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| Marshalsea 1917 |
THEY COULD NOT GET RID OF SADIE WALTERS
By David Arthur Walters
My father advised me when I was first married to remember that a man can have his wife put under observation at the state hospital if she "misbehaves" or is "having fits."
"Among other things," he said, "you might say that she wandered around at night naked under a raincoat, carrying a knife. She will probably be so upset that a doctor will commit her for two weeks at least, and she will have learned her lesson."
"By the way," he continued, "if you get into some trouble yourself, you can put yourself out of reach by getting yourself put under observation; just take care that it is not permanent. Go to the state hospital, say you want to kill yourself, wear different colored socks and different shoes. Lick your hands before you shake the hands of doctors. Stare at them, wide-eyed, do not blink, and bust out laughing for no reason."
I wrote his advice off to his extremely dry sense of humor—he was a teetotaler except for a glass of Mateus every six months—he loved gung-ho Army life so much he re-enlisted during the war, and afterwards went to law school. He did not talk much of the past. I did not know about his grandmother's Journal back then. Her name was Sarah E. Walters née McLaferty. She had in 1914 been committed to the infamous Insane Ward at Marshalsea outside Pittsburgh.
My dad, referring obliquely to that family history after he caught me drinking and smoking at age 10, muttered, ever so ominously, "the seed that fell on rocky ground." Hence I was blessed with the notion that our people were somehow cursed to fail in the end. I recently got my hands on the family heirloom and discovered how Sadie won her freedom and the freedom of countless other poor women and got druggists convicted of illegal dope dealing. I did not know until then that the cruel nurses at Marshalsea dragged women by the hair, held them down and beat their heads into concrete, tied down Sadie and told her that insanity runs in families.
Sadie's attorneys argued in their habeas corpus petition in the Common Pleas Court in Pittsburgh that she had no notice of the proceedings that committed her to the insane asylum as an indigent person; the District Attorney did not say in his petition that she was indigent; and that she was not insane.
Judge John C. Haymaker opined that his Common Pleas Court had jurisdiction on the insanity determination alone. He refused to issue a writ for her release and remanded her back to the asylum. She called that fate "worse than death" given her experience in the notorious Insane Ward of the "Poor House" dubbed 'Marshalsea' after the London prison described by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit.
The need for such a separate ward was alluded to in the 1872 Annual Report of Superintendent Patterson: "The Superintendent alludes at length to the necessity of classifying the inmates, and suggests that quiet old persons, 'God's poor,' who are driven to the institution from stern necessity to find a home, should not be forced to make associates and room companions of the vagrant, the depraved, the profane and vulgar, but should have for their associates kindred spirits, nor should the evening of their life be disturbed by the ravings, day and night of the maniac."
Once confined to the "asylum" duly provided, a poor soul might arrive quite sane to be driven stark-raving mad in short order. Sadie's Journal gives a first-hand account of the profitable abuse during her time there in 1914. A few horror stories and extensive negative inspection reports were reported by the press over the years. Clean bills of health, however, were provided by the directors, who got $250 a month per in today's dollars from the state to help defray expenses in addition to other income; inmates were doing much of the work since work was deemed therapeutic. The Pittsburgh Press on 20 January 1912 exposed high salaries and unnecessary employees on the payroll.
The Daily Free Press of Easton, Pennsylvania, printed a report entitled 'Brutality In An Asylum,' dated Mar. 3, 1881: "On July 4th, last, Maria Holden, who a few days before, had been delivered of a child, protested against the treatment she had received. Superintendent Grubbs, it is alleged, choked, struck her and held her head under the spigot of the bathtub and treated her to a shower bath. A few days later she died and laid her death at Mr. Grubb's door. Two attendants were cognizant of the facts, and Mrs. Reinhart one of them, saw the alleged cruelty and was present when Mrs. Holden died. While the reported was getting the facts, word was telegraphed the acting superintendent to say nothing about the affair. The coroner will to-day make an investigation. The scandals with which superintendent Grubbs' name is coupled has completely prostrated his wife, an estimable lady."
