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AND QUAKER PRISON REFORM

And yet — in fact you need only draw a single thread at any point you choose out of the fabric of life and the run will make a pathway across the whole, and down that wider pathway each of the other threads will become successively visible, one by one. — Heimito von Doderer, DIE DÂIMONEN

One of the prevailing ideas of incarceration is, make the prisoner pay for his crime. Thus it is that one of the trends in US prisons has been toward leased prisons, in which prisoners are so much slave labor being forced to earn their keep (no, that’s not just an idea from a Chinese labor and re-education camp). Another of the prevailing ideas of American incarceration has been that of correction, and this trend gave rise in this period to the “separate” system of the “penitentiary,” the institution so arranged as an ordeal of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation that the hardened criminal would become truly penitent, repent of his or her crime, and determine that when and if released, he or she would follow in the future a straight rather than a crooked path. This is the idea which produced the prison which sits high on Cherry hill in beautiful downtown Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary, and produced in addition much prisoner mental illness and suicide.

Some have alleged that this total-long-term-solitary-confinement thingie was just another of those crazy Quaker ideas — and I need your help in figuring out the provenance of this urban legend (which did not seem to be in existence at the time of the visits of the Marquis de Lafayette, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Charles Dickens in the 19th Century but which had come into existence by the time of Kurt Vonnegut who has credited and widely publicized this urban legend).

“We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness.” — Kurt Vonnegut, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH Lecture at St. John the Divine, NYC HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1773

The compassionate Calvinist John Howard became the high sheriff of Bedfordshire and was so affected by what he was learning of the conditions of institutionalization that he would become a reformer of hospitals and prisons not only in England but throughout all of Europe. Fairly or unfairly, in WALDEN, this reformer would achieve a sort of renown as a case for application of the Biblical trope “Verily, he hath his reward” which we deploy to defend ourselves against the sort of selfrighteous persons who do good upon others for ulterior personal motives, such as to force others into displays of humble gratefulness:

WALDEN: Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in PEOPLE OF his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what WALDEN are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me.

JOHN HOWARD

Why such an extreme reaction in regard to this well-meaning reformer? Well, for one thing this Calvinist, Howard, would acquire a “tough-love” conviction of the beneficial impact on the prisoner of solitary confinement. In his model prison, the prisoners would be kept entirely isolated from human contact except during their hours of regulated labor. EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

Howard was a disciplinarian, whose regimen was to be effected through forced hard labor during the day, solitary confinement during the night, and, of course, constant mandatory catechism in the revealed truths of religion. In other words, he would not have accomplished more evil had he been an entirely vicious man.

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1776

In this year the new jail on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, built to relieve the overcrowding and scandalous conditions at that city’s Old Stone Jail, was beginning to close its doors for business.

Members of the Religious Society of Friends, and others, organized the Philadelphia Society for Relieving Distressed Prisoners. After the Revolution, this Quaker group would manage this Walnut Street Prison as a place where malefactors might meditate and repent. They termed this facility a “penitentiary.” Instead of throwing all malefactors together regardless of the varieties of offense of which they had been found guilty, and regardless of their mental condition, and sometimes even without segregation of the sexes or age groups, as was at that point in time the rule in American incarceration, in that novel institution each inmate was to be given his or her private cell with a little garden, and would be expected to work. The idea was that solitude would help the prisoners repent of their misdeeds. That such total isolation would prove to be was as cruel as or even more cruel than some of the more usual punishments was not as yet apparent to these well-meaning HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reformers of the PSRDP persuasion.

It would be, perhaps, on the basis of this Walnut Street Prison of the late 18th Century, with all its good intentions and all its problematic theory, that, in 1991, Kurt Vonnegut would ascribe the invention of the penitentiary system to American Quakers. —If we did this thing, as for instance in the now obsoleted Eastern State Penitentiary atop Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia, then, as Vonnegut suggests, We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness. So, did Quakers in fact, as Vonnegut asserts, invent the penitentiary system? Is this sort of experiment in the mental torture of solitary confinement indeed to be laid directly and solely at our door? Or is the Vonnegut allegation mere fakelore? QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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SET AN EXAMPLE

The world, not merely Quakers universally but the world universally, is desperately in need of spiritual guidance, and the need for such spirituality is demonstrably growing more desperate day by day. The problem the world has been encountering has something to do with Fake News — has something to do with elaborations and embroideries on reality that have been swamping our sense of the real and, by swamping us in this manner, causing us to lose all sense of bearings. I would like to see Quakers leading the way, to help the world withdraw from this syndrome that is currently consuming us all. — And I think I perceive a way for us to supply that so-badly-needed leadership. All we have to do is set a positive real example, of what it is like to abandon lies and deceptions and place our trust in solid verities. We could set that example, by publicly abandoning the large number of pseudohistorical accretions that have demonstrably grown up over our centuries of existence as a religious society, and then the rest of the world could look at our example and say with growing confidence “Well, if stupid Quakers can do that we can do it as well!” The world, and Quakers too, are (is?) very clearly committing the error of adding when it should be subtracting. As Thoreau said, Simplify, simplify. Often, less is more. Can we set an example of such simplification? I think that as a historian, I have uncovered any number of cases in which Quaker lore has become over the centuries encrusted with “just-so stories,” stories which are not only unnecessary but also factually inaccurate. Why do I need a Clearness Committee? Well, first, this compendium of error which I have supposedly created needs to be tested, to verify publicly that the items on this list of errors are indeed what I am supposing them to be, errors, falsehoods, just-so stories lacking in evidentiary foundation. I can’t do that without a whole bunch of serious people who will tell me, are some of the items on this list actually true and actually of value and salvageable, or is my historical judgment correct, and these pseudofactoids mere figments of folks’ imaginations? I am 82 and afibrillation and hypertension are giving me problems and time is running out and I can’t do this alone. If we can’t be a shining light to the world, why can’t we be a shining light to the world? Are we too stupid to perceive the opportunity here, the opportunity to give the world an example when what the world so desperately needs now is precisely that, an example? Do you know what a potlatch is? It is a way to set things aright by giving up more stuff than anyone else could possibly give up. We Quakers need to abandon more lies than anyone else could possibly abandon. That could be our way to set things aright in this world. Back in the day of the Great Plague carts would roll through the streets of London and the cry would go up “Bring out your dead!” We need to set carts rolling through the streets of Quakerdom, sending up a cry “Bring out your lies!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The cure for our world problem of Fake News is not a Quaker cure, it is a Jewish cure. In the Babylonian TALMUD, wisdom dating to the days of captivity in Babylon, an injunction was set down: adding to the truth sometimes amounts to subtracting from the truth. Some Quakers have asked me whether what I am attempting to do is proselytize. No, the world no more needs to become Quaker than it needs to become Jewish. The world simply needs to recognize that it is finding itself on a false, over-elaborate, deceptive course, and needs to go back by restricting itself to what it actually does know. — We need in the future to restrict ourselves to those items of information for which we actually possess clear chains of affirmative evidence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1787

Organization was begun following a paper given by Dr. Benjamin Rush at the home of Benjamin Franklin, entitled, “An Inquiry into the Effects of public punishment upon criminals and upon society.” Although the Quakers have always had a deep influence in Philadelphia, the organization would by no means be limited to Quakers. Dr. Rush for instance was a Unitarian, and Franklin didn’t have much of any preference for any particular religious worship. The President of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons for its first 40 years would be an Episcopal Bishop, William White.1

Since Franklin might be termed the grandfather of electroshock therapy on the basis of his early suggestion that persons suffering from insanity be shocked into sanity by the application of electricity, I will insert the following item here: in this year Dr. John Birch made the experiment of administering electroshock to a popular singer who was suffering from melancholia — after daily treatments for a month, he recorded, the singer was able to fulfill his engagements that summer “with his usual applause.”

Dr. Benjamin Rush was a member of the “Convention of Pennsylvania for the Adoption of the Federal Constitution.”

In this year Virginia was repealing its incorporation of the Protestant Episcopal Church (fear of powerful and wealthy churches would induce the Virginia legislature to routinely refuse to incorporate any churches,

1. For those who wish to read more, there are two books by Dr. Negley Teeters of Temple University: THEY WERE IN PRISON, a history of the PA Prison Society, and THE CRADLE OF THE PENITENTIARY. Prior to this point, prison as punishment was not known. The motivation of the experiment was to create a substitute for corporal and capital punishment. This group promotes correctional reform and social justice to this day, although now it deems itself the Pennsylvania Prison Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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seminaries, or religious charities whatever). Such provisions for separation of church and state would make their way into the US federal constitution and would continue through a succession of Virginia constitutional revisions, into the 21st Century.

Franklin was again reelected President of Pennsylvania and went as delegate to the Philadelphia convention for the framing of a Federal Constitution. Here is an indication of the lifestyles of the people who attended this convention. Note that George Mason of Virginia, J. Rutledge of South Carolina, and George Washington of Virginia were three of the largest slaveholders in North America, and that in all, 17 delegates to this convention owned the lives of some 1,400 human beings: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Franklin, who owned slaves and acted as a slave-trader in Philadelphia out of his print-shop, went to the constitutional convention in part as the official representative of the anti-slavery cause — and never once raised this vital issue. Fifty years later, when the sealed proceedings would be disclosed to the American public and it would be revealed that he had betrayed us in this fundamental respect, there would be the greatest outrage at his conduct, and a debate would begin which would be germane to the origin of our civil warfare, a debate as to whether the federal Constitution was a pact with Satan which ought to be dissolved. That is to say, the activities (or lack of activities, for he was possibly already on opium at the time) of Franklin at the constitutional convention would lead directly to the foundation of the Northern Disunionist faction. But he spent his valuable time at this important convention arguing for banal nonce items such as having several executives rather than one and one legislature rather than several. The more important stuff, that he was supposed to be talking about, was precisely what the guy wasn’t talking about. As a practical Pennsylvania politician he had found it was sometimes useful to ally with the local Quakers, if this helped him neutralize the Brit influence, and we may observe in the following quotation from his AUTOBIOGRAPHY not only this government’s general attitude toward people who have been pacified but also this “antislavery delegate” Franklin’s attitude toward people who have been negrofied: Ben Franklin’s “Autobiography”

One afternoon, in the height of this public quarrel, we met in the street. “Franklin,” says he, “you must go home with me and spend the evening; I am to have some company that you will like;” and, taking me by the arm, he led me to his house. In gay conversation over our wine, after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much admir’d the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them. One of his friends, who sat next to me, says, “Franklin, why do you continue to side with these damn’d Quakers? Had not you better sell them? The proprietor would give you a good price.” “The governor,” says I, “has not yet blacked them enough.” He, indeed, had labored hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wip’d off his coloring as fast as he laid it on, and plac’d it, in return, thick upon his own face; so that, finding he was likely to be negrofied himself, he, as well as Mr. Hamilton, grew tir’d of the contest, and quitted the government.

We can get a glimpse, in the above, of how it would come to be that Dr. Franklin could go off to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as the designated representative of the civil rights people of his day — and then, precisely 50 years later, when the articles of secrecy the delegates had sworn to had expired, it would be discovered that this politician had betrayed the people he was supposed to be representing by uttering not one single word at any time during that convention in opposition to the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery.2 James Madison, Jr. took very detailed minutes throughout the Convention, but they were subject to a secrecy READ MADISON’S NOTES

conspiracy to keep the electorate in the dark, with a sworn duration period of precisely 50 years, which was adhered to by all participants. Madison had turned over his notes on the Convention to George Washington, who kept them at Mt. Vernon, and Madison’s notes would not see the light of day until 1845. No member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 would publish any account of the Convention’s important deliberations until two years after the death the last member of the Constitutional Convention, Madison, when the notes of Luther Martin of Maryland and of Robert Yates of New York would be published in 1838 as SECRET PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1787. NOTES OF ROBERT YATES HDT WHAT? INDEX

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When Madison’s records were opened on schedule, there was the greatest outrage. We felt totally betrayed. A Northern disunion party of sorts originated, and would constitute one of the causes of the frictions leading eventually to civil war. We found out, belatedly, suddenly, that our Franklin had gone to the convention in part as the representative of the anti-slavery position, and –old, terminally ill, possibly already under the influence of opium, desiring some peace in his time– he had simply sold us out. Our guy hadn’t even so much as raised the central issue of American slavery for discussion. We were so surprised, here we’ve got this slavemaster guy who used to keep the unwanted surplus slaves of his friends and business associates in a pen behind his print shop in Philadelphia, offering their bodies for sale to the highest bidder, and we trust him and we go and send him off to our constitutional convention to be our spokesperson against slavery — and we’re so surprised and we feel so betrayed fifty years after the fact! There’s now a book out that alleges that Ben more than any other human being was responsible for the Revolutionary War. Per the book this was allegedly based upon his resentment at having been being fired as the colonial postmaster general, and publicly humiliated and scorned in Whitehall, on irrefutable charges having to do with the stealing of other people’s correspondence. Well, I don’t know about that issue — but, if I had to select out one American citizen who, more than any other, was responsible for the bloodshed of the US Civil War, I think I’d nominate Founding Father Benjamin Franklin for the honor. Well, maybe not. Anybody want to attempt to make a case for Nat Turner? Roger Taney?

