Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  Denunciations of the dime novel’s supposedly corrupting effects on young minds began appearing everywhere, from the pulpit to newspaper editorial pages to such venerable publications as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly. Writing in the late 1870s, for example, a critic named W. H. Bishop blamed everything from school truancy to petty thievery to parricide on the “sensational romances” peddled in “cheap dime fiction.” And in a famous editorial cartoon of the time, a dime novel publisher is shown giving away a free loaded pistol to every young subscriber. The implication was clear: Beadle and his ilk were little more than merchants of death, turning innocent children into cold-blooded killers.

  To be sure, there were other commentators who came to the defense of dime novels, most notably a critic named William Everett, who—writing in the distinguished cultural journal The North American Review—declared that these crude, wildly popular books “were unobjectionable morally, whatever fault be found with their literary style and composition. They do not even obscurely pander to vice, or excite the passions.” Similarly, Edmund Pearson—an early historian of the genre—scoffed at the notion that dime novels were responsible for polluting the morals of the young. To Pearson, the dime novel merely served as a scapegoat, a simple explanation for the troubling complexities of human behavior (and—for young delinquents and their parents alike—a handy way of shirking blame).

  “Parents who had shamefully neglected a son and allowed him to stray into mischief,” he wryly observed, “found it very convenient to stand in a police court and lay all the blame on dime novels. Inherent deviltry; neglect; selfishness; cruel egotism—oh, dear, no. It was nothing but wicked dime novels. Willy was such a good boy until he began to read them. . . . Judges and teachers and clergymen and Sunday-school superintendents and even police chiefs began to denounce dime novels. It was the most useful explanation of crime, and the easiest excuse for the offender.”

  Erastus Beadle himself insisted on the purity of his publications, issuing a set of guidelines to his authors that prohibited “all things offensive to good taste,” forbade any “subjects or characters that carry an immoral taint,” and warned against stories that “cannot be read with satisfaction by every right-minded person, young and old alike.” And it was certainly true that readers would have been hard-pressed to find anything even remotely suggestive in a work like Antelope Abe, the Boy Guide or Mohawk Nat: A Tale of the Great Northwest.

  Violence, however—of the ostensibly wholesome, red-blooded, all-American variety—was another matter. As cultural historian Russel Nye has written, the Beadle books were crammed with “blood, bullets, and constant frantic action.” According to Nye’s estimate, the typical dime novel averaged about twenty killings per book. And the situation became even more extreme as other publishers entered the field and began issuing ever more graphic and sensationalistic stories. To keep up with competitors like George P. Munro, the Beadles were forced to boost the bloodshed in their own publications—“to kill a few more Indians,” as Erastus Beadle put it. Before long, the level of violence in books like Redplume the Renegade, Rangers of the Mohawk, and Rattlesnake Ned’s Revenge had reached a dizzying pitch.

  In his attack on “cheap dime fiction,” W. H. Bishop estimated that among the dozens of books he had purchased while researching his study, “there were not less than ten thousand slain.” He then goes on to describe the carnage in one of the most popular dime novels of all time, Edward L. Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick on Deck; or, Calamity Jane, The Heroine of Whoop-Up:

  In the first chapter, seventy road-agents come riding into town. They slay eighteen of the residents and are slain themselves—all but one, who is, by the orders of a leader named Old Bull-whacker, immediately strung up to a tree and pays the earthly penalty for his crimes. And in the next chapter, we find a young man named Charley Davis dashing around a bend, bestriding his horse backwards, and firing at five mounted pursuers. They were twelve originally, but he has gradually picked off the rest. He is joined by Calamity Jane, a beautiful young woman who carries a sixteen-shot Winchester rifle, a brace of pistols in her belt, and another in her holsters, and between the two the pursuing five are easily disposed of. Here are a hundred dead in two chapters only!

  In a similar vein, Russell Nye cites a typical passage from one of the later Beadle novels in which the hero—having stumbled upon “the swollen, mutilated corpse of a man, covered with blood and clotted gore”—notes how “the distorted countenance was rendered doubly repulsive by the red streaks where mingled blood and brains had oozed from the shattered skull.”

  Clearly, the media violence so often deplored by contemporary critics pales by comparison to the slaughter commonly found in dime novels—those immensely popular, escapist entertainments of the pre- and post-Civil era, whose primary audience was young boys.

  * * *

  Given the profuse and extremely graphic violence in dime novels—and the long-standing tendency of moral reformers to blame juvenile aggression on the sensationalistic fantasies of popular culture—it is no surprise that, within days of his arrest, stories began to circulate that Jesse Pomeroy was addicted to these blood-and-thunder publications. “There is plenty of evidence,” declared the Boston Globe, “to show that the reading of dime novels . . . constituted a good share of the boy’s mental nourishment, and herein he was not restricted but commended rather for his studious literary disposition.”