On 20 March 1914, a few months before Sadie was abducted and taken to Marshalsea, The Pittsburgh Press reported that an expert by the name of Stanley Howe opined that the overcrowded conditions there were so barbaric as to be appalling beyond belief, and there was no hope for curing anyone there. The insane there had not really been separated from the sane, so the population was "a conglomeration of the insane, feebleminded, imbeciles, drunkards, vagrants and paupers." The inmates were so cruelly treated, as if they were being punished, that a man would lose his mind, he claimed. All that was denied by the director.
Sadie was fortunate to have friends and a lawyer. Petitions to bring her from confinement to court were immediately drawn. Judge Haymaker heard testimony from six doctors, five of them alienists or criminal brain specialists, who said she was a lunatic.
"City and County officials and their employees testified to her conduct and actions during the last several months," he wrote, "during which time she was clamoring for certain rights of which she claimed to have been denied, and was vociferous and persistent in making charges against many persons in public life, in that they were engaged in a general conspiracy against her. We regard the testimony of Dr. Carl McKinnis, Superintendent of the City Home, as of great importance, which of itself should leave no doubt of her insanity. To him she charged the District Attorney, the County Detective, the Judges and the doctors with being in a conspiracy against her. Later when the superintendent returned from Harrisburg, she asserted to him that he had gone there to obtain protection in keeping her at the Home; that inmates had been poisoned and buried alive; that she had been sent to the Home as a protection to moneyed interests and public officials, and declared her determination to regulate politics and other matters in the future."
Well, this seems to be a classic case of paranoia with delusion of persecution, does it not? And the other side of that would be a delusion of grandeur. Of course paranoia is an exaggeration of the normal state of mind in the United States where every poor soul is inculcated with great expectations in the face of great adversity. And uppity intelligent women, such as Sadie's correspondent, Ida Tarbell, were coming to the fore of the fray during the industrial, political and social revolution, setting an example of what lowly women were capable of faced with the perennial male conspiracy against them, not to mention Hobbes war of all against all and the conspiracy of the few against the many for power. To give men credit where due, Paul Kellogg was also her correspondent. After all, the underdogs, regardless of race, color, creed or economic status who bite back serve the interest of all who involuntarily submit.
"She became possessed of the notion that it was her duty to make war upon all persons who might be engaged in the sale of heroin. She considered that she was not properly supported by City and County officials. She frequently called on the District Attorney, visited the City Solicitor, City Councilmen, the City Bureau of Information, and the Morals Efficiency Bureau. At all these places she was loud and abusive, was constantly and everywhere criticizing and condemning everyone in public life, asserting on all occasions that all public officials, including the Judges of the County, were grafters and crooks. At one of the city bureaus she displayed a blackjack and threatened to kill someone if the sale of heroin was not stopped. When she reached the City Home a handy-billy was found concealed about her clothing."
Sadie got her Irish heritage up: She was madder than hell and eventually became hell on wheels at the courthouse because Fleming Drug Company was dealing poison to her son and reportedly hundreds of other Pittsburgh youths. All a kid or any other addict had to do was walk into the store with a bottle and get it filled with poison despite the local poison-control regulation she had become aware of during her marriage to the late Dr. Edwin Walters. This was going on under the noses of police officers. She was shocked to see her son Eddie emaciated by his heroin addiction. She visited Chief County Detective E.E. Clark. He promised to look into it and asked her for a photograph. She gave him a picture of Eddie when he was in good health, and made him promise its return. She said he did not return it. That image would become the pre-textual bone of contention of her courthouse rampages. She said it was not so much the picture as the principle.
