Burns’s autobiography recounts his traumatic experiences on a Georgia chain gang: Burns returns from WWI, can’t find work, is sentenced to ten years of hard labor in 1921 for petty larceny, he escapes, makes good as a magazine publisher in Chicago, is exposed as a fugitive convict by his wife with whom he has an antagonistic relationship, is tricked into returning to Georgia and denied his promised reprieve, escapes a second time, and is laying low in New Jersey in 1932 when the book was published.

His brother, Reverend Vincent Burns’s asserts in his introduction the book’s intended impact on its reader. “If people will only read his story with sympathetic understanding and pass it on for others to read there will inevitably be a wave of great indignation against this most inhuman, most un-American system—the chain gang. The public, once vividly conscious of the horrors and brutalities of chain-gang life, will rise in its wrath and force a clean-up” (35). This statement represents a fair assessment of the book’s political logic: wage struggles for political change based on subjective arguments that appeal foremost to a reader’s emotions by evoking vague senses of myth and patriotism. In fact, this book and its subsequent adaptation to film by Hollywood did launch a national reform movement against the chain gangs – which some argue was successful although evidence suggests that the Southern penal system’s eventual reform was motivated by economic factors. 

Of course, there is little doubt regarding the injustice of Burns’s individual experiences on the chain gang. Evidence too confirms the ethical dubiousness of the chain gang’s political-economic ties to Georgia’s government and reigning elite citizens, as well as its inhumane and violent treatment of its prisoners. However, Burns completely misrepresents the chain gangs, which he condemns, in the words of H.L. Mencken, as “so archaic and barbarous as to be a national disgrace.” The chain gangs were far from archaic; their corruption and violence were deeply motivated by modernity (see my post on Alex Lichtenstein’s book, Twice the Work of Free Labor). Furthermore, Burns’s story overshadowed other considerably more radical condemnations of the Southern chain gangs. It participated in a 1932 myth-making culture that distracted the public from revolutionary or historically accurate arguments, and propagandized New Deal politics.