Hudson River as it moves in stately fashion to the state capital, Albany, then passes through the foothills of the Adirondack wilderness until, hours later, it reaches the lakes of the North Country. It seems to move forward in space but backward in time, as the buildings of successive generations give way to ancient forests and mountains, a landscape barely marked by its human inhabitants. Slowly but surely the train climbs until it is hugging a cliff wall high above the chain of lakes that mark the way to Canada. Nervous passengers, advised not to look down, stare ahead instead, only to see the front of the long train implausibly near the edge of the next bend in the cliff.
Plattsburgh sits on the last and largest lake, Champlain. On one side are the jagged heights of New York's High Peaks, on the other the blue Green Mountains of Vermont. It is the site of one of the decisive naval battles of the Revolutionary War, but here such recent events seem inconsequential. Rumours persist that a prehistoric creature still swims in the deeps of the lake. This is a New York as far removed from the metropolitan and industrial visions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it is possible to imagine, but its sublime beauty has, inevitably, a dark side. As one nineteenth-century visitor commented, 'One is likely to become maudlin with the beauty of it all . . . to be possessed of an urgent desire to wander on and on.' Even today, an unprepared rover in these forests, the last remnant of those that once covered the whole state, may never return home.
When Perry and his fellow patients were transported here, the route would have been the same and the landscape similar. There are new houses, of course, but the wilderness is protected and few choose to live in such isolation all year round. In the long winters that can last into April, the temperature drops well below freezing; heavy snows cut off towns, villages and houses, and break power supplies, plunging modern residents back into an earlier way of life. Perry's train journey would have been much slower and far less comfortable. Even now there is only one train a day and one track in each direction, so a deer on the line or sudden bad weather can bring the service to a halt. A century ago visiting officials, with every comfort available to them, complained bitterly of the privations of a trip to Plattsburgh. Prisoners travelled in the most basic of conditions and even in the summer it would have been a miserable experience. To a blind man even the beauty of the landscape could offer no relief.
Dannemora State Hospital (Courtesy of Special Collections, Feinberg Library, State University of New York at Plattsburgh).
Dannemora was far away from the friends and supporters who helped Perry stay in touch with the free world. Visiting Matteawan may not always have been easy for Amelia Haswell and her fellow reformers, but the trip to the distant Adirondacks was daunting indeed. Perry knew that he was facing the greatest isolation of his life. The reputation of Clinton prison, within whose grounds his new asylum stood, was fearsome, as its nicknames reveal: 'Little Siberia', 'the Northern Bastille', the 'Dark Hole of Calcutta'. Since the prison opened in 1845, its remote location had fostered a regime that seemed indifferent to regulation. Rumours of terrible abuses led to investigations that would culminate in 1903 with the state hiring Pinkerton agents to go undercover as prisoners. The threat of ending up in Clinton had discouraged Perry from turning himself in after the first robbery and now he would be doubly confined within its grounds. Some may have found a bleak justice in this eventual journey.
Clinton, today still a maximum-security prison housing more than 2,500 men, is one of the most imposing correctional institutions in the United States. To those outside the state its name has little resonance, but once seen it is never forgotten. At night its lights shine clear across to the neighbouring state of Vermont, in daylight it is equally daunting. Clinton's sheer size and immense, solid perimeter wall, totally enclosing the world of the prison, manage to upstage its dramatic backdrop of dark wooded mountains and dwarf the small village of Dannemora that grew up around it. Clinton's convicts once laboured in rich iron ore mines, while the village people found work in the prison and later in the asylum. The work was hard and poorly paid. Even in the 1940s asylum attendants received low wages and only two weeks' vacation a year. Extraordinarily, they were obliged to draw lots for when they could take it, with losers having to take precious holidays in deepest winter.
