 . . . Summer 1999
IS THE ROAD TO HEAVEN PAVED WITH BAD EXAMPLES? By Cara J. Spindler Americans' vicarious involvement with violent crime is a focus of social research as well as media profits. And that accounts for the gritty, salacious pamphlets on child-sacrifice and horrific murders, augmented by religious sermons and political tracts and "true life" detective stories that make up the James V. Medler Crime Collection in U-M's William L. Clements Library.
Medler amassed crime literature for 50 years before the Clements, which specializes in original resources for the study of American history and culture from the 16th through the 20th centuries, acquired the collection from him in 1992.
What attracts people to this sort of literature? Clements Library Director John Dann believes it is our fascination with human failings, a fascination reflected today in the lurid headlines of supermarket tabloids and the many pseudo-documentary "news programs" that focus on crime.
The Clements acquired the Medler Collection not to exploit morbid curiosity, however, but to serve as a valuable historical tool for faculty and students. The transcripts of court proceedings show the legal history of the New World colonies. In 1770, six years before the Revolutionary War, the City of Boston's account of "the horrid massacre at Boston" was published a week after the event. "The government at an end-this has been the cry ever since the Stamp Act existed. The province in a state of rebellion ... but nothing can be more false than such a representation." The document ends hoping that the King will not "think unfavorably of his faithful subjects of the province." Similarly, an 1812 report on the trial of Arthur Hodge, convicted of killing his Black slave, sheds fight on the racialization of justice.
Interspersed throughout its varied resources we glimpse religious ideals, theories of the criminal mind, how the community regards and punishes its criminals, penology, and the race and gender roles of our past and present culture. In 1786, for example, a 12-year old girl, Hannah Ocuish, murdered a 6-year old girl. Hannah's mother was an alcoholic, and it was well known that Hannah's home life was unstable. However, the Puritan New England community's "eye-for-an-eye" mentality was strong, and Hannah was executed on the gallows.
Execution was a rarely questioned norm of social punishment and cultural regulation in Colonial days in the young republic. Awaiting execution for thievery in 1773, Levi Ames was paraded through Boston streets every Sabbath with chains about his ankles, reading his, "Last Words" to large crowds. Often, a criminal's penitent story was posted as a broadside with the headline, "A Warning To All Young People."
Take the story of Jason Fairbanks. In 1801, he murdered Eliza Fales and attempted to kill himself. Both were still young, and each of their families forbade them to see each other. The sad ending to their affair, which they'd continued despite their parents' objections, yielded this cautionary broadside in verse: "The bloody knife, O then he seiz'd, / And cut his throat like the ceas'd, / And mangl'd all his body o'er, / Hot streaming with her purple gore!"
William de Beck's 1867 book Murder Will Out: the first step in crime leads to the gallows, was printed with a wrapper that reads, "For the family."
Of particular note is the collection's number of "Beautiful Victims," admonishing tales of young women deceived by slick con-artists. In these stories, illegal abortions, false names and secret marriages were the downfall of many a bright, pretty and virtuous girl. Carlyle W. Harris, convicted and executed for murdering his young wife with an overdose of morphine in 1892, reportedly divulged his method to a friend: "[He said he] could overcome any woman's scruples ... one method was to take a bottle of ginger ale and put in it a very large portion of whisky, the other was to marry her, but under an assumed name."
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The collection as a whole is a barometer of social, legal and political history, with the reading taken at the level of day-to-day life. It includes criminals' accounts of their own stories and also others' perceptions of criminals. There are confessions written with the "guidance" of a priest, which were made into broadsides to be posted about town. There are pulp pamphlets by Barclay and Co. that highlight "horrific crimes" with graphic woodblock prints. This matrix of legal, social and cultural history is the treasure trove of the Medler Collection.
Scholars note that such crime literature reveals an implicit assumption that children and adults are inherently sinful and must be trained and reminded to live moral lives.