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Chapter Five: The Dungeons of Alcatraz
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Chapter Five The Dungeons of Alcatraz They would let neither fire, water, sword, nor executioner terrify or persuade them. . . . They would accept neither glory nor kingdom, nor all the world’s pleasures and goods in exchange for their faith in Christ, in whom they had their foundation and assurance. —The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren Traveling by Armed Guard During the two months that the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf spent at Camp Lewis, records show, they never threatened an officer or attempted to escape. On the contrary, they appeared to be the most cooperative of prisoners, inclined to obey their superiors in every way that they in good conscience could (except, of course, by serving as soldiers). But when it came time to leave the camp on July 25, two months to the day after their induction into the army, they looked the part of hardened criminals. The men were chained together in pairs and placed in the escort of four armed lieutenants, who accompanied them by train to Alcatraz.1 The army’s Manual for Courts-Martial made clear that prisoners should not be placed in irons “except in the extraordinary case” of a prisoner deemed a “desperate or dangerous character” at risk of escape.2 This was, the 1918 manual promised, the time of a “more enlightened spirit of penology .” Nevertheless, even though the guards removed the chains from the Hutterites’ feet during the day, they kept their hands manacled at all times. The Dungeons of Alcatraz 105 At night, the men lay on their backs, chained by hand and foot, a Hofer and a Hofer, a Hofer and a Wipf. They scarcely slept. They arrived at San Francisco, tired and in shackles, on July 27, about to become intimate with a twenty-two-acre island home associated with some of the nation’s worst miscreants. The island was formally designated the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Pacific Branch, but it was better known as Alcatraz, or simply “the Rock.” Alcatraz served as one of three detention centers for military prisoners, the closest destination for convicts from Camp Lewis up the coast. The Atlantic Branch was at Fort Jay, New York. The Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, served as the nation’s chief military prison. The ride to Alcatraz on a prison launch took roughly twenty minutes, charting a course due north across the San Francisco Bay, with Treasure Island and Yerba Buena visible off to the east and the wind blowing in from the west through the strait known as the Golden Gate, the passageway to the Pacific (construction of the bridge would not begin until 1933). The temperature was in the mid-sixties but felt colder, as it always did out on the bay. The men were chained together in the cabin of the launch, and the door between the cabin and the engine room was locked on the engine room side as a security precaution. When the men arrived at Alcatraz, they disembarked at the island’s only safe boat landing, the wharf where nearly a century later ferries deliver tourists every thirty minutes. Today visitors pay thirty dollars to take a ferry to the rockbound volcanic island. They walk by the empty cages in the cellhouse at the top of the island, listening on headsets to an audio tour and imagining what it would have been like to be hauled in chains to this forbidding place. The National Park Service, as it happened, inherited the bay’s second treasure island after the federal government closed the prison in 1963. The many proposals for the site included opening a gambling casino or a hotel and convention center. But simply allowing visitors to walk where criminals once walked, including four conscientious objectors from South Dakota, turns out to have been an inspired choice. More than 1.3 million tourists visit Alcatraz each year. From the dock the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf climbed a path, passing the military guard barracks (built in 1906, closed in 1933), with the bay [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:44 GMT) 106 Pacifists in Chains off to their right. Gnarled trees marked the way, bending and twisting in the wind, the trunks always leaning out into the sun, where branches ended in wispy curls. The men walked under an arch of the guardhouse and through the entryway known as a sally port (1857–1901), within yards of a trapdoor through which soldiers gone bad were...