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made when he was in conference with various party officials. These talks were revealing of certain qualities in his character not visible in the casual social view. In dealing with matters of business he displayed a capacity for serious concentration that was reassuring to observe in a future President. I was pleased to see that he dominated these councils. Up to the time of meeting him I had known vaguely that he was the senator from my own district, and wondered frankly if he was really Presidential timber. At the close of my sittings I was convinced of it. In several instances he overcame opposition from some of his chieftains with no uncertain hand, and when a bit of pardonable expletive was demanded by the nature of the case, I could not refrain from inward chortles of delight to hear them used. Here was a most natural and masculine man, with ideas of his own, and determination to stand up for them. In one conference he demanded sweeping revisions in the methods then in force of conducting the campaign, and, though pitted against stubborn opposition, carried the day with utmost decision. One remark only I will quote, as it violates no confidence:

"I did n't want this job, anyway," he said, "but now that I am in the fight, I am determined to do all that lies in my power to win."

On another occasion he betrayed possession of that necessary thing, a bit of temper. Of the many gifts and good-luck tokens that were sent to him, the one that evidently pleased him most was a miniature herd of Chinese elephants, nicely carved from ivory and graduated in size. They formed a procession across the front of his

desk, led by the largest, with the tiniest bringing up the rear. Though donors were numerous, souvenir-hunters seemed to be also, the herd diminishing by degrees until it had nearly vanished. The protest, when it came, was somewhat explosive, but certainly the occasion justified it. My sittings concluded, I thanked the object of my efforts, receiving a cordial handshake and a quizzical smile.

"You have heard a great many things in this room," he said. I smiled in response.

"Really, Senator, I have n't heard a word," was my reply.

"Of course not; I might have known," and he bestowed a friendly pat upon my shoulder.

A short time after this I motored over to Marion from my home, taking proofs from the plates with me. Again he received me on the back porch, where he sat, coatless, battling with the heat. He expressed pleasure in the result of my efforts, autographing examples of each portrait for me with kindly inscriptions.

"I have only one adverse criticism to make," he said, smiling: "I am not nearly so good looking as they suggest."

My next meeting with him was at the White House. It was in the early summer shortly after his inauguration. A friend of mine in New York had insisted that I request from the President sittings for a portrait in oils, a thing that I was loath to suggest. Upon his carrying his point finally, I made my next trip West by way of Washington, and the proposal met with a generous reception.

"You are not a bad fellow to have around," was the President's kindly

form of acquiescence; "so come along in September. I can find time for it then."

Never before or after did I see him with such an appearance of physical fitness. His color was fresh; he was bright of eyes and jovial. After I left him in the executive office, he passed me in an outer corridor, walking rapidly with a long and vigorous stride that denoted pleasure in the movement of his muscles. In a hearty voice he called a greeting to me, and again said good-by.

The portrait was fated never to be born, due to a fault of my own. I worked too hard in my Ohio studio during the heat of the summer, and was forced to go to the north woods to recuperate. Arriving in Washington with November well under way, an effort was made even then to find time for my project. The Arms Conference was about to convene, and the President was working from eight o'clock each morning, not ceasing until midnight in many instances. Fatigue was apparent in his face. While I waited my opportunity, the foreign delegates to the Arms Conference began to arrive. A glimpse at the picturesque Briand, premier of France, caused my fingers to itch with a desire to do him in dry-point. Then came Balfour, Maréchal Foch, Lord Cavan. In view of the press of his duties, the portrait of the President was postponed. With encouragement from both the White House and the State Department, and with active coöperation in helping to arrange sittings, I found myself launched, by degrees, in a series of dry-point portraits, uniform with those of the President, that constitute the Arms Conference Memorial Portfolio.

