Lost Privilege Company
The Poems of Lost Privilege Company appear under the signature of the Blunt Research Group, an anonymous, contemporary collective of poets, activists, and scholars of diverse origin.
The poems (about 40 in all) are composed entirely from phrases drawn from individual case files of the earliest youth prisons in California between 1910 and 1925. The histories contained in these files were gathered and archived by the now defunct Eugenics Records Office, an American organization that helped to shape the international eugenics movement through activities carried out in these juvenile reformatories (primarily at the Whittier State School, founded in 1891). Eugenics “researchers” and fieldworkers used these prisons–and the utopian fantasies of early California development–as a laboratory to develop diagnostic procedures intended to identify certain “ungovernable” teens as mental “defectives” and to construct genealogies of “degenerate” families. These diagnoses were used to determine whether the “propositus” (the teen “ward” in the case file) should be recommended for compulsory sterilization–to prevent him or her from “procreating”–a policy legalized by the California legislature in 1909 and pursued with great vigor until the early 1940s. Over 20,000 people were sterilized in California during this period, and some of the teens in these poems were referred to the sterilization “mills” of the Sonoma State Home and the Pacific Colony.
The development of eugenics touched the very core of the California myth: the founding of Venice Beach, for example, by Abbot Kinney in 1905 was motivated in part by fashionable ideas about eugenics. And, in a very different context, the diagnostic models and sterilization policies developed in California were enthusiastically received by eugenics “researchers” in Europe. The social engineers of Nazi Germany drew directly on the California model. In Mein Kampf, Hitler alludes enthusiastically to the eugenics policies implemented in California and, before long, the Nazi symbology of “degenerates” destined for confinement and extermination included the categories of the “Asozial” (the asocial) and the “Arbeitssheu” (the work-shy)—terms reinforced by the eugenics vocabulary of the California experiment. The pseudo-science behind the earliest Nazi Concentration Camps (at Breitenau, for example, in 1933) can thus be traced, in part, to the teen prisons of the California dream. Replicating its forgotten California affinities, the modern Breitenau facility eventually turned into a reformatory for teenage girls in the 1960s. Ulrike Meinhof, before she went underground as one of the founders of the Red Army Faction, produced a radio documentary in 1969 on the teen inmates of the Breitenau school.
Venice Beach, it turns out, was once the other shore of National Socialism. And the sterilization mill of the Pacific Colony was not far removed from the celebrity enclave of the Malibu Colony. Yet the verbal evidence of these teenagers’ lives must be viewed not as fragments of an isolated past, but as traces of Ernst Bloch’s conception of the “not-yet” in history: deeds, daydreams, and suffering that did not achieve their full expression in the past, but now point towards a still unrealized future: a utopian surplus, the tenuous and volatile materials of hope.
Youths of all races were confined at the Whittier School, but most files used for these poems document cases of Chicano or African-American youths, aged 13-17 years. Voices of diverse protagonists were retrieved from the case files: the direct speech of teen “wards,” of their friends and families–and the comments of the eugenic “fieldworkers” conducting the interviews. Text in italics always indicates the voices of the “wards,” while text without quotation marks or italics conveys the words of the fieldworkers. Text in quotation marks conveys the voices of the wards, or of their families and friends, cited indirectly by the fieldworkers. The names are real.
The ensemble of poems is entitled “Lost Privilege Company”: the name of the isolation ward at the Whittier State School where offenders could be sentenced under harsh conditions for misconduct. Suicides in 1939 and 1940 by two Hispanic teens in the isolation ward brought unprecedented public scrutiny of the prison’s history and methods.
Alec
not a dirtier boy in the house vile
and effeminate
Extra Squad
taking shorts cuts across orchards
breaking flumes
windows electric globes
just to hear the noise
they make
a horror of tattling
stayed for three months
because “he liked the horse”
Frances
I might as well be here as any other
just the place
a little “stand-offish”
on one occasion
allowed carrots and potatoes to burn
while she sat by reading
little brother a “tyrannical bossy street-gamin”
in the habit of junking
dances and heap movies
stupid
in the habit of screaming all night
Cornelius
A mania for stealing bicycles,
given two lickings.
The boy’s mother has a picture
taken with her dead triplets
which she very proudly shows to friends.
Petit larcenist.
Acquainted with picture-show men
who sometimes gave him money.
When told to get back into bed said
“Oh, _________” or something similar
fooling along the country road
near the packing house
Dorito
fireman had his hands burned, etc.
found a small crow-bar to which the goat had been
tied with this crow-bar Dorito broke the lock
and Ralph pulled the switch and broke out
the red glass.
The wind blowd out the light.
Propositus
a glutten over suffering would do mean things and
say he did it “just for fun”
on fire says
Workhouse Detail
ear candling
shows a lot of spontaneous “drollness”
Johnny
boy says it’s hard for me to remember
no pep not enough pep
to move
needs circumcision
he doesn’t get mad very often
but when he does get very mad
he begins to cry.
He found his mother and would stay
with her until they found him.
Under no circumstances
should he be returned to society
to get into more difficulties and eventually procreate
another tainted generation
cannot even erase the board
without resting
not a boy with any close friends
Javier
the boy says of himself
I don’t get mad easy
working for eats
A detective found me
took me back again
sleeping at night in a little shack
among the mesquit trees
after he’d been “lost track of
for three months”
the boy’s mother “mentioned laughingly that he returned home
with some of the money he earned planting onions
still in his pocket”
refused to go to bed
declaring he was not sick
so that he collapsed all at once
Javier
used to slip off to Venice or some other beach
the boys also stole cigarettes from a Japanese store
which they sold to some tramps
extreme fondness for wandering
father’s second wife killed by some Indian
in the absence of the husband.
A 6 cent car line on the same street.
At Juvenile Hall fairy tales
interest him chiefly
he merely “sits”
without making any attempt
to work
Theodore
Observed to have an enormous appetite
a great big over-sexed boy
keeping late
and unusual hours
“Mr. Young asked to be allowed
to take him into Mexico as a cook
flunky and servant for himself
and a party of men.”
sent to Lost Privilege Company for refusing to work
breaking dishes maliciously throwing peach pits
making improper insinuations about a small boy