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No, not exactly true. Native people could vote in many states earlier that that. However, it is partly true in that in some states Native people were being prevented from voting before the 1970s. In some states Native people continue to be prevented from voting to this day. It has been a very long path for voting rights for Native people in the US. It has much in common with voting rights for other minorities but with its own twists and turns and it is less well known.In 1924, Native Americans got US citizenship in the Indian Citizenship Act. Before that about 1/2 were citizens by other means. After 1924, in theory, all Natives should have been able to vote. But it was not the case for many people. It should be noted that this was also the case for man minorities in many places in the 1920s.It helps to go back over the history. In 1880 John Elk, who was Winnebago tried to registrar to vote in Omaha. He said he was a citizen under the 14th amendment. In Elk v Wilkins the Supreme Cort ruled he was not a citizen. Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884)In 1890, the United States Census formally enumerated all of the Indians of the country. According to the Census, there were a total of 248,253 Indians in the United States. However because of racism in some places Native people did not report that were Native. In New England many passed as French Canadians, for example.The Indian Naturalization Act of 1890 was passed and finally granted citizenship to some Native Americans by an application process. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs announced that the 8th of February was to be celebrated as Franchise Day. It was on this day that the Dawes Act was signed into law. The Dawes Act provided the legal mechanism for Indians to become citizens of the United States, its primary purpose was to break up communal land holdings on reservations and to give each Indian family a small plot of land to farm.Then, in Matter of Heff, the Supreme Court held in 1905 that Indians became American citizens as soon as they accepted their land allotment as was happening under the Dawes Act. The decision infuriated Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs who had insisted that Indians who accepted allotments could not become citizens until the end of their trust period of twenty years.Matter of Heff, 197 U.S. 488 (1905)In 1916 the United States v. Nice, had the Supreme Court take away some rights and said that Native people could be citizens and also treated as minors. United States v. Nice, 241 U.S. 591 (1916)Ethan Anderson (of the Pomo tribe) first attempted to register to vote with the Lake County clerk in 1915, and was denied. He and several members of his met and worked to raise money for two years so that he might take his case to court. A state court ruled in his favor in 1917, for under the Burke Act of 1906 any Native American who had received a patent-in-fee or left a reservation to lead a “civilized life” was granted citizenship and through that the right to vote. The court case (Anderson versus Mathews) gave non-reservation Indians the right to vote. Anderson had attempted to register to vote in Mendocino County and was refused. The court case, which was decided by the California Supreme Court, was funded by the Indian Board of Cooperation. Anderson v. MathewsDuring World War I, Indians were required to register for the draft but were ineligible to be drafted since they were not citizens. Yavapai physician Dr. Carlos Montezuma protested the draft policy and urged the United States to make Indians citizens and then draft them. They enlisted in large numbers. Around 10,000 Indians served in the military in WWI. In 1919, Congress passed an act which provided citizenship for all Indians who served in the military or in naval establishments during World War I.In North Carolina, the Eastern Cherokee tribal council drafted a resolution which argued that the fact that the Eastern Cherokee were denied the right to vote in North Carolina also denied them fair treatment and equal rights by county draft boards. The council asserted that“any organization or group that would deprive a people of as sacred a right as the right of suffrage would not hesitate to deprive them of other constitutional rights including the three inalienable rights – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if the opportunity to do so presents itself.”After WWI there was a great deal of pressure to grant citizenship by Native rights groups and allies. The 1924 act was promoted by progressives who were concerned about the constitutional rights of Indians and who wished to free Indians from federal control.Two days after passing the Indian Citizenship Act, Congress passed a bill to allot the Eastern Cherokee in North Carolina. However they neglected to upgrade the language in the bill to account for the Indian Citizenship Act. The bill said that the Eastern Cherokee would become citizens only after receiving and registering their allotments. The NC State Attorney General said that the Eastern Cherokee were not citizens because this bill superseded the Indian Citizenship Act. The Bureau of Indian Affairs said they were citizens. The Cherokee NC were treated as though they were not citizens and were not allowed to register to vote.Charles Curtis was the 31st Vice President of the United States from 1929 to 1933. He was a Native American from the Kaw tribe (and also Osage and Potawatomi). He had been Senator from Kansas from 1907 to 1929 (except for 2 years) and was majority leader. During his time in the Senate, Curtis became an original sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Republican part had the ERA on its part platform plank from 1940 until 1980. Before that he had been in the House from 1893 to 1907.Here is VP Curtis campaigning on the in Montana with Crow tribal members in 1928. In the Depression he pushed Hoover to create a 5 da work week to help with jobs.In Congress passed another act in 1928 which specifically granted citizenship to the North Carolina Cherokee. Two years later Eastern Cherokee leader Henry M. Owl was denied the right to register to vote in 1930. The state of NC said he was not a citizen. So, Congress passed another act once again reaffirming citizenship for the Eastern Cherokee. The Southern states said is was interfering with “States Rights”. The same lies they used to stop African American voting. Henry Owl had a MA in Cherokee history from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is his dissertation: The Eastern band of Cherokee Indians before and after the removalIn Arizona two Pima Indians (Gila River Indian Community), Peter H. Porter and Rudolph Johnson, attempted to vote in 1928. The Arizona Supreme Court in Porter v. Hall concluded that Indians were not entitled to vote because they were “wards of the government” and persons “under guardianship” were prohibited from voting by the state constitution. Porter v. Hall, 34 Ariz. 308Other states continued to fight voting b Native Americans as well. The Montana state constitution was amended in 1932 to permit only taxpayers to vote. Since Indians on reservations did not pay some local taxes, they could not become voters.A 1937 report by the US Solicitor General found that several states denied Indians the right to vote. It found that four states—Idaho, New Mexico, Maine, and Washington. Colorado’s attorney general replied: “It is our opinion that until Congress enfranchises the Indian, he will not have the right to vote.” Indians were not allowed to serve on juries in Colorado until 1956. Tribal members on reservations were not allowed to vote there until 1970.NC continued to deny Cherokees the vote until after World War II. North Carolina now claimed that Indians were illiterate. The superintendent of the Cherokee Agency reported: “We have had Indian graduates of Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools in stances much better educated than the registrar himself, turned down because they did not read or write to his satisfaction.”In 1940 the Nationality Act which again conferred citizenship on American Indians and required that Indian men register for the draft. In spite of the reconfirmation of citizenship, some states, such as New Mexico and Arizona, refused to allow Indians to vote. The Act was opposed by the Indian Defense League of America. Tuscarora leader Clinton Rickard urged those who wish to volunteer for the armed services do so as alien non-residents.At the Tohono O’Odham village of Toapit in Arizona, 30 men under the leadership of Pia Machita refused to register for the draft in 1904. Marshalls and Indian police attempted to arrest the leader, but they were roughed up and forced to release the 84 year old Machita. The Tohono O’Odham escaped into the desert.During the World War II, 24,521 American Indians served in the military and received the following awards: Air Medal (71), Silver Star (51), Bronze Star (47), Distinguished Flying Cross (34), and Medal of Honor (2). More than 480 Indians were killed during the war. Brigadier General Clarence Tinker, an Osage from Oklahoma, headed the Hawaiian Air Force. Joseph (“Jocko”) Clark, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, was the only Indian naval admiral.In the Pacific, two American Indian Marines were involved in raising the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima.Louis Charlo, the great-grandson of the Bitterroot Salish Chief Charlo, was born in Missoula, Montana in 1926. In November 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. The battle for Iwo Jima started on February 19, 1945 and four days later Private Charlo and seven other Marines reached the summit of Mount Suribachi. At 10:20 AM, Charlo and the other Marines used a 20-foot section of pipe to raise an American flag from Missoula at the top of the mountain. Several hours later, this flag was replaced by a larger flag. Charlo was killed by a sniper on March 2, 1945Ira Hayes was born in 1923 on the Gila River Pima Indian Reservation. He enlisted in the Marines in August, 1942. He became a “paramarine”. On top of Mount Suribachi, he was one of six Marines photographed raising the second larger American flag. He did not want to be identified but later was. He did not like the attention and had troubles after the war. He was found dead of exposure near his home in Arizona on January 24, 1955, only 32 years old.The draft board in Gallup, New Mexico decided that non-English speaking Navajo were not eligible to be drafted. Tribal leaders objected to the ruling because many Navajo wanted to serve.In Arizona, six Hopi men were arrested for not registering for the draft. The Hopi claimed that registration was against their religious traditions, but a federal judge ruled that these traditions did not have any bearing on draft registration. The Hopi men were sentenced to a year and a day in a prison camp.In New York, the Six Nations Iroquois – Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Cayuga – declared war on the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in 1942.The Fort Peck Tribal Executive Board (Sioux and Assiniboine tribes) in Montana passed a resolution supporting U.S. involvement in the war and pledged men, women, and materials to the war effort. The Board asked to use $10,000 of their tribal money to purchase defense bonds.On Attu Island in the Aleutians Aleut people were the primary inhabitants. On June 7, 1942, six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the 301st Independent Infantry Battalion of the Japanese Northern Army landed on the island. Three Natives died in the attack. The 42 Attu inhabitants who survived the Japanese invasion were taken to a prison camp near Otaru, Hokkaidō. Sixteen of them died while they were imprisoned.In 1945, a Japanese bomb carried by balloon landed on the Hupa reservation in Northern California.Indian veterans returned home with different expectations about how they were to be treated. They had fought in Europe and in the Pacific and had been treated as equals. They returned home to find that they were still second-class citizens (and in some states, the recognition of their citizenship lacking). The Indian veterans expected to