The sittings for and finishing of the twenty-five portraits of this group consumed months. Exhibitions in New York and Washington followed. On the latter occasion I again saw the President, when he autographed a number of impressions of the portraits of him for a limited edition of complete autographed sets, in the completion of which all of the statesmen who had sat for me coöperated. I entered his office intent upon saving his time, but his morning's work was done, and he was in a leisurely mood. He looked tired, and talked slowly and deliberately. He asked to see my Arms Conference portraits, examining them with interest and commenting upon the character of some of the delegates. He then turned to the task of signing his name to the portraits of himself that I had brought, ringing first for an indelible pencil, so that the signatures could not be obliterated. Every movement slow and deliberate, and he talked with me as he wrote. Yet, despite evident fatigue, the usual line of visitors awaited him outside, and he shook hands with them all.

A year later found me again in Washington, exhibiting at the Corcoran Gallery. Again I saw the President, and he seemed to be much improved in vigor and health, by dint, I was told, of regular attention to golf and horseback-riding. The sallow color of my previous visit was not so evident; he was more like his old self. It was a shock when, some months later, as I descended to breakfast in my club in London, to read of his untimely end. He was a martyr to the multiplicity of burdens that threaten any President of the United States who will not fight against them.

T

The Professional Criminal

An Inquiry into the Making of Criminals

BY FRANK TANNENBAUM

HE professional criminal is a human being. That is not half so startling a statement as it sounds. It really is true. If our halfhysterical, half-mystical common people and their spokesmen were to take careful account of the matter, they would gradually arrive at the same conclusion. The professional criminal is a human being and a professional. That too may seem strange, but it is n't. A professional is one who practises a skilled and elaborate technic of a specialized character. People learn their professions after a painful apprenticeship. It takes a long time It takes a long time to make a good criminal, many years of specialized training and much elaborate preparation. But training is something that is given to people. People learn in a community where the materials and the knowledge are to be had. A craft needs an atmosphere saturated with purpose and promise. The community provides the attitudes, the point of view, the philosophy of life, the example, the motive, the contacts, the friendships, the incentives. No child brings those into the world. He finds them here and available for use and elaboration. The community gives the criminal his materials and habits, just as it gives the doctor, the lawyer, the teach

er, and the candlestick-maker theirs.

All criminals were children once. The murderers, the thieves, the gangsters, the sneaks, the cutthroats, those who fill the world they live in with hate and fear, were little children once. Long ago a mother crooned over a cradle and filled the world with song because a child was born-a child of promise and fruitfulness to lighten the burdens of life and bring succor to the aged and strength to the weak. An endless promise of good filled the dreams and the pains of a mother once; to-day the papers proclaim her child as the very embodiment of evil, to be branded as something foul and brutal, something made for a hangman's noose. The insistence upon the fact that all criminals were children once may seem as unwise as that they are still human; but it is also true. It is a recorded fact that a professional criminal was born of a woman and nurtured in love and fear and joy and pain. I am insistent upon this because it is a point of departure; it is a good place to begin. The child grew up, and somewhere along the way, somewhere in his childhood, between his infancy and his embittered and degraded manhood, a beginning was made that envisaged the end, a shadow was cast ahead that led to crime, to theft, to murder, to the

gallows. There was a beginning somewhere; that too is important. There is no sudden criminality. There is even no sudden insanity. People who go suddenly insane have been going insane for a long time. It is physically, emotionally, psychologically impossible for people to go insane all of a sudden. A conflict was started along the path of life somewhere, a disease was contracted, a gap was made sometime before, long before, so long ago that it is often outside present memory and often escapes even careful scrutiny. But there was a beginning. So too in crime. There is no such thing as a sudden criminal, a sudden murderer, a sudden thief. Somewhere a start was made, and it is in the story of the growth of this small beginning that the tale must be told.

There is much passionate controversy in the discussion of behavior. People are so insistent that they know the why of it all, especially of bad people, that it might be a useful thing to inquire into the behavior of good people. We take "good" behavior so much for granted as not even to ask questions about it. Why are you good, if you are? What What do you mean by being good? I am not urging the philosophical problem of evil versus virtue, of ultimate goodness and ultimate evil. I know nothing about that, and most of my friends who do are not very clear about what it is they know. At least they are always disagreeing with one another.

