter, "A Recreational Program and Its Relation To Institutional Administration," 354; Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 164.

56 Eduard Lindeman, “How Supervised Recreation Can Contribute,” The Prison World 5, no. 5 (September-October 1943): 7.

57 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 218.

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The historian Blake McKelvey described this new paradigm in his 1936 monograph American Prisons. He argued that recreational policies had become common enough, beginning “during the early years of the second decade,” that

“departures from the strict rule of silence culminated…in a recreational movement that swept the last vestige of the old Auburn technique out of the prisons.” Prison athletics, he believed, “not only proclaimed the end of the Auburn system and the triumph of one feature of reformatory technique, but presaged a new era in prison discipline.”58

Whether McKelvey was correct in his belief that recreational policies played a central role in breaking down the old penal order was perhaps less important than the fact he so readily recognized a direct connection between the rising role of the recreation yard in convict life and the waning effectiveness of older measures of prisoner control.

The War on Coddling

While the specifics of prison recreation differed from place to place, most interwar institutions granted inmates at least an hour on the yard each day, an enormous change from the forced isolation of a generation earlier. Prison administrators did not act as one, however, and some moved more slowly to offer their wards regular outdoor sport and exercise. Those hesitations often emerged out of a political fear of the public seeing such behaviour as "coddling." That prison sport had the administrative support it did was, in fact, surprising, as public attitudes toward inmate exercise and play were often unsympathetic to inmate desires. Therefore, endorsing "enlightened" practices posed something of a professional risk for administrators who had to appease the whims of public officials and their constituencies.

58 McKelvey, American Prisons, 261.

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By the 1920s, experimental penologists such as Jesse Stutsman, the Director of the United States Training School for Prison Officers, felt moved to address the perception that sport provided a “reward” for inmates. Speaking to the “thoughtless critics” who did not recognize the “educational values and health-building qualities of recreation,” Stutsman claimed that, while “anything to these critics is better than

‘coddling’…these people would probably be first to complain if a prisoner, treated after the order of their prescription, should revert to crime at the conclusion of their grinding- out process.”59 In 1922, the Russell Sage Foundation's R.K. Atkinson, writing for the

American Correctional Association Congress, argued that the public did not properly understand the benefits of sport, explaining that “many an institutional official has been unjustly criticized because of the extensive use made of sports, when the choice lay not between play or work, but between play or idleness."60 In 1931, the Wickersham

Commission responded to continued hostility toward prison sport within pockets of the public by positing that Americans had “lost sight” of the “favourable effect of pleasure upon character."61

As the country's most famous promoter of organized prison sport, Lewis Lawes received the most direct criticism from those in the public eye. In 1923, Police

Commissioner Richard E. Enright delivered a speech at New York City's Town Hall entitled "Guarding a Great City." He subtly jabbed at the local warden, declaring "prison

59 Jesse Stutsman, Curing the Criminal: a Treatise on the Philosophy and Practices of Modern Correctional Methods (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926), 190-1.

60 R.K. Atkinson, “Sports in a Penal Institution – Limits and Control,” Proceedings of the Annual Congress of Correction of the American Correctional Association (1922): 256.

61 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 269.

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reform has been carried to a ridiculous extreme. No one will deny that there is need of prison reform, but the reformers have carried it beyond all reason. There is little punishment meted out to the criminal now. That individual has now all the comforts of home in prison. He has his baseball and lawn tennis, his movies, drama, and occasionally grand opera. He misses nothing but Coney Island in Summer and the

Great White Way in Winter.”62 In 1931, Supreme Court justice William F. Bleakley also chided Lawes through the press for starting a football program. Speaking to a local service club, the jurist “asserted that there should be no glamour associated with prison life, and that convicts should not be popularized as heroes.” It was his belief that, “when a man is sent to Sing Sing, he should not be permitted to enjoy the things which many hard-working and honest men are denied owing to family obligations.”63

Bleakley's critiques echoed throughout the country. The Kansas City Star published a particularly pointed op-ed in 1931 that shared many of the same thoughts.

Harmon Allen of Ottawa, Kansas’s Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church argued against

Leavenworth taking their inmates to stadia outside of the prison to play against free- world teams, claiming “we make heroes of convicts,” the result being “that prison is not a bad place to be, and that doing time is easy.”64 This was the understandable and common view of many Americans who struggled throughout the Great Depression and resented what they perceived as luxuries the state had provided to prison inmates.

62 "Crime at Low Point Here, Says Enright," New York Times, February 27, 1923, 10. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (103151369).

63 "Football Publicity at Sing Sing Assailed," New York Times, November 28, 1931, 17. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (99226368).

64 "The Case Against Convict Baseball Games," Kansas City Star, September 10, 1931, 6.

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Such objections also extended to members of the custodial staff themselves. Virgil

O'Malley, the Associate Warden at the California Vocational Institution, recalled hearing remarks from his staff that included “Wasting the poor taxpayers’ money!” “Giving them

BUMS games, movies and entertaining them!” “They don’t need play, they need hard work!” “I can’t get any time to play games; why should the inmate be allowed to play?”

“How can I give you officers a day off? We must let the POOR BOYS have their REC re

A shun!”65

There is no clear way to gauge how popular or unpopular organized prison sports were with the public, and much of the country likely felt indifferent or ambivalent to the practice. In the popular media of the time, though, artists sometimes used sports as a subtle critique of what they viewed as penal pampering. The films Hold 'Em Jail (1932) and Up The River (1938) provided two Hollywood satires that relocated the popular, lighthearted college football films of the era to New York prisons.66 Similarly, certain pop songs of the day wryly raised concerns about prisoners’ extravagant lifestyles. The lyrics to the song “Eleven More Months and Ten More Days,” which the songwriting duo of Arthur Fields and Fred Hall penned for Columbia Records in 1930, included the cheeky line, in the voice of a prison inmate, "There’s lots of folks would like to come and see us when we play, but they’ve built a wall around the place to keep the crowd away."

While a throwaway verse, that line was indicative of deeper concerns about prison sports. Similarly, the 1934 novelty song “Sing Sing Isn’t Prison Any More” saw the Yacht

65 Virgil O’Malley, “Recreation a Major Factor in Disciplinary and Custodial Control,” Correctional Recreation 2, no. 2 (October 1946): 10.

66 Hold 'Em Jail. Dir. Norman Taurog. Perf. Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey. RKO Radio Pictures, 1932; Up The River. Dir. Alfred L. Werker. Perf. Preston Foster, Tony Martin. Twentieth Century Fox, 1938.

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Club Boys critique the relative comfort of the institution even more directly: “When first we came to Sing Sing back in 1923, it was not the kind of life you would desire. But here of late there’s been some changes and now you see, it’s a lovely place to come when you retire.”67

There was no great solution for wardens, guards, and administrators who, by the interwar period, had largely accepted the managerial wisdom of having a recreation yard. The yard was, after all, not simply a space for sport and exercise, but the only way to remove all or most men from their cells at one go, thereby diminishing inmates' excessive dead time. In the overcrowded interwar prisons, the recreation yard provided the only alternative to building more prisons or releasing inmates, solutions that came with titanic economic and political costs that far outweighed the resentment the public felt toward prison sport. By gradually embracing prison recreation and the spaces that accompanied sport and exercise, however, administrators, guards, and wardens found a solution to overcrowding that felt both economical and moral.

Baseball, The Penitentiary’s First National Pastime

If one game represented the rising trend of organized sports and recreation within American prisons between the 1870s and 1930s, it was baseball. An activity that spread throughout the country during the Civil War, baseball professionalized decades before any other major American team sport and exploded in popularity within the country's urban environs, where young workingmen first created local and semi- professional teams. As Gorn and Goldstein explained, the game had enormous

67 Arthur Fields and Fred Hall. "Eleven More Months & Ten More Days." Perf. Early East Coast Hillbilly Band. Arthur Fields and Fred Hall: Eleven More Months & Ten More Days. B.A.C.M. (unknown print date); Yacht Club Boys, "Sing Sing Isn't Prison Anymore." Perf. Yacht Club Boys. Underneath the Harlem Moon. Rex, 2010.

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intercultural appeal, attracting members of every national, ethnic, and racial group, from

"old-stock Americans to the Irish, the Germans, the newly freed slaves, and others," marking players as "possessing something singularly American."68 As with organized labor, though, baseball's Americanizing influence did not dissolve demographic divisions, as immigrant and minority populations formed their own teams as means of expressing group affiliation. Playing baseball was, for many men, a way of expressing an American identity while also holding on to a unique ethnic, racial, or national home world.69

By the late-nineteenth century, a significant national enthusiasm for baseball supported a pair of professional leagues, primarily based in the Northeast and Midwest.

From the 1880s onward, professional clubs employed white athletes from a broad array of European backgrounds, including both native-born and immigrant Americans, as well as Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, all of whom played on the same teams in a somewhat rare display of uniracial multiculturalism.70 By 1900, Major League Baseball's total attendance had grown to 3.6 million, a number that ballooned to more than nine million in 1920. The first World Series in 1903 signified baseball's ascendance to the

68 Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 124.

69 There exists a very large literature on baseball, ethnicity, and national identity. Some of the standout works on this topic include Lawrence Baldassaro and Richard A. Johnson, eds. The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002); Edward J. Rielly, ed, Baseball and American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003); Jules Tygiel, Past Time: Baseball as History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Steven Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999).

70 The literature on the Black and Latino/Hispanic experience in baseball has grown a great deal over recent decades. Some of the best works on this subject include Rob Ruck, Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); Adrian Burgos, Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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national consciousness and, by the 1920s, Babe Ruth brought new levels of public attention to the game, emerging as one of the country's biggest interwar celebrities.71

Major League Baseball’s popularity trickled down to civic institutions throughout the century’s first three decades. The American Legion, for instance, established a youth baseball league in 1925 and found enormous success in offering the game to white, middle-class Protestant parents as character-building experiences for developing citizens. Shrugging off the negative connotations of baseball as a sport dominated by immigrants and racial minorities, the American Legion framed its leagues as "100 percent American." The organization wrapped the sport in a type of performative hyper- nationalism and militaristic imagery befitting a body whose mission, according to the

Legion itself, was to provide "the best possible medium through which to teach the principles of Americanism."72

Baseball loomed large in the public's consciousness, especially in discussions of how sport, exercise, and leisure might instill stronger character and proper values in men. Reformers surely felt drawn to its founding myth, which placed the game’s origins in rural upstate New York, as the apocryphal story of Abner Doubleday suggested to

Progressive sports enthusiasts that baseball could serve as a didactic instrument by promoting an Anglo-Saxon, Yankee version of American identity.73 Ultimately, baseball

71 Claude S. Fischer, "Changes in Leisure Activities, 1890-1940," Journal of Social History 27, no. 3 (1994): 455; Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 192.

72 Pope, "Negotiating the Folk Highway of the Nation," 327-8; Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 182.

73 For more information on Al Spalding, the Mills Commission, and the apocryphal origins of baseball, see Peter Levine, A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: the Promise of American Sport (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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meant more than most other sports to interwar Americans and, for that reason, played a major role in how prison administrators integrated sport and recreation into convicts’ lives. By the end of the interwar period, baseball was so important to prison recreation that administrators drastically rearranged inmate spaces to secure room for baseball fields. Such measures, in turn, provided men from different cellblocks and of dissimilar backgrounds opportunities to associate.

The Origins of Organized Prison Baseball

Baseball had a fleeting presence within some prisons prior to the 1890s, but a lack of space and institutional enthusiasm for organized sport meant nineteenth-century prisons were slow to adopt the game. The Sacramento Daily Record-Union published one of the earliest accounts of prison baseball in 1887, recalling the Prison Club at the

California State Prison at Folsom playing against the visiting American River and

Folsom City Baseball Clubs. “It keeps the boys busy, and when they’re busy, why there’s nothing doing,” the yard captain explained approvingly, citing the pacifying and distracting nature of the game.74 By 1899, inmates at Michigan’s Ionia Penitentiary also regularly matched up with visiting teams from the outside world, a practice that the

Michigan State Prison at Jackson adopted by the next year. The wardens of both institutions argued that the threat of losing baseball encouraged respectful behavior from inmates, a remark that suggested the practice was a number of years old by that point.75

74 "Baseball Games," Sacramento Daily Record-Union, May 3, 1887. Accessed May 4, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/49980250.

75 "Sport in the Prison Yard," Grand Rapids (IA) Herald, July 10, 1899, 4; "Convicts Went on Strike," Gainesville (FL) Star, March 12, 1903. Accessed May 2, 2018. https:www.newspapers.com/image/81276554.

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Though the evidence remains spotty, baseball seems to have expanded into a variety of state prisons around the country by the early twentieth century. The

Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown held an eighteen-team championship tournament in 1904, with squads divided by work assignment, sentence length, and race. The Mississippi State Prison at Jackson also had a dedicated “official” prison baseball team by 1906, despite the general apathy Southern penologists showed toward Progressive penology. These programs were outliers, but they augured the rapid expansion of prison baseball in the following decade.76

By the 1910s, prison baseball teams throughout the country regularly played local, semi-professional, and industrial teams in their surrounding regions and, in May

1912, Leavenworth and USP Atlanta broke new ground by establishing permanent baseball league play. Leavenworth’s Warden, R.W. McLaughry, explained to the press at the time that baseball “takes the mind of the prisoner off his troubles, stimulates him to better efforts, and…is one of the best diversions possible.”77 Befitting such an upstanding activity, McLaughry made baseball an official part of the prison’s recreation program, placing Deputy Warden William Mackey in charge of the new league. Buoyed by a faith in baseball’s power to Americanize and reform, Mackey oversaw the construction of a regulation diamond in the recreation yard, replete with bleachers to seat 1500 spectators. He also tapped various inmates to help organize the league,

76 "Better Treatment for Prisoners Coming," New York Tribune, December 23, 1906. Accessed May 2, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/206533804; "Convicts Who Play Ball," The Beaumont (TX) Enterprise, September 9, 1904. Accessed May 1, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/174219573; "When the Men in Stripes Play Baseball," San Francisco Call, July 19, 1908. Accessed May 2, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/80977322.

77 Timothy Rives and Robert Rives, “The Booker Four’s Unlikely Journey From Prison Baseball to the Negro Leagues,” Prologue 36, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 20.

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which would include permanent teams, tryouts, regular schedules and games, and a silk pennant awarded to the eventual league champions.78 Within a decade, prisons all around the country parroted Leavenworth's model as they rushed to build stadia, attract paying audiences, and devise structured, permanent leagues.

The San Quentin Prison baseball program was also innovative, as it joined the

San Francisco Recreational Baseball League in 1912 and created tiered "major" and

"minor" leagues for intramural play the same year. By 1913, San Quentin, Leavenworth,

Atlanta, and Eastern State Penitentiary all had organized baseball leagues, populated by teams with clear racial identities. In 1914, Warden T.J. McCormick brought organized baseball to Sing Sing Prison, which quickly began producing the country’s best baseball and football players.79 By the end of the 1910s, correctional institutions throughout the country ran organized baseball programs. The historian Harold Seymour found that, by the end of the 1920s, 44 of the 50 prisons he surveyed at random had organized baseball, and 25 singled out baseball as the most popular sport among both inmates and wardens.80 When interwar administrators brought baseball to the hulking state prisons of the Midwest, some programs reached extraordinary sizes. The Ohio State

Penitentiary's softball league, at 500 players, was about twice the size of all of Major

78 Rives and Rives, "The Booker Four's Unlikely Journey From Prison Baseball to the Negro Leagues," 20-21; Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 403.

79 "Women Convicts to See Baseball Game," San Francisco Call, September 8, 1910. Accessed May 2, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/80977322; Edward F. McGrath, I Was Condemned to the Chair (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1934), 83; Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 406.

80 Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 431.

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League Baseball, which is why the prison ran three separate inmate leagues of its own.81

The national trend toward organized prison baseball leagues was strong enough by the 1920s that many institutions across the country scrambled to create recreation spaces large enough to support the game.82 In South Dakota and Tennessee, prison administrators built miniature baseball fields to accommodate unyielding recreation yard boundaries. At the Maine State Prison in Thomason, inmates played their baseball games in a quarry, whereas those at New Hampshire State Prison in Concord negotiated a fireplug between second and third base.83 In New York, Sing Sing's

Thomas Mott Osborne was so determined to install baseball fields that he had his staff cut down most of the trees lining the prison garden.84

81 Henry Luce, ed. “Ohio Penitentiary Has Big Sports Program: Prisons Turn to Sports Programs,” Life Magazine, May 5, 1941, 49-55.

82 San Quentin, one of the country’s largest prisons by population, provided an early example of the dramatic effect baseball leagues had on the architecture and layout of the prison. In July, 1908, the institution held a baseball game on the best available space, the yard behind the prison’s jute mill. A reporter for the San Francisco Call commented on the difficulty San Quentin administrators had in putting the game on, explaining “there is no center field and only about three yards of right field, and the left garden is brought to an abrupt close by one of those frowning stone walls which constitute so large a part of the architectural splendors of the prison grounds.” Befitting an institution built well before the national rise of both baseball and organized prison recreation, there was simply not enough space to play the game properly, and administrators “incorporated certain specific rules to meet the exigencies of the case,” such as counting home runs into the short right field porch as singles. "When the Men in Stripes Play Baseball," San Francisco Call, July 19, 1908. Accessed May 4, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/ image/81001187.

83 Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 431.

84 New York was ground zero for prison recreation yard experimentation. In 1920, a reporter for the New York Times reported that "Great Meadows, according to the men and keepers up at Comstock, is the only prison that can boast of a baseball field not enclosed by walls…surrounded by nothing but the road on one side, where the automobiles gather to watch the game, and by woods and hills on every other side. "Convicts Who Play Ball and Don't Run Away," New York Times, August 22, 1920, xx2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (97991533).

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Marketing the Prison with Baseball

Interwar prison administrators, wardens, and guards likely had a variety of rationales for promoting prison baseball, many honorable and well-meaning.85 When

Warden Lawes claimed “the man who plays baseball learns the necessity of rules, or laws, and cooperation with his fellows…learns to subordinate his own desires to the good of the whole team,” he likely believed it, as the notion echoed many common sentiments of Muscular Christianity.86 There was, however, also a presentational element at play for wardens and administrators, as some of the most famous prison administrators in the country fashioned secondary careers in the media or in politics based on their public images as enlightened reformers, and baseball was a tool through which they presented that image.

By 1912, Leavenworth's baseball team not only played host to other federal prison camps and the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, but they also played teams from the free world. The most famous of these visitors were the Kansas City Packers of the Federal League, a team against whom Leavenworth inmates played a highly publicized exhibition game in 1915.87 Similarly, in California, the San Quentin All-Stars, the prison’s varsity club, took on a variety of minor league and industrial teams, as well as Army and Navy squads.88 At Sing Sing, Lawes's handpicked, racially integrated

85 Blue, Doing Time In The Depression, 164.

86 Lewis Lawes, Life and Death in Sing Sing (New York: Sun Dial Press, 1937), 105.

87 “Playing Ball is Prison “Trade,” Fairbanks (AK) Daily News-Miner, January 10, 1928, 1; Rives and Rives, “Journey From Prison Baseball to the Negro Leagues,” 20.

