Thomas Mott Osborne

Thomas Mott Osborne (September 23, 1859 – October 20, 1926) was an American prison administrator, prison reformer, industrialist and New York State political reformer. He was also known as "Tom Brown," a name he gave himself when he spent a week in the Auburn Prison in New York state in 1913.

In an assessment of Osborne's life, a New York Times book reviewer wrote: "His career as a penologist was short, but in he interval of the few years he served he succeeded in revolutionizing American prison reform, if not always in fact, then in awakening responsibility.... He was made of the spectacular stuff of martyrs, to many people perhaps ridiculous, but to those whose lives his theories most closely touched, inspiring and often godlike."^[1]

Thomas Mott Osborn (seated, center) with his four sons

Family

Osborne grew up in Auburn, New York, a hotbed of progressive political activity, particularly anti-slavery activism before and during the American Civil War. His family included a number of eminent reformers, particularly his grandmother, Martha Coffin Wright and her sister, Lucretia Coffin Mott, who were organizers of the world's first women's rights conference, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in Seneca Falls, New York.

His grandmother, Martha Coffin Wright, and in succession her daughter and Osborne's mother, Eliza Wright Osborne, and a niece, Josephine Osborne, oversaw the finances of Harriet Tubman, who spent her last half-century in Auburn. Martha's home in Auburn was part of the Underground Railroad where she harbored fugitive slaves. Both women frequented the Osborne household during Thomas Mott Osborne's upbringing. The third of the Coffin sisters, Ellen, or as she is known to her descendants, Nella, married William Lloyd Garrison Jr., the son of the noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Thomas Mott Osborne's mother, Eliza Wright Osborne, wife of David Munsen Osborne, was also a feminist leader, though of lesser note.

Early years

Thomas Osborne attended Adams Academy^[2] in Quincy, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University with honors in 1884, where he was among the founders of the Harvard Cooperative Society.

Upon David Munsen Osborne's death in 1886, Thomas Osborne became president of his family's manufacturing company, DM Osborne & Co., which by 1903 grew to become North America's third largest producer of agricultural implements. In 1903, the family sold the company to the International Harvester Trust, leaving Osborne to pursue social reform and public service. International Harvester took over management in 1905.

His wife died of cancer just a few months after giving birth to their fourth son in 1896.

Thomas Mott Osborne served on the Auburn School Board from 1885 to 1896, becoming the youngest chairman in its history. In 1896, he became a trustee on the board of the George Junior Republic, a self-governing youth colony, and soon its chairman, just in time lead a campaign to prevent New York State from shutting it down.

In 1898, he ran on the Independent Citizens' ticket for Lieutenant Governor of New York.

Osborne was elected mayor of Auburn in 1902, serving two terms. He was known to disguise himself and visit local taverns to eavesdrop on conversations to get a sense of public opinion.^[3] In 1905 he launched a daily newspaper, the Auburn Daily Citizen, as a progressive voice to counter the city's dominant daily, the Auburn Daily Advertiser.

Reformer

In 1907, Governor Charles Evans Hughes selected Osborne to serve as upstate commissioner on the state's first Public Services Commission. At one point, to determine whether railroads could safely trim staff as they proposed, Osborne dressed as a hobo and rode the rails and was once arrested by police in Syracuse, New York in the course his sleuthing. His report to the commission, however, was instrumental in persuading the panel to order railroad staff maintained.

Between 1910 and 1912, Osborne teamed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a New York State senator, and Louis McHenry Howe in unsuccessful efforts to reform the New York State Democratic Party. FDR, Howe and Osborne were upstate New York's best-known foes of Tammany Hall and William Randolph Hearst. But after the 1912 national Democratic Convention, where the three worked for the presidential nomination of Woodrow Wilson, Wilson ignored their faction of the state Democratic party and instead selected the larger, Tammany Hall-led wing of the Democratic party to represent the state. Osborne quit politics in disgust.

In 1912, sick in bed, Osborne was inspired to read My Life In Prison^[4] by Donald Lowrie, a former inmate of San Quentin prison in California. The following year, he persuaded New York Governor William Sulzer to appoint him chairman of a new State Commission on Prison Reform. On behalf of the commission that year he entered the Auburn Prison, now Auburn Correctional Facility, in prison garb insisting to the administration and inmates that he be treated like any other prisoner. On September 29, Osborne began six days of imprisonment as "Tom Brown," Inmate 33,333X.^[5] He recorded his experiences in Within These Walls. Its publication in 1914 made him the most prominent prison reform crusader of his day.