be able to vote and when states attempted to deny them that right, they took their case to the courts. Throughout the country, barriers to Indian voting began to fall. But just as in the segregated South, some other states tried to refuse voting rights. The last states to refuse with state law were New Mexico and Arizona and UtahAfter WWII in 1946, North Carolina county registrars refused to register Eastern Cherokee war veterans to vote. The Cherokee appealed the decision to the governor and attorney general. Nothing was done.In 1948, Miguel Trujillo Sr fought the case in New Mexico. He was a Isleta Pueblo tribal member. He attended the Albuquerque Indian School and then the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kan. That is where Trujillo met his wife, Ruchanda Paisano. He eventually earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico. He had been in the Marines in WWII. He was back in New Mexico getting his master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. He and his wife also taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs Laguna Pueblo Day School.The state’s constitution barred American Indians living on reservations from participating in elections. It prohibited from voting “idiots, insane persons, persons convicted of felonious or infamous crime unless restored to political rights, and Indians not taxed.” That had been condemned by the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1947. That line in the constitution was written before American Indians were granted citizenship, but they were paying taxes to the state and federal government like other citizens.This is Trujillo and his daughter.Both his son and daughter, Josephine Waconda (in photo), went into medicine. Dr. Michael Trujillo was director of the Indian Health Service under President Bill Clinton.Felix Cohen, a prominent Indian civil rights lawyer took the case. He was Jewish, from New York, and had written The Handbook of Federal Indian Law in 1941. The Court found that New Mexico had discriminated against Indians by denying them the vote, especially since they paid all state and federal taxes except for private property taxes on the reservations.The federal judge said:“We all know that these New Mexico Indians have responded to the needs of the country in time of war. Why should they be deprived of their rights to vote now because they are favored by the federal government in exempting their lands from taxation.”In that same year, in Arizona a lawsuit by another veteran, Frank Harrison and Harry Austin, both Mohave-Apache at the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation, resulted in Indians being able to vote for the first time in that state. (Harrison and Austin v. Laveen). Cohen was also on that case. Harrison and Austin had tried to register to vote in Maricopa County, Arizona, and been denied by the county recorder, Roger Laveen. The Felix Cohen was also one of the attorneys in this landmark case. The National Congress of American Indians, the Department of Justice, and the Department of the Interior also filed amicus curiae (friends of the court) briefs in these cases. In Harrison v. Laveen the Arizona Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs that their Arizona and United States constitutional rights had been violated. With this decision, Indians were granted the right to vote in the state of Arizona. Harrison v. LaveenNew Mexico and Utah had said Native people weren’t residents of the state, making them ineligible to vote. The laws remained on the books until 1957 in Utah and 1962 in New Mexico. However Native people were voting in New Mexico after 1948. Here are people registering to vote after the Trujillo decision on 27th of Sept 1948.Utah denied Indians the vote because Indians on reservations were not actually residents of Utah but were residents of their own nations. Indians were thus considered non-residents and hence not eligible to vote. In 1957, the Utah state legislature finally repealed the legislation that prevented Indians living on reservations from voting. It did so only after being forced by a federal judge.New Mexico in 1962, the last state to enfranchise Native Americans. It took five years after that to change the state’s constitution.Today, New Mexico has the highest registration rate for American Indians in the country. According to the National Congress of American Indians, Native Americans 77 percent of potential Native voters are registered to vote, compared to 73 percent for African Americans and 70 percent of white voters, 78 percent Hispanic and 62 percent for Asian Americans.Even with the lawful right to vote in every state, Native Americans suffered from the same mechanisms and strategies, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation, that kept African Americans from exercising that right.In 1965, with passage of the Voting Rights Act and subsequent legislation in 1970, 1975, and 1982, voting protections were reaffirmed and strengthened. However, there has needed to be many law cases brought to tr to force states to stop Native people from voting. There have repeatedly been voting rights abuses against Native Americans in Alaska, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, and other states with significant Native American populations. At least 70 cases have needed to be brought.The Native American Voting Rights Coalition (NAVRC) was formed in 2015 to address this. It is made up of the Native American Rights Fund (NARF); National Congress of American Indians (NCAI); American Civil Liberties Union, Voting Rights Project (ACLU); Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR); Fair Elections Center; Western Native Voice; and Four Directions. Home - Native American Voting Rights CoalitionSome recent cases are:October 30, 2018, Spirit Lake Tribe and six individual plaintiffs sued to ensure that eligible Native American voters residing on reservations in North Dakota will be able to cast a ballot in the 2018 midterm elections and in all future elections.On December 13, 2017, the Native American Rights Fund again brought action against the state of North Dakota seeking to overturn North Dakota’s newest discriminatory voter ID law.For decades San Juan County in Utah has prevented Native American representation, voting, and presence on juries. It is an area of 7,933 sq mi. That is bigger than Delaware or Connecticut or NJ. County clerks kept Native candidates off the ballot, refused to register Native voters, and held written elections in English, disenfranchising those who were illiterate or didn’t speak the English well. In the mid-1980s, the U.S. Department of Justice sued San Juan County for violating the Voting Rights Act. Then, the county drew its lines still violated the Voting Rights Act, because it packed minority voters into a single district while spreading the white vote over multiple districts. That meant Native voters could only elect one representative. Navajos were kept off the school board too. A U.S. Department of Justice official who later reviewed disparities in course offerings between the county’s white and Native schools said in 1997 that he “hadn’t seen anything so bad since the ’60s in the South.”Even though Native Americans are the majority in the in the 14,750-person county, the county commissioner and school board district lines were gerrymandered to give white Mormon voters disproportionate power for more than three decades. Under both the Voting Rights Act and Utah state law, counties must redraw voting districts at least every 10 years to ensure that the population is spread evenly across districts. But San Juan County hadn’t redrawn its voting districts since 1986. Actions in the last few years changed that. The 2018 election ended that. Navajo are now the majority on the county commission. Grayeyes wins county seat in historic electionHere is one of the Navajo winners, Kenneth Maryboy.In late 2018, Senator Udall introduced the Native American Voting Rights Act of 2018. It has a poor chance of passing right now because of Republican obstruction and racism. Text - S.3543 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): Native American Voting Rights Act of 2018“In 1948 – 70 years ago – my grandfather, Levi Udall, served as Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court where he authored the opinion extending the right to vote to Native Americans then living on-reservation. My grandfather wrote, ‘To deny the right to vote… is to do violence to the principles of freedom and equality.’ I wholeheartedly agree. But today, 70 years later, state and local jurisdictions continue to erect insidious new barriers to the ballot box for Native Americans, from the elimination of polling and registration locations to the passage of voter ID laws intentionally designed to prevent Native Americans from voting. These undemocratic barriers have blocked too many Native voters across New Mexico and Indian Country from exercising their franchise.”

Q. Why are surgeons more aggressive and short tempered than doctors of other streams?A. TL;DR There are potential risks and consequences of operating room nurse/colleagues abuse and these include violation of institutional and medical staff bylaws and violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with potential monetary awards which are not covered by most malpractice carriers. If the awards include punitive damages, they are designed to punish and are not recoverable from any insurance held by the defendant.The JCAHO recommends that disruptive physicians be educated and that the focus of handling disruptive behavior should be based on rehabilitation rather than punishment. JCAHO regulations do recognize that at times, after attempts at rehabilitation have failed, suspension, abridgement, or revocation of hospital privileges are the only options remaining to the institution. At that time, reporting of the decisions to the State Licensing Board and the National Practitioner Data Bank is mandatory.Consequences and potential problems of operating room outbursts and temper tantrums by surgeonsGeorge B. Jacobs and Rosanne L. WilleAbstractBackground:Anecdotal tales of colorful temper tantrums and outbursts by surgeons directed at operating room nurses and at times other health care providers, like residents and fellows, are part of the history of surgery and include not only verbal abuse but also instrument throwing and real harassment. Our Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Nancy Epstein, has made the literature review of “Are there truly any risks and consequences when spine surgeons mistreat their predominantly female OR nursing staff/colleagues, and what can we do about it?,” an assigned topic for members of the editorial board as part of a new category entitled Ethical Note for our journal. This is a topic long overdue and I chose to research it.Methods:There is no medical literature to review dealing with nurse abuse. To research this topic, one has to involve business, industry, educational institutions, compliance standards and practices, and existing state and federal laws. I asked Dr. Rosanne Wille to co-author this paper since, as the former Dean of Nursing and then Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at a major higher educational institution, she had personal experience with compliance regulations and both sexual harassment and employment discrimination complaints, to make this review meaningful.Results:A review of the existing business practices and both state and federal laws strongly suggests that although there has not been any specific legal complaint that is part of the public record, any surgeon who chooses to act out his or her frustration and nervous energy demands by abusing co-workers on the health care team, and in this case specifically operating room personnel, is taking a chance of making legal history with financial outcomes which only an actual trial can predict or determine. Even more serious outcomes of an out-of-control temper tantrum and disruptive behavior can terminate, after multiple hearings and appeals, in adverse decisions affecting hospital privileges.Conclusions:Surgeons who abuse other health care workers are in violation of institutional bylaws and compliance regulations