88 Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 168.

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baseball and football teams, which he called the "Black Sheep," played against local semi-professional sides and received regular coverage in the New York Times.89

By the 1930s, celebrities and professional athletes, the most famous of whom were baseball players, also visited prison recreation yards with some frequency. Sing

Sing, within an easy commute of New York City, received a variety of stars. The prison baseball program made national news in 1929 when Babe Ruth played in a Sing Sing league game and hit three home runs in front of 1500 prisoners in the stands one year after making a similar visit to Eastern State Penitentiary.90 Two years later, the owner of the NFL's New York Giants, Tim Mara, brought his team to Ossining to scrimmage with the inmates.91 Folsom Prison's proximity to Los Angeles, a major hub of American celebrity, meant that institution also received frequent visits. In 1939, a year after the world champion tennis stars Ellsworth Vines and Fred Perry played an exhibition match on the recreation yard, Chicago Cubs star Dick Bartell led a group of major leaguers in an exhibition against the best baseball players Folsom Prison had to offer.92

While high-profile athletic endeavors may have served as enjoyable encounters for both the prison and free world teams involved, they did not use prison resources efficiently and only occupied the attentions of a few dozen inmates at a time. Such

89 Joseph Overfield, "Alabama Pitts," The Baseball Research Journal 14 (1985): 19-22; Seymour, The People's Game, 418.

90 "Babe Ruth, in Jail, Leaves Autographs," Washington Post, May 29, 1928, 15. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149926604).

91 "Ruth Hits 3 Homers in Sing Sing Game," New York Times, September 6, 1929, 29. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (104905601); "Six Grid Stars Sent to Prison By Their Boss," Oakland Tribune, November 3, 1931. Accessed May 4, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/103938969.

92 "Big League Ball Stars to Invade Folsom for Game," Oakland Tribune, February 22, 1939, D9; "Vines and Perry to Play Match for Prison Inmates," Tallahassee (FL) Democrat, January 25, 1938. Accessed May 5, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/244651906.

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events were, however, extremely effective at drawing media attention to the prison.

Therefore, prison all-star teams, visiting celebrities, and media-friendly league play did not merely represent benevolent efforts at inmate betterment on wardens’ parts.

Whether they consciously conceived of prison baseball as a propagandistic tool or simply as good policy, the wardens of America's largest prisons quickly embraced both sport and the media attention that came with it.93

The Racial Politics of Prison Baseball

In 1954, Jacques Barzun proclaimed "whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game."94 The sentiment that baseball reflected the values of the country was broadly accurate when it came to the messy racial politics of prison play, as early penal leagues represented

American society in trying to separate players by race, ethnicity, and work. By the

1930s, though, the racial politics of prison baseball were, in some ways, far more liberal than those of the free world. While Leavenworth had racially segregated teams and bleachers by 1907, they did away with those practices in 1932, responding to the institutional unrest and rioting of the period not by eliminating the league, but by racially integrating it fifteen years before Major League Baseball ended its’ own "Gentleman's

Agreement."95

93 Perhaps it was for that reason that Sing Sing not only invited sports teams from the free world to visit their recreation yard, but also, in 1915, hosted the evangelist Billy Sunday and the American songwriting icon Irving Berlin. Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 408.

94 Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced With a Few Harsh Words (New York: Vintage Books, 1959 [1954]), 152.

95 Rives, "The Booker Four's Unlikely Journey From Prison Baseball to the Negro Leagues," 21-2.

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Most of the country's prison baseball looked like Leavenworth's throughout the

1910s and 1920s, as the federal penitentiary divided league teams, beginning in 1912, along as many racial lines as possible. White Protestants were the "White Sox," Black inmates were the "Booker Ts," and American Indians found themselves saddled with the inartful name of the “Red Men.”96 These cleavages varied somewhat across institutions based on the prison's makeup. For example, San Quentin fielded a Chinese- only baseball team in 1915 and prisons around the country also featured teams made up of Jewish, Italian, and Irish inmates.97 Rebecca McLennan noted that, at Sing Sing, the administration sponsored teams with names such as “the “Neapolitan Street

Singers,” the “Society Garabaldini del Mare,” the “Irish Comedians,” and the “Colored

Players.”98 While the teams separated along race lines, though, intercultural contests served to break down distance between groups by putting them into direct contact, even if the animosity fostered by racial divisions and fierce game play sometimes spilled into visible agitation. Certainly it was common to see men such as Auburn's Tom B., a thirty- year-old white player, accuse the commanding officer/umpire of "favoring the colored inmates" during a 1940 game. That Tom then told the administration to lock him up, lest he turn violent, was both a sign of self-awareness on his part and a hint of the risible passions such games could inspire in men.99

96 Ibid, 21.

97 Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 168; Seymour, Baseball: A People's History, 402.

98 Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 373.

99 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 47966.

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Southern states tended not only to divide prison teams along race lines, but they went so far as to create separate leagues, a practice that mirrored the divisions of Major

League Baseball and the Negro Leagues. Such neat racial distinctions within the prison were not always possible, though, and wardens and administrators often had to make concessions when juggling administrative functionality with the inconvenience of racial segregation.100 At Leavenworth, officials quietly folded Indian and Mexican inmates into the White Sox by the 1920s, a move indicative of both the administration's desire to provide all inmates with baseball and of a relative lack of commitment to maintaining racial segregation.101

Segregation also hindered prisons in putting their best possible teams against squads from other prisons and the free world, making the mixed-race "all-star" team perhaps the most radical innovation common to interwar prison baseball leagues throughout the country. Following a one-off experiment at San Quentin, which hosted an exhibition game with mixed-race teams in 1908, wardens and administrators regularly ignored racial boundaries in creating teams composed of their top players.102 Both San

Quentin and Ohio Penitentiary had mixed-race "varsity" teams, the latter merging its'

“Colored All-Star Team” and “White All-Star Team” to create a mixed squad named

100 Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 168, 174, 182; Chad Trulson and James Marquart, First Available Cell: Desegregation of the Texas Prison System (Austin: University of Texas Press), 62.

101 Rives, "The Booker Four's Unlikely Journey From Prison Baseball to the Negro Leagues," 22.

102 Rives, "The Booker Four's Unlikely Journey From Prison Baseball to the Negro Leagues," 168; "Women Convicts to See Baseball Game," San Francisco Call, September 8, 1910. Accessed May 8, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/80975150; "When the Men in Stripes Play Baseball," San Francisco Call, July 19, 1908. Accessed May 9, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/81001363.

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“Henderson’s Hurricanes,” in honor of Warden Frank D. Henderson.103 In some of the largest prisons in the country, the compulsion to provide baseball for all inmates, or to field as competitive a team as possible, simply outweighed assumptions of racial segregation.

This is not to say that players necessarily co-existed peacefully on these teams.

Sometimes, white inmates refused to share the field, much less a team, with Black players. In 1943, Auburn administrators identified Eugene S., an electrician from the

Bronx imprisoned for robbery, as a "ringleader" in a scheme to boycott the prison's all- star team out of opposition to the presence of a Black player.104 Such behaviors likely came as no surprise to the administration, as inmates regularly bared their racial animus while on the baseball diamond in a variety of ways and Auburn's guards often wrote up white inmates for "trying to start trouble between white and colored inmates in yard."105 This behavior sometimes devolved into race rioting, one memorable event coming on August 8, 1921, when two white inmates turned their baseball bats on Black players during a game, the result being dozens of Auburn inmates brawling on the yard.106

That prison baseball could serve as both an opportunity for interracial socializing and for acts of base hostility aligned with prison culture more generally. The yard

103 Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 429; "Prisons Turn to Sports Programs," Life Magazine, 52; Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 168.

104 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 48083.

105 One example of this occurred on August 12, 1933 between NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 45093; NYSA ICFACF, 46133; and NYSA ICFACF, 45946.

106 Those involved in the brawl were NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 38125, 37705; 38003; 38125; 38171; 37995; 37764; 38235; 36403; 38235; 37076; 37871; 38340; 38309; 37469; 34902; 38093; 37428; 37992; 38102; 38106; 37357; 35246.

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served, at once, as a place of violence, cooperation, and indifference. Some prisons had racially segregated leagues, others merely had segregated teams, and others yet hosted racially integrated teams. That variance reflected the degrees to which administrators and inmates tolerated interracial mixing more generally. Perhaps the most important implication of the national rise of organized prison baseball, though, was that it opened up yards throughout the country. Those yards, which administrators organized to allow diverse groups of inmates to play, indirectly facilitated all manner of contact and transgressive behaviors, turning recreational spaces into important economic, cultural, and political hubs for inmates.

The Culture of the Yard

It is difficult to describe the nature of the interwar recreation yard nearly a century after the fact, though a wide variety of mid-century monographs, articles, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and novels provide some impressions of the space. The

Wickersham Commission stressed the easy sociality of the yard, claiming it was the primary area for "gossip, talk, and public opinion."107 Similarly, Eugene Debs found in

USP Atlanta that, "on Saturday and Sunday afternoons when the entire body of prisoners were allowed the freedom of the ball park, the social life of the prison found its most interesting expression…all sorts and conditions of men mingled freely there."108

John Resko, an inmate at Clinton Prison, recalled how "a pickpocket might be hanging out with a heist man or burglar, a con man might be on intimate terms with a rape artists

107National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 21.

108 Eugene Debs, Walls and Bars: Prisons and Prison Life in the "Land of the Free" (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2000 [1927]), 75.

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or purse snatcher."109 Former Stateville inmate Nathan Leopold described the yard as having a complete lack of formality and rigid discipline, explaining how “you could go where you like"110

The yard's cramped environs were not always positive and respectful, however.

The publisher Samuel Roth, who spent the period from 1936 to 1939 in USP Lewisburg, described the most common yard activity as prisoners laconically circling the space during recreation time, "talking, hoping, planning, taking their ugly jabs in the body and hoping their cells [were] not being robbed in the meantime."111 The novelist and pro-

Nazi propagandist George Viereck, who spent World War II as an inmate at

Leavenworth, recalled that "recreation was a joke. There was nothing to do except loll on the blankets, talk, play cards, or stalk up and down like a beast in a cage."112 While views of the yard's character ranged from positive to negative, the common thread of most former inmate accounts was that it had little in the way of oversight, it put few parameters on inmate behavior, and it allowed prisoners to mix freely. David Rothman affirmed this sentiment when he claimed that, "like contemporary Mexican prisons, the yard had something of the atmosphere of a village about it."113

Inmate behavior was subject to some official oversight, as guards sat in watchtowers and patrolled the yard's walled perimeters. From 10 or 20 feet above,

109 John Resko, Reprieve: The Testament of John Resko (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 126.

110 Nathan Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), 135.

111 Samuel Roth, Stone Walls Do Not: Chronicle of a Captivity (New York: William Faro, 1930), 326.

112 George Viereck, Men Into Beasts (New York: Bridgehead Books, 1955), 57-8.

113 David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Hawthorne: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2002 [1980]), 18.

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however, guards would have struggled to tease out any particular conversations or catch every discrete behavior.114 In most prisons, one or two guards also walked amongst the inmates themselves. Those overseers had little chance of properly monitoring hundreds of inmates, however, as many had developed effective measures for hiding their activities from the "yard-hack."115 While some inmates employed a lookout while gambling, Ethan Blue noted that such a measure was usually unnecessary as, more often than not, "guards found better things to do when they heard dice clicking off a cell wall."116 In fact, guards at Leavenworth and Auburn rarely reported inmates for gambling, loafing, and fighting on the yard. At both prisons, only around one in 20 conduct infractions occurred on the recreation yard.117 Those numbers surely did not represent the extent of actual inmate rule breaking in recreation areas, though, as the freedom and openness of those spaces leant themselves particularly well to private communications and surreptitious behaviors.118

Making Due Together

Guards' ineffectiveness or disinterest in upholding prison rules in the recreation yard meant that space was indeed like the proverbial village square Rothman invoked.

An invaluable area for communication and trade, it was ideal for exchanging

114 Edward F. McGrath, I Was Condemned to the Chair. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1934), 83.

115 George Milburn, "Convict's Jargon," American Speech 6, no. 6 (August 1931): 442.

116 Blue, Doing Time in the Depression, 110.

117 The Leavenworth inmate case files this project has sampled yielded 2283 total conduct infractions, though only 152 (6.7%) traced to the recreation yard. Similarly, of the 3258 total conduct infractions in the sampled Auburn files, guards only identified 176 (5.4%) as having occurred on the recreation yard. See Table 3-5.

118 Sykes, Society of Captives, 33.

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contraband, as men from all around the prison hid in plain sight. That there existed a space in which men from different prison blocks and workshops could buy and sell from one-another was extraordinarily important, given that contraband was critical to easing the pains of imprisonment through providing convicts with physical comfort and mental removal.

Administrators surely knew that they saw only a fraction of the contraband trade that comprised a broad network of dealings, catching mere glimpses of the continuous movement of drugs, food, messages, ideas, and so forth into and out of the penitentiary.119 To that end, there was a broader significance when Auburn guards caught Robert H., a twenty-two-year-old Black porter from Columbus, Ohio, bringing a pair of pork chops he had stolen from the butcher shop to Peter G., a twenty-five-year- old Jewish clerk from New York City. After all, in the free world, Robert and Peter would have had little reason to associate, much less cooperate. They not only traded within the prison, though, but they did so across a racial divide that Auburn, like prisons throughout the country, maintained as an official policy. The open recreation yard brought men like Robert and Peter together, and it provided them with the requisite space for an unconventional partnership.120

119 In 1999, Charles Bright, author of The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the "Big House," 1920-1955 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), guided a group of researchers at the University of Michigan's Residential College in a project that outlined some of the ways in which guards facilitated the secondary economies of major Michigan penitentiaries. Looking at the records of embattled Jackson State Prison Warden Harry Hulbert, they found that, by "recognizing the prisoners’ vulnerability, a guard could greatly supplement his income by carrying contraband into the prison," and "thousands of dollars circulated inside the prison with which elite inmates bargained with officials and one another for paroles and drugs." Adrienne Eaton, John Knox, Frank Sudia, Marianne Carduner, Roy Doppelt, Jody George, Ellen Leopold, and Charles Bright. A History of Jackson Prison, 1920-1975 (University of Michigan, Residential College Social Science Research Community, 1999), 18.

120 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 42930; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 43930.

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At Leavenworth, Edward M. and Rodney L.’s trading of goods on February 11,

1928 was similarly representative of the recreation yard’s larger importance. Edward, a middle-aged Black laborer from the District of Columbia, was in the third year of a decade-long term for housebreaking and larceny. He lifted "2 steaks, 4 fried eggs and some salt pork" from the hospital kitchen, where he worked, and brought the food to

Rodney, a white carpenter from California who was more than ten years Edward’s junior. In exchange, Rodney handed Edward a checkerboard.121 The trade, though minor, was an encapsulation of so much of the contraband economy of the prison, pointing not only to the diversity of goods that made their way throughout the prison, but also to the way in which products, privileges, and spatial considerations intersected and led inmates to reach across racial and ethnic lines.

In addition to interracial and cross-cultural trade, the yard allowed inmates to uphold other elements of a prison contraculture, as it offered a space for dealing in precious, forbidden goods. Drugs were one of the most coveted commodities inmates traded on the yard, especially at Leavenworth, which had a separate, adjacent facility for drug offenders. In 1925, guards caught Luis A., a Latino mechanic from Los Angeles serving a two year sentence for a Drug Act violation, “peddling intoxicating liquor on the yard,” sharing the bottle with another inmate. When a guard came to take the bottle,

Luis “disappeared in the crowd.”122 Similarly, guards found two needles, one medicine dropper, and sixty two grains of morphine on Dean P. while he was on the yard, as the

“needle [and] medicine dropper were sewn in the front part of his coat and were sewn in

121 NAKC RG129 LVCF1895-1957, 22672; NAKC RG129 LVCF1895-1957, 23529.

122 NAKC RG129 LVCF1895-1957, 22519.

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with a machine.” The guard on duty found Dean had hidden the morphine “in the shoulder of the coat. The way the stuff was sewn indicates that it was prepared inside the prison ready to issue to proper persons when they went through the clothing department.”123 Such stories of surreptitious exchange peppered Leavenworth’s records, speaking to a bustling contraband exchange that ran throughout the prison and into the yard.124

Usually on the periphery of the prison grounds, recreation yards also provided inmates with opportunities to interact with the outside world. At Auburn, guards caught numerous inmates literally trying to reach the outside world, passing along either information or goods. In 1924, Scott L. tried to "pass out a crooked letter by giving it to a visitor who came in with a ball team," whereas guards caught Ben S. passing a necklace through the gate while "trying to receive money from an outsider" in 1925.125

These behaviors were by no means specific to penitentiaries, as guards at Angola Farm uncovered similar behaviors. In 1935, Charles P., a white sawmill worker from

Louisiana, received 35 lashes for "bringing dope to front gate," whereas James B., a

123 NAKC RG129 LVCF1895-1957, 26520.

124 The Leavenworth drug trade also extended into the free world, as the case file of Robert R. attests. Robert came to prison with a long record of forgeries and drug trading and, upon his arrival in Kansas, somehow convinced administrators to send him alone to the prison infirmary for multiple morphine injections. After a few months, guards caught Robert bribing a guard, the inmate having asked Officer Henry Beardon to mail letters “to Mrs. Hilda Nicholas, a Notorious Narcotic Peddler of Detroit, Mich [and] to send Morphine to Mr. Barden at the Majestic Hotel Kansas City Mo." Such a request not only took exceptional hubris on Robert's part, but it was also indicative of the fact the Oklahoma native felt he could use prison administrators as drug runners. Beardon noted in Robert's record that he got the inmate to admit he had been trading drugs out of the prison and he "received Morphine from Mrs Nicholas thru underground Channels.” It took the administration some time to cotton on to Robert's multi-faceted operation, a fact that suggested similar networks could have functioned throughout not only Leavenworth but prisons around the country. NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 25664.

125 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 39963 and 40176.

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Black Floridian serving a life sentence on murder charges, received 40 lashes in 1933 for "stealing groceries and selling to outsiders."126

Space for Intimacy

The prison yard served as a village square or bazaar for a great many men and, for perhaps a much smaller number, it served as a space for interracial and interethnic friendships and romances. One man for whom this was the case was Chris C., who entered Leavenworth on a life sentence for murder and manslaughter in 1940.127 The

Wisconsin native did not enter the massive state prison in Waupun because Chris had grown up on a Chippewa Indian Reservation in the tiny town of Odanah as a status

Indian.128 By and large, Chris’s record was similar to that of many working-class men of the time. His file described him as a “well nourished” twenty-seven-year-old farmer and laborer, road worker, and heavy drinker with “defective intelligence.”129 Perhaps most curious, given the way his prison life played out, was the fact that Leavenworth officials also identified him as married and a member of the Catholic Church, firmly establishing

Chris’s formal affiliations with two of the country’s more heteronormative institutions.

