First his book of poetry disappeared. Although he could not read its contents himself, it was a powerful symbol of his resistance to the grim reality of incarceration. One day, he could not find it in his cell, and nobody would tell him if it had been stolen by another inmate or confiscated. He was devastated and begged Amelia Haswell to help. She asked Dr North to have the book found because writing was therapeutic: T have always encouraged his composing rhyme, as I thought it would help divert his mind. . . . If I was blind and had no way of diverting my mind, I am not sure I would have a mind to divert very long.' A month later she wrote again. Perry was evidently heartbroken. Eventually North replied that even if the book was found, he would be reluctant to return it to Perry in his 'present condition'. He was in no mood to compromise.
Amelia Haswell was infuriated by Dr North's intransigence but she was even more stern with Perry who, she felt, was letting himself down. She warned him, in an eleven-page letter, that his disobedience, particularly his persistent refusal to wear clothes, condemned him in the eyes of the officials who would decide his fate. Choosing a biblical analogy, as usual, she reminded him, perhaps unwisely, of the fate of Nebuchadnezzar, 'who did not give God the glory for any of his blessings'. Might he not, she asked, rather idealistically, take his mind off his sufferings and try to do some good by influencing others? She signed off 'A Friend "in storm and sunshine"'.
But something had snapped. Perry did not read her letter: not because it was confiscated or because he had no reader, but because he refused it. His faith had always been in his Christian friends rather than in Christ, and for him God personified justice and right in this life, not the promise of eternal redemption. Now the missionary's exhortations to trust in God rang hollow. He wanted to win his freedom in this life, not the next.
Although her tireless support for Perry stemmed from real love and compassion, Amelia Haswell's letters are often heavy going for a reader who lacks her faith, and her model of patient suffering was one that could not have been less likely to appeal to the rebellious Perry, always more Lucifer than Christ. To Perry she was, and would remain, a friend, but her advice, always less welcome than her practical help, was now almost a torment.
Dr North lost no time in informing her that Perry was unwilling to read any more of her 'fanatical letters'. Her distress was obvious. She replied, defensively, that she was a busy woman with far too many souls to care for to spend her time working to help someone who was not willing to be helped. But, however wounded she felt, Amelia Haswell was no quitter, as she wrote: T cannot believe God permitted me to go through the persecution I have trying to befriend Oliver, unless some good must come from it some way, sometime, somehow.' Amelia Haswell continued to write to Oliver Perry and he later referred to her with affection, but after more than twenty years their relationship would never be quite the same.
In February 1912 another link between Perry and the world was broken. Perry had rejected his 'Mother'; now the father who had rejected him died. Oliver H. Perry slipped on a frozen sidewalk outside his home and fell, fracturing his skull. He was carried inside bleeding, as his daughter had been decades before, and died without regaining consciousness. After his death, Perry's stepmother Sarah went on to run a boarding house, while his half-brother took over their father's business. In an ironic twist, given his relatives' risky lives, Claude's son, Perry's nephew, became a successful insurance agent. They excised Oliver Curtis Perry from family memory.
A letter from Amelia Haswell to Oliver Perry in 1912
Amelia Haswell wrote to see how Perry, who 'always seemed to have considerable affection for his father and grieved because he did not visit him', had taken the news. She wrote that Perry's attitude had always surprised her, as she knew about his rejection just when 'he needed a parent's love'.
There are of course no records of how Perry took the news, but there are signs of a change in his behaviour. Oliver H. Perry's early rejection had done irreparable damage to his son, sparking an anxiety about rejection and a compulsive need to prove himself that would contribute to his crimes and his inability to cope with prison. Perry senior's recent apparent indifference had caused him real distress. But the father's death seems to have given the son a form of release. In 1913 the reporter for The World who had interviewed him after the Matteawan escape was allowed to visit him and found a very different man. He was still maintaining his tough regime in protest at his conditions but now seemed to have found almost an inner calm after the repeated storms of his prison life.
