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Juvenile Justice and Women's Clubs: Ogden as a Case Study

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/26428652.90.4.03

2642-8652

Sarah Langsdon,

Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis

The murder of James A. Clough occurred in the early morning hours of August 22, 1920, at his home in Ogden, Utah. The police would come to believe that Clough's own son—a fourteen-year-old named Ray—had shot him. The circumstances of the tragedy left Ray without anyone to care for him while he awaited trial. Because Ogden had no juvenile detention center, the boy could only stay in the city jail with adult criminals: hardly a fitting environment for a child, no matter his guilt or innocence. The case piqued the interest of local women, many of them socially prominent, who belonged to the Child Culture Club, the Martha Society, and the Children's Aid Society, among other organizations. While the women's concern began with Ray Clough and was rooted in Progressive Era–values, their efforts continued well through the 1950s as they worked with court professionals, lawmakers, and the community to establish a robust, functioning juvenile justice system in Ogden.Social activism and reform characterized the Progressive Era in the United States, which lasted from roughly 1890 to 1920. During this time, members of women's social clubs worked to create a juvenile court system and involved men in their reform efforts. As one scholar has observed, “Locked out of other career paths, the women of the Progressive Era understood the similarity between their activities in the juvenile court and the rites they were expected to fulfill in broader society as nurturers and caretakers.”1 The first state juvenile courts were established in 1899 in Illinois and Colorado, with a goal to substitute treatment and care for punishment. The women behind the movement saw children as more than small adults, who needed to be treated differently. Progressive women also recognized the need for specifically trained professionals to work with minors. For them, the establishment of detention centers addressed the concern that placing children in adult prisons and jails might make them more antisocial and even put them on a path to criminality.Prior to the establishment of the juvenile court system, youth were treated the same as adult offenders. The children, when arrested, would be housed in jails next to adults. Youths were seen, moreover, by judges who did not view them any differently in the criminal system than adults. Judges often sent children sent to industrial schools, which were juvenile reform schools, or to prison depending on their crime. Many clubwomen of the time felt it was their duty to protect these children.These upper class women represented a cultural phenomenon that the scholar Tony Platt refers to as “child saving,” as the women responded, in part, to “a void in their own lives, a void which was created by the decline of traditional religion, increased leisure and boredom, the rise of public education, and the breakdown of communal life in impersonal, crowded cities.’”2 Both feminists and antifeminists alike regarded the movement to achieve juvenile courts as appropriately within the female domain. It was a reputable task that allowed women to extend their housekeeping functions into the community—and become involved in politics—without upsetting the ideal stereotype of women's nature and their place in the home.3Women began to get involved in the juvenile justice system in Chicago around the turn of the century. The Chicago Woman's club started to push for reforms to the justice system by removing children from the influence of adult criminals with the establishment of separate courts for children's cases. The first court was created in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899 and operated in place of parents.4 When the court convened on its first day, several women from the Chicago Woman's club sat beside the judge to advise him on the juveniles in court and even to take responsibility for the youths.5 The women of this club were examples of the women across the country who saw the welfare of women and children in their respective communities to be of utmost importance.With the establishment of the juvenile court system, women advocated for their place in that system and saw their role as mothers toward the community. As the suffragist Rheta Childe Dorr wrote, “But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family.”6 Even though authorities usually did not allow observers into juvenile court sessions, they understood the advantage of having women join in the proceedings to advocate for the welfare of children.7These responses to juvenile delinquency, which had long been a problem throughout the United States, provide a fitting context for the development of a juvenile justice system in Ogden, Utah. One of the best ways to understand the problem of juvenile delinquency—and the