YOU CAN’T WIN
You Can’t Win
BY
JACK BLACK
With a foreword by
ROBERT HERRICK
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1926
*All rights reserved*
Copyright 1925,
By Jack Black.
Copyright 1926,
By The Macmillan Company.
---
Set up and electrotyped.
Published September, 1926.
Reprinted October, 1926.
Reprinted December, 1926.
Printed in the United States of America
By The Cornwall Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This book is dedicated to Fremont Older, to Judge Frank H. Dunne, to the
unnamed friend who sawed me out of the San Francisco jail and to that
dirty, drunken, disreputable, crippled beggar, “Sticks” Sullivan, who
picked the buckshot out of my back—under the bridge—at Baraboo,
Wisconsin.
The Author.
FOREWORD
The revelations of a thief or of a prostitute are rightfully suspected
by the normal citizen of having been dressed for publicity, either
sensational or sentimental or both. An unstable emotionalism in the
subject, perhaps psychopathic, induces a melodramatic and unreal
treatment of past experience. The tale is told not as it happened but
rather as the subject likes, in reverie, to think it happened or as he
believes the reader would like to have had it happen. There is nothing
of that sort in Jack Black’s story of his life as a professional thief.
The honesty of the “confession” is self-evident. With a few lapses into
the conventional, the expected, he displays the rare literary power of
letting the facts speak for themselves, without any window-dressing,
either lachrymose or hilarious. He has an instinct for realities.
Indeed it is that mental grip, enabling him to perceive and apply
realities, that obviously brought him out in the end so that he could
break the shackles of his criminal habits and reinstate himself
completely in accord with society. It was almost purely a mental feat.
At the end, to be sure, he dwells upon the helpfulness of kind friends,
especially of Mr. Older, of the “square deal” he got from Judge Dunne,
and recognizes fully the impulse of gratitude to a friend who helped him
escape from prison by “cutting out the hop”—the hardest single bond he
had to break. Those were emotional responses. But if it had not been
for his own good mind which he had slowly disciplined by reason, that
resolve “to go straight” would have been but another feeble human
aspiration for amendment with which the human hell is paved. The chief
interest I find in Black’s rapid survey of his life as a thief is this
progress of mental awakening and a corresponding growth of character
as a man, without which all the help of kind and enlightened friends
would have availed naught. It is what Black did for himself, what he
was, that counted most.
Jack Black was an experimental psychologist: he discovered slowly and
painfully, as most do, the psychological character of himself and of the
world in which he was placed. Thus he explored the law of habit and the
purely mental quality of self-control long before he attempted to apply
his knowledge to his own case. Any habit, he maintains, apropos of the
opium habit, can be broken provided the victim *wants* sufficiently to
change, and he notes the power of substitution, welcoming even his
worries as distractions, mentally, from the obsession of opium. His
emphasis on the necessity of a subjective desire for change is an
unerring diagnosis of self. He wanted another kind of life enough to
make it come true. That is the great distinction of Jack Black as
professional lawbreaker and person.
His case is so common in our restless, mobile civilization that it may
be called typical or standard. An active, intelligent, likable boy with
no stable ties, he adventured on the open road, almost by accident, the
wide world tempting him on, took what he wanted, learned the habits and
the resources of vagrancy, of criminality, of vice. But he did not sink
to the dregs per formula. He went to the top of his society. Stirred by
emulation with the only companions he had—hoboes, thieves, gamblers,
yeggs—he distinguished himself not only by success in individual
exploits but by a superiority of character that would not break,
“snitch,” or play the other fellow’s game—and by loyalty to his mates.
Then came as he was emerging from youth the chance that landed him in a
well-run Canadian prison and fertilized the seed of intellectual
interest by giving him access to a good library. For the first time he
discovered consciously his own mind—the interest of it—and from this
period it is evident that the habit of reading, of thinking, gained on
him until with relentless logic his mind, thus freed and fed, convinced
him that his boy’s life of defiance and lawlessness was wrong. After he
was convinced, it took years to free himself from all the implications
of twenty years of crime. But once convinced, with a mind of that
quality, the result was inevitable. Strange irony that the mental life
so essential to Black’s salvation should have been further fostered by
the gift of a library which Abe Ruef gave to the prison where he and
Black happened to be fellow prisoners. Ruef had taken the money which he
bestowed in this form on his fellow criminals from the public of San
Francisco. Mr. Fremont Older, as a powerful newspaper editor, was
largely responsible for putting Ruef into the prison (and later in
freeing him!) where Ruef was indirectly an instrument in freeing Jack
Black from his bonds.
There was an aspect of the Canadian-prison experience less commendable
than its order and its providing the prisoners with a good library,
its wholesome and on the whole human management so glaringly in
contrast with the American prisons pictured in this story—and that
was flogging. In these days of a return to medieval punishments
for criminals, advocated by many leading citizens, it is well to
realize how devastating to Black were his two experiences of brutal
force—flogging in Canada, the strait-jacket in Folsom. They made
him—and many others—inhuman wild beasts ready for murder or suicide.