and create a hostile environment at work which adversely affects efficient productivity and violates specific State and Federal laws which prohibit discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.Keywords: Compliance, discrimination, employment, federal laws, harassment, hospital privileges, hostile, sexual, state lawsINTRODUCTIONThe history of surgery abounds with tales of angry and difficult senior surgeons who abused any person who, because of physical proximity, became the object of their fury. Many of us find amusement in retelling these anecdotes after we have escaped to the relative safety of rank or distance but remember that we passed the ring of fire and escaped injury. In the operating room, the abusive outbursts were commonly directed at the scrub nurse who was expected to stand mute and take it. I specifically do not want to name the offending surgeons who not only used words but also threw instruments to the floor and occasionally at the nurses. Their aim happily was often spoiled by their rage but occasionally hit its intended victim. Most of us in academic medicine know about a famous chair of neurosurgery in the Midwest and another famous chief of surgery in New York whose statue adorns the lobby of a major medical center as chronic offenders. Younger surgeons often took on the traits of their teacher and I vividly remember a chief resident who was described by our “CHIEF” with some admiration as someone who could slam a curtain. I myself had less luck with attempts at dominant behavior in the operating room. As a young surgeon, I once irritably instructed a very young scrub nurse that I wanted only blind obedience in my operating room. For the next 35 or so years, when she was an operating room director and I was a surgical chair and we were friends, she never once let me forget the stupidity of my outburst which was told and retold accompanied by gales of laughter at my expense over and over again. I am a quick learner, so I never repeated anything like that again.Tolerating this abysmal behavior is thankfully no longer accepted. Public abuse of operating room personnel can, and should, be stopped instantly by surgical chiefs, medical staff officers, and administrators. It is more difficult to stop private discussions which border on abuse and insults, but education through mandatory conferences dealing with sexual abuse and a hostile work environment should and will help. Both industry and colleges and universities have required, compliance mandated, sessions to prevent violations of real and at times oversensitive and perceived, rather then intended, offenses.This paper will examine the industry and institutional standards and existing state and federal laws which may potentially apply and represent a risk for the offenders.INSTITUTIONAL BYLAWS AND PRACTICESEvery institution providing health care, be it a major medical center or a local community hospital must, as part of its incorporation and accreditation documentation, provide a set of bylaws of the governing body and the medical staff. All of the bylaws have a section dealing with ensuring and supporting a productive work environment. The specific wording may differ from institution to institution, but the meaning of the bylaws is uniformly clear, and that is to promote a healthy, cooperative, and safe environment for patients and staff alike.Regulatory agencies, i.e. the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO), also known as The Joint Commission (TJC), State Medical Boards, and the federally mandated National Practitioner Data Bank have established requirements for handling and reporting of disruptive behavior by physicians. The JCAHO recommends that disruptive physicians be educated and that the focus of handling disruptive behavior should be based on rehabilitation rather than punishment. JCAHO regulations do recognize that at times, after attempts at rehabilitation have failed, suspension, abridgement, or revocation of hospital privileges are the only options remaining to the institution. At that time, reporting of the decisions to the State Licensing Board and the National Practitioner Data Bank is mandatory.[5,7]Specific forms of disruptive behavior listed are:[5,7] (1) degrading comments or insults, (2) inappropriate joking, (3) profanity, (4) physical assault, and (5) spreading malicious rumors.The JCAHO, in other words, recognizes and condemns abusive behavior in the operating room and elsewhere in the hospital environment. Insulting language or descriptions involving a member of the health care team or the spreading of malicious rumors about colleagues, out of the immediate institutional environment, would qualify as being disruptive behavior.Large businesses, industry, and educational institutions have a long history of needing to deal with complaints about discriminatory practices. In industries where the majority of workers are women and many supervisors are men, an allegation of sexual harassment is not unusual. To be defined as sexual harassment, the behavior does not have to be a request for sexual favors. Offensive comments about, or interpreted to be about, women are sufficient to be labeled sexual harassment. In an environment where the majority of nurses are women and the majority of surgeons are men, it is not difficult to imagine that the person at the receiving end of a barrage of insults decides that she was a victim of sexual discrimination.[6,14]In order to meet corporate compliance regulations of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and reduce liability of harassment claims, a company (educational or health care institution) must train employees and supervisors, require employees to report harassment, thoroughly investigate all reports, and take corrective actions.[5,6] Many institutions, including colleges and universities and major medical centers, have instituted mandatory training and education which is conducted on an yearly basis. There are multiple providers of compliancy training to assist organizations to meet the requirements and be proactive in preventing or ending a hostile work environment. Inactivity represents a real liability financially and a potentially devastating public image risks affecting the success of the institution, be it a business, hospital, or university.FEDERAL ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWSThe Federal EEOC is charged with enforcing all the federal laws prohibiting job discrimination.For the purpose of this paper, the most significant federal law is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. As a corollary to the 1964 Civil Rights Act is the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which among other provisions provides monetary damages in cases of intentional employment discrimination.[4]It does not take much imagination to see how this can be applied to nurse abuse in the operating room by surgeons.STATE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWSMany states have adopted anti-discrimination legislation which, to some extent, is similar and even mirrors the federal laws. The most specific is California AB 1825 which requires employers of 50 or more employees to provide all supervisory employees with formal education consisting of 2 hours of sexual harassment prevention[13] every 2 years. The final regulations were issued by the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission (FEHC) which published the finding that failure to comply with AB 1825 will open the door to sexual harassment lawsuits and make it harder to prove in court that the (your) organization took reasonable steps to correct sexual harassment.A similar law in Connecticut requires that all supervisory personnel be given 2 hours of harassment prevention instruction within 6 months after becoming a supervisor. Additional training within 3 years is encouraged.Maine Title 26, Section 808 requires that employers of 15 or more employees train all their employees about workplace harassment and discrimination within 1 year. The specifics of the training are not defined.Other states have approved anti-discrimination laws, but training is not required for compliance. Federal anti-discrimination rules and training requirements apply in all states.ATTORNEY ADVERTISINGIt is only necessary to open a yellow page phone book or access Google or any other search engine to find advertising from multiple law firms seeking clients. The law firms promise to address potential discrimination claims using state and federal courts. Nearly all of the firms offer a contingency fee arrangement, or a no risk to the client lawsuit alleging, among other complaints, sexual harassment, the creation of a hostile work environment, and employment discrimination. In view of the media-publicised hostile work environment, sexual harassment, and employment discrimination awards, it is a surprise, not an expectation, that some operating room nurse has not thought about how to respond to an aggressive surgical attack instead of ignoring the torment. Sooner or later, however, this is bound to happen.DEFENDING HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT CLAIMSThere are two separate areas of potential problems for the abusive surgeon which may call for a legal defense. The first one is the institution and the second, a court of law. Only two theories are available to the defense.What Dr. X said does not meet the “severe or pervasive” definition of harassment laws. He didn’t mean it. He is sorry. She is oversensitive and he was just talking and making a joke.[9] This defense theory can be best described as the “I didn’t know the gun was loaded” defense.This claim represents a violation of my First Amendment rights of free speech.This line of defense has a more substantial chance of success. Professor of Law at UCLA, Eugene Volokh, has written extensively about Freedom of Speech and Workplace Harassment Laws.[9] He reported a big free speech win in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Huffington Post.[19] The court opined that in an academic community, a professor's expression on a matter of public concern (even if offensive to some) does not constitute harassment.DISCUSSIONThis paper aims to address the questions: “Are there risks and consequences when spine surgeons mistreat their predominately female operating room nursing staff/colleagues and what can we do about it?” It became quickly obvious to us that this could not be handled in the same manner as our usual literature search. Medical literature does not address abusive behavior problems except obliquely. Even nursing literature tends to shy away from this topic. We had to turn to industry and the law to answer these questions.Gender discrimination at work has been described in Psych Central News, an internet psychology journal.[10] In Forbes Magazine, an excellent article by Michael Morris and Susan Fiske quoted Susan Fiske's keynote address at the Columbia Business School Conference in 2012. Dr. Fiske is a Princeton University psychologist. The theme of the conference was that despite decades of activism, legislation, and human resources programs, discrimination at work continues unabated but manages to hide itself better.[8]Many of us are products of training programs which profess to practice the Socratic Method of Education.[1,3] This educational theory is based on teaching by dialogue rather then lectures and is very appealing until it becomes a method of practicing resident abuse at Grand Rounds. The fellows, who are at times leading the conferences, are expected to follow the example of the Chief and actively participate in resident hazing in order to "make men of them." Small wonder that after this education, some of us turn to nurse and colleague abuse, particularly if they are women and appear to be defenseless.The term “sexual harassment” was used for the first time in 1973 in a report to the President and Chancellor of MIT about various forms of gender issues. It may have been used by various women's groups as early as 1970.[11,12] It is essential to understand that sexual harassment does not have to include demands for sexual favors. It is sufficient that it can be interpreted as being gender specific and severe and pervasive. Employment discrimination law recognizes several protected categories. Among the 16 categories listed, Sex or Gender and Gender Orientation are pertinent to this paper.