progressive response to it—can be gained by examining the efforts of the women's clubs of Ogden, who sought to find ways to address the issue. Central to these efforts was the 1920 case of Ray Clough, the fourteen-year-old boy who was arrested and tried for the murder of his father.When the police arrived at the Clough family home on August 22, 1920, Ollie Clough, the mother, was agitated and unable to give a clear account of what had happened. The body of her husband was found lying face down just off the bed in a second smaller bedroom in their house at 2175 Jackson Avenue. Once the police calmed Ollie down, she told them that two unknown men had broken into the home and argued with her husband. One of the assailants then pulled out a gun and shot him. They threatened to kill her children and asked if anyone else was in the home. Ollie said that her oldest son, Ray, was sleeping in the crawl space under the house because he was afraid of his father. She claimed that the men went to find Ray but were scared off and left the property. When the police questioned Ray, he corroborated his mother's story—at least at first. He stated that he was sleeping in the crawl space because he was worried about punishment from his father after he was caught stealing from a local store. Two weeks earlier on August 9, Ray had been arrested for allegedly robbing the Sawyer Brothers’ Grocery at 1002 Twenty-Second Street, and his father had picked him up from the police station. Since that day, Ray had only come home late at night or when his father was at work. He told the police that he was asleep under the house when two men yelling for him to get out had awakened him. A noise outside scared the men and they left. Ray went upstairs to find his mother upset and his father dead in the bedroom.8Not until much later that day did Ray finally tell the police what really occurred at the home that morning. In order to get Ray away from the situation, Detective Everett Noble suggested that he and Robert Burke should take Ray to the store to get some food for the family. It was in the police automobile that the Clough boy told the facts of the killing. During the trial, Robert Burke, the chief detective for Ogden City, recounted the story that Ray told them. Burke testified that Ray “had storied a little to us,” but that The reason he did that was to protect his mother. He said he didn't sleep in the basement but that he was sleeping in the empty house. He said his mother had told him because he broke into the store that his father would kill him if he came to the house to sleep. He said that she had taken the keys out of his father's pocket in the morning before the killing and had gotten the gun out of the box and given the gun to him in the morning. He hid it in the weeds and that at four o'clock in the afternoon he and his mother had a conversation where his mother told him that his father had been awful mean to him when he was a baby and that she wanted him to kill him. Then he said he went back to sleep in this empty house. His mother came down at twelve-thirty and told him that his father had cut one of his brother's throat and killed the other and that she wanted him to shoot him. Said he came up, had the gun in the overalls. He walked to the door and shot his father and his father raised up. He said I am going to quit, but mother had a hold of my arm and told me to keep shooting.9After Ray confessed to the shooting, the police arrested both the young man and his mother for murder in the first degree. Ray was charged on August 22 for “unlawfully, wilfully, feloniously, deliberately, maliciously, premeditatedly and with malice” making an assault upon James Clough and that “a certain revolver which then and there was loaded with cartridges containing powder and bullet shoot off at, against and upon the body of James Clough.”10 The authorities housed Ray in the Ogden City jail along with adults until he was arraigned—for unlike other juvenile offenders, Ray did not have a responsible adult who was willing to take care of him until his arraignment and trial, and Ogden City did not have a detention center for youths. There was only the State Industrial School, which was for juveniles who had been convicted of crimes against the federal government. Moreover, the family originally lived in Texas and had only moved to Ogden in early 1918, leaving all extended family behind.Ollie was also charged with murder, and she quickly faced trial. Her purported mental state allowed the courts to call for a speedy evaluation and trial. Newspapers described her as demented in accounts of the murder. During the trial, William Clough, her brother-in-law, testified that Ollie had suffered from periods of alleged insanity for years and that the family had committed her to mental institutions three different times in Texas. He said that she had once tried to kill his brother with a knife while he slept.11 By August 25, the jury found her insane after a short deliberation and ordered her to the