"At the request of that officer she furnished him with the photograph of her son," reads Haymaker's Opinion, "and Mr. Clark promised to make some investigation of certain poolrooms. In doing so he found that she was interfering with the work of his officers by personally going to such places, and being dissatisfied with her conduct he so expressed himself to her, and, as he claims, returned her photograph, and declined to render her further service. The relator denied that the picture was returned. From that time on she made frequent trips to see that officer, demanding her picture, claiming that he was going to place it in the Rogue's Gallery. On November 23rd last she went to the County Detective's office again, on the third floor of the Court House, she sat with a memorandum book in her hand apparently taking notes, until that officer came, and then she made an assault upon him, striking him about the face, charging him with being a grafter and crook, screaming so that she could be heard about the building, and swearing that she would get her revenge by disfiguring him. She could be removed only by officers taking of her. Later she appeared at one of the Judge's chambers, where her language was violent and indecent, claiming that she could not get justice here and would have to take matters in her own h ands. It was her assault on the County Detective that brought about her arrest and commitment to jail and later to the City Home."
She denied she had assaulted the chief county detective. She claimed he had assaulted her and had her hustled out the front door and thrown down the courthouse steps. Said she was told to file an assault and battery complaint against him the next day, but when she went to do that she was arrested and jailed because he said she had assaulted him, not vice versa
She denied she had carried a blackjack under her clothes with the intention of killing someone if she did not obtain a square deal—none was found on her when she was stripped at the jail. And she denied she had threatened to throw acid in officials' faces.
Sadie's witnesses said they had not seen her behave insanely; but they were not on the scene. Her own testimony confirmed most of the facts provided by the doctors and officials.
"Her own testimony was but a confirmation of that of the respondents, in which, among other things, she spoke of a state and city organization in which state, county and city officials were banded together in a conspiracy to commit perjury to deprive her and others of their legal rights, and expressed her determination to expose these conspirators and startle the community by the publication of a book, which she said she had already written, and by denouncing them from the rostrum, as soon as proper arrangements could be made."
Her journal of her ordeal is a family heirloom of which a special edition shall be published in the near future. She speaks plainly therein of her persistence and determination, of how she "ran and screamed" at officials. It is really a woman's story, a true story that will cause many men to feel some shame. It is a story told in plain language during the Great War, after the Civil War and countless other wars in the history of the planet. Rational men justified the violence; they believed progress was the fruit of irrational conflict; and women were naturally expected to handle things at home and produce ample cannon fodder for the brutal dialectic on the battlefields. Females were agitating for suffrage and temperance, and, of course, abortion, which was religiously prohibited by Judeo-Christians following the example of the ancient Hebrews who lacked enough manpower to conquer the world in those good old days.
Poor women who did not behave were especially at risk of commitment to mental institutions, where they were abandoned and abused, perhaps sterilized to reduce uneconomic imbecility in the population between wars. Fortunately, Sadie had not only the sympathy of hundreds of men and women who came to the trials to see for themselves if she was crazy; she also had the support of a reform-minded, wealthy businessman and grand jury foreman, one Mr. C. Brown Hill, President of Double Day Electric, and his dear wife. Nevertheless, the judge thought any sane or reasonably wholesome man in his right mind could see that she was hysterical and thus insane or unwholesome as she ran from office to office, screaming at officials, or sat determinedly as if paralyzed outside a judge's chambers. Mind you that she made some wisecracks that demonstrated she was a keen-witted as well as a sharp-tongued woman.
Hysteria, the "wandering womb" disease, purportedly allowed vapors or spirits from the convulsive womb to disturb other parts of the body via the nervous system. That and pouting and withholding sex had allowed females since prehistoric times to protest nonviolently against brutish men and civilize them the best they could without getting themselves killed. Sensitive men were beginning to catch the disease and become agitated although they did not have wombs—it would not be long until some of them wanted sex-change operations to bring out the woman locked inside of them. Agitated people who became political agitators like Sadie were not appreciated by the power elite who rationalized their rule with straight-jacketed Reason, so-called. A raving madwoman is, if anything, honest in her opinions, and there is nothing so offensive as truth unmitigated by rationalizations—Apollo had to take over Delphi from the python dragoness and install priests to render judicious ambiguous interpretations of the ravings of pythiatic nuns imported from Crete and drugged with a gas seeping through the floor of the cave as they say on their tripods.