They left Black not cowed, but mutinous, hating and hateful. The
experience was wholly bad and futile, except possibly as a test of his
own growing self-control. It does not need Jack Black’s corroborative
evidence to know that brutality does not pay, even when applied to the
dangerous and to the outcast. In spite of the talk about reviving the
whipping post, we know that the use of physical brutality—floggings,
strait-jackets, and third-degree methods—will disappear: they are
failures in getting results from human beings. It is only a crude
society, as ours still is largely, that would tolerate what goes on
often in our larger prisons, where the application of “justice” is left
to a class little removed from the criminals on whom they operate. To
maim and mutilate human beings, to terrify and brutalize them in order
to correct them, is so obviously foolish and wicked that it hardly
needs statement.
In some cases like Black’s the victim is not broken, but tempered and
hardened in will, in evil. And that brings me to the most depressing
fact in criminology that the present book illustrates: the criminal is
almost always of an inferior mentality. It is only a superior mentality
such as Black’s that can survive and ultimately win freedom. Probably
Jack Black would admit that among his wide acquaintance in the criminal
class only a few, a very few, had the mental quality, the character, to
break their chains. The mass were condemned to remain criminals because
of defective mentality. That suggests inevitably the confused subject of
eugenics and birth control, in society’s relation to the criminal class,
which it so much fears and detests, but before which it so often seems,
as at the present moment, hopeless, like an ignorant, half well-meaning
parent angry over a troublesome child whose troublesomeness is in large
part the fruit of the parent’s own defective character. Many of these
aberrant specimens might be deflected from crime by feeding their minds.
Few ever can do it for themselves as Black almost wholly did it for
himself. Does modern life offer youth sufficient mental stimulus? The
motor car, the movie, bootleg liquor, and sex—these are the raw stimuli
with which youth tries to infuse some color and movement into the
tyrannous drabness of a standardized industrial life. In drawing his
moral at the end Black forgets, as the middle-aged are wont to forget,
the glamour and the lure of the “hangout” and the open road, which in
his boyhood seemed to be the only way out of a cheerless drudgery.
There are, of course, many other ways, which Black discovered later for
himself. And that is why I think his story is so well worth while
reading and pondering upon. Besides it is entertaining, because
unvarnished and unpretentious.
Robert Herrick.
YOU CAN’T WIN
CHAPTER I
I am now librarian of the *San Francisco Call*.
Do I look like one? I turn my chair so I can look in the mirror. I don’t
see the face of a librarian. There is no smooth, high, white forehead.
I do not see the calm, placid, composed countenance of the student. The
forehead I see is high enough, but it is lined with furrows that look
like knife scars. There are two vertical furrows between my eyes that
make me appear to be wearing a continual scowl. My eyes are wide enough
apart and not small, but they are hard, cold, calculating. They are
blue, but of that shade of blue farthest removed from the violet.
My nose is not long, not sharp. Nevertheless it is an inquisitive nose.
My mouth is large—one corner of it is higher than the other and I appear
to be continually sneering. I do not scowl, I do not sneer; yet there is
something in my face that causes a man or woman to hesitate before
asking to be directed to Dr. Gordon’s church. I can’t remember a time
that any woman, young or old, ever stopped me on the street and asked to
be directed. Once in a great while a drunk will roll over to where I am
standing and ask how he can get to “Tw’ninth ’n’ Mission.”
If I gaze into the mirror long enough and think hard enough I can
conjure up another face. The old one seems to dissolve and in its place
I see the face of a schoolboy—a bright, shining, innocent face. I see a
mop of white hair, a pair of blue eyes, and an inquisitive nose. I see
myself standing on the broad steps of the Sisters’ Convent School. At
the age of fourteen, after three years’ “board and tuition,” I am
leaving to go home to my father and then to another school for “big
boys.”
My teacher, a sweet, gentle Sister, a madonna, is holding my hand. She
is crying. I must hurry away or I will be crying, too. The Mother
Superior says good-by. Her thin lips are pressed so tightly together
that I can barely see the line where they meet. She is looking into my
eyes intently and I am wondering what she is going to say to me when the
crunching of gravel warns us that the old coach is ready and I must be
off. The Mother takes my teacher gently by the hand. I see them go
through the wide door and disappear silently down the long, dark hall.
All the boys in the school, and there were fifty of them, lined up and
gave me a noisy send-off. The old coachman clucked to his horses, and I
was off for the train—and the world.
Any reader with a spoonful of imagination can picture me going home,
then to other schools in turn, then to some sort of an office job;
advancement here and there, always leading a well-ordered, quiet,
studious life, until he finally places me in the respectable and
responsible position of librarian of a metropolitan newspaper. That’s
the way it should have been, but wasn’t.
