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HE extent to which Dr. Work has been criticized (particularly in the Democratic newspapers seeking the election of Governor Smith) naturally brings up the question of why Hoover brought about his selection as National Chairman. The strategy behind the choice of John J. Raskob was obvious enough. He brought to the Democratic Party the solidity of big business, and his many wealthy friends were potential contributors to the campaign fund. But why Dr. Work? Why did the Republican nominee pick out this doctor-politician from Colorado?

In the first place, although he has never been among the supreme leaders in his party, Dr. Work has been politically minded for many years. He is familiar with the countless details of politics regarding which Hoover, and all his close friends, once were profoundly ignorant. He had served for several years as state chairman in

Colorado and had been national committee-man from 1913 to 1919. Hoover made Work chairman, however, for the specific reason that the Secretary of the Interior had given his candidacy support at a time when it was desperately needed. It is not too much to say that without this support Hoover's race for the nomination might never have gotten well under way. Victory having been achieved at Kansas City, it was the first task of the candidate to find a successor to Mr. Butler, who had been hostile almost to the end.

Hoover's very definite debt to Dr. Work becomes more clear as one looks

back on the history of his efforts to obtain the Republican nomination.

Of doubtful standing in his party, he had little backing except among personal friends without the slightest political influence. As long as President Coolidge was a possible candidate he could not, of course, admit that his eyes had wandered in the direction of the White House. Then came the famous "I do not choose" statement from the President, and Dr. Work, who had long admired Mr. Hoover, hurried to Black Hills, S.D., for a conference with Mr. Coolidge. What was said at that historic meeting will never be known, but somehow Work became convinced that the President really meant what he said. Within a few days he let it be known that Hoover was, in his opinion, the best qualified man for the nomination, and from that time, in August of 1927, he labored energetically and not without skill in behalf of the Secretary of Commerce.

The significance of Work's support rested upon the fact that he was a member of the Coolidge Cabinet. Its importance was increased, too, by his reputation as a sober, conservative party man with a distaste for rash action. It convinced a good many politicians, most of them more or less insurgents from the control of the

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This was to advance Hoover as the candidate of the House of Representatives. During the winter of 1927-28, he was instrumental in arranging, very discreetly and without using his name, several dinners for members of the lower house. At each of these Dr. Work made a speech adroitly advancing the idea that to take the lead in supporting Hoover would be to strike a deadly blow at the smugly superior Senate the self-styled "Presidentmakers" who believed they had a monopoly in picking men for the White House. Dr. Work seems to have been extremely successful in arousing their college spirit, and one almost imagines that his harangues were followed by three long cheers for the House with a

short yell for Hoover at the end. At all events, when the fourth of these feasts was held during the late winter, more than 100 Congressmen were included among the Hoover adherents. Most of them, naturally, were men of some political influence in their home communities. They added to the air of authenticity beginning to surround the Hoover boom. And the Senate Presidential oligarchy woke up to find that the despised members of the lower house had been stealing their stuff.

Dr. Work, Senator Moses and Mr. Good of Iowa are probably entitled to most of the credit for the pioneer work. Also responsible, but later on, for Hoover's success were Lowden, Norris and the die-hards of the "Draft Coolidge" movement. Each of these hated each other as much as they hated Hoover and they could not form an alliance at Kansas City. Dr. Work moved through the aisles of the convention hall knowing his man would be nominated on the first ballot, and the faint smile of self-satisfaction which played about his lips was pardonable. Hoover had no alternative but to make him national chairman, and this, no doubt, he was perfectly willing to do. For he fully intended to run his own campaign. He knew from contacts at Cabinet meetings that Dr. Work was a gentleman who both admired and respected him. As national chairman he would not be stubborn about his own ideas and would be amenable to suggestion.

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As chairman

of the Republican National Committee, as during the years when he was in the Post Office and Interior Departments, Dr. Work looks like a thousand other elderly Americans to whom the years have brought a measure of prosperity. His hair is gray and always neatly in place. His mustache is meticulously trimmed. He is well-tailored and has no weakness for gay cravats, for handkerchiefs in his breast pocket. He belongs, in brief, to what the collar advertisements call "The stiff collar class," and he might be a successful banker, merchant or corporation attorney.