In 1896 the Superintendent of Prisons, the Warden of Sing-Sing and Henry Allison of Matteawan had visited Dannemora and chosen it as the site for a new asylum. It is hard now to imagine how such a remote location, far from most patients' families and friends, can have seemed a good choice, but the decision was both well intentioned and expedient. Like Matteawan, it was a rural, supposedly restful, location, with cold, clear air that gave Clinton the highest survival rates in the state of prisoners with tuberculosis. It also had a supply of free convict labour to build the new institution.
A Dannemora Ward during Perry's time there (Courtesy of Special Collections, Feinberg Library, State University of New York at Plattsburgh).
The completed asylum was celebrated in the press as 'A Comfortable and Ornamental Structure, and Credit to the State'. Its opulent entrance is unchanged, with an elegant hallway and sweeping staircase of dark, highly polished wood. An early visitor could have easily felt that he or she was entering a well-appointed retreat. But the building that is now a medium-security annexe to the main prison was then known as the 'mountain bughouse' and the bugs' accommodation was less than salubrious. Today most of the men sleep in dormitories, as if they were in a particularly shabby boarding school, but some, such as sex offenders and others who need to be segregated for their own safety, still inhabit the 'rooms' that once held the criminal insane: stone cells with high windows that even now, with heating, are chilly reminders of life beyond the polished surface. Like Matteawan, this institution has moved on, but its past is visible in odd corners. Prisoners queue to see the doctor outside cold tiled rooms where the original inmates were once 'treated'. In the basement is a row of bare stone cells, formerly used to hold the most unruly men. Nearby stands a large steel cage with wide-spaced bars. Now it stores broken furniture, but its design suggests it would have been ideal for administering the notorious water treatment used across the state in Perry's day. Here men who could not be controlled in any other way could, like Perry when he attacked James Shaw in Auburn, be blasted with high-pressure water hoses until they were subdued. The force drove men against the bars and made many lose control of their bowels.
Perry should logically have disappeared in Dannemora, as he all but did in Matteawan. Few traces of convicts declared insane were preserved and most that were are forbidden to the public. But digging in the Dannemora archives revealed a case file full of Perry's correspondence and writings. There are letters from supporters and government officials, and on dozens of pieces of paper, from neat lined sheets to small torn scraps, and always written in pencil, Oliver Perry's own writings. Unlike the letter from Lyons, these are not, of course, in his own handwriting. As in Matteawan, he dictated all his letters and poems to other inmates, whose varying degrees of literacy are poignantly revealed. One or two wrote in careful copperplate, but most struggled to spell even simple words and were defeated by Perry's sometimes ambitious vocabulary. Intriguingly, each note is signed 'Oliver C. Perry' with a similar flourish and large, proud capitals, suggesting the blind prisoner was still determined to sign his own name. Although Dannemora threatened Perry with the greatest isolation of his life, it has left the fullest record of his thoughts, revealing a man of extraordinary determination and spirit.
If the Matteawan authorities breathed a sigh of relief when Perry went north, those in Dannemora may have had greater confidence that they could cope. The new building was not overcrowded and was certainly less vulnerable to escape attempts. And Perry seemed to be a spent force. Times had changed, new stories occupied the press, and how much trouble could one blind madman cause? The staff in the new hospital would also have been well prepared for Perry, as their first Superintendent was Dr Robert Lamb, the
physician and amateur photographer from Matteawan. Dr Lamb had done rather well for himself. As well as being promoted to the new post, he was highly respected in state government circles. In the summer of 1902, when Perry arrived, he was travelling in Europe for the New York Department of Prisons, to explore new approaches to criminal identification. He went first to Paris to study under Alphonse Bertillon, the deviser of the Bertillon method of identification by measurement, then on to England to research the even newer technique of reading fingerprints. But if the Superintendent and his staff assumed that Perry would be easier to manage than he had been in his previous institutions, they were badly mistaken.