The course I followed from that convent school to this library desk, if
charted on a piece of paper, would look like the zigzag line that
statisticians use to denote the rise and fall of temperature or rainfall
or fluctuations of business. Every turn I made was a sharp one, a sudden
one. In years I cannot remember making one easy, graceful, rounded turn.
It has often been a question with me just how much the best of it a boy
has, who has his mother with him until his feet are well planted under
him; who has a home and its influences until he gathers some kind of a
working philosophy that helps him to face the world. There is no
substitute for the home and the mother.
It may not mean much to the average chap to have a friend say: “John, I
want you to meet my mother.” To me it means more than I can put on
paper. It seems to explain to me why the man who so proudly says, “This
is my mother,” is so many things that I am not and never can be. The
insurance people have not yet got to the stage of insuring a man against
a lifetime of failure, but if they ever do, I imagine the chap who can
guarantee them that he will keep his mother with him until he is twenty
will have a shade the best of it when he pays his premium.
I am not lugging in the fact that I was left motherless at the age of
ten to alibi myself away from anything. Nevertheless I think a fellow
has the right to ask himself if things might not have been different. My
mother died before I got very well acquainted with her—I doubt if any
child gives its parents much thought before the age of twelve or
thirteen.
I probably thought that my mother was a person put into the world to
scrub my face and neck and to be screamed and kicked at; to put
scratchy, flannel rags around my neck with smelly grease on them when I
had the croup; and to stand by the bed and keep me in it when I had the
measles. I can remember distinctly how angry I became when she brought
me a nice, new toothbrush and showed me what to do with it.
This was the greatest indignity of all—the last straw. I threw the thing
away and refused to use it; told her up and down that I was “no girl”
and wouldn’t have any “girl things.” She did not get angry and scold;
she just went on with her work, smiling. She may have been pleased with
my manly outburst. I don’t know.
I don’t remember that I was shocked or pained when she was buried. I
cried, because it was expected of me. Mother’s relatives, a couple of
sisters, whom I never saw before or since, were crying. I saw tears in
my father’s eyes. So I tried to cry, and did. I know my father realized
what we had lost and his grief was genuine, but I could not feel it
then.
A few days later father sold our little cottage home and furnishings and
we moved into the only hotel in the little town. Schools were few and
far between for poor children then. I played around the hotel all day,
running wild, till father came home from work. He would have his dinner,
read a paper, and then put me to bed. After that he would read a book
for an hour and go to bed himself. We lived this way for almost a year.
Some nights he would put down his book and look at me strangely for
minutes at a time. I was a problem, undoubtedly, and he was trying to
decide what to do with me. A ten-year-old boy without a mother is a
fit problem for any father’s mind, and my father was a thoughtful man.
Looking back at it, it seems to me that I was blown here and there like
a dead leaf whipped about by the autumn winds till at last it finds
lodgment in some cozy fence corner. When I left school at fourteen I was
as unsophisticated as a boy could be. I knew no more of the world and
its strange way than the gentle, saintly woman who taught me my prayers
in the convent.
Before my twentieth birthday, I was in the dock of a criminal court, on
trial for burglary. I was acquitted, but that is another story. In six
years I had deserted my father and home, gone “on the road.” I had
become a snapper-up of small things, a tapper of tills, a street-door
sneak thief, a prowler of cheap lodging houses, and at last a promising
burglar in a small way.
At twenty-five I was an expert house burglar, a nighttime prowler,
carefully choosing only the best homes—homes of the wealthy, careless,
insured people. I “made” them in the small hours of the night, always
under arms.
At thirty I was a respected member of the “yegg” brotherhood, a thief of
which little is known. He is silent, secretive, wary; forever traveling,
always a night “worker.” He shuns the bright lights, seldom straying far
from his kind, never coming to the surface. Circulating through space
with his always-ready automatic, the yegg rules the underworld of
criminals. At forty I found myself a solitary, capable journeyman
highwayman; an escaped convict, a fugitive, with a background of
twenty-five years in the underworld.
A bleak background! Crowded with robberies, burglaries, and thefts too
numerous to recall. All manner of crimes against property. Arrests,
trials, acquittals, convictions, escapes. Penitentiaries! I see in the
background four of them. County jails, workhouses, city prisons, Mounted
Police barracks, dungeons, solitary confinement, bread and water,
hanging up, brutal floggings, and the murderous straitjacket.
I see hop joints, wine dumps, thieves’ resorts, and beggars’ hangouts.
Crime followed by swift retribution in one form or another.
I had very few glasses of wine as I traveled this route. I rarely saw a
woman smile and seldom heard a song.
In those twenty-five years I took all these things, and I am going to
write about them.
And I am going to write about them as I took them —with a smile.