So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Read Free Book Online Page B

its most awful form, is there . . . The person who can go and look on death merely to gratify an idle humor is destitute both of humanity and piety.”
    After lunch, I traveled the few miles to the Massachusetts Historical Society, a grand old townhouse on Boylston Street. I remembered something Jonah had e-mailed me before I flew to Los Angeles: “The shaming process is fucking brutal.” I thought about the phrase “shaming process.” It was probably reassuring for a shamee to envisage their punishment as a process rather than a free-for-all. If you’re being destroyed, you want to feel that the people tearing you apart at least know what they’re doing. Well, maybe less delicate shamees wouldn’t care how orderly their shaming was, but Jonah struck me as someone for whom structure was important and someone who had only ever wanted to impress people and fit in.
    It turned out that public shaming
had
once been a process. A book of Delaware laws I discovered at the Massachusetts Historical Society revealed that if Jonah had been found guilty of “lying or publishing false news” in the 1800s, he would have been “fined, placed in the stocks for a period not exceeding four hours, or publicly whipped with not more than forty stripes.” If the judge had chosen a whipping, local newspapers would have published a digest detailing the amount of squirming that had occurred. “Rash and Hayden squirmed considerably during the performance, and their backs were well-scarred,” wrote the
Delawarean
of an 1876 whipping. If Jonah’s whipper had been deemed to have not whipped hard enough, the reviews would have been scathing. “Suppressed remarks were expressed by large numbers. Many were heard to say that the punishment was a farce. Drunken fights and rows followed in rapid succession,” reported Delaware’s
Wilmington Daily Commercial
after a disappointing 1873 whipping.
    â€”
    The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet letter. But according to the documents I found, that wasn’t it at all. They didn’t fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.
    The movement against public shaming was already in full flow in March 1787 when Benjamin Rush, a United States founding father, wrote a paper calling for their outlawing—the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot.
    Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth up on any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.
    â€”B ENJAMIN R USH ,“A N E NQUIRY INTO THE E FFECTS OF P UBLIC P UNISHMENTS U PON C RIMINALS , AND U PON S OCIETY ,”M ARCH 9 , 1787
    In case you consider Rush too much of a bleeding-heart liberal, it’s worth pointing out that his proposition for alternatives to public shaming included taking the criminal into a private room—away from the public gaze—and administering “bodily pain.”
    To ascertain the nature, degrees, and duration of the bodily pain will require some knowledge of the principles of sensation and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system.
    Public punishments were abolished within fifty years of Rush’s paper, with only Delaware weirdly holding out until 1952 (which is why the Delaware whipping critiques I excerpt were published in the 1870s).
    The New York Times
, baffled by Delaware’s obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial.
    If it had previously existed in [the convicted person’s] bosom a spark of