state mental hospital in Provo. She was sentenced to stay hospitalized until a doctor found her sane and then she would be ordered to stand trial. Ollie was taken to Provo where she underwent evaluation and treatment, while her children were placed in state custody. According to an account in the Ogden Standard Examiner on August 23, 1920, “Mrs. Clough was taken to the county jail, while Leo, age 12, Alvin, age 8 and Josephine Clough an infant, were placed under the care of the Martha Society and the Crittenton home.”12 The care of the younger children first brought the case to the attention of Ogden's clubwomen.A little background is necessary to understand the situation in Ogden. The Florence Crittenton home first opened in Ogden in 1896 at 2544 Porter to help unwed mothers and their babies. Charles Nelson Crittenton had established similar homes across the country after he witnessed young women with nowhere to go. “Two girls were found in sin who were the first to be converted. They had no door open to them, so Mr. Crittenton opened a home, the Mother mission, then and there, which was the commencement of all the missions.”13 Crittenton purchased the building in Ogden for the cost of $2,150 and held it in trust for the state.14 Ogden's home was the only one of its kind in the state and the Intermountain West. Within six months of establishing the home, Crittenton turned the house over to the Woman's Home Association with the condition that it would serve as a home for girls in Utah who had become pregnant outside of marriage.15 The association relied on state and local government for funding; in 1924, for instance, the home received $1,500 annually from the state to cover the monthly costs of $100.16The Martha Society began in Ogden in the 1890s as the Ogden Charitable Committee, which divided the city into twelve districts with a woman in charge of the needs and welfare of the people who lived in her district. By 1908, the organization had changed its name to the Martha Society after the death of its founder, Martha Brown Cannon. The society included some of the well-to-do women of Ogden, such as Julia Kiesel, Eva Lewis, Mary Scowcroft, Thelka Becker, Annie Dee, and Mary Ann Browning. Some of the clubwomen were married to prominent businessmen, such as Edna McIntosh, whose husband worked for the Utah National Bank of Ogden, Bertha Eccles, wife of millionaire David Eccles, and Martha Wright, wife of the president of W. H. Wright and Sons. Several of the women owned businesses themselves, including Frances Glen, who owned the Glen Hotel, and Carolyn Bichsel, who was the president of an investment company. These women came from various religious backgrounds and became involved in the Martha Society because of their desire to become civically engaged and use their influence to help struggling members of the broader community.In 1913, the women of the Martha Society started a nursery home for the children of working mothers. The society covered half the cost of daycare so that the women could work and provide for their families. After World War I, the home grew to include temporary housing for homeless children who had previously been housed in city jail pending adoption or before being returned to their delinquent parents. Years later, in 1948, Robert M. Hoggan wrote, “If the Martha Home had not been established, these children would have to be placed as had happened prior to the founding of the home, in the City Jail, a deplorable condition to imagine for these youngsters of tender age.”17Both the Martha Home and Crittenton home were part of the state's juvenile system and received a large portion of their annual operating budgets from the state; they were accordingly subject to yearly evaluations. The law required these annual inspections, which the state superintendent of public instruction, state attorney general, and secretary of the juvenile court commission conducted, along with city and county commissioners and welfare workers. The visits included stops at the State Industrial School and the Children's Aid Society offices as well.18 The Children's Aid Society, importantly, was an organization founded in Weber County in 1910 to protect children in a variety of circumstances; representatives from twelve local clubs—including the Child Culture Club, the Crittenton home, and the Martha Society—composed its membership.19 In 1917, after a visit to the Martha Home, Senator W. W. Armstrong of Salt Lake City stated, “For every dollar that the two state institutions in Ogden ask, and also the three other institutions, the Martha society, the Crittenton home and the Children's Aid Society association, the state will receive $100 in service and efficiency. I stand for the appropriation of every dollar that the state can stand for these institutions.”20 These were the resources that existed in Ogden at the time of Ray Clough's trial—institutions and advocates that would eventually work together to form the basis of a more appropriate facility for juvenile