Timothy E., for his part, was serving 9 to 15 years for theft, assault, and unlawful entry for acts he committed during military basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas. Timothy’s file

126 FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963, 20398 and 14099.

127 NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963, 600.

128 Prison records cast some suspicion, either inadvertently or purposefully, on the authenticity of Chris’s racial identity. In his Alcatraz file, administrators chose to describe him as an “Indian,” but also placed “negro” in parentheses beside the designation.

129 Chris’s unimaginably low estimated I.Q. of 54 likely says more about prison administrators’ conceptions of racial intelligence from the time than it does about Chris himself.

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described him as a twenty-one-year-old single, home-schooled Baptist who lived with his mother and worked as a printer in the small town of Indiana Harbor, Indiana.130

Whether they put their religious and romantic self-images on pause during their time in prison or discarded them altogether, Chris and Timothy took on sexual identities at Leavenworth that seemed not to match their free world biographies. The two men engaged each other romantically at some point between late 1940 and mid-1941, with news of the relationship trickling up to the prison administration on August 28, 1941, when an inspection of Chris’s cell uncovered a love letter from Timothy. Hidden in a book that he had received from another inmate, the letter “revealed perversion,” according to Chris’s cryptic case file, and confirmed a suspicion guards had harbored after spotting the two “in an endearing and loving embrace” on the recreation yard a few days earlier. The next day, the Warden checked Timothy’s handwriting against the letter he had found in Chris’s cell and confirmed the match, which Timothy himself acknowledged. The two men, one of whom was married, admitted that they had been exchanging love notes and meeting on the prison yard for trysts for some time.131

This relationship was apparently not troubling enough for the administration to justify segregating the men, as a month later, guards found Timothy “attacking” Chris in the South East corner of the recreation yard. Timothy strongly argued against the characterization that he was acting violently or that either man was angry at the other, claiming instead that they were “wrestling after the younger inmate attempted to cajole the older into playing handball.” Chris did not corroborate Timothy’s explanation,

130 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 57230.

131 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 57230

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suggesting Timothy was acting violently, perhaps out of upset or jealousy.132 In August,

Chris alluded to what may have triggered Timothy’s anger, explaining to the administration that he had engaged in homosexual practices with a number of inmates over the years. Guards euphemistically noted on Chris’s record that he let “other inmates use him as a woman” in exchange for cigarettes.133 By September 1941,

Leavenworth officials segregated Chris from his cell block “so he could not successfully engage in his activities as an institutional prostitute,” having submitted “to sodomy for pay – playing a massive part.” In May 1943, Leavenworth sent Chris off to Alcatraz, feeling that they had lost their ability to control his sexual liaisons.134

It is altogether possible, if not likely, that Timothy’s aggressions in September

1941 grew out of jealousy. Institutional accounts described Chris as a sought-after

“fairy” with numerous partners, and Timothy may have felt irritated by Chris’s divided attentions. Either way, Chris and Timothy’s romance only existed because the recreation yard allowed the two men to meet, connect, and navigate their tumultuous relationship. Guards spotted them embracing on the yard one day and fighting there the

132 NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963, 600.

133 Auburn and Leavenworth records both suggest that, while institutions aspired to limit sexual contact between inmates, administrators seemed almost puritanically uncomfortable discussing the issue. This was most clearly the case at Leavenworth, where guards employed euphemisms to describe the men they caught in the throes of same-sex intercourse. On December 14, 1928, guards wrote up Louis M., a part-time boxer and painted who deserted his military post for being “in bed with 27442 and…committing a crime against nature on him.” On September 23, 1936, Wayne K., a married Catholic man serving seven years for robbing a post office, earned the administrative label of “a confirmed degenerate” after “using inmate #45442, as a woman in the store room of Clothing Factory.” One guard found Terrance G. “jump out of a bed in which another inmate was” on September 23, 1936, concluding obliquely that his “actions indicated degeneracy.” Some guards were less reserved in their descriptions than others, however, as one found G. “under the bed with his pants off, and penis erect, with [another] inmate,” a far blunter description of sexual misconduct. For the most part, however, administrators danced around the issue. NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 25264; NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963, 386 and 411.

134 NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963, 600.

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next. The yard also likely served as a “cruising” site for Chris, as he may not have had quite so many opportunities to meet with a variety of men and exchange sexual favors and payments outside of yard time, though such an assumption is speculative.135

Even if Chris was an outlier and exceedingly few open interracial romances or sexual liaisons flourished within interwar prisons, the fact that the two men openly displayed their relationship on the recreation yard, in front of other inmates, was telling.

Only the administration seemed troubled by Chris’s actions, as no other inmates, according to the records available, approached Chris and Timothy with hostility, even though the two men engaged in an interracial, homosexual romance in the open yard.

This was perhaps a testament to the fact that inmates were more preoccupied with addressing the pains of penal deprivation than they were with policing racial or sexual boundaries. Other inmates’ toleration or indifference toward Chris and Timothy did not represent acceptance, per se, but it emphasized the role of the yard in serving as a space in which inmates could connect with cultural, ethnic, and racial others and negotiate ways of addressing their unique needs.136

135 For more on the sexual politics of early twentieth century prisons, see Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). In addition to Kunzel’s field-defining work, additional important studies of sexuality and imprisonment include Joseph Fishman, Sex in Prison: Revealing Sex Conditions in American Prisons (New York: National Library, 1934); Clemmer, The Prison Community; Sykes, The Society of Captives; Estelle Freedman, “The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915-1965,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 397-423.

136 George Chauncey has written effectively on the elasticity of working class male sexual identity in the early twentieth century, as well as on the sexual dynamics of American prisoners. As he describes it, his outstanding monograph Gay New York “reconstructs the gay world that existed before the hetero- homosexual binarism was consolidated…It ends around 1940, when the boundaries between “normal” and “abnormal” men were beginning to change.” Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 23.

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Conclusion

Edwin "Alabama" Pitts, a minor celebrity and the most famous prison athlete of his time, died on June 7, 1941. That night, in a Valdese, North Carolina tavern, Pitts asked a woman to dance, only for her boyfriend to stab him in the stomach, leaving him to bleed to death.137 In a way, this act symbolized the end of the interwar prison sports boom, as Pitts served as the locus of a national debate about the role of sports and recreation in prisoner reform just a few years earlier.

A native of Opelika, Alabama, Pitts robbed a New York City grocery store of

$76.25 in 1929 after his discharge from the Navy. After he pled guilty to robbery, the state sent Pitts to Sing Sing, where he first worked as a coal passer in the powerhouse and, in his off hours, proved himself the prison’s best baseball and football player, starring on Lewis Lawes's "Black Sheep" varsity teams between 1931 and 1934.138 By

1935, Pitts's play received enough coverage in the popular press to attract professional scouts, including one from the Albany Senators, a Class AA International League affiliate of the Major Leagues’ Washington Senators. After he secured his probationary release in the summer of 1935, Pitts signed a $200-per-month contract with the Albany team, only for Judge William Bramham, the President of the National Association, to void Pitts’s contract within hours, using the hazily articulated notion that he was safeguarding the game’s broader interests.139

137 "'Alabama' Pitts Stabbed to Death," Tampa Bay (FL) Times, June 8, 1941. Accessed May 2, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/314775731.

138 Ralph Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004): 197, 224.

139 Hank Utley and Josh Davlin, "Alabama Pitts," Society for American Baseball Research, accessed January 20, 2018, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/d7db6951; Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing, 224; Overfield, "Alabama Pitts," 22; Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 417.

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Bramham's decision set off a brief national firestorm, as Albany manager and

Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Evers argued the prohibition “trample[d] on sentiment and stabs fair play to the heart,” a view echoed by baseball stars Dizzy

Dean and Pepper Martin, who also wrote in to Bramham on Pitts’s behalf.140 The decision was similarly unpopular with the national press, as some newspapers began serializing Pitts’s life story and others issued stinging rebukes through op-eds. The New

York Mirror and the New York Daily News published powerful defenses of Pitts’s signing, as did a writer for the Buffalo Courier-Express, who called the decision “un-

Christian, un-American, and un-sportsmanlike.”141 Despite this wave of public criticism, however, Bramham held fast, arguing that it sullied the sanctity of the game to open the profession to former convicts. Major League Baseball’s Commissioner Kennesaw

Mountain Landis, concerned about the negative attention wrought by Bramham's decision, stepped in to mediate. He quickly approved Pitts to play, claiming he had received new information about the case, namely that “reputable people” had pronounced Pitts reformed and that denying him the right to sign with a team would scuttle his rehabilitation.142

Ultimately, Pitts enjoyed a moderately successful career as a professional athlete. He signed with Albany for the remainder of the 1935 baseball season before inking a contract with the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League in 1936.

The next year, he began his own barnstorming basketball team, the “Alabama Pitts All-

140 Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 416-7; Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing, 224.

141 Joseph Overfield, "Product of Sing Sing Won Public’s Support,” Baseball Research Journal 14 (1985): 19-22; Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing, 225.

142 Blumenthal, Miracle at Sing Sing, 226; Seymour, Baseball: A People's Game, 417-8.

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Stars," before finally retiring from paid athletics.143 For the purposes of this work, however, his actual athletic success was not what mattered, as it was his brush with the national limelight that reflected the importance of prison sports. As a member of the

Black Sheep, Pitts, a white Southerner, played alongside Black teammates a decade before Major League integration. Furthermore, his success on the field, which the New

York Times regularly covered in its sports pages, helped raise the profile of prison sports, and progressive penology more generally, and the publicity of his quest to professionalize made prison baseball a matter of public concern.

The debate over whether Pitts should play professional baseball was, at its heart, about the notions of rehabilitation and human changeability. It was also about the sanctity of professional baseball, a game that America's cultural gatekeepers invested with so much meaning that they fabricated an origin story for the game itself and, beginning in 1936, instructed Hall of Fame voters to seriously consider "integrity, sportsmanship, [and] character."144 It is not a stretch, then, to see how prison administrators might have seen baseball, and sports more generally, as something to better inmates on a moral level. As America's civil religion, sport was a ubiquitous element of modern penology, and a way of replacing the strict policies of isolation borne of actual religious doctrine. The yard, then, was not just an expression of the

Progressive Era's sporting ethos, or an apolitical passing fad, or the marketing tool of self-serving careerists. It was some combination of all of those elements and perhaps more, having emerged out of a variety of colliding needs and impulses. That it resulted

143 Utley and Davlin, "Alabama Pitts."

144 BBWAA Election Rules, National Baseball Hall of Fame (website), accessed March 12, 2018, https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/rules/bbwaa-rules-for-election.

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in a space for convict socializing, conflict, and collusion was, for administrators and the public, a regrettable problem and, for the inmates themselves, an amazing opportunity.

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Table 4-1. Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number Pseudonym Institution Inmate Number Tom B. Auburn 47966 Wayne F. Auburn 37705 Scott L. Auburn 39963 Ben S. Auburn 40176 Peter G. Auburn 42930 Robert H. Auburn 43935 Eugene S. Auburn 48083 Jonathan W. Auburn 38125 Luis A. Leavenworth 22519 Louis M. Leavenworth 25264 Robert R. Leavenworth 25664 Dean P. Leavenworth 26520 Timothy E. Leavenworth 57230 Wayne K. Alcatraz 386 Terrance G. Alcatraz 411 Chris C. Alcatraz 600 James B. Angola 14099 Charles P. Angola 20398 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963.

Table 4-2. Yard Infractions, Percentage of Population and Race Institution White Black Other Leavenworth 4.3 9.0 6.0 Auburn 5.9 11.2 n/a Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

Table 4-3. Yard Infractions, Percentage of Population and Age Cohort Institution Under 20 20-29 30-39 40 and Over Leavenworth 14.5 6.4 4.8 1.7 Auburn 12.3 7.9 5.6 2.4 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

Table 4-4. Yard Infractions, Percentage of Population and Sentence Length Institution Under 2 2-4.5 5-9.5 10 and Over Leavenworth 3.3 6.9 9.3 13.2 Auburn 2.7 3.0 5.4 13.6 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

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Table 4-5. Leavenworth and Auburn Infractions and Yard Infractions Institution Sample All Infractions Yard Infractions Leavenworth, 1919-1928 1358 1766 79 Leavenworth, 1929-1940 686 517 73 Auburn, 1919-1928 1231 978 44 Auburn, 1929-1940 1544 2280 132 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

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CHAPTER 5 THE SIGH OF THE OPPRESSED CREATURE: INMATE REBELLION, 1929-1940

There was nothing much remarkable about Leavenworth guards finding a significant amount of “junk” in Michael L.'s cell on New Year’s Eve, 1919. Amidst his bricabrac, the Muscataine, Iowa native held “several packages of syrup candy made in the prison kitchen…$4.00 in money, several boxes of cigars, several dozen bags and cans of smoking tobacco, a quantity of cigarette papers, several dollars worth of chewing gum, [and] several packages of cigarettes and candy.” Guards noted that

Michael obtained none of this merchandise through "regular means," and the inmate readily admitted that he had "been doing an extensive traffic among prisoners.”1

Of the many goods that guards unearthed from Michael’s cell, however, they only expressed concern over a collection of books, "principally radical literature and approximately 2000 lbs., of IWW and socialistic literature.”2 Part of their worry may have stemmed from a fear that, at the outset of the country’s first Red Scare, the Marxist tracts leaking into prisons might inspire convict activism. Michael was, after all, the publisher of the Muscataine Socialist, a radical newspaper that agitated for leftist candidates for public office and played a significant role in the 1917 election of a socialist city council in nearby Davenport. Over his adulthood, in fact, Michael had been so aggressive in his radical outreach, including his opposition to both the First World

War and alcohol prohibition, that authorities moved his trial for selling liquor in "dry"

1 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 12650.

2 Ibid.

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territories without a license from Muscataine to Davenport, as two decades of agitation in his hometown made Michael something of a pariah there.3

Michael’s commitment to left-wing causes framed him as a member of a small, but significant, socialist contingent in American politics.4 While he likely met few fellow inmates with his specific convictions, a small number of political radicals did make their way into federal prisons.5 Convict records did not suggest that interwar prisoners actively engaged in the sort of radical communist reading groups that historian Peter

Zinoman found present in 1930s French Indochina, but both institutional records and newspaper articles throughout the Great Depression frequently recounted convicts engaging in behaviors that reflected elements of unionism, socialism, and other forms of political agitation.6 This is not to say that inmates knowingly acted as political agents, but only that fragments of radical ideology bounced about the nation’s various prisons, as convict communities used elements of those free world experiences and knowledges

3 William H. Cumberland, "The Davenport Socialists of 1920," The Annals of Iowa 47 (1984): 457-9.

4 Juan R. provides an interesting complement to Michael L. An imprisoned Latino seaman who began his own distribution of political literature at Leavenworth in October 1919, by April 1920, Juan received solitary punishment for "abusing" his writing privileges. His inmate case file reports that he had been penning "radical letters advocating the over throw of the Government by force, and letters supposed to be for publication," following an aborted attempt at strike organizing in 1918. NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895- 1957, 13111.

5 Like Juan R., Scott C. was the sort of radical who occasionally made his way through the federal prison system and tried to stir up rebellion. A seaman by trade who was serving a sentence of five years for “Assault on High Seas” and, according to his file, had sever venereal disease, was a remarkable example. Oahu Prison administrators transferred Scott to Alcatraz because, “while incarcerated in City & County Jail he was a trouble maker & went upon a hunger strike, claiming that food was not good and that he was required to attend religious serives.” Oahu administrators also noted that Scott took “great pride in setting forth that he had been in many a Picket Line and in many a street brawl during shipping strikes.” NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963, 339.

6 A number of historical monographs from recent decades have located explicitly political reading groups and social organizations in particular prisons both within and without the United States throughout the twentieth century. Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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to craft their own political practice in the form of ongoing prison uprisings. While he may not have successfully recruited any of his fellow inmates to the IWW, Michael likely introduced some Leavenworth residents to radical leftism and may have encouraged other prisoners to share socialist tenets in other penal environs.

Chapter 5 discusses the ways in which inmates conceived of their political relationships to one another and to the prison, and how they engaged in collective resistance, both openly and surreptitiously. The permeability of the interwar prison's walls fostered convict rebellion throughout the period, both as major displays of violence and everyday acts of resistance. Chapter 5 considers how free world notions and political strategies leeched into prison communities and guided the ways in which inmates affected change. None of this is to say that every interwar inmate held radical sympathies, or that rebels always consciously allied in a shared political identity, or even that inmates carried their collectivist sentiments into the free world with them upon their re-entry into society. Indeed, inmates' abilities to work in common cause may have been evidence of an absence of strict ideology, including a willingness to temporarily abandon longstanding racial and ethnic animus for the sake of affecting positive change in their own lives.

Interwar newspapers and institutional records suggest that inmates collaborated across racial and ethnic lines with some regularity. While not free of prejudices or chauvinistic assumptions, convicts seemed more concerned with bettering their material conditions within the cramped, uncomfortable confines of the Depression-era prison than in wholly eschewing groups and peoples they disliked or distrusted. The coordinated rebellions of the interwar period and general changes in convict behavior

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throughout that time, then, did not signify that radical elements had fundamentally transformed prison populations. Rather, it showed that the national convict community, in the aggregate, had opened itself up to engaging in brief acts of radical behavior.

Inmates, after all, shared a variety of overlapping beliefs and expectations about their relationship to the prison administration and to the world at large. To that end, while convicts never produced a universal political ethos, they did share some ideology that helped unify them in their common aspirations.

Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of the Depression Era's extraordinary wave of rebellions, drawn from a variety of newspapers and first-hand accounts of the heaviest sustained series of prison uprisings in American history. It pays particular attention to the earliest outbreaks at Auburn, Leavenworth, New York's Clinton Prison, and the

Colorado State Prison at Canon City, a series of explosive, violent outbursts that set the model for the next dozen years of convict uprisings. After surveying some of the larger rebellions throughout the 1930s, it then considers inmates’ professed and perceived motivations and examines the ways in which convicts and prison administrators disagreed on even the most basic meanings of resistance. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses a failed strike effort at Leavenworth near the end of the interwar period, and it considers what the composition of the strike’s organizing committee, its stated ideology, and its fallout uncover about the nature of Depression-era prison rebellions more broadly.