Slavery is never directly mentioned in the US Constitution, although the document explicitly regard people coming into the nation from Africa to constitute cargo rather than to constitute prospective citizens. Also, Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons. (Art. I, Sec. 2)

2. Yes, children, it was our trusted and revered Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, as much as any single American, who caused the bloodletting of our Civil War. Was the guy on drugs during this convention? —No, we don’t know for certain sure that he began his heavy use of opium before the year after this one. The only drug we can be quite certain he was on at this point, besides fatheadedness, was racism.

Son of so-and-so and so-and-so, this so-and-so helped us to gain our independence, instructed us in economy, and drew down lightning from the clouds.

Incidentally, in using the trope “peculiar institution” today we tend to make an implicit criticism of enslavement. Not so originally! In its initial usages, to refer to slavery as “peculiar” was not in any way to attack it but rather proclaim it to be defensible. “Peculiar,” in this archaic usage, indicated merely that the legitimacy of the system was based not upon any endorsement by a higher or more remote legal authority, but based instead upon the “peculiar conditions and history” of a particular district of the country and a particular society and a particular historically engendered set of customs and procedures and conventions. This trope went hand in hand with the Doctrine of States Rights, and went hand in hand with the persistence of the English common law. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This is usually telegraphed by some comment such as “Our founding fathers believed that black people were 3 subhuman, and evaluated them as /5ths of a human being.” That would have been bad enough, but this section is open to another, more accurate, and more pejorist, interpretation. Consider the key words here, “Representatives ... shall be apportioned” in the light of the end of this paragraph, which assigns the number of representatives each state would have until the first census could be taken, and ask yourself the question “So, how many representatives does each state initially get in the US Congress? The formula that was used is that representation was proportional to population, except that only 60% of the slaves were counted. Representatives represent those who elect and re-elect them. Blacks, free white children, and free white women were not allowed to cast ballots. The proper critical question to ask of this passage would not be, Why 3 were slaves counted at only /5ths, when free white children and free white women were counted as whole units? The question would be, Why were they counted at all? Their inclusion in the census only served to inflate the representation of the free citizens of the slave-holding states. It certainly did nothing to promote the representation of the slaves in Congress. It could easily be demonstrated that the political interests of the free white men who were casting ballots had a significant amount of overlap in that period with the political interests of free white children and free white women, but it would be significantly harder to demonstrate a significant amount of overlap between the interests of slaveholders and the interests of their slaves. Of the actual voters in slave-holding states, how many held the same political opinions as the slaves? It might be a good guess that the answer is, close to zero. So why were these voters allowed extra representation, as if they could speak for 60% of the slaves? If we want to make a slogan of it, we shouldn’t 3 be saying that the founding fathers considered a slave to be /5ths of a person. We should be saying that they considered a slave a nonperson who increased someone else’s, the possessor’s, political worth by 60%. Bear in mind that what we are considering here is an era in which voting rights and property rights were still conceptually entangled — simply because in any event only men of property were entitled to cast a ballot.

3 3 Why /5ths? –Because on an average you can only get about /5ths as much work out of a slave, through a motivational system primarily consisting of punishments and the threat of punishment, that you can get out of a free person, through a motivational system primarily consisting of rewards and the prospect of rewards! 3 (Also, very practically, because both the North and the South were willing to compromise at /5ths whereas 5 the northern colonies would never have entered the Union had Southern slaves been weighed at /5ths and the 0 southern colonies would never have entered the Union had their slave property been weighed at /5ths.)

On the popular but quite incorrect interpretation of Art. 1 Sec. 2 of the US Constitution, whatever benefit 3 a population received from being counted, the slave population was to receive but /5ths of that benefit. On a more accurate interpretation, the slave population was to receive no positive benefit at all, or was to receive a negative benefit, from being thus counted, for you will notice that the benefit that accrues from 3 counting /5ths of the slave population is a benefit which is assigned to the free voting population of the same state, which is thus even more powerful — and even more capable of abusing those being held in captivity.

In a November 9, 2000 op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The Electoral College, Unfair from Day One,” Yale Law School’s Akhil Reed Amar would argue that intent of the Founding Fathers in creating the electoral college which was so perplexing us during the Bush/Gore presidential election, like their intent in creating the 3 /5ths rule, had been to protect America’s southern white men from the vicissitudes of majority rule: In 1787, as the Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia, James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed direct election of the president. But James Madison of Virginia worried that such a system would hurt the South, which would have been outnumbered by the North in a direct election system. The creation of the Electoral College got around that: it was part of the deal that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Southern states, in computing their share of electoral votes, could count slaves (albeit with a two-fifths discount), who of course were given none of the privileges of citizenship. Virginia emerged as the big winner, with more than a quarter of the electors needed to elect a president. A free state like Pennsylvania got fewer electoral votes even though it had approximately the same free population. The Constitution’s pro-Southern bias quickly became obvious. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency. Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800 against John Adams from Massachusetts in a race where the slavery skew of the Electoral College was the decisive margin of victory. The system’s gender bias was also obvious. In a direct presidential election, any state that chose to enfranchise its women would have automatically doubled its clout. Under the Electoral College, however, a state had no special incentive to expand suffrage — each got a fixed number of electoral votes, regardless of how many citizens were allowed to vote. With the assistance of abolitionist Quakers, in this year the newly freed slaves of the city of Philadelphia formed a Free African Society. The society was intended to enable mutual aid and nourish the development of a cadre of black leaders. The immediate cause of organization of this Free African Society was that in this year the St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia had segregated its colored members from its white communicants. Blacks to the back: African worshipers were sent to the church’s gallery. One Sunday as the African members knelt to pray outside of their segregated area they were actually tugged from their knees, so they understood that they needed to form this new society — and out of this came an Episcopalian group and a Methodist one. Restrictions placed on the number of “Allenites” permitted to attend Methodist meetings organized by Richard Allen obliged him to help organize in an old blacksmith shop an independent Methodist Church. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Pennsylvania enacted a gradual emancipation act providing that no child born in Pennsylvania after March 1, 1780 should be a slave. (It would still be possible to purchase and sell slaves in Pennsylvania after the passage of this act, and in fact we can find frequent sale ads in Pennsylvania newspapers as late as 1820. Pennsylvania slaves could not, however, any longer be legally sold out of the state. Anyone who was a slave prior to the passage of this Gradual Emancipation Act was still a slave for life, even if he or she had been a mere newborn infant as of February 1780. Slaveholders could still sell the time of young people born to slave mothers after 1780, subject to the ban on out-of-state sales, until they reached the manumission age of 28. Therefore, as late as the 1830 census, Pennsylvania still sported some 400 slaves. There were many conflicts over enforcing the law, including with slaveholders who attempted to transport pregnant slaves to Maryland so that a child would be born a slave rather than born merely a servant until the age of 28. Slaveholders initiated arguments about whether the grandchildren as well as the children of slaves would be bound to serve until age 28. “Sojourning” slaveholders from other states would raise issues of the status of slaves brought into Pennsylvania. “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1790

In England, the jurist Jeremy Bentham was developing a scheme of control through visuality and information which he would term the “panopticon”: a prison architecturally designed to minimize personal privacy while maximizing the convenience of constant surveillance of all prisoners by a minimal set of guards.

It would be in this decade, also, that the Irishman Robert Barker would be pioneering a scheme of information through visuality and surveillance which he would term the “panorama,” displayed in a specially designed “rotunda” space. Since these panoramas could be rolled up and carried around from town to town in a cart, and since they could be unrolled at one end while being rolled up at the other end for the benefit of a stationary viewing audience, they functioned as a sort of low-tech moving picture show.

Get this: movie-goers and prison-guards were being constructed as engaging in the same sort of activity!

The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons helped in the creation of the first penitentiary, a “Penitentiary House,” with a capacity of 16 single cells, an experiment with day and night solitary confinement (Block D in a wing of the old Walnut Street Jail). The name of the organization would be changed at its first centennial to The Pennsylvania Prison Society, and the organization continues to have a strong influence in the Pennsylvania Correctional scene. Designated members of the Society continue, by law, to be official visitors to all state and county prisons throughout the Commonwealth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In England, the jurist Jeremy Bentham was developing a scheme of control through visuality and information which he would term the “panopticon”: a prison architecturally designed to minimize personal privacy while maximizing the convenience of constant surveillance of all prisoners by a minimal set of guards.

It would be in this decade, also, that the Irishman Robert Barker would be pioneering a scheme of information through visuality and surveillance which he would term the “panorama,” displayed in a specially designed “rotunda” space. Since these panoramas could be rolled up and carried around from town to town in a cart, and since they could be unrolled at one end while being rolled up at the other end for the benefit of a stationary viewing audience, they functioned as a sort of low-tech moving picture show.

Get this: movie-goers and prison-guards were being constructed as engaging in the same sort of activity!

The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons helped in the creation of the first penitentiary, a “Penitentiary House,” with a capacity of 16 single cells, an experiment with day and night solitary confinement (Block D in a wing of the old Walnut Street Jail). The name of the organization would be changed at its first centennial to The Pennsylvania Prison Society, and the organization continues to have a strong influence in the Pennsylvania Correctional scene. Designated members of the Society continue, by law, to be official visitors to all state and county prisons throughout the Commonwealth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1817

A prisoner, Henry Phillips,3 was hanged for murder in Boston. This year marked the last use of the public whipping post in the town of Spindle Hill, Connecticut, where Bronson Alcott was at this point 17 years of age.4 THE ALCOTT FAMILY

FAMOUS LASTS

1817 Mary Ashford a final appeal to Trial by Combat

last whipped at the whipping post of Spindle Hill, 1817 pair of cattle thieves Connecticut

Charles Carroll of Carrollton or last of the signers of the Declaration of Indepen- November 14, 1832 Charles Carroll III dence, age 95

3. This was, actually, the 2d Henry Phillips or Philips to commit murder in Boston. The initial Henry Phillips or Philips had been a gentleman who had killed another gentleman Benjamin Woodbridge in a sword duel on the Common on July 3/4, 1728, and had with the help of friends escaped judgment by fleeing to England and then France. 4. In English law the public whipping of women, which had been happening with decreasing frequency since the 1770s, was brought to a stop during this year. The public whipping of men, however, would continue in England into the 1830s. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The last persons so tortured, a pair of cattle thieves, received 7 lashes each across the back, over the wounds from which a quantity of rum was afterward poured.

Things were much more benign in New York State, where a new prison facility at Auburn began in this year to experiment with the scheme generally referred to as “lease prisons.” Since we honest citizens have all these prisoners we are punishing, having nothing productive to do with their wait time, let’s force them to labor for their own upkeep while under detention! (It’s only fair to us! The harder and more unpleasant their labor, the more of a punishment it will be! They’ll learn their lesson and sin no more! Why should we pay a criminal’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bills for him? Does anyone suppose that becoming a criminal gives a person some sort of right to be on the public dole? No way Jose! I mean, get serious! Etc. :-)

Here’s some commentary on the situation which has appeared in the April 1996 issue of Prison Legal News: Sometimes private business entities contracted with states to operate their entire prison system; other times the state would operate the prison and “lease” the prison labor to businesses. Nineteenth-century prisons were essentially forced labor camps. Prisoners were made to produce a wide array of goods, including shoes, furniture, wagons, and stoves. For the sake of profit, they were often housed in squalid conditions, fed spoiled food, and given scant clothing or shoes. Whippings were commonplace, and medical care was nonexistent. LEASED PRISONS According to Jeffrey Weeks’s SEX, POLITICS AND SOCIETY (Longman, 1981), during this year in England a man was sentenced to hang under the sodomy laws for having oral sex with a boy (after being thoroughly frightened, he would be pardoned).