[9]Professor Volokh, in his excellent paper in the Georgetown Law Journal,[20] describes the fact that the law's vagueness increases its breath and makes it open to interpretation. He advises to stay wide of the unlawful zone and eliminate any possible offensive behavior and severe and pervasive practices to create a hostile or abusive environment at work. If an employer continues to question his attorney to describe specific potential consequences of violations of the law, Professor Volokh advises counsel to answer: “We won’t know until it gets to court.” That is exactly the potential fate of the surgeon who insists on abusing co-workers.A complaint to the governing body of the institution (hospital, medical center) leads to a hearing by a medical staff committee. Depending on the seriousness of the complaint, the resolution may be dismissal of the complaint or may include a number of remedial actions up to and including revocation of privileges. When that happens or when a suspension or abridgement of privileges is recommended, the case invariably will end up in court. It would be unusual to have operating room nurse abuse alone result in a penalty so severe that a report to the National Practitioner Data Bank and the State Board of Medical Examiners becomes mandatory. Any adverse decision about clinical privileges meets the mandatory reporting criteria in every state.[5,7] To result in privilege abridgment, or more, the physician would have to be considered a disruptive physician whose continued presence on the medical staff would interfere in quality health care delivery. Very few judges are likely to reverse that kind of decision.During my tenure as a Department Chair, President of the Medical Staff, and Chair of the Medical Board (Medical Executive Committee), and my many years of membership on the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors of the University Hospital, we had several instances dealing with impaired physicians and only one instance when a revocation of privileges was recommended because of disruptive behavior. The physician who came under review did not just abuse operating room nurses, but also engaged in hostile and threatening behavior in other areas of the institution.Most industries recognized some time ago that it is not a good business practice to use gender-specific names and terms which part of the workforce might find demeaning or offensive. Both I and Dr. Wille, as professional pilots, experienced this alternate terminology when we were directed to change the name of “cockpit” to “flight deck” and “stewardess” to “flight attendant”. It was only after the change in name was official that most of us recognized the potential problem which could be interpreted as contributing to the creation or maintenance of a hostile work environment.The First Amendment to the Constitution, adopted on December 15, 1789, simply states: Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for regress of grievances. In the beginning, the First Amendment applied only to the federal governments, but in the 20th century the Supreme Court incorporated the Establishment Clause which made the amendment apply to the states as well.[15–18]It is the First Amendment freedom of speech clause which is used to defend most of the verbal harassment complaints which are the discussed in this paper.CONCLUSIONSThere are indeed potential risks and consequences of operating room nurse/colleagues abuse and these include violation of institutional and medical staff bylaws and violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with potential monetary awards which are not covered by most malpractice carriers. If the awards include punitive damages, they are designed to punish and are not recoverable from any insurance held by the defendant.Finally, for those surgeons who have a self-value far in excess of what any nurse has, it is worth to consider the following as a valuable lesson of what the world thinks of nurses: On the retirement of Lieutenant General Eric B. Schoomaker, MD, PhD, as the US Army Surgeon General, President Obama nominated and the US Senate confirmed the appointment of Major General Patricia D. Horoho as the US Army Surgeon General. General Horoho served as the Commanding Officer of the Army Nurse Corps and Assistant Surgeon General prior to be given the Army Medical Command. On December 5, 2011, General Raymond T. Ordierno, the Army Chief of Staff, promoted Major General Horoho to Lieutenant General and administered the oath to swear her in as the Army's Chief Medical Officer. General Horoho is the first woman and the first nurse to serve as the Commanding Officer of the Medical Corps. Think about that the next time you decide to abuse a nurse or a woman colleague.[2]FootnotesDisclaimer: The authors of this paper have received no outside funding and have nothing to disclose.Available FREE in open access from: http://www.surgicalneurologyint.com/text.asp?2012/3/4/167/98577REFERENCES1. Areeda PE. The Socratic Method. Harv Law Rev. 1996;109:911–22.2. Army News Service. 1996;109:911–922.3. Benson HH. Socratic Wisdom: The Model of Knowledge in Plato's Early Dialogues. New York: Oxford University Press; 2000. pp. ix–292.4. Federal Laws Prohibiting Job Discrimination: EEOP/Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA) Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Office of Special Councel (OSC) Merit System Protection Board (MSPB)5. Gross JC. Article Regarding Disruptive Physicians. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from: http://www.medical-peer-review.com/Articles/Article-Regarding-Disruptive-Physicians.sh,2012 .6. Huhman H. How to Recognize Sexual Harassment in the Workplace. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voicescareers/2011/11/11 .7. McDonald O, Silbaugh B. Disruptive Physician Behavior. Quantia MD. 20118. Morris M, Fiske S. The New Face of Workplace Discrimination. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/12/discriminination-workplace-prejudiceleadership-managers .9. OPM web site. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://www.opm.gov/er/address2/guide01.htm , http://www.osc.gov/ , http://www.mspb.gov/10. Psych Central News Editor. Gender Discrimination in the Workplace. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from:http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/09/gender-discrimination-in-theworkplace/8868.html .11. Rowe M. Saturn's Rings: Graduate and Professional Education of Women, American Association of University Women. 197412. Rowe M, Bendersky C. Workplace to Society. New York: Cornell University Press; 2001. Workplace Justice, Zero Tolerance and Zero Barriers.13. State of California: AB 1825, June 27, 2003.14. US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Sexual Harassment. 2003 Jun 27;15. United States Supreme Court: Burlington Industries v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 199816. US Supreme Court: Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687. 199417. US Supreme Court: Everson v. Board of Education. 194718. US Supreme Court: Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, U.S. 755. 199819. Volokh E. Freedom of Speech vs. Workplace Harassment Law–A Big Free Speech Win in the Ninth Circuit. [Last accessed on 2012 Feb 15]. Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eugene-volokh/freedom-of-speech-vs-work_b_584017.html .20. Volokh E. What Speech Does “Hostile Work Environment” Harassment Law Restrict? Georgetown Law J. 1997;85:627.

Well, I'd have to go with this guy- shown here after a rather nasty beat-down by a extremely loyal, brave and talented English butler on the family estate of one of America's greatest financial and banking dynasties... (WARNING- I might have gotten a bit carried away, and I've written a extremely lengthy answer, going into tht guy's story in great detail. Even so, it's well worth reading; and by the time you finish reading it, I'm sure you'll agree that he's probably the most fitting real-life Joker-analogue):This man is Erich Muenter, a University professor who taught German language. Accounts of his early life are sketchy. Muenter was apparently born in Germany about 1871 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1890; however, he would in his later life fabricate a host of stories as his tenuous grip on reality slipped away. He alternately claimed to have been born in Texas or Wisconsin, the son of German immigrants, or in the South as the son of landed aristocrats, or that he was of Finnish extraction forced to emigrate to the United States by Russian persecution. As such, his origin story, and thus his true identity, is still a mystery to this day (just like that of the Joker).Regardless of the fictions he contrived of his own origins, Muenter clearly evinced a natural gift for languages. He demonstrated fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Finnish. His German accent was almost imperceptible, except on the few occasions when he was seen by friends to explode in rage; most who met him thought he merely had a mild speech impediment. Muenter took his Bachelor’s degree in German at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1899. In 1902 Muenter married a young woman named Krembs, who acquaintances described as “a pleasant German-American woman,” and as a “a woman of striking beauty.” She taught school in Chicago for a brief period. 1903 found Muenter and his wife at Kansas State University where he took some graduate courses. There he authored a paper entitled “Insanity and Literature”, and his wife gave birth to their first child, a boy.In 1904, Muenter hit the big time: he was accepted for doctoral work at Harvard University, and was permitted to teach undergraduate courses in German language. One of the faculty members at Harvard said that “in the classroom Professor Muenter was very calm and precise, and had much charm of manner.” Muenter and his wife lived in modest rooms at 107Oxford Street in Cambridge which they rented from Thomas W. Hillier, a local livery stable owner. Hillier later recalled that the only evidence of strangeness Muenter was shown was the strange conviction that “a wonderful new language could be built up out of Gaelic and Scots” (actually, newspapers published the report as a language built from combining “Gaelic and Scotch” — which has a certain interesting potential in and of itself...)Yet his university colleagues saw dark oddities in Muenter’s behavior. There were three separate occasions on which neighbors accused Muenter of blowing out the gas lights in his bedroom in an attempt to asphyxiate his sleeping wife. Muenter claimed that the gas had been blown out by the wind — a common hazard in the days of gas lighting — and the neighbors’accusations were dismissed as over-active imagination. Certainly, his landlord had vouched for Muenter, claiming that Muenter had seemed genuinely concerned for his wife’s fate. Several friends recalled he obsessed over sexual matters (the details of which were apparently too risqué to detail in Edwardian newspapers) and one reported that he had, with some friends, formed “a secret organization for the study of medieval mysticism.”He showed moments of irrational behavior; he “discovered” a poem which he touted as a previous unknown masterpiece of German literature. A German literary society soon pointed out that it was a fairly well-known work of Goethe, and Muenter seethed with anger for months over the affair. Professor Hugo Münsterberg later recalled that while Muenter was at Harvard, “he often came to my laboratory for the purpose of borrowing books on insanity. Some of these he needed to write theses on insanity. Others he would borrow because he was interested in the subject.” Münsterberg thought Muenter was a “pathological study” even before he emigrated to the U.S., and that “the man was always interested in mysticism and metaphysics”. He added “I can scarcely imagine any man being a moreinteresting psychological study that this man Muenter.”While at Harvard, Muenter’s wife gave birth to their second child. By early 1906, she was pregnant a third time. But this time, something