offenders.Ray Clough appeared before court for the first time on August 29, 1920. His attorney, George Halverson, agreed to represent him because the boy was without funds and would have been forced to face trial without any defense. One press account noted that in court, Ray showed no emotion as he was questioned and when asked for his plea, he answered all of the questions in a clear and even tone. The newspaper remarked, using the language and perspective of its time, that “Ray displayed none of the characteristics of a tough kid or a mental defective. He has an innocent-looking face, with large blue eyes and regular features.”21The Clough case came to the attention of the Children's Aid Society at a meeting on September 3. According to the minutes, Elizabeth Barrows and Caroline Bichsel “had visited the young boy at the jail and said that this was really a pitiful case.” In response, the club's president, Edna McIntosh, asked Bertha Eccles, Frances Glen, and Barrows to attend the trial.22 Two days later, the women of the Children's Aid Society and Martha Society voluntarily assumed responsibility for Ray and his two brothers. Judge Dan Sullivan said that the members of these two societies believed that Ray Clough, despite the fact that he shot his father, probably committed the crime because he was an impressionable young man who had inherited some mental instability from his mother.23Because he had no relatives to care for him, the two societies made preparations to befriend the boy and care for his siblings. As the Standard Examiner reported, “The Ogden institutions are now caring for the Clough children, the two younger than Ray being at the Martha Society home while the 15 month old baby is being cared for at a private home.”24 An older sister, Afton Rose, moved from Texas to Ogden to take responsibility for the children.The women of the Children's Aid Society, including Bertha Eccles, Edna McIntosh, Frances Lewis, Rose Ensign, Alice Bowman, and Elizabeth Hess, attended the hearing in the police court on September 17, where Ray was bound over for trial in November. They waited for Sheriff Herbert Peterson after the case, “asking that Ray be placed in the custody of some officer instead of being held in jail. Which he gladly promised to do.”25 In the process, the women discovered that Ogden did not have a juvenile detention center for children to be safely housed in while they awaited trials. The women were previously unaware of this because there had been no local children accused of grievous crimes like murder before. As the newspaper reported, “The women accused nobody in connection with the case but they point out that even under the most humane enforcement of laws relating to juvenile offenders, the condition of a boy in the predicament that young Clough finds himself in is deplorable.”26 Ray had been placed in the city jail alongside the adult male population. During the pretrial proceedings, Ray's lawyer, Halverson, pleaded the case for having the boy housed somewhere other than with adults. As Halverson argued in court, “I would suggest, if your Honor please, that this boy ought really to be put in the custody of perhaps some officer, so that he would not be confined as the common, ordinary prisoner, and possibly one of the officers might be willing to take charge of him. I believe it would be in the interest of justice if something of that kind were done.”27 Simply put, Halverson and the women of the Children's Aid Society worried that contact with adult prisoners would have a detrimental effect on Ray.At the November 18, 1920, meeting of the Child Culture Club, Judge Dan Sullivan spoke about the development of the juvenile court and Utah's efforts. He mentioned many cases and conditions that needed to be addressed. Elizabeth Hess “moved that the club go on record in a protest against the inefficiency of juvenile laws especially in the case of Ray Clough, a 14 year old boy who had been in jail three months awaiting trial. The motion was seconded and carried.” The clubwomen then moved to prepare a protest for the press and confer with the Children's Aid Society.28 As a result of this effort, the Federated Women's Club of Utah—an organization with representatives from each women's club in Utah, including the Child Culture Club of Ogden—also launched a campaign to work on better laws and conditions for the handling of juvenile offenders. Ray's case started their long campaign to improve the lives of offenders. According to a front-page press account, the November meeting of the Child Culture Club stirred the women to “indignation” and action—especially the case of “Ray Clough, a 14-year-old boy who has been confined in the city and county jails for three months. This boy is not under conviction of the crime but awaiting trial. Under this strict confinement and environment, the boy's health and mentality are slowly but surely being undermined.” In their note of protest, the clubwomen asked to know “wherein the blame lies. Is it with the