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1819

From this year until 1823, at the New York State prison in Auburn, the “congregate” system of penitentiary organization would be being developed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1821

Another group of manumitted persons, from Hanover County, Virginia, arrived in Columbia, Pennsylvania.

After many years of lobbying by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, the Pennsylvania Legislature approved funding to build Eastern State Penitentiary to house 250 inmates. Four architects submitted designs for this massive new structure. The design of John Haviland, a British architect who had settled in Philadelphia, was selected, and he was awarded $100. William Strickland, whose design had been rejected, was hired to oversee the construction.

The citizens of Philadelphia sent a petition in regard to bankruptcy to the federal Congress: The poor African, ...devoid of the intellectual torments which are produced by dependence and subjection, to a mind nurtured in the habits of liberty and intelligence, stands on ground far more enviable that than maintained by the insolvent debtor. (It is clear from the text of this 1821 petition that said “insolvent debtors” who were sending this missile off in the direction of the federal Congress, who although “nurtured in the habits of liberty and intelligence” were presently reduced to “dependence and subjection,” were all and only white people completely lacking in any recognition of or sympathy for the intellectual torments that come with being nonwhite in a racist culture.)

Dr. Thomas Low Nichols, in FORTY YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE, 1821-1861 (NY: Stackpole Sons, originally issued in 1864, reissued in 1937), would characterize the following four decades of his experience as a period of constant unsettled scratching and scraping to keep ahead of the Joneses. It is clear that, where he is speaking of “everyone” and of “all,” actually he is confining his attention to the American white people: Every one is tugging, trying, scheming to advance — to get ahead. It is a great scramble, in which all are troubled and none are satisfied. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1822

Dr. Richard Harlan was appointed a physician in the Philadelphia Almshouse, where he would remain in practice until he would decide, in 1838, to relocate to France.

A Colored Orphan Asylum was created in Philadelphia. Of course, no such faculty would be needed in Boston.5

A student of Dr. Joseph Parrish, Samuel George Morton, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. After earning an advanced degree from Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1823, he would begin the practice of medicine at Philadelphia in 1824. From 1839 to 1843, he would be the Professor of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania.

In Philadelphia, construction began on the foundations and walls of the Eastern State Penitentiary. William Strickland was fired from his job overseeing the construction and John Haviland, the architect who had created the design for the building, was hired to replace him.

5. In 1838 a mob of Philadelphians, persuaded that “nigger charity” was not different from throwing money away, would torch this orphanage. We don’t know whether Dr. Morton would have agreed with this sort of sentiment, but we do know that he supposed black people to be essentially and necessarily inferior to white people — and therefore somewhat less entitled to consideration. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1825

Due to overcrowding at Auburn and Newgate, establishment of the New York state prison at Ossining, familiarly known as Sing Sing, near Auburn, a model prison at which, rather than follow the “isolation” system of Pennsylvania, prisoners would be required to work together at industrial tasks. Still, the prisoners were not to be allowed to communicate with one another in any manner as they were marched at close lockstep with heads bowed from cells to workshops, and then from workshops to cells: for contrast with the “separate” system this would come to be known as the “silent” system. Both systems would seek to prevent prisoners from any association with one another. Per Morris, Norval and Daid J. Rothman, eds. THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE PRISON: THE PRACTICE OF PUNISHMENT IN WESTERN SOCIETY: It was not the case, although many suppose it to have been the case, that imprisonment has been a dominant means of punishment. Imprisonment played only a minor role prior to the 19th century. In colonial America the sanctions which were the most widely used were fines, whippings, techniques of humiliation (branding, letter wearing, ear cropping, the pillory and the stocks), banishment, and of course the ultimate “humiliation” and “banishment” — the gallows tree. Then came the Pennsylvania Plan for the “penitentiary” in which prisoners did not come into contact with one another, and the New York Plan, implemented at Auburn State Prison, where prisoners were kept in solitary cells at night but labored together in a workshop during the day. The Auburn plan would prevail, presumably not because it corrected the criminal but because it organized the essentially free prison labor with greater efficiently at a lower cost. It would serve as a model for European prison builders as well as American, as the idea that this custody was for purposes of correction gradually came to be used only as a cover story which gave to this practice of incarceration an aura of respectability, as somehow different from the techniques of humiliation which it had replaced. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 20, Monday: The Marquis de Lafayette visited the unfinished Eastern State Penitentiary on Fairmount Avenue in Philadelphia.

In his 2d Birmingham concert, Franz Liszt presented an overture (presumably the overture to his unperformed opera Don Sanche).

Per the journal of Albert Gallatin’s son James as recorded in THE DIARY OF JAMES GALLATIN: We are all very happy here [at Friendship Hill]. The country is beautiful and mamma certainly has the art of making everybody comfortable. Josephine is delicate but loves the good air here, particularly for our boy, who is growing apace. Father worships him at a distance. A few days since I told father for the first time of Mr. Adams’ letter to me of February last. I had written privately to Mr. Adams informing him of father’s reasons for refusing the Treasury under his administration. Father has always been above suspicion and I may frankly say (although he is my father) that he is the only one of either party who has not fallen into some error which has cast suspicion on their motives. This Mr. Adams frankly acknowledges in his letter to me. When I read this paragraph I could see father’s evident gratification at the opinion held of him by a political opponent-and that opponent the actual President of the United States. We drifted into reminiscences of Paris. Father’s heart is there and in Geneva, but only stern duty keeps him here.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 20 of 6 M / Sister Elizabeth left us with her husband & child for home. - Sister Ruth accompnying them as far as Providence where she intends to spend a few days in hopes a change of Air may be beneficial to her health. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE JUNE 20TH, 1825 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST). NOBODY COULD KNOW, AT THE POINT OF THE MARQUIS’S VISIT, THAT THIS PRISON WAS TO BECOME NOTORIOUS FOR THE EGREGIOUS HARM IT WOULD DO TO ITS PRISONERS BY MEANS OF LONG-TERM SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.

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1826

Construction of the Eastern State Penitentiary on Fairmount Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was completed. Since the land in question had previously been a cherry orchard, the facility would be referred to familiarly as the Cherry Hill Prison, and Fairmount Avenue would come to be termed Cherry Street.

(The original “separation” or “isolation” aspect of this facility would be an abject failure, allegedly leading its inmates into mental disorders. The facility would finally close in 1970 — only to briefly re-open a few years later to handle overflow during the Holmesburg Prison riots.)

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1829

At least 75,000 Americans were being held in prison for debt each year, the majority of these owing less than $20 (in today’s currency, something like $2,000). Massachusetts reorganized its state prison in Charlestown. Pennsylvania added to its state prison in Pittsburgh another one, in Philadelphia.

John Haviland designed the original 7 cellblocks of the Eastern State Penitentiary, radiating like the spokes on a wheel from a central observation point. He positioned this edifice of enlightened correction high on Cherry

Hill above downtown Philadelphia in order that Pennsylvania children might be frightened into behaving themselves. It cost $780,000 and was rumored to be the most expensive structure in the United States of 1 America. Haviland designed the cells to be solitary confinement chambers, 7 /2 feet wide and 12 feet deep and 16 feet high which is exceedingly generous by today’s standards, and provided a round skylight in the ceiling that would remind the incarcerated person of the eye of God gazing down upon him or her in his or her penitence. The entrance door was intentionally low in order to force the prisoner to stoop upon entering, so as

constantly to remind the prisoner of his or her humiliation. Each cell had a back door which led to its own equally isolated exercise area of equal size, which was to be visited on schedule, for exactly 2 hours each day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Each such whitewashed cell was to be equipped with one sleeping platform, one workbench, one desk and stool, one Bible and one toilet facility — and with exactly nothing else. The workbench was to be used for such productive labor as shoemaking and weaving, tasks which could be accomplished entirely in privacy and in relative silence. The corridor along which the cells are aligned has a barrel-vault ceiling, so that any sounds will reverberate, and the guards would have the strictest orders to detect and punish any whispering among the inmates. No inmate was ever to come into contact with any other inmate, the only communication being terse official functional communication with the guards. The whole idea was to keep 250 souls in total isolation from one another and subject to a long-term Quaker silence. Each person was to be allowed the opportunity to confront his or her God in the depths of his or her own soul. Per Morris, Norval and Daid J. Rothman, eds. THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE PRISON: THE PRACTICE OF PUNISHMENT IN WESTERN SOCIETY: It was not the case, although many suppose it to have been the case, that imprisonment has been a dominant means of punishment. Imprisonment played only a minor role prior to the 19th century. In colonial America the sanctions which were the most widely used were fines, whippings, techniques of humiliation (branding, letter wearing, ear cropping, the pillory and the stocks), banishment, and of course the ultimate “humiliation” and “banishment” — the gallows tree. Then came the Pennsylvania Plan for the “penitentiary” in which prisoners did not come into contact with one another, and the New York Plan, implemented at Auburn State Prison, where prisoners were kept in solitary cells at night but labored together in a workshop during the day. The Auburn plan would prevail, presumably not because it corrected the criminal but because it organized the essentially free prison labor with greater efficiently at a lower cost. It would serve as a model for European prison builders as well as American, as the idea that this custody was for purposes of correction gradually came to be used only as a cover story which gave to this practice of incarceration an aura of respectability, as somehow different from the techniques of humiliation which it had replaced.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

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April 23, Thursday: Philadelphia enacted legislation specifying “separate or solitary confinement at labor.” The concept was that solitude would provide the criminal with the maximum opportunity to reflect on his or her crime, and repent (hence that new term “penitentiary”). This correctional theory would become known as the Pennsylvania System.

Plans were finalized to prohibit all contact between prisoners at the Eastern State Penitentiary, nearly ready for its initial load of inmates. Masks were fabricated, to ensure that the inmates could not communicate, or even view one another or their escorting guards, during the rare occasions on which they would be relocated from one isolated cell to another. The cells had individual exercise yards that prevented any contact between inmates and minimized contact with guards. Meals would be slid through a feed door.

Sam Houston steamed away from Nashville aboard the Red River on the Cumberland River. (He would disembark at Cairo, Illinois and, in the company of “an Irishman named H. Haralson,” board a flatboat and have themselves a drunken rollicking time all the way down to the mouth of the Arkansas River, where they would board a steamboat for Little Rock.)

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 23 of 4 M / We attended Meeting in Providence it was Preparative & Select Meeting - I was again tried with Poverty - indeed I could hardly come at any thing like sensibility -Hannah Robinson Prayed & then preached — In the Preparative Meeting the whole Queries were Answered - In the Select Meeting things were again low tho’ I believe it was a time of feeling to some. —- Our friends Moses Brown & Wm Almy were sick which made the gathering very small, with the exception of my wife & self - there were but five to compose the Meeting. — We not being members of the Moy [Monthly] Meeting. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

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October 23, Thursday: The United States navy was making brief landings along the coast of Cuba in this year, in pursuit of pirates. The landing on this date, the last for the year, was at Camrioca. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

The Boston Weekly Messenger announced that at the recent cattle show in Brighton, John Thoreau, Senior’s pencils made in Concord had won a $2.00 prize.

In Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary first opened it doors (or, rather, it being a prison, a better rendition would I suppose be that it first locked its doors and drew its blinds). Its initial inmate was “...Charles Williams, Prisoner Number One. Burglar. Light Black Skin. Five feet seven inches tall. Foot: eleven inches. Scar on nose. Scar on Thigh. Broad Mouth. Black eyes. Farmer by trade. Can read. Theft included one twenty-dollar watch, one three-dollar gold seal, one, a gold key. Sentenced to two years confinement with labor. Received by Samuel R. Wood, first Warden, Eastern State Penitentiary....”

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 23 of 10th M / A Short testimony by J Dennis & by me some favour experienced as well as Some tossings & rovings of mind — The epistle from the last Yearly, to the Subordinate Meetings was read in The Preparative meeting, & tho’ I had heard it several times before, now seemed fresh — The Queries were answered as usual. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

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1831

The superintendent of the Philadelphia House of Refuge acknowledged de facto segregation of the facilities for orphans, commenting about how degrading it would be “to the white children to associate with beings given up to public scorn.”