Warden of Sing Sing

Osborne was appointed warden of Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York on December 1, 1914. After addressing the prisoners in chapel, he undertook a week's stay inside the prison, again experiencing the prison from the prisoners' point of view. He next stunned the guards and prisoners by visiting the prison yard unarmed and unescorted. He establish a system of internal self-rule called the "Mutual Welfare League" within the prison and quickly won enthusiastic support from both guards and prisoners.

His principal opponents were prisoners who had lived comfortably within the system before his reforms, by intimidating others or using their financial resources to bribe guards for privileges. One of these, a former Manhattan banker in prison for larceny, used his financial and political connections to instigate a rigged "investigation" of Osborne's administration. When he was indicted for perjury, neglect of duty, and "unlawful [sexual] acts with inmates," Osborne fought back with a speaking tour of the state. Carnegie Hall saw two mass meetings supporting his defense, one attended by the retired president of Harvard University Charles William Eliot. The prison guards wrote a letter in support as well. After the judge in the case directed a verdict of acquittal, Osborne returned to Sing Sing in triumph. The front page of the New York Times described the celebration at the prison: "Convicts' Carnival Welcomes Osborne; Prisoners, in Costume and Wild with Joy, Give Pageant for Him at Sing Sing, Hundreds of Spectators."^[6][7]

He resigned his position as Sing Sing's warden later in 1916, tired of battling his superiors and New York State Governor Charles S. Whitman.

Commander at Portsmouth

In 1916, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, at the likely suggestion of Assistant Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an ally of Osborne from his years in New York State reform politics, commissioned a report on conditions at the Portsmouth Naval Prison in Kittery, Maine. Osborne again investigated conditions by living inside the prison like any other inmate. He found a facility in desperate need of his reforms. In a speech at the Twentieth Century Club in New York City, he denounced "degrading" uniforms and "absurd" procedures: "When the men return from working on the seawall, a place where they could not possibly obtain anything but sand, boulders and seaweed, they are stripped and searched."^[8]

In July, 1917, now a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, he took up the position of commander of the Portsmouth Naval Prison, a post he held for two and a half years.

Later career

His books, public speaking and notoriety helped end the so-called "rule of silence," floggings and other prisoner abuses common in U.S. prisons at the time. But Osborne's cherished prisoner self-government plan, the "Mutual Welfare League," vanished soon after his death in 1926. His initial experiments had been greeted by the press largely with derision, but over the course of his life he won grudging admiration from both the press and the public.

When Osborne died at 67 on October 20, 1926, he was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn dressed in a Portsmouth prison uniform.

In 1931, the Welfare League Association and several other organizations Osborne had created were merged and re-organized as the Osborne Association.^[9] The Association is devoted to helping released inmates adjust to their lives post-incarceration.

Notes

Publications

• Within Prison Walls: Being a Narrative of Personal Experience During a Week of Voluntary Confinement in the Stete Prison at Auburn, New York (NY: Appleton and Company, 1914)
• Society and Prisons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916)
• Prisons and Common Sense (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1924)

Sources

• Denis Brian, Sing Sing: The Inside Story of a Notorious Prison (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2005)
• Rudolph Chamberlain, There Is No Truce: A Life of Thomas Mott Osborne (1935)
• Jack M. Holl, Juvenile Reform in the Progressive Era (Cornell University Press, 1971)
• Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
• New York Times: "Condemns Navy Prison" Dec. 4, 1916, accessed Dec. 7, 2009
• New York Times: "Convicts' Carnival Welcomes Osborne" July 17, 1916, accessed Dec. 7, 2009
• New York Times: "Costume Welcome to Warden Osborne" Sept. 1, 1915, accessed Dec. 7, 2009
• New York Times: "Osborne in riumph and Defeat" July 8, 1934, accessed Dec. 7, 2009
• New York Times: "Roosevelt Charges Libel; Orders Suit" Oct 26, 1920, accessed Dec. 6, 2009
• New York Times: "T. Mott Osborne, Reformer, is Dead" Oct. 21, 1926, accessed Dec. 6, 2009
• Frederick R-L Osborne, "Introduction to excerpts from Thomas Mott Osborne's Within These Walls"
• Alfred Brooks Rollins and Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (Transaction Publishers, 2001)
• Syracuse University Library: Osborne Family Papers
• Syracuse University Library: Biographical History
• Frank Tannenbaum, Osborne of Sing Sing (The University of North Carolina Press, 1933)

External links

• Osborne Association home page
• Osborne Family Papers at Syracuse University (primary source material)