[Delaware has received in recent months national
attention because a member of Congress asked in Congress
whether the use of the whipping post in Delaware cannot
be declared contrary to the provisions of the national
constitution. To flog prisoners seems to most people a
relic of barbarism. Is it justified? Do you agree with
the Governor of Delaware?]
Delaware has whipped criminals of certain types since 1656, and
will continue to whip them until the statutes under which corporal
punishment is indicted shall be repealed.
Congress cannot, and certainly will not, interfere in the exercise
of proper authority under the law, and as the whipping post is an
integral part of the criminal law of Delaware every law officer must
consent to its use regardless of any personal views he may have in the
matter. Hysterical women, weak men, bullies, cranks and blackguards
in all parts of the country have written to me demanding that I set
aside the law and prohibit whippings for crime in Delaware. These good
souls give no heed to the fact that the whippings are quite as legal in
Delaware as imprisonment. Their demands amount to anarchy, so far as
law enforcement goes. They cry, “Down with the law!” without knowing
whereof they speak.
I want every criminal, every sharper and every moral leper to know that
if he comes to Delaware and violates the law he will not only serve
a long term in our none too comfortable jails, but that he will be
whipped in public on his bare back before he enters his cell. I wish
this fact could be spread to the uttermost corners of the country.
Delaware wants no undesirable citizen. This State offers nothing but
the whip and the workhouse for the gunmen, white slavers, panders,
highwaymen and common thieves which people the underworld of some of
our larger cities and who seem to get a certain amount of applause for
their more daring performances from the same type of people who demand
that I shall set aside a fundamental law of my State and defy the
decrees of our High Court.
[A] From several newspapers.
Delaware houses one-half of her population in the city of Wilmington.
All the rest of the State is strictly rural. Our people are of the
soil. They are typical farmers—plain, wholesome, God-fearing people
who obey the law and who punish crime with severity. We have neither
the means nor the machinery with which to patrol our rural districts
with armed officers. It follows, then, that we must have laws carrying
severe penalties and rigidly enforce them.
Half the people in Delaware south of Wilmington never lock their doors
at night, window fasteners are uncommon, and thought of burglars is
totally absent from the minds of our people. Once in a long while some
half-drunken loon will enter a house at night. When he is not kicked
out as a mere intruder he is locked up, tried, convicted and whipped
according to law, and then locked up long enough to think it over
himself and to deter all others from a like offense.
Those who criticise the whipping post adversely overlook the fact that
Delaware is the broad highway between four chief American cities.
Our unthinking critics include those who do not know that time or
the loss of time means nothing at all to a very large proportion of
our population. A day, or a week, or a month, more or less, costs a
low-grade negro nothing at all in opportunity or in money. The native
negroes of Delaware know their place and make no trouble. They are far
above the average in habits and in intelligence, but we have a floating
negro population which is definitely bad, and we must safeguard our
people, white and black, against those who come from all parts of the
Shore country to the canneries, work a few weeks or months and then
pass on, only to give place to another lot just as bad, or even worse.
The negro with city habits is a worse proposition than the farm trained
hand, who is usually law-abiding and useful. Delaware can handle her
own negroes with little or no force, but the passing throng of bad
men needs attention, and they file by with eyes front on the whipping
posts. Cells mean nothing at all to such men, white or black.
Delaware is absolutely free from all forms of white slavery. This
particular form of crime is punished here without recourse to the
Mann Act or aid from the Federal authorities. Did the whipping post do
naught else but keep cadets out of Delaware it proves its eternal value
here. In every other State in the Union in which there is a large city
the white slave problem comes up with a degree of regularity. The same
people who condemn the whipping post wring their hands and wonder what
to do about the cadets and their wretched victims. Delaware answers,
“Whip the cadet!”
Years ago a gang of desperadoes undertook to rob a Wilmington bank.
They tunneled under the building, and would have carried off $500,000
in negotiable securities but for the suspicions of an alert watchman.
They were arrested, and on trial paid one attorney a very large fee
solely to the end that they might be saved from the public whipping.
The late great Chief Justice Lore sentenced them to long terms in
prison and to the utmost limit of the law as to pillory and lashes.
There has never been a bank robbery attempted in Delaware from that day
to this by professional burglars. These men were bank robbers of the
first grade; the same men who managed one of the sensational robberies
in New York—the Metropolitan Bank, I think. That type of criminal never
considers Delaware now for a second.
A prison term means nothing at all to him, but he would never dare show
his face in his usual haunts after the lash fell on his bare back in a
Delaware jail.
All prison reformers and all humanitarians agree that the object of
all punishment is to prevent crime—remotely to cure the criminal.
We are not discussing the cure of criminals. We are discussing the
whipping post per se, and I submit that the whipping post has prevented
two of the most terrible of all crimes short of murder—white slavery
and burglary. There is a grave doubt in my mind if there has been a
single burglary in Delaware within twenty years committed by a man who
was entirely sane and wholly sober, and I do not recall any second
offenders.
It will not be seriously questioned that society has a right to protect
itself. If the whipping post proves to be a perpetual and potential
protector against the burglar, the highwayman and the cadet, why cry
down its effectiveness? New York had an epidemic of gunmen; Chicago had
an epidemic of highwaymen; Boston and Philadelphia made war on cadets.
Delaware simply painted her whipping posts and multiplied school houses.
Within recent weeks, in Philadelphia, Judge Norris S. Barratt declared
from the bench that nothing except a thoroughly good whipping at a
public post would serve to adequately punish a wife beater before him.
This learned jurist is intimately familiar with social and political
conditions in Delaware and, before the Sons of Delaware, most ably
defended the whipping post as an aid to crime prevention.