A very rich man died in this year in Philadelphia (which happens to be as good a place as any to die), and was forced under the circumstances to leave all assets behind. Richard Girard left his entire estate to create a foundation for the care of “poor male white orphan children.” A condition of the bequest was that no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of the gospel ever darken the door of that establishment, or darken the minds of the children it protected. The will would be trapped in litigation for the following more than fifteen years, until a decision of the US Supreme Court in 1844 would allow it to begin this work in 1846.

Work was completed on Block #3 of the Eastern State Penitentiary, the last of the original single-story cell blocks, and the initial female prisoner was received. Work began on the 2-story Blocks #4, #5, #6, and #7 to accommodate an ever-increasing numbers of convicts needing to be taught to repent of their criminal pasts (Block #7 would be completed in 1835).

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

October 12, Wednesday: French Commissioners Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont arrived at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. De Tocqueville asked to interview –in private, if you please– every prisoner.

The magazine The Youth’s Companion presented an article “Heroism” which presented the ideal American mother during the revolutionary war as one who sends her sons to kill the enemy, and the ideal American parson as one who blesses these local lads as they depart with their weapons: A good old lady, in 1775 lived on the sea board, about a day’s march from Boston, where the British army then was. By some unaccountable accident a rumor was spread, in the town and country, about there, that the Regulars were on a full march for the place, and would probably arrive in three hours at fartherest. This was after the battle of Lexington; and all, as Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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might be well supposed, was in sad confusion; some were boiling with rage, and full of fight, some with fear and confusion, some hiding their treasures, and others flying for life. In this wild moment, when most people in some way or other, were frightened from their property, our heroine, who had two sons, one about 19 years of age, and the other about 16, was seen by our informant, preparing them to discharge their duty. The eldest she was able to equip in fine style, she took her husband’s fowling piece, ‘made for duck or plover,’ (the good man being absent on a coasting voyage to Virginia,) and with it the power- horn and shot bag: but the lad thinking the duck and goose shot not quite the size to kill Regulars, his mother took a chizel, cut up her pewter spoons, and hammered them into slugs, and put them into his bag, and he set off in great earnest, but thought he would call one moment and see the parson, who said, ‘well done my brave boy; God preserve you;’ and on he went in the way of his duty. The youngest was importunate for his equipments, but his mother could find nothing to arm him with but an old and rusty sword; the boy seemed rather unwilling to risk himself with this alone, but lingered in the street, in a state of hesitation, when his mother thus upbraided him: You John H*****, what will your father say, if he hears that a child of his is afraid to meet the British? Go along: beg or borrow a gun and march forward, and if you come back, and I hear you have not behaved like a man, I shall carry the blush of shame on my face to my grave. They both joined the march: and met the enemy. A violent conflict ensued, but the villagers, came off victorious, and our heroes returned to their homes amid shouts of applause, and to the joy of their fond mother.

The American army was victorious and when these sons returned to their fond mother they returned as heroes, which demonstrates the excellence of such counsel.

Further, this issue of The Youth’s Companion presented an article reprinted from Sunday School Journal, which warned that much depended upon a youth’s caution in the choice of companions, and which encouraged parents to devote quality time with their offspring: A friend has kindly suggested to us the high importance of this subject in the education of children, especially their religious education. “The character of youth,” he says, “is very much formed, or at least materially modified, by the opinions and practices of those whom they select as familiar companions. Nothing, therefore, is more important, in order to training them in the way they should go, than that they receive wholesome advice on this subject.” Our friend then proposes the following extract, the appropriateness of which is very obvious: 1. Be not over anxious about society. Do not take up the opinion that all happiness centres in a friend. Many of you are blest with a happy home, and an agreeable circle around your own fire-side.* Here seek your companions HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in your parents, your brothers and sisters. 2. Determine to have no companions rather than an improper one. The one case is but a privation of what is pleasant, the other is the possession of a positive evil. 3. Maintain a dignified but not proud reserve. Do not be too frank and ingenuous. Be cautious of too hastily attaching yourselves as friends to others, or them to you. Be polite and kind to all, but communicative and familiar with few. Keep your hearts in reserve, till your judgment has most carefully examined the character of those who wish to be admitted to the circle of your acquaintance. Neither run nor jump into friendships, but walk towards them slowly and cautiously. 4. Always consult your parents about your companions, and be guided by their opinions. They have your interests at heart, and see further than you can. 5. Cultivate a taste for reading and mental improvement. This will render you independent of living society. Books will always furnish you with intelligent, useful and elegant friends. No one can be dull who has access to the works of illustrious authors, and has a taste for reading. And after all, there are comparatively few whose society will so richly reward us as this silent converse with the mighty dead. 6. Choose none for your intimate companions but those who are decidedly pious, or persons of high moral worth. A scrupulous regard to all the duties of morality; a high reverence for the Scriptures; a belief in their essential doctrines; a constant attendance on the means of grace, are the lowest qualifications which you should require in the character of an intimate friend. * Let me here address a word to parents. As you would not drive your children to seek improper companions abroad, seek to make them contented and happy at home. Render their own houses pleasant to them, and they will rarely feel a desire to seek happiness in the houses of others. Be you there companions and friends, and they will not be anxious to seek foreign ones. As far as circumstances will admit, be much at home yourselves, and that will keep your children there. Spend what evenings you can in the bosom of your family. Point out to your children what books to peruse. Read with them and to them. Converse with them in a free and engaging manner. Do not be household tyrants; driving your children from your presence by severity, petulance, and ill humour: but conduct yourselves with that affection and affability which shall render your return welcome to your family, and draw your children in a little crowd of smiling faces round you the moment you enter the room.

(If such a magazine’s counsel is heeded, we may expect that the children so guided are unlikely ever to wind up in the solitude of Eastern State Penitentiary!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1832

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1st story, “Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation of the German,” was published in a Philadelphia magazine, the Saturday Courier.

An inmate of the Eastern State Penitentiary, because he was working as the warden’s waiter, was able to lower himself from the roof of the front building. This was the institution’s 1st escape but the fugitive was promptly recaptured (since the same prisoner would in 1837 use the same technique to stage a 2d escape, the warden could not have been a very big tipper).

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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1834

This year produced the 1st of a number of investigations into Eastern State Penitentiary’s finances, punishment practices, and deviations from the Pennsylvania System of confinement.

There had never been more than about a hundred “Free Quakers,” even during the Revolution. At this point there were only two of the disowned “Free Quakers,” or “Pretend Quakers,” still regularly attending at the special meetinghouse constructed in 1783 in Philadelphia — Friend “Betsy” Ross and Friend John Price Wetherill. There was no longer any attempt being made, to hold meetings for worship. In this year these two permanently closed the doors of their meetinghouse, so that it could be rented out and converted successively into a school, a library for apprentices, and then a plumbing warehouse — as a source of income for them.6 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

6. The persons who would continue to be members of this group would continue only for purposes of property ownership, out of their entitlement to a share in the brick building at the corner of 5th Street and Arch Street in Philadelphia. Presently it is the headquarters for the Junior League of Philadelphia, although annually the descendants of the Free Quakers meet there to decide upon the distribution of funds generated by rental of the hall and income invested for charitable purposes. Inside are two of the original benches, and an original window exists nearly intact. The balcony is a recent addition. Among the exhibits is the 5-pointed star tissue pattern that Friend Betsy had allegedly used in making the 1st American flag (but the legend of her making such a flag is simply that, a legend and nothing more). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1836

Philadelphia had a place to put dead bodies: in this year the Laurel Hill Cemetery began to accept burials.

Philadelphia had a place to put living bodies: in this year the original buildings of the Eastern State Penitentiary complex were completed under the supervision of their architect John Haviland at a cumulative cost of nearly $780,000 (the most expensive and elaborate structure in the United States of America). Tourists were coming more than a mile by horse and buggy to marvel at the structure, which filled 10 acres with 450 centrally-heated cells and featured state-of-the-art plumbing and sewer systems. Governments throughout the world would model prisons after this marvel. Samuel Cowperthwaite, Convict #2954, would created a lithograph in 1855 depicting the building from above:

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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1841

June 1, Tuesday: In his American travels, the English Quaker abolitionist Joseph Sturge visited the Refuge for Juvenile Delinquents and the Eastern State Penitentiary on Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia:

During my short stay in Philadelphia on this occasion, I visited several of its prisons, philanthropic institutions, et cet. These are pro-eminently the glory of this beautiful city; yet as they have been often described, I shall pass them by in silence, with the exception of two, the Refuge, and the Penitentiary; which I briefly notice because I may offer a few general remarks in another place, on the important subject of prison discipline. The Refuge is an asylum for juvenile delinquents, founded on the just and benevolent principle that offences against society, committed by very young persons, should be disciplined by training and education, rather than by punishment. In this establishment there are from eighty to ninety boys, and from forty to fifty girls, of ages varying from eight to twenty-one years. The former are employed in various light handicraft trades, and the latter in domestic services, and both spend a certain portion of their time in school. They remain from six months to four years. From the statements of the superintendent and matron, it appeared that about three-fourths of the male, and four-fifths of the female inmates become respectable members of society, and the remainder are chiefly such as are fifteen or sixteen years of age when first admitted into the Refuge, an age at which character may be considered as in a great measure formed. The labour of the children pays about one-fifth of the expense of the establishment, the rest being defrayed by the legislature. The prejudice of colour intrudes even here, no children of that class being admitted into the Refuge. Coloured delinquency is left to ripen into crime, with little interference from public or private philanthropy. As might have been expected, coloured, are more numerous than white criminals, in proportion to relative population; and this is appealed to as a proof of their naturally vicious and inferior character; when in fact the government and society at large are chargeable with their degradation. The Penitentiary contained, at the time of my visit, about three hundred and forty male, and thirty-five female prisoners. In HDT WHAT? INDEX

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this celebrated prison, hard labour is combined with solitary confinement, a system which is technically known as the “separate” system. Silence and seclusion are so strictly enforced as to be almost absolute and uninterrupted; even the minister who addresses the prisoners on the sabbath is known to them only by his voice. A marked feature of this institution is security without the aid of any deadly weapon, none being allowed in the possession of the attendants, or indeed upon the premises. As compared with the “silent” system, exhibited in the not less famed prisons of the State of New York, this is much less economical, as the mode of employing the prisoners, in their solitary cells, greatly lessons the power of a profitable application of their labour.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

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1842

In this year opened the first permanent wire-cable suspension bridge in the USA, the Fairmont Suspension Bridge over the Schuykill in Philadelphia. Charles Ellet, Jr. created this suspension bridge to replace Lewis Wernwag’s “Colossus” of 1812, which at 340 feet had been the longest timber span in the US of A but which in 1838 had burned.

Charles Dickens came across the pond attempt to interdict American copyright piracy of his stuff, and to view Niagara Falls and the Eastern State Penitentiary. He would write “The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong....”

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Spring: Charles Dickens visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia: There were three young women in adjoining cells, all convicted at the same time of a conspiracy to rob the prosecutor. In the silence and solitude of their lives they had grown to be quite beautiful. Their looks were very sad, and might have moved the sternest visitor to tears, but not to that kind of sorrow which the contemplation of the men awakens. One was a young girl; not twenty, as I recollect; whose snow-white room was hung with the work of some former prisoner, and upon whose downcast face the sun in all its splendour shone down through the high chink in the wall, where one narrow strip of bright blue sky was visible. She was very penitent and quiet; had come to be resigned, she said (and I believe her); and had a mind at peace. “In a word, you are happy here?” said one of my companions. She struggled —she did struggle very hard— to answer, Yes; but raising her eyes, and meeting that glimpse of freedom overhead, she burst into tears, and said, “She tried to be; she uttered no complaint; but it was natural that she should sometimes long to go out of that one cell; she could not help that,” she sobbed, poor thing!