went terribly wrong. She was, from all accounts, a strong, healthy woman. Yet with this pregnancy, she seemed to grow weaker and weaker with each passing week. Friends of the family attempted to bring in a physician, Dr. H. B. McIntyre of Boston, to attend her in her confinement (imposed in accordance with the quaint but dysfunctional Victorian custom of keeping a woman housebound during the final months of pregnancy). But Erich Muenter would have none of it; he "did not believe in doctors", and his wife meekly acceded to the dismissal of Dr. McIntyre.On April 16th, 1906, Muenter’s wife died before she could give birth to their third child. There was no attending physician at her deathbed, in keeping with her husband’s requirements. Muenter turned her body over to a local undertaker, A. E. Long, to be prepared for burial; but Long, an experienced mortician, grew suspicious when he began embalming the body. There was something not quite right with the look of the woman’s internal organs. He called in Professor Whitney of the Harvard Medical School, who conductedan impromptu autopsy. He determined that Mrs. Muenter had died from the cumulative effects of numerous small doses of arsenic, and that throughout her confinement, her husband had fed his wife beef tea laced with poison.Long and Whitney went to the Cambridge police with their information, but before the Cambridge police could obtain an indictment for murder against Muenter, the case took a bizarre turn. Muenter took his two children, and his wife’s corpse, placed them all in an automobile and drove to Chicago. On the 19th of April, he had his wife’s body cremated in an attempt to destroy the evidence of his crime, abandoning his children (assumedly at his sister's, who lived in Chicago, but possibly abandoning them on the streets to fend for themselves), and fled the country to Mexico.He immediately set about creating a new identity for himself, selecting the name “Frank Holt”. In early 1907, “Frank Holt” appeared on the doorstep of Samuel Brothers, an American-owned gold mining company operating in El Oro, Mexico, a small gold mining town about a hundred miles north of Mexico City, seeking a position as a stenographer. One of the executives of the company, James Dean, recalled that “Frank Holt” had proved “an excellent stenographer, but kept aloof from every one in the company. This drew many comments and attracted attention to him. He had a worried look and gazed abstractedly into space for a long time frequently. He never spoke a word about his past, even when questioned closely.”While in Mexico, Muenter did not fully sever his ties to old acquaintances made before his wife’s murder. As he created his new persona as “Frank Holt”, he sent abusive letters back to his former associates at Harvard, still writing as Erich Muenter. He even took time to publish a rambling pamphlet which burlesqued the death of his wife, “and told in gruesome fashionhow he had put into practice his theories of revenge.” In it, he stated that the law had taught him that revenge was right. Police were quickly tipped off as to Muenter’s whereabouts, and dispatched investigators to Mexico City to track him down. Muenter was still a few steps ahead of them though: days before they arrived in Mexico, he had quit his job with the mining company, packed his few belongings and moved to Dallas, Texas, where he elected to enroll in a small Texas college, the Agricultural and Mechanical College, believing that in this intellectual backwater, it would be less likely that any of his former Harvard co-workers would stumble across him and reveal his identity.While there, he met a young lady, Leone Sensabaugh, the daughter of a prominent Dallas minister. They were soon married. He graduated in 1909with a degree in German language, and during the 1909-1910 term, he served as Assistant Professor of German at Oklahoma University. A local newspaper carried a notice when he joined the faculty: “Mr. Frank Holt, the new Instructor in German, is a graduate of the Fort Worth Polytechnic Institute and has spent several years of his life in Germany and speaks German as well as English. He has had several years of experience in teaching the language and comes highly recommended. He also speaks Spanish and French fluently and has studied at the University of Berlin, and studied in Rome and Paris and has traveled over Europe. He gave lectures on German literature in Berlin.”Most of the notice appears to be a concocted fiction of Muenter’s fertile imagination, an attempt to establish a past for the fugitive from Harvard. The university accepted his claims at face value without ever investigating his veracity. Muenter’s employment there was to be short-lived, however. He was frequently afflicted with insomnia, and would disappear from campus for days on end. Brooding over fancied injustices to himself, he grew increasingly angry that the chairmanship of the languages department had not been given to him, rather than to another professor who had served atthe university for many years, and he was soon dropped from the faculty.He left Oklahoma State University and then went on to take positions at several other prominent colleges. By 1912, he was back in the Ivy League, lecturing at Cornell. But Muenter never forgot that he was still a fugitive from justice. Learning that a former Harvard colleague, Professor Kuno Francke, was planning to visit the Cornell to give a short series of lectures, Muenter decided to take a short vacation to New York City rather than face being exposed. He did not return until the day after Francke departed.Then, everything changed with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. While the United States would not enter the war until 1917, there was still considerable anti-German feeling which made “Frank Holt” even more of an outsider than before. Though insisting he was born in the United States, Holt still spoke with a distinct German accent which aroused suspicion despite his being careful to hide his pro-German beliefs. Many prominent Americans were already pushing for U.S. entry into the war, including financier J.P. Morgan who had lent millions to the Russians and the British to promote the war effort. For all that he insisted he was a pacifist, Holt was outraged and wrote numerous letters to newspapers denouncing Morgan's use of his wealth to promote the war against Germany.Muenter informed the university that he would be resigning to accept a professorship teaching Romance Languages at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, which was scheduled to open for its first classes in September of 1915. He packed his wife and children off to Dallas to livewith his father-in-law just before the term ended- and as he left Cornell, Muenter informed his colleagues that he intended to spend a few days in New York City doing research before rejoining his family in Dallas. But his wife and university colleagues hadn't realized the extent of Muenter’s obsession over American munitions shipments to Europe. With twisted hypocrisy, the man who'd had no compunction about slowly murdering his pregnant wife with arsenic had convinced himself that American arms shipments to the Allies were immoral, and must be stopped. The sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania by a German warship on May 7, 1915 had made American involvement in the war all but inevitable; and it would behis holy cause to bring an end to the bloodshed in Europe.While his wife was getting settled in their new home in Texas, Muenter checked in at Mills Hotel Number 3, located on Seventh Avenue at 36th St, for two weeks. It was a large but certainly not lavish hotel, where rooms rented for 30¢ a day, paid in advance. Clerks at the crowded hotel only recalled Muenter having stayed there because of the inordinate amount of mail he received, and because he had gotten into an altercation with another guest over a war notice posted on a newspaper stand which required intervention by police to stop. Muenter devoted his first week in New York City to gathering together the materials he thought he would need to end the flow of weapons to Europe.He traveled to Jersey City, New Jersey, where he purchased a .38 caliber Iver and Johnson revolver from John S. Menagh, a hardware dealer. With a box of cartridges, the pistol cost Muenter $2.25. He asked the hardware dealer if the gun came with a guarantee to “work every time.” Menagh frowned and explained that "revolvers didn’t come with that sort of guarantee". Muenter had actually wanted two pistols, but the .38 was the only handgun Menagh had in stock. Obligingly, he suggested that Muenter try the pawnshop of Joseph Keechan across the street. There, he purchased a used .32 caliber revolver. For both transactions Muenter gave his name as “C. Hendricks.”Muenter then rented a cottage in Bethpage (at the time called “Central Park”) from Louis Ott, a local real estate broker. He gave his name as “Mr. Patton” and told Ott that his physician had ordered him to move to the country for his health, and that he wanted a quiet, isolated place to live in. The two-room bungalow Ott offered him was perfectly situated off the main road and completely hidden by trees. The largest of the two rooms was only about ten feet square; the second, smaller room was used by the cottage’s owner are a storeroom for furniture. But it suited Muenter’s purpose, who divided his time between his rooms in New York City and the Bethpage cottage.he rented a bungalow in New York City under the name of “Patton”, and used the bungalow to put together his own quiet campaign against the U.S. government.For the next few days, Muenter traveled through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to find the single most important item he needed to execute his grand design. He was frustrated again and again, but finally, he found a company in Long Island City that offered to sell him what he so desperately wanted: a case of dynamite. The sales representative informed him that the company did not, of course, keep any dynamite on hand; it would have to be special-ordered and would be freighted to Bethpage by train. Every day for the next week and a half, Muenter visited the Bethpage Rail Road Station’s freight office with clockwork regularity, impatient for his shipment of high explosives.Muenter was so annoyingly insistent that the freight agent, George B. Carnes, finally lost his temper with him. Although the manufacturer, Keystone Powder Co. of Emporium, Pennsylvania, had shipped out the explosives immediately, the dynamite had lain in a Long Island Rail Road warehouse for nearly a week. The railroad’s safety regulations required that dynamite had to be moved on special trains that carried no passengers or regular freight. Finally, on the 28th of June, the first two of three cratesarrived for “C. Hendricks,” the same alias Muenter had used to purchase revolvers a few days before in New Jersey, each containing 120 pounds of 60% dynamite. Several small explosions started happening in Central Park, near the bungalow he had rented, as he started to create his own experimental bombs.He would later explain to Captain Thomas Tunney, head of the New York City Police Department’s “Bomb and Anarchist Squad”, that he made his devices by taping together three sticks of dynamite, then hollowing out a depression in one of the sticks and filling it with the heads of “trick matches” which he had obtained in a novelty joke shop in New York City. The matches were designed to explode when struck. He placed a glass vial filled with concentrated sulfuric acid, stoppered with an ordinary cork, upside down next to the hole filled with match heads. The sulfuric acid would eat slowly through the cork, until a few drops of acid landed on the match heads, causing them to ignite and explode the dynamite — a slow chemical detonator. Muenter had experimented over and over again with this arrangement until he could accurately estimate how long it would take forthe acid to detonate the bomb. The timing was perfect; The Fourth of July weekend was only a few days away, and now, Erich Muenter was ready to set off some fireworks of his own.Building the first of what would be several bombs, he traveled to Washington, D.C. on June 