Dr. Work is sober, industrious, efficient. He finds life satisfactory to the degree that it is orderly, a day successful to the extent that it has seen accomplishment of the scheduled tasks. New ideas, one fancies, are not too pleasant. He subjects them to searching tests. They serve a long apprenticeship before

they are accepted by his mind. Many a politician has risen to eminence by adopting his party's principles through expediency. It is unthinkable that Dr. Work has any ideas that are not based on conviction. He really believes that most of the blessings of America are the result of Republican rule. A speech such as the keynote address of Senator Fess at Kansas City is not, to him, a partisan oration made for campaign purposes. It is a sound, truthful, historically accurate summation of what the Grand Old Party has done. Thus he is that American phenomenon, a political dry who does not drink.

If, at times, he is a little brusque, it is because he is constantly moved by a passion to get done with the work in front of him, and in order to do this he gets to his office at 7:30 o'clock each morning. He spends the first hour and a half reading letters, dictating and getting things into shape before the deluge of political callers starts. He can rarely be persuaded, so anxious is he to get on, to read any letter more than one page in length. The first paragraph of a newspaper article is enough for him-even when the article concerns himself. This same impatience makes it virtually impossible for him to get through a book. Besides, he has little time to read, for he must get to bed soon after 9 o'clock in order to be ready for the next day. His tendency to hurry through conferences is deplored by the Republican statesmen who now call upon him in vast numbers; men devoted to lengthy conversations regarding this or that situation, they feel uncomfortable in the presence of this national chairman. They are particularly angered by the fact that the door of his office is usually kept open and they can see, as they hold forth, two or three other callers awaiting their turn. No politician, thus encouraged to brevity, can adequately outline some crisis in the organization, and many of the aspersions cast upon Dr. Work during the past few weeks were born, it is probable, of this system.

Dr. Work is no longer a young man -he is sixty-eight years old—and this accounts for the fact that his life now runs in routine channels. It was not always so. Of Scotch descent, he was born in Marion Center, Pa., in 1860, the son of a farmer. Apparently the parental farm was prosperous enough, for he was sent to the state normal school and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated, a

The man

full-fledged M.D., in 1885. whose years draw close to seventy may now be rather conservative, all too conventional. But the young physician felt the call of a new country and he turned toward the West, there to settle at Greeley, Colorado, a mountain village. named after the editor who had first called upon the youth of the land to throw their lot with the empire in the hills. It is not difficult to picture those early days. Work must have traveled countless miles in a buckboard. He must have been called to mountain cabins at all hours of the day and night and have forced his way through the passes when snow swirled down from the peaks. His muscles must soon have become hardened to the contours of a Western saddle. He was physician, surgeon, obstetrician, dentist and confessor to the race which had been bred by the first pioneers.

From Greeley, Dr. Work moved to Fort Morgan and later to Pueblo, Col., on the eastern slope of the Rockies not far from the Great Divide. At first, this was a small community to which prospectors came after searching for gold. Then it became a farming center and with the development of irrigation it grew to be a bustling town. Work watched it grow. His practice increased and he became moderately prosperous, a leading citizen. He seems to have been primarily interested in the hidden mental tangles which cause insanity, and in 1896 he founded the Woodcroft Hospital for mental and nervous diseases, and his reputation as a skilled neurologist traveled far beyond the boundaries of his own state. At various times he was President of the Colorado State Medical Society, PresiIdent of the Colorado State Board of Health, President of the American Medico-Psychological Society and President of the American Medical Association. Even as a doctor, it is obvious, Work was beginning to show a slant for politics and he is given credit, or held to blame, for the fact that the A.M.A. went on record for prohibition.

Dr. Work might have remained merely one of the "best minds" of his party, called upon for occasional advice and appointed to unimportant committees, had it not been for Warren Harding. The Colorado physician had been active in the West during the Harding campaign and he was summoned to Washington partly because of

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THE

HE basic principle of imprisonment for crime under the theory of penal management which has prevailed since the dawn of civilization may be expressed in a single work-punishment.

By NELS ANDERSON

We say that the man who breaks our laws must be punished so that society may be protected from further depredations by him. When we send him to prison we tell him that he is being sent there to be reformed and we hope that others may be deterred by the example of his suffering from any emulation of his crimes.