law or is it with the court? If the former, we appeal for a revision whereby juvenile offenders are not treated as adult criminals. If the latter, may we as representative women of Ogden, plead for leniency on behalf of this boy that he may yet have the chance to become an upright and honorable citizen. Signed, the Federation of Women's Clubs, the Children's Aid Society.”29As a result of these efforts, it became obvious that a widespread problem existed involving juvenile offenders. Even Judge Sullivan addressed the need for changes. In the Biennial Report of the Juvenile Court Commission in 1920, he stated, “Our biggest handicap here is the lack of a detention home for temporary custody. In the matter of girl cases this need is absolutely acute. Out of the 1,500 cases handled by the court there have been 32 commitments to the Industrial School, out of which number only two commitments were girls.”30 Clough, meanwhile, had no one to take up his case. He stayed in the city jail for weeks awaiting his preliminary hearing when he was bound over to district court. He was then transferred to the county jail because was no other place that was capable of keeping him. Sullivan also argued “If Ogden has a detention home, the boy could have been given a greater degree of attention and even in the event that his trial dragged on for some time, it is not probable that he would have had to experience torments of almost solitary confinement to which he has been subject.”31 To Sullivan, the Clough case was one of the best examples ever to show the public the absolute need of the city to establish a detention home for juvenile offenders.In October 1920, there was a bit of relief, for Ray had been assigned as a trusty in the jail and was allowed to stay in the quarters of the officer and his family. As Elizabeth Barrows of the Children's Aid Society reported on October 15, “[Ray] was in better quarters as he is now a trusty. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Hess reported that she had fitted Ray out with clothes.”32 When the sheriff's office was questioned about the boy's living conditions, they said that he had not been into the interior of the jail proper. He had been allowed in the sheriff's office and the connected rooms, along with the kitchen. Clough took all his meals at the table with the sheriff's daughter, who lived at the courthouse and oversaw all the work of the woman who did the cooking for her family and the prisoners. After a walking nightmare one night when he tried to injure himself with a knife from the kitchen, Ray was closely watched and slept in a room with an officer in the adjoining room to keep an eye on him. When he was asked by a news reporter if he would rather be in the jail or the state industrial school or another institution, he replied “I would rather stay here.”33Having been assured that Ray was being cared for in the jail setting, the women of Ogden turned to supporting him through his trial. Women from various clubs crowded into the courtroom during the trial. On the first day, November 26, the courtroom was almost at capacity with many women present. The Ogden Standard Examiner reported: “Following the adjournment at noon, a score of women rushed forward and shook hands with the boy and offered words of encouragement. The boy appeared to appreciate the action of the women but did not converse with them to any extent, simply answering questions with yes or no.”34 The women made sure that Ray knew he wasn't alone and had motherly figures who would help in any way possible. Such public attention to the welfare of children, it should be noted, fit neatly with broader societal perception that “women were considered the ‘natural caretakers’ of wayward children.”35The trial continued for three days, with the prosecution calling witnesses from the police department and coroner's office to discuss what they had seen the day they went to the Clough home and the boy's actions and demeanor during that time. George Larkin, the funeral director, recalled his experience with Ray who came to see his father's body before it was shipped off for burial in Texas. In Larkin's words, Ray said that The night that he shot his father, she [Ollie] had told him to go down there and sleep. She then went down and woke him up and said his father had killed his two brothers and he would have come up and defend them. He said that on Saturday morning his mother had given him the gun—taken it from his father's box—to protect himself against his father. Ray said that when he went up to the house, his mother took him to the room and told him to shoot. He shot once, and his father raised up and made some sound. [Ray] didn't want to shoot, but she held both his arms and told him to keep pumping the gun. Then he saw his two brothers and that his mother held his arms and forced him to [keep shooting]. He then took the gun and went out in front to throw the gun away and to tell anybody that there had been burglars in the house. [Ray] thought he was