The Culture of Crime

Boaz Ganor, Craig LaMay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351304986
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

There is no journalistic work more deserving of the designation "story" than news of crime. From antiquity, the culture of crime has been about the human condition, and whether information comes from Homer, Hollywood, or the city desk, it is a bottom about the human capacity for cruelty and suffering, about desperation and fear, about sex, race, and public morals. Facts are important to the telling of a crime story, but ultimately less so than the often apocryphal narratives we derive from them.

The Culture of Crime is hence about the most common and least studies staple of news. Its prominence dates at least to the 1830s, when the urban penny press employed violence, sex, and scandal to build dizzying high levels of circulation and begin the modern age of mass media. In its coverage of crime, in particular, the popular press represented a new kind of journalism, if not a new definition of news, that made available for public consumption whole areas of social and private life that the mercantile, elite, and political press earlier ignored. This legacy has continued unabated for 150 years. The book explores new wrinkles in the study of crime and as a mass cultural activity from exploring the private lives of public officials to dangers posed by constraints to a free press.

The volume is prepared with the rigor of a scholarly brief but also the excitement of actual crime stories as such. Throughout, the reader is reminded that crime stories are both news and drama, and to ignore either is to diminish the other. The work delves deeply into current problems without either sentimental or trivial pursuits. It will be a volume of great interest to people in communications research, the social sciences, criminologists, and not least, the broad public which must endure the punishment of crime and the thrill of the crime story alike.

I
Overview

1

The Wicked World: The National Police Gazette and Gilded-Age America

Elliott J. Gorn

Sensational news reports of crime and corruption, warned Anthony Comstock, were destroying America’s youth: “They make a pure mind almost impossible. They open the way for the grossest evils. Foul thoughts are the precursors of foul actions.” Comstock wrote during the heroic age of capitalist expansion in the late-19th century, an era that coincided with an easing of rigid Victorian ways. The thaw in morality disturbed many respectable Americans. Let down the floodgates to passion just a bit, clergymen, editors and reformers warned, and the tide of lust would wash away virtue. The reign of sin, of hedonism, of self-indulgence had already begun, and evidence was everywhere—in crime, in pornographic literature, in high living and extravagant consumption, in gambling and prostitution. The loosening of standards was particularly evident in the lower wards of Manhattan, where tens of thousands of working-class men and women—individuals living beyond the watchful eyes of moral agents such as churches, shopkeepers and kin—reveled by night.

For those who sniffed foulness at the wellsprings of virtue, the printed words flooding the country in the last decades of the century were a constant source of anxiety: “The father looks over his paper in the morning to ascertain the state of the market, to inform himself as to the news of the day,” mused Comstock, founder and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, in his 1883 book Traps for the Young. “His attention is attracted by the heavy headlines designed to call especial attention to some disgusting detail of crime…. He turns away in disgust, and thoughtlessly throws down in the library or parlor, within reach of his children, this hateful, debauching article, and goes off to business little thinking that what he thus turns from his child will read with avidity.”

Detailed and sensational news stories about wickedness, according to Comstock, glamorized the lives of libertines, harlots and criminals, and destroyed parents’ best efforts at sheltering their children: “This deadly stream thus poured in to thousands of homes is breeding scoffers and breaking down the restraints and counteracting the sweet influences of religion.” Even worse than newspapers, Comstock believed, illustrated weeklies concentrated evil messages into a single source, so that rather than occasional sensational stories scattered amidst news and business reports, the depravity was undiluted. Add illustrations, and “we then have a thing so foul that no child can look upon it and be as pure afterward.” Such publications unleashed passions so strong that the quiet piety and self-restraint necessary to lead useful lives became impossible.

