I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!

278 Pages·1997·9.77 MB·English

by  Robert E. Burns

I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A GEORGIA CHAIN GANG!
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ROBERT E. BURNS
I AM A
FUGITIVE
FROM A
GEORGIA
CHAIN
GANG!
Foreword to the Brown Thrasher Edition
by Matthew J. Mancini
BROWN THRASHER BOOKS
THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS
ATHENS AND LONDON
Published in 1997 as a Brown Thrasher Book
by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
Foreword to the Brown Thrasher Edition © 1997
by the University of Georgia Press
All rights reserved

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

01 00 99 98 97 P 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burns, Robert Elliott.
I am a fugitive from a Georgia chain gang! / Robert E. Burns :
foreword to the Brown Thrasher edition by Matthew J. Mancini —
Brown Thrasher ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Vanguard press, 1932.
“Brown Thrasher books.”
ISBN 0-8203-1943-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Burns, Robert Elliott. 2. Criminals—Georgia—Biography.
3. Convict labor—Georgia. I. Title.
HV6248.B79A3 1997
365'.6'092—dc21
[B] 97-14202

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! was originally published in
1932 by the Vanguard Press and The Macfadden Publications, Inc.

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4301-3
FOREWORD TO THE BROWN THRASHER EDITION
MatthewJ. Mancini
I
RC)BERT E. BURNS'S account of his capture, imprisonment
escape, recapture, reimprisonment, and second escape is
a classic of American prison autobiography. It is a tale of
devotion and betrayal, courage and cowardice, liberty and ser-
vitude, imprisonment, flight, and deliverance—with quite a bit
of violence and more sex thrown in than was expected in a
memoir of 1932. The book caused a great sensation, and al-
most as soon as it was published it was made into a stirring
movie directed by one of Hollywood's leading directors and
starring one of the greatest film actors in Hollywood history.
In fact, it was probably the finest film to come out of Holly-
wood in 1932.
The author, Robert Elliott Burns, was a short, skinny, feisty,
and excitable New Yorker with a tenth grade education and a
restless ambition for success and respectability. Photographs of
the celebrated fugitive from about the time of the books origi-
nal publication show a neat, stylish dresser with sharp, hand-
some features and hair combed straight back from a high fore-
head. In 1917 Burns was in his middle or late twenties and still
somewhat adrift.1 In 1912 he'd left his Brooklyn home and
wandered for years without contacting his family, subsisting on
meager wages as a Great Lakes sailor and a farm laborer.
Two days after the United States entered World War I, Burns
enlisted in the Army. Undoubtedly, like thousands of other
vi Foreword to the Brown Thrasher Edition
young men, he viewed the war as a means of escape from a
stodgy future in the same city and neighborhood where he'd
been raised. But—again like thousands of other young men—
he found that the war provided him not with escape but with
hell on earth. Burns served in the medical detachment of an
engineering regiment that saw action in every major American
engagement of the Great War—Château-Thierry, the Argonne,
and St. Mihiel—was wounded, and emerged from the harrow-
ing experience with his nerves shattered and his future as un-
certain as ever.
According to his rather sanctimonious brother, Vincent,
Burns was "a typical shell-shock case" when he returned from
the front.2 But Robert himself never made too much of his
nervous condition and attributed his lamentable ordeal to a
combination of his own actions and the treachery of others,
whether low-life criminals or highly placed public officials
(indeed, in Burns's narrative it is often hard to tell those two
types apart). However tenuous his psychological condition was,
Burns's tale did have an aura of fate or destiny about it that
struck a resonant chord with the men and women of his gen-
eration, especially after the start of the Depression.
And the tale Burns has to tell is truly amazing. He returned
from the war to find his job and his sweetheart taken by other
men. The old tendency to wander reasserted itself; combined
with his mental condition, it led to a second departure from
Brooklyn, prolonged homelessness, and, ultimately, to an ob-
scure Atlanta flophouse. There he was tricked into participat-
ing in a pathetic robbery that netted its three perpetrators the
princely sum of $5.81. The three were abruptly arrested and
swiftly convicted, which in Georgia in 1921 meant sentenced
to hard labor on the infamous chain gang. Burns's appalling
sentence: six to ten years.
Foreword to the Brown Thrasher Edition vii
The reason the sentence was so dreadful, and that doing time
in Georgia was so notorious, can be traced to a simple fact: the
State of Georgia did not have a prison. Indeed, it had not had
one since 1874, and would not acquire one until 1938. To
understand the full implications of Burns's predicament, then,
it is necessary to draw back into the recesses of the curious and
depressing history of crime and punishment in Georgia.
In the administrative and fiscal chaos of post—Civil War
