II
There were two incidents in my work which grew to great proportions in my mind. They happened close together, when I had been about seven years in the Tombs.
Walking one day along a corridor of the prison, past the cells, my attention was caught by an old man. He sat on a low stool, close to the grated door, his face pressed against the bars. On it was written appalling, abject despair.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
He glared at me sullenly. It was some time before he replied.
"They've got me wrong," he said.
The date on the door of his cell gave the history of the case. His name was Jerry Barnes. Arrested three weeks ago, without bail, he had pled guilty the day before to burglary in the third degree, and was awaiting sentence before Justice Ryan.
"What did you plead guilty for?" I asked, "if they had you wrong?"
"Wot's the use? You won't believe me."
With a little urging his story came in a rush. He was an old-timer, had done three bits in state prison, but coming out four years before he had decided to "square it." He wanted to die "on the outside." He had no trade, but had wrung out a meagre living, stuffing straw into mattresses. In the rush season he earned much as a dollar a day. Sometimes only twenty cents. And sometimes there was no work at all. He slept in a ten-cent lodging house, ate ten cent meals – forty cents a day, plus twenty cents a week for tobacco. What was left went into the Bowery Savings Bank. He wanted to have enough so he would not be buried in the Potters' Field. It had been a barren life. But the fear of prison – the fear which only an old-timer, who wants to die outside, knows – had held him to it.
Coming home from work one night he had stopped to watch a fire. As the crowd broke up he saw on the sidewalk several bags of tobacco and some boxes of cigarettes. He picked them up and almost immediately was grabbed by two detectives.
While the crowd had been watching the fire, someone had broken into a tobacco store and looted it. The detectives led Jerry to Central Office, identified him by the Bertillon records, and charged him with burglary in the second degree, for which the maximum sentence is ten years.
Jerry said that he knew nothing of the burglary. When he had been brought into court the district attorney had told him that if he would consent to plead guilty of burglary in the third degree, for which the maximum is only five years, he would intercede with the judge and ask for a light sentence.
Jerry had been hopeless of proving his innocence in the face of his previous record and the fact that some of the proceeds of the burglary had been found on his person. He had no friends. He did not believe that a poor man had any chance in court. So he had pled guilty in the hopes of a short sentence.
His story rang true, but I took great pains to verify it.
The police believed that Jerry was one of three or four who committed the burglary. One hundred dollars in money and twice as much stock had been taken. They had no evidence against Jerry except the packages of tobacco found in his pockets, and his record.
Mr. Kaufman, his employer, spoke highly of him. Jerry had been a regular applicant for work, and a preferred employee. If there was any work at all it was given to him. And sometimes in slack seasons, he had been employed out of charity. Kaufman said he would be glad to come to court and testify to Jerry's regular habits during the last three years. The lodging house keeper was also willing to appear on his behalf. Jerry had earned a definite reputation for quietness and sobriety. He had kept very much to himself and certainly had not been associating with professional criminals.
I took the whole story to Judge Ryan. He always placed great reliance on my judgment in such matters, and I was convinced of Jerry's innocence. Ryan said he would allow him to withdraw his plea of guilty and stand trial. I had a harder time persuading Jerry to do so. He was inclined to take his medicine – let well enough alone. He might live through a couple of years in prison and die outside, but he was afraid to take a chance on a long term. But finally I argued him into doing it.
When at last the case came up for trial, Ryan was off on his vacation, and it was set down before O'Neil, with whom I had less than no influence. Mr. Kaufman had been called out of town by the death of his father. No one appeared to speak for Jerry except the lodging house keeper, who made a poor showing, being mightily frightened under the cross-examination. The district attorney produced a handful of Rogues' Gallery photographs of Jerry. The police expanded their memory to the point of swearing that they had seen Jerry in the rifled premises. The jury convicted him without leaving the room, of burglary in the second degree. And the judge gave him eight years…
I sneaked out of the court room and locked myself in my office. It is not a pleasant thing to think about or write down even now… I am sure he was innocent. If I had not meddled – he had not asked me to – he would have gotten off light. And eight years was the same as "life" for him.
The next two days when duty took me into the prison, I kept as far as might be from Jerry's cell. What could I say to him?
But on the afternoon of the second day, I met him by accident face to face. He was one of a line of ten men, old and young, chained together – just starting up the river. He jumped at me so hard, it threw the entire line off their feet. His slow, desperate curses as they led them out to the prison-van still haunt me, sometimes, at night.
Now that Jerry is dead – he died during the fourth year – I, more than ever before, wish I could believe in a life beyond death. I cannot imagine another life in which we would not understand and forgive the wrongs done us in this. And I cannot think of anything I would rather have than Jerry's forgiveness.