Perry recognized the reporter's voice as he approached his cell and said, T suppose I have to make my toilet,' as the keeper unlocked his door. His 'toilet' consisted of wrapping a white band over his eyes, wrapping a towel around his loins and putting on a pair of very short prison socks. Despite the temperatures, which sometimes dropped to thirty-five below, Perry lived naked and kept the window of his room wide open day and night. 'You know,' he explained, T can't stand the kind of underwear they give me here. I feel very happy this way. I never catch cold. I used to suffer from colds when I was outside, but since I got rid of my clothes I am in perfect physical condition.' The report described a man who, however strange his appearance, was calm and good-humoured. He entertained his visitors by reciting his own poetry, committed to memory. The loss of his book, like the loss of his father, no longer caused him the sharp pain that had driven him to react with such self-destructive violence.
One by one he had stripped away all the trappings of his prison existence. He refused to wear the signs of his convict status, or to feel them against his skin, just as he resisted the institution's other regulations and regimes. While his self-blinding may have been a desperate return to the womb, his defiant return to an elemental state was almost a rebirth. Once the unwanted boy had sought status and comfort in the fine clothes and jewellery that he could only get through crime. Like the era he lived in, he had followed the dangerous dream of extreme individualism and material gain at any cost. Unlike the robber barons, who had bent the law with impunity, he had broken it, and lost his freedom. Now, in the brutal society of the asylum, he found another way of being, with no possessions and little respect, but a stronger sense of self-worth than he had ever had. He had turned the terrible conditions of the dungeon into a pared-to-the bone way of life.
He still hoped to be freed from Dannemora, but had accepted that he would never be seen as normal and wanted only to be sent to an asylum near his friends. The father whose love and acceptance he had never been able to win was dead and the adolescent struggles with authority, triggered by his childhood, seemed to have been played out. It is hard not to see, in the naked blind man standing in the icy wind that whistled through his cell, a fusion of raging Lear and sightless Gloucester, granted new insight through suffering.
Perry's struggle to be pardoned and sent to an asylum near his friends momentarily caught the attention of the Governor, John Dix, but, as so often happened with Perry, he seemed more fascinated by the man than his case and made no intervention.
Outside the confined world of the asylum, the free world was convulsed by conflict. The Great War raged across Europe, while the United States debated the rights and wrongs of this battle between old imperial powers. J. Pierpont Morgan lost no time in extending 500 million dollars' credit to the allied powers, but his investment in the conflict failed to raise American confidence in intervention. In New York State the battle was still being waged between those who sought to preserve the old order of patronage, particularly strong in the rural north-east, and those who argued for a regulated meritocracy to usher in a modern age of professionalism and progress. Prisons were an obvious target for both sides as numerous commissions, enquiries and investigations revealed. Accusations of financial impropriety and corruption flew to and fro in the legislature and the press, hitting reformers and conservatives alike, including Cornelius Collins who was indicted by Grand Jury for larceny and forgery. The Democratic Governor, William Sulzer, founded a 'Prison Re
form Commission' that championed the ideals of the 'New Penologists', radical thinkers with ambitious ideas about what prisons could achieve. Thomas Mott Osborne embarked on his undercover operation in Auburn, exposing the horrors of the dungeon and the degradations of prison life. He and others, who had experienced the miseries of working as keepers, went on to become enlightened wardens, trying to build better regimes. There were many setbacks, but gradually some of the worst excesses of the old penal regimes were brought to light. Yet, as usual, Perry and his fellow 'patients' in what was now known as a State Hospital saw little change in their conditions.
1917 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Perry's final train robbery. To mark it, his life story, in his own words, was published in a number of papers, melodramatically headlined by one 'Out of His Living Tomb Speaks Oliver Curtis Perry'. The story, from rejection by his parents to his robberies, self-blinding and recent protests, was a familiar one. It couched a final appeal, not for freedom, but for compassion. He knew that it was impossible to lift what he called 'the brand of insanity at this time', but was anxious to reassure those used to sensational tales of his bad, mad behaviour that he was not 'the same old Oliver Perry of years ago'. In his skill as a communicator he was very much the old Perry, pointing out the harshness of his sentence before making his appeal to be sent to a civic asylum near his old friends: 'Unless the Governor extends his humanity, I will have to serve twenty-four years and five months more, whereas a man who takes a life gets twenty years. Murderers have been in prison a dozen times before, yet they obtain a parole after twenty years of service. My simple prayer is that my sentence be reduced. The State Lunacy Commission would then have the power to transfer me to the Hudson River State Hospital at any time.'