The English author would warn us sternly, after his tour of this penitentiary, that what was going on behind those walls was not in any sense to be considered benign or helpful: “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

Moncure Daniel Conway skipped school in order to glimpse the passing author: Charles Dickens came like one of our Rappahannock freshets, which once or twice rose high enough to float logs in our wood- cellar. Methodist prejudices against novel-reading were in this case floated, and I remember my parents laughing and weeping over the books of “Boz” while I was only old enough to build infant romances out of Cruikshank’s illustrations. Dickens supplied our homes with new fables, phrases, types. Our neighbour Douglas Gordon broke a small blood vessel laughing over Pickwick, and we pitied him no for the lesion, but because HDT WHAT? INDEX

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his doctor forbade him to read Dickens. My baby brother Richard acquired by his infant excitability the sobriquet “Tim Linkinwater.” In 1842 news came that Charles Dickens had arrived in America, and presently it was announced that on a certain day he was to pass through Fredericksburg on his way to Richmond. He was to come by steamboat from Washington to Aquia landing, thence by stage to Fredericksburg, alighting only for lunch at Farmer’s Hotel. The prospect of setting eyes on the greatest man in the world filled me with such emotion that my parents agreed that I might in their name ask Mr. Hanson for the necessary permission to leave school a little before the midday recess. The usage when we wished to leave the schoolroom temporarily was to stand silently before the master. This I did, but he happened to be irritated by some one in the class he was hearing and motioned me off. On my endeavouring to say I had permission of my parents, he ordered me to my seat. Thither I returned, jumped out of an open window, –seven or eight feet from the ground,– and reached the inn just as the author was alighting. On my return to school just after recess, there was a dead silence; my leap had been observed by many, and none knew the reason for it. Mr. Hanson stood pale and agitated, for I had been hitherto obedient. My brother Peyton was absent, and I was too much dazed by the situation to arrest by any plea the impending switch. It was the only flogging I ever received in school; and feeling that it was unmerited I bore it without a word or a tear. But tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. The dear old master, when he learned the whole story was more troubled than I was, for I had got a good look at Dickens. During my remaining five years in the school he treated me with a sort of affection, and when I left and entered college, in my sixteenth year, he announced the fact in school, and uttered a eulogy on my conduct and diligence. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

By this point the original plan for the Eastern State Penitentiary atop Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia had, fortunate for the mental health of its inmates, been subverted somewhat by a warehousing reality, and its solitary confinement cells were being shared among multiple inmates. Eventually 8 new cellblocks would be added to the original 7 that had radiated out from that observation hub atop Cherry Hill like the spokes of a wheel. Female prisoners were being housed in smaller cells in an upper story, of course without any exercise capability. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

Robert Collyer’s young son Samuel Collyer, whom he had left behind in Leeds, England in the care of his grandmother, at this point was summoned to Philadelphia.

Philadelphia became the first major city to issue revolvers to policemen (for the following six decades it would refrain from providing them with any training in the use of such weapons).

A fulltime schoolteacher was hired for the Eastern State Penitentiary.

The University of Pennsylvania appointed Professor Joseph Leidy as its delegate to the American Medical Association at St. Louis, Missouri. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

During this year 10,000 tourists, the largest number ever, visited Eastern State Penitentiary (largest number until, that is, historic tours would begin in these emptied buildings in 1994).

The public transportation in the city of Philadelphia was at the point the most firmly segregated by race, of any city in the Northern states. One day, when Frances Watkins, a nonviolent abolitionist and the best-known black poet in the USA, needed to ride in one of the horsecars, she refused to hang on the platform outside as she ought, but insisted upon being allowed to sit down inside, as black women were at that time being allowed to sit down on the public conveyances in the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. Since a white passenger requested that the conductor not attempt to eject her, this man limited himself to petitioning her to sit in a corner. She would not change her seat. When she arrived at her destination –the conductor finding he could not hold out his hand to receive her money– she was forced to place it on the floor at his feet.

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, AMERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

Fall: The crown prince of England, “Good old Teddy” or “Dirty Bertie” the Prince of Wales who would become Edward VII,7 touring Canada, visited the falls of the Niagara River:

From Montreal he went on to Ottawa, where he ... rode a timber shoot down the Ottawa River; then on, past Kingston, to Toronto and across Lake Ontario to the Niagara Falls, where he saw Charles Blondin, the French acrobat, walk across the Falls on a tightrope, pushing a man in front of him in a wheelbarrow. Blondin offered to put the Prince into the wheelbarrow for the return journey across the tightrope to the United States. The Prince accepted the offer, but was naturally prevented from going. So Blondin went back by himself, this time on stilts.

Continuing his tourism, the English prince arrived in Pennsylvania:

At Philadelphia, which he thought the “prettiest town” he had seen in America, he went to the opera –where the audience stood up to sing “God Save the Queen”– and he visited the big, modern penitentiary, where he met a former judge, Vandersmith, who was serving a sentence for forgery. He asked him if he would like to talk. “Talk away, Prince,” Vandersmith replied breezily. “There’s time enough. I’m here for twenty years.”

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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7. This is the guy that the immortal lines would be penned for –when he fell seriously ill just before his coronation which therefore had to be postponed– by the poet laureate of England, Alfred Austin:

“Swift down the wire th’electric message came ‘He is no better, he is much the same.’” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1877

At the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, construction began on 4 new cellblocks, without attached exercise yards. The new cellblocks would be positioned in the spaces between existing cellblocks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1894

At the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, construction of 4 new cellblocks, without attached exercise yards, begun in 1877, was completed. The new cellblocks were positioned in the spaces between existing cellblocks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1913

The “Pennsylvania Model” of incarceration in solitude was officially abandoned8 and our former “penitentiaries” were recognized as mere ordinary prisons for our routine warehousing of human beings whom we don’t know what to do with.

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8. Anyway, the isolation system had actually broken down decades earlier. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1923

Female prisoners were removed from the Eastern State Penitentiary to a new prison at Muncie. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1924

Inmates at the Eastern State Penitentiary were allowed to eat for the 1st time in group dining halls. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1925

Construction began on 3-story Cell Blocks #13 and #14 at the Eastern State Penitentiary. Any space between cellblocks had largely been removed. The institution, originally intended to warehouse 250 souls, was confining 1,700. Some of the inmates were bussed to labor on a new “farm branch” at Graterford. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1929

Al Capone was a citizen who was not a prisoner of war and, while incarcerated in this year and the following one for a total of 8 months at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, he would be allowed by the guards to decorate his cell with Persian carpets, antique furniture, and oil paintings. (His objets d’art would of course be in quite as poor taste as had been his Chicago rotgut whiskey.)

An article in the Philadelphia Public Ledger for August 20, 1929, described Capone’s cell: “The whole room was suffused in the glow of a desk lamp which stood on a polished desk.... On the once-grim walls of the penal chamber hung tasteful paintings, and the strains of a waltz were being emitted by a powerful cabinet radio receiver of handsome design and fine finish...” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1945

At Eastern State Penitentiary, a dozen of the prisoners escaped through a tunnel they had dug under the 30- foot-high, 12-foot-thick crenelated, granite-gray walls that emerged at Fairmount Avenue and 22nd Street in beautiful downtown Philadelphia. Prison plaster worker Clarence Klinedinst had designed and built most of the tunnel. At the time of the escape Klinedinst had only two years left to serve. Most of the escapees were caught within minutes. Klinedinst, outside the walls for two hours, would see ten years tacked onto his sentence, while the celebrity bank robber and escapist Willie Sutton, another of the dozen, would take the credit for having planned his tunnel! The Pennsylvania legislature recommended abandoning the Eastern State Penitentiary.

A week after the discovery of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a rumor reached the British Army’s “Desert Rats” that at the nearby village of Rather the 18th SS Training Regiment of the Hitler Jugend Division had executed prisoners of war. The “Desert Rats” were then closely engaged in a battle with SS defenders of the village of Nahrendorf near Hamburg and slowly, in groups, these SS were beginning to surrender. As the noise of battle died away and villagers emerged from their cellars, they would discover the corpses of 42 SS soldiers in a shallow grave. They would inter these corpses in their hilltop cemetery near the village, and after the war, each year, hundreds of SS veterans would visit this cemetery in order to pay tribute to fallen comrades — they would allege that these men had surrendered but had been gunned down on the orders of a “crazed blood-thirsty British NCO.” WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1953

When Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s PLAYER PIANO was distributed by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, that made it his 1st book club selection (the work was also published in this year outside North America, by Macmillan of London).

The Eastern State Penitentiary became the State Correctional Institution at Philadelphia, or “SCI-PHA.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1958

Americans purchased 100,000,000 hula hoops. Boston’s Central Artery was completed.

The City of Philadelphia certified Eastern State Penitentiary as historic property.

The new West Wing of Emerson Hospital in Concord opened. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1961

The cell blocks at the Eastern State Penitentiary were racially desegregated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1965

The US federal government designated Eastern State Penitentiary a National Historic Landmark (yes, that does sound desperate).

George Evelyn Hutchinson’s THE ECOLOGICAL THEATER AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PLAY.

In Britain, the 2d Brain Committee recommended increased control over opiates, including a system of addict notification, the establishment of special treatment centers which would seek to rehabilitate and not just maintain drug users, and the restriction of heroin supplies to these centers. These recommendations would be put into effect with the Dangerous Drug Act of 1968.

Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to dioxin, a highly toxic chemical component found in the Agent Orange used in Vietnam. The prisoners would later be checked to see if they had gotten cancer as a result of these secret medical experiments — which would seem to indicate that we have been suspecting all along, that Agent Orange might well prove to be carcinogenic.

Anyway, 42% of all this “herbicide” being spread across the countryside by Operation Ranch Hand would be dedicated to croplands and intended to produce famine, so if it’s famine we’re after, why should we draw the line at a few cancers? SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1970

During the following decade Chief Justice Warren E. Burger of the United States Supreme Court would be proselytizing for the conversion of our prisons into what he termed “factories with fences.” (Of course, nobody could figure out what the hell he was talking about, since our factories normally are surrounded by Cyclone fencing already anyhow. :-) LEASED PRISONS

The electrical and mechanical systems of the Eastern State Penitentiary atop Cherry Hill near beautiful downtown Philadelphia were in terrible shape (although its walls were still excellent). Most of the remaining 28 long-term inmates were remanded to the State Correctional Institution at Graterford. However, Philadelphia would discover that during this year and the following one, the “closed” “obsolete” facility would need to be pressed back into service, to house prisoners from the county prison at Holmesburg following a riot there. Friend Mary Ellen Chijioke of the Swarthmore monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends has commented in the 21st Century, “The now-deserted Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia stands a monument to the potentially disastrous consequences of well-meaning reform. Quakers had been all too aware of the horrors of 18th- and early 19th-Century prisons where only the wealthy could buy the privilege of

privacy. They also had felt the healing effect of quiet contemplation in their own lives. They therefore conceived of a prison that would allow convicts the privacy to reform themselves through meditation. The result was rigid solitary confinement and all its horrors. It’s a classic example of what happens when a new insight into one aspect of a problem is allowed to become the basis for a one-dimensional solution. Making provision for privacy was a good thing; enforcing it 24 hours a day was monstrous. How often do we repeat the pattern when we elevate a specific insight into a universal principle?” (Cherry Hill’s Pittsburgh counterpart, Western State Penitentiary, featured in John Edgar Wideman’s BROTHERS AND KEEPERS, may still be in use.)

It had been during the late 1700s that Louisiana had originated its legal conviction that the category “Negro” was to rigorously encompass any person at all, in whom might be detected “any traceable amount” of black ancestry. This decade, however, would see some hard bargaining in the Louisiana state legislature, with the Conservatives holding out for 1/64th as the determining fraction and the “more enlightened” legislators forcing a compromise at 1/32nd. (This compromise fraction would be upheld by the Louisiana State Supreme Court in 1974.)

The US law of military conscription would be amplified during this year in the Welsh v. US cases “398 US 333” and “398 US 33.” The question was whether Congress could defer to an individual’s conscience only when the individual’s views stemmed from adherence to religious beliefs. The court would determine that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Congress could not. “If the exemption [from military service] is to be given application,” Justice John Marshall Harlan would write in his concurring opinion, “it must encompass ... those whose beliefs emanate from a purely moral, ethical, or philosophical source.” Congress could draw no line between religious beliefs and secular beliefs when determining who might be recognized as a conscientious objector. As a result of this decision, the authority of individual conscience, however formed, was elevated in its capacity to refuse the obligation of military service. In theory, we may note, the US Congress might then have rewritten the draft law to eliminate any provision for conscientious objectors, for it remained the law that “government has the right to the military service of all its able-bodied citizens, and may, when an emergency arises, justly exact that service from all.” However, with continuing protests about the justness of the Vietnam war and the equity of the draft, to revise the selective service act was not politically possible. MILITARY CONSCRIPTION

OHNE MICH!

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1971

Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. founded the US Labor Party as a vehicle for electoral politics, maintaining that both the major parties had abandoned the American System economic policies that the LaRouche organization had embraced (LaRouche names Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt as exemplars of this school of thought). He organized the New Solidarity International Press Service as a wire service for his publications. He founded the weekly Executive Intelligence Review and co-founded the Fusion Energy Foundation.

