Trials and Crimes, Spectacles and Myths: Finding Meanings in Historical Legal Proceedings

When my book about murder trials was accepted for publication, I hoped that the marketing department would create a cover that would be mostly black with red letters and feature the word “murder” rendered as large as it possibly could be. My hope and the works reviewed here underscore a reality in publishing: crime and trials sell. Or at least they usually do for those who are not historians. Journalists, fiction writers, filmmakers, crime buffs, and others dominate the genres. In their works, the lurid predominates, and all too often standards are lacking. Invented dialogue and descriptions of exactly what other people were thinking mark their treatments. Hyperbole and belief in outlandish conspiracies abound; entertainment outweighs enlightenment.

Yet the topics can inform, and historians have long used notable legal proceedings from crimes or trials (especially if they generated much media attention) to explore aspects of the past. In these days of declining numbers of history majors, the appeal of sensational crimes and trials is obvious. For a faculty member thinking of integrating some spice into an existing course or even designing a course focused on crimes and trials, the works under review are quite a good starting point. Two of the books reviewed here—Conforti’s Lizzie Borden on Trial and Gallo’s No One Helped—are well within the tradition; the third, Friedman’s The Big Trial, is an exploration of the nature and meaning of the different forms such “didactic theater” can take (p. 4).

Conforti’s book is in the prize-winning Landmark Law Cases and American Society series edited by Peter Charles Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull. The existence of the series reinforces the points that trials and crimes are perceived to be interesting to a large audience and can serve as an entryway to understanding the past. Aimed at course adoption (I have used several books in the series myself), it has all the virtues of works in the series: it is clearly organized, lucidly written, and focused on its themes. The subtitle—Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender—nicely encapsulates almost all the foci of Conforti’s work. Class, which interrelates with ethnicity in this period especially, could have also claimed a space in the title, as it is woven into the fabric of Conforti’s treatment of this sensational crime and trial.

The brutal daylight slaying of Andrew and Abbie Borden on August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, became an overnight sensation. Fall River was an industrial mill town where people could rise economically and socially. Andrew Borden had “through austerity, industry, and the avoidance of debt . . . cobbled together a fortune” of stock in banks and mills, as well as real estate, both in and out of town (p. 24). When Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter Lizzie was arrested and tried for killing her father and stepmother, the crime moved from being an overnight sensation to one that has lived in notoriety for over a century. From the beginning, the community and nation were divided over Lizzie’s guilt. Because she was upper class, descended from Puritan forebears, and a respectable church-going woman active in temperance and charity work, the native-born Protestant upper crust of her community rallied to her cause, quickly followed by women’s groups and some of the nation’s leading newspapers. At the same time, a significant part of the community, led by the Fall River Globe, which appealed to the large (and growing) Irish-American population of Fall River, perceived her as a killer who escaped justice...