A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Panzram’s confession is an attempt to justify himself to one other human being. Where others were
concerned, he remained as savagely intractable as ever. At his trial he told the jury: ‘While you
were trying me here, I was trying all of you too. I’ve found you guilty. Some of you, I’ve already
executed. If I live, I’ll execute some more of you. I hate the whole human race.’ The judge
sentenced him to twenty-five years.
Transferred to Leavenworth penitentiary, Panzram murdered the foreman of the working party with
an iron bar and was sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Lesser had been showing the autobiography to
various literary men, including H. L. Mencken, who were impressed. But when Panzram heard
there was a movement to get him reprieved, he protested violently: ‘I would not reform if the front
gate was opened right now and I was given a million dollars when I stepped out. I have no desire to
do good or become good.’ And in a letter to Henry Lesser he showed a wry self-knowledge: ‘I
could not reform if I wanted to. It has taken me all my life so far, thirty-eight years of it, to reach
my present state of mind. In that time I have acquired some habits. It took me a lifetime to form
these habits, and I believe it would take more than another lifetime to break myself of these same
habits even if I wanted to...’ ‘... what gets me is how in the heck any man of your intelligence and
ability, knowing as much about me as you do, can still be friendly towards a thing like me when I
even despise and detest my own self.’ When he stepped onto the scaffold on the morning of 11
September 1930, the hangman asked him if he had anything to say. ‘Yes, hurry it up, you hoosier
bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.’
Here we can see clearly the peculiar nature of the logic that drove Panzram to a form of suicide. To
begin with, he committed the usual error of the violent criminal, ‘personalising’ society and
swearing revenge on it. The address to the jury shows that he saw them as symbolic representatives
of society. ‘Some of you, I’ve already executed. If I live, I’ll execute some more of you...’ In his
early days, his crimes were a ‘magical’ attempt to get his revenge on ‘society’ - magical because
there is no such thing as society, only individuals. The seven-year sentence turned a petty crook
into a man with a mission - to ‘teach society a lesson’. But the Warden Murphy episode seems to
have been a turning point. After his escape, Panzram fought a gun battle because he was too
ashamed to return to the prison and look the warden in the face. The savage punishment that
followed seems to have been something of a relief. At this point, Murphy might have completed the
work of reformation by looking Panzram in the face and asking how he could have done it. But
Murphy’s patience was exhausted, and now Panzram despised and hated himself as much as
society. The robbery and murder of sailors seems to have been an attempt to somehow convince
himself that he was ‘damned’.
What Murphy had done was to make Panzram realise that his logic - that ‘society’ was against him
- was based on a fallacy. When Murphy treated him with sympathy, it must have begun to dawn on
Panzram that his ‘society’ was an abstraction - that the world was made up of real individuals like
himself. But when Murphy’s regime collapsed because of Panzram’s betrayal, Panzram went back
to his false logic with redoubled persistence. ‘They’ - other people - were the enemy. However, no
one can live out such a philosophy; everyone must have at least one close relationship with another
person to remain human. The twenty murders Panzram committed after his escape could be
regarded as a form of self-punishment. In 1912 he had broken back into jail to try and rescue Cal
Jordan; by 1920, he had turned his back on personal feelings and committed murder as a kind of
reflex.
By the time he was in jail again - this time for good - Panzram had achieved complete selfalienation.
He had convinced himself that the world was vile, that human beings all deserve to be