"We are at a loss to see how any one, after hearing the testimony in this case and reading letters written by Mrs. Walters," pronounced Judge Haymaker, "could reach any other conclusion than that the relator was insane at the time of her committal. We are equally of the opinion that she is an indigent insane person. She is without property, real or personal, and is dependent upon an aged mother, who conducts a rooming house, and the uncertain employment of a son."
As for the original process itself, again, that was out of his hands; relief should have been sought from the original court. He sympathized with Sadie's unwillingness to remain at Marshalsea: He mused that a hospital would be a better place for her. His sympathy on the bench did not inspire anyone to pay for a hospital.
Sadie’s lawyers were on it. They immediately petitioned the Federal District Court for a writ habeas corpus on the grounds their client's constitutional right to due process had been violated. It so happened that Sadie knew the judge presiding, Honorable William Henry Seward Thomson, from his private practice: He had given her good advice when she sought retribution against a drunken alderman for charging her with disorderly conduct for speaking up in defense of her mother in a barking dog case.
Well, it seems Sadie had a great deal of due process in Judge Haymaker's court, where her insanity was affirmed by the government's brain doctors. But that was not the point. She had not been tried and convicted of a crime, a process that she could appeal from all the way to the state supreme court, and then to the federal courts if there were a constitutional question. No, she had been seized on the street and then committed without prior notice and judicial hearing to an insane asylum on the word of two doctors supplied to county commissioners and a court after a cursory examination at the jail. Her imprisonment had not been an adjudicate thing, or res judicata as latinated lawyers like to say. The process and not insanity was the question Judge Thomson ruled on. There had been no trial and judicial verdict she could appeal from; that is, she had not been afforded the opportunity for redress. True, she could petition the state courts for a writ of habeas corpus, if she had plenty of money for legal fees, until she were blue in the face or dead, yet there was nothing to keep her from petitioning the federal court for a writ on the federal question.
The process was unconstitutional whether she was insane or not. The state statute, the Act of June 26, 1895, P. L. 388, was overturned. She was released on bail to face the assault and battery charge. A countless number of poor people were saved from the pernicious process. Sadie Walters was declared a hero. And that she was.
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NOTES:
See:
Commonwealth vs. McKinnie (sic), Habeas corpus. No. 1410 January Term, 1915. C. P. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions.
Walters vs. McKinnie, Habeas corpus. No. 2 May Term, 1915. District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania.
Act June 26, 1895, P. L. 388. P. A L. Dig. Sup. 3S6, \ 10. Insane Prisoner to be Removed to Asylum—Maintenance. Section 1. That upon commitment by a justice of the peace or other committing magistrate to a county jail or other prison within this commonwealth of any person on a criminal charge less than felony, who, upon examination by any two physicians of at least five years' practice, shall be certified by them to be insane, it shall be the duty of county commissioners of such county, with the approval of the court of quarter sessions of such county, or one of the judges thereof to, within fifteen days after such examination, certification and approval, at the expense of such county, remove such indigent insane person to the proper hospital for the insane, there to be maintained at the expense of such county as indigent insane persons are now kept and supported, until the proper legal settlement of such indigent insane person can be ascertained and determined.
I had a roommate in California once. He had a two bedroom apartment and was keeping his very young son from his ex-wife in an acrimonious divorce where she was apparently acting very irrational according to him--a stabbing. But one day, he had to return to Pittsburgh where his mother was and he was born. He said that she had committed suicide. He remarried, but then, quickly quit his job and moved to an unknown location (Denver). I never heard from him again. I sensed insanity in his family.
Ron