Comstock’s name evokes snickers today, but late-19th century America honored and respected him. His New York Society was supported and bankrolled by a powerful group of socially prominent men— J.P. Morgan (finance), William E. Dodge (copper), Samuel Colgate (soap, appropriately), Kilaen Van Rensselaer (of the old New York Dutch aristocracy), William C. Beecher (attorney and son of Henry Ward Beecher) and Morris Ketchum (merchant, banker, multimillionaire). Such men were agents of America’s transformation, for they built corporations that gave rise to mass immigration, unimagined concentrations of wealth, ever-finer specialization of labor, and bureaucracies employing a whole new class of white-collar workers. But even as their efforts caused radical change, they lamented the lost world of their youth. Unruly and heterogeneous cities were quite unlike the small towns and farms of romanticized antebellum childhoods.

The anti-vice campaign was an effort by reformers to patch up the cracks on the cultural edifice. Piety, hard work, sobriety, steady habits, frugality; a strict division of sexual roles into home, nurturance and moral elevation for women; work, productivity and patriarchal authority for men; above all, tight control of bodily desires and the checking of all forms of lust—these were the central virtues. It was, of course, a bourgeois culture, a culture that at once facilitated, sanctified and set moral limits on the process of acquiring property, building businesses and consolidating fortunes.

Above all, Comstock and his allies believed that evil was a contagion and that unregulated freedom of the press allowed the disease to spread. Comstock called on parents to keep “vile and crime-full illustrated papers” out of their homes and to boycott stores that sold them. By glamorizing the fast life, illustrated weeklies made the Victorian virtues of piety, morality and steady habils seem dull. Why labor diligently when easy money, sexual adventure and good times were there for the taking?

Undoubtedly the most popular and influential of these salacious publications—and certainly one uppermost in Comstock’s mind, one that he took to court on several occasions—was the National Police Gazette. The “barber’s bible” was kept on file at saloons, hotels, liveries, barber shops—anywhere men (for it was very much a journal aimed at a male audience) congregated—so that circulation estimates of 150,000 copies per week seriously underrepresent its readership. In the very year that Comstock published Traps for the Young, the new Police Gazette tower at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most noteworthy buildings on the New York skyline, and the journal’s owner was well on his way to becoming a multimillionaire.

No doubt the Gazette’s success by the late 1870s and early 1880s through coverage of “human interest” stories—crime, sexual scandals, corruption, sports, glamour, show business—set an example for the daily papers. By the 1890s, the “new journalism” practiced by the burgeoning dailies packaged the news as a series of melodramas and atrocities, of titillating events covered as spectacles, complete with illustrations. If, as Michael Schudson observes, men like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer redefined news reporting as the art of storytelling, of entertainment with words and pictures, the National Police Gazette led the way for them, pioneering the techniques that later gave rise to the “yellow press.”

The Gazette began publication in 1845 as a chronicle of the crimes of the day, though in its early years the weekly did more than merely report on malefactors and their wrongdoings. The Gazette was very much an organ of artisan and working-class culture, upholding the virtues of natural rights, republicanism and the public good, condemning not only those who committed crimes against individuals and their property, but also corrupt public officials, all who held inordinate economic power, and all who sought “aristocratic” privilege. So persistent in exposing transgressors was the early Police Gazette that editor George Wilkes and his cohorts found themselves in numerous brawls, some of them resulting in fatalities.

By the Civil War, however, the implicit assumption that scoundrels of wealth and power were as culpable as horse thieves and pickpockets got lost in more conventional crime reporting. During the war the Gazette turned from covering government corruption to publishing lists of Union soldiers absent without leave in order to help the federal Army stem the tide of desertions. In the postbellum period, George Matsell, former New York City chief of police, took over the paper and began sensationalizing the coverage of crime, but despite his efforts circulation dwindled, and as the century entered its last quarter the Gazette teetered on extinction.

Enter Richard Kyle Fox, a Belfast journalist who had immigrated to America a year after Anthony Comstock had spearheaded the formation of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Upon his arrival in the States Fox went to work for the New York Commercial Bulletin, but within two years he acquired the old Police Gazette in lieu of debts owed to him by the paper’s owners.