Georgia—as in the entire South—legislators, at once desper-
ate and uncaring, chose to deal with the problem of criminal
punishments by tossing it aside. They passed and enforced
new laws that established an entirely different kind of prison
system. Under the new regime, convicts were leased to both
individuals and corporations, who undertook to maintain and
guard them while the convicts themselves provided the labor
the now slaveless South so desperately needed. Most states had
no prison building at all, and in those that did, like Texas and
Arkansas, the structures were so tiny, dilapidated, and under-
staffed that they played only a minor role in those states' crimi-
nal justice systems.
Such was the institutional ancestry of the inaccurately named
"prison" system in which Burns found himself enmeshed in
1921. Its results were horrific. Prisoners were scattered all over
the state in small squads and large gangs, on plantations, coal
mines, sawmills, and brickyards. There the mostly black work
force endured foul shacks, putrid food, backbreaking labor, bru-
tal punishments with whip and stocks, and sometimes literal
torture. As the years passed, prisoners' sentences grew ever
longer, while the ever-younger convict population doubled,
then tripled, and by the 1890s grew to ten times its pre—Civil
War size. Escape and death rates together averaged six percent
annually—for forty years.
viii Foreword to the Brown Thrasher Edition
During the 1880s and 1890s, a slight variation on this
kind of convict forced labor began to emerge in Georgia. It
was simultaneously officially conducted and completely illegal.
Georgia's counties were in need of labor on public works and
were under pressure from smalltime contractors to provide
them with labor (just as the state was pressured by big corpo-
rations); and so the counties began leasing their own prisoners
to those smaller operators. These county convicts were petty
criminals who had been convicted of misdemeanors and had
sentences of less than one year, in contrast to the state prison-
ers, who had felony convictions and much longer sentences (in
1890, for example, nearly half of the state prisoners had sen-
tences often years or more).
The practice of leasing county convicts was unambiguously
against the law. A statute of 1879 outlawed it, and two sepa-
rate decisions of the state supreme court reaffirmed the ban,
but to no avail. As late as 1908 the state's Prison Commission
was still complaining to the governor that it had "for ten
consecutive years, in each of its annual reports, reported such
[county] chaingangs to the General Assembly as being orga-
nized and conducted illegally, and contrary to law, and that it
had no power or authority to break them up, or impose fines."3
It is in these county-based chain gangs that we can see the
real seeds of Burns's prison experience. In 1908, amid much
fanfare and self-congratulation, the Georgia legislature abol-
ished the convict lease, which had not only defined the states
prison policies but had increasingly come to symbolize the
state's alleged backwardness in other regions of the country. But
the abolition legislation was hardly a paradigm of humanitar-
ian reform, as so many officials, North and South, tried to make
it seem at the time. Instead it was a means of providing the
plaintive, labor-deprived counties with the workers that the
Foreword to the Brown Thrasher Edition ix
legislature and the courts had so long denied them but which
they took anyway. According to the 1908 law, the state con-
victs would simply be parceled out to counties, which would
construct labor camps to house and feed the prisoners. The new
plan had something for everyone. Counties gave up the illegal
practice of leasing their misdemeanants, and in compensation,
so to speak, the state turned over its felons to the counties for
hard labor. The state could engage in a charade of progressive
reform while not incurring any cost, the counties could have
access to convict labor without those bothersome legislative in-
vestigations, and the citizens could enjoy better roads, bridges,
and other public works at rock-bottom tax rates. Even the cor-
porations that had leased state convicts were satisfied, because
by 1908 the costs of the leasing contracts had risen to about
the level of the wage bill for free unskilled labor anyway.
Serious students of southern history may safely ignore Burns s
attempt to explain the historical origins of his predicament
(193—95).4 It is an unsteady compound of hearsay, myth, and
stereotype that hardly touches on the realities of race, political
corruption, economic calculation, public administration, or the
material conditions of the convict camps. But he was accurate
in asserting that "today, the county is the contractor. Although
the county does not pay the State any money for the use of
the convicts, they are compelled to clothe, feed, and house the
prisoners at the county expense" (195). This was the essence
of the new system that went into effect in 1909, just a dozen
years before Burns's conviction.
Believing his sentence to be literally unendurable, Burns
devised an ingenious and successful escape plan, which is re-
counted here in thrilling, vivid detail. After a desperate flight,
he made his way to Chicago, and there, over a period of seven
years, he remade himself. He worked, sweated, saved, bought