February 8, 2007
O. J. Simpson and Helen Jewett Posted by Ellen Feldman at 02:15 PM EST The Judith Regan–O. J. Simpson brouhaha has died down—for the moment—but reading The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, by Daniel Stashower reminded me of another acquitted alleged murderer who managed to have it both ways, and the publisher who made a bundle in the bargain.
Stashower’s excellent book is about the murder of Mary Rogers in 1841, an unsolved crime that inspired Poe to set his brooding detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who would serve as a model for the modern gumshoe, to a fictional solution of the case in “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” It also put in motion reform leading to a centralized municipal police force. But another crime recounted in the book bears a closer analogy to current events.
Five years earlier, Helen Jewett, a 23-year-old prostitute, who worked at the Palace of Passions on Thomas Street in New York City, a mere stone’s throw from the local police station, was bludgeoned to death with a hatchet, her body subsequently set on fire. Jewett was, according to James Gordon Bennett, “beautiful but erring.” For the press, murdered young women of easy virtue are always beauties. Plain Janes never meet violent ends. In the New York Herald, which Bennett had started only a year earlier, he described his visit to the scene of the crime for voyeuristic (and aren’t we all) readers of the day. “Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. . . . The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.”
Bennett’s account of the dead girl was not much more lurid than others in the penny press. His true originality and flair emerged when he turned the paper’s attention to Richard Robinson, the 19-year-old clerk and would-be roué arrested for the murder. The police, the newspapers, and the public found it an open-and-shut case. Several witnesses placed Robinson with Jewett in her room the night of the crime. The weapon matched a hatchet that was missing from the shop where Robinson worked. The blue cloak found at the crime scene looked like one Robinson was seen wearing that night, though he denied it. But if Bennett, whom Walt Whitman described as a “reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes and breathing mildew at everything fresh and fragrant,” was going to outsell his competitors, he had to have a gimmick. The Herald pinned the blame on another culprit. “Is it not more likely the crime of a woman? Are not the whole chain of circumstances within the ingenuity of a female, abandoned and desperate?” All evidence pointed, Bennett insisted, to a jealous Rosina Townsend, an “old miserable hag who has spent her whole life seducing and inveigling the young and old to their destruction.” When an army of young clerks took up the cry and crowded the courtroom, sporting special rakish hats, cheering Robinson, and heckling the prosecution, acquittal was inevitable. According to Stashower’s book, “Robinson, whom a later writer branded ‘the Great Unhung,’ would spend the rest of his days coyly hinting that he had gotten away with murder.”
The scenario sounds uncannily like a certain television interview that few have seen and fewer still have been able to avoid hearing and reading about. The similarity belongs to the the-more-things-change-the-more-they-remain-the-same school of history. Our fascination with murder, especially if it is committed in passion, remains eternal. Our need to project current concerns onto the details and take away relevant lessons from them is equally constant. Bennett blamed womanhood, weak and immoral, for the murder of Helen Jewett. A large part of America found revenge, or at least redemption, for a greater centuries-old crime in the acquittal of Simpson. The fact that the first was a put-up job and the second a valid grievance does not make the injustice any less perplexing.
February 4, 2007
Fictions of History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:20 PM EST Wisdom about the logic of history shows up in odd places. Kim Newman is a British writer of genre fiction, as well as the author of somewhat scholarly books for the British Film Institute. His fiction can be difficult to describe, because while some of it falls within a specific genre, he is celebrated for dexterously mixing different pop cultural genres in fascinating ways. A collection of linked alternate history stories, Back In The USSA, imagined the history of a Communist United States (with Al Capone as our Stalin) and then refracted that fantasy through a variety of genre optics, with homages to John Steinbeck, Apocalypse Now, Jack Kerouac, Buddy Holly, and a number of other American icons. A horror novel modeled Senator Joe McCarthy as a demon living off the pain and humiliation of a blacklisted writer, a vampire series set novels in the World War I Royal Flying Corps and Fellini’s Rome, and so on. Meldings of different pop genres, once simply called crossover fiction, are now more portentously described as post-modernist, but they can still be very diverting. A recent collection of Newman’s short stories, The Man From The Diogenes Club, while a far cry from his best work, does lead off with an interesting tale: In the early 1970s a number of former World War II veterans, not unreasonably disgusted with various aspects of the United Kingdom of their time, cast a spell to bring back what they most fondly remember of the Second World War to their village on the south coast. They succeed in getting back the social solidarity of wartime, at the unanticipated price of bringing back versions of Hitler and Mussolini. Newman’s point, simple and I think wise, is that historical nostalgia tends to present idealized and very selective visions of the past. He is also arguing, more darkly, that some precious things come at a very stiff price. For example you cannot get wartime solidarity without a war. This repeats a lesson of a play I saw the other night, a revival of Brian Friel’s 1981 Translations. Friel is a splendid contemporary Irish playwright, and Translations, set in an Irish village where British engineers are beginning the Ordnance Survey mapping of the United Kingdom, is a complicated play, but it includes a couple of insights that parallel Newman’s. The most subtle and bitter, I think, is that the beauty and intricacy of pre-industrial Irish culture, which is mourned and celebrated throughout the play, came at the price of hideous vulnerability: The great famine is just around the corner. Another insight is that the gentlemen who officered the nineteenth-century British army, simultaneously colorful and vastly impressive, and sometimes charming, maintained imperial order by significant and cruel repression. The intersection of those lessons may suggest that the imperial order destroyed much that was beautiful and irreplaceable, and in the course of doing so abolished the specter of famine. So nothing is free. History pairs its offerings to us, and we are not likely to get any great advance without a price, often a very harsh one.