The person who knew Perry best, who had stood by him through all his, and her own, trials and tribulations, was Amelia Haswell. Determined to bridge the great distance between them, she wrote to Dannemora with extraordinary regularity: long letters to Perry with religious cards, newspaper clippings and brief notes to the Superintendent accompanied by money to buy 'comforts' for her friend. Her greatest gift, was, in her eyes, the reminder of his hopes for a better life to come, but she did all she could to make his present life more bearable. Every couple of weeks she sent money for small items, each winter she sent money for flannel underwear or blankets to help him survive the terrible cold, and each Christmas she sent a gift. All too often these were judged inappropriate and returned, much to his, and her, disappointment. But it was her letters, often the only friendly contact Perry had, that were his real lifeline. Communication with the outside world was one of the most precious privileges for the men in Dannemora. It was also one of the easiest to control and silence from a patient often meant that the privilege had been withdrawn as a punishment. Perry's silences could last for many months and his friend's ensuing anxiety was exacerbated by the distance between them.
Amelia Haswell was neither rich nor in good health, but she was determined to visit Perry in his first summer in Dannemora. Perhaps unwisely, she wrote to him about her plan, only to find that ill health prevented her. Her own eyes had become diseased, and one was removed that year in an emergency operation. The experience deepened her sympathy for Perry, but her understanding was no consolation. Although she reassured him she would make the journey at a later date, and did manage to visit him some years later, his disappointment when the visit was postponed was acute. As Amelia Haswell knew, to a man with little to look forward to, and who had felt betrayed and unwanted since infancy, few things hurt as much as a broken promise. There is no record of how Perry responded to this disappointment. But he was already preoccupied with the miseries of his new home and about to embark on a potentially fatal campaign against one aspect of the Dannemora regime: food.
Food had long been something of an obsession of Perry's. After a childhood of neglect, poverty and abuse, he was always anxious, sometimes paranoid, about what he ate. Food had been the trigger of many incidents in Auburn and Matteawan and in Dannemora it was the catalyst for his next dramatic act. It started with his usual, and undoubtedly accurate, complaints about his rations. Food in all prisons was bad: often stale, sometimes maggoty, and rarely nourishing. Organized and casual 'scams' meant that better items might be creamed off, while contamination by staff or inmates was an ever-popular trick.
One of Perry's more light-hearted criticisms was a sarcastic four-page long 'Bill of Fare' describing a week's meals. This included breakfasts of 'cracked rice mush with watered molasses' or 'cornmeal mush', dinners of 'pea soup well watered', 'beef stew with mighty little meat' and 'fresh fish and unpared potatoes no longer than hen's eggs. No gravy and about two mouths of fish', and suppers of 'Apple sauce well watered', and 'five prunes floating in water'. 'The meals', Perry concluded, 'consist of mush, mush, mush, or slush, slush, slush.'
While few can have relished their rations, Perry had additional reasons for complaint. He had been suffering for years from the combined effects of the rupture discovered soon after his arrival in Auburn, and of later beatings, that made it hard for him to digest many foods. As a blind man he also had physical difficulties in eating some foods, and an increased vulnerability that gave him a deep suspicion of what he was eating and a desperate desire to get some control over it. Using his ability to turn other people's logic to his own advantage, as he had in court and in the press, he argued that as he had been judged insane, and so in need of care, he should be given better food than that provided for ordinary prisoners. No concessions were made, so, convinced that he had nothing to lose, he took a dramatic step. On 19 November 1903 he announced that unless his requests for better food were granted he would stop eating altogether. The authorities refused to listen, so he refused all food. Oliver Perry was on hunger strike.
CHAPTER 18
'When I am yelling for freedom'
D AYS PASSED, Perry began to weaken, and still he refused to eat. Without food, death would be a certainty before long. But was he really determined to die rather than compromise? He was certainly not suicidal. A man like Perry, as he had proved when he blinded himself, could have found a quicker way to die. There was no audience watching or waiting for the outcome. Although he was genuinely angry about the conditions he and his fellow patients endured, unusually, given his past mania for publicity, he did not seem to be trying to attract the attention of the press or the public. In his letters to Amelia Haswell and others he made no reference to the hunger strike as a public protest, only mentioning the particular concerns he wanted addressed by his keepers. Just as his reasons for blinding himself remained unclear, so Perry's motives in taking his hunger strike so far were never fully explained, but he was undoubtedly driven by the reckless, masochistic impulsiveness that characterized his adult life. He was trying to assert his will, at any cost.
