FULL TEXT (Article 1 of 2):
The Function It Performs in the Affairs of Our City Is Essentially that of a House of Collection – It Takes Its Toll in Days and Hours, in Minutes and Seconds – Time Is Its Silver, Men’s Opportunities Its Gold.
By Theodore Roberts
Actor, author and philosopher.
I am concluding my spectacular
engagement of 182 consecutive nights at Ludlow Street Jail in the domestic
drama “All for the “Woman.”
In one way it has been a paying run, not exactly so much to
me as to the large cause which I felt called on to represent. And it has given
me a large insight into an element of life with which I naturally was
unfamiliar.
In playing the triple role of star, leading man and shining
mark, I began with a matter of $2,600 alimony carefully computed on the books against
me.
Nut a way lay upon – one of two – to erase it. It was my
privilege to pay this very considerable and disturbing amount of money in cash
to the former of my joys and sorrows or to permit myself to booked at this
historical home of real drama until such time as, through the thoughtful
enactment of our Legislators, my personal self-sacrifice had equaled the amount
of money.
I chose to make the sacrifice hit.
I decided to immure 165 pounds of perfectly good actor, to
retire from the highways and the byways and whiteways and take up my residence
where Tweed for other reasons found habitation and where moths, knowing they do
not have a chance, do not break in and steal.
Having played in “The Barrier,” I was not without courage;
and besides, $2,600 to many of us – surely to me – is like unto the opulence of
the Croesus person.
But I digress.
Ludlow Street Jail is unique. It houses mostly honest men.
There are no real crooks or sharpers here. Victims make up continually shifting
personnel.
Take my nearest neighbor, for instance. A man bumped into
him on the street and broke his glasses. When he remonstrated the bumper hit
him. The bumpee had the bumper arrested, but as he had no witnesses the bumper
was discharged, and shortly afterward sued the bumpee for false arrest. The
bumpee was put under $1,000 bond to keep the peace. He could not furnish it and
the door of Ludlow opened to receive him.
Take another case – the case of a man who has been my
companion for weeks. He was paying his wife $5 a week alimony by order of the
court when he fell from a scaffold – he was a carpenter – and broke his leg. He
was in the hospital for weeks and his alimony payments ceased. On his recovery,
as the story is told, he found that his wife had established himself in another
flat and he started to bring divorce proceedings – only to find himself
arrested for his failure to pay his back alimony, which amounted to $70; so
here he is.
And there are others – victims of our system, or lack of it.
Architecturally, Ludlow Street Jail is imposing. It
suggests, from a distance, a hotel in Sheboygen, Wis. It is large enough to be
roomy and it many uniform and neighborly, as well as carefully protected,
subdivisions, cozy enough to be snug, but its appointments are not entirely
satisfying, being mostly political.
When I summoned a taxi to take me hither, the chauffer,
knowing my custom, not less than my habit and taste, in his innocence asked
“The Waldorf, sir?”
“No, my good man,” I asked him. “I am not going to the
Waldorf, where there is a courteous attendant for every guest, but to that
other controversy, wherein one finds time for introspective meditation and the
attendants outnumber the guests two to one.
And knowing, without another word, he drove me here.
Ludlow Street Jail is generally supposed to be a house of
correction. It is scarecely that. The function it performs in the affairs of
our goodly city that of a house of collection. It takes its toll in days and
hours, in minutes and seconds. Time is its silver, men’s opportunity its gold.
And I have paid both of gold and silver and my alimony is
squared.
In the quiet of my nine by twelve apartment I have not only
had a toothache, but I have constructed, line by line, entrance and exit, a
play which as yet is unwanted. It may be a good play. Time will tell.
The plot has been drawn in part from life as I have seen it
here, and part from incidents less circumscribed. It is a mosaic and there’s a
woman in it, but no decree. And there’d a fireside, but no steam radiator.
The engagement now ending sought me, even as William A.
Brady, needing the services of a good actor in another role, sought me. I am
booked for his new production, “Believe me, Xanthippe.”
So I slip from this donjon and resume my interrupted life
work where its threads were broken, with an added store of experience. And
believe me, Xanthippe, Broadway is always brightest when it is silhouetted
against the twin shadows of alimony and Ludlow street.
[Theodore Roberts, “Ludlow St. Jail as I saw It From the Inside,”
The World (New York, N.Y.), Jul. 6, 1913, magazine section, p. 5?]
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FULL
TEXT (Article 2 of 2):
“Theodore
Roberts, the Well-Known Actor, Analyzes the Famous Ludlow Street Jail, Where
Mea Are Imprisoned for Unpaid Alimony and Other Debts, in an Unusual Article
Written from Six Months’ Enforced Intimacy with Its Interior.”
On
New Year’s Day this year Theodore Roberts was sent to Ludlow Street Jail for
failure to pay accrued alimony due to the wife from whom he was separated. Mrs.