That year America finally joined in the war that would cover the fields of France and Belgium with the graves of young men. But at the close of 1917 Perry was still to be found in his 'living tomb' at Dannemora.
He would, however, outlive the man he called his 'adversary in chief. In December Charles North was killed by a murderer called Chris Reichert, who had been declared insane in Sing-Sing. Unlike Perry, he was judged to be no threat and made a 'trusty', so North was relaxed as he visited the carpentry workshop and talked with him about a toy he was making. But when he turned away to leave, Reichert plunged a chisel into his back. The Superintendent bled to death on the floor.
North was succeeded by his assistant, Dr John Ross, but if Perry hoped, as he so often did, that the change might be for the better, he was swiftly disappointed. Ross had a difficult task, running an ever more overcrowded and under-resourced institution. The war had made it almost impossible to recruit attendants, and, echoing Perry's 1895 assessment of the difficulty of obtaining able employees, he appealed for better pay. But nothing changed, and in the summer of 1919 he and his staff were publicly accused of maltreating their patients. The charges were identical to those repeatedly made by Perry only to be ignored, ranging from keeping inmates on an inadequate diet, 'doping' them to make them appear insane to visitors, and failing to release sane men, to causing the death of two inmates in brutal assaults by attendants. This time the complaints were voiced not by a patient, but by a lawyer whose brother was an inmate. The newly elected Democratic Governor Alfred Smith swiftly ordered a formal enquiry into conditions at the institution at which witnesses testified to harsh conditions and brutality. One ex-inmate was direct in his judgment of the Superintendent: 'Dr Ross will go the same way Dr North did. He will be killed by some one of the men. He treats men worse than dogs.'
The investigation, although welcomed by progressives, brought no radical change, and Dr Ross remained in post, while Governor Smith, a principled reformer, was caught up in a seesaw battle for New York with the sardonic Republican Nathan Miller. While Smith eventually created the Department of Corrections and transformed New York's social policy, Miller's conservatism was more in tune with the nation's intolerant, introspective post-war mood. Fear of potential enemies within, of 'reds', in the wake of the Russian Revolution, of immigrants, often assumed to be radicals, and of African Americans, who were moving north to escape continuing persecution, made it hard to work for change. The desire for 'normalcy' made it almost impossible to champion difficult causes.
In a strange synchronicity the year that Perry's chief adversary died also saw the death of his staunchest friend. On Sunday, 14 September Amelia Haswell died at the age of seventy-one. She had caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. The courageous campaigner who had risked her reputation for her principles died in the year when the women of New York were finally given the vote. She may have been naive, even deceived by him at times, but she had been Perry's friend and champion for over thirty years. In years to come, in an ironic twist to the rumours that had dogged their relationship, she would be transformed in popular myth into his sweetheart: a pretty, but insipid, young Sunday School teacher called Amy. There is nothing in Perry's records, of which very few were preserved after the Great War, to give any hint of how he reacted to the news of Amelia Haswell's death. It is not even clear that he was told that she had died. In a sense, her death would have finally made him the orphan he had always seemed to be.
It is easy to assume that Perry was now totally alone, and he had certainly withdrawn, at least in part, from the world in which he was forced to live. But one letter, sent from the 'Natawanda Club' in New York City, suggests that he was still capable of kindness and even fun:
Dear Friend Oliva Perry, Will you please write to me and let me know if I could help you getting out of the bughouse. If you want me to get you out I will promise to do anything that is in my power. As I have friends on both side. Republicans and Democrats. Hoping to hear from you soon. As I don't forget a pal. Aspecially [sic] as slept next room as you play music aluminum bucket for two night and gave me something to eat a couple sandwiches and tobacco to chew. As I still remain your true Pal. Charles Isola.
