Free Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce Page B

against the rigid rules, the rule of silence in particular. It was the first known disturbance on The Rock and the participants, about half the population of 250, were put on bread and water. Warden Johnston described the affair, a strike, as a “test of strength between the prisoners and the Department of Justice as to who is going to run the prison.” The Department of Justice won. At the strike’s end, after three days of the spare diet, the warden announced that the rules remained “exactly the same.”
    Tex Lucas, the strapping Texas Badman who did thirty days in the dungeon as a leader of that affair, spent three months the following year, 1937, organizing a second strike. His lieutenant was Burton (Whitey) Phillips, twenty-five-year-old Kansan doing life for bank robbery and kidnaping. One autumn morning Lucas gave the signal in the machine shop, and the men dropped their tools and began shouting, “We want to talk! We want newspapers! We want radios!” Soon the cries rang through all the shops. Notified by phone, Warden Johnston said: “Give them a half hour to get back to work.”
    Jeers and curses greeted this ultimatum, and the warden issued an edict: no work, no eat. They were locked up, and placed on bread and water. For days the cellhouse reverberated with shouts, tin cups banging on bars, steel table tops slammed against steel walls, iron beds dropped on concrete. By the end of a week most of the convicts, tiring of the skimpy diet, returned to their jobs. Lucas, Phillips, and a dozen other suspected leaders made the dungeon. A guard inquired daily if the holdouts were ready to work. On the fifth day Whitey Phillips meekly gave in. He seemed thoroughly repentant as he ate lunch, stood up with his tier group at the first whistle, turned at the second, and at the third filed past the steam table to check in his flatware.
    Warden Johnston chatted with the captain near the door, his back to the convicts. Guards stood idly at their scattered posts. The armed guard on the gun balcony outside kept a wary eye on the room. All was quiet, except for the shuffle of heavy shoes and a muffled clatter in the kitchen. As he approached the door, Phillips bolted from the line and crashed a fist behind the warden’s right ear. The warden dropped unconscious, as if struck by a mallet. Phillips kicked his face, then straddled him and rained trip-hammer blows. The guard on the catwalk rammed a machine-gun barrel through a port but dared not fire. It took five guards to drag Phillips off the warden and subdue him.
    Johnston spent a week in the Marine Hospital in San Francisco. A prison official told the press Phillips was hospitalized on The Rock but declined to state the “nature of his ailment.” In the rescue of their warden, and aroused to a cold fury by the viciousness of the attack, the guards had requited blow with blow in generous measure. P. F. Reed, a counterfeiter who witnessed the scene, described it after his release in a series of articles, “Alcatraz is Hell,” in the San Francisco Examiner in October 1938. He related that Phillips was floored with a gasbilly and then two guards took turns playing croquet on his head with their metal clubs, driving him, inches at a whack, halfway across the dining room.
    The impression gained at the time was that Phillips’s wild attack was motivated by anger over the warden’s action in starving out the strikers. James Martin MacInnis, San Francisco lawyer who later conferred with Phillips on a writ, said the convict revealed a deeper motivation.
    “Phillips was a victim of the hysteria of the early thirties,” says MacInnis. “He was a young fellow who got in with bad company and joined in robbing a small-town bank in Kansas. They took the manager as hostage, drove down a country road and let him out, unharmed. This was Phillips’s first offense, but he drew a life term. Driving down that back road they happened to cross a state line, and he was the first to be