Lucy Roberts. She had sued him for divorce, but told the justice that she had
changed her mind. For this change of mind she received a severe reprimand from
the judge, who warned her against trifling with the courts of justice. Because
Mr. Roberts owed his wife $700 he was sentenced to six months in the debtors’
jail at Grand and Ludlow streets, on the East Side, in New York. Recently Mr.
Roberts, having served the full term, was discharged from prison.
For
the first time a man of fame and scholarly tastes and attainments and keen,
trained powers
of observation, tells the truth from the inside about this relic of
medievalism, a debtors’ prison. Mr. Roberts utters no plaint for himself,
refers to no injustice wrought him, but with broad view and judicial manner
analyzes and pillories the system of a so-called justice which sends men and
women to prison for poverty in the twentieth century and in the most enlightened
city of the world.
By
THEODORE ROBERTS, the Celebrated Actor and Recent “Alimoniac.”
A
PRISON term is usually something to conceal and to bury among the closet
skeletons of a life. My prison term in Ludlow Street Jail for the non payment
of alimony has been so widely exploited through the press of America that any
attempt on my part to conceal or minimize it would be absurd, even though I
desired to draw the mantle of forgetfulness over it. I am in position,
therefore, to speak without reserve of Ludlow’s Alimony Club from the
standpoint of intimate association for six long months, the longest term that
is allowed to a Ludlow commitment.
During
my stay there were never more than twenty-three inmates and never less than twelve.
Of this shifting population not more than 80 per cent were on alimony
commitments, though, owing to the fact that those committed on alimony either
stayed for three or six months, the other prisoners did not represent more that
50 percent of the inmates at any one time.
The
Alimony Club, therefore, consisted of from six to ten members. I want to
impress this fact on the reader for future reference. In alimony commitments no
two cases were exactly alike. They all differed in essential details. Owing to
this fact, the courts have found it expedient to boil all different contentions
in matrimonial cases into the one condition, that of a fine imposed for
non-fulfillment of an obligation and a prison term imposed for contempt of
court for not paying that line.
Having
distilled all the heterogeneous elements of multiple marital complications into
the one lenient of an obligation to the court, like the physician who threw all
his patients into fits because he was strong on fits, the court finds itself
able to deal quite readily and expeditiously with its victims by the dictum,
“pay or stay.”
Judges
find it very easy to commit a victim to Ludlow. It is not a very severe
punishment nor
does it carry with it the stigma of criminality that other imprisonments imply,
nor are three months or even six a very long time. So judges sign readily and
easily a commitment to Ludlow. There are fifty reasons for commitment, some
absurdly trivial; but, once in there is only one reason for release. There is
nothing for the victim to do but pay.
No
appeal on the ground of mercy or justice or expediency will be entertained for
a moment. The crimeless victim of a Ludlow commitment is the only prisoner in
the State who cannot reach the slightest clemency. His family starving – sudden
death with all its horror – great physical collapse or pain – all are against
that one stone wall “pay,” and if you haven’t got the money and cannot get it,
“suffer.”
Let us consider Ludlow from another angle. Thousands of cases go through the New York divorce mill every year. Thousands of husbands are ordered to pay thousands of wives more or less alimony.
And
in Ludlow there is a little band of six who are suffering the mighty grip of
eternal justice on their throats for not paying that alimony.
Does
not this suggest some ground for speculative thought?
What
shall be said of that little band of six wives who have forced their husbands
into Ludlow?
Are
they heroic figures that stand in the forefront of the battle for the purity of
the home
and the sanctity of the marriage tie? Let me give just a little data:
As I
write there is one young man in Ludlow whose wife had a record on the police blotter
before he was inveigled into marrying her, and when he found out her past be
demanded his freedom and his wife sued him for separation and the court
assigned her a weekly
alimony. He fled from her as from a plague and spent five years in Chicago,
where, gathering proofs and complying carefully with all the technicalities the
law demands, he sued and won a divorce from her. He returned to New York to
find that the New York courts would not recognize the Chicago decree, and as an
opportunity to force the collection of quite a sum of money from this young
man, whose father was fairly well to do, was thus placed by the courts in the
hand of this unprincipled woman, she proceeded against him and he was haled to
Ludlow.
He
has abundant evidence on which to get a divorce from her in New York, and is
now trying to get his case tried that he may be divorced a second time, but in
the interim he is doing his six months in Ludlow.
There
is another young man, a painter by trade, whose wife secured a decree of
separation with alimony. He paid this alimony until he fell from a scaffold and
was laid up in a hospital for some weeks, when he fell behind in his payments,
it was about this time that he learned that his wife was living very
comfortably under the protection of another man.