About the same time, I had taken up the work of supervising the men "on parole" from the reformatory. It was very hard to find satisfactory employment for these boys. I wrote an article which was translated and printed in one of the Yiddish dailies. I described the reformatory, told of the conditions on which the inmates were paroled and the civic duty of encouraging them to make good. And I appealed to the Jews to help me find work for the sons of their race. Many offers of employment came as a result of this article.
One day a fine old Russian Jew, named Lipinsky, came to my office on this business. He was a fur merchant on Second Avenue. He and his son, about nineteen, worked together, and he could use an assistant who would accept apprentice wages and live in the family. I liked the old man; he was a sturdy type, had worked up through endless hardships and reverses to the point where he was beginning to make a surplus and win respect in his trade. He was ambitious for his son, on whom all his hopes centered.
It seemed to me an unusually fine opening, the home conditions I felt sure would be good, and the first Jewish boy who came down – his name was Levine – I sent to Lipinsky. I called two or three times and everything seemed to be going well. But after about three months the crash came. Levine and young Lipinsky were arrested in the act of burglary in a large fur warehouse. They had several hundred dollars' worth of choice ermine skins in their bags. Young Lipinsky went to pieces under the "third degree" and confessed everything. They had been at it for more than a month. It had been a strong combination – his knowledge of furs and Levine's skill with the "jimmy." In an apartment on Fifteenth Street, where they had been keeping two girls, the police recovered large quantities of expensive furs.
Levine got seven years in state prison, and young Lipinsky, because he had turned state's evidence and because of my influence, got off with a sentence to the reformatory.
Old Lipinsky was utterly ruined. His rivals accused him of complicity. The detectives raided his store. They found nothing, but it was enough to ruin his credit. He peddles shoe-strings now on Hester Street.
But greater than this material loss was the blow to his heart – his hope in his only son shattered. He knocks at the door to my office now and then to ask news of his boy. It is sad news I have to tell him. His son is now doing his second term in state prison, a confirmed crook.
Old Lipinsky does not curse me as Jerry did – he relies on me to pay his rent and coal bills. He weeps.
I tried to look at these discouraging incidents, with reason. I tried to tell myself that my intentions had been good, and that intentions counted more than results. I tried to recall the very many families to whom I had brought a blessing. It is not a matter to boast of – nor to be modest about. The work I had chosen gave me daily opportunity to bring help to those in awful need. But try as I would to preserve what seemed to my reason proper proportions, the curses of Jerry, the wailing of old Lipinsky, drowned out all else. It obsessed me.
Looking back over those years it is hard for me to decide whether Norman was the determining element in my thinking, or whether from different angles, by different processes of mind, we reached the same conclusions. Certain it is that many times a conversation with him would precipitate fluid-vague feelings of mine into the definite crystals of intellectual convictions. A talk on this subject – of intentions and results – stands out as clear in my mind as any memory I have of him.
It started, I believe, by some jovial effort of his to lift me out of my profound discouragement. We had lit our pipes, Guiseppe was clearing the supper litter from the table. Nina was dividing her attention between a pile of to-be-darned stockings in her lap and Marie, who was safe in her cradle and needed no attention at all. Nina was a constant factor in all our arguments in those days. She was always silent. Much of our talk must have been far above her comprehension, but she would sit on the divan, her feet tucked up under her, and listen for hours on end. Her presence in some subtle way contributed to our discussions. The ancient Egyptians brought a skeleton to their feasts to remind them of death. Nina was to us a symbol of life – a silent chorus of actuality. Some word or look of mine that night showed Norman how desperately serious was my discouragement, and he dropped his flippant tone.
"After all intentions don't justify anything. We must demand results. But what results? When I see a chap, whose efforts I know to be good, get discouraged, I'm sure he's looking for the wrong kind of results. Of course, our unseen, unintentional influence is much greater than the influence we consciously exert. Some little of it we know about, the greater part we ignore. You're worried because some of your well-intentioned efforts have gone wrong, because our fight for a reformatory ended in a fizzle. These two cases, you speak of – Jerry and Lipinsky – are on your mind. There are probably dozens of others, just as bad, which you don't know about. Are they the kind of results on which you have a right to judge your work? I think not.
"The one real result of human activity is knowledge. Zola makes a character in 'Travail' say that science is the only true revolutionist. And if science is something more than dead laboratory data, if it's live workable human knowledge, a real aid to straight thinking, he is right.
"That must be the test of your activity – the judging result. What does it matter to the race that Jerry is beating his head against the walls of Sing Sing? In all the black history of the race, in all the long up-struggle, which rubbed off most of our hair, what does a little added injustice signify? Nothing. Unless – and this is the great chance – unless you can make the race realize the stupidity of such injustice. If you could make Jerry's tragedy bite into us like Uncle Tom's – well – then you and he would have earned the right to wrap the draperies of your couch about you and all that.