Through the remainder of the 1870s Fox continued to emphasize crime but made some significant changes. He cut the size of the pages but increased their number to 16. Above all, he gave ever more space to illustrations, making them much more graphic depictions of murders, seductions and horrible accidents—all that was gruesome or thrilling. By 1883 Fox had worked out the formula that the Police Gazette followed for the remainder of the century. The end of the economic crisis of the 1870s and Fox’s aggressive marketing (for example, he gave cut rates to hotels, saloons and barber shops, all of which kept back files for their male clientele) placed the Gazette among the top two dozen or so American magazines published in the quarter century following the Civil War. Special editions of the Gazette—especially those covering sporting events like championship fights—occasionally sold nearly half a million copies.

As with other newspapers and magazines of the era, advertising became an increasingly important source of the Gazette’s revenues. During the early 1880s the magazine contained a full page of advertisements, which were sold at 75 cents per line. Many of these ads were for Richard K. Fox publications, mostly compilations of stories previously printed in the Police Gazette. Other ads promoted sporting goods, saloons, vaudeville houses, venereal disease cures, organ-enlarging drugs, remedies for impotence, shoes, gambling aids, pictures of athletes and chorus girls and a variety of other goods. A few years later, advertising sold at $1 per line (the same rate as Leslie’s, Godey’s and Ladies’ Home Journal), and two full pages of ads weekly filled Fox’s coffers.

The tone of the Gazette was always personal, even chatty. Writers approached the reader as an equal, took him by the elbow, and showed him a thing or two. The emphasis on rumor and gossip, on story well told, lowered the barriers between the producers of the paper and its consumers. Victorian didacticism and moral certitude were absent from these pages. Editorial style rarely made claims for voracity based on superior knowledge; columns of jokes or tidbits of sporting information left little room for pontificating on the issues of the day.

Coverage of sports—especially illegal blood sports like boxing and cockfighting—of vaudeville and variety shows, and of sexual scandals, particularly among the socially prominent, grew increasingly important to the Gazette, but crimes of violence, the more bizarre and blood-soaked the better, were the journal’s lifeblood during the 1870s and ’80s. By the late 1870s the Gazette was printed on pink paper, and its graphic displays of blood and sex far outstripped any other publication. A regular column, “Vice’s Varieties,” offered brief descriptions of wrongdoing contributed by readers from every state. Series with more specific purposes were also important, and many had a historical cast. “Lives of the Poisoners: How They Killed and What They Killed With,” written by “a member of the New York bar,” gave detailed descriptions of celebrated murders committed with various toxins. The titles of other regular columns reveal the Gazette’s tone: “Murder and Suicide: A Gush of Gore and Shattering Brains All Around the Horizon”; “This Wicked World: A Few Samples of Man’s Duplicity and Woman’s Worse Than Weakness”; “Crooked Capers: Scrapes and Scandals of All Sorts and From All Quarters”; “Glimpses of Gotham” by Paul Prowler (a.k.a. Samuel MacKeever), which took readers on tours of the slums and dives and resorts of the metropolis, giving them the vicarious excitement of participating in lives of deviance. Other ongoing summaries of crime around the nation went under such titles as “Homicidal Horrors,” “Noose Notes” and “Crimes of the Clergy” (one of Fox’s favorite subjects).

Other stories went beyond purely interpersonal violence to hint at the social dimensions of aggression. The stories in a single issue of the Gazette (October 9,1886) offer a good example. One told of a Mrs. Pauline Mittelstaedt, who brought pregnant women into her lying-in hospital and then disposed of the infants for a fee of $300. An article about a Brooklyn “lunatic asylum” began with a description of how one inmate was murdered by an attendant with scalding water, and then went on to expose other horrors of the institution. Thus the headline—“Cooking a Cripple”—was followed by “How the Pauper Insane of the City of Churches are Housed and Maltreated Near Brooklyn.” Another expose described Georgia’s convict lease system as one of pure exploitation by the state’s wealthy to extract the labor of “ignorant negros and low whites” who died at rates approaching 20 percent per year. Implicitly, the Gazette here asked readers who the real criminals were.

