A sensational crime provokes thought about class privilege and injustice in the American legal system.
The still-unsolved mysteries surrounding a Jazz Age murder offer a fascinating window into class, privilege, media influence, and criminal justice.
In 1922, the body of Clarence Peters, a 19-year-old "penniless sailor" dishonorably discharged from the Navy for stealing, was discovered by the side of a suburban road with a bullet through his chest. Days later, Walter Ward, the scion of a successful bakery empire, confessed to the shooting. He claimed self-defense, arguing that Peters was one of a gang of blackmailers, "shadow men," who were pursuing him. However, his lurid confession—“as one newspaper noted, the entire tale of blackmail and murder read ‘like a thriller in a dime store novel’”—left out the motive for the alleged blackmail operation. The murder became a local sensation and then a headline story in the national press. Polchin’s engaging tale unfolds throughout New York City, in Gatsby-worthy mansions, impoverished tenements, racetracks, underworld nightspots, and pool halls. Peters hung around Bryant Park, where sailors and soldiers met up with wealthy men willing to pay for sexual favors. Had Ward been entangled in a "muzzle" scheme, leading to blackmail attempts? “Those who have explored the case have usually concluded that queer sexual blackmail was at the heart of the murder,” writes Polchin, and he seems to agree with those conclusions. His previous book, Indecent Advances, concerned the cold-blooded killings of gay men in 20th-century America. If the author doesn’t definitively prove that sexual relations between Peters and Ward drove the latter to murder, neither did the courts. Regardless, Polchin’s investigation yields a compelling social history that makes clear the power of the press, wealth, political clout, and influence in determining legal outcomes and obfuscating the heart of scandalous affairs.
A sensational crime provokes thought about class privilege and injustice in the American legal system.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781640096004
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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