When
he came out of the hospital he enlisted the services of two of his friends and,
gaining an entrance to his wife’s apartment, verified all that he had heard. He
has with him now the duly attested affidavits of his two companions on that
raid. His wife forced him into Ludlow and he is now doing three months, and
without a dollar to employ counsel to bring the counter suit for absolute
divorce that the conditions warrant.
Another
man points to a jagged cicatrice of
a gunshot wound that his wife inflicted. He got
it in the neck. He enters Ludlow to purge himself of the life-long obligation
to pay her alimony,
and has just completed his three months purgation.
There
is yet another case, of considerable newspaper notoriety, that went through
Ludlow. A man of considerable wealth found himself subjected to what seemed to
be a family conspiracy to force money from him, and he deliberately submitted to three months’ imprisonment rather
than trust to the sentimentally sympathetic justice of the courts to protect
him from the combination of a disloyal wife and a mercenary mother-in-law and
quite a following of sisters and uncles and aunts. These cases are not
traditions of the jail. They are present cases that transpired under my
observation and the men were my associates.
Nothing
that I say and no inference that I draw from the conditions that were around me
is in any way to be taken as applicable to my own case. I do not believe that
among all the wives that forced their husbands to endure the torture of Ludlow
while I was there there was one honest, deserving woman.
What
is to be said of the morality that employs spies to dog every minute of a man’s
time?
Ludlow has been and is a club with its handle ever ready to leap into the hand extended for it. It is a weapon of revenge, not of justice. The woman who really wants to do the right thing does not use it. It is only the woman who has become a fury, who has forgotten all sense of proportion in her thirst for revenge, who is ready to destroy herself as well as the man in the desire to blindly rend and tear.
Often
she has industrious moral support. The mother-in-law may be an ancient joke,
but too much family has led many a man to Ludlow.
Ludlow,
viewed from the standpoint of its defenders, is a necessary adjunct to county
administration. Theoretically it fills an imperative need of the community. The
court must have a means of peremptory enforcement of its mandates. Husbands
must be made to support wives, employers must pay their employers, and men who
run from their just obligations must he compelled to give some guarantee that
they will appear when called to answer before the court. Theoretically Ludlow
is good. I write of it, however, only as I found it, and place against those
theories that justify its existence the facts that I know. As it exists to-day
it is a network of robbery, intrigue and vengeful persecution. I think the judges
are largely to blame for this condition by their readiness to grant an order of
commitment on the slightest pretext, thus making it possible for unscrupulous
collectors to force money out of claims of doubtful justification.
In
writing of the County Jail of New York, more familiarly referred to as
“Ludlow,” the modern imitant of that old English “Marshalsea,” where
imprisonment for debt in England died three-quarters of a century ago under the
scathing pen of Charles Dickens, I find it hard to avoid the personal equation
that would lead me into the error of expressed rebellion against the cruelly
unjust imprisonment from which I have suffered within its walls. It is not my
purpose to voice a personal grievance. Ludlow lowered before me for years as a grim
probability, and I faced its sure and ominous approach with that same
fatalistic mental attitude that many take toward the inevitable approach of
death.
Could
the roster of Ludlow be opened for public inspection a mighty network of
politico-financial warfare would be revealed for. While its fame is coupled
with the word “Alimony,” and a weeping Cupid with broken wing is its accepted
allegorical exemplar, it has been mere often a weapon of the warring factions
of finance than a factor in the high cost of loving.
Ludlow,
as an institution, is unique in the world. I do not believe there la its
counterpart anywhere. Its functions are taken over as a by-product of the.
penal and reformatory institutions of other communities. New York alone
maintains a big expensive building with all the accessories of uniformed
keepers, and clerks, and engineers, and cooks, and cleaners, and cells with
great iron doors that clang and bolts that shoot into place to the turning of a
master key big enough to drive a spike or kill a horse, maintains all of this
simply as a municipal collection agency, and not for the collection of
government money either, but to collect the smallest sums from the most
insignificant threadbare debtors upon almost any trumped up claim that has an unprincipled
lawyer to push it before the courts.
From
this “House of Collection” every inmate can obtain instant release, morning,
noon or
night, at any hour of the twenty-four, if he has the price. It is imprisonment
for revenue only. We never asked the newcomer what he was in for, but how much.
And the sums at times were absurdly small. One case that came under my
observation involved the payment of a dollar and a half!
Reputable
lawyers know very little of the intricate legal machinery of Ludlow. There are
a class of lawyers that use Ludlow as a sandbag to rob the petty tradesman and
the huckster
and the foreigner ignorant of his rights. The floating population of this
squeezing press is almost entirely made up of strangers to our language as well
as to our laws, and the babel of tongues is wonderful. We had an initiation
ceremony to our midst. At the cry “New Member!” we formed ourselves into the
semblance of a court of interior jurisdiction. We had our judge and attorneys
for defense and prosecution, and the novice was told that he must prove himself
worthy to associate with us or be relegated to an imaginary limbo termed by us
“The other part of the jail.” That was the way we made the new member “ride the
goat.”