After centuries of trying to restrain criminals with the rod and the lash and the dungeon we have more criminals than ever before. The prison keeper, the Judge on the bench and the rank and file of mankind still have an unbounded, instinctive confidence in the efficiency of punishment.

Today there are more than 100,000 law breakers in our prisons. It has cost the taxpayers of the United States approximately $300,000,000 to land all those fancy thinkers from Subterranea behind the walls. And then Society forgot them! Just imagine a body of people forgetting a $300,000,000 investment. Thirty-five percent of the present prison population are recidivists doing life terms on the installment plan. They have been in and out of prisons all their lives for everything on the calendar of crime from stealing door mats to robbing banks: they'll probably die in prison.

Obviously there must be something wrong with our prisons. They seem definitely to have failed in the purpose for which they were erected. The writer believes that they have failed because they have proceeded upon a totally false assumption. Let's see

what efforts are made to effect the moral rehabilitation of the criminal.

First of all what sort of men are managing our prisons? Are they equipped for the positions that they hold? Are they skilled in the business of making good men out of bad? Do they really try to make good men out of bad?

It may be said without fear of contradiction that the average prison official from the Warden down to the

keeper in the ranks is utterly unqualified for the position that he holds. He is not skilled in the business of making good men out of bad. He does not really try to make good men out of bad. He is not interested in effecting the moral rehabilitation of the convict.

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The average prison official is a first class wise cracking, rough riding, hand shaking politician who obtained the job because he was a good party man and not because he possessed any peculiar qualifications for the job. He is a man handler pure and simple and in addition to that a man breaker. His idea of a successfully managed prison is wherein the "cons" are made to eat out of his hand and where escapes are few and far between. He will tell that discipline cannot be maintained without the use of the lash and the dungeon. He will tell you that convicts will not respond to humane treatment, and like his brother the detective he believes that a crook never reforms.

you

Altogether he is an notoriously inefficient person. He could probably handle a gang of stevedores or ditchdiggers and get magnificient results, but when it comes to converting a social human liability into a social human asset he is lost.

He believes that convicts

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are sent to prison to be punished and exploited, so he punishes and exploits them and in this he is aided and abetted by Society. And he formulates system bulwarked with abnormal regulations for the sole purpose of impressing upon his charges the stigma of their predicament. His system breeds men as wantonly brutal as the treatment they have been forced to endure.

This old school Warden is one of the reasons why we have an annual crime bill of $10,000,000,000.

Let's take a peek at the convict behind the walls and his reaction to the un-natural life in prison.

The average "con" is a pretty harmless individual, otherwise he wouldn't

be a "con." He is a criminal simply because he is unintelligent and unimaginative. He thought he could beat a game wherein the cards were stacked against him and in which the odds were a million to one that he couldn't win. When he lands in prison he immediately proceeds to adapt himself to the routine. From the moment that "the big gate" closes behind him isolating him from the world until he goes through it again to liberty at the expiration of his term, his mind is obsessed with but one thought-avoid trouble. He wants to avoid trouble because he will receive "the good time allowance" of two months off every year that he has to serve.

It is a comparatively easy matter for him to avoid trouble in a prison which does not have contract labor, but where contract labor prevails, that, in his language, is a horse with another collar. Avoiding trouble in "a stir" where the contractor rules the roost is not so easy.

He soon learns that the contractor runs the prison and that the Warden and his keepers stand ready to carry out the commands of the contractor. If the contractor desires to have "Michigan Red" committed to the dungeon because he has failed to do the contractor's task, why into the dungeon Red goes. If the dungeon treatment fails to bring Red around and the contractor thinks he should have "a little leather" the Warden take Red over to "the bull pen" and gives him "a little leather."

Red is stripped naked. With the aid of a pulley and a rope he is drawn up until his toes just touch the ground. His hands and feet are tied together. A black cap covers his head and face. His bare hide is beaten with a long leather strap in the end of which there are a number of rivets. The rivets break the skin and after Red has received about twenty-five "licks" he is raw from his hips down to his thighs. After this dose he is sent back to the shop. If he doesn't come through with the task he goes to "the bull pen" for "a little more leather" and he keeps going until he has executed the contractor's task.

It never occurrs to the Warden or

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the hungry contractor that the convict may not be physically able to do the task. When a man fails to come through with the stipulated day's work they interpret his failure to do so as stubbornness. They think he is "laying down on the job" so they begin to make him "fear God." Either they will make him do that task or they will kill him. Here is a story of what happened to a convict in a Southern prison where the contractor ruled with an iron hand.