2 and managed to plant the bomb in the reception room of the Senate Capitol building (he couldn’t plant the bomb in the Senate chamber itself as he had originally intended), leaving the building at about 4 p.m. Passing a mail box, he dropped a handful of letters, addressed to the President of the United States and to the four major newspapers in Washington DC, into the slot and returned to his boarding house. He packed the few belongings he had brought with him into a valise, and for the next few hours, he wandered aimlessly around the streets of Washington. Late in the evening, he was back in the street outside the Capitol. At 10:30, Muenter was seen by a young couple, who were standing on the Senate terrace, pacing back and forth and staring at the windows of the reception hall. Muenter then apparently took a quick walk around the perimeter of the Capitol building before returning to his vantage point at the Senate terrace. Then he sat down on a bench at a nearby trolley stop.At 11:23 PM EST, the bomb exploded. Though there were no fatalities, since the building was unoccupied at the time, the Senate reception room was destroyed, and the blast even caused some damage to the Vice President’s office. The bomb blast was heard a mile away, and within a few minutes,the East Plaza outside the Capitol was filled with curiosity seekers. Satisified, Muenter walked three blocks to Union Station, arriving in time to catch the 12:10 train from Washington back to New York City. Both conductor J. L. Riland and head brakeman J. N. Purcell recognized Muenter when shown a picture of him. He wore a “cheap suit of light material with a stripe running through it” and a stiff brimmed straw hat, and was reported to have been wearing an extremely broad grin at the time.Muenter was sprawled out in Berth 6 of Car 27- and in one of the many little ironies of the case, Washington’s Chief of Police, Raymond Pullman occupied Berth 4 in Car 26 on the same train, going to New York City to follow up a lead on the Capitol bombing. In the letter he'd wrote to D.C. newspapers (which he signed “R. Pearce”), Holt took credit for the explosion which he intended as a statement about the supplying of arms to the war effort in Europe. “Sorry I, too, had to use explosives. (For the last time, I trust.) It is the export kind and ought to make enough noise to be heard above the clamor for war and blood-money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace! One editor said: There are times when one government may be expected to speak on behalf of other countries and of humanity in general. God bless you Mr. Editor, that was a timely word in this blood-money madhouse. Let us stop this colossal American crime!”But the bomb was only the beginning for Holt. Changing trains in Manhattan, Muenter boarded the Oyster Bay branch of the Long Island Rail Road. At about 8:30 a.m. on the morning of July 3rd, Muenter stepped off the train at Glen Street Station. He carried a suitcase filled with newspaperclippings which he hoped to use to convince Morgan that he should stop armaments shipments to Europe. Also in the suitcase were several sticks of dynamite. In Muenter’s coat, he carried two revolvers and a stick of dynamite. At Glen Street Station, Muenter hired Arthur J. Ford and his automobile (first in the fleet of Glen Cove’s “Yellow Taxi Company”) to drive him to the estate of J.P Morgan Jnr. and his family, a distance of two miles.Once at the mansion, Muenter started towards the house, before abruptly stopping and returning to the taxi. “Oh, I forgot,” Muenter said. “I have to get my card.” Ford watched Muenter open his suitcase, and thought he saw him withdraw a revolver and slip it into his pocket. Muenter then walked rapidly to the house, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. At the door, Muenter was met by Henry C. Physick, the Morgan family butler. “I want to see Mr. Morgan,” Muenter said, and handed him a worn business card which read: SUMMER SOCIETY DIRECTORY- Thomas C. Lester, representing.“What is your business with him?” Physick asked. “I can’t discuss that with you,” Muenter replied. “I am an old friend of Mr. Morgan. He will see me.”“You must tell me the business you have with him,” Physick reiterated.Muenter pulled out both revolvers, and shoved Physick out of the way.“Don’t dare try to stop me!” Muenter yelled. Muenter demanded where Morgan was. Physick thought quickly. Although he was well aware that Morgan was in the breakfast room with his house-guests, he told Muenter that he was in the library — at the opposite end of the house. Muenter raced down the hall towards the library, with Physick following a few paces behind. As Muenter entered the library, Physick turned and ran towards the breakfast room shouting “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs, Mr. Morgan!” Afraid to go into the breakfast room, for fear of tipping Muenter off as to Morgan’s exact location, Physick darted down a staircase to the basement to rally the staff to defend the household.“We were at breakfast in the room on the ground floor, when the butler was heard shouting from the main entrance by the library to Mr. Morgan to go upstairs quickly,” the British Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice (who coincidentally happened to be attending the residence as a breakfast guest of the Morgans on that very day) later recalled. “We did not know what was the matter, whether it was fire or burglars, and the whole party left the table and ran up the rear staircase, which was nearest to the door.” At the top of the rear staircase they found Rosalie McCabe, an elderly nurse employed by the Morgan family to look after their youngest children. “What has gone wrong up here?” Morgan asked. “What do you want me for?”“Nothing has happened up here that I know of,” McCabe replied. “Everything has been quiet.”Morgan and his guests began a room by room search to try to figure out what had caused Physick to yell out. Sir Spring-Rice ran up to the third floor, where the guest and servants’ quarters were located, and noticed nothing amiss. A moment later, McCabe, who was standing near the headof the main staircase, located in the center of the house, criedout that a stranger was coming up the stairs. Muenter, realizing that he had been fooled by the butler, had started back to the main staircase.Along the way, he heard voices from a small side room. He entered to find Morgan’s younger children at play. He pointed a pistol at them. “Where is Mr. Morgan?” he asked. The children didn’t answer. Muenter demanded they follow him. Finding the main hallway deserted, he started up the main staircase, the children following a few steps behind. As Muenter reached the second floor landing, a loaded revolver in each hand, he yelled out “Now, Mr. Morgan, I have you!”Seeing the pistols, Mrs. Morgan heroically tried to place herself between Muenter and her husband. Morgan pushed her aside, and lunged at Muenter. Muenter fired two rounds into Morgan before he was smashed to the ground by the 220-lb bulk of the millionaire. He pulled the trigger two more times, but the gun misfired both times. Morgan landed with the weightof his body squarely on Muenter, and they struggled for a moment until Morgan managed to twist the revolver from Muenter’s hand. Completely by chance, Morgan had landed in such a way that he had accidently pinned Muenter’s left hand, holding the second revolver, to the floor in such a way that Muenter was unable to fire it.Morgan’s wife, Spring-Rice and Miss McCabe pried the second revolverfrom Muenter’s grasp. “I have a stick of dynamite in my pocket,” Muenter shouted. “Take care of it!” Realizing his attempt had failed, Muenter was overheard by Morgan’s valet, Bernard Stewart, to cry “Kill me! Kill menow! I don’t want to live any more. I have been in a perfect hell for the last six months on account of the European war!” By this time, Physick and a small phalanx of household staff, armed with make-shift weaponry, had reached the second floor. Physick had armed himself with the closest weapon that came to hand: a large chunk of hard coal. He used it to pound Muenter into insensibility as he lay beneath Morgan on the floor. After taking away his guns and tying him up for the police, another servant noticed the dynamite sticking out of Holt’s pocket, and the dynamite was immediately placed in a pail of water, just in time to avert an explosion which could have destroyed the Morgans' Manor.Satisfied his attacker would not escape, Morgan went to the telephone andcalled Dr. William M. Zabriskie, a local physician who lived on Highland Road and who attended to many of the Gold Coast millionaires when they were summering in Glen Cove. He calmly informed Zabriskie that he had been shot, and his services were needed. It was only then that Mrs. Morgan and the household realized that Morgan had been struck by Muenter’sbullets. Morgan assured them that he wasn’t in pain, and that the injuries were slight, as they indeed proved to be. Dr. Zabriskie then attended to Muenter’s injuries. Muenter was still dazed- when Zabriskie asked who he was, the only reply that Muenter would give was “Christian gentleman.” Although he looked much worse for wear after his encounter with Morgan and the coal-wielding butler, battered and bruised beyond recognition, all of Muenter’s injuries were superficial.A few minutes later, Justice of the Peace William E. Luyster, who presided over the Glen Cove Court House, and the local chief of constables, Frank E. McCahill arrived at the house. They collected Muenter and his pistols and dynamite and suitcase filled with newspaper clippings and carted him off to the Glen Cove Court House. Inside the Glen Cove Court House, Luyster and McCahill searched through Muenter’s pockets. They found a small slip of paper, on which was written the names of Morgan’s four children. He also had three ten dollar bills and an editorial cartoon clipped out of the Philadelphia Record. The cartoon showed Lady Liberty pointing to a crate of fireworks, representing the European war, and admonishing Uncle Sam that they are “dangerous fireworks”. More ominously, they found a schedule of sailings for merchant vessels leaving New York, on which several ship departures were circled.Muenter, still clinging to his identity as “Frank Holt,” explained to Luyster and McCahill in a quiet, methodical manner exactly what his plan for the Morgan household had been. “I have a well-trained mind and I studied for a long time as to what would be the proper course for me to pursue before Idecided to take the matter up with Mr. Morgan personally... I wanted to go to every manufacturer personally, and persuade him to stop this traffic. It was physically impossible for me to do this, but Mr. Morgan, with his great influence could do what was impossible for me, and so I decided to apply to him.”He explained that it had been his intention to take Morgan’s wife and children hostage. Muenter intended to seal them into a room while he forced Morgan to do his bidding to stop munitions shipments to Europe. He had planned to cut a small hole with his pocketknife in the doorway of the room he placed the Morgan family in, through which he intended to pass food during what even he perceived would have been a lengthy siege. At first, Muenter claimed that his shooting of Morgan had been accidental. “I shot to frighten him. You see, I wanted to talk to him. He came running angrily towards me as soon as I saw him and I shot to frighten him so that it would be possible to avoid a mix up and so I could place my arguments before him... The bullets which I intended to go wild struck him.”Muenter added that he “would not have been shot if he had not been violent,” concluding that “I admire Mr. Morgan’s courage. If hewould display a quality of moral courage equaling the physicalcourage he showed towards me, he would go down in history asa very great man.”But Muenter faltered in his story on at least one occasion, and admitted that his purpose had been to assassinate the financier. In Mineola, the interrogation of Muenter continued. The prisoner was weak, had lost a fair amount of blood from the pummeling that Frank Physic had given him, and had eaten little or nothing since he was brought to the Mineola