Abstract
The United States has been throughout its history a violent and murderous place. Scandalous and sensationalized murders have regularly attracted local and national attention. In the recent past, the eight-month-long trial of American football-star-turned-actor, O. J. Simpson, for murdering his ex-wife and her friend, generated hundreds of hours of cable television broadcasting and billions of dollars in revenues. Simpson’s trial, however, was merely one of countless high-profile episodes of violent death that have influenced American culture. Since the beginning of the nation, the history of scandalous murders can be traced through notable incidents such as the fatal shooting of Alexander Hamilton by Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804 or the notorious family murder charged to Lizzie Borden in 1892. Still, social histories of murder in America have been more interested in trying to explain the anomaly of the high homicide rates in the United States; whereas per-capita incidents of murder have steadily declined for centuries in Europe, homicide rates remained at least five times higher in the United States than in Europe at the end of twentieth century.1
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Notes
George Lipsitz, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: Marketing and the O.J. Simpson Trial,” Birth of Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 3–30.
For recent historical explanations for U.S. homicide rates, see Eric Monkkonen, “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” American Historical Review 111 (2006), 76–94;
Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009);
see also Roger Lane, Murder in America: A History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997).
Ari Adut, On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3, 23–24;
Gary Alan Fine, Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1–6, 130–66;
Sara L. Knox, Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life (Durham: Duke, 1998).
James Lull and Stephen Hinerman define a “media scandal” as occurring “when private acts that disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community are made public and narrativized by the media, producing a range of effects from ideological and cultural retrenchment to disruption and change.” Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, eds. James Lull and Stephen Hinerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3.
Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7–32;
Michael Ayers Trotti, “Murder Made Real: The Visual Revolution of the Halftone,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 111 (2003), 384–385.
In fact, technological advances lagged behind consumer demand; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 18, 31–35;
Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 12–14;
David Ray Papke, Framing the Criminal: Crime, Cultural Work, and the Loss of Critical Perspective, 1830–1900 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1987), 39.
John D. Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Historians have mistakenly characterized this as the origins of sensationalism. Sensationalist crime literature had existed for centuries in early modern Europe;
see Joy Wiltenburg, “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” American Historical Review 109 (2004), 1377–1404. Wiltenburg cites the example of Burkard Waldis, a Lutheran minister, whose 1551 pamphlet, “A true and most horrifying account of how a woman tyrannically murdered her four children and also killed herself, at Weidenhausen near Eschwege in Hesse,” possessed all the characteristics of modern sensationalism—emotive language, suspense, and graphic descriptions of bloody violence, including a “grisly woodcut of the mother dismembering her children” (1386).
Circulation figures were certainly helped when the Sun and Herald took opposing sides as to the innocence of Robinson; see Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Knopf, 1998);
Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press, 42–53.
The readership for Bennett’s New York Herald tripled during the few months of the Robinson-Jewett scandal; see Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years, 1690–1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 233.
The first episode of the “The Lives of the Felons” exposed the crimes of pugilist, forger, and otherwise notorious criminal, Robert Sutton, known as “Bob the Wheeler.” Members of Sutton’s gang, or his own son, started the saloon brawl over the exposé. When Sutton was released from prison a few months later, his gang descended on the Gazette office to exact vengeance, and in the ensuing melee, three more lives were lost; see National Police Gazette (October 16, 1845); Walter Davenport, “The Nickel Shocker,” Colliers 81 (March 10, 1928), 26, 28.
Elliott J. Gorn, “The Wicked World: The National Police Gazette and Gilded-Age America,” Media Studies Journal 6 (1992), 5;
see also Guy Reel, The National Police Gazette and the Making of the Modern American Man, 1879–1906 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Dan Schiller has argued that the National Police Gazette represented a critical development in self-representation of journalism as fact-based, authentic, and marked by objectivity. Contemporary newspapers heralded the Gazette for reporting “founded entirely on truth,” or for “pictures of reality, not fancy”; see Schiller, Objectivity and the News, 96–124; quotations on p. 103. What Schiller does not address is the common trope of authenticity used to mask imaginative and fictional productions in American popular culture. For a fine reflection on authenticity, realism, and the masking of fiction in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows, see Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Knopf, 2005).
Since the idea of visibility is most prevalent in scholarship about gender and sexuality, it is imperative that we highlight the gender and sexual dimensions of imaginings and representations of murder. The sources on visibility and gender and sexuality are too numerous to cite here. On the visibility and spectacle of new women and murderous violence at the end of the nineteenth century, see, for example, Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000);
Catherine Ross Nickerson, “’The Deftness of Her Sex’: Innocence, Guilt, and Gender in the Trial of Lizzie Borden,” Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, ed. Michael A. Bellesiles (New York: New York University, 1999), 261–282.
Trotti, “Murder Made Real,” 379–410; John R. Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” American Quarterly 33 (1981), 163–184; H. L. Mencken, “A Good Man Gone Wrong,” American Mercury (February 1929), 254–255.
Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 20–21.
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© 2013 Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier
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Dorsey, B. (2013). Changing Representations of Scandalous Murders in the United States. In: Martschukat, J., Niedermeier, S. (eds) Violence and Visibility in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378699_4
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