Eastern State Penitentiary lay all but abandoned. The Philadelphia Streets Department was using the areas between its buildings for storage. Vandals were smashing its skylights and windows, and an urban forest was developing in the abandoned halls and cells. Dan McCloud, the last city caretaker, was continuing to feed a family of stray cats that had taken possession of the property. (All this would persist into the mid-1980s.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1974

Philadelphia’s Mayor Frank Rizzo suggested demolishing the Eastern State Penitentiary to construct a criminal justice center.

A former member of Lyndon LaRouche, Jr.’s US Labor Party, Gregory Rose, published an article in the National Review alleging that LaRouche had established contacts with Palestinian terrorist organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and also with the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1980

Kurt Vonnegut’s SUN MOON STAR, a children’s Christmas story with illustrations by Ivan Chermayeff, was published by Harper & Row.

The City of Philadelphia took title to the Eastern State Penitentiary, for some ungodly reason paying just over $400,000 to the State of Pennsylvania. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1983

Spring: Kurt Vonnegut, a native of Indianapolis, Indiana, preached at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The subject of his homily has since become Chapter XV of his book, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE OF THE 1980S (New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991).9 An excerpt of that chapter follows: FATES WORSE THAN DEATH: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE OF THE 1980S

“I will speak today about the worst imaginable consequences of doing without hydrogen bombs. “Scientists, for all their creativity, will never discover a method for making people deader than dead. So if some of you are worried about being hydrogen-bombed, you are merely fearing death. There is nothing new in that. If there weren’t any hydrogen bombs, death would still be after you... “But suppose we foolishly got rid of our nuclear weapons, our Kool-Aid, and an enemy came over here and crucified us. Crucifixion was the most painful thing the ancient Romans ever found to do to anyone. They knew as much about pain as we do about genocide. They sometimes crucified hundreds of people at one time. That is what they did to all the survivors of the army of Spartacus, which was composed mostly of escaped slaves. They crucified them all. There were several miles of crosses.10 9. I am including this preaching by Vonnegut in my file on the Eastern State Penitentiary, because Kurt would begin to elaborate here a quite tendentious account of Quaker history, that 19th-Century American Quaker foolishness and unworldliness involved the conceit that maddening long-term solitary confinement would possess a magic power as a curative. He would be referring to “the penitentiary system, an invention of American Quakers.” What I want you to take careful notice of is the fact that Kurt for all his lovable storytelling has never been a practitioner of the craft of the historian. When he asserts that he has found out something that nobody else has found out –a piece of true history– there is no reason in the world to believe him. He has no credentials, he has no credibility, in such an area. He has never studied Quaker history, has never been a close reader of Quaker pamphlets; he has never studied Philadelphia history, has never studied the history of American prisons, etc. He knows a lot but not about the way things used to be. He’s often right but sometimes attitudes are merely attitudes. He’s projects an intriguing personality but he’s also a pain in the ass — ask him to draw you a picture of his asshole. 10. Vonnegut’s calculations seem a bit off here. There were 6,000 crosses, and crosses simply cannot be placed less than a yard from one another! To the contrary, for maximum impressiveness they would have distributed those 6,000 crosses all along the Appian Way for the entire distance from Capua to Rome — which would put the average distance between crosses at about 120 running feet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“If we were up on crosses, with nails through our feet and hands, wouldn’t we wish that we still had hydrogen bombs, so that life could be ended everywhere: Absolutely. “We know of one person who was crucified in olden times, who was supposedly as capable as we or the Russians are of ending life everywhere. But He chose to endure agony instead. All He said was, ‘Forgive them, Father — they know not what they do.’ “He let life go on, as awful as it was for Him, because here we are, aren’t we? “But He was a special case. It is unfair to use Jesus Christ as an exemplar of how much pain and humiliation we ordinary human being should put up with before calling for the end of everything. “I don’t believe that we are about to be crucified. No potential enemy we now face has anywhere near enough carpenters... “But what if they [the Pentagon] said, instead, that we would be enslaved if we did not appropriate enough money for weaponry?... “And slavery would surely be a fate worse than death. We can agree on that, I’m sure. We should send a message to the Pentagon: ‘If Americans are about to become enslaved, it is Kool-Aid time.’ “They will know what we mean. ICBMS

“Of course, at Kool-Aid time all higher forms of life on Earth, not just we and our enemies, will be killed... “I have never seen a human slave, though. But my four great- grandfathers saw slaves. When they came to this country in search of justice and opportunity, there were millions of Americans who were slaves... “If the Soviet Union came over here and enslaved us, it wouldn’t be the first time Americans were slaves. If we conquered the Russians and enslave them, it wouldn’t be the first time Russians were slaves. “And the last time Americans were slaves, and the last time Russians were slaves, they displayed astonishing spiritual strengths and resourcefulness. They were good at loving one another. They trusted God. They discovered in the simplest, most natural satisfactions reasons to be glad to be alive. They were able to believe that better days were coming in the sweet by- and-by. And here is a fascinating statistic: They committed suicide less often than their masters did. “So Americans and Russians can both stand slavery, if they have to — and still want life to go on and on. “Could it be that slavery isn’t a fate worse than death? After all, people are tough. Maybe we shouldn’t send that message to the Pentagon - about slavery and Kool-Aid time. “But suppose enemies came ashore in great numbers because we lacked the means to stop them, and they pushed us out of our homes and off our ancestral lands, and into swamps and deserts. Suppose that they even tried to destroyed our religion, telling HDT WHAT? INDEX

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us that our Great God Jehovah, or whatever we wanted to call Him, was as ridiculous as a piece of junk jewelry. “Again: This is a wringer millions of Americans have already been through — or are still going through. It is another catastrophe Americans can endure, if they have to — still, miraculously, maintaining some measure of dignity, or self- respect. “As bad as life is for our Indians, they still like it better than death. “So I haven’t had much luck, have I, in identifying fates worse than death? Crucifixion is the only clear winner so far, and we aren’t about to be crucified. We aren’t about to be enslaved, either — to be treated the way white Americans used to treat black Americans. And no potential enemy that I have heard of wants to come over here to treat all of us the way we still treat American Indians. “What other fates worse than death could I name? Life without petroleum?... “My guess is that we will not disarm, even though we should, and that we really will blow up everything by and by. History shows that human beings are vicious enough to commit every imaginable atrocity, including the construction of factories whose only purpose is to kill people and burn them up.... “What can save us? Divine intervention, certainly - and this is the place to ask for it. We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness. “But the inventiveness which we so regret now may also be giving us, along with the rockets and warheads, the means to achieve what has hitherto been an impossibility, the unity of mankind. I am talking mainly about television sets. “Even in my own lifetime, it used to be necessary for a young soldier to get into fighting before he became disillusioned about war. His parents back home were equally ignorant, and believed him to be slaying monsters. But now, thanks to modern communications, the people of every industrialized nation are nauseated by the idea of war by the time they are ten years old. American’s first generation of television viewers has gone to war and come home again — and we have never seen veterans like them before.... “Thanks to modern communications, the poor, unlucky young people from the Soviet Union, now killing and dying in Afghanistan, were dead sick of war before they ever got there.... “Thanks to modern communications, the same must be true of the poor, unlucky young people from Argentina and Great Britain, now killing and dying in the Falkland Islands... Thanks to modern communications, we know that they are good deal more marvelous and complicated than that, and that what is happening to them down there, on the rim of the Antarctic, is a lot more horrible and shameful than a soccer match. “When I was a boy it was unusual for an American, or a person of any nationality for that matter, to know much about HDT WHAT? INDEX

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foreigners. Those who did were specialists — diplomats, explorers, journalists, anthropologists. And they usually knew a lot about just a few groups of foreigners, Eskimos maybe, or Arabs, or what have you. To them, as to the schoolchildren of Indianapolis, large areas of the globe were terra incognita.... “So we now know for certain that there are no potential human enemies anywhere who are anything but human beings almost exactly like ourselves. They need food. How amazing. They love their children. How amazing. They obey their leaders. How amazing. They think like their neighbors. How amazing. “Thanks to modern communications, we now have something we never had before: reason to mourn deeply the death or wounding of any human being on any side in any war. “It was because of rotten communications and malicious, racist ignorance that we were able to celebrate the killing of almost all the inhabitants in Hiroshima, Japan, thirty-seven years ago. We thought they were vermin. They thought we were vermin. They would have clapped their yellow hands with glee and grinned with their crooked buckteeth if they could have incinerated everybody in Kansas City, say. “Thanks to how much the people of the world now know about all the other people of the world, the fun of killing enemies has lost its zing. It has so lost its zing that no sane citizen of the Soviet Union, if we were to go to war with that society, would feel anything but horror if his country were to kill practically everybody in New York and Chicago and San Francisco. Killing enemies has so lost its zing that no sane citizen of the United States would feel anything but horror if our country were to kill practically everybody in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev. “Or in Nagasaki, Japan, for that matter. “We have often heard it said that people would have to change, or we would go on having world wars, I bring you good news this morning: People have changed. “We aren’t so ignorant and bloodthirsty anymore.... “I dreamed last night of our descendants a thousand years from now,...I ask them how humanity, against all odds, managed to keep going for another millennium. They tell me that they and their ancestors did it by preferring life over death for themselves and others at every opportunity, even at the expense of being dishonored. They endured all sorts of insults and humiliations and disappointments without committing either suicide or murder. They are also the people who do the insulting and humiliating and disappointing.... “I give them a quotation from that great nineteenth-century moralist and robber baron, Jim Fisk, who may have contributed money to this cathedral. “Jim Fisk uttered his famous words after a particularly disgraceful episode having to do with the Erie Railroad. Fisk himself had no choice but to find himself contemptible. He thought this over, and then he shrugged and said what we all must learn to say if we want to go on living much longer; ‘Nothing is lost save honor.’ HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“I thank you for your attention.”

Also known as “Doomsday Critic Laureate,” Vonnegut introduced the above when he was writing FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, his naive sermon 7 years after he had preached it. For the postscript of his sermon from the cathedral pulpit: “On the subject of how casual technology had made us about war, I should have called attention to the transmogrification of my birthday, November 11, from Armistice Day to Veterans Day ... and by the time I was preaching in St. John’s, the message of November 11 was that there were going to be lots more wars, and that we were ready for them this time (were we ever!), and that not just boys but girls, too, should want to grow up to be veterans (don’t be left out!) “We hadn’t yet killed more than a thousand Panamanians in the process of kidnapping their Head of State (a paid CIA agent) on suspicion of drug trafficking, or I sure would have talked about that. I would have reminded people my age what Captain J.W. Philip said to his crewmen aboard the Battleship Texas in Santiago Bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. (American public school kids used to know his words by heart. I bet they don’t anymore.) Shellfire from the Texas had set the Spanish Cruiser Vizcaya ablaze from stern to stern. And Captain Philip said, “Don’t cheer, boys, those poor devils are dying.” War back then, while perhaps necessary and surely exciting, was also a tragedy. It is still a tragedy, and can never be otherwise. “(Yes, and while I was doing the final editing on this book, which was written in the summer of 1990 and is supposed to about the 1980s, we experienced our great victory over Iraq. I will simply repeat what a woman said at supper a week after we stopped shooting and bombing and rocketing: ‘The atmosphere of this country now is like a big party in a beautiful home. Everybody is polite and bubbly, but there is this awful stink coming from somewhere, and it’s getting worse and worse. And nobody wants to be the first to mention it.’)”

Vonnegut has nothing but the highest praise for his cathedral host who had lived and preached in Indianapolis for many years and has been his and his wife’s friend and traveled with him. In response to a pregnant woman who asked him if he thought it was wrong to bring a child into such an awful world, he said, “What made living almost worthwhile for me was all the saints I met, and I named Bishop Moore.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1984

The city of Philadelphia transferred the Eastern State Penitentiary to the Redevelopment Authority to seek proposals for commercial use (maybe the solitary confinement cells could be transformed into office cubicles?).

The aircraft carrier USS Constellation was returned to service, fully refurbished and modernized. It had become able to carry the Navy’s newest strike fighter, the F/A-18 Hornet. During WESTPAC 87, the Connie would provide air cover for the escort of US-flagged tankers through the Persian Gulf. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

1988

After the declaration of a mistrial, charges were refiled against Lyndon LaRouche. The 2d California AIDS initiative, again supported by LaRouche, lost again. LaRouche’s 2d autobiography, again entitled THE POWER OF REASON.

