Punishments Now and Then

As a fourteen-year-old ninth grader in the 1960’s, only once did I go through the indignity of being told to bend over so a man teacher could swing a wooden paddle and bust the hell out of my rear-end. It hurt. It likely hurt so much I kept my smart-aleck mouth zipped more often in class.

I was an assistant principal at two Dallas high schools in the ‘70’s when corporal punishment was an acceptable and expected form of discipline. I swung the paddle.  When I was principal of the high school in Lockhart in the ‘80’s, we kept paddling as an option in our quiver of disciplinary arrows, but used the board less and less as the years passed. 

I expect that by now, 25 years later, the paddle is an extinct dinosaur in public schools. Having received and given “licks,” or more delicately “swats,” I’m glad corporal punishment is gone. My experience was that “spare the rod and spoil the child” is wrong. 

Sure, the “rod,” or paddle, worked with some kids, like me. But a phone call to my mother would have worked just as well.  As a school principal, I found that the paddle more often simply hardened a child towards adults and school.

I’ve wanted to say that to someone for quite a while, but I’m uncomfortable enough in my history of participation in school paddling, that I’ve remained silent about it until now. Those memories are not of my best work as a principal.

Having said that, I admit to silently wishing I could use a B-B gun to sting the occasional jerk at the top of the gym bleachers who would decide not to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance at football pep rallies.

The armies of the 19^th century had no such qualms about applying the rod, or the lash, or the red-hot branding iron, as means of disciplining soldiers. 

They also did indeed shoot deserters to death on occasion as a deterrent to other home-sick and war-weary soldiers.

In the first two Captain McBee Civil War novels, I didn’t include the punishment of a soldier in the plot, but just last week the storyline of Defiant Honor prompted me to choose among several punishments routinely doled out for “minor” misbehaviors.

In 2016 we blanch, as we should, at the cruelty of the punishments in the armies’ quivers of discipline options. Suffice to say, times were different and harder.

Consider these well-documented punishments:

Should I “buck and gag” James Fisher, the private who incurred the ire of his company commander? That means tying up the soldier like a roasting chicken going on the spit, with arms bound over his bent knees and a rag stuffed in his mouth.

Or have him stand on a stump wearing a sign all day? 

Or put a barrel over him and parade him around the camp for hours?

Or should I make his infraction serious enough to tie him to wagon wheel and use a whip to lash his back up to 39 times, drawing blood with each stroke? 

Or brand his cheek with a letter, forever publicly designating his sin to all who see him?

Since Fisher’s infraction wasn’t too serious, I chose to have him “ride the rail” from dawn until dusk. You can see the period drawing of that particular punishment and see an actual Civil War photo of two soldiers straddling a split rail as punishment.

Note the large wooden “toy” sword held by the man on the rail in the drawing. It would have been really heavy and added to his ever-increasing pain as he endured the weight of it on his shoulders for hour after hour.

Interestingly to me, both the drawing and the photo image were done during the 1864 siege of Petersburg, Virginia, the same setting as in Defiant Honor where I needed to punish a soldier. It was during the long hot summer when both armies were manning earthworks with little activity, but lots of discomfort and boredom. Day after day, week after week, of living in a sweltering smelly dusty ditch, elbow-to-elbow with other soldiers, always with the danger of a sniper shooting you if you raised your head too high. Just the sort of situation when young men screw up.

If any of you readers are modern veterans and care to tell the rest of us how military discipline was-is administered in the  20^th and 21^st centuries, I urge you to offer a comment.