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05/19/2005: "A GOOD MAN GONE WRONG"
Today's guest blogger is H.L. Mencken
(From the American Mercury, February 1929. Henry Judd Gray, a corset
salesman, and Ruth Brown Snyder killed her husband, Albert, an art editor,
on March 20, 1927. They confessed and were executed at Sing Sing, January
12, 1928 CE)
Mr. Gray went to the electric chair in Sing Sing on January 11, 1928,
for his share in the butchery of Mrs. Ruth Snyder’s husband. The present
book was composed in his last days, and appears with the imprimatur of
his devoted sister. From end to end of it he protests pathetically that
he was, at heart, a good man. I believe him. The fact, indeed, is spread
all over his singularly näive and touching record. He emerges from it as
the almost perfect model of the Y.M.C.A. alumnus, the conscientious husband
and father, the Christian business man, the virtuous and God-fearing
Americano. It was his very virtue, festering within him, that brought him
to his appalling doom. Another and more wicked man, caught in the net of
La Snyder, would have wriggled out and gone on his way, scarcely pausing
to thank God for the fun and the escape. But once poor Judd had yielded to
her brummagem seductions he was done for and he knew it. Touched by sin, he
shriveled like a worm on a hot stove. From the first exchange of wayward
glances to the final agony in the chair the way was straight and inevitable.
All this sounds like paradox, but I offer it seriously, and as a
psychologist of high gifts. What finished the man was not his banal
adultery with his suburban sweetie, but his swift and overwhelming
conviction that it was mortal sin. The adultery itself was simply in bad
taste: it was, perhaps, something to be ashamed of, as stealing a poor
taxi-driver’s false teeth would be something to be ashamed of, but it was
no more. Elks and Shriners do worse every day, and suffer only transient
qualms. But to Gray, with his Presbyterian upbringing and his idealistic
view of the corset business, the slip was a catastrophe, a calamity. He
left his tawdry partner in a daze, marveling that there could be so much
wickedness in the world, and no belch of fire from Hell to stop it.
Thereafter his demoralization proceeded from step to step as inexorably
and as beautifully as a case of Bright’s disease. The woman horrified him,
but his very horror became a kind of fascination. He resorted to her as a
Christian dipsomaniac resorts to the jug, protestingly, tremblingly and
helplessly. In his blinking eyes she became an amalgam of all the Loreleis,
with the Rum Demon peeping over her shoulder. Whatever she ordered him to
do he did at once, like a man stupefied by some diabolical drug. When, in
the end, she ordered him to butcher her oaf of a husband, he proceeded to
the business almost automatically, wondering to the last instant why he
obeyed and yet no more able to resist than he was able, on the day of
retribution, to resist his 2,000 Volts.
In his narrative he makes much of this helplessness, and speculates
somewhat heavily upon its cause. That cause, as I hint, is clear enough:
he was a sincere Presbyterian, a good man. What is the chief mark of such
a good man? That he cannot differentiate rationally between sin and sin –
that a gnat gags him as badly as a camel. So with poor Gray. His initial
peccadillo shocked him so vastly that he could think of himself thereafter
only as a sinner unspeakable and incorrigible. In his eyes the step from
adultery to murder was as natural and inevitable as the step from the
cocktail shaker to the gutter in the eyes of a Methodist bishop. He was
rather astonished, indeed, that he didn’t beat his wife and embezzle his
employers’ funds. Once the conviction of sin had seized him he was ready
to go the whole hog. He went, as a matter of record, somewhat beyond it.
His crime was of the peculiarly brutal and atrocious kind that only good
men commit. An Elk or a Shriner, persuaded to murder Snyder, would have
done it with a certain decency. Moreover, he would have demanded a
plausible provocation. But Gray, being a good man, performed the job with
sickening ferocity, and without asking for any provocation at all. It
was sufficient for him that he was full of sin, that God had it in for
him, that he was hopelessly damned. His crime, in fact, was a sort of
public ratification of his damnation. It was his way of confessing. If
he had any logical motive, it was his yearning to get into Hell as soon
as possible. In his book, to be sure, he speaks of Hell under the name of
Heaven. But that is mere blarney, set down for the comfort of his family.
He was too good a Presbyterian to have any illusions on the point: he was,
in fact, an amateur theologian of very respectable attainments. He went to
the chair fully expecting to be in Hell in twenty seconds.
It seems to me that his story is a human document of immense interest and
value, and that it deserves a great deal more serious study than it will
probably get. Its moral is plain. Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of
the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when
to play with it and when to let it alone. Run a boy through a Presbyterian
Sunday-school and you must police him carefully all the rest of his life,
for once he slips he is ready for anything.
