The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [21]
[15]Cesare Beccaria-Bonesana: An Essay on Crimes and Punishment. With Commentary by M. D. Voltaire (Stanford, California: Academic Reprints; 1953), pp. 187–8. (A facsimile reprint of the American edition of 1819, translated from the French by Edward D. Ingraham. Philadelphia: P. H. Nicklin; 1819.)
[16]R. Lindner: The Fifty-Minute Hour (New York: Bantam; 1958), pp. 193–4.
CHAPTER II
WHO THEY WERE
Clyde Benson
CLYDE’S FATHER, a farmer and carpenter by trade, was a hardworking, successful, respected member of a rural community in western Michigan. His family and acquaintances described him as a man of good disposition, who was, however, “severe” and given to losing his temper. Clyde’s mother, according to reports, was fretful, worrisome, ambitious, and hard-working, too. She was deeply religious and read the Bible every day. Both she and her husband belonged to a small Protestant Fundamentalist church and both were teetotalers. Mrs. Benson had been in poor health for a long time. Clyde was born after she had been married for six years and had suffered several miscarriages. It is, therefore, not surprising that Clyde was overprotected from the day of his birth, nor that throughout his life he maintained a childlike dependence on his parents. He was, however, closer to his mother than to his father and he complained bitterly that his sister, two years younger than he, was his father’s pet.
Clyde married at twenty-four. His wife, Shirley, was the daughter of a prosperous farmer. For the first ten years of their marriage, the couple lived with Clyde’s parents; for the next five they lived on a rented farm three miles away. Thereafter, with his father-in-law’s help, Clyde bought a farm of his own. Since the father-in-law was divorced, he moved in with the younger couple and Clyde worked both his own farm and Shirley’s father’s.
Shirley died following an abortion, eighteen years after the couple were married. Clyde, then forty-two, was left with three daughters. In the next year, a whole string of misfortunes assailed him.
Within four months, his father died, of a liver condition, at the age of seventy. Shortly thereafter, Shirley’s father died. Next, Clyde’s oldest daughter married and moved away. Then his mother, also in her seventies, died—case records state that she had become a morphine addict. By this time, Clyde had begun to drink heavily.
When Shirley died, Clyde tried to persuade his oldest daughter to put off her marriage and keep house for him and the two younger girls. She refused, and for a year and a half he had to depend on his two younger daughters to keep house for him.
Then, in 1934, Clyde married again. The two girls went to live with their maternal grandmother, and Clyde moved to the farm of his new wife, Alma. At the time of their marriage, Alma had two teen-age children of her own and was pregnant with Clyde’s child. The couple had known each other from childhood, and it was Alma who had courted Clyde. She came to visit him often after Shirley died and, as she too was a heavy drinker, the two of them frequently went out drinking together.
By the time Clyde remarried he had acquired quite a bit of property. In addition to his own and Alma’s farms, he had inherited a half share in his father’s and all of his father-in-law’s. He was angry that his father had left his younger sister the other half share, and he saw this as further proof that his father always did more for her than for him.
According to Clyde’s second daughter, he was a devoted father, who often played with the children. She feels that he never really grew up. He seemed unable to make decisions on his own, and always sought the advice of his parents, wife, and father-in-law. She remembers from childhood that Clyde once left home with two other men to ride the freights westward, where he had heard that there was a great deal of