Victor Folke Nelson

Victor Folke Nelson grew up in an orphanage and was sent to Lyman Industrial School, a Massachusetts reformatory for children. He enlisted in the Navy around World War I, was caught going AWOL and spent six months in the Naval Prison at Portsmouth, NH, while prison reformer Thomas Mott Osborne was its commander (1917-1920) and was conducting his then famous Mutual Welfare League. Nelson was restored to duty, went AWOL again, and was returned for another short prison term.

Released from the service but subject to alcoholism, Nelson was soon arrested and sentenced to three to five years, probably for robbery, at the Massachusetts penitentiary at Charlestown. In May 1921, after five months, he escaped and was at large for four months, until August 1921.

On Aug. 21, 1921, Nelson happened to be in Cincinnati when Osborne was there accompanying "The Right Way," a feature film Osborne had helped make. The film (only two of eight reels so far discovered still in existence) fictionalized a man's imprisonment under "the old way," as Osborne put it, and his new way, the Mutual Welfare League.

Nelson saw the movie, and after Osborne told the audience that the Navy had discontinued the Mutual Welfare League, he approached his former commander and told him, according to Osborne's letters, that he was considering turning himself in. They talked until Nelson said: 'That settles it; I'm going back to Charlestown.' I asked 'Why?' He answered: 'I am one of the failures. It's fellows like me that give them an excuse to kill the League. So I think I ought to go back to show them I'm not altogether a failure.'" Osborne wrote (Feb. 4, 1924, Osborne Family Collection, Syracuse University) that Nelson's return "on the whole, the bravest act I have ever known. Nelson hated the prison, loathed the system, despised the prison authorities and had no special friends among the prisoners to help him bear his burdens."

Nelson's return to prison made national headlines, and by 1924 pressure from Osborne and other prison reformers get Nelson released in late 1923, and he went to work in Auburn, NY, as an assistant in Osborne's library. In early 1924 he got drunk again and stabbed and robbed a man, was arrested and returned to prison. It made new national headlines and was a deep embarrassment to Osborne.

Research about Nelson continues.