  As a particularly incriminating bit of “evidence,” the Globe cited the testimony of a boy named George Thompson, supposedly a “chum” of Jesse’s, who revealed that the latter “always had a brick-colored ‘Beadle’ or a white-covered ‘Munro’ in his pocket or hand. In school, he used to keep a novel in back of his history, grammar, or geography book and devour it while pretending to study his lessons.”

  To be sure the interviewee himself—along with the rest of his pals—was an equally avid consumer of dime novels, who loved playing games of violent frontier make-believe. “I always insisted on playing Wild Bill, because he had killed thirty-nine men,” the young man cheerfully asserted. Other boys in the group preferred such two-fisted, all-American characters as Buffalo Bill, Dashing Charlie Emmett, Texas Jack, Wrestling Joe, and Rattlesnake Ned.

  What made Jesse so suspect was his highly unnatural sympathy for the Indians. “Jesse would watch us,” said Thompson, “but he thought it unfair that the Indians were always wiped out, while the scouts were victorious. He seemed to think more of the Indians than he did of the scouts. Simon Girty, I remember, was his hero. Jesse used to think it was a fine thing to be a renegade like Girty; to be the one white man in a great Indian tribe like the Shawnees; to have lots of squaws do all the work, while he sat around and discussed roasted venison. Then the fun with the prisoners of war! The running of the gauntlet, and the different modes of putting captives to death!”

  Reports like these soon led to authoritative pronouncements—issued by assorted savants—that it was Jesse’s fondness for “reading cheap blood-and-thunder stories, particularly those about Indians and the way they torture prisoners” that “first put it in his mind to torture boys.”

  One of the weirdest news stories on this subject appeared in the April 27 issue of the Boston Herald, under the following headline:

  THE CHILD MURDER.

  The Dreams of a Spiritual Medium on the Subject of the Tragedy— Pomeroy the Agent of Young Indian Devils Avenging Themselves on “the Whites”—A Theory Which Requires Time for Substantiation.

  According to this article, a reporter for the paper—seeking to shed light on Pomeroy’s motivations—had sought out the advice of a “thoroughly reliable trance medium.” This unidentified spiritualist had promptly put himself in touch with a mysterious “intelligence” that proceeded to reveal the following information through the medium’s lips:

  The intelligence spoke of the recent event and, incidentally, of previous acts of violence committed by the youth Pomeroy. It said that . . . he was to blame and yet not to blame.
The law would hold him guilty, but in another sense he was not responsible for the act. He was defective in his mental organization and lacked an appreciation of right and wrong, so that even in the commission of murder he would have no realizing sense of wrongdoing. If his parents had watched him closely in years past, they would probably have observed that he manifested an unnatural fondness for witnessing acts of torture and cruelty, like the excessive beating of horses and the like.

  But this was not all that was said in explanation of the affair. Through this weakness, he had attracted about him a spiritual influence of an even worse type, so that in the present act of murder the boy was but the tool of a blood-thirsty and cruel band of spirits. To be more explicit, this band was composed of a number of wild and untutored Indian boys about a dozen years old, led on by another young savage of some seventeen years. Most, if not all, of them had within a few years been massacred by the whites in the far Western plains, and, having been educated to hate the “pale-face,” they had gathered about the boy (Pomeroy) and through him sought vengeance upon the oppressors of their people.

  In evidence of the truth of this assertion, the intelligence called the writer’s attention to the published fact that the boy would dance around his victims, real Indian fashion, and seemingly delight himself as he saw the blood flowing from the wounds of the tortured captives.

  Needless to say, the theory that Jesse was demonically possessed by a band of vengeance-crazed Indian spirits was bizarre in the extreme. Nevertheless, some of the medium’s comments were surprisingly astute—his observation about Jesse’s parents, for example, and their failure to note his early “fondness for witnessing acts of torture and cruelty.” The same point is commonly made by modern psychologists, who list childhood sadism as an early warning sign of what is now called “conduct disorder.”

  Indeed, what strikes a contemporary researcher into the Pomeroy case is that—when it comes to understanding the root causes of sociopathic behavior—things haven’t progressed very much in the hundred-plus years since the “boy fiend” was on the prowl. We are still groping for answers, still putting the blame on violent popular entertainment, or neglectful parents, or innate propensities for evil. In fact, there are still people who insist that “the devil made them do it.”

  In the end, the answer provided in a newspaper editorial that appeared on Friday, April 24, 1874, was as good as anything modern criminology has come up with. There was only one way to explain the atrocious deeds of Jesse Pomeroy, proclaimed the paper. The boy was “a moral monstrosity.”

  20

  Public interest in the tragic death of the child Horace H. Millen does not seem to abate, but, on the contrary, daily grows more intense.

  —Boston Post, April 27, 1874

  The growing notoriety of the Pomeroy case was demonstrated again on Monday, when the Boston Evening Herald ran an editorial pertaining to the Millen murder by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous American preacher of the day.

