Hangmen Also Die

‘They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” Bob Dylan intones flatly in the opening stave of his long and haunting lament, “Desolation Row.” Those who have had the opportunity to read James Allen’s extraordinary book “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America” will need no further illustration of what is intended: For several generations (and well into the fourth decade of the 20th century), public immolation of outcasts furnished an occasion for Saturnalia. The lurid photographs of the event, cheaply reproduced for sale and salacity and still counted as “collectibles” (which is how Allen, an antique dealer, came across them), were often the least of it. Fingers, toes and ears, or pieces of the rope, or even private parts in the special instance of alleged rapists, were given and taken as souvenirs, trophies or talismans.

Generally speaking, the hanging was just the beginning of the treat, a treat for which special excursion trains were run and special editions run off the presses. A semi-garroting would be 1952998688too turbulent and outlandish and was finally domesticated and moved inside official doors and gates, the element of prurient lavishness was not entirely discarded. There were still rituals by which the victim could be kept endlessly uncertain of his fate, and there were still excited descriptions by radio and newsmen, and there were still ways in which-as the name “Old Sparky” in Florida continues to remind us-the object of all the excitement could be burned alive.

Many playwrights and novelists have expended themselves on the occult ways in which these practices-the gratification of the mob, the amputation of souvenir body parts, the elaborate and la1935894902another even more obvious line of descent: the lineage of the American penal system from the English one. Look at the history of capital punishment in Britain and you will find all the ancestors of the pornography of lynching. “Hanging, drawing, and quartering’-the procedure whereby a half-strangled convict is cut down, eviscerated, and castrated alive, and then dismembered and burned-was the big attraction at what is now Marble Arch on the northeastern corner of Hyde Park, then called Tyburn. Grisly keepsakes were commonplace. Favorable vantage points were for sale. Ministers of religion (usually Protestant) were on hand. Executioners were celebrities. The free availability of strong drink, loose women and a generalized atmosphere of fiesta were of the essence.

An awareness of this history and a strong revulsion against English tradition form the underlay of this potent book. Charles St. Lawrence Duff, who occasionally employed his Gaelic synonym 1130460264Little enough is known about his life, yet his name alone makes it a certainty that he was born into a Catholic or nationalist family, in what is now Northern Ireland, but several years before Ireland was partitioned. When the first of “A Handbook on Hanging’s” seven editions was published in 1928, it was subtitled “A Satire’: One need not be too fanciful in imagining the young Duff, having witnessed many hangings and shootings of Irish rebels, modeling himself in part on Swift and “A Modest Proposal.” The last public hanging in Britain was of a Fenian named Michael Barrett in May of 1868; Duff mentions it with particular scorn. (His next book, published in the rather early, not to say advanced, year of 1932, was entitled “James Joyce and the Plain Reader.’) He refers, in closing this book, to “the Struldbrugs who order our affairs,” which witnesses at any rate to a close reading of Gulliver.

Duff might, indeed, have made room for a substantially wider range of literary allusion than he did, since English literature has not exactly declined the challenge presented by the gibbet 1634624544of vicious crime at public hangings; Dickens in “Barnaby Rudge” gave us a hangman-the unrelievedly hateful Mr. Dennis-whose chief delight is to reminisce, as if over sexual conquests, about his part in dispatching young women, and infants, and sometimes mother-and-child combinations. In an obscene piece of vernacular, Dennis describes this exercise as “working-off’: an expression for which Duff also finds sarcastic use. (The portrait of Dennis, Dickens insisted, was taken from life and reality.) Oscar Wilde found the hanging day the most onerous and terrifying of his entire sentence. George Orwell, writing in Duff’s own day, noted, primly but grimly, that there was one aspect of the hanging process that was known and whispered by everybody but never mentioned in print or polite society. (He meant the stupendous erection that results from dislocation of the neck, and that is a commonplace in sadomasochistic literature from Jean Genet onwards.)

Sternest and most penetrating of all, in my view, was Thomas Hardy in his 1888 story “The Withered Arm.” Here, it is the stark arm of the gallows tree that spreads a minatory and supersti1953066869own diseased limb before visiting the sinister local shaman Trendle:

“There is only one chance of doing it known to me. It has never failed in kindred afflictions-that I can declare. But it is hard to carry out, and especially for a woman.”

“Tell me!” said she.

“You must touch with the limb the neck of a man who’s been hanged.”

She started a little at the image he had raised.

“Before he’s cold-just after he’s cut down,” continued the conjuror impassively.

“How can that do good?”

“It will turn the blood and change the constitution. But, as I say, to do it is hard. You must get into jail, and wait for him when he’s brought off the gallows. Lots have done it, though pe1919443312 Duff, who for his satire adopted the tone and style and address of an English barrister, does not make too much of prurience and fetishism. He seeks to lampoon the judicious, the forensic, 1634624544manifestation, perhaps, but in all the other permutations, too.

“They do things better in those efficient United States. Take, for example, the efficiency of the publicity given to the electrocution of Mrs. Creighton, romantically called ‘New York’s Bo1919379809that she was ‘unable even to feel needles thrust into her body and was unconscious when lifted from a bath-chair into the electric chair.’ Sing Sing certainly must have an excellent publicity service-not much happens in it that Americans cannot read in their fine morning papers. Do not think for a moment that this pamphlet is a subtle piece of American or other propaganda; or an attempt to advocate American methods. But let honor be given where it is due, and let us also frankly recognize that we are not respected for our hole-and-corner hangings.”