What seems obvious is that people are judged by their behavior-by their public behavior, by what they do, by how they do it. What kind of man is he, means what kind of things does he do, how does he do them, what are his habitual modes of response. The good

man goes through life swimmingly; that is, he fits in so well with our way of doing and living, of talking and reacting, that we barely notice him. If he stands out from the crowd, it is because he differs from it, is conspicuous by some deviation. If he differs in degree only, we forgive him; sometimes we acclaim him. But if he differs in kind,-in the value he gives to things, if he does the things we condemn,-then he is bad, a sinner, a dangerous crank, a criminal. But it is by his behavior that we judge him, just as our neighbors judge us by ours.

I am at present leaving the question of inheritance out of the discussion; we know so little about it that to pass judgment on it in general terms is to condemn oneself before critically minded people as being naive and unsophisticated. We need only to see clearly that regardless of the capacity, if any, that a man may have brought with him into the world, the use he puts it to is determined by the way he uses it. And the way he uses it is determined by the tools, the habits, the molding, the slant, the attitude, the values, the recognition of environmental situations as worth while that have been kneaded into him. I use the word "kneaded" deliberately. The habits a human being gets are the most important things that he has to live with and to live by: they ultimately become the person. His very values are habitual. How does the "bad" man get his bad habits? How does the "good" man get his good habits? What do we mean by habits? What do we mean by forming a habit? Upon the clearness of the answer to these questions depends our understanding of the criminal and our understanding of the saint, or our under

standing of the man who is both a criminal and a saint, for they are not incompatible in the same personality. A habit is a slow growth. It takes a long time for a mode of behavior to become so organized as to be automatic and propulsive. It is not a habit until it projects itself, until one is carried by it, and until one resists it with the greatest difficulty only after many failures and after a long struggle by gradually substituting another habit. To watch the growth of a way of living there is no place like the family. That is where habits are first formed, first organized, first acquired, and at the most plastic period in one's life.

How does a child learn to be polite, learn to say "please"? How many thousand times does a mother say to her little son, "What do you say now, Billy?" And, with a rising accent if there is no response, "Billy, what do you say now?" Ten thousand times is an understatement. She says it until there is no more need for saying it, and age does not matter. Again the technic may change, the temper may change; but the persistence goes on, the watchfulness knows no relenting. The other members of the family join in. In a friend's house the other day, I gave a little girl of five a gift. Her sister, a little girl of eight, said, "Mary, what do you say now?" Mary did not respond, and the older child repeated the variation: "Say "Thank you,' Mary." There was to be no mishap, no break in the practice; the family mode must be carried on even by the younger members of the family.

It is interesting and important to observe the physical response that such pressure to conform imposes. Watch a child say "please." Notice

the outstretched hand, the submissive tone, the slightly stooping attitude, bent a little forward, a supplicating, a begging attitude. Apparently, if you are going to say "please," you are going to do it that way, in a submissive, respectful, courteous manner, with a slightly bowed head and slightly stooping body. That is the habit. It is not merely the word "please." It is the physical accompaniment of the word, it is a way of looking at people and a way of approach to companionship and acceptance. The habit is thus more than the mere sound-it is a whole pattern, a mode of behavior, an expression of personality. What needs to be observed also is that once you learn how to say "please" to people that way, then for all of your life and even under the most trying circumstances the word "please" will call forth that attitude of supplication, the slightly bowed head, the slightly stooping body. The habit is thus an organized physical posture which expresses itself in a word, "please"; the word "please" is the vocalized summary of the physical attitude. That is the habit. And a human being has thousands of such habits, each an organized physical pattern, each slowly acquired, each accompanied by a sound, a word, that expresses it. A human being is a bundle of such habits; they are the organized personality, the effective human being expressing himself in relations with other human beings. His habits are his way of living. He could not live without them, and different habits would give him different relations with his fellows.

For the sake of clarity, let us take another example of the way a family group organizes and molds a child's behavior. Have you ever watched a

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