Isola, as the reference to his politician friends implies, was a petty New York Italian gangster whose career, bound up with the new age of crime ushered in by Prohibition, had brought him briefly to Dannemora. There he had met a living embodiment of a different era of crime and the outlaw and the gangster had become friends. But his offer to help Perry never reached him. Letters from ex-prisoners had been banned.
In the aftermath of the Great War and the terrible flu epidemic that devastated the nation, political struggles continued to occupy the men charged with oversight of the most vulnerable of prisoners. In 1921, after a bitter argument, Dr Charles Pilgrim, Head of the State Hospital Commission, resigned, complaining that the Republican administration had restored 'something like pre-war conditions', while Governor Miller defended New York's 'splendid care' of the 'mentally afflicted'.
Amelia Haswell's death made it difficult for Perry to contact the press, if he wanted to, but the newspapers were filled with stories of gangland crime anyway. The new celebrity criminal was a sharp-suited gangster with a machine-gun and a moll, not a train robber with a revolver and a missionary. The few articles that appeared were grotesque, inaccurate caricatures, one describing Perry as 'an insane animal with a terrible lust for blood'. Another, in February 1924, announced 'Perry, Noted as Outlaw, Fighting Death in Prison'. The article retold the story of his past robberies, but gave no details of the threat to his life and almost no sense of his present. Perry had survived so long against the odds that he was almost an embarrassment. In an age when the stories of villains like Al Capone and clean-cut heroes like Lindbergh, the farm boy turned aviator, offered neat moral lessons, even his younger self was out of place. Perry won his fight with death, but he had been forgotten.
Four years later, after a life as quiet as Perry's had been turbulent, the other central character in the original drama bowed out. On 18 December 1928 Daniel Mclnerney died. That same year Governor Smith set his sights on the Presidency but lost to Republican Herbert Hoover, who confidently predicted an end to poverty. Hoover had come to publi
c attention as the wartime head of the Food Administration, encouraging Americans to eat less with suggestions like 'Meatless Tuesdays' and 'Wheatless Wednesdays'. It is tempting to wonder what Perry might have made of his ideas. Post-war New York seemed, as it had in the Gilded Age, a glittering place of new products and unprecedented pleasures, designed now for the masses not the few. Entertainment had become a boom industry and New York was at the forefront. Country dwellers may have seen their local markets close and farmers leave their land, but a trip in a family motor car, once a sign of unattainable wealth, could take them to a picture palace.
Gloversville might not be the centre of the nation's glove-making any more, but one of its new companies, 'Shine Enterprises', ran seventy-eight picture-houses across the state, where the movie-star heroes and heroines fuelled new fantasies. Outside the walls of the Dannemora State Hospital, the unspoiled wilderness became a favourite filming location. Although the era's chronicler F. Scott Fitzgerald would call it 'the greatest, gaudiest spree in history', few realized that the spending was underpinned not by solid economic growth but by unprecedented speculation. America was gambling with its future as Oliver Perry had done once before.
The optimistic President was worried about one growth industry: crime. Gangsters thrilled moving-picture audiences as once outlaws like Perry had gripped newspaper readers. But in reality, the prohibition of alcohol turned many ordinary men and women into petty criminals, and battling the big business of organized crime put intolerable pressure on the law enforcement agencies and the prison system. The good times had offered little to those in prison, and at the close of 1928 and in the summer of 1929, the men of Auburn and Clinton fought back against their miserable conditions in the most violent riots ever seen. Auburn was all but destroyed by fire, the Warden taken hostage, the Principal Keeper and eight prisoners killed. The riots spread across the state and beyond. Then, as order was restored in the prisons, and before the enquiry that would establish new security grading and a parole system, 24 October 1929 turned into a Black Thursday and America's great Depression began. In the Mohawk valley, men started digging for Perry's treasure, unaware that the man they thought had buried it there was still alive.
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