1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  Gray wrote his thoughts in a book, Doomed Ship: The Autobiography of Judd Gray, published after his death. He claimed not to be writing for absolution or “as an excuse for my sins and misdeeds. I am not writing it even for understanding—I have in my mind one purpose only—that of showing how possible it is to fall into anything—how impossible it is to hurdle life’s conventions—that the only way to salvage life after practicing duplicity is to confess our sins.”16 The book sought to tell the truth, as Gray saw it, in order to refute the testimony of Snyder, dispel the stories presented by the press, and ponder the frenzy and publicity generated by the event. “The reporters in droves had made prisoners of all my family,” Gray wrote, referring to the barrage of media that descended on his wife, mother, sister, and even daughter after his arrest. “One reporter going so far as to go to my little daughter’s schoolroom and demand that the child be delivered into his custody.” Other reporters claimed to be investigators with the police department or “long lost friends or relatives,” or they simply stole items from the yards of Gray’s family members, including their mail. His family was, Gray wrote, “quite unaware, however, that this was the beginning of the war maneuvers of the great American Press” (219–220). The approaching trial increased the number of reporters and, according to Gray, the falsity of the reports. “The public had tried the case before it ever came to court, fed by stories, mythical of course;—the products of reporters’ brains—tales entirely inconsistent with not alone ethics, but good sense.” And Gray confessed that “these lies and falsities were one of the hardest things I had to bear” (228–229). All this attention led Gray to reflect:

  And I could but wonder, though I do not wish to seem cynical nor arrogant, how people could clamor and fight to reach the inside of the courtroom—to listen to the sordid details of the sins of others. All I could think of was the side show of a circus—and Ruth and I the freaks to be viewed. At the minimum cost of a pass. And these people—high and low—well-known stage and screen celebrities—sat day after day being entertained by the review of a crime and the sad, illicit sins of others—fed on the misfortunes of those that loved wrongly—and they tried to pick into the crannies of two souls to see if there was not a little dirt left in overlooked corners—I hope and pray that there were many who took a lesson home from the sordid calamity. (229–230)

  The trial was a media event involving the press, especially the relatively new tabloid picture papers like the New York Illustrated Daily News, the New York Daily Mirror, and the New York Evening Graphic, which by 1926 had a combined circulation of more than 1.3 million. The often-married Peggy Hopkins Joyce was hired by the William Randolph Hearst–owned Daily Mirror to share her thoughts on the case, and the well-known Reverend John Roach Stratton denounced the couple in another paper for violating each of the ten commandments in their crime. Sister Aimee Semple McPherson wrote in the pages of the Evening Graphic (owned by True Story and True Confessions publisher Bernard McFadden) that men should desire “a wife like mother—not a Red-Hot Cutie.”17 Other celebrities in attendance and sharing their views included playwright David Belasco, film director D. W. Griffith, evangelist Billy Sunday, and contemporary bestselling author of The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant. Chicago playwright Maurine Watkins, along with lead actress Francine Larrimore, took time out from their current Broadway run to observe the proceedings as research, and publicity, for their own work. In Chicago, Roxy Hart (played by Larrimore) proclaims, after committing homicide, “I really have the tenderest heart in the world—wouldn’t hurt a worm.”18 According to John Kobler, “Ruth precipitated a near riot by announcing, ‘Kill my husband? Why, I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’”19

  The trial itself was high theater, as evidenced by the crowds of people present at the courthouse. Microphones and loudspeakers enabled the overflow crowd in the corridors to hear the proceedings, and some spectators paid as much as fifty dollars for what turned out to be counterfeit admission tickets to the courtroom. Hundreds of stickpins, adorned with a miniature sash weight, were sold for ten cents apiece. The general atmosphere was controlled by the presiding judge, Townsend Scudder, who ordered, “No photographers in the courtroom. No minors or picnic baskets.”20

  Snyder was not able to win over public sentiment, as evidenced during the appeals process when the Queens County Court of Appeals received a postcard signed by “The Public” warning, “We will shoot you if you let that woman Snyder go free. She must be electrocuted. The public demands it. If she is not done away with, other women will do the same thing. She must be made an example of. We are watching out.”21 But not everyone was against her. She wrote a poem criticizing the press for spreading lies about her that included the lines “You have blackened and besmeared a mother, Once a man’s plaything—A Toy—What have you gained by all you’ve said, And has it—brought you Joy?” After it was published, she received 164 offers of marriage should she be released.22 Snyder and Gray, and especially Snyder, remained subjects of media attention until their electrocution and beyond. Even though no photographers were allowed to witness the execution, Thomas Howard, posing as a reporter, strapped a camera to his ankle and took a photograph of Ruth Snyder as she was being electrocuted. The photo ran on the front page of the New York Daily News and became a matter of controversy itself. It also led to changes in the lighting of death chambers to make it impossible to photograph them. Even after the death of Snyder and Gray, within minutes of each other on January 12, 1928, Snyder’s appeal lawyer, Joseph Lonardo, attempted to block an autopsy of her body. The New York Times later revealed that this attempt was part of a scheme to resurrect her with a shot of adrenalin to her heart.23

