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http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/N...ain%20gang.bmp |
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JJ |
Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
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Why is everybody wearing a hat?
In those days, most men wore hats simply as part of being dressed, even in prison. If you look at some of the old prison movies, even one starring Laurel and Hardy, the prisoners wore caps issued as part of their uniform. Only a boor would leave his hat on indoors, and so hat racks were something stores actually sold. You also tipped your hat when addressing a woman. Look at a picture of a ball game crowd from before WW II (and even a few years afterward). You'll see virtually every man in a hat—straw in the summer (until Labor Day). In the early 1950s, my dad (and every other man in New York City) wore his fedora whenever he went out. Men's hats were still a big business. But by the end of the 1950s, hats—after centuries of being practically required—had pretty much disappeared. Of course, in the early 1950s, every male spectator at a ball game would also have been wearing a suit, and on the NY subways you'd have seen women wearing hats, veils, and gloves. Times have changed. PS. Mickey Mantle recalled that when he joined the Yankees in 1951, for street clothes he wore what the well-dressed Oklahoma boy would wear on a Saturday night: clean jeans, shined penny loafers, and a sport shirt (and I suspect clean white socks). Hank Bauer told Mantle that New York was different, and offered to buy him the necessary suit. After they got him fitted, Mantle said that he couldn't believe that it was possible to spend so much money on a suit of clothes—$35. (I'm sure that included a hat.) Incidentally, sportscasters used to talk about a "shirtsleeve crowd." That term might not make much sense today, but it meant that the weather was nice enough that the men could take their suit jackets off. Since most men wore white shirts, the players often had a hard time picking up the ball. The most famous example was Joe Pepitone, who "lost a throw in the background of white shirts" (according to a written account) and gave the Dodgers the deciding run of the final game of the 1963 World Series. |
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Actually, during the building of Folsom Prison in Northern CA. in 1852, inmate were broken down into two groups: supervisory and laborer. These inmates lived on a "prison ship" on the American River during the construction. IIRC, the supervisor inmates wore uniforms with vertical stripes and the worker inmates wore uniforms with horizontal stripes. LomUmp:cool: |
Jack Kennedy was the first U.S. president not to wear a hat routinely when out of doors. It was part of his image campaign vs. Nixon. The trend had probably already begun, but when the president stopped wearing a hat most men followed suit.
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8 x 8 cell, a head, a sink and a cott
In Georgia prisons of the 1930s, not even the guards had it that good. The prisoners slept fastened by a long chain to a row of beds made of wooden planks. Infractions such as asking a guard the time were punished by flogging. Serious violations, such as "eyeballing" a passerby on the road, were dealt with more severely. I read where Charles Ng, who tortured and murdered several people and was sent to California's death row, sued the prison because the dessert cookie placed on his tray was cracked, and the condition of the cookie upset him so much that he couldn't eat it. It cost the state $5,000 to defend itself in a hearing in which a nutrition expert testified that not eating the cookie posed Ng no nutritional threat. There doesn't seem to be a recorded case of anyone on a 1930s Georgia chain gang suing the prison because he didn't like the dessert he got. |
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And still, that is a better life than many of our young men & women. They committed no crime - they just decided to put their lives on the line for the rest of us! In combat, they have no sinks or toilets. No three squares or cots. No TV or video games. No clean laundry. Do you hear them complain? Screw the prisoners! God Bless our boys & girls in the military! |
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I agree that the government has gone too far incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders, especially while two monsters—each with more than 20 (!) burglary convictions—were free in Cheshire, Connecticut, to commit that state's crime of the century earlier this year. (Google Komisarjevsky Hayes for the horrendous details.)
The War on Drugs has succeeded only in making drugs of all kinds cheaper and more plentiful, and as with prohibition, it has created and fostered a drug-specific criminal class. It has also built a huge and apparently permanent edifice of special interests with a stake in keeping things exactly as they are. But I don't have the answer. Legalize drugs? Crack? Meth? Yes, the U.S. incarcerates a lot of people, but too many nonviolent offenders and too few violent ones. A few miles from my house, violent felonies are committed one after another: stabbings, shootings, armed robberies, beatings, gang attacks, carjackings, and so on apparently without end. And that's just in Trenton, which is nothing compared to Newark or Camden. They catch maybe a fifth of the perps, but if you do the math, even conceding that juveniles routinely get a pass, there should be a million guys in New Jersey's prisons. Anyone who thinks the authorities have a clue should know that NJ recently passed a law making it a crime to recruit for gang membership while on school property. Isn't that great? Just wait till those Bloods and Crips find out that if they're caught recruiting in science class, they'll have to go to the principal's office. And yes, thank God for our brave and dedicated military. |
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