The Eastern State Task Force, a group of architects, preservationists, and historians, was formed. Philadelphia’s Mayor Wilson Goode urged the Redevelopment Authority to reject all proposals for commercial use of the crumbling property of the Eastern State Penitentiary. The initial limited group tours were staged. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1991

Kurt Vonnegut’s FATES WORSE THAN DEATH: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE OF THE 1980S, a bunch of reprocessed speeches and magazine articles, was published by Putnam.

Kurt had gotten married with his Shortridge High School classmate Jane Marie Cox (they had 1st met in kindergarten; she was Quaker, a daughter of Harvey Cox and Riah Cox and a graduate of Swarthmore College). The couple had produced a boy Mark Vonnegut and the girls Edith Vonnegut and Nanette Vonnegut. They had adopted the orphaned children James Adams, Steven Adams, and Kurt “Tiger” Adams of Kurt’s sister Alice Vonnegut Adams. They had gotten divorced, but, having had a 1st marriage with a Friend, presumably Kurt had had an opportunity to learn something or other about Quakerism. In FATES WORSE THAN DEATH he offered a thought on page 180 in regard to the 19th-Century American Quaker involvement with solitary imprisonment as a curative.11 Kurt comments on the fact that when his book JAILBIRD was translated into other European languages, none of these other languages turned out to possess any term for “persons who find themselves locked up again and again, since the penitentiary system, an invention of American Quakers, is so new.” —If we did this thing, as for instance in Eastern State Penitentiary atop Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia, then, as Vonnegut comments elsewhere in this opus on human inventiveness, We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness. QUAKER FAKELORE The story has grown up, that prisoners driven mad by these Quaker ideas for “correctional facilities” ended up committing suicide. However, try as I might, I have not been able to discover any evidentiary basis for such a history of suicides at this prison. It would seem that the evidence for a wave of suicides there is the same as the evidence for a wave of suicides following the publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s DIE LEIDEN DES JUNGEN WERTHERS (THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER): the evidence amounts to nothing more and nothing less than continual repetition of the accusation. In the realm of fakelore, endless repetition counts as multiple attestation until the cow does indeed jump over the moon.

So, had Quakers in fact, as Vonnegut was asserting, as presumably his Philadelphian wife had informed him, initiated this penitentiary thingie? Is this sort of experiment in mental torture indeed to be laid directly and solely at our door, as a National Public Radio NPR podcast now confidently asserts? No, in fact, although there were Quakers involved in the development of the penitentiary system and the institution of solitary confinement, these committee members were not unusually influential and were not leaders. The head of the prison-planning group, actually, was a member of another Christian grouping (to protect the guilty, I’m not going to tell you which one), and was a person of influence in that other Christian grouping — yet no-one ever, ever accuses that other Christian grouping (which, I repeat, I have refrained from identifying) of having had bad judgment in the manner in which it has become conventional to accuse the Quakers!

11. Kurt may, alternatively, have acquired this false account of Quaker history from the newspapers of this year, since in this year they were reporting that with generous funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts, stabilization and preservation efforts had begun upon what remained of the structure of the Eastern State Penitentiary. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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What follows is a complete list of the members of the Philadelphia prison society in question. Perhaps, using this list as a starting point, we will be able to ferret out which of these had been Quakers, and which of these Quakers had been so influential in the prison society as to be able significantly to influence its policies of prisoner correction, and which of these influential Quakers had been advocates of the sort of “penitent” solitary confinement which was being alleged by Vonnegut to have led to insanity and suicide? (Or, maybe not. One thing I will mention, in passing, is that there is in fact an influential book dating to that period, which did seem to recommend such harsh policies — however, said book, titled THE STATE OF THE PRISONS IN ENGLAND AND WALES and issued in 1777, had been authored by John Howard, a wealthy crazed English Calvinist who has most decidedly never been accused of being any sort of Quaker. Also, when confronted by Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon” model, Howard had insisted that this was not at all the sort of thingie which he had had in mind.) Abercrombie, James Baily, Francis Adams, Richard Baker, John Adcock, William Ballantyne, Thomas Affleck, Thomas Bankson, Jacob Allen, Andrew Barclay, James J. Allen, Enoch Barker, James N. Allen, Joseph Beaven, William Allen, Joshua Beck, William C. Andrews, John Bedell, G. T. Annan, Robert Bend Joseph G. T. Anthony, John Benezet, Philip Anthony, Joseph, Sen. Bethel, Robert Ashby, William Bettle, Edward Attmore, Caleb Bingham, Archibald Bache, Franklin Bingham, William Bacon, Job Bird, Charles Bacon, John Blackwell, Robert Bleakley, John Claypoole, John Boothe, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Boyd, George Coates, Benjamin H. Boys, Elias Coates, Josiah Bradford, Thomas, Jr. Coates, Samuel Bradford, William Coates, William Bringhurst, John Collin, Nicholas Bunker, Nathan Collins, Isaac HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Bush, Solomon Connelly, John Caldwell, T. Connelly, Patrick Carmalt, Caleb Conner, Michael Carmalt, Jonathan Cooper, James Carson, Andrew Connelly, Henry Carter, D, B. Cope, Marmaduke C, Clark, Ephraim Copperthwaite, Joseph Clarkson, Gerardus Coxe, Charles S. Clarkson, Joseph Tench, Coxe Claypoole, David C. Cresson, Caleb. Jr. Carey, Mathew Crawford, Charles Engles, Joseph P. Cruikshank, Joseph Engles, William M. Davis, Samuel Evans, Charles Davis, Samuel Evans, John Dawes, Jonathan Evans, Joseph Delancey, William H. Falconer, Nathaniel Dobson, J. L. or Thomas Fare, John Dobson, Judah Fassit, James Dobson, Thomas Fassit, John Drais, Daniel Ferris, Benjamin Drinker, Henry Few, Joseph Duffield, Benjamin Field, John Duffield, George Finley, Francis Duncan, William Fisher, Jeremiah John Dunlap Fisher, John Du Plessis, Peter Le Barbier Fisher, William Earp, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Thomas Eldridge, Samuel Forbes, William Ely, E. S. Foulke, John Fox, George Green, Jacob Fox, Samuel M. Griffitts, Samuel P. Franklin, Benjamin HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Haines Ephraim Franklin, William Temple Haines, Reuben Fuller, Benjamin Hall, William Gallagher, David Hallowell, Israel Gardner, John Harding, Jasper Gardner, Richard Harrison, Thomas Garrett, Philip Hartshorne, Pattison Garrigues, Abraham M. Helmuth, J. Henry Garrigues, William Henderson, S. J. George, Edward Hewes, Josiah Geyer, Andrew Heysham, William Gibson, James Hill, Henry Gilpin, Henry D. Hood, William H. Gordon, Elisha Hopkins, Robert, Jr. Goffin, Joseph M. Hornor, Benjamin Green, Ashbel Howell, Isaac Humphreys, Richard La Roche, Rene Humphreys, Thomas Latimer, George Hutchinson, James Lawrence, William Ingersoll, Joseph R. Leib, George James, John Leib, Michael James, Joseph Lewis, Robert M. James, Thomas C. Lippincott, Samuel Jobson, James Lippincott, William Jones, John Lloyd, Peter Kaign, John Lloyd, Thomas Keable, John Lowber, John C. Keating, William H. Lownes, Caleb Keen, Joseph Lucas, William Jackson, Kemper Lucas, William Kidd, William Ludwick, Christopher Kimber, Thomas. 2d McCrea, John Kite, Joseph S. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

McGoffin, Joseph Kittera, Thomas McIllhenney, William Krebs, George McIllhenney, William, Jr. Large, Ebenezer McIlvaine, Joseph MacKensie, William Moore, Joseph Magaw, Samuel Moore, Thomas Marshall, Benjamin Moore, Thomas L. Marshall, Benjamin Morris, Benjamin W. Marshall, Charles Morris, Israel W. Marshall, Christopher, Sen. Morris, John Marshall, Christopher, Jr. Morris, Robert Maule, Israel Morrison, John Mead, George Morrison, Thomas Meder, John Morrison, William Merriam, Ezekiel Morton, John, Jr. Miles, Samuel Morton, Samuel G. Miller, Clement S. Moyers, James Mitchell, Abraham Neal, Benjamin T. Mitchell, Thomas Needles, Edward Molyneux, Robert Norris, Joseph P. Montgomery, James O'Brien, Michael M. Moore, Charles Oldden, Daniel Moore, James Oldden, John Palmer, Samuel Pilmore, Joseph Palmer, Thomas Pleasants, Samuel Parke James P. Potts, David Parker, Jeremiah Poulson, Charles A. Parker, Richard Poulson, Zachariah Parker (Parkinson), Thomas Poultney, Benjamin Parrish, Isaac Price, Richard Parrish, Joseph Price, William Paschall, Joseph Pyle, Joseph Paul, John HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

Ralston, Gerard Paul, Joseph M. Randolph, Edward, Jr. Paxson, Benjamin Randolph, Jacob Pemberton, James Rawle, William Pennock, Abraham Read, John M. Penrose, Jonathan Reed, Joseph Perot, Elliston Reed, William B. Perot, John Redman, John Pickering, Elihu Remington, Job B. Riley, John Shields, Thomas Reynolds, James Shipley, Thomas Robbins, Samuel J. Shippen, William, Jr. Robinson, James Shoemaker, Abraham Roberts, George Shoemaker, Benjamin Roberts, Robert Shoemaker, Jacob Rodgers, F.R.B. Sims, Joseph Rogers, Thomas Smith, George Washington Rogers, William Smith, Henry Rotch, Joseph Smith, Robert H. Rundle, George Snowden, Jedediah Rush, Benjamin Sproat, James Rutledge, E. Stansbury, Joseph Ryerson, Thomas Starr, James Sansom, Samuel Starr, John Say, Benjamin Starling, John Shade, Peter Stewardson, Thomas Shewell, Thomas Stockton, Richard Stroud, George McD. Waln, Nicholas, Jr. Swanwick, John Waln, Robert Taggart, Robert Warder, Jeremiah Tatem, Joseph Watson, Thomas, Jr. Thaw, Benjamin Wayne, Joseph Thomas, Jacob HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Wayne, William, Jr. Thompson James B. Weatherly David Thompson, Jonah Weiberg, Caspar Thornton, William Welbert, F. Anthony Tittermary, Richard Weller, George Todd, John Wells, Richard Towers, Robert Wharton, George M. Troth, Henry Wharton, John Tyng, S. H. Wharton, Kearney Tyson, Daniel Whim, Francis Uhler, George White, William Vaux, Richard Whitall, James Vaux, Roberts Wilcox, Mark Will, William Yarnall, Ellis H. Williams, George Young, William Williams, Joseph Zane, William Williams, Thomas Wistar, Bartholomew Wistar, Bartholomew Wistar, Caspar Wistar, Richard Wistar, Thomas Wood, James Wood, Samuel R. Wood, Thomas Wylie, Samuel B. Wynkoop, Benjamin Yarnall, Benjamin H. Yarnall, Charles Yarnall, Edward Yarnall, Ellis

Also, in this book FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, Vonnegut wrote the following: “The United States of America had human slavery for almost one hundred years before that custom was recognized as a social disease and people began to fight it. Imagine that. Wasn’t that a match for Auschwitz? What a beacon of liberty we were to the rest of the world when it was perfectly acceptable here to own other human beings and treat them as we treated cattle. Who told you we were a beacon of liberty from the very beginning? Why would they lie like that? Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and not many people found that odd. It was as though he had an infected growth on the end of his nose the size of a walnut, and everybody thought that was HDT WHAT? INDEX

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perfectly OK.” – Kurt Vonnegut, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, page 84

