Neal Dow set out to change all that. Five years before the 1851 Maine Law was passed, his state enacted a “prohibitory” bill that restricted alcohol sales. But it had no teeth, and Dow resolved to give the new legislation fangs. Along with hitting violators with stiff fines and prison terms, Dow inserted rules permitting the local “sheriff, city marshal or deputy” to “search the premises described in said warrant, and if any spirituous or intoxicating liquors are found therein he shall seize the same.” So long as they were voters, any three individuals could stand before a judge and assert that they had “probable cause” to believe malfeasance was occurring. That’s all it took. (To Dow’s credit, he also changed the law so that at least one of the complainants had to attest that he’d actually witnessed a crime. He couldn’t just say he suspected it, he had to swear under oath that he had seen it. This was a major change that raised the evidentiary standards in all search-and-seizure procedures.)
When other states modeled their prohibition laws after Maine’s, they established similar measures, and police raids into private residences became standard practice nationwide. While this might seem to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, the Bill of Rights originally applied only to the federal government; states weren’t bound by it. A series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings over the years gradually reined in local authorities, culminating with Mapp v. Ohio in 1961, when the Court firmly applied the exclusionary rule to the states.
Herb Adams and I head back to Neal Dow’s house, and before hitting the road I say good-bye to Rob, who’s still giving a tour to the folks from Portland.
From here it’s off to North Carolina to see the correctional facility where a Prohibition-era moonshiner named David Williams was locked up after fatally shooting a sheriff’s deputy who had charged onto his property. The crime itself wasn’t particularly historic; deadly encounters between bootleggers and law officials were common during the 1920s. But while in prison, Williams invented a weapon that, according to General Douglas MacArthur, helped U.S. forces win the Pacific ground war in 1945. Williams created the patent-winning innovation under the noses of the prison’s warden and security guards. He designed it, in fact, with their blessing.
PART V
SPARKS
Inventions and Technological Advancements
CALEDONIA CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
Dear John: I thought of writing you last Sunday, but did not. I have been studying up at odd times about Marshall. He has what is called paranoi[a].…
He seems to have a particular grudge against his wife and against his father and the history of such cases are that the first person they kill, they go mad and try to kill everybody. He has certain paralysis of the head while I was down there and was very much worse Sunday than he was two or three days later.
He has an insane delusion of being a bandit and killing someone, and if he is not restrained in some way the result in the next two or three years can almost be predicted.
—From a letter written in October 1919 by the Reverend J. Mack Williams to Jahn Williams about their brother David Marshall Williams. Less than two years later David was arrested for killing Deputy Sheriff Al Pate, and this letter was presented in David’s trial—by his own defense counsel.
SEVERAL SHOTS SEEMED to come out of nowhere. One bullet whizzed past Sheriff N. H. McGeachy’s face, almost nicking his nose, and another clipped Deputy Bill West’s ear. McGeachy had seen at least three men with guns scurry toward a wooded area when he drove up to David Williams’s moonshining operation in Godwin, North Carolina, but they had all disappeared into the trees before opening fire. As McGeachy and West dropped to the ground, Deputy Al Pate, still standing, suffered a direct hit and died within seconds. Later that night McGeachy found Williams’s father, a respected and prosperous member of the community, and encouraged him to surrender his twenty-year-old son. David Williams denied shooting Pate but admitted to running the illegal still and gave himself up.
“Mr. Pate was about 60 years of age and leaves a widow and four children,” the Fayetteville Observer wrote on July 23, 1921, the day after the evening raid. “One of the saddest features of his death is the fact that his daughter, who was married last week, is off on her honeymoon.” Residents were grief-stricken and outraged, and they demanded swift justice for the deputy’s murder.