They
came in bubbling over with their wrongs, and it was our delight to get them to
pour them forth. A very few suspected that it was not all a necessary part of
their catastrophy [sic], but for the most part overawed and frightened by the
sound of the closing door behind them they were ready to believe anything that
was told them, and they took their oath on the book without ever discovering
that the tome was the Farmers’ Digest for 1805.
Probably
the most amusing part of our inquisition came when it was all over and the new
member was told it was all a joke, and we watched the feeling of indignation at
being made a fool of change to gleeful anticipation as the next new man came
in.
But
always and always the foreigners! The very zest and seasoning of our sport lay
in the struggles
of injured innocence to tell his woes in an unknown tongue while our inquisitor
deliberately tangled him in a perfect network of variegated language.
Poor
devils, they had for the most part run up against these sharpers and shysters
to find themselves in jail without the remotest idea or shadow of understanding
of why they were there.
These
tricksters of the legal profession swarm about Ludlow as ambulance chasers do
about the municipal hospitals, and they have at their finger-tips every cunning
little device, every sharp little technicality and trick, and they use Ludlow
for their treacherous ends as shamelessly as a card sharper uses his
paraphernalia of his calling. Sit as I have sat, over and over again through
several months, a toy judge at a mock trial of real prisoners, I have seen
foreheads beaded with the sweat of a great fear while wife and babies are
waiting at the portal wondering where food is to come from.
We, the little band of “Alimoniacs,” were the aristocracy, the first families as it were. We knew why we were there, many of us had come very willingly as to an insolvency hospital to have our obligations softened or amputated, and we knew, too, how long we were to stay, and none that I met while I was there would have gone out if the doors had been left wide open.
But
the cases of commitment on “order of arrest,” on account of breach of promise,
or irregularities in bankruptcy, or partnership disputes, or claims for wages,
or failures to respond to subpoenas, or failure to secure immediate bonds, or
even as in one case for impertinence to a judge, all came in uncertain as to
how long they should stay and what the law was in regard to their cases.
I
have seen a tailor come into Ludlow with thimble still on his finger and an
assortment of
needles fully threaded sticking in the lapel of his coat. One day an engineer
came in with the grease of his engine still on his hands and face, and his
pockets bulging with cotton waste. There was a teamster with his driving gloves
still on and a whip in his hand.
I recall
a pathetic figure who took off an old overcoat to disclose the white linen coat
and apron of a baker taken from his bread pans. Nothing could be more eloquent
of the very nature of Ludlow’s function as a weapon of the summary collector of
bills. And a noticeable fact in all Ludlow’s activities that should strike the
economist is that with all this tremendous machinery, the game is so small, the
amounts collected so petty and trifling, that I do not believe the total
enforced payments won by this judicial blackjack would pay the expenses of one
of the keepers, let alone the score of others who are part of the machine.
The
Sheriff’s finger, like that of Fate, beckons and they must go!
There
are incidents that live with me now of my long martyrdom. The Grim Reaper took
son from father, brother from brother, and in one instance took from our midst
one of our associates to a suicide’s grave.
“Old
Murphy” had earned the title by nineteen years faithful guardianship of the
grim portal of Ludlow. An old soldier, he held his position as a sort of
pension, more desirable than a billet to the Soldiers’ Home. When I entered
Ludlow his was the most condemned name in it. Few of the prisoners had a good
word to say of “Old Murphy.” Carrying over the army discipline into his work he
carried over also the army roughness, and there was an inexorable finality in
his refusal to let visitors stay one minute over the half hour the regulations
allowed that gave many a frightened wife or mother a nerve-racking knowledge of
what imprisonment of her loved one meant.
It
came his turn to suffer the loss of his life’s companion, and when his wife was
laid away
the old man’s mind and nature seemed to undergo a complete metamorphosis.
It
was some time before we realized that the old man’s mind was senile, though
events proved that he realized it himself, and from little remarks he let drop
we saw a growing fear in his mind that he was soon to be locked up as he had
locked up so vast an army in his time. On April 7 he bade us a cheerful
good-night, and on the following morning ho threw himself in front of a subway
train and was cut to pieces. We heard of it with a numbing sense of horror that
afternoon.
It
was an unique picture of prison life to see the prisoners to whom Murphy had stood
as an unyielding Cerberus at the outer gate dipping deep into their pocketbooks
to buy a wreath of flowers for his funeral. Is there anywhere in the world a
replica of Ludlow?
[Theodore Roberts, “New York Still in the Dark Ages with Its
‘Bastille for Husbands?” The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), Sep. 7, 1913,
color section, p. 7]
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