The Age of Revolutions, 1929-1940

While American penitentiaries had to contend with intermittent inmate rebellions throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it was not until the tail end of the 1920s that a wave of violent outbreaks plunged penologists throughout the country into political crisis. Beginning with a succession of national newsmaking agitations in

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1929, wardens, guards, and politicians suddenly found themselves struggling to keep peace within growing prison populations. The fact that the first of these major rebellions erupted at New York’s Clinton Prison, an institution that penologists jokingly referred to as “Siberia,” given the town of Dannemora's relative remoteness, may have augured the troubles to come. The Clinton administration was on edge by 1928, when the warden openly discussed how his staff would address prisoner rioting upon its inevitable eruption.7 Such best-laid plans meant little, though, when 1300 inmates, who guards first thought to be simply lolling about the recreation yard, broke out into open mutiny on

July 22. The inmates set fire to buildings, attempted to escape, and beat guards with crude weapons, shattering the notion that “Siberia” was an unshakeable penal fortress.

The conflict left three rioters dead and twenty more wounded. While it may have felt like an aberration at the time, the conflict at Dannemora simply hinted at things to come.8 On July 28, less than a week after the Clinton outbreak, inmates at Auburn

Prison, located just 244 miles away from Dennemora, engulfed that institution in flames as well. Warden Jennings described the events in detail:

At 1:15 o’clock yesterday afternoon, a trusty approached Merle Osborne, the guard on duty at the gate leading from the yard to the administration building, and asked to be admitted. Osborne unlocked the door and the trusty jumped him immediately, hurling acid in his face. At the same time the trusty drew a revolver and fired at Osborne, but missed his aim and shot one of the guard’s fingers…The convicts then rushed the prison arsenal, unlocking it with a key taken from Osborne. There they obtained

7 Joseph Spillane, Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 38.

8 "Series of Prison Riots and Escapes in Last Five Years," Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1935, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (181622041); "Five Prison Revolts Make Nation Wonder," Washington Post, December 15, 1929, 27. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149902121); "Convicts Riot, Put Torch to Auburn Prison," New York Times, July 29, 1929, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (104959725); Nathaniel Cantor, Crime and Society; an Introduction to Criminology (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1939), 297; Fred G. Zerbst, "Current Trends in Prison Management," Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association (1935): 61.

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the sub-machine guns and about twenty-three rifles and pistols and several rounds of ammunition… After cleaning out the arsenal the prisoners dashed for the main gate. The guard on duty there, seeing them coming toward him, locked the gate and threw the key over the wall into the street.9

The Auburn rebellion was an institutional catastrophe, as four prisoners escaped while hundreds of others collectively razed six buildings. Even though state troopers successfully quelled the rioters within five hours, killing two and wounding four, the inmates’ successful capturing of the prison arsenal troubled administrators both in New

York and around the country. In the preceding months, Auburn’s residents had shown themselves to be intelligent, knowledgeable, and handy enough to rock the prison with little warning, suggesting inmates had not only premeditated the July attack, but they had given it real forethought and planning. Speaking to the New York Times, Jennings confirmed that the trusty who instigated the uprising had acquired a revolver from outside the prison. He also said inmates had found a way to extract sulphuric acid from fire extinguishers, boiling it down to make Nitroglycerine, which they then used to level buildings.10

Just three days after the Auburn administration wrestled institutional control back from their wards, inmates at Leavenworth broke into open revolt. Nine hundred convicts lashed out over insufficient food and abuse from the guards. Over the rebellion's five

9 "Governor Lays Prison Riots to Rigor of Baumes Laws; Acts to Stop Outbreaks," New York Times, July 30, 1929, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (104950427).

10 Ibid. Whether the trusty received his pistol from an accomplice who threw it over the wall or smuggled it into the prison remains a mystery, but prison administrators were certain it came in through the prison's contraband network and did not belong to an employee. The acquisition of sulphuric acid behind bars, on the other hand, was almost certainly an "inside job." One gets a passing glance at the process of acid acquisition in the record of William B., a 37 year-old serving ten years on a burglary conviction. On April 8, 1929, Auburn officials found William “taking sulphuric acid from a fire extinguisher in the Yardmasters Shop and having a contraband cell key in his possession. The acid was to be boiled down into Nitro Glycerine.” NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 44832.

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hours, guards killed one prisoner and injured three others in what administrators identified as a direct response to the blowups at Auburn and Clinton.11 Following the

Leavenworth disruption, an unsteady peace spread over the country's penal landscape for two months until, on October 4, the Colorado State Prison at Canon City saw one of the largest prison riots in the country’s history. Over the course of an all-day siege, prisoners killed seven guards and brought down five buildings in flames. Guards responded by killing five inmates.12

As at Auburn, the Canon City rebellion was, at least in part, an instrumental response to legitimate grievances. National news agencies reported on the influence of the Ku Klux Klan within both the prisoner and guard populations, as former Warden

Thomas Tynan, who the state had squeezed out of his position in the previous months, told the press that Klan members had given preferential treatment to certain prisoners and failed to discipline fellow order members.13 If Tynan's claims were true, the prison riot was an understandable and rational response on the part of inmates, many of whom surely felt mistreated by racist, nativist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic Klan-affiliated prison employees.14 The fact that a coalition of pro- and anti-Klan forces cooperated to

11 "3,700 Convicts Riot At Leavenworth; One Dead, Many Hurt," New York Times, August 2, 1929, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (104741591).

12 "Klan Politics Held Prison Riot Cause," Washington Post, November 29, 1929, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149953575).

13 Ibid; "40 Colorado Prison Inmates To Be Free for Quelling Riot," Atlanta Constitution, December 24, 1929, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (500666248).

14 By 1929, Klan membership was in freefall. Nancy MacLean noted that membership in Georgia plummeted from 156,000 in 1925 to just 1,400 in 1930, a fact not representative of the disappearance of racism and nativism, but of the shunting of the Klan specifically to the nation’s political margins. By 1936, MacLean notes, the Klan sold the Imperial Palace and, by 1944, the order dissolved completely. Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 177-8.

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oust Tynan from his office in 1927 for systematic corruption and cruelty also suggested that material conditions, irrespective of Klan influences, may have promoted rebellion.15

Auburn inmates broke out in open defiance of the administration once more before the end of the year, despite the first outbreak’s failure to affect significant change.16 On December 11, they entered the mess hall at noon. The Washington Post reported that one prisoner took a look at the menu and complained “Here is that d—n

Spanish rice again,” before seizing a platter of rice and throwing it at an attendant. This set off the commotion, as hundreds of convicts took dishes of food and cutlery and hurled them at guards before stampeding into the prison yard.17 As the Chicago Daily

Tribune poetically waxed, once outside, “they milled around, cursing each other, cursing their keepers, cursing everybody, and like Indiana at the dog dance, working themselves up into a pitch of emotional insanity.”18 Either by design or simply due to the spirit of the moment carrying them away, the convicts also took the warden and several guards hostage. In response, local law enforcement called in the state militia, who killed

15 Spillane, Coxsackie, 32-3.

16 Chapter 5 views the politics of rioting through the lens of socio-historical works on rioting as subaltern resistance. E.P. Thompson's "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" provided early historical research into instrumental rioting, framing peasants and farmers as spurred by an implied “moral economy” based in an informal, unspoken social contract between the rich and poor. In 1993, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James Scott turned his focus to a non-Western peasantry, grounding informal rights in what he called a “subsistence ethic." Samuel Popkin rebutted Scott in The Rational Peasant, arguing that self-interest, not emotion, fueled peasant rebellions. Since the 1980s, discussions of subaltern resistance have turned more toward anti-colonial rebellions in the Global South. Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979; James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976; E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present 50 (1971): 76-136.

17 "Five Prison Revolts Make Notion Wonder," Washington Post, December 15, 1929, 27. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149902121).

18 "Series of Prison Riots and Escapes in Last Five Years," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 18, 1935, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (181622041).

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eight convicts and the prison’s principal keeper in the ensuing siege. The rebellion flamed out in relatively short order.19

Viral Rebellions

The 1929 quintet of major prison rebellions set off a maelstrom of inmate defiance, as prisons in every region of the country erupted in conflict. Despite some institutional variations, rebellions retained a remarkable level of consistency in form and function. The recreation yard remained a critical space of inmate defiance throughout the decade. In 1930, guards at the New Jersey State Prison found 1500 armed prisoners after a surprise frisking on the recreation yard, the convicts having prepared to launch their rebellion during a baseball game. The administration identified twelve leaders who had stashed a twenty-five-foot rope, improvised blackjacks, and razor blades in a sewer inlet in the yard.20 In 1934, seventy-five inmates at Philadelphia’s

Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the country’s oldest and largest institutions, whipped

1300 of their fellow inmates into a riotous din. Upon the release of the entire prison population into the recreation yard for their daily exercise, inmates took the opportunity to set fire to the kitchen and smash machinery in the shops with whatever sticks, pipes, and clubs they could acquire.21 Inmates at Massachusetts’s Concord Reformatory also rebelled during their recreation period in February 1938. They lined up in an orderly

19 "Five Prison Revolts Make Notion Wonder," Washington Post, December 15, 1929, 27. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149902121).

20 “Prisoners Found Armed for Mutiny,” New York Times, September 23, 1930, 13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (98813804).

21 "Pennsylvania Convicts Fire Prison, Quelled," Washington Post, November 22, 1933, 1, 10. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (150312848).

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single file and marched toward the gate that divided the yard from the free world, shouting a variety of political slogans and protesting living conditions.22

New England prisons tended to be smaller, with very few holding a thousand or more inmates, and the Concord event played out in a similar fashion in New Hampshire,

Maine, and Rhode Island, with inmates in each institution engaging in non-violent protests. In general, rebellions in smaller institutions tended to be less violent than rebellions in major penitentiaries, perhaps because larger populations were more unwieldy, more difficult for inmate politicians to organize, and therefore more combustible. In the Midwest, riots occurred more frequently than elsewhere and tended to be more violent, a fact that surely due, at least in part, to the concentration of enormous prisons in the region. On April 28, 1930, a week after a fire at Ohio

Penitentiary took the lives of 320 inmates at one of the largest and most critically overpacked institutions in the country, prison administrators called in the National

Guard, fearing that the furious surviving residents, who were openly organizing and speaking openly of violent insurrection, might bring down the institution at any moment.23 Eight months after the Ohio fire, at the similarly enormous Missouri

Penitentiary, 473 convicts took over a cellblock and captured three guards.24 In neighboring Illinois, at Stateville Prison, 1100 men took their recreation time as an opportunity to destroy the prison shops, the dining hall, and the kitchen, leading guards

22 "600 Convicts Riot in Concord Prison," New York Times, February, 12, 1938, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (102655013).

23 "Riot Looms Again at Ohio Prison," Atlanta Constitution, April 28, 1930, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (500762611).

24 "Riot Breaks Among 473 Bad Men Housed in Missouri Penitentiary," Washington Post, January 25, 1931, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (150155642).

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to open fire on rebels with shotguns, rifles, and tear gas, killing two men and injuring others. A week after that, while at breakfast, 680 Stateville convicts rioted again, resulting in another inmate death.25

Even in the South, a region with relatively few penitentiaries and little interest in providing inmates with the recreational spaces that often facilitated large-scale rioting, multiple prison populations engaged in open rebellion. The early 1930s saw small-scale outbreaks at Maryland Penitentiary and at a roadside prison camp in Brooksville,

Florida, the latter requiring intervention from the Tampa branch of the National Guard.26

Prison violence intensified by the mid-1930s, as the South came to look more like the rest of the country in its use of massive penitentiaries. In August 1936, guards at

Georgia’s Baldwin State Prison at Milledgeville locked into an extended conflict with inmates, leaving one convict dead and 15 others wounded. Administrators, perhaps looking to deflect responsibility for the institution's breakdown, claimed that a former

Folsom State Prison inmate from California had led the rioters in freeing fellow prisoners from their shackles and in setting fire to their mattresses.27 The next year, guards killed one inmate while two other prisoners suffered stab wounds during an uprising at

Alabama’s Kilby Prison.28

25 "Rioting Convicts Burn New Illinois Prison," Atlanta Constitution, March 19, 1931, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (501113661).

26 While Maryland isn’t an iconic Southern state, it is considered a Southern state by the Bureau of the Census. "Two Shot in Riot at Maryland Pen," Atlanta Constitution, September 17, 1930, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (500851196); "Florida Prisoners Threaten Revolt," Atlanta Constitution, Juy 6, 1933, 17. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (501786526).

27 "Convict Slain, 15 Others Shot in Prison Riot," Washington Post, August 26, 1936, 10. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (150769604).

28 "Convict Dies, Two Hurt in Prison Riot," Washington Post, July 26, 1937, 22. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (150840908).

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The Optics of Resistance

As early as 1929, correctional agencies hurriedly tried to address the burgeoning rash of rebellions by creating “riot-proof” institutions. In addition to New York's Attica

Penitentiary, which opened in 1932, the earliest important experiments in riot-proof prisons were the federal penitentiaries at Graterford, Pennsylvania and Alcatraz Island,

California. Administrators believed they could arrange institutions in such a way as to choke off the possibility of collective resistance, a notion that inmates proved misguided by 1934. That year, approximately 200 Graterford inmates caused an estimated

$40,000 in damages by using baseball bats, metal pipes, knives, and cleavers to destroy three cellblocks, a barn, two garages, an industrial workshop, and the prison’s laundry and kitchen. Having prided themselves on their enlightened kindness and moderation, Graterford’s administrators were aghast at the inmates’ behaviors. 29

It was not until 1946 that Alcatraz experienced a wide-scale violent rebellion of the Graterford sort, but security concerns flummoxed overseers of the country’s most famously oppressive institution almost from the outset. In July 1936, the institution's third summer functioning as a federal prison, approximately half of the 200 inmate population engaged in a coordinated, non-violent strike for better treatment and greater privileges.30 In 1940, they tried again, with 140 inmates remaining in their cells during free time, voluntarily subsisting on only bread and coffee. Warden James Johnston noted that the inmates continued their work as usual, and they made no effort to engage

29 "200 Convicts Riot at Graterford," New York Times, August 26, 1934, 28. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (101233219).

30 "Diet of Bread and Water Wilts 'Riot' at Alcatraz Prison," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 23, 1936, 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (181696711).

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in concerted agitation, refraining from “booing or shouting and otherwise.” Eschewing concerns about food, space, or recreation, Alcatraz inmates demanded only that the prison transfer them elsewhere.31

In an exchange with James V. Bennett, the federal Director of Prisons, Warden

Johnston expressed palpable irritation with the rebellion, seeing the inmates’ subtle non-violence as a concerted attempt to damage the institution’s reputation and proper functioning. Johnston explained with some exasperation that, “so far as I can judge at this moment, the men seem to be making their annual bid for attention and perhaps came to the conclusion that striking was not the way to do it but going without food, a la

Mahatma Gandhi, would be a better sort of protest.” The San Francisco Examiner had heard about the strike, Johnson noted, and “played the story over the front page," giving it "as prominent a space as they did President Roosevelt and the Democratic

Convention and more attention than they did to Hitler, Mussolini and the World War.”32

While the Alcatraz strikes were, in their non-violence, unlike those at Leavenworth,

Auburn, and elsewhere, the notion of a semi-united, motivated prison population chilled administrators throughout the country.

While some institutions suppressed rioting better than others, no prison was truly

“riot-proof” during the interwar period and a majority of the outbreaks of the time saw

31 J.A. Johnston to James V. Bennett, July 19, 1940, “Memorandum for the Attorney General, Re: Strike at Alcatraz, July 19, 1940,” United States Bureau of Prisons, Intra-Bureau Correspondence, United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz California. 129.5 Records of the U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, CA, 1938-63, Textual Records.

32 J.A. Johnston to James V. Bennett, July 22, 1940, “Memorandum for the Attorney General, Re: Strike at Alcatraz, July 22, 1940,” United States Bureau of Prisons, Intra-Bureau Correspondence, United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz California. 129.5 Records of the U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, CA, 1938-63, Textual Records.

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some violence. For that reason, wardens and guards were quick to employ retaliatory force. Statevillle, Ohio Penitentiary, and Utah State Prison were among the larger institutions where officials used tear gas and machine guns to put down rebels, and

Alabama’s Speigner Reformatory went so far as to gun down 24 convicts during a 1932 conflict.33 The prisons that did not kill or wound rebel leaders threatened them with solitary confinement, despite how difficult prisons found locating separate spaces for the many leaders of these well-organized rebellions. In Michigan, where guards identified

53 men as “suspected instigators,” or in Missouri, where administrators held “more than a score of ringleaders,” incapacitating the coordinators in solitary confinement meant setting aside a large amount of precious space.34 Given the premium on cell space within interwar penitentiaries, that punishment only further exacerbated pre-existing managerial concerns.

The new looming threat of rebellion also brought with it a managerial crisis regarding potential consequences for rebels, as there existed few suitable threats or punishments for such massive groups. Because the vast majority of prison rule breaking was minor in the eyes of guards and administrators, most penitentiaries developed an array of lesser punishments from which administrators might select. Some regions of the country ventured from the norm, with the South relying more heavily on corporal

33 "Riot Looms Again at Ohio Prison," Atlanta Constitution, April 28, 1930, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (500762611); "Convict Wounded in Utah Prison Riot," Washington Post, November 27, 1932, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (150329973); "Punish Leaders of Prison Riot, 53 in Solitary," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 22, 1940, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (176376550); "Shot in Prison Riot," Chicago Defender, October 22, 1932, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (492352650).

34 "Hunger Ends Prison Riot," New York Times, August 3, 1936, 34. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (101803939); "Convicts Strike in Second Prison," New York Times, August 29, 1934, 36. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (101026083).

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punishment, though punishments generally remained consistent throughout the country.

The National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement’s 1931 Report on

Penal Institutions, Probation, and Parole studied punishment at 68 men’s prisons and found five predominant modes of rebuke: loss of privileges, loss of “good time” (credit toward early release), solitary confinement of two weeks or fewer, short-term solitary confinement of a few hours, or a restricted diet of bread and water.35 Administrators might wield any of these punishments effectively on an individual level, but they were far less potent in dealing with rioters numbering in the hundreds or thousands.

Reading Rebellion

One major administrative impediment to effectively responding to interwar prison rebellions was self-inflicted, as governmental accounts of rioting’s root causes persistently avoided engaging with convicts’ stated rationales for rioting. Contemporary press coverage of prison uprisings often suggested that inmate populations clearly stated their instrumental goals: better amenities, more humane treatment, and greater legal protections. Journalists of the time identified anger over food as a particular cause for rioting. The Associated Press reported, for instance, that 1600 prisoners at

Michigan’s Jackson State Prison demonstrated in the dining hall, “banging dishes and shouting complaints about their food,” revolting over another dinner of chili, bread, and tea.36 Wire services also reported that, in Kansas, 348 prisoners called for “better

35 These five punishments were not only the most common, but were overwhelmingly so, as 88% of prisons regularly practiced short-term isolation and 82% used a loss of privileges. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, ed. George Wickersham, v. 9, Report on Penal Institutions, Probation and Parole (Washington: GPO, 1931), 33.

