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IN THE FALL OF I922, JONATHAN B. CROSSED THE THRESHOLD OF New Mexico State Penitentiary, sent up by state prosecutors on a one-year larceny conviction. The 31-year-old railroad switchman brought with him into prison a variety of tattooed images that spoke to a broad, hypermasculine, and ethnocentric curiosity of the outside world. Etched on his biceps and forearms were, among other pictures, crisscrossed United States and Cuban flags, a "Chinese woman," and a "Jap dragon."1 A few thousand miles away, 26-year-old steamfitter Bruce G. entered Pittsburgh's Western State Penitentiary on a breaking and entering conviction, adorned with depictions of an "Indian maid with headdress" and a "Japanese maid wearing kimono and holding [a] parasol."2 Soon after, Gregory B., an Illinois-born cook, checked into Sacramento County's Folsom State Prison on a burglary conviction, bringing with him pictures of a "dragon head," "tiger," and a "Japanese dancing girl."3
Despite their seemingly exotic tastes in tattoo art, the three nonviolent criminals appear at first blush to be no more educated or worldly than the average white US male of the time. Each was literate but had no college education, lived within a heterosexual nuclear household, and staked out a career as a transient semiskilled laborer.4 The seeming averageness of the three convicts is what makes the fact that each man was, like scores of his fellow inmates, emblazoned with Orientalized images connoting intercultural contact and hypermasculinity worthy of reflection. Prisoners of the interwar period (1919-1940) regularly marked their bodies with images of sexualized Romani, Mexican, Asian, and Native American women; the names of distant locales; and exotic or mythical creatures.
An extraordinarily large number of interwar convicts belonged to a US working-class culture that was more worldly, mobile, and pluralistic than criminologists and historians have generally assumed. Having frequently served in the armed forces before falling into the transient working class that filled out the rolls of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the underemployed urban bachelor subculture of the early twentieth century indirectly fostered the creation of a convict class which used tattoos to share experiences and build bonds that they carried with them throughout the country and behind bars.
This article looks to the tattoos inmates brought into...