Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [129]
This last point is probably the key to the horror that bigamy evoked. Victims of bigamy were, in the language of the times, “ruined” women; that is, women who had lost their virginity, their ticket to respectable matrimony. Even worse, the second wife was living in sin. She was committing a legal and social crime—through treachery. This was an impossible situation. When the American wife of Theodore Foens, a “big, handsome man” who had emigrated from Denmark, found out that he had a wife back home in Copenhagen, she promptly turned him in to the police. She felt “like a Judas,” but she had no choice: “I had to protect my good name.”29
Laws punishing bigamy were, in other words, part of a dense system of social norms about chastity and respectability. The law protected these goods, for the sake of “decent” women, and for the sake of the men in their lives as well. Bigamy laws were only a small part of this system, which included laws against seduction, against statutory rape, and similar offenses (see chapter 10), not to mention the civil action for breach of promise of marriage.
Bigamy seems to have gone into decline in the 20th century. Published, reported cases are not a very reliable gauge of what the criminal justice system is up to. Still, for what it is worth, I note that the digests of reported cases for 1870 to 1910 list dozens of appellate cases about bigamy; the Decennial Digest for 1966—76 lists only two. There are still, to be sure, occasional cases of bigamy; but fewer than in the past. There are a number of reasons why. Divorce is easier to get, relatively cheap, and carries much less stigma. Gender roles, too, have changed considerably; women are more mobile, less dependent on marriage (to a degree). Chastity is certainly not what it used to be. A little sex here and there does not “ruin” a woman forever or destroy her chances of getting married—not, at least, in most circles of society. Swindling is still a growth industry; and there are surely men who are eager to separate women from their money. But the drastic step of marriage is no longer central to the scheme.
Mobility and Murder
Mobility was the soil in which bigamists and swindlers thrived; in it grew rich crops of victims as well. These crimes were also threats to mobility. They were perversions of it, misuses of it, and hence attacks on the very basis of American society.
When a man left home to seek his fortune, he was playing a classic American game; but the game had rules. Bigamists and swindlers abused the rules, took advantage of them. This is why they were condemned, hounded, punished. America was full of towns and communities peopled by strangers. Strangers were ambivalent figures at best. It is hard to trust a stranger. But a society of strangers, like all societies, depends on trust, shared norms, on common understandings, on basic expectations.
At the very core of the system of criminal justice was a profound distrust of men without settled connections. As we have seen, the laws and norms weighed heavily against hoboes, vagrants, tramps. These were the debris of mobility, the failures at the game of seeking one’s fortunes, those whose habits of life mocked American ideals. They were not out looking for opportunities, they were looking for handouts, rummaging in garbage cans, begging, stealing, hanging around. No greater affront to respectability can possibly be imagined.
Mobility affected crime and punishment in a deeper, more pervasive way. It worked on the motivations of men (and, to a degree, women) in society. It held out opportunities that not everybody could take; it offered hopes that were frequently dashed. For some people, crime was a shortcut to money and position. For others, it was a consequence of rootlessness and