Here, as throughout the book, Duff’s irony is bitter and unrelenting, though in his eagerness to reprove British hypocrisy he could be said to have missed a trick: Surely the detail about the544105829 Still, the chief virtue of his book is precisely its exposure of hypocrisy, which many believe to be the characteristic vice anglaise. Having resolved to “go straight,” as it were, and to543711606servants; secrecy and discretion veiled the proceedings; pious little notes posted on the front gates of prisons were the only public notification that a “working-off” had taken place at all. Yet an assiduous reporter or attorney could compile a whole anthology of atrocity and indecency, lurking shadily behind this pretense. The hangman who took a little too much drink to steady his hand; the plastic underwear proffered to female victims; the rope that slipped and caused slow strangulation; the rope that was poorly judged and caused decapitation; the rope that broke; the second and even third attempts to “work off” miscreants who didn’t expire the first time

In the past few years there have been, to my certain knowledge, three belated public admissions by the British authorities that they committed the ultimate profanity of hanging an innocent 1835101742also known or at least conjectured. The most appalling such case, and the one which began the long campaign in and out of Parliament for abolition, was that of Derek Bentley in 1953. Bentley, who had gone on a stupid thieving expedition with an accomplice named Christopher Craig, had actually been arrested when his younger friend discharged a shot and slew a policeman. Since Craig was only 16 it was legally impossible to hang him (I pause here to note that 17 Americans have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 for crimes they committed while they were still minors), and thus Bentley was awarded the death penalty because somebody had to pay for the crime.

Duff was prescient in his treatment of the hanging of the innocent, and also in his summary of this landmark case, where he deployed his icy sarcasm (and his Irish Republicanism) to the bes19482801661885630319 “When it was announced that the sentence must be carried out, all sorts and conditions of people, including many members of Parliament, set to and did their utmost to have the decision alt1701995876For the first time in their lives, members of Parliament and the public had it strikingly brought home to them that the inflexibilities surrounding and guarding the Royal Prerogative were acting in a way to silence even the House of Commons-the elected representatives of the people!-when the matter was the important one of to hang or not to hang. A member asked whether the House must wait until Bentley was dead before it was entitled to say that he should not die.”

That arresting question was in point of fact answered by the Speaker in the affirmative, and Derek Bentley was duly hanged.

In characterizing this gruesome and arbitrary episode, Duff uses the un-ironic words “authoritarian totalitarianism,” ’blood sacrifice,” and “ritual hanging.” These may appear extreme 1651864620life-to exact this penalty as an example or symbol of its power-is a survival or hangover from the days of Divine Right, of feudalism, of the ownership of human beings, and the propitiation of evil spirits. It deserves its association with slavery and racism in the Americas, and with capricious hereditary power in Europe. The arguments that support it would (and once did) make a case for maintaining an official torturer. To look up the dates on which the death penalty was either abolished or restored in the 20th century is to consult a palimpsest of modern reaction (abolished by Weimar, restored by the Third Reich; reinstated in Italy by Mussolini). Thus when the Mitterrand government abolished the guillotine in France as its first legislative act in 1981, its Minister of Justice Robert Badinter made the usual patient points about the failure of the guillotine to deter crime, but told the National Assembly that capital punishment was fundamentally abhorrent because it expressed a totalitarian conception of the relationship between the citizen and the State.

Such a conception, Duff points out, was reflected in the vast expansion of the death penalty, specifically to punish crimes against property and the social order, that occurred in Georgian 1634624544state killing, have adopted the new technology of “lethal injection,” but in doing so they have not been able to disguise the absolutist, and pitiless, character of the act. When I attended the execution of Sam McDonald in Potosi prison, Miss., in 1997, I was forced as a “state’s witness” to see the entire thing through a thick glass window. McDonald was speaking volubly as the chemical cocktail first silenced and then extinguished him, but nothing could be heard, and then the “attendants” lowered the blinds. I later asked the prison authorities to tell me what his last words had been: They solemnly instructed me that he had said, “Tell my brothers to be strong.” He had been speaking for much longer than that. In medieval times, the doomed man was permitted his last words on the scaffold; white-coated efficiency now denies even this grace-note (presumably because it cannot be scripted). All the same, the element of obscene Saturnalia cannot be entirely repressed. As the guards began to 1936221552 Duff updated his polemic every decade from 1928 through 1938 and 1948 and up until 1961, and there can be little doubt that he exerted an influence on the two decisive interventions made by A1920231541 “Great Britain is that peculiar country in Europe where people drive on the left side of the road, measure in inches and yards, and hang people by the neck until dead.”

While hile Camus, who wrote his “Reflexions sur la guillotine” for a symposium with Koestler the following year-and the year after the hanging of many Hungarian rebels in what he called ‘578054245 Koestler lived to see capital punishment abolished in his adopted country. Camus and Duff did not; their victory was posthumous (and today the European Union will not even consider admittin1730175264the mob or crowd. Indeed, the second edition of Koestler’s volume, in 1957, carried an “Introduction for Americans” by professor Edmond Cahn of New York University, which asked the provocative question, “Are we no worse than the English?” Professor Cahn pointed out that the original manifesto against capital punishment-Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 tract “On Crimes and Punishments’-had found a ready audience among Enlightenment men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush. Elements of this American abolitionist tradition still survive (Michigan, for example, forbids the practice in its state constitution), but the memory has been overlaid by the toxic mixture of populism and elitism that sometimes goes by the name of “law and order.” A new or fresh exposure to Duff’s saeva indignatio may help people to discern the cultural and historic roots of the gallows tree and the unalterable opposition that has always obtained between it and the liberty tree, and perhaps assist in tearing out the roots of the first, the better to nurture and preserve the second.