"It's the same with good results. They are insignificant! In terms of the race, they matter as little as the half hundred slaves Mrs. Stowe helped to escape via the underground railroad. Take Tony – this wreck you've dragged into dry-dock and repaired. It's important to him that you came along at the right time. But what does it matter to all the other immigrant craft that are trying to find safe anchorage on this side of the world? There's a new Tony launched every minute.
"Seven years you've been in the Tombs – had your nose in the cesspool. What have you learned – not just subjective acquisition of information, but what has it taught you for the race? Sooner or later, you'll begin to teach. You can't help it. It's too big for you – it will force an outlet.
"Prisons are a stupidity. Why do we cling to them? Natural viciousness? Innate cruelty? You don't believe that. It's ignorance! Dense black ignorance! Sodden ways of thinking. You've seen, you know. Well – that's footless – unless you can make the rest of us see and know. One man can't add much to this great racial mind. But if you can do the little, the very little, that Beccaria did, that John Howard and Charles Reade did – one lightning gleam – these little results you are worrying about now will sink into insignificance.
"You won't solve the problem of crime. That's too much to expect. What you teach about reform – reforms of judicial procedure, reforms of police and prisons – won't interest me much. I know these things seem big to you, but it will be mostly out of date before it's off the press. What I will look for is some help in understanding the problem. That will be your contribution – the judging result of your living. Perhaps some youngster, one of the generation to come, will read your book and go into the Tombs, see it for himself and in two years understand all it has taken you ten years to learn. That's human progress!
"We must saturate ourselves with the idea of evolution. Think of ourselves, our little lives, as tiny steps in that profound procession. Knowledge is the progressive element in life, just as nerve cells are the only progressive tissue in our bodies. We won't develop any more legs as we evolve through the ages ahead of us – the change will be in our brains."
The conversation rambled off into some by-paths which I forget. But it was this same night, I think, that he struck the main road of his philosophy, mapped out before me his idea of the country the race has yet to explore.
"The impediment to progress," he said, "is our fool idea of finality. It's funny how humanity has always been looking for an absolute, final court of appeal. The king can do no wrong. The pope is infallible. God is omniscient! Now we have the age of reason. The old gods have been driven from Olympus. And in place of Jehovah and Zeus our college professors have made a god of truth, the absolute, the final! Sooner or later we've got to learn that progress – growth of any kind – is in exact antithesis to this idea of finality.
"A large part of the scientific world and, I suppose, ninety-nine per cent of what is called "the enlightened public," believe that Darwinism is the last work in natural science. There are a thousand question marks strewn about the theory of natural selection. Only those biologists, who have sense enough not to accept the finality of anything, are trying to answer these questions.
"Socialism is a spectacular example. What did Karl Marx do? He stumbled along through the life which was given him, doing kind things and mean things by the way, all of which is, or ought to be, forgotten. The real thing he did – his contribution – was to keep his eyes open, to look at life without blinders. In the long process of thinking, this is the most important, the fundamental thing. And what he saw he pondered over, sweated over, prayed atheistical prayers over – and then he spoke out fearlessly. The people about him were hypnotized by the wonderfully growing industrialism of the day. It was going to solve all the ills of the race. No one had any responsibility any more. Laissez faire! Virtue and happiness and the next generation were automatic. The praise of the machine became an enthusiasm, a gospel. Marx had looked at it harder than the rest, had seen through its surface a glitter. And like Cassandra he shouted out his forebodings, careless of whether the world listened or not. 'It's a sham,' he said, 'this industrialism of yours is fundamentally immoral. It bears within itself death germs. They are already at work. This thing in which you put your trust is already putrid.' I don't know anything more amazing in the history of the human mind than Marx prophecies. Wrong in some details of course. He didn't claim any divine inspiration. But those three volumes in German are stupendous. And the secret of it is that he turned his penetrating eyes on the life about him. He looked!
"But the socialists of today – are they following his example? No. Marx did not believe in finalities; they make a finality of him. He sought new knowledge. They are defending what is already old, and like everything old, some of it is wrong now. Marx was a revolutionist – one of the greatest. The Marxists are conservatives. Think of it. Not an American socialist has tried to analyze Wall Street! Instead of scrutinizing the life about them, they spend their time arguing over his agrarian theory. No country in the world offers such glaring examples of industrial injustice as these United States and the books they circulate are translations from German. Some day they'll wake up – then I'll join them.