jail. Thejailers were concerned that he had taken poison, and brought in Dr. Cleghorn to examine him. Cleghorn announced that Muenter merely had “an intestinal disorder which frequently was associated with mental diseases.”Throughout the interrogation, Muenter claimed that he “didn’t want to hurt any one” and that his singular purpose was to end America’s role in the carnage in Europe. A New York City police detective asked Holt if he was ananarchist. He shook his head. They asked him if he was a socialist. He said quietly “Not yet.” One New York City detective bluntly asked Muenter whether or not he thought he was insane. “I haven’t been able to settle that question yet,” Muenter responded matter-of-factly. Luyster and Weeks were extremely circumspect in offering their opinions relative to Muenter’s sanity; both suspected Muenter would try to raise an insanity defense at his trial. But Chief William J. Flynn of the United States Secret Service was more forthright. He pronounced Muenter “unbalanced.” The jail’s physician, Dr. Cleghorn, pronounced him “a fit subject for Matteawan.”Captain Tunney, New York City Police Department’s bomb expert, asked Muenter for details about how he had made the bomb which he had detonated in the Capitol, which the newspapers had dubbed “the infernal machine.” He played on Muenter’s ego, feigning amazement at how the German-languages professor could have devised such a brilliantly-conceivedtiming mechanism. “There wasn’t any guesswork about it,” Muenter saidproudly. “I had experimented, not once, but many times. I knew just what I was doing, and how to do it. I really didn’t take any chances, for all my observations had been checked up, and I knew when the bomb would go off almost to the minute... I knew how much time I had. So I hung around while the acid was eating its way through the cork. I pulled out my watch and said to myself that 'it ought to be going off pretty soon'. And, sure enough, it did go off pretty soon. Then I hurried to catch the train to New York.” Here, Muenter slipped again, explaining that the reason he'd had to hurry back to New York was “to kill Mr. Morgan.”Muenter also took a few minutes to complain to Warden Hults of the Mineola jail that the guards had shown him disrespect by calling him by his first name, and requested that he be referred to as “Mr. Holt”. The warden provided him with the latest New York City newspapers, in which he read the accounts of both the Capitol bombing and the shooting of Morgan. He pronounced the coverage “very satisfactory”, and told CommissionerWoods that he thought the publicity garnered from the acts would help him to "obtain his objective". He even offered his opinions on the Kaiser, the King of England, and the Czar of Russia: “It would be a good thing if they were blown up. Then the people would have some chance of getting their rights.” In his cell, Muenter was described as “a grouchy sort of man, not a crook... But a highly educated man with fine sensibilities... He is easily insulted, andquestioning him had to be a matter of extreme tact.”Throughout hour after hour of interrogation, Muenter refused to provide certain details about his plans, and especially about the quantity of dynamite he had on hand. Cryptically, he would only state that on Wednesday, July 7th, he would tell all. Some of the detectives working on the case believed that Muenter was trying to give his co-conspirators, either German agents or violent pacifists, time to escape the country. But otherswere beginning to feel that Muenter had something more ominous planned, something scheduled to occur in spite of Muenter being securely behind bars.It took several days for police to track down the trunk Muenter had placed in storage in New York City. They traced it to a warehouse operated above a livery stable and garage at 342 West Thirty-Eighth Street. The effort was well spent, however. The trunk contained an anarchist’s delight: 134 sticks of60% dynamite (carefully packed in sawdust), a box of blasting caps, coils of fuse, batteries, nitric acid, windproof matches, six wooden containers of mercury fulminate, smokeless powder, and three recently completed home-made tin can bombs. Each was five inches in diameter and eight inches high.New York City’s Inspector of Combustibles Owen Egan declared it “the greatest equipment for bomb making ever brought to New York.” The owner of the warehouse, R. L. Vaughan, was lucky to be alive; for days, he had been tossing it around the warehouse without a care. “Muenter was ready for anything with his little arsenal,” explained Egan. He added that “there is nothing in the argument that he must have had financial backing, for a good deal of what he had could be bought for fifteen cents a pound. I dothink, however, he must have had somebody to instruct him in bombmaking, for I do not see how he could have learned all he evidently knew unaided."It was not until July 6th that Muenter had the benefit of legal council. Muenter’s Cornell colleagues retained attorney Thomas J. Reidy, of the NYC firm of Clocke, Koch and Reidy to defend him. Reidy had known Muenter at Cornell, and in fact had been his landlord for much of the time he was there. He announced that “Frank Holt” had told him that he was wasn’t sure where he was in 1906 — he might have been in Germany studying German — but that he was “positive he was not Muenter.” While in jail, Muenter wrote out a lengthy polemic addressed to “The People” and gave it to Reidy to instructions to release it to the press.Reidy, instead, pocketed the document. “I intend to keep the notes which the prisoner has given to me,” Reidy told reporters. “Enough of his writings and statements has been printed already.” He asked that Muenter not be subjected to any more interrogations by the Secret Service or police. “He is very weak and his condition is serious. They must have obtained all the factsthey want from him by this time, and further ordeals might put his life in danger.” The Nassau County District Attorney consented. A few details were still unresolved, but in the three days they had to interrogate him, they had learned enough to put a solid case together.Muenter’s father-in-law hired attorney Martin Littleton to assist in his defense. Littleton met with Muenter in the afternoon. Muenter asked repeatedly whether his act had stopped the shipment of arms to Europe. He offered to waive a public hearing, saying he “did not want to cause the Morgans any more trouble,” and asked repeatedly as to Morgan’s condition.“I talked with him some time,” recalled Littleton. “It was obvious I was simply talking to an insane man. He would close his eyes and apparently doze off. I would ask him a question and he seemed to wake suddenly.”Muenter told his lawyer that the jail guards were refusing him access to newspapers. He grew so upset that Littleton stepped out into the corridor and grabbed a daily paper that a guard lad left lying there, giving it to him before leaving the jail. Dr. Cleghorn had received a report from Cambridge which detailed several operations which had been performed on Muenter. Reidy’s ban on police interrogation didn’t apply to physicians, so Cleghorn went to the Mineola jail and examined Muenter to see whether or not there were scars which matched the descriptions. They matched exactly. The Nassau District Attorney was also notified that a large contingent of Cambridge residents would be setting out that day for Mineola to try toidentify Muenter.Dr. Carlos F. MacDonald, a psychiatrist, was brought to the Mineola jail to interview Muenter. MacDonald pronounced Muenter a “paranoic of the reformatory type,” adding that his statements “...for the most part seem logical... when the subject is an abstract one, his mental weakness does not come out strongly. In his discussion of concrete facts, however, his wildnessis more apparent, notably when he describes how he thought he could imprison the Morgans, barricade the door on them, and prevent their rescue by laying a stick of dynamite on the table.”“Don’t you think you made a mistake in going there with two revolvers and trying to influence Mr. Morgan that way?” MacDonald asked. “The mistake I made was that I walked ahead of the children instead of after them,” Muenter responded. “If I could have gotten him and his family into the rooms and imprisoned them all there and kept them there with myself while he was planning the work, that is the work, that is why I brought thefamily there, so they couldn’t shoot off into the room, it would have set this off. If they shot into the room it would have exploded the dynamite. I would lay it on the table and say: ‘This is dynamite. If you shoot at me, go on. It is for the protection of all of us.’”“Didn’t you think that was an unusual way to protect them?” MacDonald asked. “The children were innocent of any wrongdoing.”“If the father wanted to kill the children by shooting into the room, he could do so, but he was informed beforehand that the dynamite was there,” Muenter repeated. “I would tell him that — ‘There is dynamite on this table, therefore don’t shoot into this room.’ It was to keep him from rescuing the children."“But suppose Mr. Morgan had told you that he would decline to accede to your plans?”“I would have said ‘All right; until you are tired.’ I would have held his family in prison.”MacDonald next asked Muenter whether or not he thought he had a legal right to take action against Morgan. Muenter responded that it had “nothing to do with legal right. My dear sir, this is war, you are mistaken.”“But we are not at war.”“You are wrong. We are at war. We are actually at war, we are killing thousands of people every day.”“But we haven’t declared war,” MacDonald reminded him.“Yes, we are doing it underhandedly,” Muenter replied.“Do you think that you, single-handed, could arrest the whole trend of an age?”“No, but Mr. Morgan could.” Muenter lamented over his failed plan. “It was the only thing that could have been done. If it had succeeded it would havebeen a very fine thing.”On that same day, on the 6th of July, Muenter’s wife received a letter fromher husband which had evidently written in the few hours while he was in Washington, when he'd been placing his “infernal machine” in theCapitol building. Of greatest concern was the paragraph stating that a ship would be sunk en route to England on the 7th of July. Muenter’s wife immediately brought the letter to the authorities in Dallas, who telegraphedthe Department of State in Washington that a bomb may have been planted aboard an England-bound steamship. The Department of State immediately forwarded the telegram to Secretary of the Navy Daniels. The news was quickly disseminated to the Secret Service agents, as well as to the New York City and Washington D.C. detectives.New York Police Commissioner Woods later recalled that “We had been worried for several days about what Holt, or Muenter, expected to happen on Wednesday. He had said several times that he was going to tell his story on Wednesday... On Sunday, when I tried to get him to talk to me about the dynamite, he said ‘I will tell you all about that on Wednesday, but on Wednesday the whole world will know.’ We did not feel that we could afford to regard his threats lightly, as if they were the boasts of an ordinary crank, because he had proved that he was a man of ability and one very likely, in view of the seemingly impossible things he had done already, to do what he predicted that he would do.” Woods sent his personal secretary, Guy Scull, by automobile to Mineola to beg Muenter to tell them which ship he had planted the bomb on. Unfortunately though, Scull would arrive ten minutes too late to get his answer.Muenter had already tried to kill himself on the night of July 5th, by slashing his wrists with the metal eraser retainer on a broken pencil. The effort was wholly ineffectual; a guard simply pulled the pencil from his hand. County jail authorities were certain that he was trying to starve himself to death, and gave instructions that if Muenter was not taking solidfood by the 7th, the guards were to force-feed him. Jail authorities were certain that he would try to commit suicide again, and he'd been placed on suicide watch, but personnel shortages made complying with the instructions impossible- only one guard was available per shift. The guard assigned to watch Muenter during the evening shift was Jerry Ryan, who'd arrived at 8:10pm. On the instructions of the jail warden, the cell door had been left open, to enable the watchman to rush into the cell and foil any more attempts by Muenter to commit suicide and escape the hangman's noose.