A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

wrapped-up goose under one arm and a ham in the same condition under the other... butting at the
garden wall in the belief that he was pushing open the gate, and transforming his tall hat into a
concertina in the process...’ But only for the onlooker. For the man beating his head against the
brick wall, or the bee hurtling itself at the windowpane, the situation is grimly serious.
In a sense, the bee is behaving perfectly logically; it is only trying to escape towards the light, and
can see no reason why it should not do so. We can see that one of its basic premises - that light
cannot pass through solid objects - is mistaken, and that if it wants to achieve its objective it must
change its direction. But the bee, conditioned by millions of years of evolution, is in no position to
revise its instinct.
Human beings can change direction - which is why the behaviour of the violent man strikes us as
so absurd. He seems determined to smash his way through the sheet of glass or destroy himself in
the process. Yet to him this is not self-destruction so much as his own stubborn and quirky notion
of courage. The violent man’s problem lies in his own logic - that is, in his concept of what is a
normal and rational response to the challenges of his existence. The premises of this logic contain a
mistaken assumption - like the bee’s assumption that the window-pane is unreal because it is
invisible.
Abbott offers us a clue to his own premises in the list of men to whom he dedicates the book. Most
of them are ‘criminal rebels’, and the first on the list is Carl Panzram, whose career exemplifies the
logic of self-destruction.
Panzram, like Abbott, became a writer in prison; but in 1928 his autobiography was regarded as too
horrifying to publish and had to wait more than forty years before it finally appeared in print.
Panzram was awaiting trial for housebreaking; his confession revealed him as one of the worst
mass murderers in American criminal history. The odd thing is that most of these murders were
‘motiveless’. He killed out of resentment, a desire for revenge on society. Panzram’s basic
philosophy was that life is a bad joke and that most human beings are too stupid or corrupt to live.
His is a classic case of a man beating his head against a brick wall. His father, a Minnesota farmer,
had deserted the family when Carl was a child. At eleven, Carl burgled the house of a well-to-do
neighbour and was sent to reform school. He was a rebellious boy and was violently beaten.
Because he was a ‘dominant male’, the beatings only deepened the desire to avenge the injustice.
He would have agreed with the painter Gauguin who said: ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of
revenge.’
Travelling around the country on freight trains, the young Panzram was sexually violated by four
hoboes. The experience suggested a new method of expressing his aggression.’... whenever I met [a
hobo] who wasn’t too rusty looking I would make him raise his hands and drop his pants. I wasn’t
very particular either. I rode them old and young, tall and short, white and black.’ When a
brakesman caught Panzram and two other hoboes in a railway truck Panzram drew his revolver and
raped the man, then forced the other two hoboes to do the same at gunpoint. It was his way of
telling ‘authority’ what he thought of it.
Panzram lived by burglary, mugging and robbing churches. He spent a great deal of time in prison,
but became a skilled escapist. But he had his own peculiar sense of loyalty. After breaking jail in
Salem, Oregon, he broke in again to try to rescue a safe blower named Cal Jordan; he was caught
and got thirty days. ‘The thanks I got from old Cal was that he thought I was in love with him and