"The trouble comes from thinking there are finalities in life – ultimate truths. We've got to get it into our heads that truth itself evolves.
"It's coming to me stronger and stronger that the point of attack ought to be on our ideals of education. My God! You quit college at the end of your freshman year and wasted exactly three years less than I did. I feel so sure that this is the real issue that I'm losing interest in everything else.
"A system of education which wakes up the human mind instead of putting it to sleep! Education which begins where it ought to! At the beginning! the process of seeing, of looking at life with our own eyes – instead of through some professor's spectacles. If we could only teach the trick of original observation!
"The trouble isn't so much that we think incorrectly. We don't see straight. I remember our professor used to tell us that logic is a coffee-mill. If we put coffee in at the top it will come out at the bottom in a more usable form. But if we put in dirt – it stays dirt, no matter how fine we grind it. And then he switched off to train our coffee-mills – a lot of rigamarole about syllogisms, the thirteen fallacious ones – perhaps it was fourteen. But not a single word about how to distinguish dirt from coffee. It's the original assumptions that need questioning. I don't believe Darwin was a better logician than Saint Augustine. But he went out into the world and looked. He used observed facts for his coffee-mill. Saint Augustine ground up a lot of incoherent beliefs and dirty assumptions. Anyone can learn the laws of logic in a three months college course, or in as many weeks from a text-book. But I don't know of any place where they even try to teach original observation.
"Education, everybody says, is the bulwark of democracy. And we Americans really want democracy in a way the most radical European never dreamed of. Yet we are content with our schools! Nobody really worries about improving them. We assume that our system is the best in the world, perfect. Final! Damn finality! I'm not sure that our system isn't the worst. We consistently kill all originality. The minute the kids strike school the process begins. 'This, my child, is what you must believe,' you say. 'This block,' the kindergarten teacher says 'is red.' Of course what she should say is, 'What color is this block?' The college professor says to his senior seminar, 'Goethe is the greatest German poet; if you prefer Heine, you are a barbarian. Milton's epics are the pride of English letters; if you prefer L'Allegro, you show your lack of culture. Shelley was undoubtedly a great poet, but, I regret to say, an incendiary. Of course you must read The Ode to the West Wind and the Clouds, but I warn you against the Revolt of Islam.' From grammar school to university it is all this business of predigested tablets.
"Just look at the effect this sort of business has had on our politics! We Americans are dead. New ideas, discussion of fundamental political principles are fomenting everywhere but here. A Paris cab-driver thinks more about the theory of government than our congressman. We Americans sit back – our feet on the table – puff out our chests and say 'complete and absolute liberty for all time was decreed by the fathers in 1789.' How many men do you know who ever seriously questioned that proposition? How many Americans really believe that it takes 'eternal vigilance' to be free? No. Our Constitution is the most glorious document penned by man. It's final – it's stagnant and stinking!
"If we don't revolutionize our education, we'll rot or give up democracy. It's a clear choice. A national Tammany Hall and dizzy Roman decadence or Neo-aristocracy with restricted suffrage and hare-brained experiments in human stock breeding. If we don't learn to educate in a truer way, if we don't manage to kill this folly of finality, it's a choice between physiological decay and eugenics.
"I'm getting out of everything else – can't see anything but education. No more personal charity, no more checks to shoddy philanthropies. All the money I can lay my hands on goes into a trust fund to finance an educational insurrection. It's the only revolution I'm interested in.
"I tried to write about it. But – hell – people won't take me seriously. I knew somebody would giggle if I talked, so I ground out an article. I found a man in the club laughing over it – said it was 'clever.' Well – I've put what I think about it in my will. Perhaps they won't laugh when they read that."
As I said I am not sure whether Norman gave me my ideas, or whether he voiced conclusions which were forming already in my mind. At least I owe him their concrete shape.
My work in the Tombs took on a new visage. I began to think of it as something to communicate. I went about it with the feeling of a showman or a guide. There was always someone at my shoulder, to whom I tried to explain the essentials back of the details. The routine which had begun to be mechanical was revivified. I began thinking out my book. What I wanted to do was to draw a picture of the complex phenomena of crime and to contrast with it the dead and formal simplicity of our Penal Code, to show its hopeless inadequacy. I began work on a section devoted to "Theft." From my notes and my daily experience, I tried to show the kind of people who steal, the motives which drive them to it, the means they develop towards their end, petty sneak thieves, swindle promoters, bank robbers, pickpockets, fraudulent beggars, defaulting cashiers. The reality of theft is an infinitely more tangled thing than one would suppose from reading the meagre paragraphs in our statutes which deal with "Larceny." The book grew slowly. I felt no hurry. Now and then I published sections in the magazines – "Stories of Real Criminals."