Abstract
In presenting a unique story of a sudden catastrophe within the Big House prison, Mitchel Roth has produced a captivating work offering a fresh perspective on the pains of imprisonment. He guides readers through the minutes and hours immediately preceding a devastating fire at Ohio Penitentiary that took the lives of 320 prisoners. Roth reflects on the cause of the April 21, 1930 inferno before considering the event’s broader social context, including the state- and federal-level political machinations that followed. The result is not simply a consuming story, but is also a powerful consideration of public commemoration and historical memory.
In lieu of a linear narrative, Roth has provided a series of twelve free-standing chapters, each of which encapsulates a unique and important dimension of the larger story. Early chapters provide readers with the major beats of the fire’s onset and the immediate fallout, presenting the tragedy from the perspectives of Warden Preston Thomas, Father Albert O’Brien, and a variety of firefighters, journalists, and local residents. Roth draws a bleak picture of institutional unpreparedness and resource strain, describing how emergency workers ferried corpses to the state fairgrounds, where overwhelmed and underfunded medical professionals struggled to attend to wounded and dying prisoners.
In Chapters Three through Five, Roth reflects on what made Ohio’s largest prison both similar to, and distinct from, penal environments throughout the rest of the country. Columbus, in addition to serving as a government and college town, grew to become “synonymous with its famous prison,” similar to “a handful of other American cities – Huntsville, Texas, Clinton and Ossining, New York, and others” (p. 55). Its rapid growth reflected the escalation of national prison populations throughout the country between 1870 and 1935, as overcrowding quickly came to define life within American prisons generally, but was especially prominent in Big House prisons, such as the Ohio Penitentiary. Overcrowding and strained prisoner-administration relationships were a fact of life in most prisons, Roth claims, and the fallout of the 1930 fire showed the fragility of Ohio Penitentiary’s social ecosystem.
Having established the mise en scene, Roth speaks to the principle players of his narrative, beginning with a discussion of Warden Thomas, before speaking to the demographic makeup and daily habits of both the institution’s correctional officers and the prisoners themselves. In a commendable effort to capture individual prisoner voices, Roth draws on the writings of the authors and Ohio Penitentiary residents O. Henry (William Sidney Porter), James Winning (real name unknown), and Chester Himes, the celebrated author of detective novels and short stories. Himes’ semi-autobiographical novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry holds particular resonance within Roth’s book (pp. 117–9), in part because it speaks to an African-American experience in the prison that was so often bowdlerized in the popular press.
The final four chapters of Fire in the Big House address the fire’s political fallout, beginning with a summary of a Board of Inquiry investigation that finds Warden Thomas partially at fault for the tragedy. Following a too-brief discussion of the emergence of an organized prisoner uprising, borne of the disorienting and chaotic nature and weak management of the post-fire penitentiary, Roth returns to the ongoing explorations into the fire’s origins. He describes a year-long search, replete with months of conjecture, speculation, and mystery, that found only partial resolution. Ultimately, the public remained split on the subject of responsibility for the fire and the only real justice to emerge from the incident was that it contributed to a larger national discussion regarding the human toll of prison overcrowding.
Fire in the Big House is unquestionably successful in imbuing a largely forgotten tragedy its due attention. While event-based historical studies occasionally struggle to stress the dynamism and complexity of the past, Roth has moved well beyond sepia-tone snapshots, bringing the Ohio Penitentiary fire of 1930 into full focus. Roth’s Depression-era Big House offers portrayals of prisoners, guards, administrators, and politicians who are ambivalent, circumspect, and sometimes hypocritical. This impressive texture is partly the result of Roth’s use of discrete voices from the writings of Himes, Henry, and Winning, as well as an array of prison staff and inmate interviews, collected and transcribed by the Bureau of Investigation. Roth adds further texture to his story with both a substantial photo section of compelling images (pp. 128–43) and an appendix detailing the biographical details of the men who died in the Ohio Penitentiary fire (pp. 215–231), the result being an immersive and readable style fit for specialists and general audiences alike.
While Roth’s work is a success, it harbors a couple of historiographical blind spots. Most pressing is Roth’s non-engagement with much of the pre-existing literature on twentieth century American incarceration. Roth does not draw on the works of Charles Bright, Rebecca McLennan, Ethan Blue, and various other important penal historians who have published on the pre-World War Two Big House. A more rigorous approach toward the field might not only have offered Roth greater insights into his subjects, but it may have given a much-needed national context to the Ohio fire. In spite of such limitations, however, Fire in the Big House is a welcome contribution to the field of penal history. Roth has crafted a stirring account of a critical Depression-era moment and his engrossing narrative deserves a place in the libraries of historians, law and society scholars, and criminologists alike.