  Columnist Damon Runyon characterized the crime as “dumb.” “It was stupid beyond imagination,” he wrote, “and so brutal that the thought of it probably makes many a peaceful, home-loving Long Islander of the Albert Snyder type shiver in his pajamas as he prepares for bed.”24 But the public interest in this trial and others like it was more than just a momentary interest in something unusual. As Charles Merz observed, “A nationally famous trial for homicide is no longer a startling interruption of a more lethargic train of thought. It has become an institution, as periodic in its public appearances and reappearances as the cycle of the seasons.”25 As John R. Brazil pointed out, much of this public fascination with murder trials was the result of aggressive promotion by the tabloid press, which accelerated in 1919 when the New York Illustrated Daily News became the first “tabloid picture paper.” These tabloids emphasized photographs and illustrations rather than detailed text in covering sensational stories. The tabloids did not, and were not meant to, replace standard daily newspapers in presenting the news; rather, they created a larger newspaper-reading public by attracting people who had not read the standard papers but were attracted by magazines like True Story and True Confessions.26 Bernard McFadden, who owned both magazines, also published the Evening Graphic, which sought, according to McFadden, to “dramatize the news and features . . . to appeal to the masses in their own language.”27

  The tabloids often did more than report the news; in some cases they created a story, as in the case of the New York Daily Mirror, which “uncovered” new evidence in a murder trial from 1922 and forced a new trial in 1926. The case had involved a minister, Edward Hall, and a choir member, Eleanor Mills, found dead together. The evidence brought forth by the Mirror led to the arrest and trial of the minister’s widow, though it failed to gain a conviction.28 Murder trials sold newspapers, and since trials lasted for days, they did not sell just a single issue but kept readers coming back for more. “With the single exception of the Lindbergh flight, virtually every sizable paper had its largest average circulation during intensive murder trial coverage: its single best days were when verdicts were announced or when executions were carried out.” When Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray were executed, the issue of the Daily News featuring the bootleg photograph of Snyder’s electrocution “sold 250,000 extra copies and had to run
off 750,000 additional pages later.”29

  murder trials and democracy

  Not only murder trials, but crime in general was more prevalent in the nation’s press. A survey of over sixty major American newspapers from 1899 to 1923 found that by 1923, the average paper devoted 77 percent less space to editorials, 180 percent less space to letters to the editor, and 275 percent less space to social news. During the same period, while general, political, business, and foreign news increased slightly, sports news received 47 percent more space, and crime news increased by 53 percent.30 Most observers believed that the increase in crime reporting was directly related to an increase in the crime rate, though no reliable statistics support the connection. Even an increase in the crime rate does not explain people’s interest in crime stories, both real and fictional. John R. Brazil sees a connection between the intense press coverage of murder trials, like Snyder and Gray’s, and the development of the “hard-boiled” school of detective novels characterized by such writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Unlike such traditional detectives as Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan, the hard-boiled detective did not rely on intellect and logic alone. “Working frequently outside the law and occasionally against it, his primary characteristics were toughness and self-control (this control usually contained a passionate, violent nature, which could be released to serve his moral or professional ends).” And while Holmes and Chan sought to restore order to their worlds by solving crimes, the hard-boiled detective sought merely to survive in a chaotic world “while often adding to the general store of brutality and chaos.”31 In other words, the hard-boiled detective was a response to modernity, a reaction to the idea that the world was no longer rationally ordered and was therefore beyond anyone’s ability to rationally control it with intellect and logic.

  This same reaction to modernity can be seen in the popularity of murder trials as well. It was not the bizarre, unique, or exceptional that made for a highly publicized murder trial or a good hard-boiled detective novel but, rather, the ordinary: domestic disputes, infidelity, greed, and jealousy. Alexander Woolcott claimed that what made Ruth Snyder extraordinary was that she was not exceptional. The most intense interest surrounded the most ordinary of murders.32 Likewise, most hard-boiled detective fiction centered on ordinary characters and ordinary crimes. Brazil argues that what made both the sensational murder trial and the hard-boiled detective story popular in the 1920s was their relationship to “traditionally accepted but increasingly less secure assumptions about human nature, about the efficacy of the individual, and about the adequacy of post-Enlightenment causal thinking.”33 Brazil also sees this theme of declining tradition at work in other popular fiction of the period, such as the western novels of Zane Grey, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). The dramatic tension in all these works develops out of a conflict arising from modern ideas that have displaced traditional values and mores. This tension is seen clearly in the play Chicago by first-time playwright Maurine Watkins. Watkins worked as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune and made a name for herself covering “Murderess’ Row,” as she called the wing of the Cook County Jail that held women arrested for violent crimes. Her articles, published from March to June 1924, focused on two murderesses in particular, Belva Gaertner, “‘the most stylish’ of Murderess’ Row,”34 and Beulah Annan, “the prettiest murderess Cook county has ever known.”35 The two women were not the ordinary type of gangsters, bootleggers, and criminals prominent in Chicago newspapers. Rather, they were white, middle- and upper-middle-class women who were not after money or revenge; they had both killed their respective partners rather than lose them. Adding to these stories of extramarital affairs and of women reacting in the most extreme manner were two of the favorite vices of the 1920s, gin and jazz. When asked how her date, Walter Law, had been shot in her automobile with her gun, Gaertner replied, “I don’t know. I was drunk.”36 Annan was reported to have sat listening to a jazz record, Hula Lou, while the man she shot, Harry Kalstedt, slowly died in her bedroom.37 Both women had their day in court, and both were proclaimed by a jury to be not guilty of their alleged crimes.