36 "Michigan Prison Food Riot Quelled," Washington Post, December 20, 1935, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (150593792).

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cooked food” whereas, in New York, Clinton inmates demanded eggs, milk, butter, and meat.37 Journalists often quoted inmates and enumerated their demands, making clear that, throughout the country, the dire nature of prison fare spurred large numbers of inmates to action. This did not mean that administrators or penologists took those views seriously, however. Sheriff William Emig simply chided 75 striking Santa Clara County

Jail inmates who wanted more bread, telling the local press “they should be ashamed of themselves…most of them are getting better meat now than they would if they were free.”38

The Right to Leave Prison

Beyond food, inmates often described their insurrections as attempts to reverse or replace sentencing and parole policies they considered unjust. In the words of hunger strikers at Oregon State Prison in Salem, prisoners wanted “more liberties and better living conditions…[and] judges to reduce our penalties,” directly attributing their actions to a state court decision which served to deny automatic freedom to those prisoners who had served their minimum terms.39 At Stateville Prison, one United Press writer reported, “eighteen hundred prisoners screamed a weird litany to the incendiary flames which ruined Illinois’s model prison,” setting fire to the institution in opposition to overly-

37 "600 Convicts Riot in Concord Prison," New York Times, February 12, 1938, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (102655013); "Five Prison Revolts Make Nation Wonder," Washington Post, December 15, 1929, 27. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149902121); "40 Leaders in Prison Mine Riot Face Solitary Cells in Kansas," Washington Post, June 20, 1935, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (150610350).

38 “S.J. Jail Inmates Strike for More Toast at Breakfast,” Santa Cruz (CA) Evening News, January 22, 1934. Accessed May 2, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/image/50572540.

39 "Hunger Ends Prison Riot," New York Times, August 3, 1936, 34. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (101803939).

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strict parole guidelines and the dismissal of a prisoner-signed petition requesting “milder treatment.”40

It is unlikely the massive rebellions resulted from uniquely punitive Depression- era policies, given the nature of sentencing and parole throughout the period. While full sentencing data for the interwar era is incomplete, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s publication Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories provided partial data on both definite and indeterminate sentences between 1923 and 1935. The two most significant changes in definite sentencing throughout period were the proportional rise in short-term sentences, with sentences of two years or less growing from 36.2% of all to 42.2%, and the proportional halving of life sentences, from 5.5% to just 2.8%.41

For indeterminate sentencing, trends ran in the opposite direction, as rates of mandatory minimum sentences of fewer than two years declined from 6.9% to 3.9% while life sentence maximums nearly tripled, going from 2.0% to 6.2%.42 If indeterminate and definite sentences were equally common, these changes would generally even out and suggest no significant changes in punishments. Between 1923 and 1935, however, the ratio of indeterminate-to-definite sentences for men swung from 1.22 to 0.76, meaning that the country as a whole decisively moved away from increasingly punitive indeterminate sentences and toward less-punitive definite sentences.43 Similarly, it does

40 "Rioting Convicts Burn New Illinois Prison," Atlanta Constitution, March 19, 1931, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (501113661).

41 Bureau of the Census, Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1926 (Washington: GPO, 1929), 22; Bureau of the Census, Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1935 (Washington: GPO, 1937), 22.

42 Bureau of the Census, Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1926, 22.

43 Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories, 1935, 14, 17.

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not seem that an absence of opportunities for parole would have stoked these behaviors. Sixty percent of the country's prison and reformatory inmates left their institution on some sort of conditional release in 1923, a number that declined during the 1920s to just 51% by 1930 but rose back up during the most active period of inmate striking, reaching 61% in 1936, a number that mostly held steady throughout the

1940s.44 On a national level, though prisoners rebelled against unjust treatment, they did so as sentencing and parole policies became less severe than in the 1920s.

Unlike the country in toto, New York was a state in which sentencing became decidedly harsher throughout the 1920s, so the origins of prison uprisings in the Empire

State were perhaps more understandable. Governor Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech less than a month after the second Auburn riot in 1929, and he acknowledged inmates' concerns about the effects of the Baumes Laws and sentencing policies more generally.

He explained that he understood why prisoners who committed minor crimes and received the same sentences as murderers felt embittered against society.45 In 1932, the sociologist Clayton Ettinger’s The Problem of Crime echoed many of Roosevelt's sentiments. Ettinger drew a connection between ongoing waves of prisoner rebellion in

New York, longer sentences, a reduction in the number of convicts who received parole, and an extension in the average amount of time inmates had to serve prior to gaining parole eligibility. Such policies, “taken at the demand of a nervous public,” he argued, meant "keeping prisons crowded and driving to despair those who have been living in

44 Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850-1984 (Rockville: Westate, 1986), 49.

45 "Drastic Parole System Blamed in Prison Riots," Christian Science Monitor, January 17, 1930, ProQuest; "Governor Lays Prison Riots to Rigor of Baumes Laws; Acts to Stop Outbreaks," New York Times, July 30, 1929, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (104950427).

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the hope of an earlier release.”46 Raymond Moley, a Professor of Public Law at

Columbia University and a former member of the New York Crime Commission, similarly believed that the Baumes Laws, which he claimed the state had enacted during

“a hysterical wave of fear,” prompted a greater sense of despair in men who already entered prison with little hope. At some level, Roosevelt, Ettinger, and Moley’s comments suggested that they took the prisoners’ explanations for their own rebellious behaviors at face value. New York state investigators argued that “excessive sentences are perhaps the greatest cause of discontent…[and,] with the exception of recreation,

[living conditions] have not greatly improved,” a belief clear enough to suggest a path forward for corrections professionals.47

Despite a small group of academics and politicians showing an openness to engage inmates on their own terms, though, a broad conservative ethos at the highest levels of government scuttled attempts to engage with those solutions set forth by the prisoners themselves. In 1931, Sanford Bates, the head of the Federal Bureau of

Prisons, spoke to the national press about his “scientific yet commonsense…progressive yet protective, program of penal reform” to combat the recent prison rebellions. His plan included the establishment of sanatoriums for drug addicts, the construction of prison hospitals for the criminally insane, and the creation of model prisons for short-term inmates. Because Bates saw crime as a disease, he viewed the solutions to the riots as external to the issues that the “ill” men who made up

46 Clayton Ettinger, The Problem of Crime (New York: R. Long & R.R. Smith, 1932), 456-7.

47 "Criminologists Vary in Ascribing Cause of Prison Revolts," Washington Post, August 4, 1929, 13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149943169).

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the nation’s penitentiaries cited.48 Though sympathetic to some of the inmates' concerns, Bates's view of rioters as acting out due to maladjustment or pathology mostly delegitimized their claims in his mind, a view politicians, penologists, and wardens throughout the country tended to share.49

A National Debate

The schism in the ways politicians, academics, inmates, and the press viewed these disturbances formed very early in the discussion. On August 4, 1929, the

Washington Post ran a major feature entitled “Criminologists Vary in Ascribing Cause of

Prison Revolts,” setting forth the various notions that dominated academic discussions of the riots over the following decade. The piece highlighted five potential causes for the insurgencies: Failure to classify convicts according to record and character, health and mentality; prison idleness; overcrowding and bad sanitation; inferior, underpaid personnel, susceptible to bribery and politically appointed, and failure of the parole system owing to lack of officers.50 Only two of those explanations – bad sanitation and failure of the parole system – addressed inmates’ many stated concerns.

48 Charles Stevenson, "Ending Federal Prison Scandal: The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin," Current History and Forum 34, no. 4 (1931): 555-6.

49 A significant minority within the corrections field even blamed overly kind treatment of inmates for the uprisings, an understandable position given the significant pushback from both the general public and many prison guards and administrators at the time against the perceived “mollycoddling” of inmates. In the wake of Auburn’s second revolt in 1929, Sergeant George Sullivan laid blame at the feet of the Mutual Welfare League. “[Officer] Durnford was killed by Mutual Welfare League men in front of the league room in the basement of the league room in the basement of the administration building,” Sullivan explained. “It was twenty league men who tied the warden up in that room. The whole thing started right in front of that league room, and the league is out.” "Five Prison Revolts Make Nation Wonder," Washington Post, December 15, 1929, 27. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149902121).

50 “Criminologists Vary in Ascribing Cause of Prison Revolts,” Washington Post, August 4, 1929, 13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149943169).

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In 1930, the National Committee on Prisons and Labor convened an Emergency

Committee at the behest of prison officials from 20 states to explore potential systematic reforms to prevent the continuation of prison riots. Headed by Ogden Hammond, a former Ambassador to Spain and past President of the New Jersey State Board of

Institutions and Agencies, the body met at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia to discuss penal policy. Following the meeting, Hammond explained to the press that “the present tragic conditions in our prisons are due to four major reasons; overcrowding, idleness and wrong employment, indiscriminate mingling of different types of prisoners, [and] obsolete buildings.” Again, this explanation did not address the stated views of the rioting inmates. Rather, the committee was content to ascribe rebellious behavior up to what Hammond deemed “criminal minds.”51

That Bates, Hammond, and others cast aside inmates’ concerns does not mean that issues such as overcrowding, idleness, and underqualified guards were irrelevant to the proper functioning of the prison. There was clearly far too little work available to keep inmates busy, and when Bates pointed out that only 5,700 of 27,000 federal inmates had steady work in 1929, a point that criminologist Hastings Hart also stressed to the New York Times in 1930, his point had obvious merit. Similarly, the generally low standard of training for guards also warranted the significant attention Hart gave it, as many prison guards were overworked, underpaid, and undertrained. He explained “we have schools for doctors, lawyers, preachers, salesmen, nurses and barbers, but only two small new schools for the training of guards and other prison officers in the whole

51 "Organize to Survey Prisons of Nation," New York Times, June 21, 1930, 19. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (98624066).

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United States.”52 Given their lack of preparation for the job, prison staff members were often cruel, corrupt, or simply incompetent, which could only serve to inspire or enable prison rebellions.

Writing anonymously in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and

Social Science, an anonymous inmate agreed with Hart:

Until staffs are composed of trained men, as in many European countries; until wardens, deputy wardens, chaplains, doctors, and guards cease to receive appointments as the result of political favoritism and farcical civil service examinations, society will continue to stagger under the increasing burden of our prisons and recidivism.53

Such critiques applied to institutions throughout the country, tapping into wardens' real anxieties about underfunding and the difficulties of employing strict custodial oversight in overcrowded prisons. Even if these were not among the stated concerns of the rioters themselves, they were valuable additions to conversations about inmate discontent.54

While convicts and administrators did not necessarily ascribe prisoners’ rebellions to the same underlying issues, the two groups may not have been completely talking past each other. The former spoke of inadequate food, unreasonable parole expectations, and unfair sentencing guidelines; the latter spoke of inadequate sanitation, underprepared guards, and mass idleness. Each group’s reading of prison rebellions was, at its’ most basic, rooted in a belief that the country had taken an overly punitive turn and had failed to properly finance state and federal prison operations. The

52 Hastings Hart et al. Report of the Committee on Treatment of Persons Awaiting Court Action and Misdemeanant Prisoners (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1922), 135.

53 A. Prisoner, "The Prisoner Speaks," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 157 (1931): 144.

54 Stevenson, "Ending Federal Prison Scandal,” 559.

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ideological schism that prevented prison administrators from understanding their wards and girding their institutions against mass uprisings, then, emerged out of each group’s solution to the problem. Inmates wished to spend less time in prison and to have greater material comforts while there. Administrators believed, as inheritors of the New

Penology tradition, that more reformative programming, more inmate labor, and more- effective treatment could reverse the trend toward prison uprisings. By not taking prison populations’ stated views seriously, or even addressing them, penologists not only failed to quell rebellions, but they may have inadvertently promoted a shared convict culture.

Specifically, politicians and administrators’ approaches facilitated an environment in which inmates had more incentive to create a shared contraculture and contraband trade that could address their common discomforts outside of the formal mechanisms of the prison.55

The Banality of Radical Rebellion

By the time the Second World War brought an end to the interwar period prison binge, administrators, guards, social scientists, and journalists around the country had acknowledged the 1930s as a time in which inmates perpetuated a discernable, radical counterculture that permeated prison walls and stretched across state lines. Sanford

Bates, in speaking to the prison riots of 1929, blamed the “knowledge which was undoubtedly borne into some of these men of the prison riots in other parts of the

55 Part of the failure to address the needs of prisoners also had to do with the previously mentioned inability to provide adequate physical space for increasing populations. While most states tried to expand the number of prisons or the size of their existing institutions, the economic crisis of the 1930s made prison building a more difficult proposition, even after President Herbert Hoover committed to major prison building programs in the state- and city-level financial stimulus packages he handed down following the Depression’s onset. Hart et al., Report of the Committee on Treatment of Persons Awaiting Court Action and Misdemeanant Prisoners, 135.

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country” as a potential root cause of the outbreaks of violence throughout the country, tacitly acknowledging the connectedness of the nation’s many uprisings.56 Like many other prison officials, Bates understood the riots as an expression of an emergent national convict culture, even if he did not see that culture as having emerged out of a complex juggling of cooperative and antagonistic impulses, tying together overlapping cultural ideals and notions from the free world.

Moving Language

Prison inmates’ importation and exportation of ideas, sentiments, and organizational tactics into and out of institutions throughout the country took a variety of forms. As Chapter 3 outlined, men on the economic margins of society cross-pollinated institutions around the country as they drifted in and out of various prisons, transporting their language, ethics, and survival strategies into geographically varied penal systems.

Men from one area of the country regularly entered prisons far from their home states, a script that played out time and again throughout the country. As a result, prison experiences became more similar across the country and inmate culture homogenized in various ways.57

In addition to the gradual drift of cultures across space, one of inmates’ most effective means of transporting ideas and information within and across prison boundaries was through an expressive vernacular, or prison argot. The unique vernacular of prison life emerged, at least partly, out of many of the subcultures that fed prison populations, as members of various marginalized cultures long practiced

56 "Prison Mutiny is Blamed on Idle Convicts; Unrest Still Seethes at Leavenworth," Chicago Daily Tribune, August 3, 1929, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (181047583).

57 See Tables 3-6 through 3-10 for more information on this subject.

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surreptitious forms of communication.58 As a result of the ways in which native cultures mixed and evolved behind bars, prison inmates developed a rich argot by the 1930s. By

1931, the linguist George Milburn found much of same language at the United State

Penitentiary at McNeil Island, located in Washington, as at California’s San Quentin

Prison. Unaffiliated studies of prisons in Washington, Kansas, and Illinois noted specific terms, such as "right guy" (someone who "does his own time") and "politician"

(someone who actively works to secure privileges from the administration) overlapping in a variety of regions of the country by 1940.59

It was plausible that prison inmates populations around the country could have independently developed words and phrases for general inmate types, of course, but the fact that those terms existed in identical form in the Southeast, Midwest, and along the Pacific coast suggested the spread of a unique language. The use of subcultural prison argot was not limited to the United States or even to the twentieth century.

Patricia O'Brien outlined the importance of "corporate argot" in nineteenth-century

French prison communities, for instance, highlighting prisoners' "need for a sense of autonomy in the depersonalizing institution, or a desire to escape detection, or at least a need for an alternate structure through which such elements as group identification,

58 In 1958, Gresham Sykes named off a few groups he could identify as contributors to prison argot, including "prostitutes, tramps, beggars, carnival workers, and jazz addicts." Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 [1958]), 84. Clemmer identified it as largely coming from "hoboes and armies." Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (New York: Rinehart, 1958 [1940]), 89.

59 George Milburn, "Convicts' Jargon," American Speech 6, no. 6 (August 1931): 437. Hans Riemer studied an unnamed Kansas prison as a participant-observer and Hayner & Ash and Clemmer studied the Washington State Prison and Illinois's Menard Prison, respectively. Hans Riemer, "Socialization In The Prison Community," Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association (1937): 151; Norman S. Hayner and Ellis Ash, "The Prison as a Community," American Sociological Review 5, no. 4 (1940): 579; Clemmer, The Prison Community, 212.

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status, and rights could be defined."60 What was unique within the interwar United

States was that this particular vernacular, and the ideas that they shared in identical forms, spread so widely and quickly.61

Inmates transmitted language, notions, and mores across state lines throughout the interwar years, but the specifics of those communications were never totally clear to administrators and onlookers in the press. In discussing the Auburn riot of the summer of 1929, the New York Times reported in hazy language that inmates had planned their uprising through the “grapevine telegraph,” a means of communication that somehow connected prison populations by way of informers both within and without the prison, though the newspaper never offered specifics.62 A Washington Post piece from the same year also described the grapevine as a “telegraph system,” one that allowed inmates to know what was happening “in every prison in the land.” The article compared the grapevine to “the inexplainable system that prevails among the untutored Africans by which they can send a message clean across the Dark Continent in an incredibly brief space of time.”63 That journalists, politicians, and administrators regularly spoke of inmates’ modes of communication as mystifying or foreign only emphasized the grapevine's effectiveness, as it remained hidden from those who fell outside of the

60 Patricia O'Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 79.

61 "Institutional lingo," as Erving Goffman described it, allows residents of total institutions to "express the events that are crucial in their particular world." Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2009 [1961]), 53.

62 "Convicts Riot, Put Torch to Auburn Prison," New York Times, July 29, 1929, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (104959725).

63 "Five Prison Revolts Make Nation Wonder," Washington Post, December 15, 1929, 27. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (149902121).

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inmate community. Frank Tannenbaum, a former inmate himself, did not offer many details, but he obliquely noted how “anyone who has been in prison can recall a thousand ways of associating with other prisoners” and that not even solitary confinement could suppress their association.64

Both Auburn and Leavenworth records provide brief glimpses into inmates’ covert forms of communication, as well as the difficulties staff had in catching prisoners in the act. Occasionally, guards intercepted notes or overheard inmate conversations.

More often, though, inmates employed cryptic hand gestures to communicate, a practice that led guards to report all manner of idiosyncratic behaviors, even if they had no clear reason to suspect prisoner wrongdoing. In 1930, for instance, Auburn guards reported James G. for “putting his finger to his nose to State Trooper” and Matthew C. for “putting his finger to his nose at the state trooper.”65 Indignant at this seemingly arbitrary write-up, for which the guard offered no justification, Matthew barked “what is the matter, can’t I look at those bums?”66 Leavenworth guards were clearer in spelling out the problems they had with such gestures, noting in 1927 that Alvin B. had been

“using a silent code. Hand extended fan like, tips of thumb touching nose…while passing down mess hall isle.”67 Alvin may have simply used the gesture to tease another inmate, as the description sounded a great deal like the common, and mostly harmless, “thumbing the nose” gesture. That the guard so easily misinterpreted the

64 Frank Tannenbaum, Wall of Shadows: A Study in American Prisons (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 16.

65 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 43536.

66 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 41976.

67 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 23024.