  Two days earlier—on Saturday, April 25—the little boy’s funeral had taken place. The plight of John and Leonora Millen—so poor that they could not afford a coffin for their four-year-old child—had elicited an outpouring of sympathy from the people of South Boston. The grief-stricken parents had been deluged with notes of condolence, many containing small sums of money. The Millens had also received a purse of $50 from John’s fellow-workers at Clark’s cabinet factory; while the police officers attached to Station Six had contributed an additional $150.

  As a result, the Millens had been able to purchase a handsome casket for their child. Following the funeral service on Saturday morning, at which the Reverend Mr. Rand officiated, Horace’s body was transported by train to Wicasset, Maine—John Millen’s birthplace—for burial in the family plot.

  It was the terrible ordeal of the murdered boy’s parents—and especially of Horace’s mother, who had been virtually prostrated by the tragedy—that inspired the editorial. The Reverend Mr. Beecher (who was himself at the center of a nationwide scandal at the time of the Pomeroy affair, having been publicly denounced as an adulterer by the flamboyant women’s rights crusader, Victoria Woodhull) based his article on a passage from scripture, Hebrews 12: 11: “Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.”

  The editorial itself—a kind of consolatory sermon, entitled “A Mother’s Sorrow”—begins with an evocation of the indescribable raptures of mother-love:

  As the waters roll in on the shore with incessant throbs, night and day, and always, not alone when storms prevail, but in calms as well, so it is with a mother’s heart bereaved of her children. There is no grief like unto it—Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are not! With what long patience, what burden and suffering does the mother wait until the child of her hope is placed in her arms and under the sight of her eyes. She remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man is born into the world.

  Who can read, or, if he saw, could utter the thoughts of a mother during all the days and nights in which she broods the helpless thing. Every true mother takes home the full meaning of the angel’s word, that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. The mother does not even whisper what she thinks, and the whole air is full of gentle pictures, every one of the background of the blue heavens.

  The child grows; grows in favor of God and man—and every admiring look cast upon it, even by a stranger, sends light and gladness to the mother’s heart. Wonderful child! The sun is brighter for it! The whole earth is blessed by its presence! Sorrows, pains, weariness, self-denials, for its sake are eagerly sought and delighted in.

  Beecher then delineates the crushing sense of grief and self-recrimination that overwhelms the mother when her cherished boy is suddenly snatched away from life:

  The mother’s heart was like a heaven while it lived; now it has ascended to God’s heaven and the mother’s heart is as the gloom of midnight. Wild words of self-reproach at length break out, as when a frozen torrent is set loose by spring days. She that has lavished her life-force upon the child turns upon herself with fierce charges of carelessness, of unskill, of thoughtlessness. She sees a hundred ways in which the child would have lived but for her! All love is turned to self-recrimination. Tears come at last to quench the fire of purgatory. But grief takes new shapes every hour, till the nerve has lost its sensibility, and then she coldly hates her unnatural and inhuman heart that will not feel!

  The editorial concludes on a note of solace that suggests the healing effects which the passage time—and the return to the mundane routines of everyday life—inevitably bring:

  A child dying, dies but once; but the mother dies a hundred times. When the sharpness is over, and the dullness of an overspent brain is passed, and she must take up the shuttle again and weave the web of daily life, pity her not that she must work, must join again the discordant voices, and be forced to duties irksome and hateful. These all are kindly medicines. A new thought is slowly preparing. It is that immovable constancy and strength which sorrow gives when it has wrought the divine intent.

  On the same day that this editorial was published, the inquest into Horace Millen’s death resumed at Police Station Nine. The session, which began shortly after lunch and lasted for about three hours, was held behind closed doors—a circumstance that led to a great deal of griping on the part of reporters. “Why the whole thing needs be shrouded in mystery is unaccountable,” the reporter for the Boston Journal complained; while his colleague at the Evening Transcript similarly questioned the purpose of such “secretive sessions” and denounced them as “stupid proceedings.”

  Not that the newsmen were the only ones excluded from the inquest on Monday afternoon. Even Jesse’s lawyers were obliged to leave the hearing room once the testimony began. Nevertheless, thanks to the persistence of the reporters, who (in
the self-congratulatory words of the Herald’s man) “lingered about the premises for over three long and weary hours with their customary patience”—the papers were able to provide their readers with a summary of the day’s proceedings, gleaned from interviews with participants.

  Altogether, the coroner’s jury heard testimony from the Powers brothers, Obed Goodspeed, and four other people who had been on the marsh the day of the murder. At least three of the witnesses positively placed Jesse at the crime scene. The casts of Jesse’s boot prints were also exhibited, along with the confiscated boots themselves, whose soles were shown to match their plaster counterparts point for point. In addition, the jury learned that Jesse’s double-bladed knife had been subjected to a microscopic examination, and that (as the Herald reported) “traces of blood were plainly distinguishable on the larger blade.”