The convict's underworld name was "Seldom Seen." He was a safe cracker, one of the best that ever carried a bottle of "soup" (nitro glycerine). He was a little fellow. He stood about five feet six and weighed around a hundred and twenty pounds. He was a criminal born and bred. His father had been a second story man. His mother "Toledo Nell" was a pick pocket. "Seldom Seen" was the type of crook who would go a hundred miles out of his way to avoid trouble and so when he landed in the Southern prison he was determined to walk the chalked line in order to win the good time allowance.

After he had been "mugged" and finger printed the Warden assigned him to the foundry where one of the contractor's assistants began to instruct him in the art of making stoves. It was heavy, laborious work, but "Seldom Seen" tried to do it. He tried and tried but was unable to do the job. Day in and day out the contractor dogged and threatened him.

"You'll never get away with this

stalling," he assured the safe cracker. "If we let you get away with it all the cons in the place would be laying down on me; do this task, kid, or we'll make y' wish you'd never been born."

Every afternoon at four o'clock "Seldom Seen" was escorted to the "bull pen" where they gave him "the leather." Every afternoon for two weeks they beat him. Eventually he got so that he could hardly walk. Then one day he resolved to end it all. He poured a ladle of white heat molten iron down the leg of his boot. When the boot was taken off half of the leg and all of the foot came with it. "Seldom Seen" hobbled out of the Southern prison on crutches, a cripple for life. The contractor and the brutal warden thought he was "shamming" when he said he couldn't do the task.

The convict who witnesses such spectacles in prison realizes that nobody is interested in his moral rehabilitation. When the Judge sentenced him he told him that he was being sent to prison for two purposes-to liquidate his debt to Society and to be reformed. What he has to say about that Judge wouldn't look well in print. And what he has to say about the prison contractor and the society which tolerates contract labor wouldn't look well in print.

He hasn't been in prison very long before he is planning retaliatory measures. He knows this prison outfit is inferior in many respects to the convicts they exploit and dehumanize.

"Wait until I get out of here," is his

I'll make somebody pay for this." And when he gets out he immediately proceeds to make somebody pay for the heart-breaking day in and day out grind to which the contractor and the prison officials have subjected him. Very frequently he toboggans right back to "the stir" while endeavoring to break even with society. When he goes back the fourth time we pronounce him an habitual criminal and cage him up for life. We are responsible for what he has become and then we punish him for being that thing.

If it so happens that he faithfully performs the tasks arranged for him, tasks which net the contractor three or four dollars a day profits from his labor. they pay the prisoner from a cent and a half to sixty cents a day! Reformation is impossible in a prison where hungry contractors and cold blooded prison officials exploit and maltreat criminals.

Ed Morrell, the hero of Jack London's "Star Rover", wrote a book on his experiences in the California prisons.

"The Twenty-fifth Man" is the best book on contract labor prisons that was ever written. The California prison masters were experts at exploiting and torturing convicts. The reputations of the infamous jute mill and the straight jackets at San Quentin are world wide. San Quentin, Joliet and the Eastern Penitentiary at Philadelphia are three of the worst prisons that ever existed. They still keep men locked up twentythree hours a day in Philadelphia. The Warden of that prison is an ex-State policeman. His predecessor was an exArmy officer. Such training makes good man-handlers, but other qualities are needed for the serious business of reclaiming social misfits. The Warden should be a man of the highest char

acter.

He should be compellingly genial, human and sympathetic. He hould be a man with an immense knowledge of life. He should be a man with a natural indulgence for human frailty. He should be a man who not only believes in men but who makes men believe in him and through him in themselves.

The most profitable industry within. the power of society is that of converting criminals into law-abiding citizens. And all that is required to do this isintelligence and imagination. It can't be done with policemen, politicians, and Army officers. Punishment will not do it. You can't scare a man into think(Please turn to page 758)

C

it

URIOUSLY

enough,

By SHERLOCK B. GASS

Emerson persists among us. And yet nothing, seems to me, could be sharper than the contrast between the drift, at once frantic and tame, of the American current, and the aloof, serene audacity of Emerson, implicit and explicit in the atmosphere which he created and carried about with him, and from which he plucked the discrete particles of his life-long discourse. He is not representative, like Franklin, of the shrewd wisdom and intellectual earthiness that have gone to the redeeming of the continent. Nor, like Whitman, of a certain fine rowdiness of rapture at the expanding spectacle. And his persistence is obviously not due to the enthusiasm of those now most immersed in the current. What goes under the name of Americanization abroad, and the comic caricature under that legend at home are as far as possible from Emersonian.