Although the evidence fingering Williams as the shooter was weak and mostly circumstantial, his legal team felt the safest strategy was for him to plead insanity. They submitted the letter written two years earlier by his brother the Reverend J. Mack Williams, stating that David was clinically paranoid, and asked the reverend to testify in person. The Reverend Williams obliged, reiterating his fears about David’s mental health and his “mania” for guns going back to his childhood days hunting in the backwoods of Godwin. It was a risky legal strategy (Williams himself wasn’t too pleased about being called mentally unhinged), but a single juror remained stubbornly convinced that Williams was indeed insane, and the judge declared a mistrial. Williams agreed to lesser charges and received a thirty-year sentence. He maintained his innocence but knew that if he attempted a second trial and lost, he could face life in prison or the electric chair.
“[David Williams] was a sandy-haired, broad-shouldered youngster, his light-blue eyes hard and unsmiling,” wrote Captain H. T. Peoples in a lengthy 1951 article about Williams and his time inside North Carolina’s Caledonia Prison Farm. Peoples was the prison’s superintendent, and he remembered Williams well. “In the first month I don’t believe young Williams spoke more than twenty words to anyone.” Williams kept mostly to himself, failing even to correspond with his parents. When Peoples nudged him to send a letter to his distraught mother, Williams opened up for the first time and told him that he “didn’t want to write home from a prison postmark” and that he had “hurt them enough already.” Peoples also recalled:
He looked at me steadily, with those bright, intense eyes. After a moment he said: “I was a crazy kid to get mixed up in that moonshine business. I never killed anyone—never. But all of this could kill my mother and father. Somehow, I’m going to make it up to them.”
A week later Williams requested a pencil and some paper, which Peoples gladly provided. When he caught Williams scribbling away after the other prisoners had gone to sleep, he saw that Williams was doodling instead of composing a letter. Peoples was disappointed at first but then noticed “the hard, bitter eyes were softening. Whatever he was doing, it was making him a little happier.”
Williams’s knack for fixing hopelessly broken-down machines earned him a coveted job running the metal shop. One night Peoples walked in on him slaving away with draft instruments, drawing boards, and sketches scattered everywhere. Williams made no effort to hide his handiwork, and the two men looked at each other for a moment.
“It’s … a new kind of gun,” Williams said. Then he broke into a rare grin. “Don’t worry, this has nothing to do with an escape. I wouldn’t try to escape now if the gate was wide open. I’ve got too much work to do, and this is a good place to do it.”
Now called the Caledonia Correctional Institution, the prison is located about ninety miles northeast of Raleigh. While driving up to the facility, I might have thought a freak blizzard had recently swept through the rural county recently if it weren’t for the 95-degree heat; I’ve never seen cotton fields this late in the harvesting season, and the soft white clumps dotting the brown earth look like patches of thawing snow.
Waiting for me at the main entrance is my escort for the afternoon, Lieutenant Daryl Williams.
“Nice to meet you,” I say. “Are you related to David Williams?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But that means you could be,” I say.
“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
Daryl asks me if I want to go straight to the old metal shop or tour the whole facility.
“I’m up for the full deal.”
Daryl tells me that about 560 i
nmates are incarcerated here, and the total property covers 7,500 acres. Having watched enough prison documentaries, I don’t see anything at Caledonia that’s totally unfamiliar—cell blocks, cafeteria, yard, visiting area, and so on—but what does surprise me is how relaxed the environment feels. This isn’t to diminish the very real threats both the guards and prisoners face on a daily basis, but I expected the atmosphere to be more tense, vaguely hostile.
I mention this to Daryl, and he assures me that one has to stay alert at all times. “Just this morning we had an incident,” he says but doesn’t go into details.
We walk through the prison’s canning factory and its adjoining warehouse, which is packed high with generically labeled cans of corn, collard greens, applesauce, and fruit punch.
“Most of this will go to prisons and other state institutions throughout North Carolina—except public schools,” Daryl tells me while ducking out of the way of a small forklift hoisting pallets.