Solitary confinement has been proved a failure. It rots out the
prisoner, destroys all ambition, and when his hour of freedom comes
he is without initiative, without occupation and without hope. Trades
are now taught these men, but day after day they are “lined up” as
professionals, and their lives become a misery to them.
Now I repeat that the basic idea of punishment has to do with the
protection of society against the criminal. It would be a little beyond
me to explain the psychological effect of a public whipping upon the
mind of a professional criminal, but of course I had ideas. The fact
remains, however, that the mere prospect of such a whipping keeps men
out of Delaware who would not hesitate a second to “shoot up” a dance
hall in New York or Chicago.
It is a fact of common knowledge that ship masters of undoubted
courage, of tested and proved valor, are as timid as little children
when ashore; that firemen who never give a thought to personal peril
at a conflagration, bawl and make an awful to-do about having a tooth
filled. Frank Gotch, the wrestler, who could tear an ordinary man apart
with his hands, bows with absolute submission, I am told, to the will
of Mrs. Gotch.
Doubtless the men of science, the psychologists, have a definite name
for this phenomenon of the mind. I do not know this word, but I do
know that burglars and highwaymen who would brave the police force of
Philadelphia or any other large city will not even consider a “job” in
Delaware and that these men when asked why, invariably reply that they
will take no chance of the whipping post. It may be a display of vanity
more than fear. I do not quite know.
I have no quarrel with those who want to reform prisons, but I am a
most earnest advocate of any and every method that prevents crime, and
this the whipping post does to a marked degree.
The sense of shame that follows a public whipping is quite a different
matter from the innermost feelings of the same man flogged in privacy.
In the underworld, where there exist strata of preferment just as there
are social equations in organized society, a man who has done “a bit”
of long duration lives in a degree of reflected glory. A yeggman who
has served ten or twelve years in Cherry Hill, Sing Sing, Joliet or any
one of the other notorious prisons has a certain standing among his
fellows in crime. But it is a curious yet certain fact that the man
who is whipped in public loses caste at once and forever. It seems to
be that in having been sentenced to be whipped, the scene in the court
room, the display in the jailyard and the final flogging—all produce a
profound and a lasting mental shock.
This is not true when a mere warder calls a man out of his cell, beats
him and then throws him in a dark hole. This performance is followed by
mere resentment. The victim of this system, and the prisoner is very
often a victim, merely promises himself to kill the warder if he ever
has a chance, or some like foolish threat. Not so when a High Court, a
Chief Justice, amid scenes of dignity and decorum, orders the whipping.
It is the effect upon the mind of the man whipped and the result of the
whipping upon the minds of other criminals that count. It is purely
psychic but it is none the less effective.
None of the men whipped in Delaware is punished to the point that very
great physical torture follows. Such a lashing would create a martyr
of a criminal, and this must be avoided.
Criminals of the type that hold up trains, raid banks and rob
Government buildings are jealous of their reputations in the
underworld. Once whipped they become objects of derision and contempt
in their own circles. Some of these men are inordinately vain. It is
quite likely that this vanity, affectation or love of even doubtful
glory deters them from invading Delaware and daring the post.
Notice how the arrest of a notorious yeggman is always followed by
accurate reports of his record. Study these records and you will seldom
see that the prisoner was whipped in Delaware. It is idle to assume
that these men are afraid to come to Delaware because we have police,
a militia and all the other agencies for the enforcement of law. These
are common to all communities. They are not in any degree afraid of
the physical punishment involved in a Delaware whipping. Many of them
in friendly boxing bouts are more thoroughly beaten up every few days
while exercising. It is the preliminaries, the mental picture of the
trial, the solemnity of the sentence, the ignominy of the performance,
and, last of all, the contempt, ridicule and humiliation at the hands
of their consorts, male and female, that produce the result first on
the individual whipped, and ultimately upon all of his kind.
If there was nothing to it but a mere flogging by a prison warder
of doubtful authority; simply one man in brief authority beating up
another man but temporarily in his keeping, there would be, could be,
no such result, and the whipping of criminals would probably degenerate
into revolting performances with attending scandals. The Delaware
system precludes any such possibility.
The women of the nation lead in all humanitarian work as they should.
In every large city in the United States, except Wilmington, Delaware,
some brute is sent to jail every day or so for wife beating. Chicago
has had to establish a Court of Domestic Relations for the almost
exclusive benefit of women who have been whipped by beasts who swore to
love and honor them. Delaware will never need any such court so long as
the whipping post is so near the court house and in such great favor
with our judiciary. There is no Judge sitting in Delaware who does not
strongly favor the last for wife beaters.
Some of our good friends who call themselves penologists,
philanthropists, humanitarians and prison reformers overlook one all
important matter in their crusades. This essential is the prevention of
crime. Without discussion I will agree to everything that any of them
propose for the health and education and reformation of a criminal, but
I still insist that he is best off when he is kept from crime.
The people of Delaware are not barbarians. In education, in culture, in
true charity and in man’s love for man the people of Delaware rank with
the best in the land and in patriotism second to none. It is absurd to
attempt the indictment of a people of a sovereign State. Delaware has a
proud place in the history of the country and is prepared to meet every
proper issue as it arises and Congressmen from the wilds of Montana
will do well to study the practical results following legislation in
Delaware before asking for Federal interference in a purely State
matter.
Let every professional criminal in all the world know that Delaware is
no field for his operation; that crime here means public whippings on
the bare back, the ultimate of public disgrace, absolute enforcement of
the law and Delaware will be well served. Other States may toy with the
criminal; experiment with crime and multiply the police, but Delaware
will continue to prevent crime and thus save the criminal from himself
and protect the public from the criminal.
There is no considerable sentiment against the whipping post in
Delaware.