not awful in doing that, and that was the story they all held until Detective Noble found the gun in the bush. When they had found the gun he confessed.36The defense called Ray's siblings, Afton Clough Rose and Leo Clough, as well as neighbors Florence Hunsinger and W. A. Jones. The witnesses talked about the state of the Clough home and the incidents between the parents, James and Ollie. Additionally, Ray testified on his own behalf, explaining how his father had beaten him once while living in Texas but not again. He said he was scared that, after being arrested for robbery of the Sawyer Brothers’ Grocery store, his father would hit him again. Ollie purportedly used that fear to fuel Ray's fear of his father and wind him up to a point where he would believe the story his mother told him on August 22. Ollie constantly met with Ray and said that his father intended to kill him if he saw him. She told Ray that he should not sleep at home but instead in a deserted home down the street. As the press account reported, “Ray had been given the revolver by his mother early in the morning with instructions to protect himself against his father.”37 Apparently, Ray had even mentioned to the police that he was sorry for what had happened and had he known that his mother was in the condition she was, he would not have done it. By the time the testimony ended on November 27, a reporter for the Standard remarked that several women in the audience were wiping tears from their eyes after hearing the stories of the Clough family.38The court case concluded on the afternoon of November 28, 1920. Judge Alfred Agee gave the jury extensive instructions before they retired. The jury consisted of twelve men from Ogden, who were mostly farmers, as well as a salesman, a bookkeeper, a laborer, and the manager of the Ogden Canyon Sanitarium. One of the instructions was that if definitive proof did not exist that Ray Clough, as a child between the age of nine and fourteen, knew the wrongfulness of his actions, then the jury should acquit him. Agee also instructed the jury that if Ray “did not comprehend his own situation and the circumstances surrounding him, or that he supposed that he was committing an act of necessary self-defense of himself or his mother, you should acquit him.”39 The final instruction from the judge was that if the jury found that Ray killed his father under the influence of his mother, Ollie, that they should return a verdict of not guilty.The jury left to deliberate but filed back in after only forty-five minutes. With a full courtroom, Judge Agee “cautioned the spectators that regardless of the verdict, no demonstration must follow its reading. Despite this warning, when the court clerk Simon Barlow read the words ‘Not Guilty’ many women shrieked wildly and men applauded.”40 The jury found that Ray killed his father under the influence of his mother. As attested to by the discrepancy between the image of Ollie as the unstable mother who led her own child to commit murder and the well-off clubwomen who tended to Ray in court, there was a class element to the place of different women in Ray's life. The Clough case exemplified the contemporary idea that clubwomen could provide maternal care toward the poor of their community because the poor needed moral and spiritual assistance as well as economic help.41Ray was released from custody and went to live at the Martha Home with his younger brothers. The Children's Aid Society asked Mattie Ritter, the police matron for Ogden City, to find a home to take Ray because they were unsure his older sister could handle all the children since she already had three of her own. The actions of the clubwomen of Ogden in investigating the details of the Clough case and calling attention to the inadequacy of the juvenile laws added interest to the plight of young offenders. As the Standard Examiner reported that day, “Other boys should be told the story in its true light to avoid any possibility of impressionable minds thinking there was one commendable thing in the terrible tragedy.”42As a result of their experience with Ray Clough, the clubwomen decided to focus a considerable amount of time and effort on working to improve the juvenile justice system. The women had previously not know about the lack of a detention center in Ogden because they had no experience with juvenile delinquents until this case. The Ogden City commissioners recognized the help the women could offer and asked the federation to create a committee to work on this matter. The Children's Aid Society reported in its November 4, 1921, meeting that Bertha Eccles had visited the city commissioners to ask for a female worker in the juvenile court, and that Moroni Skeen, Edward Green, and John Child supported having two women police officers. Edna McIntosh, meanwhile, left a written petition for the commissioners on the issue.43 The Child Culture Club appointed Chloe Douglas to serve on the committee for the purpose of aiding the juvenile court.44In the wake o