Even coverage in the summer of 1884 of the death of the celebrated bank robber George Leonidis Leslie took on social overtones, for it was pointed out that Leslie was well educated, acted the gentleman, patronized the arts, theater and literature, and mixed with the best company. Again, who were the pillars of the community, who the scoundrels?

Sports slowly began to overtake crime and violence in the Police Gazette—Fox quickly learned the sales value of sports when coverage of the 1880 championship fight between Paddy Ryan and Joe Goss kept his presses rolling for days—so that by the late 1880s over half the written copy in most issues was devoted to games of physical competition. While some of this coverage went to comparatively mainstream sports like baseball (still a somewhat shady enterprise given its associations with gambling, drinking and other working-class vices) and college football, most of it dealt with sports that were criminal or violent or both. Boxing was illegal until 1892, and dreadfully bloody under the bare-knuckle rules. It was also the pet sport of the Gazette. Richard Kyle Fox decreed six weight classifications, offered championship belts in each, sponsored matches, put up stake money, fought anti-boxing laws in court, imported talent from abroad, arranged bouts in his offices and publicized upcoming events. He retained William Edgar Harding as his sports editor, and Harding wrote masterful accounts of prizefights. Indeed, sparring was not confined to the ring, as editor Fox exploited his personal enmity with fighter John L. Sullivan to back a series of challengers, whip up enthusiasm for the ring, and sell thousands of copies of his paper.

Not only boxing but cockfighting, ratting, dog baiting and other premodern blood sports received widespread coverage and sponsorship by the Gazette. So-called trash sports—such pseudo-events as “Battle of the Network Stars,” activities with little basis in tradition but designed to attract television viewers—had their analogues in Police Gazette promotion and coverage of all sorts of bizarre competitions, water-drinking championships and hair-cutting contests among them. All of these events, from rifle shooting to six-day walking matches to weight lifting with one’s teeth created instant celebrities because of publicity in the Gazette. Annie Oakley, for example, first came to national prominence when she won one of Richard Kyle Fox’s contests for marksmanship.

Fox spent perhaps half a million dollars on belts, trophies, prizes and promotional expenses for these and other competitions, an investment that paid handsomely in increased sales of his paper. Along the way he provided an early model of a journal creating news, not merely reporting it. Since the goal of reporting was to entertain rather than enlighten citizens, why wait for events to happen? Through his sports pages, Fox blurred the line separating journalism from its subject matter, a hallmark of modern media.

If violence and sports were two pillars of the Gazette world, the third was sex. Virtually as soon as Fox took over as editor, nakedness increased, stories of infidelity proliferated and images of libidinous abandon multiplied. Many of these centered around the indiscretions of wealthy individuals or the hypocrisies of the devout. Samuel MacKeever described a rendezvous at a downtown department store in 1880 between two otherwise married people, both of substantial backgrounds. The man bought the woman an expensive coat, and MacKeever contrasted their moral and financial casualness with the poverty of the salesgirl who took their order. She smiled at her customers so as not to lose her job, which barely paid her enough to live. MacKeever concluded that shop girls in New York City were like the bond-girls of Constantinople, serfs amidst luxury, the “white slaves of the metropolis.” Similarly, in a thoroughly typical story under the heading “Religious Notes,” one Reverend Finerty of the Methodist Church of Mokona, Illinois, was accused of attempting an “outrage” against one of his flock. The clergyman slipped into her room and threw her down, but the young woman screamed, clawed his face, and freed herself.

Such stories had a double edge, at once upholding “female virtue” and exciting male readers with hints of its violation. The predominant image of women in the Gazette, however, was less concerned with protecting their honor and more with depicting them as free from Victorian strictures. Above all they were creatures of fantasy who openly gave and received pleasure. To give a seemingly innocuous example, a story from March 25,1893, noted that a California woman sued for the right to attend horse races. The Gazette applauded the judge’s decision to let her, noting that those who did not want to go should stay home, that choosing to attend such an e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Overview
• Part II Views on Crime and Media
• Part III The Culture of Crime
• Part IV Review Essay
• For Further Reading
• Index