The Subterranean Brotherhood

by Julian Hawthorne

There will be time enough to discuss these riddles. It is time now to get into your prison suit, with its "U.S.P." on the back of the coat, and your number; its "U.S.P." on the back of the shirt, with your number; its "U.S.P." on the front of your trousers-legs, and your number; your canvas shoes and your vizored cap. But beware of putting on the cap within prison walls, lest the guard report you to the captain, the captain to the deputy, the deputy, if necessary, to the warden, and ye be cast into the inner darkness. There shall there be thin slices of bread, and water, and gnashing of teeth.

With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, we shuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across the hall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sown with tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standing at coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in one window, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensed to shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this model jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quick and skilful in their use. They are the sauce for meals and the encouragement to labor. But casualties seldom happen; when they do, they are hushed up, and the body of the man is buried next day in the prison graveyard.

I will postpone to a future chapter the subject of the dining room and what is done there. As we filed out, I noticed "MERRY CHRISTMAS," and "HAPPY NEW YEAR" emblazoned in green above the door. It was to remind us, perhaps, of what we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading to the warden's office, and to freedom, by a steel-barred gate, we saw a guard seated in a chair with a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might have mutinied with as much hope of success as we at that juncture; but the guard had to be used for something, and convicts must not be allowed to forget that they are in prison. At all events we forbore to mutiny, and were rounded into our cells and locked up for half an hour, during which we might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, dirt, and the rest the refuse of the weed, supplied to the prison by contract; or we might read, or comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the Divine blessing upon the labors of the coming day.

The interval is really provided as a measure of security; many of the prisoners do their work outside the main buildings; but it is deemed unsafe to unlock the outer gates while the whole body of prisoners is on the move. They might make a concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to be shot down in detail by the guards in the towers.

Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on the Atlanta Constitution, makes the following statement in an issue of the paper shortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "Warden Moyer was unfit."—"It is safe to assume," Mr. Ormund affirms, "that if all the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termers and each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a like term, William Moyer, the present incumbent—a man who has done more to make prison life bearable than any man in this country—would be selected without a murmur of opposition."

That is a fine, explicit statement of Mr. Ormund's, such as any warden in dire trouble and perplexity might be glad and proud to have a faithful friend make concerning him. It has no strings to it, and is followed up by similar sentiments throughout the article. But why, in that case, are the gates into the yard locked, and the man with the rifle provided? If Warden Moyer renders life at Atlanta prison more bearable than at any other in the country, what conceivable grounds are there that his affectionate inmates should wish to run away from him? That warmhearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly put the Government to the expense of supplying safeguards against a contingency which his own tender and lovable nature renders unthinkable, even if the thirty-four foot wall outside does not. There seems to be a non-sequitur here, which Mr. Ormund, perhaps, may feel inspired to clear up. When he has done that, it will be time to call his attention to a score or more other incongruities which a residence of only six or seven months in this humane institution has been sufficient to disclose.

At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside our pipes, or our prayer-books, and were ready for the activities of the day. The others were detailed to their regular work; but my friend and I had our final rites of initiation still to undergo. A young official, whose countenance readily if not habitually assumed a sullen and menacing expression, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed him downstairs to an elevator, in which he ascended to the upper floor, while we pursued him upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. Ivy—such was his poetic given name—was worn on the extreme rear projection of his head, and he used his club in place of speech; not that he actually pummeled us with it, but by wavings and pointings he made it indicate his will, and kept us mindful how easily we might afford him a pretext for putting it to its more normal use. Mr. Ivy, as I afterward learned, was a Southerner by birth, as are the majority of the guards in the penitentiary, and may have been, like most of them, a graduate from the Army. In reporting the case of Private George, of the U.S. Army, now a prisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Penitentiary, it was stated by Mr. Gilson Gardner that "The common soldier in the U.S. Army has no rights. When he enlists, he gives up the guarantees of the Constitution, the protection of jury trial, and even his right to petition for a redress of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, secretly tried and cruelly punished, and he has no remedy."

As regards unjust, cruel and despotic treatment, the status of the U.S. soldier and of a penitentiary convict are on all fours, though of course the former has the advantage of belonging to a service traditionally honorable, of open air service and exercise in all parts of the country or abroad, of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of whatever glory and advancement campaigning against an enemy may bring him. But we may readily perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge of discipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, by indiscretions incident to Army life, might say to himself, on receiving his discharge, "I am bred to no trade, I am good for nothing, but I should like to get back at somebody for the humiliations and hardships I have endured. Why not take a job as a prison guard; the pay is only $70 a month, but instead of being the under dog, I shall be on top, licensed to bully and belabor to my heart's content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and to get away with it unscathed!"

For my part, I can imagine no reason more plausible to explain the large number of ex-soldiers among prison guards, and their conduct in that position. With some shining exceptions, they are petty tyrants of the worst type, sulky, sneering, malignant, brutal, and liars and treacherous into the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, immersed in that sinister and unnatural atmosphere, hating and hated, with no sane or absorbing occupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play the part of spies and false witnesses, ignorant and demoralized,—tends to create evil tendencies and to confirm such as exist. No worse originally than the average of men, they are made baser and more savage by their circumstances. And no man able to hold his own in the free life and competition of the outside world, would stoop to accept a position as guard in a jail.

I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quite possible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had no opportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish and futile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment on individuals, save as they may illustrate the point under discussion. But I am the less reluctant to animadvert upon this or that employee of the penitentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from compromising him with the higher prison authorities, abuse from me would only recommend him to their favor.—Mr. Ivy, such as he was, conducted us to a bench outside a closed door, already partly occupied by three or four half naked convicts, white and black. We gathered from his gestures of head and club that we were to remove our upper garments and our shoes and stockings, and place them on the floor in front of us. It was a cold morning, and the floor was of limestone. We obeyed instructions, and for the next twenty minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity or amusement to our fellow benchers and to passers-by in the hall, and with nothing to keep us warm but the genial influences of the occasion. Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through the door into a sort of office, with clerks and Dr. Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 a year,—a tall, wooden faced young medical school graduate, who cultivated a skeptical expression and a jeering intonation of speech. He and an assistant put us through a physical examination, and took a series of measurements, all of which were entered by the clerks in ledgers. Our photographs were then taken, and afterward (it was the next day, but may as well be told here) we were further identified by taking the impressions of our finger prints, and by a second photograph without our mustaches—these having been removed in the meantime. We were now convicts full-fledged and published, and our pictures were disseminated to every prison and penitentiary in the country, to be enshrined in the rogues' gallery and studied by all police officials.