The facility seems clean and orderly, and I would confidently eat whatever’s in these cans (except the collard greens, but only because my Yankee taste buds find them bitter). I can understand, however, parents being somewhat wary about their kids slurping down fruits and vegetables prepared by men incarcerated for rape, child abuse, drug trafficking, and premeditated murder.
We head back to the main building. “So this,” Daryl tells me, opening a door to a steep, narrow staircase, “is where the old blacksmith shop used to be.”
I follow him down, and we encounter about half a dozen prisoners in two adjoining rooms fixing the basement pipes. They all look over, and a few say hello.
“This used to be all one big space,” Daryl says as we step into the smaller room. Both are empty now.
I ask Daryl what would happen today if an inmate, especially one sentenced for killing a law enforcement officer, were discovered constructing a “new kind of gun” in the metal shop. The answer isn’t a surprise: He’d be locked up in a special disciplinary unit.
Back in 1921, Superintendent Peoples was less hamstrung by such regulations and not only encouraged Williams to keep at it but allowed him to pick through the prison junkyard for parts. Williams plunged in, collecting old tractor axles, Ford drive shafts, walnut fence posts, and other scrap items that he filed down, pieced together, and manipulated to construct half a dozen rifles. Guards stopped by to have Williams work his magic on their guns, too, whenever they needed repairs.
And it was at Caledonia that he constructed the prototype of what would become his most influential innovation: the short-stroke piston. In early models of semiautomatic carbine rifles, the entire barrel kicked back almost four inches to hit the breech mechanism. Williams cut that to one-tenth of an inch without losing substantial firepower. “You know how you can hit one croquet ball a long distance by holding your foot on another ball and transmitting the shock of the mallet?” Williams explained to Peoples. “It’s the same idea.” This alteration alone led to the production of a shorter, lighter, and more dependable rifle, the M1 carbine.
“I didn’t know it then, of course, but what this young prisoner was telling me that night would one day be considered by firearm experts one of the most revolutionary advances since Browning’s development of the machine gun,” Peoples later wrote.
The notion of a cop-killing inmate assembling a small arsenal of handmade weapons behind bars didn’t sit well with some folks, and Peoples was summoned before North Carolina’s prison board in Raleigh to explain himself. According to one report, Peoples stated that he was so confident Williams wasn’t plotting to break out that he offered to serve the remainder of Williams’s sentence if he did.
That wouldn’t be necessary. Newspaper articles and word of mouth soon transformed the young, self-taught engineer into something of a local hero. By the late 1920s, a number of influential names had joined Peoples in lobbying Governor Angus McLean to release Williams early: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Sheriff McGeachy, and reportedly even Deputy Pate’s widow. On September 29, 1929, almost eight years after his conviction, David Marshall Williams was pardoned.
The Winchester Repeating Arms Company hired Williams after he was released, but corporate life proved almost more arduous to him than prison. Paranoid that his colleagues would steal his ideas and feeling stifled in the bureaucratic environment, Williams became a raving hothead who stormed out of meetings and threatened his colleagues when he felt ignored or underappreciated. Winchester considered firing him but recognized that, despite his tantrum-throwing antics, Williams was still a genius.
When the U.S. Ordnance Department requested designs for a “light rifle” prototype, Winchester submitted a semiautomatic carbine that incorporated Williams’s short-stroke piston concept, making the rifle more compact and reliable. The military had already been impressed by Williams’s floating chamber (another invention he conceived while inside Caledonia), which enabled weapons meant for .30- and .45-caliber ammunition to fire .22 ammo during training. This might not sound terribly exciting, but it saved the War Department millions of dollars, since the .22s were smaller and cheaper.
On October 1, 1941, Winchester officially received word that it had won the contract for the M1 carbine. An estimated eight million M1s were produced during World War II and the Korean War, more than any other American small arm. General Douglas MacArthur is quoted as heralding the M1 as “one of the strongest contributing factors in our victory in the Pacific.”