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situation showed just how little precision the staff exercised in policing prisoner communication. The infrequent and inconsistent records of surreptitious prisoner communication in both Auburn and Leavenworth portray administrators as having had little or no notion of how inmates were passing information, or whether the gestures they took offence to constituted significant transgressions in the first place.

Learning to Code

Surreptitious communication not only served to pass along information, but it also moved values and norms from space to space. As many similarities as interwar convicts happened to share in the free world, the "Convict Code" was ultimately the closest thing inmates had to a social contract that could resolve outstanding cultural schisms between imprisoned men. For that reason, the Code was, in one way or another, a central part of interwar prison culture and a subject of constant discussion among mid- century penal scholars. While neither totally consistent in practice from prison to prison, nor from person to person, it was powerful and ubiquitous. Social scientists, journalists, administrators, and inmates alike recognized the Code as providing the moral guidelines of prisoner society and the primary means by which inmates shared their beliefs.68

The Code was, at once, a set of rules, etiquette guide, and list of aspirations that inmates defined informally and collectively. Observers recognized it as critically

68 In Outsiders, Howard Becker set forth a series of observations about deviance that summed up why inmates might take on this common code. “From a sense of common fate, from having to face the same problems, grows a deviant subculture,” Becker explained, “a set of perspectives and understandings about what the world is like and how to deal with it, and a set of routine activities based on those perspectives.” Prisoners, like almost any other “deviant” subculture, expressed “a general repudiation of conventional moral rules, conventional institutions, and the entire conventional world.” Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 2012 [1963]), 37, 40.

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important to life in prison, though the Code was likely an incidental creation, having evolved out of any number of preexisting subcultures present within the interwar prison, mirroring the older Thief's, Hobo, and Carnie Codes, among others.69 In the penal context, Code rules outlined what constituted proper inmate conduct behind bars, providing a specific ontological framework that stressed the common hardships that all

American prisoners faced, functioning outside of a clear racial, ethnic, or class hierarchies. Mid-century sociological studies of prison culture described the Code as a set of moral notions and best practices aimed at making all inmates “con-wise,” thereby turning them into allies who might internalize the inherent value of working in common cause to address their shared deprivations.70

Donald Clemmer was the earliest academic to study the Convict Code in depth.

His observations about common practice and his rich descriptions of inmate life at

Illinois’s Menard Penitentiary led him to develop the concept of “prisonization.” He characterized the process as the acceptance, practice, and internalization, to greater or

69 John Irwin and Donald R. Cressey, “Thieves, Convicts and the Inmate Culture,” Social Problems 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1962): 142-55.

70 Mid-century sociologists struggled to land on an exact definition of the prison inmates’ relationship with the prison administration and with the free world. Gresham Sykes argued that the social system of the American penitentiary was a Gebietsverband, or that of a territorial population living under a small ruling regime, the Code serving to help the subject group undermine the dominant group’s authority. Erving Goffman viewed residents of total institutions less like political actors, instead framing the Convict Code as an emancipatory response to the dehumanizing arrangement of the penitentiary. Goffman did agree with Sykes's view, though, that “mitigating the pains of imprisonment under a custodial regime having near total power” (as Sykes and Messinger described it) necessitated temporarily buying in to a group identity that might bridge pre-existing divides. Goffman referred to this culture creation as a “fraternalization process,” by which “socially distant persons find themselves developing mutual support and common counter-mores in opposition to a system that has forced them into intimacy and into a single, equalitarian, community of fate.” Sykes, The Society of Captives, 48; Erving Goffman, "On the Characteristics of Total Institutions," in The Prison: Studies in Institutional Organization and Change, eds. Donald Cressey, Donald Ray, and Johan Galtung (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1961), 23, 54; Gresham M. Sykes and Sheldon L. Messinger, "The Inmate Social System," Theoretical Studies in Social Organization of the Prison (1960): 5-19.

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lesser degrees, of the wide variety of habits, customs, mores, folkways, and cultural traits of the prison. This idea drew on the sociologist Henry Field’s earlier findings that prison groups shared an “elemental sense of group loyalty” that they drew from common imported values.71 In 1940, Norman Hayner and Ellis Ash noted that the adoption of a prison identity was not a straightforward adoption of local customs, but the result of honest, emotional experiences that produced authentic prison identities and, in turn, a complex inmate counterculture.72 It may be the case that none of the sociological studies of the time really captured the quintessence of penal culture or the Convict

Code. Relative consistency in sociological studies of prison culture lent credence to the notion that inmates throughout the United States had similar habits, mores, and ambitions, however.73

Because the tenets of the Convict Code represented, in part, a negotiation of the various working-class attitudes and behaviors that convicts imported from the free world, the Code stood in clear-cut opposition to the values of middle-class bureaucrats.

It cast most non-prisoners as enemies and demonized the notion of cooperation with prison officials, who inmates viewed as domineering representations of a hostile society.

The result of those assumptions was a series of inmate-mandated rules that social scientists located in nearly identical forms throughout the country. Gresham Sykes and

71 Henry E. Field, "The Attitudes of Prison Inmates," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 1, no. 5 (1931): 487.

72 Norman S. Hayner and Ellis Ash, "The Prison as a Community," American Sociological Review 5, no. 4 (1940): 577-83.

73 Stanton Wheeler, “Socialization in Correctional Communities,” American Sociological Review, 26, no. 5 (October 1961): 697; Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (New York: Rinehart, 1958 [1940]), 114; Henry E. Field, "The Attitudes of Prison Inmates," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 1, no. 5 (1931): 487; Norman S. Hayner and Ellis Ash, “The Prisoner Community as a Social Group,” American Sociological Review 4, no. 3 (June 1939): 362-369.

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Sheldon Messinger, with the benefit of some hindsight, produced the most economical description of the Code in 1960, classifying its central tenets into five organizing considerations: Don’t interfere with inmate interests; never rat on a con; don’t exploit inmates; don’t weaken; and don’t be a sucker.74

Rightness

Generally, the Convict Code's rules stressed the common notion of what inmates around the country called “rightness,” an amalgam of positive characteristics that included peer loyalty, ability to withstand personal hardship, and a steadfast refusal to accept or endorse the values of the prison administration and of conventional culture more generally. To not “interfere with inmate interests,” for instance, simply meant not intervening in, or complicating, other inmates' attempts to serve the shortest sentence with the greatest number of comforts possible. This notion also tied into the prohibition of “ratting on a con” (informing guards of others' malfeasance) and “not exploiting inmates” (taking goods from other inmates, whether through theft or force). Such practices not only ebbed the effectiveness of the prison's underground economy, but they also harmed inmates’ attempts to present a unified resistance to the prison administration.75

The Code’s other parameters, which prohibited publicly complaining about one’s treatment, succumbing to demands for subservience, showing respect to the

74 Sykes and Messinger, "The Inmate Social System"; Lloyd E. Ohlin, Sociology and the Field of Corrections. Prepared for the American Sociological Society by Lloyd E. Ohlin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1959), 28-29; Charles Wellington Thomas and David M. Petersen, Prison Organization and Inmate Subcultures (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 46

75 Richard Cloward and George Grosser, eds, Theoretical Studies in Social Organization of the Prison (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 99; Sykes and Messinger, "The Inmate Social System," 6-8; Sykes, Society of Captives, 102.

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administration, or losing face in front of guards, concerned themselves with demonstrating the strength of a united prisoner class. The sociologist Hans Riemer, who voluntarily spent time as a prisoner in an interwar penitentiary, expressed surprise at the social capital he accrued by swearing at a guard. Prisoners watched each other’s gestures and actions, Riemer believed, with more scrutiny than in any other social world.76 Given the aspirational nature of the Convict Code, however, and the attendant importance of symbolic shows of defiance, the esteem Riemer accrued was not actually surprising.

Inmate displays of anti-administrative defiance were common at both

Leavenworth and Auburn throughout the interwar period, as prisoners often employed theatrical denunciations of prison staff and policies. When a Leavenworth guard asked

Philip B., a fireman from Illinois serving five years for writing bad checks, to take a bath,

Philip “shouted in a load tone…fuck you, stick your goddam bath up your ass’” to the commanding officer in front of a group of fellow inmates.77 In a similar vein, when a guard told Charles B. to finish his shower, the convict retorted in front of others “Do you have a watch?...stick it up your ass.”78 Heath M., a glazier from San Francisco who came to Leavenworth in 1925 on a Drugs Act violation, loquaciously told an officer to

“pull your pants down below your knees and fill your ass hole full of spit and make it nice.”79 Both Auburn and Leavenworth inmates regularly chose to verbalize their

76 Frank Tannenbaum, Wall of Shadows: A Study in American Prisons (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 64; Hans Reimer, "Socialization In The Prison Community," Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association (1937): 151.

77 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 53199.

78 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 67719.

79 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 23530.

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distaste for prison overseers in ways that were both baldly defiant and as conspicuous as possible.80

Jarring, profane insults punctuated Leavenworth and Auburn inmates’ backtalk.

For some, such talk may have merely signified social maladjustment or a lack of self- control. For others, though, it may have exemplified an attempt to diminish the administration’s power in the eyes of the prisoner population. Accordingly, when

Auburn’s Daniel C. called Officer Harrington “a dirty c--- s-----” in the presence of his entire cellblock in 1930, he did so in a particular political context. Administrators had identified the New York City native as a political radical as far back as 1926, noting that he was “an agitator and gang leader in the Shop…threatening other inmates and trying to induce them to go on Strike.”81 There is no way to know what Daniel’s exact motivations were when he insulted Harrington, then, but if prison strike organizers needed to win hearts and minds, the sort of naked display of animosity Daniel demonstrated in 1930 provided his fellow inmates with a strong, public example of his opposition to the administration.82

80 It was an even bigger gamble for Black inmates to insult their white overseers. In 1928, Leavenworth’s Daniel W., a butler from Chicago, asked a guard not to spit on the floor. When the guard told him to keep quiet, Daniel replied “You go fuck yourself, will you?” NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 28976.

81 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 43017.

82 Inmate challenges occasionally skirted the ridiculous, as Auburn guards issued William A. with a citation in 1930 for “causing a disturbance in the wing by farting at the officers.” According to his prison case file, William chafed at this charge and, in the words of the on-duty officer, “he came up to me and said ‘what are you trying to do, hang that faring rap on me?’” Issuing a direct challenge to the guard in front of the entire prison wing was an audacious decision on William’s part, even if the subject of the conflict itself was utterly absurd. NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 42993.

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Theory and Practice

While prisoners might show their mettle through overt acts of rudeness and hostility toward administrators, they could also attain a certain level of respect by simply adhering to the Code consistently. This was partly because, while the Convict Code played a critical role in outlining the official morality of the prisoner community, individual fidelity to the code was, in practice, spotty at best. The historian and convict criminologist Frank Tannenbaum found during his own 1920 residency in a New York

City jail that, whereas “loyalty to one’s group is the basic law in the underworld,” there existed little consistency in the actual willingness to suffer deprivation or delayed gratification for the benefit of the community.83 Numerous mid-century studies of the prison’s social ecology reached that same conclusion, suggesting that inmates were as willing to break the laws of the prison community as they were the laws of society at large.84 Even if most everyone agreed with the code’s philosophical validity and eagerly ascribed to it in principle, many were simultaneously willing to betray the Code if administrators offered proper remuneration.

In practice, inmate behavior varied widely within the prison, ranging from total adherence to the Convict Code to full collaboration with guards and administrators. No behavior better underscored the failure of inmates to live up to their philosophies than

83 Tannenbaum, Wall of Shadows, 64.

84 The major works that discuss convict culture are scattered throughout Chapter 5, though some important works that get less attention include S. Kirson Weinberg, "Aspects of the prison's social structure." American Journal of Sociology (1942): 717-726; Lloyd W. McCorkle and Richard Korn, "Resocialization Within Walls," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1954): 88-98; F. E. Haynes, "The Sociological Study of the Prison Community," Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 39 (1948): 432; Peter G. Garabedian, "Social roles and processes of socialization in the prison community," Social Problems (1963): 139-152.

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the widespread willingness to inform on fellow prisoners' misdeeds in exchange for preferential treatment. Partly because it was so common, prisoners tended to consider

“ratting” or “snitching” on others as one of the more grievous betrayals of Code ideals.

Hayner and Ash pointedly noted that “the stool is the scum of inmate body.”85 Speaking on the convict culture of New York state prisons, the National Commission on Law

Observance and Enforcement not that “it is common knowledge that there is a prison code among convicts whereby no inmates, whether he be a trusty or a potential parolee, dare inform the warden or any of the guards against another inmate.”

Nonetheless, the Wickersham Commission noted, “the stool pigeon, the snitch and the talebearer” remained a common figure behind bars.86

Though inmates regularly failed to live up to the Code’s highest ideas, those ideals still functioned as an aspirational script. Like a religious tome or etiquette guide, the Convict Code laid out the ideal morality of the convict class and provided justifications and guidelines for radical action when necessary. As in free society, convicts were able to simultaneously believe in and betray their moral philosophy, much as religious adherents might engage in the cognitive dissonance necessary to maintain devotion and piety in the wake of personal failings.87

85 Clemmer, Prison Community, 123; Sykes, Society of Captives, 34; Thomas and Petersen, Prison Organization and Inmate Subcultures, 258.

86 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, v. 9, 22-23; Morris G. Caldwell, "Group Dynamics in the Prison Community," The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 46, no. 5 (1956): 655; Hayner and Ash, “The Prisoner Community as a Social Group," 364; According to Sykes, guards identified a full 41% of inmates as men willing to “squeal” on their fellow prisoners. Sykes, Society of Captives, 34.

87 Charles W. Thomas, "Toward a More Inclusive Model of the Inmate Contraculture," Criminology 8, no. 3 (1970): 258; Lloyd Ohlin capably summed up the idiosyncrasies of the Convict Code when he wrote that, “if the code is not actively promoted by the majority of inmates in the prison systems of the United States, it is at least respected and deferred to by them.” Ohlin, Sociology and the Field of Corrections, 29.

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Perhaps the most radical element of the Convict Code was that, in its various incarnations, it was ethnically and racially agnostic, as it did not address those subjects at all, treating prisoner concerns as universal in nature. While the decision to decline to comment on issues of race effectively endorsed the persistent white power structure of both free society and the prison, the Code’s “color-blind” philosophy at least provided some space for interracial cooperation by not actively hobbling Black, Asian, American

Indian, and Latino involvement. Instead, the Code’s tenets applied to all inmates equally, providing prisoners with a common script that allowed men of various types to compartmentalize their free-world hostilities and work in tandem. Inmates could still hate each other, hold grudges, come to blows, and stoke conflict over their divisions. Racial and ethnic divisions certainly persisted throughout the interwar years, much as they had in the preceding and following decades. The Code ensured, though, that inmates ascribed to the same standards of “right” behavior, that they held the administration as their primary antagonist, and that they productively affiliated when the time came to push back against the prison regime.

Behavioral Changes, Big and Small

On June 6, 1930, Auburn guards locked Raymond L. and Martin W. in their respective cells for serving as “agitators” for shorter hours and more food while working at the prison Road Camp. That Raymond and Martin asked for better treatment and encouraged other inmates to do the same was not unique, as administrators at both

Auburn and Leavenworth frequently cited prisoners for complaining about substandard conditions and trying to raise others in the spirit of rebellion. That Raymond was a white steel roller from Roland, New York and Martin was a Black cook from Greenwood,

South Carolina was telling, however. Race divisions remained strong in New York

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throughout the interwar period and there was nothing to indicate that Raymond and

Martin had anything in common on an individual level, or that they even associated again after their joint agitation at the Road Camp. As far as the historical record suggested, the two men affiliated as a matter of mere convenience, agitating briefly and ineffectively before drifting apart.88 Such was the nature of most inmate resistance in the

1930s, as men of different ethnic and racial backgrounds created evanescent partnerships in smaller acts of resistance that served to destabilize everyday prison life.

Conduct records from Auburn and Leavenworth suggest that the ways in which inmates engaged in everyday rule breaking shifted over the interwar period. In both institutions, a sharp set of characteristics defined troublemakers, those inmates who guards were likely to identify as flaunting the rules. Being under thirty years old, serving a sentence of 10 or more years, and having committed a violent crime, particularly murder, manslaughter, robbery, or assault, most strongly correlated with who guards reported as having broken a rule in either institution. Alternately, inmates over 40 years old and those serving sentences of two years or fewer rarely received punishment for breaking rules.89 These trends generally reflected the incentives of long-term inmates to act in contradiction to administrative policies as means of easing the “pains of imprisonment,” given that a loss of "good time" meant much less to them, proportionally, than to those inmates serving shorter sentences, for whom any loss of "good time" threatened to significantly extend their sentence. The fact that the majority of inmates

88 NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 43729; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956, 43891.

89 See Tables 5-4 through 5-11 for more information on rule breaking at Auburn and Leavenworth.

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within both prisons better fit the former model than the latter also meant that the culture of the prison generally leaned toward the disruptive.

Inmates may have undertaken sexual deviance, intoxication, and gambling en mass, but guards rarely reported catching inmates engaging in such behaviors, perhaps because of the relative ease in hiding those activities. At both Auburn and Leavenworth, guards tended to report only five types of conduct infractions in significant numbers:

“insolence” (rudeness to prison officials), possessing contraband, fighting, “loafing”

(avoiding work), and what Chapter 5 refers to as “process infractions,” a miscellany of behaviors relating to the performance of compliance to administrative rules, the breaking of which did not directly challenge institutional authority. Process infractions included activities such as talking in line, smoking, being late for work or a meal, shouting, singing, laughing, or marching out of step.90 Unlike gambling, intoxication, possession of contraband, sexual deviance, or escape, all of which clearly served to either undermine Progressive notions of moral reform or destabilize the smooth functioning of the prison itself, process infractions involved inmates flouting the rules without meaningfully challenging institutional dominance. The proportionate move away from process infractions, in turn, suggested a general cultural shift among inmates toward stronger challenges to the penal regime.

The changes to the ways in which convicts engaged in rule breaking throughout the interwar period either suggest a dramatic shift in institutional policy regarding rule

90 In their 1930 study of juvenile delinquents at Massachusetts’s Concord Reformatory, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck noted a similarly colorful array of behaviors including “gaping about,” “hands in pocket,” and “acting queer in room.” Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Five Hundred Criminal Careers (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1975 [1939]), 33.