Yet he is typical of something still latent in America. So far as his appearance is accountable at all he was the product of conditions that could have existed nowhere else. And the ghost still moves, old truepenny, beneath a surface trampled hard by the regimentation-villain of the American. piece-which conscripts us and bids us march at the precise moment when our native prompting is to fly.

We all read him in boyhood. We did not ask for a logic which he himself could no more have supplied than we could have desired. He touched us with fiery particles. They validated themselves with us, as they had in their genesis with him, by their own incandescence. What made us so susceptible to the spark, though it might and usually did prove a flash in the pan, was our American kinship with him. He was both the firstling and the belated discoverer of the opportunity that lay in our newness. We still shared, however unconsciously,

some remnant of the same influence. Certainly the shades of the prisonhouse fall later about the American boy than about those born in maturer societies. We were intellectually old enough to be out of the nursery before we donned, perhaps more docilely than those others, the prison uniform and

"acquired by degrees the gentlest asinine expression."

Am I generalizing too broadly? Most of us, I think, will remember an adolescent interim in which we read him as we sat in the chimney corner, or lurching street-car, or, better still,

on

was the quintessence of ethics, the virtue of virtues.

In the course of time, perhaps, we ceased to read him and came to terms with conventions and institutions. But he never quite ceased to rankle. He remained, and remains, a voice of conscience in the intellectual life of America, rebelled against, cried down, but persistent, the troublous reminder of the forgotten man, whose existence so many of the pressures of American life and modern life in the large conspire to suppress.

some shady hillside, and thrilled N

from moment to moment at glimpses of the undiscovered country of our own spirit's autonomy. We found a rapture of recognition in the reminder of how often our own unheeded thoughts rose up to confront us in the pages of genius, then blushed to realize that that thought, too, we might have seized but hadn't. And for a moment we stood confronted with what is, I venture, the central and persistent note of Emerson's significance. Not his Transcendentalism, except as a nebulous supplement, nor his verse except as it echoed in allegory the voices of his prose, but the clear, empirical perception of the subtle meaning of the individualthere, I think, is the essential Emerson.

He posted himself at the geometric point where, to use the current jargon, the unconscious becomes the conscious, where the phenomena of nature become the symbols of thought, and he made himself the champion of the transaction at that juncture. Whatever might become of them afterward, it was here in the loneliness of the individual mind that thoughts emerged and were captured or escaped. And that momentous option hung upon the alertness, the confidence, the courage of the lone watcher at the portal. What did become of them afterwards was too often the dogma, the institution-lengthened shadow of a man-subject of numb repetition. The truer the thought the

more liable to become a substitute for the one essential human feat.

Emerson was thus a pure prophet of the intellect-scarcely of logic, which is a method of intellect and ancillary-but of intellect in its ultimate and primitive act of conception. If he was ethical in his bent—well, this

OTHING could have been more timely than Emerson's appearance. In the cultures from which America sprang the life of the mind had expanded slowly downward and outward from above, from aristocrat to democrat, from priest to people. And on the way it had found its place, its arrogance, perhaps, but also something of the independence for which Emerson But in the American was jealous. experiment, in which life has tried to rise upward and inward from the mass, the intellect has labored under two handicaps. On the one hand was the necessity to borrow the substance of its foundation. On the other was the very virtue of the mass, its massiveness -the union that gave it strength, the conformity that welded it.

It is hard to see how else it could have risen at all. But it was a happy moment when a serene native voice, backed by a serene embodiment of the doctrine it proclaimed, uttered what Holmes has called our declaration of intellectual independence. A declaration of national independence was bound to be acclaimed in the Thirties. But more searchingly and painfully it was a declaration of individual independence, a cutting of the more sensitive ligaments that united us collectively at home.

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“.. A man must know," Emerson said, and the sting lost nothing for want of a calm example, "how to estimate sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor . . . but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. . . . It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the