  In both cases, the modernism of women unashamedly conducting extramarital affairs, engaging in Prohibition-era drinking, conspicuously consuming the latest fashions and music, and murdering their male partners conflicted with socially held notions of subservient, docile, and weak women in need of the protection of men. This conflict is seen in Watkins’s articles and in her play. After Elizabeth Unkafer, one of the seven inmates of “Murderess’ Row,” received a sentence of life in prison for the murder of her lover, Watkins wrote a Chicago Tribune article about what the remaining inmates thought counted most with a jury. Watkins revealed the inmates’ beliefs that what mattered was gender (“‘A woman never swung in Illinois,’ said one triumphantly.”), looks (“Elizabeth Unkafer was not cursed with fatal beauty!” and “‘A jury isn’t blind,’ said another, ‘and a pretty woman’s never been convicted in Cook county!’ Gallant old Cook county!”), and youth (“Elizabeth was 43.”)38 Watkins’s articles criticize and capitalize on the notion that pretty women, with the right publicity, could indeed get away with murder.

  This critique of illegality became the basis for the play Chicago, which recasts the story of Beulah Annan into the tale of Roxy Hart and includes a thinly veiled Belva Gaertner as Velma, the “stylish divorcee.” Chicago was touted, especially during its New York run, which opened on December 30, 1926, as a satire on Chicago politics and the unsophisticated nature of the Midwest. But when Chicago opened in the Windy City in September 1927, boosters of the city used publicity about the play to further their own agendas, with Mayor William Hale Thompson suggesting that Watkins act as publicity agent for the city as someone well suited to informing the world about Chicago.39 Beulah Annan’s defense attorney, W. W. O’Brien (characterized in the play as Billy Flynn), came out in support of the play, stating, “It is the finest piece of stage satire ever written by an American.”40 O’Brien hoped the favorable publicity generated by the play would help revive his declining reputation. Belva Gaertner came to the opening and validated the accuracy of the characters: she recognized Velma as herself—“Sure that’s me”—and added, “Roxie Hart’s supposed to be Beulah Annan.”41

  For Watkins herself, the success of Chicago created more demand for her services as a journalist than as a playwright. She was sought after by New York newspapers to cover such court cases involving women as the “Peaches” and “Daddy” Browning divorce case and the Snyder-Gray trial. Her second attempt at drama came with the offer to adapt for the stage the Samuel Hopkins Adams novel Revelry, based on the corruption and scandals of the Harding administration. After the play had only a modest run and little success, Watkins ended her career as a playwright and journalist. What is remarkable about Watkins’s career and Chicago is the way they benefit from and criticize the modernity of American society by entertaining people with their own weaknesses and shallowness. The modern press, especially the tabloid press, created an audience for the type of articles Watkins wrote, while the conflict between traditional values about gender roles, marriage, sex, and immorality, on the one hand, and the more modern assumptions of the “new woman,” on the other, gave both her articles and her play the dramatic tension necessary to satirize the criminal justice system, the press, and American society. Watkins herself benefited from the greater opportunities created by the feminist movement as she also capitalized on the increased interest in crime and court cases, especially involving women, and the growing publicity apparatus surrounding any big event. It is her portrayal of this publicity machine—with the press at the center—that puts Watkins in an expanding group of writers and social critics who see publicity as more and more central to the way American society works.

  Walter Lippmann, in a 1927 essay for Vanity Fair, discussed the publicity machine: “This engine has an important peculiarity. It does not flood the worl
d with light. On the contrary it is like the beam of a powerful lantern which plays somewhat capriciously upon the course of events, throwing now this and now that into brilliant relief, leaving the rest in comparative darkness.” The primary problem with the publicity machine, according to Lippmann, is the fact that it is a machine. “It does not have and could not have an automatic governor to regulate its use according to accepted standards, or any standards, of good taste and good policy.” In fact, he continues, “The machine itself is without morals or taste of any kind, without prejudice or purpose, without conviction or ulterior motive.” It is, says Lippmann, newspapermen who “scan the horizon,” looking for the next big event in the hopes of hitting upon something that will catch the public’s fascination. Lippmann admits that there is little rhyme or reason in the selection of which events will engage the public but argues that the “best sensations involve some mystery, as well as love and death.” But foremost in determining which events will be reported in the modern sense (that is, covered completely down to the merest detail) is timing. “We know that sensations have to be timed properly for the public cannot concentrate on two sensations at the same time. It is no use trying to tell the public about the Mississippi flood when Ruth Snyder is on the witness stand.” Also key to these media events is “the personal narrative which gives the illusion of intimacy and inwardness.”42