In years to come similar situations would test prison authorities across the world. Some prisoners have stopped eating as a suicidal protest, refusing to sustain a life no longer worth living. Others, like the British suffragettes and Irish Republicans, have used their own bodies as weapons in a battle for political change. Today, the legal and ethical dilemmas of treating a prisoner who refuses food are complicated by the gaze of the media, but the central question remains: can someone be forced to live? In the closed world of the asylum in 1903, the doctors had an answer. When Perry was near death, they strapped him to a table, pushed a tube up his nostril and poured a mixture of eggs and milk into his stomach.
When it was clear that the doctors could end his hunger strike by force, Perry changed tactics. He was determined to win some control over his life, so if his food was served according to his requirements, he would eat. If not, he insisted, the doctors would have to tube-feed him or watch him die. In effect he forced his own force-feeding. From his cell he issued constant written requests and complaints. Sometimes he included his fellow inmates, with whom he seems to have been quite popular, as he had been in the past, in his requests. But usually his demands were personal: Oliver Perry was still a determined individualist. His demands often read like an imperious customer dealing with room service in a bad hotel. He refused food because it was inferior to that served to the keepers, or had been tampered with, such as milk that he claimed was watered down after the cream had been skimmed off for the staff. He rejected food that was stale, like a cake sent by Amelia Haswell and delivered so late it had dried up.
Sometimes he specified what he would like to eat, in bills of fare that read like poignant reminders of real food he had once enjoyed: 'Breakfast. Two hard fried eggs turned over; and boiled or fried potatoes or hash. Dinner. Fried Beefsteak, or carved Roast Beef, or fresh fish together with boiled or mashed potato and gravy. Also macaroni and beans when prepared. Supper. Two hard fried eggs turned over; and fried potatoes or hash.'
One of Perry's bills of fare.
Only rarely did Perry win any concessions from his doctors and keepers and many notes revealed the harsh reality of his situation. He often begged the doctors to warm through the mixture that they pumped through his nose into his stomach o
r to reduce its volume so that it caused him less pain. Although sometimes he ate regular food in his room from a metal plate, and his weight remained quite stable, Perry was forcibly tube-fed, sometimes for weeks at a time, for the rest of his long years in Dannemora.
His attempt to take control of his own life was not confined to eating. After years of complaining about being forcibly drugged, he tried to manipulate the use of medication. He warned his doctors that if his suffering became too much to bear, he would shout all night until they administered a knockout injection and gave him some 'oblivion'. As with the tube-feeding, he tried to turn punishment into treatment on demand. Some months later he extended his campaign even further. Insisting that as a man judged 'insane' he should not be forced to wear the degrading clothing of a prisoner, particularly distressing for a man once known for his style, he tore off all his clothes and demanded decent attire. When this was refused he went naked, wrapping himself in a blanket only when visitors arrived, anticipating by over half a century the actions of political prisoners in Northern Ireland. Occasionally he would wear underclothes, if he felt that he had been well treated. Going naked was no casual gesture. Perry was housed in a room with no heating and in winter the temperature was well below zero, day and night.
It would be hard to argue that a man who imposed such a regime on himself was sane, but his writings, preserved by the authorities he fought, reveal that while he was clearly prone to paranoid fears and compulsions, his intellect and reason were as sharp as ever and he had sensitivity and subtlety as well as a violent temper. His behaviour also prefigured that of some more recent prisoners who, after extreme bouts of destructiveness and delusion, have, in better surroundings, recovered completely.
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