“Oh, I want to sleep so bad,” Muenter told Ryan. Ryan told him to try to get some sleep. “I shall do everything I can to get some sleep,” Muenter said.“Then I’ll do all I can to keep things quiet for you.” Muenter laid down on his cot, face towards the cell door, and put his arm over his head. He seemed to doze off immediately, and for half an hour seemed to sleep. At 10:35 on the evening of July 6th, Ryan walked out of the cell to investigate a noise made by another prisoner, inexplicably leaving the cell door open and Muenter unguarded. With his guard no more than fifteen feet away, Muenter managed to slip out of his cell, scrambled up the cross-bars onto a railing on the second floor of the jail block, and dove head-first onto the concrete floor of the jail corridor, a distance of nearly twenty feet.His head struck the floor with such tremendous force that the noise of the impact sounded like an explosion, giving rise to a short-lived rumor that Muenter had smuggled a pressure-sensitive mercury fulminate blasting cap into the jail and had detonated it between his teeth. Ryan rushed back to the cell, nearly tripping over Muenter, who was lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood. The noise of the impact had sounded to Ryan like a pistol shot. He called for another jailkeeper to send for Dr. Cleghorn, that Muenter had shot himself. “As soon as Dr. Cleghorn came he flopped the body over, and I helped him,” Ryan later recounted to reporters. “I said, ‘He must have had a gun, because I heard an explosion’ and the doctor said ‘It looks as though he had blown his nut off’.”Cleghorn had been mislead by the reports provided to him by the jail guards. But more careful inspection failed to show any bullet wound; an autopsy later determined that he had died of a compound fracture and a cerebral hemorrhage. About ten minutes after Muenter killed himself, a team of New York City police detectives led by Guy Scull arrived to interrogate him about his plot to blow up a munitions ship at sea. Frustrated, a few of them went on to Bethpage, hoping to find a clue in his bomb laboratory there, while the remainder returned to the City. Nassau County District Attorney Smith was furious, as Muenter’s death had cheated him out of what would have been one of the most celebrated court cases of the era. In Dallas, the Rev. O. F. Sensabaugh stated that he would not inform his daughter of Muenter’s suicide until the morning. “Of course, we are terribly sorry to hear of Frank’s death, but there is little I can say.”Investigators working on Muenter’s threat to sink either the Philadelphia or the Saxonia learned that both ships had left for Liverpool from NYC on the 3rd. Both were owned by J. P. Morgan. However, although he had originally intended to target the Saxonia or Philadelphia, Muenter’s plan had run afoul of an anonymous shipping agent’s cost-cutting efforts. Muenter hadn't specified that he wanted the package shipped on a specific vessel, so the shipping agent had held them aside for a few days to get a lower shipping rate onboard another Morgan-owned vessel, the SS Minnehaha.The Minnehaha was registered to the International Merchant Marine, a Morgan subsidiary. It was valued at $1 million. On the day Morgan was shot, she had been berthed at Pier 58, at the foot of West Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. The next day she was moved to Gravesend Bay in Queens to take on a cargo of more than $6 million in war supplies bound for Great Britain. The cargo included 2,800 cases of shrapnel shells, 1,723 cases of artillery cartridges, 1,000 cases of cordite explosive, 1,400 cases of TNT, 3,000 barrels of motor oil, 66 hogsheads of rum, 230 horses bound for service with the British Royal Artillery, and several hundred tons of desperately needed food bound for the British people — wheat, flour, pork, beef, and poultry. Unlike the Saxonia or Philadelphia, she was also carryinggeneral freight.Minnehaha left the Port of New York at 7:14 p.m. on July 4th. At half an hour past midnight on the morning of July 7th, her wireless operator intercepted the message, intended for the Philadelphia and Saxonia, that bombs may have been placed aboard England-bound vessels. Her captain, a long-time International Mercantile Marine employee named Claret, orderedthe small boats swung out in case an explosion occurred and it was necessary for the crew to abandon ship. At 4:15 in the afternoon of the 7th — right on time with Muenter's threats — the bomb exploded, with the blast flinging crewmen ten feet into the air. Following the explosion, a largefire broke out, filling the ship with dense smoke. Fighting acrid smoke and flames, the crew had to shift a large portion of the cargo in the hold in order to get at the fire. Then they closed the hold and flooded the compartment with live steam to try to suffocate the flames. Luckily, the general freight had been placed in its own separate hold, on the opposite side of the ship from the high explosives- and it was in the general freight compartment that Muenter's bomb had been placed.The assorted residents from Cambridge, sent down at the request of the Cambridge police detectives to try to positively identify Erich Muenter, arrived the morning after his death. A police sergeant checked Muenter’s dental records with the teeth of the late “Frank Holt”; it was certainly the right man. His former landlord, the two newspaper reporters, and the mayor of Cambridge all positively identified the body as being that ofErich Muenter. Muenter’s death certificate filed with the Hempstead Boardof Health officially listed him as “Frank Holt”, rather than Erich Muenter, born in Wisconsin, rather than Germany, on 25 March 1875. Originally, the Sensabaugh family had planned to have the body buried in Ithaca, rather than Dallas, to spare Leone the horror of a funeral. However, she decided that she wanted him buried near her home.On July 9th, County Coroner Walter P. Jones convened a formal inquest at Hempstead to determine the cause of death. After the short testimony of Dr. Cleghorn, Jones announced that he was satisfied that Muenter had committed suicide by leaping to his death from the bars of his cell. However, for the sake of thoroughness, he adjourned the hearing until the 16th. He wanted to hear the testimony of several of the other inmates of the jail present when Muenter killed himself. At the same time the inquest went into recess, the Nassau County Board of Supervisors announced that they would be undertaking a full investigation to determine whether or not negligenceat the jail was responsible for Muenter’s death. In 1914, the Nassau County Jail had scandalized the region when it was revealed that prison guards were engaging in “orgies” with female prisoners. Five guards were indicted and found guilty. Certainly, the Board of Supervisors wanted no part of another such debacle.Ryan began to feel that the county was planning to scapegoat him for Muenter’s death. He gave a protracted interview to a newspaper reporter at his home in Spring Valley, steadfastly held to his story that he was not asleep at his post. “I had plenty of sleep before I went to work. I particularly remember that I had slept all day Tuesday. I didn’t dare to go to sleep while I was watching Muenter, for I had my revolver on me and he knew it. I was afraid he might try to take it away from me.” He showed his revolver to the reporter. “It has been loaded this way for two years, so you can see he wasn’t shot with my gun.”“I have never decided whether Muenter jumped to his death or was shot or shot himself. It seemed to me like there was an explosion. Whatever it was that made the crash, I am not going to make a crack now, but everything is coming out. I am not going to be made a goat of in this thing. Now, I want it understood that I had nothing to do with the door’s being open. Thatwas all arranged for when I got there. After I had gone to see what the noise was I had heard up the cell block, leaving Muenter apparently asleep, I heard the explosion and ran back to find him lying in a pool of blood. When the officials came I walked away; I was sore because he had put one over on me.” As to his not closing the cell door before he investigated, Ryan said, “That was probably carelessness on my part. I knew he could not get away. I knew I would only be away a second. Yes, I did violate my instructions when I left the prisoner alone."At the end of the investigation, after the Board of Supervisors convened a meeting behind closed doors with District Attorney Smith, they issued the following typewritten statement to the press: 'The Board of Supervisors, at a conference with the District Attorney, agrees with the District Attorney that there has been a great neglect of duty at the jail as to the custody of one Frank Holt, who committed suicide on July 6th, 1915. The District Attorney is doing everything in his power to investigate and find out who is directly responsible for the act and will lay the whole thing before Sheriff Pettit on his return, and, if the facts warrant, further action will be taken and the persons responsible dealt with according to law...'However, after the press conference, District Attorney Smith said that the Board of Supervisors was “creating false impressions” and that in facthe was not investigating the jail. “What is all this fuss about?” he asked reporters. “There is no question that there has been negligence. We all know that.” Smith laid full responsibility for laxity at the jail in the lap of Warden Hults. “There is nothing to investigate. It is admitted there was negligence. The Warden is responsible. He made a mistake in judgement. He should have had two guards. He had, however, to deal with Holt, who was so weak a ten-year-old boy could have handled him. Two doctors had examined him and we were thinking of sending him to the hospital.” Newspapers called Muenter “the most loosely guarded and most important prisoner ever in the custody of Nassau County.” A former Nassau county official told reporters from the steps of the Mineola Court House “Nassau County is lucky Holt killed himself. If he hadn’t, he might have walked away from us.”So, there you have it. A story where it isn't just one man, Erich Muenter, who can be compared to The Joker, but where practically every other individual of any significance involved along the way can be compared to other Batman characters; the Morgans can be compared to the Waynes, Henry C. Physick can be compared to Alfred T.C. Pennyworth, D.A. Smith can be compared to D.A. Harvey Dent, Dr. William M. Zabriskie can be compared to Dr. Leslie Maurin Thompkins, Commissioner Woods can be compared to Commissioner Gordon, Dr. Cleghorn can be compared to Dr. Hugo Strange; the list goes on and on, and it's just about the most perfect fit imaginable.Basically, think of this tale as our Earth's take on the foiling of a near-perfect clone of Batman's origin story- one where the Joker decided to try and kill Thomas and Martha Wayne by storming Wayne Manor instead, but where Alfred Pennyworth's quick thinking and rallying of Wayne Manor's staff managed to foil his assassination effort and save the Waynes' lives, and the Joker subsequently managed to successfully kill himself on the second attempt (unlike in the comics, where he's tried to kill himself innumerable times and always failed).Perhaps on a parallel earth, Erich Muenter succeeded in his effort to kill the Morgans, and elected to escape Mineola prison and resume his insane campaign of terror on the streets of NYC, deeming it to be more worthwhile than killing himself in the spur of the moment. And thus, provided the incentive for the orphaned Morgan children to don their capes and cowls ,and become that particular reality's version of the Bat-Family. With a bit of Captain America-style war patriotism and anti-German sentiment added to the mix for good measure, of course...