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enforcement, for which there exists no evidence, or significant changes to inmate behavior.91 The differences between the 1920s and the Great Depression at both

Auburn and Leavenworth were remarkable and consistent. Along with major decreases in process violations, which fell by 39.6% at Leavenworth and 31.1% at Auburn, both institutions saw recidivists who formerly served in unrelated prison systems commit a far greater proportion of all infractions. At Leavenworth, inmates who had previously served sentences in one or more state-level correctional institutions committed 12.7% of conduct infractions in the 1920s, a number that climbed to 27.6% during the Great

Depression. Similarly, inmates who had served in the federal system or within state prisons outside of New York prior to arriving at Auburn only committed 5.7% of the prison’s conduct infractions between 1919 and 1928, a number that more than doubled to 13.3% for the 1929 to 1940 period.92

As the interwar era proceeded, then, conduct infractions took on a more challenging, anti-authority character by moving away from process violations. Auburn and Leavenworth also increasingly contended with the arrival of recidivists from around the country who were more likely to challenge prison rules. Some of the changes in

New York may have been a result of the broader shift in Auburn’s population, as that

91 All offences are divided into one of four groups – Violent-Economic, Violent-Non-Economic, Non- Violent-Economic, and Non-Violent-Non-Economic. This paper characterizes Violent Economic offences as arson; robbery of any sort; kidnapping; and pimping (“white slavery”). Violent-Non-Economic offences include murder, manslaughter, rape, and any attempt at such acts. Non-Violent-Economic offences include a broad swath of crimes, such as any variation on theft (burglary; larceny; embezzlement; fraud; IRS infractions; smuggling; prohibition violations); black market trading relating to alcohol or other drugs; postal law violations; and breaking & entering. Non-Violent-Non-Economic crimes are often status offences or have a tangential link to economic gain. They usually revolve around sex (carnal knowledge; adultery; sodomy; incest abandonment); military conduct (AWOL; desertion; espionage); perjury; escape; or immigration laws.

92 See Tables 5-3 through 5-12.

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institution’s total percentage of American-born inmates from outside of New York State grew from 19.4% to 34.8% of the total population between 1920 and 1940, an increase of 79.4%. The percentage of inmates born within New York also rose over that time, however, from 44% to 50%, whereas the number of foreign-born inmates plummeted.93

It is, of course, impossible to tell how much of the punishment handed out to any inmate or group of inmates was attributable purely to racial profiling, personal animus, or simple disagreement among individual guards about the extent to which they should enforce a particular rule. Nonetheless, by looking at thousands of conduct infractions that span 20 years, certain patterns emerge that do suggest ways in which one might view the radical rebellions of the interwar period on not only a macro level but also on a micro level of day-to-day agitation.94

The Leavenworth Strike of 1941

The last Leavenworth prisoner strike prior to World War II was also the last major prison rebellion of the interwar period. Neither the most famous nor the most impactful uprising of the period, it did not even constitute the most memorable interwar takeover at Leavenworth. In capturing the daily struggle of political organizing, low-level rule breaking, contraband trading, and cross-cultural negotiation within the convict

93 See Tables 3-19 and 3-20.

94 An examination of infractions at contemporary Angola (n=1817) suggests that, as with so many other elements of Louisiana's state prison, the presence of Jim Crow policy and overt white supremacy set the focus of rule enforcement firmly on Black inmates. Making up approximately three-fifths of the prison population, Black inmates, by White guards' reckoning, undertook more than four-fifths (84.3%) of all infractions, with a full half of rule breaking (n=908) tied to "loafing," or refusing to work on the prison farm with the requisite rigor expected by the prison administration. The focus on Black loafing, like convict leasing, Black Codes, and the crop-lien system, was a clear legacy of the state's ties to antebellum plantation slavery. Such patterns also signify a remarkable distinction from prisons outside the Deep South, as productive labor was relatively rare throughout the country. Accordingly, the second most common forms of rule breaking for Angola's predominantly black prison population was "insolence" (n=379, 20.9%), or the showing of improper reverence for the overseer. FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963.

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community, though, extant case show that the event, unexceptional by the standards of the time, said a great deal about interwar convicts’ capacities for cooperation.

Leavenworth’s guards took care in recording the rebels’ actions over the days and weeks, providing direct quotes, reports on conduct infractions, and truncated life histories. The result of their diligence was a set of records that, taken together, show the ways in which inmates adopted political identities, cooperated across race and ethnic lines, and coordinated differing needs and desires in dynamic ways to develop a massive strike effort that was diverse, complex, and bureaucratic.95

On the Eve of Infamy

In the summer of 1941, just a few months before the United States formally entered World War II, once-idle federal penitentiary factories took on a renewed importance. Though not officially committed to the Allied side yet, the American government and its prisons put inmates to work in support of President Roosevelt's

Lend-Lease policy, producing shoes and brushes for the Army. In fact, penal administrators considered Leavenworth inmates so integral to pre-war production that they unilaterally increased the inmate workweek from 39 to 44 hours. This was remarkable, given how often interwar prisons struggled to find full-time work for their wards. That federal economic imperatives pushed unwilling inmates into the workforce threatened to stoke labor unrest, however. Feeling overworked and underpaid,

95 The Warden’s Notebook collection, held within the National Archives at San Francisco’s Records of the Bureau of Prisons (Record Group 129.5, Records of the U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, CA 1938-63) is an outstanding resource, in that it offers the richest narratives of any prison system’s records that I have seen. For each file, the warden’s accounts of current and prior offence, conduct infractions, and life outside of prison frequently receive paragraph-length write-ups. Thankfully, because Alcatraz administrators were in close contact with Leavenworth staff, events at Leavenworth found their way into Alcatraz records.

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approximately 1100 Leavenworth workers staged a sit-down strike on July 7, demanding a reduction in hours as well as double pay for overtime. This action ultimately served as one of the interwar period's largest expressions of non-violent collective bargaining in the prison sphere, bringing together major swaths of the institution's various ethnic and racial constituencies.96

The strike, while large, was mostly uneventful, as it failed to initiate any meaningful change. Despite inmates’ performative idleness, the prison functioned as usual, as chapel services, meal times, and recreational periods continued unaffected.

That the strike ended after two days was not necessarily indicative of abject failure on the organizers’ parts, however, as few of the other prison uprisings of the time secured clear, immediate concessions from the administration. Furthermore, while a cursory glance at the strike’s outcome suggested that the inmates were wholly unsuccessful in disrupting the administration’s functioning, and many uprisings of the time were more successful at upending prison life, the strike committee may have succeeded in destabilizing the prison in some way. The fact that Warden Hudspeth responded to the event by immediately deporting the 29 organizers to Alcatraz on the July 10, one day after the strike's conclusion, suggested the effort made some sort of impression on the

Leavenworth administration.

If, outside of their ability to organize 1100 inmates, the strike organizers failed to affect meaningful change in labor policies at Leavenworth, why did the administration

96 “Strike Halts Work At Leavenworth,” Atlanta Constitution, July 5, 1941, 11. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (503853714); “Strike in Prison! 1,100 ‘Sit’,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 6, 1941, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (176577334); “US Prison Director Opens Leavenworth Strike Inquiry Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 7, 1941, 13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (176574534); “U.S. Breaks Strike At Leavenworth,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 1941, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (131348688).

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transfer dozens of prisoners who engaged in non-violent conduct infractions to USP

Alcatraz, an institution organized around the notion of incapacitation? Hudspeth’s rationale may have stemmed more from the composition of the strike committee than from its effectiveness, as the group’s makeup signaled bigger potential problems for prison administrators. The Leavenworth strikers appeared inclusive, deliberately crossing cultural and demographic boundaries, linking Blacks and whites; Catholics,

Protestants, and Jews; the chronically unemployed and the consistently employed; career criminals, military veterans, gang members, former policeman, peddlers, and farmers in a common cause.97 The Leavenworth strike was not only the last major act of large-scale organized inmate rebellion during the interwar period, but it was deeply heterogeneous, as inmates bridged demographic differences in hopes of affecting mutually beneficial changes. In a world in which racial segregration was an element of everyday life, such cooperation was threatening to the status quo.

A Motley Crew

The Leavenworth strike encapsulated some of the most radical elements of the political spirit that defined American convicts’ interwar rebellions. As both the sheer size of the strike and its organizational body suggest, the inmates’ attempt at collective bargaining was deliberate, comprehensive, and ambitious, the product of long-term planning by a group of inmates of remarkably different backgrounds. Four separate men laid claim to the role of strike committee leader but, aside from tepid leadership claims on the parts of Edward M., a twenty-seven-year-old vagrant drifter, and Christopher P.,

97 The breakdown of this population by race is 27 white and 2 Black. By religious affiliation, it is 18 Protestants, 7 Catholics, 2 Jews, and 2 non-affiliated. By age, 14 were in the 20-29 cohort, 10 in the 30- 39 group, and 5 from 40-49. NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963.

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a forty-six-year-old whose longest permanent residence was seven months as a survivalist in the Wisconsin woods, records suggest that a chimera of two quite-different inmates took the lead.98 One man was Matthew H., who was serving 199 years on a combined kidnapping-prison break-murder conviction. According to Officer Redford, one of Leavenworth’s guards, Matthew had a penchant for fiery political speeches to his fellow inmates. Redford heard Matthew on the recreation yard advocating for a strike, bellowing “I’ll represent you…and, by God, I’ll see that you get what you want and more.”99 Matthew also had his heavies, Theodore W. and Monty S., who aggressively canvassed the factory floor and the recreation yard, threatening steel shop workers with violence if they went to work during the strike. Theodore spent over a month prior to the big strike trying to cajole participants into joining the effort. Monty, a convicted bank robber who spent six years in a North Carolina prison camp, reportedly told fellow prisoners that, if they did not join the strike, 40 or 50 men would “clean them out.”100

Matthew’s main counterpart at the head of the strike organizing committee.

James H., was the middle-aged firebrand’s near-opposite. Raised in a single mother in

Philadelphia, just twenty-two years of age, and having recently completed four semesters of college training in electrical engineering, James was a prison house intellectual of sorts, as administrators estimated his IQ as 121. He was also ambitious, as guards not only reported James as having vigorously solicited for the role of "Strike

Leader," but he also had a pre-existing history of agitating at the federal prisons at

98 NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963, 569 and 567

99 Ibid, 556.

100 Ibid, 552, 553.

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Lorton, Virginia and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Appropriately, his convict record was a list of insolent and resistive behaviors, ranging from "shaved head without permission" to "gave inmate special service" to "diversion of gov't prop. to own use."101

Outside of Matthew and James, some of the more notable strike committee organizers were the group’s two Black representatives, as their very presence within the movement represented a deliberate effort on the white leaders’ parts to fold Black inmates into the larger movement. One of those men, Bruce R., served as co-head of the Colored Committee, the strike committee’s Black auxiliary. Bruce, a “quiet mannered, pleasant, and courteous” First World War veteran from Memphis, was serving a 30-year sentence for robbing an A&P. He was a peculiar choice to galvanize the prison's Black population, given that he was the strike committee's oldest member at

48 and, according to administrative records, had "subnormal" intelligence.102 Perhaps this was why the organizers matched Bruce with a partner, Lawrence S., a Minnesotan

10 years Bruce's junior who had made a great deal of money in the morphine trade prior to his arrest. Leavenworth administrators “recognized [Lawrence] as an agitator among the negroes, although he is a white man,” a reality that made Bruce and Lawrence a compelling dyad, yoking Black and white, Southern and Northern, Protestant and

Jewish.103 Not only were a white drug dealer and a Black veteran a unique pairing for the early 1940s, but the fact that Lawrence's role was to give Bruce additional purchase with Black inmates was significant in itself, as it reflected the limits of racial division and

101 Ibid, 569; 567; 554.

102 Ibid, 550.

103 Ibid, 566; 550.

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the room for intercultural cooperation among Leavenworth inmates. The fact the strike committee made an effort to reach out to Black prisoners, at all, despite that community constituting approximately one-tenth of the prison population at any given time, also signified a powerful cooperative ethos that privileged cohesion over racial segregation.

Prison Classmates

Few of the 1941 Leavenworth strike leaders were “middle class,” at least as modern observers might understand the notion today, but the organizing committee was varied in members’ professional and educational backgrounds. Having served on the

Cincinnati Police Force from 1929 to 1932 after a term as a Sergeant in the United

States Army, Sylvester J. was perhaps the most ‘respectable’ strike coordinator, though the administration also described Frank G., who was serving a thirty-five year sentence for kidnapping and committing four armed hold-ups, as the "son of [a] reputable, middle class family."104 For the most part, though, the records of the strike leaders look more like Doug S., whose parents abandoned him at the age of eight, leading to his residence in a juvenile reformatory from thirteen to sixteen. Committee members often entered the prison system at an early age and matriculated into state penitentiaries, as Doug began in Iowa’s State Training School for Boys before eventually moving on to state prisons in

Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin.105

Committee members’ files also frequently mentioned "broken homes" and divorce, though even those men with reportedly stable home lives often entered adulthood at early ages. More often than not, organizers looked like Eric M., who began

104 Ibid, 568; 576.

105 Ibid, 568; 576; 557.

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wage work at 14 as a killer in a poultry factory; or Kenneth D., who was a baker's apprentice by 15; or Tom P., who started a career as a messenger boy at 14; or Patrick

C., who took up work in a junk yard at 16.106 Many also grappled with chronic unemployment, as William E. had “no regular work history [and] worked brief periods as musician on ships” after leaving the military; Michael A. "left home at 17 to join a CCC camp"; and George W. was "nomadic and worked as a farmer, sheepherder, and miner."107

Many of the strike leaders were also hypermobile. Lawrence S. wandered about the country for over a decade, serving time in local jails for vagrancy in areas as diverse as Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Louisville, and Kalamazoo. Edward M. served time for vagrancy in a dozen different jails in areas stretching from Kansas to Louisiana to

Arizona.108 Tony N., one of the Black organizers, was also itinerant, having moved about the country looking for work as he followed the general pattern of the Great

Migration, beginning in Alabama in 1900 before run-ins with the law in Chicago, Detroit,

Columbus, and New York City.109 With a few exceptions, the economically margainalized Leavenworth strike organizers traversed the country over the course of their adulthoods, supporting themselves with few familial ties. The fact that they coordinated their efforts, then, indicated the relative power of their shared life

106 Ibid, 588; 579; 560; 574.

107 Ibid, 561; 555; 577.

108 Ibid, 566, 569

109 Ibid, 580.

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experiences, their common anomic distress in prison, and the real limits of race and ethnic divisions in the face of heavy deprivation.

The committee functioned not because members found strength in their difference and embraced the tenets of multiculturalism. They may very well have resented each other’s racial and ethnic differences. Rather, members’ shared economic and material interests were powerful enough that they found strength in spite of their difference. Their ability to find common cause even continued to resonate at

Leavenworth weeks after the strike collapsed, as Donald B.'s case file suggested. In

July 1941, Leavenworth guards found Donald in the recreation yard calling for yet another strike, announcing to twenty or thirty spectators "next time we call a strike we will get everything we ask for." He claimed that they could plan a new strike in a week, as long as "stools" didn't "slip up." When guards asked him to explain himself, Donald plainly stated that he was still "100%" with the strikers who the administration had already deported to Alcatraz weeks earlier, and that he planned to "stick with" those men.110

That the architects of the strike were long gone and had no ability to foment a new strike effort at Leavenworth made Donald's statements misguided. The tenacity that Donald showed in his continued support of the strike committee, though, was remarkable. He was an Indian from an Indiana reservation who, as a self-employed miller, had no union affiliations and belonged to neither the white nor Black communities. Nonetheless, he felt a commitment to the strike that outlived the

Leavenworth tenure of the organizers themselves. This was indicative of the tension

110 NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957, 54716.

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within prisons of the time, as intercultural organization and near-certain failure of inmate strikes typified the unique spirit of the era’s uprisings.

Conclusion

By the time the United States entered the Second World War in 1941, the prison unrest of the preceding decade had frayed the patience of inmates and administrators alike. In July, this took an uncommon form, as the Associated Press noted that the women inmates of Alabama’s Wetumpka State Prison “started a free-for-all fight, in which a poker was used, hair was pulled and faces were scratched” in the institution’s new beauty shop. Warden J. Curtiss Weldon responded to the riot, which he claimed emerged out of a disagreement over one inmate’s refusal to provide a manicure to another, by whipping five of the rioters with seven lashes each. Corporal punishment was a common part of prison life in Alabama, but the application of the whip to women set off a political firestorm in the state and Weldon offered Governor Frank Dixon his resignation a few days later on the pretense that he had failed to obtain the necessary permits and permissions to administer the lashings.111 That Weldon employed the punishment so hastily in the first place reflected a broader exasperation, as the ongoing wave of prisoner rebellions had outlasted the entirety of the Great Depression, inmates had spent more than a decade undermining prison programs and daily functions.

However powerful national and political inmate resistance was throughout the interwar period, though, it was never really a self-conscious movement. Ultimately, prison populations were, like cities, collections of strangers attempting to negotiate the

111 “Women Whipped in Alabama Prison After Beauty Shop Riot; Warden Out,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 25, 1941. Accessed May 2, 2018. https://www.newspapers.com/139428232.

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amazingly complex dynamics of race, ethnicity, religion, family, and work on both a personal and community level. In looking at both major and minor rebellions, as well as the ways in which everyday acts of misbehavior changed over time, Chapter 5 contends with the ways in which prisoners negotiated their differences across place and time.

Ultimately, the cooperated out of common cause and self-preservation, affiliating with unalike men and showing the boundaries of their racial and ethnic chauvinism in the process.

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Table 5-1. Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number Pseudonym Institution Inmate Number Michael L. Leavenworth 12650 Juan R. Leavenworth 13111 Alvin B. Leavenworth 23024 Heath M. Leavenworth 23530 Daniel W. Leavenworth 28976 Philip B. Leavenworth 53199 Donald B. Leavenworth 54716 Lawrence P. Leavenworth 57228 Charles B. Leavenworth 67719 James G. Auburn 41976 William A. Auburn 42993 Daniel C. Auburn 43017 Matthew C. Auburn 43536 Raymond L. Auburn 43729 Martin W. Auburn 43891 William B. Auburn 44832 David F. Alcatraz 104 Stephen F. Alcatraz 190 Bruce R. Alcatraz 550 Theodore W. Alcatraz 552 Monty S. Alcatraz 553 James H. Alcatraz 554 Michael A. Alcatraz 555 Matthew H. Alcatraz 556 Doug S. Alcatraz 557 Tom P. Alcatraz 560 William E. Alcatraz 561 Lawrence S. Alcatraz 566 Christopher P. Alcatraz 567 Sylvester J. Alcatraz 568 Edward M. Alcatraz 569 Patrick C. Alcatraz 574 Frank G. Alcatraz 576 George W. Alcatraz 577 Kenneth D. Alcatraz 579 Tony N. Alcatraz 580 Eric M. Alcatraz 588 Rodney B. Angola 13286 Sources: NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963.