THOMAS JEFFERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

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SET AN EXAMPLE

The world, not merely Quakers universally but the world universally, is desperately in need of spiritual guidance, and the need for such spirituality is demonstrably growing more desperate day by day. The problem the world has been encountering has something to do with Fake News — has something to do with elaborations and embroideries on reality that have been swamping our sense of the real and, by swamping us in this manner, causing us to lose all sense of bearings. I would like to see Quakers leading the way, to help the world withdraw from this syndrome that is currently consuming us all. — And I think I perceive a way for us to supply that so-badly-needed leadership. All we have to do is set a positive real example, of what it is like to abandon lies and deceptions and place our trust in solid verities. We could set that example, by publicly abandoning the large number of pseudohistorical accretions that have demonstrably grown up over our centuries of existence as a religious society, and then the rest of the world could look at our example and say with growing confidence “Well, if stupid Quakers can do that we can do it as well!” The world, and Quakers too, are (is?) very clearly committing the error of adding when it should be subtracting. As Thoreau said, Simplify, simplify. Often, less is more. Can we set an example of such simplification? I think that as a historian, I have uncovered any number of cases in which Quaker lore has become over the centuries encrusted with “just-so stories,” stories which are not only unnecessary but also factually inaccurate. Why do I need a Clearness Committee? Well, first, this compendium of error which I have supposedly created needs to be tested, to verify publicly that the items on this list of errors are indeed what I am supposing them to be, errors, falsehoods, just-so stories lacking in evidentiary foundation. I can’t do that without a whole bunch of serious people who will tell me, are some of the items on this list actually true and actually of value and salvageable, or is my historical judgment correct, and these pseudofactoids mere figments of folks’ imaginations? I am 82 and afibrillation and hypertension are giving me problems and time is running out and I can’t do this alone. If we can’t be a shining light to the world, why can’t we be a shining light to the world? Are we too stupid to perceive the opportunity here, the opportunity to give the world an example when what the world so desperately needs now is precisely that, an example? Do you know what a potlatch is? It is a way to set things aright by giving up more stuff than anyone else could possibly give up. We Quakers need to abandon more lies than anyone else could possibly abandon. That could be our way to set things aright in this world. Back in the day of the Great Plague carts would roll through the streets of London and the cry would go up “Bring out your dead!” We need to set carts rolling through the streets of Quakerdom, sending up a cry “Bring out your lies!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

The cure for our world problem of Fake News is not a Quaker cure, it is a Jewish cure. In the Babylonian TALMUD, wisdom dating to the days of captivity in Babylon, an injunction was set down: adding to the truth sometimes amounts to subtracting from the truth. Some Quakers have asked me whether what I am attempting to do is proselytize. No, the world no more needs to become Quaker than it needs to become Jewish. The world simply needs to recognize that it is finding itself on a false, over-elaborate, deceptive course, and needs to go back by restricting itself to what it actually does know. — We need in the future to restrict ourselves to those items of information for which we actually possess clear chains of affirmative evidence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1994

Lyndon LaRouche was released on parole after serving 5 years of a 15-year sentence, and promptly went back to his political activity concentrating much of his attention on 3d-World nations.

The Eastern State Penitentiary opened for historic tours on a daily basis. The program was administrated by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, the society that had begun under the name “Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons” and had nearly two centuries earlier lobbied for the building’s construction. More than 10,000 visitors would attend during this 1st year: “Look, Harriet, this is where they kept Al Capone!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

1995

Friend Floyd Schmoe was at the age of 100 again nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. At some point he commented during an interview that “You feel hopeless sometimes, but the only answer to hopelessness is to have optimism to expect things to be better — to hope that you in some way can make them better.” THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering, and Professor of History, at Duke University Henry Petroski’s ENGINEERS OF DREAMS: GREAT BRIDGE BUILDERS AND THE SPANNING OF AMERICA.

On the Duke campus, the freshmen class began to occupy the dormitories of East Campus (as now). This had been the 1st major residential change to occur in a couple of decades. Living groups in the dorms would be named “Randolph Hall” after Trinity College’s origins in Randolph County, North Carolina, and “Blackwell Hall” after Blackwell Park, the old Durham fairground and racetrack that Julian Shakespeare Carr had donated to be the college’s new home.

In this year Duke’s School of the Environment became the Nicholas School. The Nicholas School has its roots in the School of Forestry, and in the Marine Laboratory at Beaufort (this would be redesignated as the Nicholas School of the Environment in recognition of a $20,000,000 gift by Peter M. Nicholas, Class of 1964).

If the South can get away with hoo-hah the North can get away with hoo-hah. In a related piece of news from this year, with funding from the William Penn Foundation, permanent museum exhibits were constructed and a marketing campaign began at the city of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary. An on-site art exhibit, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Prison Sentences,” received international attention. A cultural performance series began, that lay the blame for crazy-making solitary confinement at the feet of those sincere but doofus Quakers. It didn’t matter one little bit that historically, actually, the Quakers had had nothing whatever to do with this harmful historical use of crazy-making solitary confinement, that this is nothing but a piece of Fake News, because of course everybody now knows that they did. The eminent historian Kurt Vonnegut had attested to this in a trade-press book, and even the Quakers, glad for the publicity, were admitting that they had, even though there was zero evidence for this! In the realm of fakelore, endless repetition counts as multiple attestation and the cow did indeed jump over the moon. The site was featured in The New York Times, Art in America, and on BBC and PBS. Attendance nearly doubled. QUAKER FAKELORE

In the Durham monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

Clerks of Meeting 1943-1947 Edward K. Kraybill 1947-1948 William Van Hoy, Jr. 1949-1949 John de J. Pemberton, Jr. 1950-1951 Harry R. Stevens 1951-1952 John A. Barlow 1952-1957 Susan Gower Smith 1957-1960 Frances C. Jeffers 1960-1961 Cyrus M. Johnson 1961-1965 Peter H. Klopfer 1965-1967 Rebecca W. Fillmore 1967-1968 David Tillerson Smith 1968-1970 Ernest Albert Hartley 1970-1971 John Hunter 1971-1972 John Gamble 1972-1974 Lyle B. Snider (2 terms) 1974-1975 Helen Gardella 1976-1978 Cheryl F. Junk HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1978-1980 Alice S. Keighton 1980-1982 John B. Hunter 1982-1984 Edward M. Arnett 1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger 1986-1988 John P. Stratton 1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore 1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart 1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March 1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes 1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore & Karen Cole Stewart 2000-2002 Amy Brannock 2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting) 2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor 2005-2007 Terry Graedon 2007-2009 Anne Akwari 2009-2012 Joe Graedon 2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman 2013-2016 Co-clerks Cathy Bridge & David Bridge 2016- Toby Berla HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

SET AN EXAMPLE

The world, not merely Quakers universally but the world universally, is desperately in need of spiritual guidance, and the need for such spirituality is demonstrably growing more desperate day by day. The problem the world has been encountering has something to do with Fake News — has something to do with elaborations and embroideries on reality that have been swamping our sense of the real and, by swamping us in this manner, causing us to lose all sense of bearings. I would like to see Quakers leading the way, to help the world withdraw from this syndrome that is currently consuming us all. — And I think I perceive a way for us to supply that so-badly-needed leadership. All we have to do is set a positive real example, of what it is like to abandon lies and deceptions and place our trust in solid verities. We could set that example, by publicly abandoning the large number of pseudohistorical accretions that have demonstrably grown up over our centuries of existence as a religious society, and then the rest of the world could look at our example and say with growing confidence “Well, if stupid Quakers can do that we can do it as well!” The world, and Quakers too, are (is?) very clearly committing the error of adding when it should be subtracting. As Thoreau said, Simplify, simplify. Often, less is more. Can we set an example of such simplification? I think that as a historian, I have uncovered any number of cases in which Quaker lore has become over the centuries encrusted with “just-so stories,” stories which are not only unnecessary but also factually inaccurate. Why do I need a Clearness Committee? Well, first, this compendium of error which I have supposedly created needs to be tested, to verify publicly that the items on this list of errors are indeed what I am supposing them to be, errors, falsehoods, just-so stories lacking in evidentiary foundation. I can’t do that without a whole bunch of serious people who will tell me, are some of the items on this list actually true and actually of value and salvageable, or is my historical judgment correct, and these pseudofactoids mere figments of folks’ imaginations? I am 82 and afibrillation and hypertension are giving me problems and time is running out and I can’t do this alone. If we can’t be a shining light to the world, why can’t we be a shining light to the world? Are we too stupid to perceive the opportunity here, the opportunity to give the world an example when what the world so desperately needs now is precisely that, an example? Do you know what a potlatch is? It is a way to set things aright by giving up more stuff than anyone else could possibly give up. We Quakers need to abandon more lies than anyone else could possibly abandon. That could be our way to set things aright in this world. Back in the day of the Great Plague carts would roll through the streets of London and the cry would go up “Bring out your dead!” We need to set carts rolling through the streets of Quakerdom, sending up a cry “Bring out your lies!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

The cure for our world problem of Fake News is not a Quaker cure, it is a Jewish cure. In the Babylonian TALMUD, wisdom dating to the days of captivity in Babylon, an injunction was set down: adding to the truth sometimes amounts to subtracting from the truth. Some Quakers have asked me whether what I am attempting to do is proselytize. No, the world no more needs to become Quaker than it needs to become Jewish. The world simply needs to recognize that it is finding itself on a false, over-elaborate, deceptive course, and needs to go back by restricting itself to what it actually does know. — We need in the future to restrict ourselves to those items of information for which we actually possess clear chains of affirmative evidence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

April: An excerpt from a newspaper editorial column by Chuck Colson, chairperson of Prison Fellowship Ministries and a sterling fellow whom we should all trust: As a recent guest on Bill Buckley’s “Firing Line” television program, I had a chance to tell the audience about Humaita, a remarkable prison in Brazil. Operated by Prison Fellowship, Humaita is a model of a Christian approach to corrections, with religious signs and symbols everywhere, daily chapel services, and mentoring of inmates by Christian families. The results are nothing short of astounding: Only two staff members are needed to oversee 750 inmates, and over the past 20 years, only 4 percent of offenders released from Humaita have ever been rearrested (in America, 62.5 percent of all ex-prisoners are rearrested within a mere three years of their release from prison). The other participants on the program were clearly impressed with Humaita’s successes. But during a break, I turned to the head of the Prison Project of the ACLU and asked what he would do if we tried to start a program like Humaita in the U.S. “I’d sue you, of course,” he replied matter-of-factly.... Humaita demonstrates that religion is a more powerful curb on criminal behavior than the strongest manacles. When a new inmate arrives, his chains are removed, and he is told, “In this place you are chained not by steel but by the love of Christ.” This explains why Humaita can operate with such a minuscule staff. The rest of the security is provided by the prisoners themselves. And the system works: Over the past 20 years, hundreds of prisoners have participated in work-release programs in the community, and only six have failed to return. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

1996

Lyndon LaRouche for the 6th time attempted to obtain the Democratic nomination for President. This time the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee refused to allow him to be considered as a candidate and refused to seat the two delegates LaRouche had obtained in a Louisiana parish election. LaRouche would sue unsuccessfully under the Voting Rights Act. His appeal to the First Court of Appeals would then be rejected, in 1999, on the ground that freedom of association permitted political parties to reject members.

The city of Philadelphia granted the Pennsylvania Prison Society a 10-year license to develop the historic site of the Eastern State Penitentiary. The World Monument Fund included this penitentiary on its list of the 100 most important endangered landmarks in the world. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

1997

July 11, Friday: Judith H. Dobrzynski wrote in the New York Times about the emptied and dilapidated Eastern State Penitentiary structure on Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia as “a valued and threatened historical site” with “a fascinating history and some manifest charms,” a “welcome antidote for those tired of the ersatz, theme-part quality of many tourist attractions.”

She pointed out that in the century following its erection at truly enormous cost in the 1820s, some 300 prisons around the world were modeled upon its credo of totally solitary confinement, such major institutions as the one in the “stone city” of Joliet, Illinois (a good place to be from, far from). The one full-time year-round employee who remained, Program Director Sean M. Kelley, spoke of the need for funding in order to refurbish the multidenominational chapel and movie theater so as to be able to sponsor discussions of “issues of criminal justice and the development of prisons.” Ms. Dobrzynski indicated in her article that to commemorate Bastille Day, residents of the upscale Victorian residential neighborhood which now adjoins the former prison were going to dress up as French revolutionaries and, armed with muskets and cannon and singing La Marseillaise, were intending to storm the dilapidated gatehouse. Someone attired as Marie Antoinette was to be on the roof, the plan was, “tossing Tastykakes and Twinkies into the crowd” in accordance with that old “Let Them Eat Cake” thingie. The good gray Times, our newspaper of record, of course indicated no official displeasure at the prospect of using this site of such incredible anguish as the venue for a toney neighborhood frolic.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2020. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: February 14, 2020 HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.