By the time Williams died at the age of seventy-four, he had been credited with dozens of patents and earned numerous awards and tributes. In 1952 the feature film Carbine Williams, starring Jimmy Stewart, was released, and a state marker was erected near Williams’s Ogden home that says: “1900–1975, ‘Carbine’ Williams, designer of short-stroke piston, which made possible M-1 carbine rifle, widely used in WWII.” And in 1968 ex-felon Williams was made an honorary deputy U.S. marshal.
There may be more examples, but after an exhaustive search I could find only two other inmates in American history who created significant innovations while serving time. In the spring of 1921, a convict at Leavenworth’s maximum-security penitentiary designed a new type of adjustable wrench (patent 1,413,121), and about sixty-five years later in a Texas prison, a convicted pot grower named Jason Lariscey developed a method for cutting Kevlar that facilitated the mass production of bulletproof helmets for U.S. troops.
Lieutenant Daryl Williams and I climb the stairs out of the old metal shop and return to the main entrance. I thank him for my tour and ask if, on the way out, I can pick some souvenir patches of cotton, which are beyond the gates but still technically on the prison’s property. He doesn’t see why it should be a problem. “I just don’t want to get shot or anything,” I tell him.
After visiting Caledonia, I had planned on passing through a town called Franklinton just outside of Raleigh to find the unmarked spot where the famed boxer Jack Johnson died. On June 10, 1946, Johnson was refused service at a local diner because he was black, and he sped off in a rage and skidded around a corner too fast, hurtling his car into a tree. Physically and historically, Johnson was a giant. Born to slaves, he became boxing’s first African American heavyweight world champion in 1908. When he creamed former champion James Jeffries, who’d come out of retirement to (in his words) “demonstrate that a white man is the king of them all,” race riots erupted in twenty-five states and caused at least two dozen deaths. In 1912, Johnson became the first person convicted under the Mann Act, which prohibited “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes.” The lady in question was Lucille Cameron, Johnson’s soon-to-be-wife. That she happened to be white and a prostitute didn’t help his case or public image. Cameron refused to testify, but an old flame named Belle Schreiber—also a white prostitute Johnson had traveled with—agreed to work with prosecutors, and Johnson fled the country. He returned seven years later and spent almost a year in prison after surrendering himself at the United States/Mexico border.
As
epic as Johnson’s life was, I’ve decided I’m not going to Franklinton. Right before arriving in North Carolina, I had a minor anxiety attack upon realizing that I’d burned through the majority of my allotted budget and estimated schedule, despite being only halfway through my itinerary. Time to pick up the pace and resist the urge to follow every potential lead. Franklinton will have to wait.
For the record, though, Jack Johnson’s story wasn’t entirely irrelevant. He was the guy who invented a new kind of adjustable wrench while imprisoned at Leavenworth.
ELISHA OTIS’S BIRTHPLACE
She took her place in the [elevator] car, with a superintendent and the man who worked the apparatus. Instead of descending, the car began to mount with alarming rapidity. The casting which united the piston to the platform on which the car rested had broken.… [T]he piston darted downwards with fearful speed to the bottom, while counterweights, now much heavier than the car and its load, pulled the car up at a dizzy rate. Arriving at the top floor, the car was rammed against the top beam. The shock … broke the chains which held the counterweights, and the car went flying down to the basement. The weights fell with a report almost equal to a cannon shot.… The three occupants of the car were dead.
—From an 1877 American Architect and Building News article describing Baroness de Schack’s death in a hotel elevator, which was not constructed by the Otis Elevator Company
ON APRIL 10, 1790, Congress passed the first U.S. Patent Act, granting inventors legal protection over their creations. All blueprints and, if possible, working models had to be approved by a three-man board, and the original members of this triumvirate were no run-of-the-mill bureaucrats: Secretary of War Henry Knox, U.S. Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson reviewed every proposal.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 21