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Table 5-2. Selected List of Major Prison Disturbances, 1929-1940 Institution System Year Auburn Prison State (Auburn, NY) 1929 Clinton Prison State (Dannemora, NY) 1929 Leavenworth Penitentiary Federal (Leavenworth, KS) 1929 Kilby Prison State (Mt. Meigs, AL) 1929 New Mexico State Penitentiary State (Santa Fe, NM) 1929 California State Narcotic Hospital State (Spadra, CA) 1929 Maricopa County Jail County (Phoenix, AZ) 1929 Rhode Island State Prison State (Howard, RI) 1930 Marion County Prison County (Marion, NC) 1930 Ohio Penitentiary State (Columbus, OH) 1930 Louisiana Penitentiary State (Baton Rouge, LA) 1930 Maryland Penitentiary State (Baltimore, MD) 1930 Folsom State Prison State (Folsom, CA) 1930 Blackwell Island Penitentiary City (New York City, NY) 1930 Missouri State Penitentiary State (Jefferson City, MO) 1930 New Jersey State Prison State (Trenton, NJ) 1930 Stateville Prison State (Crest Hill, IL) 1931 Vandalia Prison State (Vandalia, IL) 1931 Utah State Penitentiary State (Salt Lake City, UT) 1931 Charlestown State Prison State (Boston, MA) 1931 Oklahoma State Reformatory State (Granite, OK) 1931 Missouri State Penitentiary State (Jefferson City, MO) 1931 Marquette Branch Prison State (Marquette, MI) 1931 Oklahoma State Reformatory State (Granite, OK) 1932 Utah State Prison State (Salt Lake City, UT) 1932 Maryland State Penitentiary State (Baltimore, MD) 1932 Speigner Prison State (Speigner, AL) 1932 Kansas State Penitentiary State (Lansing, KS) 1933 Angola Prison Farm State (Angola, LA) 1933 Kilby Prison State (Mt. Meigs, AL) 1933 Huntsville Unit State (Huntsville, TX) 1934 Washington State Penitentiary State (Walla Walla, WA) 1934 Northampton County Prison County (Easton, PA) 1934 Pontiac Prison State (Pontiac, IL) 1934 Eastern State Penitentiary State (Philadelphia, PA) 1934 Graterford Penitentiary State (Graterford, PA) 1934 Santa Clara County Jail County (San Jose, CA) 1934 San Quentin State Prison State (San Quentin, CA) 1935 Oklahoma State Reformatory State (Granite, OK) 1935 Lansing State Prison State (Lansing, KS) 1935 Jackson State Prison State (Jackson, MI) 1935 Essex County Detention Home County (Newark, NJ) 1935 Oregon State Penitentiary State (Salem, OR) 1936 Baldwin State Prison State (Milledgeville, GA) 1936

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Table 5-2. Continued Institution System Year Alcatraz Penitentiary Federal (Alcatraz Island, CA) 1936 Folsom State Prison State (Folsom, CA) 1937 Kentucky State Reformatory State (Frankfort, KY) 1937 Kilby Prison State (Mt. Meigs, AL) 1937 Concord Reformatory State (Concord, MA) 1938 Marquette Branch Prison State (Marquette, MI) 1940 Michigan Reformatory State (Ionia, MI) 1940 Alcatraz Penitentiary Federal (Alcatraz Island, CA) 1940 Wisconsin State Prison State (Waupun, WI) 1941 Wetumpka State Prison State (Montgomery, AL) 1941 Leavenworth Penitentiary Federal (Leavenworth, KS) 1941 Sources: ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Google Newspaper Archive; Newspapers.com.

Table 5-3. Trends in Sentencing, By Prison and Period Institution 0.5-4.5 Years 5.0 Years-Life Auburn, 1919-28 46.8 53.2 Auburn, 1929-40 42.8 57.2 Leavenworth, 1919-28 86.8 13.2 Leavenworth, 1929-40 86.7 13.3 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

Table 5-4. Trends in Offence Type, By Prison and Period Institution Violent Non-Violent Economic Other Auburn, 1919-28 44.7 48.1 7.2 Auburn, 1929-40 47.9 43.6 8.5 Leavenworth, 1919-28 3.8 76.4 19.8 Leavenworth, 1929-40 2.6 73.8 23.6 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

Table 5-5. Breakdown of Conduct Infraction Types, By Prison and Period Institution Process Insolence Fighting Contraband Auburn, 1919-28 36.6 13.1 14.6 13.8 Auburn, 1929-40 25.2 16.4 25.9 13.8 Leavenworth, 1919-28 50.0 7.8 6.9 14.4 Leavenworth, 1929-40 30.2 11.6 10.1 23.8 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

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Table 5-6. Breakdown of Angola Conduct Infraction Types, By Period Institution Laziness Insolence Fighting Contraband Angola, 1919-28 48.7 15.9 19.7 5.0 Angola, 1929-35 50.4 23.1 12.4 3.2 Sources: FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963

Table 5-7. Breakdown of Auburn Inmate Infractions, By Age Cohort Age Cohort 0 Infractions 2+ Infractions All 55.0 26.4 16-25 38.7 40.6 40-90 77.2 11.6 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

Table 5-8. Breakdown of Leavenworth Inmate Infractions, By Age Cohort Age Cohort 0 Infractions 1+ Infractions All 58.1 41.9 16-25 43.6 56.4 40-90 77.0 23.0 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

Table 5-9. Breakdown of Auburn Inmate Infractions, By Race Race 0 Infractions 2+ Infractions All 55.0 26.4 White 56.2 25.3 Non-White 47.2 33.4 Sources: NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

Table 5-10. Breakdown of Leavenworth Inmate Infractions, By Race Race 0 Infractions 1+ Infractions All 58.1 41.9 White 60.4 39.6 Black 45.9 54.1 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957.

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Table 5-11. Breakdown of Inmate Infractions, By Prison and Sentence Length Institution Sentence 0 Infractions 1+ Infractions Auburn All 55.0 45.0 Auburn Under 2 years 79.7 20.3 Auburn 10+ years 34.6 65.4 Leavenworth All 58.1 41.9 Leavenworth Under 2 years 66.0 34.0 Leavenworth 10+ years 29.4 70.6 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

Table 5-12. Breakdown of Auburn Inmate Infractions, By Offence Institution Offence 0 Infractions 2+ Infractions Auburn All 55.0 26.4 Auburn Robbery 33.5 45.6 Auburn Status 74.6 12.7 Sources: NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; NYSA ICFACF 1914-1956.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

The prison population comprising the subject of this dissertation inherited a significant legacy of military involvement. Due in part to a variety of foreign entanglements that occupied the nation throughout the early twentieth century, the

United States military employed millions of Americans between 1900 and 1940.1 Prior to

World War I, the Army and Navy sent hundreds of thousands of young men across the world to facilitate a variety of expansionist economic and political policies. They deployed forces to Hawaii, Guam, Mexico, Russia, and the Philippine Islands between

1899 and 1918. The U.S. also fomented regime change in a variety of Central American and Caribbean nations through a series of so-called “Banana Wars” between 1898 and

1934, sending American soldiers into Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, Honduras,

Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.2

World War I hastened an escalation in American forces to unprecedented numbers, and it formed a generation of young American men’s worldviews. Though the

United States’ involvement in the war was relatively brief, it was far-reaching, as the government deployed approximately two million men overseas over two years, only for the armistice of November 11, 1918 to end their military careers abruptly. In the absence of a G.I. Bill-type program, vast numbers of decommissioned working-class

1 Department of Defense, Selected Manpower Statistics: Fiscal Year 1997 (Washington: GPO), 50.

2 Some of the more significant works on American military policy throughout this time include Lester Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983); Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Charles Harris III and Louis Sadler, The Great Call-Up: The Guard, The Border, and the Mexican Revolution (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).

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soldiers found themselves among the country's economic "have-nots," much as veterans had in the preceding decades. While the military provided a temporary respite from unemployment, it never offered men the life-altering opportunities for education and financial uplift that New Deal policymakers later carved out for veterans of the

Second World War. Some veterans successfully reintegrated into society without a social safety net, but others found themselves disabled, homeless, or otherwise cast to the fringes of society.3 Waiting on Adjusted Service Certificates that would not mature until 1945, many First World War veterans fell back into the country's economic margins. E.Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney echoed this reality in one of the most popular songs of the period, Brother Can You Spare a Dime? In the piece, Bing Crosby famously intoned "when there was earth to plow or guns to bear I was always there right on the job…why should I be standing in line just waiting for bread?"4

As they entered prison, interwar inmates carried symbolic evidence of the extent to which military experience touched their lives.5 Prison administrators witnessed members of the large, underemployed veteran populations bring images of eagles,

American flags, shields, anchors, and other emblems into the prison as tattoos upon

3 The literature on World War I veterans, outside of the context of the Bonus Marchers, is a thin, but some significant works on the subject include Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War 1 America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); David A. Gerber, "Disabled Veterans, the State, and the Experience of Disability in Western Societies, 1914-1950," Journal of Social History 36, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 899-916; Scott Gelber, "A 'Hard-Boiled Order': The Reeducation of Disabled WWI Veterans in New York City," Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 161-180. European historians have also provided significant insights on the subject, one exceptional work being Deborah Cohen's The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

4 Jay Gorney and E.Y. Harburg. "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime." Perf. Bing Crosby. The Essential Bing Crosby: The Columbia Years. Sony, 2003.

5 For more information on inmate tattoos, see Tables 6-2 and 6-3.

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their bodies. Others wore familiar soldier refrains, such as "Death Before Dishonor,"

"Coelis Imperamus," or "Rose of No Man's Land." Few types of tattoo better showed the deep meaning of military service to American prisoners, however, than declarations of infantry name and number, which tied a man's service to a specific time and place.

When men brought texts reading “Manila 1920”; “Honolulu 1920”; “China 1925”;

“Nagasaki 1919”; “Panama”; “France 1917”; or “Lisbon, Portugal March 29 20” behind bars with them, they shared a keepsake of their international travels while they also emphasized their common membership to a fraternal, and decidedly American, social group.6

When tattooed veterans entered prisons, then, they brought with them an opportunity to signify meaningful cultural bonds to strangers. This is certainly not to say that the experience of serving in the racially segregated United States military was a neat corrective to racial or ethnic hostility, but shared military backgrounds did facilitate opportunities for inmates of differing profiles to see some of themselves in one-another.

For instance, Michael D., a white engineer from Sapulpa, Oklahoma; Jagjeet S., a

Hindu farmer from India; and Jason P., a Black chauffeur from rural Georgia were, at least cosmetically, strikingly different in their religious, ethnic, and racial makeups.

Nonetheless, all three men entered New Mexico State Penitentiary in the mid-1920s, carrying upon their bodies the word “Manila,” the name of an Asian metropolis that the vast majority of Americans surely knew little about.7 That a Philippine city nearly 8000

6 CASA R136 ICF, 16132; CASA R136 ICF, 16796; FSUT LSPR CIR 16368; PHMC RG15 S15.128, 699; NMSA PCRIF 1970-006, 6281; NMSA PCRIF 1970-006, 6703; NASE RG129 MIPR 4236; NASE RG129 MIPR 4230.

7 NMSA PCRIF 1970-006, 6705; NMSA PCRIF 1970-006, 5562; NMSA PCRIF 1970-006, 4994.

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miles away was significant enough to three unalike men that they would each tattoo the name upon themselves was suggestive of the possibilities of intercultural sharing in a penal context.8

The sort of unlikely connections and cooperation this project explores is a common theme of historical inquiry, as part of the historian’s craft is to provide nuance and complexity to relationships that observers might assume were straightforward or domineering. One example of this practice, and a significant influence on this project, is

Rediker and Linebaugh’s "ground-up" history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

European colonialism in North America, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,

Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. In that work, the authors argued that "dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban laborers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves" constituted a transatlantic proletariat whose interactions hinged not on the oppressive strictures of race, gender, nationality, or class, but on cooperation, mobility, and plurality.9 They were part of a "circular transmission of human experience from Europe to Africa to the Americas" and they made "new and unexpected connections, which variously appeared to be accidental, contingent, transient, even miraculous."10 The

8 Given that World War II-era social science literature found contact between Black and white soldiers lessened racial animus within military populations, there is also some reason to believe that shared military tattoos, such as ‘Manilla,’ were indicative of broader ways in which significant emblems of cultural overlap might have worked work to link cultural divides within the prison. Samuel Stouffer et al. The American Soldier v.1: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); Thomas Pettigrew, "Samuel Stouffer and Relative Deprivation." Social Psychology Quarterly 78.1 (2015): 7-24.

9 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 4.

10 Ibid, 2, 6.

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authors acknowledged that such partnerships were unintuitive, insofar as modern onlookers might imagine that, in the seventeenth century racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions ran prohibitively deep. But the coalition’s rebellions against a variety of overseers and aristocrats, who served as shared antagonists, were never based in demographic similarity, but in a constructive coexistence. They were natural allies, the authors explain through an invocation of The Tempest, even if they were also "strange bed-fellows."11

The social alchemy that Rediker and Linebaugh described was not unique to the

Colonial Era or to the forgotten historical actors of far-flung regions of the world. The

Southern Blacks, urban Jews, Midwestern farmers, Italian immigrants, Dust Bowl evacuees, Mexican Catholics, Chippewa Indians, itinerant hoboes, radical unionists, and many others who made up the astoundingly heterogeneous prisons of the interwar

United States also proved themselves "strange bed-fellows." They did this by trading and communicating on the country's recreation yards, in their cells, and elsewhere, easing the pains of imprisonment through contraband and organizing in search of greater rights and privileges.

This cooperation was not always immediately present to prison administrators, who often saw just a mass of humanity, much of which self-segregated along racial and ethnic lines. The convict criminologist Frank Tannenbaum challenged this view, however:

Inside of this formal organization there [existed] a humming life, a life of ingenuity and association. Right under the eye of the authorities, in spite of all the restriction imposed, in spite of the constant watchfulness, in spite

11 Ibid, 29.

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of the insistence upon isolation, the men manage to find a means and method of achieving cooperation.12

Tannenbaum, a political radical and historian of Latin American politics, certainly understood the nature of racial divisions within society and within the prison, so his comments did not come from a blindness regarding man’s inhumanity toward man.

Rather, he emphasized the fact that interwar convicts were more than simple avatars of their racial, ethnic, gender, or class identities. They were human beings for whom imprisonment was surely a shattering experience. The trauma of imprisonment, or the admission to any total institution, stripped away much of a subject’s identity, along with his sense of comfort, familiarity, and personal safety. As the sociologist Kai Erikson noted in his work on victims of life-altering disasters, however, "trauma shared can serve as a source of communality in the same way that common languages and common cultural backgrounds can. There is a spiritual kinship there, a sense of identity…Estrangement becomes the basis for communality."13

12 Frank Tannenbaum, Wall of Shadows: A Study in American Prisons (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 16.

13 Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), 232.

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Table 6-1. Inmates Discussed, By Institution and Number Pseudonym Institution Inmate Number Jason P. New Mexico 4994 Jagjeet S. New Mexico 5562 Michael D. New Mexico 6705 Sources: NASB RG129 AZWF 1938-1963; NAKC RG129 LVCF 1895-1957; NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958.

Table 6-2. Sample Data on Prison Tattoos, 1919-1940 Institution Sample Tattooed % USP McNeil Island 1006 17.8 Folsom State 1561 49.7 New Mexico State 1376 39.3 Angola Farm 2034 17.3 Western State 1642 7.3 Sources: NASE RG129 MIPR 1887-1951; CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963; PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954; NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958.

Table 6-3. Most Common Tattoo Themes, 1919-1938 Institution McNeil Island Woman USA Flag Initials Anchor Heart Folsom State Woman Eagle Initials Dagger Heart New Mexico St. Woman Crucifix Initials Dagger Heart Angola Farm Woman USA Flag Initials Dagger Heart Western State Woman USA Flag Initials Eagle Heart Sources: NASE RG129 MIPR 1887-1951; CASA R136 ICF 1879-1949; FS LSPR CIR 1866-1963; PHMC S15.128 RG 15 WSP 1887-1954; NMSA PCRIF 1905-1958.

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APPENDIX A LIST OF ARCHIVES

The National Archives at San Francisco, San Bruno, CA

Records of the U.S. Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, CA 1938-63 (RG 129)

The National Archives at Seattle, Washington, WA

McNeil Island Penitentiary Records of Prisoners Received, 1887-1951 (RG 129) McNeil Island Penitentiary Prisoner Identification Photographs, 1875-ca. 1923 (RG 129)

The National Archives at Kansas City, Kansas City, MO

Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Penitentiary Leavenworth (RG 129)

New York State Archives, Albany, NY

Inmate Case Files, Auburn Correctional Facility, 1914-1956 Prison Financial Operating Reports, 1924-1933 Sing Sing Prison Admission Registers, 1865-1939 Warden’s Office Files, 1901-1973

Texas State Library and Archives, Austin, TX

Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, 1849-2004 Conduct Registers, vols. 1998/038-138—1998/038-236

American Correctional Association Archives, Arlington, VA

Ancestry.com

California Department of Corrections, Folsom State Prison Records, 1879-1949, ID #R136 San Quentin State Prison Records, 1850-1950, ID #R135. California State Archives, Sacramento, CA

Iowa, Governor. Consecutive Registers of Convicts, 1867-1960. Iowa State Historical Society, Des Moines, IA

Louisiana State Penitentiary Records, 1866-1963; Correctional Institution Records FamilySearch, Salt Lake City, UT

Pennsylvania, Descriptive Lists, 1887-1954. Prison Population Records, Western State Penitentiary, Series 15.128. Department of Justice, RG 15. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

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APPENDIX B LIST OF NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES

ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Atlanta Constitution Chicago Tribune Christian Science Monitor New York Times Wall Street Journal Washington Post

Newspapers.com

Altoona (PA) Mirror Anderson (IN) Herald Anniston (AL) Star Arizona Republic Bakersfield Californian Beatrice (NE) Daily Sun Billings Gazette Bridgeport Post Charleston (WV) Gazette Chester (PA) Times Delaware County (PA) Times Des Moines Register Gainesville (FL) Sun Greeley (CO) Daily Tribune Gastonia (NC) Gazette Hargerstown (MD) Herald Hattiesburg (MS) American Ironwood (MI) Daily Globe Jackson (MS) Spectator Jefferson City (MO) Post-Tribune Lawrence (KS) Journal World Lowell (MA) Sun Nevada Rainbow Nevada State Journal Northwest Arkansas Times Oakland (CA) Tribune Panama City (FL) News Herald Reno (NV) Evening Gazette Ruston (LA) Daily Leader Salt Lake Tribune San Antonio Light Sandusky (OH) Register

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Santa Fe New Mexican Walla Walla (WA) Union-Bulletin Wisconsin State Journal

Google News Archives

Baseball Digest Harper’s Jet Saturday Evening Post

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Alex Tepperman began his academic career in 2002 at the University of Toronto, where he earned a B.A. in History and American Studies in 2008. In 2010, he received an M.A. in History from the University of Rochester before returning to the University of

Toronto for an M.A. in Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies in 2011. After only sixteen years of higher education, he received a Ph.D in History from the University of Florida in

2018. With any luck, he will retire somewhere warm.

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