February 2, 2007
Reassessing Robert Moses Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST I once reviewed, in brisk succession, two books on Lyndon Johnson, one the second volume of Caro’s massive biography of Johnson, Means of Ascent, and the other Robert Dallek’s Lone Star Rising. Caro, already famous as the author of a massive biography of the urban visionary Robert Moses, had produced a vision of LBJ that looked rather like his interpretation of Moses: a man whose vastly flawed character significantly tainted his achievements, another one-time liberal hero dethroned by the indefatigable Caro. For various reason’s, Dallek’s portrait—a flawed but very great man, to whom the republic owes an immense debt—seemed a lot more persuasive, and if you had read it, Caro’s attack looked, on various points, starkly tendentious. After reviewing both books, I was filled with uneasiness about the power of a gifted writer with an ax to grind, and I began to wonder whether Robert Moses might not have been the greatest figure in the history of my city, because given Caro’s influence, if Moses was, I’d never have known. Well, now I have a chance to find out. A link posted on the homepage of this website leads readers to a New York Times article on revisionist interpretations of Robert Moses. Caro’s massive 1974 biography was titled The Power Broker, and I’d bet it is the most influential work of urban history ever written. The book, based on a staggering amount of research and written by a man with a considerable dramatic gift, portrayed Moses in a less than flattering light; its revealing subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” gets across the balance of Caro’s judgment of his subject. While Caro acknowledged some of Moses’s achievements, his uglier charges became what most people think they know about Moses: he was antidemocratic, an enemy of mass transit, a racist, a would-be modernizer who did profound damage to his city, etc. There may be some truth in all of these charges, but if we can believe, among others, Columbia University’s celebrated architectural historian Hillary Ballon, it turns out there is also a very strong case for the other side. If Caro got Moses wrong, in the same way I think he got LBJ wrong, it may say less about Moses’s day (1888-1981), which was more or less coterminous with the era of LBJ (1908-1973), than it does about Caro’s era, in which we still live. Caro was born in 1935, which means he was still a youngish man during the Vietnam War, when Johnson was widely demonized and when LBJ’s Great Society programs were being depicted as a massive failure on the left as well as on the right. A profound suspicion of political power marks what I’ll call the Age of Caro, as does a striking moral absolutism about political men and their actions. In the Age of Caro, the inevitably massive impurities of politics and statecraft, when held up to impossible standards, have made large numbers of Americans disenchanted with both enterprises. Some activities—not only waging wars, but also making laws, and building cities—are necessarily morally impure. To demand moral perfection in these spheres of activity is in effect to insist that nothing be done. If you do not yourself desperately need to have done the things only the state can do—pass Civil Rights acts, construct public works, dispatch expeditionary forces, etc.—pillorying the people who sully themselves by attempting such actions apparently feels pretty swell. For whatever reason, Columbia’s Professor Ballon and her colleagues at the Museum of the City of New York, and at the Queens Museum—there will be exhibitions on Moses’s legacy at all three places—are attempting to partially rehabilitate a man who got a very great deal done. Perhaps the Age of Caro is drawing to a close.
February 2, 2007
The Savings Rate Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:20 PM EST Once again, the government has released the statistic called the personal savings rate. Once again it is down from the year before. Once again, newspapers ran tut-tut stories about Americans being a bunch of shiftless grasshoppers, spending like there was no tomorrow, when we should all turn into ants and save for a rainy day, not to mention our retirement. The American savings rate was negative in 2006, -1 percent, to be precise. It’s the second year in a row that that has happened. The only other two years in American history when the savings rate was negative were 1932 and 1933, when families were dipping into savings—at least those families that had any savings left to dip into—to make up for absent paychecks. That’s terrible, right? No, it isn’t. The trouble here is not with Americans; it is with the definition of the savings rate, which is hopelessly out of date. That definition is the percentage of after-tax income that is not spent. If a family takes home $50,000 and spends $47,500, its savings rate is 5 percent. If it takes home $50,000 and spends $50,500, its savings rate is -1 percent. That definition was not a bad one in 1932 and 1933, when few American families owned their own homes, were the beneficiaries of company pension plans, held any substantial financial assets, or paid any income taxes. Today it is a meaningless statistic. Just consider. Every time a family sends a mortgage check to the bank, part of that money increases their equity in the house. But that doesn’t count as savings. Contributions, by employer and employee, to a 401(k) or other retirement plan don’t count because they are made with pre-tax income. Unrealized capital gains in stocks, bonds, or real estate don’t count. Social Security taxes don’t count either, even though they amount to 12.5 percent of total income from salaries or wages up to a little less than $100,000. Americans today have $3.2 trillion socked away in 401(k) and other retirement accounts. They have total assets of well over $50 trillion, mostly in real estate, which has been appreciating almost without interruption for several decades now. That is why the Federal Reserve reports that 88 percent of Americans over the age of 51 have adequate resources to fund their retirement. It might be noted that the savings rate peaked in 1977, when it was over 11 percent, and has been in near continuous decline ever since. Why? In 1978 the 401(k) revolution began, and more and more Americans, more than happy to have Uncle Sam help out, began saving out of pre-tax income rather than after-tax income. So the statistic called the personal savings rate declined while the amount of wealth being saved in the real world began to increase sharply. Chicken Little, call your office.
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